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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Raffles, by E. W. Hornung
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Raffles
+       Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman
+
+Author: E. W. Hornung
+
+Release Date: November, 1996 [eBook #707]
+[Most recently updated: November 2, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAFFLES ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Raffles
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN
+
+by E. W. Hornung
+
+
+Contents
+
+ NO SINECURE
+ A JUBILEE PRESENT
+ THE FATE OF FAUSTINA
+ THE LAST LAUGH
+ TO CATCH A THIEF
+ AN OLD FLAME
+ THE WRONG HOUSE
+ THE KNEES OF THE GODS
+
+
+
+
+RAFFLES
+
+
+
+
+NO SINECURE
+
+I
+
+I am still uncertain which surprised me more, the telegram calling my
+attention to the advertisement, or the advertisement itself. The
+telegram is before me as I write. It would appear to have been handed
+in at Vere Street at eight o’clock in the morning of May 11, 1897, and
+received before half-past at Holloway B.O. And in that drab region it
+duly found me, unwashen but at work before the day grew hot and my
+attic insupportable.
+
+“See Mr. Maturin’s advertisement _Daily Mail_ might suit you earnestly
+beg try will speak if necessary —— ——”
+
+
+I transcribe the thing as I see it before me, all in one breath that
+took away mine; but I leave out the initials at the end, which
+completed the surprise. They stood very obviously for the knighted
+specialist whose consulting-room is within a cab-whistle of Vere
+Street, and who once called me kinsman for his sins. More recently he
+had called me other names. I was a disgrace, qualified by an adjective
+which seemed to me another. I had made my bed, and I could go and lie
+and die in it. If I ever again had the insolence to show my nose in
+that house, I should go out quicker than I came in. All this, and more,
+my least distant relative could tell a poor devil to his face; could
+ring for his man, and give him his brutal instructions on the spot; and
+then relent to the tune of this telegram! I have no phrase for my
+amazement. I literally could not believe my eyes. Yet their evidence
+was more and more conclusive: a very epistle could not have been more
+characteristic of its sender. Meanly elliptical, ludicrously precise,
+saving half-pence at the expense of sense, yet paying like a man for
+“Mr.” Maturin, that was my distinguished relative from his bald patch
+to his corns. Nor was all the rest unlike him, upon second thoughts. He
+had a reputation for charity; he was going to live up to it after all.
+Either that, or it was the sudden impulse of which the most calculating
+are capable at times; the morning papers with the early cup of tea,
+this advertisement seen by chance, and the rest upon the spur of a
+guilty conscience.
+
+Well, I must see it for myself, and the sooner the better, though work
+pressed. I was writing a series of articles upon prison life, and had
+my nib into the whole System; a literary and philanthropical daily was
+parading my “charges,” the graver ones with the more gusto; and the
+terms, if unhandsome for creative work, were temporary wealth to me. It
+so happened that my first check had just arrived by the eight o’clock
+post; and my position should be appreciated when I say that I had to
+cash it to obtain a _Daily Mail_.
+
+Of the advertisement itself, what is to be said? It should speak for
+itself if I could find it, but I cannot, and only remember that it was
+a “male nurse and constant attendant” that was “wanted for an elderly
+gentleman in feeble health.” A male nurse! An absurd tag was appended,
+offering “liberal salary to University or public-school man”; and of a
+sudden I saw that I should get this thing if I applied for it. What
+other “University or public-school man” would dream of doing so? Was
+any other in such straits as I? And then my relenting relative; he not
+only promised to speak for me, but was the very man to do so. Could any
+recommendation compete with his in the matter of a male nurse? And need
+the duties of such be necessarily loathsome and repellent? Certainly
+the surroundings would be better than those of my common lodging-house
+and own particular garret; and the food; and every other condition of
+life that I could think of on my way back to that unsavory asylum. So I
+dived into a pawnbroker’s shop, where I was a stranger only upon my
+present errand, and within the hour was airing a decent if antiquated
+suit, but little corrupted by the pawnbroker’s moth, and a new straw
+hat, on the top of a tram.
+
+The address given in the advertisement was that of a flat at Earl’s
+Court, which cost me a cross-country journey, finishing with the
+District Railway and a seven minutes’ walk. It was now past mid-day,
+and the tarry wood-pavement was good to smell as I strode up the Earl’s
+Court Road. It was great to walk the civilized world again. Here were
+men with coats on their backs, and ladies in gloves. My only fear was
+lest I might run up against one or other whom I had known of old. But
+it was my lucky day. I felt it in my bones. I was going to get this
+berth; and sometimes I should be able to smell the wood-pavement on the
+old boy’s errands; perhaps he would insist on skimming over it in his
+bath-chair, with me behind.
+
+I felt quite nervous when I reached the flats. They were a small pile
+in a side street, and I pitied the doctor whose plate I saw upon the
+palings before the ground-floor windows; he must be in a very small
+way, I thought. I rather pitied myself as well. I had indulged in
+visions of better flats than these. There were no balconies. The porter
+was out of livery. There was no lift, and my invalid on the third
+floor! I trudged up, wishing I had never lived in Mount Street, and
+brushed against a dejected individual coming down. A full-blooded young
+fellow in a frock-coat flung the right door open at my summons.
+
+“Does Mr. Maturin live here?” I inquired.
+
+“That’s right,” said the full-blooded young man, grinning all over a
+convivial countenance.
+
+“I—I’ve come about his advertisement in the _Daily Mail_.”
+
+“You’re the thirty-ninth,” cried the blood; “that was the thirty-eighth
+you met upon the stairs, and the day’s still young. Excuse my staring
+at you. Yes, you pass your prelim., and can come inside; you’re one of
+the few. We had most just after breakfast, but now the porter’s heading
+off the worst cases, and that last chap was the first for twenty
+minutes. Come in here.”
+
+And I was ushered into an empty room with a good bay-window, which
+enabled my full-blooded friend to inspect me yet more critically in a
+good light; this he did without the least false delicacy; then his
+questions began.
+
+“’Varsity man?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Public school?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Which one?”
+
+I told him, and he sighed relief.
+
+“At last! You’re the very first I’ve not had to argue with as to what
+is and what is not a public school. Expelled?”
+
+“No,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation; “no, I was not expelled. And
+I hope you won’t expel me if I ask a question in my turn?”
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+“Are you Mr. Maturin’s son?”
+
+“No, my name’s Theobald. You may have seen it down below.”
+
+“The doctor?” I said.
+
+“His doctor,” said Theobald, with a satisfied eye. “Mr. Maturin’s
+doctor. He is having a male nurse and attendant by my advice, and he
+wants a gentleman if he can get one. I rather think he’ll see you,
+though he’s only seen two or three all day. There are certain questions
+which he prefers to ask himself, and it’s no good going over the same
+ground twice. So perhaps I had better tell him about you before we get
+any further.”
+
+And he withdrew to a room still nearer the entrance, as I could hear,
+for it was a very small flat indeed. But now two doors were shut
+between us, and I had to rest content with murmurs through the wall
+until the doctor returned to summon me.
+
+“I have persuaded my patient to see you,” he whispered, “but I confess
+I am not sanguine of the result. He is very difficult to please. You
+must prepare yourself for a querulous invalid, and for no sinecure if
+you get the billet.”
+
+“May I ask what’s the matter with him?”
+
+“By all means—when you’ve got the billet.”
+
+Dr. Theobald then led the way, his professional dignity so thoroughly
+intact that I could not but smile as I followed his swinging coat-tails
+to the sick-room. I carried no smile across the threshold of a darkened
+chamber which reeked of drugs and twinkled with medicine bottles, and
+in the middle of which a gaunt figure lay abed in the half-light.
+
+“Take him to the window, take him to the window,” a thin voice snapped,
+“and let’s have a look at him. Open the blind a bit. Not as much as
+that, damn you, not as much as that!”
+
+The doctor took the oath as though it had been a fee. I no longer
+pitied him. It was now very clear to me that he had one patient who was
+a little practice in himself. I determined there and then that he
+should prove a little profession to me, if we could but keep him alive
+between us. Mr. Maturin, however, had the whitest face that I have ever
+seen, and his teeth gleamed out through the dusk as though the withered
+lips no longer met about them; nor did they except in speech; and
+anything ghastlier than the perpetual grin of his repose I defy you to
+imagine. It was with this grin that he lay regarding me while the
+doctor held the blind.
