Anthony Hope

“ When our friend of the slim fingers——?"
"Yes."
"Let's sit down," I suggested. We were just passing a garden-seat.
She smiled at me half sadly, half mockingly. She saw through me; she knew I wanted to hear more about it. By some sort of sympathy I knew that she wanted to talk about it. It was queer, too, to consider through what window that moon was shining on Slim-Fingered Jim. Did it—and his other surroundings—remind him of the broad Atlantic? "The risks of the profession, gentlemen!"
"Yes, he had beautiful hands," she murmured. ”

“ Charlie was just lighting the after-lunch cigarette. Charlie's hands—he is a very good fellow and well-off—are decidedly red and particularly pudgy.
II.
I liked Mrs. Pryce very much. She was pretty, dainty, bright, and—well, bachelors are so apt to think that pretty married women have a dull time at home that I will lay no stress on my own private opinion as to her domestic lot. Enough that I was always glad to talk with her, and that it was pleasant to walk with her in the Major's quiet old garden on a fine night when the wind stirred the boughs and the moon shone. ”

“ I expostulated. "You're throwing away all your dramatic effect. What did he say? His words, his words, Mrs. Pryce?"
"He didn't use any—not in the sense you mean. He just told me. He didn't even put me on my honour not to tell anybody else. He said he didn't care a hang about anybody else on board, but that he wanted to spare me any possible shock, and that he'd been concerned in the bond robbery and would probably be arrested at Queenstown, but that he expected to get off this time. ”

“ Walsh?"
"I begin to think you have more experience than you always admit," said Mrs. Pryce. "But I think you'll go wrong if you try to guess any more."
"Then I won't guess any more. Take up the thread. It's now the third night out, and the moon is shining like that." I pointed to the orb which was illuminating the Major's garden—among other places where sundry of that liner's former passengers might chance to be. ”

“ The billiard-table is a high trial.
When Charlie had brought off his shot—which he did triumphantly—his wife came and kissed him. This pleased him very much. He did not recognise the Kiss Penitential, which is, however, a well-ascertained variety.
I'm afraid that the magnetic current of immorality which seemed to emanate from Mr. James Painter Walsh passed through the sympathetic medium of Mrs. Pryce's memory and infected, in some small degree, my more hardened intellect; for even now I can't help hoping that Slim-Fingered Jim is being put to some light form of labour. ”

“ Pryce. "He recited beautifully at the concert—'The Ballad of Beau Brocade.’"
"Well done him!" I said approvingly. I began rather to like the fellow myself.
"And at the end he made a little speech, thanking the captain, and saying how sorry we should all be when the voyage ended. 'And nobody sorrier than myself,' he said, with one of his looks at me—such a twinkling look—and a tiny wave of those hands."
"He must have been the most popular man on board?"
"Well, the men thought him rather stand-offish; he snubbed some of them, I think. Well, you do meet some queer men on a liner, don't you? ”

“ Just bad—bad—bad."
"Ah, well, business is one thing and charity another, as somebody once observed. And now for the end, please—because ends do come, even though we don't believe in them."
"Yes, they do; and this one came," she said. But for an instant or two she did not begin to tell me about it; and in the silence I heard Charlie Pryce assert loudly that he had made a good shot.
III.
"At lunch on Friday," Mrs. Pryce resumed. "the steward told us that we were expected to reach Queenstown about one o'clock in the morning, and we all began discussing whether we should sit up. ”

“ It must have been the way he did it. There are some people who abolish one's moral scruples, aren't there? He was very quiet generally, but he had a way of just moving those hands of his with a little waving gesture. ”

“ Slim-Fingered Jim
By Anthony Hope
"WHAT did he get?" I asked. I had been working in my own room all the morning and had not seen the papers—they arrived from London about half-past eleven.
"Seven years' penal servitude," said our host the Major with grim satisfaction.
"Stiff!" I commented.
"Not a bit too much," asserted the Major, helping himself to game pie again—he is a good luncher. "He's a thoroughly bad lot—a professional thief, and a deuced clever one. ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1933, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”