+
+“So you think you could look after me, do you?”
+
+“I’m certain I could, sir.”
+
+“Single-handed, mind! I don’t keep another soul. You would have to cook
+your own grub and my slops. Do you think you could do all that?”
+
+“Yes, sir, I think so.”
+
+“Why do you? Have you any experience of the kind?”
+
+“No, sir, none.”
+
+“Then why do you pretend you have?”
+
+“I only meant that I would do my best.”
+
+“Only meant, only meant! Have you done your best at everything else,
+then?”
+
+I hung my head. This was a facer. And there was something in my invalid
+which thrust the unspoken lie down my throat.
+
+“No, sir, I have not,” I told him plainly.
+
+“He, he, he!” the old wretch tittered; “and you do well to own it; you
+do well, sir, very well indeed. If you hadn’t owned up, out you would
+have gone, out neck-and-crop! You’ve saved your bacon. You may do more.
+So you are a public-school boy, and a very good school yours is, but
+you weren’t at either University. Is that correct?”
+
+“Absolutely.”
+
+“What did you do when you left school?”
+
+“I came in for money.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“I spent my money.”
+
+“And since then?”
+
+I stood like a mule.
+
+“And since then, I say!”
+
+“A relative of mine will tell you if you ask him. He is an eminent man,
+and he has promised to speak for me. I would rather say no more
+myself.”
+
+“But you shall, sir, but you shall! Do you suppose that I suppose a
+public-school boy would apply for a berth like this if something or
+other hadn’t happened? What I want is a gentleman of sorts, and I don’t
+much care what sort; but you’ve got to tell me what did happen, if you
+don’t tell anybody else. Dr. Theobald, sir, you can go to the devil if
+you won’t take a hint. This man may do or he may not. You have no more
+to say to it till I send him down to tell you one thing or the other.
+Clear out, sir, clear out; and if you think you’ve anything to complain
+of, you stick it down in the bill!”
+
+In the mild excitement of our interview the thin voice had gathered
+strength, and the last shrill insult was screamed after the devoted
+medico, as he retired in such order that I felt certain he was going to
+take this trying patient at his word. The bedroom door closed, then the
+outer one, and the doctor’s heels went drumming down the common stair.
+I was alone in the flat with this highly singular and rather terrible
+old man.
+
+“And a damned good riddance!” croaked the invalid, raising himself on
+one elbow without delay. “I may not have much body left to boast about,
+but at least I’ve got a lost old soul to call my own. That’s why I want
+a gentleman of sorts about me. I’ve been too dependent on that chap. He
+won’t even let me smoke, and he’s been in the flat all day to see I
+didn’t. You’ll find the cigarettes behind the Madonna of the Chair.”
+
+It was a steel engraving of the great Raffaelle, and the frame was
+tilted from the wall; at a touch a packet of cigarettes tumbled down
+from behind.
+
+“Thanks; and now a light.”
+
+I struck the match and held it, while the invalid inhaled with normal
+lips; and suddenly I sighed. I was irresistibly reminded of my poor
+dear old Raffles. A smoke-ring worthy of the great A. J. was floating
+upward from the sick man’s lips.
+
+“And now take one yourself. I have smoked more poisonous cigarettes.
+But even these are not Sullivans!”
+
+I cannot repeat what I said. I have no idea what I did. I only know—I
+only knew—that it was A. J. Raffles in the flesh!
+
+II
+
+“Yes, Bunny, it was the very devil of a swim; but I defy you to sink in
+the Mediterranean. That sunset saved me. The sea was on fire. I hardly
+swam under water at all, but went all I knew for the sun itself; when
+it set I must have been a mile away; until it did I was the invisible
+man. I figured on that, and only hope it wasn’t set down as a case of
+suicide. I shall get outed quite soon enough, Bunny, but I’d rather be
+dropped by the hangman than throw my own wicket away.”
+
+“Oh, my dear old chap, to think of having you by the hand again! I feel
+as though we were both aboard that German liner, and all that’s
+happened since a nightmare. I thought that time was the last!”
+
+“It looked rather like it, Bunny. It was taking all the risks, and
+hitting at everything. But the game came off, and some day I’ll tell
+you how.”
+
+“Oh, I’m in no hurry to hear. It’s enough for me to see you lying
+there. I don’t want to know how you came there, or why, though I fear
+you must be pretty bad. I must have a good look at you before I let you
+speak another word!”
+
+I raised one of the blinds, I sat upon the bed, and I had that look. It
+left me all unable to conjecture his true state of health, but quite
+certain in my own mind that my dear Raffles was not and never would be
+the man that he had been. He had aged twenty years; he looked fifty at
+the very least. His hair was white; there was no trick about that; and
+his face was another white. The lines about the corners of the eyes and
+mouth were both many and deep. On the other hand, the eyes themselves
+were alight and alert as ever; they were still keen and gray and
+gleaming, like finely tempered steel. Even the mouth, with a cigarette
+to close it, was the mouth of Raffles and no other: strong and
+unscrupulous as the man himself. It was only the physical strength
+which appeared to have departed; but that was quite sufficient to make
+my heart bleed for the dear rascal who had cost me every tie I valued
+but the tie between us two.
+
+“Think I look much older?” he asked at length.
+
+“A bit,” I admitted. “But it is chiefly your hair.”
+
+“Whereby hangs a tale for when we’ve talked ourselves out, though I
+have often thought it was that long swim that started it. Still, the
+Island of Elba is a rummy show, I can assure you. And Naples is a
+rummier!”
+
+“You went there after all?”
+
+“Rather! It’s the European paradise for such as our noble selves. But
+there’s no place that’s a patch on little London as a non-conductor of
+heat; it never need get too hot for a fellow here; if it does it’s his
+own fault. It’s the kind of wicket you don’t get out on, unless you get
+yourself out. So here I am again, and have been for the last six weeks.
+And I mean to have another knock.”
+
+“But surely, old fellow, you’re not awfully fit, are you?”
+
+“Fit? My dear Bunny, I’m dead—I’m at the bottom of the sea—and don’t
+you forget it for a minute.”
+
+“But are you all right, or are you not?”
+
+“No, I’m half-poisoned by Theobald’s prescriptions and putrid
+cigarettes, and as weak as a cat from lying in bed.”
+
+“Then why on earth lie in bed, Raffles?”
+
+“Because it’s better than lying in gaol, as I am afraid _you_ know, my
+poor dear fellow. I tell you I am dead; and my one terror is of coming
+to life again by accident. Can’t you see? I simply dare not show my
+nose out of doors—by day. You have no idea of the number of perfectly
+innocent things a dead man daren’t do. I can’t even smoke Sullivans,
+because no one man was ever so partial to them as I was in my lifetime,
+and you never know when you may start a clew.”
+
+“What brought you to these mansions?”
+
+“I fancied a flat, and a man recommended these on the boat; such a good
+chap, Bunny; he was my reference when it came to signing the lease. You
+see I landed on a stretcher—most pathetic case—old Australian without a
+friend in old country—ordered Engadine as last chance—no go—not an
+earthly—sentimental wish to die in London—that’s the history of Mr.
+Maturin. If it doesn’t hit you hard, Bunny, you’re the first. But it
+hit friend Theobald hardest of all. I’m an income to him. I believe
+he’s going to marry on me.”
+
+“Does he guess there’s nothing wrong?”
+
+“Knows, bless you! But he doesn’t know I know he knows, and there isn’t
+a disease in the dictionary that he hasn’t treated me for since he’s
+had me in hand. To do him justice, I believe he thinks me a
+hypochondriac of the first water; but that young man will go far if he
+keeps on the wicket. He has spent half his nights up here, at guineas
+apiece.”
+
+“Guineas must be plentiful, old chap!”
+
+“They have been, Bunny. I can’t say more. But I don’t see why they
+shouldn’t be again.”
+
+I was not going to inquire where the guineas came from. As if I cared!
+But I did ask old Raffles how in the world he had got upon my tracks;
+and thereby drew the sort of smile with which old gentlemen rub their
+hands, and old ladies nod their noses. Raffles merely produced a
+perfect oval of blue smoke before replying.
+
+“I was waiting for you to ask that, Bunny; it’s a long time since I did
+anything upon which I plume myself more. Of course, in the first place,
+I spotted you at once by these prison articles; they were not signed,
+but the fist was the fist of my sitting rabbit!”
+
+“But who gave you my address?”
+
+“I wheedled it out of your excellent editor; called on him at dead of
+night, when I occasionally go afield like other ghosts, and wept it out
+of him in five minutes. I was your only relative; your name was not
+your own name; if he insisted I would give him mine. He didn’t insist,
+Bunny, and I danced down his stairs with your address in my pocket.”
+
+“Last night?”
+
+“No, last week.”
+
+“And so the advertisement was yours, as well as the telegram!”
+
+I had, of course, forgotten both in the high excitement of the hour, or
+I should scarcely have announced my belated discovery with such an air.
+As it was I made Raffles look at me as I had known him look before, and
+the droop of his eyelids began to sting.
+
+“Why all this subtlety?” I petulantly exclaimed. “Why couldn’t you come
+straight away to me in a cab?”
+
+He did not inform me that I was hopeless as ever. He did not address me
+as his good rabbit.
+
+He was silent for a time, and then spoke in a tone which made me
+ashamed of mine.
+
+“You see, there are two or three of me now, Bunny: one’s at the bottom
+of the Mediterranean, and one’s an old Australian desirous of dying in
+the old country, but in no immediate danger of dying anywhere. The old
+Australian doesn’t know a soul in town; he’s got to be consistent, or
+he’s done. This sitter Theobald is his only friend, and has seen rather
+too much of him; ordinary dust won’t do for his eyes. Begin to see? To
+pick you out of a crowd, that was the game; to let old Theobald help to
+pick you, better still! To start with, he was dead against my having
+anybody at all; wanted me all to himself, naturally; but anything
+rather than kill the goose! So he is to have a fiver a week while he
+keeps me alive, and he’s going to be married next month. That’s a pity
+in some ways, but a good thing in others; he will want more money than
+he foresees, and he may always be of use to us at a pinch. Meanwhile he
+eats out of my hand.”
+
+I complimented Raffles on the mere composition of his telegram, with
+half the characteristics of my distinguished kinsman squeezed into a
+dozen odd words; and let him know how the old ruffian had really
+treated me. Raffles was not surprised; we had dined together at my
+relative’s in the old days, and filed for reference a professional
+valuation of his household gods. I now learnt that the telegram had
+been posted, with the hour marked for its despatch, at the pillar
+nearest Vere Street, on the night before the advertisement was due to
+appear in the _Daily Mail_. This also had been carefully prearranged;
+and Raffles’s only fear had been lest it might be held over despite his
+explicit instructions, and so drive me to the doctor for an explanation
+of his telegram. But the adverse chances had been weeded out and weeded
+out to the irreducible minimum of risk.
+
+His greatest risk, according to Raffles, lay nearest home: bedridden
+invalid that he was supposed to be, his nightly terror was of running
+into Theobald’s arms in the immediate neighborhood of the flat. But
+Raffles had characteristic methods of minimizing even that danger, of
+which something anon; meanwhile he recounted more than one of his
+nocturnal adventures, all, however, of a singularly innocent type; and
+one thing I noticed while he talked. His room was the first as you
+entered the flat. The long inner wall divided the room not merely from
+the passage but from the outer landing as well. Thus every step upon
+the bare stone stairs could be heard by Raffles where he lay; and he
+would never speak while one was ascending, until it had passed his
+door. The afternoon brought more than one applicant for the post which
+it was my duty to tell them that I had already obtained. Between three
+and four, however, Raffles, suddenly looking at his watch, packed me
+off in a hurry to the other end of London for my things.
+
+“I’m afraid you must be famishing, Bunny. It’s a fact that I eat very
+little, and that at odd hours, but I ought not to have forgotten you.
+Get yourself a snack outside, but not a square meal if you can resist
+one. We’ve got to celebrate this day this night!”
+
+“To-night?” I cried.
+
+“To-night at eleven, and Kellner’s the place. You may well open your
+eyes, but we didn’t go there much, if you remember, and the staff seems
+changed. Anyway we’ll risk it for once. I was in last night, talking
+like a stage American, and supper’s ordered for eleven sharp.”
+
+“You made as sure of me as all that!”
+
+“There was no harm in ordering supper. We shall have it in a private
+room, but you may as well dress if you’ve got the duds.”
+
+“They’re at my only forgiving relative’s.”
+
+“How much will get them out, and square you up, and bring you back bag
+and baggage in good time?”
+
+I had to calculate.
+
+“A tenner, easily.”
+
+“I had one ready for you. Here it is, and I wouldn’t lose any time if I
+were you. On the way you might look up Theobald, tell him you’ve got it
+and how long you’ll be gone, and that I can’t be left alone all the
+time. And, by Jove, yes! You get me a stall for the Lyceum at the
+nearest agent’s; there are two or three in High Street; and say it was
+given you when you come in. That young man shall be out of the way
+to-night.”
+
+I found our doctor in a minute consulting-room and his shirt-sleeves, a
+tall tumbler at his elbow; at least I caught sight of the tumbler on
+entering; thereafter he stood in front of it, with a futility which had
+my sympathy.
+
+“So you’ve got the billet,” said Dr. Theobald. “Well, as I told you
+before, and as you have since probably discovered for yourself, you
+won’t find it exactly a sinecure. My own part of the business is by no
+means that; indeed, there are those who would throw up the case, after
+the kind of treatment that you have seen for yourself. But professional
+considerations are not the only ones, and one cannot make too many
+allowances in such a case.”
+
+“But what is the case?” I asked him. “You said you would tell me if I
+was successful.”
+
+Dr. Theobald’s shrug was worthy of the profession he seemed destined to
+adorn; it was not incompatible with any construction which one chose to
+put upon it. Next moment he had stiffened. I suppose I still spoke more
+or less like a gentleman. Yet, after all, I was only the male nurse. He
+seemed to remember this suddenly, and he took occasion to remind me of
+the fact.
+
+“Ah,” said he, “that was before I knew you were altogether without
+experience; and I must say that I was surprised even at Mr. Maturin’s
+engaging you after that; but it will depend upon yourself how long I
+allow him to persist in so curious an experiment. As for what is the
+matter with him, my good fellow, it is no use my giving you an answer
+which would be double Dutch to you; moreover, I have still to test your
+discretionary powers. I may say, however, that that poor gentleman
+presents at once the most complex and most troublesome case, which is
+responsibility enough without certain features which make it all but
+insupportable. Beyond this I must refuse to discuss my patient for the
+present; but I shall certainly go up if I can find time.”
+
+He went up within five minutes. I found him there on my return at dusk.
+But he did not refuse my stall for the Lyceum, which Raffles would not
+allow me to use myself, and presented to him off-hand without my leave.
+
+“And don’t you bother any more about me till to-morrow,” snapped the
+high thin voice as he was off. “I can send for you now when I want you,
+and I’m hoping to have a decent night for once.”
+
+III
+
+It was half-past ten when we left the flat, in an interval of silence
+on the noisy stairs. The silence was unbroken by our wary feet. Yet for
+me a surprise was in store upon the very landing. Instead of going
+downstairs, Raffles led me up two flights, and so out upon a perfectly
+flat roof.
+
+“There are two entrances to these mansions,” he explained between stars
+and chimney-stacks: “one to our staircase, and another round the
+corner. But there’s only one porter, and he lives on the basement
+underneath us, and affects the door nearest home. We miss him by using
+the wrong stairs, and we run less risk of old Theobald. I got the tip
+from the postmen, who come up one way and down the other. Now, follow
+me, and look out!”
+
+There was indeed some necessity for caution, for each half of the
+building had its L-shaped well dropping sheer to the base, the parapets
+so low that one might easily have tripped over them into eternity.
+However, we were soon upon the second staircase, which opened on the
+roof like the first. And twenty minutes of the next twenty-five we
+spent in an admirable hansom, skimming east.
+
+“Not much change in the old hole, Bunny. More of these magic-lantern
+advertisements ... and absolutely the worst bit of taste in town,
+though it’s saying something, in that equestrian statue with the gilt
+stirrups and fixings; why don’t they black the buffer’s boots and his
+horse’s hoofs while they are about it? ... More bicyclists, of course.
+That was just beginning, if you remember. It might have been useful to
+us.... And there’s the old club, getting put into a crate for the
+Jubilee; by Jove, Bunny, we ought to be there. I wouldn’t lean forward
+in Piccadilly, old chap. If you’re seen I’m thought of, and we shall
+have to be jolly careful at Kellner’s.... Ah, there it is! Did I tell
+you I was a low-down stage Yankee at Kellner’s? You’d better be
+another, while the waiter’s in the room.”
+
+We had the little room upstairs; and on the very threshold I, even I,
+who knew my Raffles of old, was taken horribly aback. The table was
+laid for three. I called his attention to it in a whisper.
+
+“Why, yep!” came through his nose. “Say, boy, the lady, she’s not
+comin’, but you leave that tackle where ’tis. If I’m liable to pay, I
+guess I’ll have all there is to it.”
+
+I have never been in America, and the American public is the last on
+earth that I desire to insult; but idiom and intonation alike would
+have imposed upon my inexperience. I had to look at Raffles to make
+sure that it was he who spoke, and I had my own reasons for looking
+hard.
+
+“Who on earth was the lady?” I inquired aghast at the first
+opportunity.
+
+“She isn’t on earth. They don’t like wasting this room on two, that’s
+all. Bunny—my Bunny—here’s to us both!”
+
+And we clinked glasses swimming with the liquid gold of Steinberg,
+1868; but of the rare delights of that supper I can scarcely trust
+myself to write. It was no mere meal, it was no coarse orgy, but a
+little feast for the fastidious gods, not unworthy of Lucullus at his
+worst. And I who had bolted my skilly at Wormwood Scrubbs, and
+tightened my belt in a Holloway attic, it was I who sat down to this
+ineffable repast! Where the courses were few, but each a triumph of its
+kind, it would be invidious to single out any one dish; but the Jambon
+de Westphalie au Champagne tempts me sorely. And then the champagne
+that we drank, not the quantity but the quality! Well, it was Pol
+Roger, ’84, and quite good enough for me; but even so it was not more
+dry, nor did it sparkle more, than the merry rascal who had dragged me
+thus far to the devil, but should lead me dancing the rest of the way.
+I was beginning to tell him so. I had done my honest best since my
+reappearance in the world; but the world had done its worst by me. A
+further antithesis and my final intention were both upon my tongue when
+the waiter with the Château Margaux cut me short; for he was the bearer
+of more than that great wine; bringing also a card upon a silver tray.
+
+“Show him up,” said Raffles, laconically.
+
+“And who is this?” I cried when the man was gone. Raffles reached
+across the table and gripped my arm in a vice. His eyes were steel
+points fixed on mine.
+
+“Bunny, stand by me,” said he in the old irresistible voice, a voice
+both stern and winning. “Stand by me, Bunny—if there’s a row!”
+
+And there was time for nothing more, the door flying open, and a dapper
+person entering with a bow; a frock-coat on his back, gold pince-nez on
+his nose; a shiny hat in one hand, and a black bag in the other.
+
+“Good-evening, gentlemen,” said he, at home and smiling.
+
+“Sit down,” drawled Raffles in casual response. “Say, let me introduce
+you to Mr. Ezra B. Martin, of Shicawgo. Mr. Martin is my future
+brother-in-law. This is Mr. Robinson, Ezra, manager to Sparks &
+Company, the cellerbrated joolers on Re-gent Street.”
+
+I pricked up my ears, but contented myself with a nod. I altogether
+distrusted my ability to live up to my new name and address.
+
+“I figured on Miss Martin bein’ right here, too,” continued Raffles,
+“but I regret to say she’s not feelin’ so good. We light out for Parrus
+on the 9 A. M. train to-morrer mornin’, and she guessed she’d be too
+dead. Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Robinson; but you’ll see I’m
+advertisin’ your wares.”
+
+Raffles held his right hand under the electric light, and a diamond
+ring flashed upon his little finger. I could have sworn it was not
+there five minutes before.
+
+The tradesman had a disappointed face, but for a moment it brightened
+as he expatiated on the value of that ring and on the price his people
+had accepted for it. I was invited to guess the figure, but I shook a
+discreet head. I have seldom been more taciturn in my life.
+
+“Forty-five pounds,” cried the jeweller; “and it would be cheap at
+fifty guineas.”
+
+“That’s right,” assented Raffles. “That’d be dead cheap, I allow. But
+then, my boy, you gotten ready cash, and don’t you forget it.”
+
+I do not dwell upon my own mystification in all this. I merely pause to
+state that I was keenly enjoying that very element. Nothing could have
+been more typical of Raffles and the past. It was only my own attitude
+that was changed.
+
+It appeared that the mythical lady, my sister, had just become engaged
+to Raffles, who seemed all anxiety to pin her down with gifts of price.
+I could not quite gather whose gift to whom was the diamond ring; but
+it had evidently been paid for; and I voyaged to the moon, wondering
+when and how. I was recalled to this planet by a deluge of gems from
+the jeweller’s bag. They lay alight in their cases like the electric
+lamps above. We all three put our heads together over them, myself
+without the slightest clew as to what was coming, but not unprepared
+for violent crime. One does not do eighteen months for nothing.
+
+“Right away,” Raffles was saying. “We’ll choose for her, and you’ll
+change anything she don’t like. Is that the idea?”
+
+“That was my suggestion, sir.”
+
+“Then come on, Ezra. I guess you know Sadie’s taste. You help me
+choose.”
+
+And we chose—lord! What did we not choose? There was her ring, a
+diamond half-hoop. It cost £95, and there was no attempt to get it for
+£90. Then there was a diamond necklet—two hundred guineas, but pounds
+accepted. That was to be the gift of the bridegroom. The wedding was
+evidently imminent. It behooved me to play a brotherly part. I
+therefore rose to the occasion; calculated she would like a diamond
+star (£116), but reckoned it was more than I could afford; and
+sustained a vicious kick under the table for either verb. I was afraid
+to open my mouth on finally obtaining the star for the round hundred.
+And then the fat fell in the fire; for pay we could not; though a
+remittance (said Raffles) was “overdo from Noo York.”
+
+“But I don’t know you, gentlemen,” the jeweller exclaimed. “I haven’t
+even the name of your hotel!”
+
+“I told you we was stoppin’ with friends,” said Raffles, who was not
+angry, though thwarted and crushed. “But that’s right, sir! Oh, that’s
+dead right, and I’m the last man to ask you to take Quixotic risks. I’m
+tryin’ to figure a way out. Yes, _sir_, that’s what I’m tryin’ to do.”
+
+“I wish you could, sir,” the jeweller said, with feeling. “It isn’t as
+if we hadn’t seen the color of your money. But certain rules I’m sworn
+to observe; it isn’t as if I was in business for myself; and—you say
+you start for Paris in the morning!”
+
+“On the 9 A. M. train,” mused Raffles; “and I’ve heard no-end yarns
+about the joolers’ stores in Parrus. But that ain’t fair; don’t you
+take no notice o’ that. I’m tryin’ to figure a way out. Yes, _sir!_”
+
+He was smoking cigarettes out of a twenty-five box; the tradesman and I
+had cigars. Raffles sat frowning with a pregnant eye, and it was only
+too clear to me that his plans had miscarried. I could not help
+thinking, however, that they deserved to do so, if he had counted upon
+buying credit for all but £400 by a single payment of some ten per
+cent. That again seemed unworthy of Raffles, and I, for my part, still
+sat prepared to spring any moment at our visitor’s throat.
+
+“We could mail you the money from Parrus,” drawled Raffles at length.
+“But how should we know you’d hold up your end of the string, and mail
+us the same articles we’ve selected to-night?”
+
+The visitor stiffened in his chair. The name of his firm should be
+sufficient guarantee for that.
+
+“I guess I’m no better acquainted with their name than they are with
+mine,” remarked Raffles, laughing. “See here, though! I got a scheme.
+You pack ’em in this!”
+
+He turned the cigarettes out of the tin box, while the jeweller and I
+joined wondering eyes.
+
+“Pack ’em in this,” repeated Raffles, “the three things we want, and
+never mind the boxes; you can pack ’em in cotton-wool. Then we’ll ring
+for string and sealing wax, seal up the lot right here, and you can
+take ’em away in your grip. Within three days we’ll have our
+remittance, and mail you the money, and you’ll mail us this darned box
+with my seal unbroken! It’s no use you lookin’ so sick, Mr. Jooler; you
+won’t trust us any, and yet we’re goin’ to trust you some. Ring the
+bell, Ezra, and we’ll see if they’ve gotten any sealing-wax and
+string.”
+
+They had; and the thing was done. The tradesman did not like it; the
+precaution was absolutely unnecessary; but since he was taking all his
+goods away with him, the sold with the unsold, his sentimental
+objections soon fell to the ground. He packed necklet, ring, and star,
+with his own hands, in cotton-wool; and the cigarette-box held them so
+easily that at the last moment, when the box was closed, and the string
+ready, Raffles very nearly added a diamond bee-brooch at £51 10s. This
+temptation, however, he ultimately overcame, to the other’s chagrin.
+The cigarette-box was tied up, and the string sealed, oddly enough,
+with the diamond of the ring that had been bought and paid for.
+
+“I’ll chance you having another ring in the store the dead spit of
+mine,” laughed Raffles, as he relinquished the box, and it disappeared
+into the tradesman’s bag. “And now, Mr. Robinson, I hope you’ll
+appreciate my true hospitality in not offering you any thing to drink
+while business was in progress. That’s Château Margaux, sir, and I
+should judge it’s what you’d call an eighteen-carat article.”
+
+In the cab which we took to the vicinity of the flat, I was instantly
+snubbed for asking questions which the driver might easily overhear,
+and took the repulse just a little to heart. I could make neither head
+nor tail of Raffles’s dealings with the man from Regent Street, and was
+naturally inquisitive as to the meaning of it all. But I held my tongue
+until we had regained the flat in the cautious manner of our exit, and
+even there until Raffles rallied me with a hand on either shoulder and
+an old smile upon his face.
+
+“You rabbit!” said he. “Why couldn’t you wait till we got home?”
+
+“Why couldn’t you tell me what you were going to do?” I retorted as of
+yore.
+
+“Because your dear old phiz is still worth its weight in innocence, and
+because you never could act for nuts! You looked as puzzled as the
+other poor devil; but you wouldn’t if you had known what my game really
+was.”
+
+“And pray what was it?”
+
+“That,” said Raffles, and he smacked the cigarette-box down upon the
+mantelpiece. It was not tied. It was not sealed. It flew open from the
+force of the impact. And the diamond ring that cost £95, the necklet
+for £200, and my flaming star at another £100, all three lay safe and
+snug in the jeweller’s own cotton-wool!
+
+“Duplicate boxes!” I cried.
+
+“Duplicate boxes, my brainy Bunny. One was already packed and weighted,
+and in my pocket. I don’t know whether you noticed me weighing the
+three things together in my hand? I know that neither of you saw me
+change the boxes, for I did it when I was nearest buying the bee-brooch
+at the end, and you were too puzzled, and the other Johnny too keen. It
+was the cheapest shot in the game; the dear ones were sending old
+Theobald to Southampton on a fool’s errand yesterday afternoon, and
+showing one’s own nose down Regent Street in broad daylight while he
+was gone; but some things are worth paying for, and certain risks one
+must always take. Nice boxes, aren’t they? I only wished they contained
+a better cigarette; but a notorious brand was essential; a box of
+Sullivans would have brought me to life to-morrow.”
+
+“But they oughtn’t to open it to-morrow.”
+
+“Nor will they, as a matter of fact. Meanwhile, Bunny, I may call upon
+you to dispose of the boodle.”
+
+“I’m on for any mortal thing!”
+
+My voice rang true, I swear, but it was the way of Raffles to take the
+evidence of as many senses as possible. I felt the cold steel of his
+eyes through mine and through my brain. But what he saw seemed to
+satisfy him no less than what he heard, for his hand found my hand, and
+pressed it with a fervor foreign to the man.
+
+“I know you are, and I knew you would be. Only remember, Bunny, it’s my
+turn next to pay the shot!”
+
+You shall hear how he paid it when the time came.
+
+
+
+
+A JUBILEE PRESENT
+
+
+The Room of Gold, in the British Museum, is probably well enough known
+to the inquiring alien and the travelled American. A true Londoner,
+however, I myself had never heard of it until Raffles casually proposed
+a raid.
+
+“The older I grow, Bunny, the less I think of your so-called precious
+stones. When did they ever bring in half their market value in £. s. d.
+There was the first little crib we ever cracked together—you with your
+innocent eyes shut. A thousand pounds that stuff was worth; but how
+many hundreds did it actually fetch. The Ardagh emeralds weren’t much
+better; old Lady Melrose’s necklace was far worse; but that little lot
+the other night has about finished me. A cool hundred for goods priced
+well over four; and £35 to come off for bait, since we only got a
+tenner for the ring I bought and paid for like an ass. I’ll be shot if
+I ever touch a diamond again! Not if it was the Koh-i-noor; those few
+whacking stones are too well known, and to cut them up is to decrease
+their value by arithmetical retrogression. Besides, that brings you up
+against the Fence once more, and I’m done with the beggars for good and
+all. You talk about your editors and publishers, you literary swine.
+Barabbas was neither a robber nor a publisher, but a six-barred,
+barbed-wired, spike-topped Fence. What we really want is an
+Incorporated Society of Thieves, with some public-spirited old forger
+to run it for us on business lines.”
+
+Raffles uttered these blasphemies under his breath, not, I am afraid,
+out of any respect for my one redeeming profession, but because we were
+taking a midnight airing on the roof, after a whole day of June in the
+little flat below. The stars shone overhead, the lights of London
+underneath, and between the lips of Raffles a cigarette of the old and
+only brand. I had sent in secret for a box of the best; the boon had
+arrived that night; and the foregoing speech was the first result. I
+could afford to ignore the insolent asides, however, where the apparent
+contention was so manifestly unsound.
+
+“And how are you going to get rid of your gold?” said I, pertinently.
+
+“Nothing easier, my dear rabbit.”
+
+“Is your Room of Gold a roomful of sovereigns?”
+
+Raffles laughed softly at my scorn.
+
+“No, Bunny, it’s principally in the shape of archaic ornaments, whose
+value, I admit, is largely extrinsic. But gold is gold, from Phœnicia
+to Klondike, and if we cleared the room we should eventually do very
+well.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“I should melt it down into a nugget, and bring it home from the U.S.A.
+to-morrow.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“Make them pay up in hard cash across the counter of the Bank of
+England. And you _can_ make them.”
+
+That I knew, and so said nothing for a time, remaining a hostile though
+a silent critic, while we paced the cool black leads with our bare
+feet, softly as cats.
+
+“And how do you propose to get enough away,” at length I asked, “to
+make it worth while?”
+
+“Ah, there you have it,” said Raffles. “I only propose to reconnoitre
+the ground, to see what we can see. We might find some hiding-place for
+a night; that, I am afraid, would be our only chance.”
+
+“Have you ever been there before?”
+
+“Not since they got the one good, portable piece which I believe that
+they exhibit now. It’s a long time since I read of it—I can’t remember
+where—but I know they have got a gold cup of sorts worth several
+thousands. A number of the immorally rich clubbed together and
+presented it to the nation; and two of the richly immoral intend to
+snaffle it for themselves. At any rate we might go and have a look at
+it, Bunny, don’t you think?”
+
+Think! I seized his arm.
+
+“When? When? When?” I asked, like a quick-firing gun.
+
+“The sooner the better, while old Theobald’s away on his honeymoon.”
+
+Our medico had married the week before, nor was any fellow-practitioner
+taking his work—at least not that considerable branch of it which
+consisted of Raffles—during his brief absence from town. There were
+reasons, delightfully obvious to us, why such a plan would have been
+highly unwise in Dr. Theobald. I, however, was sending him daily
+screeds, and both matutinal and nocturnal telegrams, the composition of
+which afforded Raffles not a little enjoyment.
+
+“Well, then, when—when?” I began to repeat.
+
+“To-morrow, if you like.”
+
+“Only to look?”
+
+The limitation was my one regret.
+
+“We must do so, Bunny, before we leap.”
+
+“Very well,” I sighed. “But to-morrow it is!”
+
+And the morrow it really was.
+
+I saw the porter that night, and, I still think, bought his absolute
+allegiance for the second coin of the realm. My story, however,
+invented by Raffles, was sufficiently specious in itself. That sick
+gentleman, Mr. Maturin (as I had to remember to call him), was really,
+or apparently, sickening for fresh air. Dr. Theobald would allow him
+none; he was pestering me for just one day in the country while the
+glorious weather lasted. I was myself convinced that no possible harm
+could come of the experiment. Would the porter help me in so innocent
+and meritorious an intrigue? The man hesitated. I produced my
+half-sovereign. The man was lost. And at half-past eight next
+morning—before the heat of the day—Raffles and I drove to Kew Gardens
+in a hired landau which was to call for us at mid-day and wait until we
+came. The porter had assisted me to carry my invalid downstairs, in a
+carrying-chair hired (like the landau) from Harrod’s Stores for the
+occasion.
+
+It was little after nine when we crawled together into the gardens; by
+half-past my invalid had had enough, and out he tottered on my arm; a
+cab, a message to our coachman, a timely train to Baker Street, another
+cab, and we were at the British Museum—brisk pedestrians now—not very
+many minutes after the opening hour of 10 A.M.
+
+It was one of those glowing days which will not be forgotten by many
+who were in town at the time. The Diamond Jubilee was upon us, and
+Queen’s weather had already set in. Raffles, indeed, declared it was as
+hot as Italy and Australia put together; and certainly the short summer
+nights gave the channels of wood and asphalt and the continents of
+brick and mortar but little time to cool. At the British Museum the
+pigeons were crooning among the shadows of the grimy colonnade, and the
+stalwart janitors looked less stalwart than usual, as though their
+medals were too heavy for them. I recognized some habitual Readers
+going to their labor underneath the dome; of mere visitors we seemed
+among the first.
+
+“That’s the room,” said Raffles, who had bought the two-penny guide, as
+we studied it openly on the nearest bench; “number 43, upstairs and
+sharp round to the right. Come on, Bunny!”
+
+And he led the way in silence, but with a long methodical stride which
+I could not understand until we came to the corridor leading to the
+Room of Gold, when he turned to me for a moment.
+
+“A hundred and thirty-nine yards from this to the open street,” said
+Raffles, “not counting the stairs. I suppose we _could_ do it in twenty
+seconds, but if we did we should have to jump the gates. No, you must
+remember to loaf out at slow march, Bunny, whether you like it or not.”
+
+“But you talked about a hiding-place for a night?”
+
+“Quite so—for all night. We should have to get back, go on lying low,
+and saunter out with the crowd next day—after doing the whole show
+thoroughly.”
+
+“What! With gold in our pockets—”
+
+“And gold in our boots, and gold up the sleeves and legs of our suits!
+You leave that to me, Bunny, and wait till you’ve tried two pairs of
+trousers sewn together at the foot! This is only a preliminary
+reconnoitre. And here we are.”
+
+It is none of my business to describe the so-called Room of Gold, with
+which I, for one, was not a little disappointed. The glass cases, which
+both fill and line it, may contain unique examples of the goldsmith’s
+art in times and places of which one heard quite enough in the course
+of one’s classical education; but, from a professional point of view, I
+would as lief have the ransacking of a single window in the West End as
+the pick of all those spoils of Etruria and of ancient Greece. The gold
+may not be so soft as it appears, but it certainly looks as though you
+could bite off the business ends of the spoons, and stop your own teeth
+in doing so. Nor should I care to be seen wearing one of the rings; but
+the greatest fraud of all (from the aforesaid standpoint) is assuredly
+that very cup of which Raffles had spoken. Moreover, he felt this
+himself.
+
+“Why, it’s as thin as paper,” said he, “and enamelled like a
+middle-aged lady of quality! But, by Jove, it’s one of the most
+beautiful things I ever saw in my life, Bunny. I should like to have it
+for its own sake, by all my gods!”
+
+The thing had a little square case of plate-glass all to itself at one
+end of the room. It may have been the thing of beauty that Raffles
+affected to consider it, but I for my part was in no mood to look at it
+in that light. Underneath were the names of the plutocrats who had
+subscribed for this national gewgaw, and I fell to wondering where
+their £8,000 came in, while Raffles devoured his two-penny guide-book
+as greedily as a school-girl with a zeal for culture.
+
+“Those are scenes from the martyrdom of St. Agnes,” said he ...
+“‘translucent on relief ... one of the finest specimens of its kind.’ I
+should think it was! Bunny, you Philistine, why can’t you admire the
+thing for its own sake? It would be worth having only to live up to!
+There never was such rich enamelling on such thin gold; and what a good
+scheme to hang the lid up over it, so that you can see how thin it is.
+I wonder if we could lift it, Bunny, by hook or crook?”
+
+“You’d better try, sir,” said a dry voice at his elbow.
+
+The madman seemed to think we had the room to ourselves. I knew better,
+but, like another madman, had let him ramble on unchecked. And here was
+a stolid constable confronting us, in the short tunic that they wear in
+summer, his whistle on its chain, but no truncheon at his side.
+Heavens! how I see him now: a man of medium size, with a broad,
+good-humored, perspiring face, and a limp moustache. He looked sternly
+at Raffles, and Raffles looked merrily at him.
+
+“Going to run me in, officer?” said he. “That _would_ be a joke—my
+hat!”
+
+“I didn’t say as I was, sir,” replied the policeman. “But that’s queer
+talk for a gentleman like you, sir, in the British Museum!” And he
+wagged his helmet at my invalid, who had taken his airing in frock-coat
+and top-hat, the more readily to assume his present part.
+
+“What!” cried Raffles, “simply saying to my friend that I’d like to
+lift the gold cup? Why, so I should, officer, so I should! I don’t mind
+who hears me say so. It’s one of the most beautiful things I ever saw
+in all my life.”
+
+The constable’s face had already relaxed, and now a grin peeped under
+the limp moustache. “I daresay there’s many as feels like that, sir,”
+said he.
+
+“Exactly; and I say what I feel, that’s all,” said Raffles airily. “But
+seriously, officer, is a valuable thing like this quite safe in a case
+like that?”
+
+“Safe enough as long as I’m here,” replied the other, between grim jest
+and stout earnest. Raffles studied his face; he was still watching
+Raffles; and I kept an eye on them both without putting in my word.
+
+“You appear to be single-handed,” observed Raffles. “Is that wise?”
+
+The note of anxiety was capitally caught; it was at once personal and
+public-spirited, that of the enthusiastic savant, afraid for a national
+treasure which few appreciated as he did himself. And, to be sure, the
+three of us now had this treasury to ourselves; one or two others had
+been there when we entered; but now they were gone.
+
+“I’m not single-handed,” said the officer, comfortably. “See that seat
+by the door? One of the attendants sits there all day long.”
+
+“Then where is he now?”
+
+“Talking to another attendant just outside. If you listen you’ll hear
+them for yourself.”
+
+We listened, and we did hear them, but not just outside. In my own mind
+I even questioned whether they were in the corridor through which we
+had come; to me it sounded as though they were just outside the
+corridor.
+
+“You mean the fellow with the billiard-cue who was here when we came
+in?” pursued Raffles.
+
+“That wasn’t a billiard-cue! It was a pointer,” the intelligent officer
+explained.
+
+“It ought to be a javelin,” said Raffles, nervously. “It ought to be a
+poleaxe! The public treasure ought to be better guarded than this. I
+shall write to the _Times_ about it—you see if I don’t!”
+
+All at once, yet somehow not so suddenly as to excite suspicion,
+Raffles had become the elderly busybody with nerves; why, I could not
+for the life of me imagine; and the policeman seemed equally at sea.
+
+“Lor’ bless you, sir,” said he, “I’m all right; don’t you bother your
+head about _me_.”
+
+“But you haven’t even got a truncheon!”
+
+“Not likely to want one either. You see, sir, it’s early as yet; in a
+few minutes these here rooms will fill up; and there’s safety in
+numbers, as they say.”
+
+“Oh, it will fill up soon, will it?”
+
+“Any minute now, sir.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“It isn’t often empty as long as this, sir. It’s the Jubilee, I
+suppose.”
+
+“Meanwhile, what if my friend and I had been professional thieves? Why,
+we could have over-powered you in an instant, my good fellow!”
+
+“That you couldn’t; leastways, not without bringing the whole place
+about your ears.”
+
+“Well, I shall write to the _Times_, all the same. I’m a connoisseur in
+all this sort of thing, and I won’t have unnecessary risks run with the
+nation’s property. You said there was an attendant just outside, but he
+sounds to me as though he were at the other end of the corridor. I
+shall write to-day!”
+
+For an instant we all three listened; and Raffles was right. Then I saw
+two things in one glance. Raffles had stepped a few inches backward,
+and stood poised upon the ball of each foot, his arms half raised, a
+light in his eyes. And another kind of light was breaking over the
+crass features of our friend the constable.
+
+“Then shall I tell you what _I’ll_ do?” he cried, with a sudden clutch
+at the whistle-chain on his chest. The whistle flew out, but it never
+reached his lips. There were a couple of sharp smacks, like double
+barrels discharged all but simultaneously, and the man reeled against
+me so that I could not help catching him as he fell.
+
+“Well done, Bunny! I’ve knocked him out—I’ve knocked him out! Run you
+to the door and see if the attendants have heard anything, and take
+them on if they have.”
+
+Mechanically I did as I was told. There was no time for thought, still
+less for remonstrance or reproach, though my surprise must have been
+even more complete than that of the constable before Raffles knocked
+the sense out of him. Even in my utter bewilderment, however, the
+instinctive caution of the real criminal did not desert me. I ran to
+the door, but I sauntered through it, to plant myself before a
+Pompeiian fresco in the corridor; and there were the two attendants
+still gossiping outside the further door; nor did they hear the dull
+crash which I heard even as I watched them out of the corner of each
+eye.
+
+It was hot weather, as I have said, but the perspiration on my body
+seemed already to have turned into a skin of ice. Then I caught the
+faint reflection of my own face in the casing of the fresco, and it
+frightened me into some semblance of myself as Raffles joined me with
+his hands in his pockets. But my fear and indignation were redoubled at
+the sight of him, when a single glance convinced me that his pockets
+were as empty as his hands, and his mad outrage the most wanton and
+reckless of his whole career.
+
+“Ah, very interesting, very interesting, but nothing to what they have
+in the museum at Naples or in Pompeii itself. You must go there some
+day, Bunny. I’ve a good mind to take you myself. Meanwhile—slow march!
+The beggar hasn’t moved an eyelid. We may swing for him if you show
+indecent haste!”
+
+“We!” I whispered. “We!”
+
+And my knees knocked together as we came up to the chatting attendants.
+But Raffles must needs interrupt them to ask the way to the Prehistoric
+Saloon.
+
+“At the top of the stairs.”
+
+“Thank you. Then we’ll work round that way to the Egyptian part.”
+
+And we left them resuming their providential chat.
+
+“I believe you’re mad,” I said bitterly as we went.
+
+“I believe I _was_,” admitted Raffles; “but I’m not now, and I’ll see
+you through. A hundred and thirty-nine yards, wasn’t it? Then it can’t
+be more than a hundred and twenty now—not as much. Steady, Bunny, for
+God’s sake. It’s _slow_ march—for our lives.”
+
+There was this much management. The rest was our colossal luck. A
+hansom was being paid off at the foot of the steps outside, and in we
+jumped, Raffles shouting “Charing Cross!” for all Bloomsbury to hear.
+
+We had turned into Bloomsbury Street without exchanging a syllable when
+he struck the trap-door with his fist.
+
+“Where the devil are you driving us?”
+
+“Charing Cross, sir.”
+
+“I said King’s Cross! Round you spin, and drive like blazes, or we miss
+our train! There’s one to York at 10:35,” added Raffles as the
+trap-door slammed; “we’ll book there, Bunny, and then we’ll slope
+through the subway to the Metropolitan, and so to ground _via_ Baker
+Street and Earl’s Court.”
+
+And actually in half an hour he was seated once more in the hired
+carrying chair, while the porter and I staggered upstairs with my
+decrepit charge, for whose shattered strength even one hour in Kew
+Gardens had proved too much! Then, and not until then, when we had got
+rid of the porter and were alone at last, did I tell Raffles, in the
+most nervous English at my command, frankly and exactly what I thought
+of him and of his latest deed. Once started, moreover, I spoke as I
+have seldom spoken to living man; and Raffles, of all men, stood my
+abuse without a murmur; or rather he sat it out, too astounded even to
+take off his hat, though I thought his eyebrows would have lifted it
+from his head.
+
+“But it always was your infernal way,” I was savagely concluding. “You
+make one plan, and yet you tell me another—”
+
+“Not to-day, Bunny, I swear!”
+
+“You mean to tell me you really did start with the bare idea of finding
+a place to hide in for a night?”
+
+“Of course I did.”
+
+“It was to be the mere reconnoitre you pretended?”
+
+“There was no pretence about it, Bunny.”
+
+“Then why on earth go and do what you did?”
+
+“The reason would be obvious to anyone but you,” said Raffles, still
+with no unkindly scorn. “It was the temptation of a minute—the final
+impulse of the fraction of a second, when Roberto saw that I was
+tempted, and let me see that he saw it. It’s not a thing I care to do,
+and I sha’n’t be happy till the papers tell me the poor devil is alive.
+But a knock-out shot was the only chance for us then.”
+
+“Why? You don’t get run in for being tempted, nor yet for showing that
+you are!”
+
+“But I should have deserved running in if I hadn’t yielded to such a
+temptation as that, Bunny. It was a chance in a hundred thousand! We
+might go there every day of our lives, and never again be the only
+outsiders in the room, with the billiard-marking Johnnie practically
+out of ear-shot at one and the same time. It was a gift from the gods;
+not to have taken it would have been flying in the face of Providence.”
+
+“But you didn’t take it,” said I. “You went and left it behind.”
+
+I wish I had had a Kodak for the little smile with which Raffles shook
+his head, for it was one that he kept for those great moments of which
+our vocation is not devoid. All this time he had been wearing his hat,
+tilted a little over eyebrows no longer raised. And now at last I knew
+where the gold cup was.
+
+It stood for days upon his chimney-piece, this costly trophy whose
+ancient history and final fate filled newspaper columns even in these
+days of Jubilee, and for which the flower of Scotland Yard was said to
+be seeking high and low. Our constable, we learnt, had been stunned
+only, and, from the moment that I brought him an evening paper with the
+news, Raffles’s spirits rose to a height inconsistent with his equable
+temperament, and as unusual in him as the sudden impulse upon which he
+had acted with such effect. The cup itself appealed to me no more than
+it had done before. Exquisite it might be, handsome it was, but so
+light in the hand that the mere gold of it would scarcely have poured
+three figures out of melting-pot. And what said Raffles but that he
+would never melt it at all!
+
+“Taking it was an offence against the laws of the land, Bunny. That is
+nothing. But destroying it would be a crime against God and Art, and
+may I be spitted on the vane of St. Mary Abbot’s if I commit it!”
+
+Talk such as this was unanswerable; indeed, the whole affair had passed
+the pale of useful comment; and the one course left to a practical
+person was to shrug his shoulders and enjoy the joke. This was not a
+little enhanced by the newspaper reports, which described Raffles as a
+handsome youth, and his unwilling accomplice as an older man of
+blackguardly appearance and low type.
+
+“Hits us both off rather neatly, Bunny,” said he. “But what none of
+them do justice to is my dear cup. Look at it; only look at it, man!
+Was ever anything so rich and yet so chaste? St. Agnes must have had a
+pretty bad time, but it would be almost worth it to go down to
+posterity in such enamel upon such gold. And then the history of the
+thing. Do you realize that it’s five hundred years old and has belonged
+to Henry the Eighth and to Elizabeth among others? Bunny, when you have
+me cremated, you can put my ashes in yonder cup, and lay us in the
+deep-delved earth together!”
+
+“And meanwhile?”
+
+“It is the joy of my heart, the light of my life, the delight of mine
+eye.”
+
+“And suppose other eyes catch sight of it?”
+
+“They never must; they never shall.”
+
+Raffles would have been too absurd had he not been thoroughly alive to
+his own absurdity; there was nevertheless an underlying sincerity in
+his appreciation of any and every form of beauty, which all his
+nonsense could not conceal. And his infatuation for the cup was, as he
+declared, a very pure passion, since the circumstances debarred him
+from the chief joy of the average collector, that of showing his
+treasure to his friends. At last, however, and at the height of his
+craze, Raffles and reason seemed to come together again as suddenly as
+they had parted company in the Room of Gold.
+
+“Bunny,” he cried, flinging his newspaper across the room, “I’ve got an
+idea after your own heart. I know where I can place it after all!”
+
+“Do you mean the cup?”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“Then I congratulate you.”
+
+“Thanks.”
+
+“Upon the recovery of your senses.”
+
+“Thanks galore. But you’ve been confoundedly unsympathetic about this
+thing, Bunny, and I don’t think I shall tell you my scheme till I’ve
+carried it out.”
+
+“Quite time enough,” said I.
+
+“It will mean your letting me loose for an hour or two under cloud of
+this very night. To-morrow’s Sunday, the Jubilee’s on Tuesday, and old
+Theobald’s coming back for it.”
+
+“It doesn’t much matter whether he’s back or not if you go late
+enough.”
+
+“I mustn’t be late. They don’t keep open. No, it’s no use your asking
+any questions. Go out and buy me a big box of Huntley & Palmer’s
+biscuits; any sort you like, only they must be theirs, and absolutely
+the biggest box they sell.”
+
+“My dear man!”
+
+“No questions, Bunny; you do your part and I’ll do mine.”
+
+Subtlety and success were in his face. It was enough for me, and I had
+done his extraordinary bidding within a quarter of an hour. In another
+minute Raffles had opened the box and tumbled all the biscuits into the
+nearest chair.
+
+“Now newspapers!”
+
+I fetched a pile. He bid the cup of gold a ridiculous farewell, wrapped
+it up in newspaper after newspaper, and finally packed it in the empty
+biscuit-box.
+
+“Now some brown paper. I don’t want to be taken for the grocer’s young
+man.”
+
+A neat enough parcel it made, when the string had been tied and the
+ends cut close; what was more difficult was to wrap up Raffles himself
+in such a way that even the porter should not recognize him if they
+came face to face at the corner. And the sun was still up. But Raffles
+would go, and when he did I should not have known him myself.
+
+He may have been an hour away. It was barely dusk when he returned, and
+my first question referred to our dangerous ally, the porter. Raffles
+had passed him unsuspected in going, but had managed to avoid him
+altogether on the return journey, which he had completed by way of the
+other entrance and the roof. I breathed again.
+
+“And what have you done with the cup?”
+
+“Placed it!”
+
+“How much for? How much for?”
+
+“Let me think. I had a couple of cabs, and the postage was a tanner,
+with another twopence for registration. Yes, it cost me exactly
+five-and-eight.”
+
+“_It_ cost _you!_ But what did you _get_ for it, Raffles?”
+
+“Nothing, my boy.”
+
+“Nothing!”
+
+“Not a crimson cent.”
+
+“I am not surprised. I never thought it had a market value. I told you
+so in the beginning,” I said, irritably. “But what on earth have you
+done with the thing?”
+
+“Sent it to the Queen.”
+
+“You haven’t!”
+
+Rogue is a word with various meanings, and Raffles had been one sort of
+rogue ever since I had known him; but now, for once, he was the
+innocent variety, a great gray-haired child, running over with
+merriment and mischief.
+
+“Well, I’ve sent it to Sir Arthur Bigge, to present to her Majesty,
+with the loyal respects of the thief, if that will do for you,” said
+Raffles. “I thought they might take too much stock of me at the G.P.O.
+if I addressed it to the Sovereign herself. Yes, I drove over to St.
+Martin’s-le-Grand with it, and I registered the box into the bargain.
+Do a thing properly if you do it at all.”
+
+“But why on earth,” I groaned, “do such a thing at all?”
+
+“My dear Bunny, we have been reigned over for sixty years by infinitely
+the finest monarch the world has ever seen. The world is taking the
+present opportunity of signifying the fact for all it is worth. Every
+nation is laying of its best at her royal feet; every class in the
+community is doing its little level—except ours. All I have done is to
+remove one reproach from our fraternity.”
+
+At this I came round, was infected with his spirit, called him the
+sportsman he always was and would be, and shook his daredevil hand in
+mine; but, at the same time, I still had my qualms.
+
+“Supposing they trace it to us?” said I.
+
+“There’s not much to catch hold of in a biscuit-box by Huntley &
+Palmer,” replied Raffles; “that was why I sent you for one. And I
+didn’t write a word upon a sheet of paper which could possibly be
+traced. I simply printed two or three on a virginal post-card—another
+half-penny to the bad—which might have been bought at any post-office
+in the kingdom. No, old chap, the G.P.O. was the one real danger; there
+was one detective I spotted for myself; and the sight of him has left
+me with a thirst. Whisky and Sullivans for two, Bunny, if you please.”
+
+Raffles was soon clinking his glass against mine.
+
+“The Queen,” said he. “God bless her!”
+
+
+
+
+THE FATE OF FAUSTINA
+
+
+“Mar—ga—rì,
+    e perzo a Salvatore!
+Mar—ga—rì,
+    Ma l’ommo è cacciatore!
+Mar—ga—rì,
+    Nun ce aje corpa tu!
+Chello ch’ è fatto, è fatto, un ne parlammo cchieù!”
+
+
+A piano-organ was pouring the metallic music through our open windows,
+while a voice of brass brayed the words, which I have since obtained,
+and print above for identification by such as know their Italy better
+than I. They will not thank me for reminding them of a tune so lately
+epidemic in that land of aloes and blue skies; but at least it is
+unlikely to run in their heads as the ribald accompaniment to a
+tragedy; and it does in mine.
+
+It was in the early heat of August, and the hour that of the lawful and
+necessary siesta for such as turn night into day. I was therefore
+shutting my window in a rage, and wondering whether I should not do the
+same for Raffles, when he appeared in the silk pajamas to which the
+chronic solicitude of Dr. Theobald confined him from morning to night.
+
+“Don’t do that, Bunny,” said he. “I rather like that thing, and want to
+listen. What sort of fellows are they to look at, by the way?”
+
+I put my head out to see, it being a primary rule of our quaint
+establishment that Raffles must never show himself at any of the
+windows. I remember now how hot the sill was to my elbows, as I leant
+upon it and looked down, in order to satisfy a curiosity in which I
+could see no point.
+
+“Dirty-looking beggars,” said I over my shoulder: “dark as dark; blue
+chins, oleaginous curls, and ear-rings; ragged as they make them, but
+nothing picturesque in their rags.”
+
+“Neapolitans all over,” murmured Raffles behind me; “and that’s a
+characteristic touch, the one fellow singing while the other grinds;
+they always have that out there.”
+
+“He’s rather a fine chap, the singer,” said I, as the song ended. “My
+hat, what teeth! He’s looking up here, and grinning all round his head;
+shall I chuck him anything?”
+
+“Well, I have no reason to love the Neapolitans; but it takes me
+back—it takes me back! Yes, here you are, one each.”
+
+It was a couple of half-crowns that Raffles put into my hand, but I had
+thrown them into the street for pennies before I saw what they were.
+Thereupon I left the Italians bowing to the mud, as well they might,
+and I turned to protest against such wanton waste. But Raffles was
+walking up and down, his head bent, his eyes troubled; and his one
+excuse disarmed remonstrance.
+
+“They took me back,” he repeated. “My God, how they took me back!”
+
+Suddenly he stopped in his stride.
+
+“You don’t understand, Bunny, old chap; but if you like you shall. I
+always meant to tell you some day, but never felt worked up to it
+before, and it’s not the kind of thing one talks about for talking’s
+sake. It isn’t a nursery story, Bunny, and there isn’t a laugh in it
+from start to finish; on the contrary, you have often asked me what
+turned my hair gray, and now you are going to hear.”
+
+This was promising, but Raffles’s manner was something more. It was
+unique in my memory of the man. His fine face softened and set hard by
+turns. I never knew it so hard. I never knew it so soft. And the same
+might be said of his voice, now tender as any woman’s, now flying to
+the other extreme of equally unwonted ferocity. But this was toward the
+end of his tale; the beginning he treated characteristically enough,
+though I could have wished for a less cavalier account of the island of
+Elba, where, upon his own showing, he had met with much humanity.
+
+“Deadly, my dear Bunny, is not the word for that glorified snag, or for
+the mollusks, its inhabitants. But they started by wounding my vanity,
+so perhaps I am prejudiced, after all. I sprung myself upon them as a
+shipwrecked sailor—a sole survivor—stripped in the sea and landed
+without a stitch—yet they took no more interest in me than you do in
+Italian organ-grinders. They were decent enough. I didn’t have to pick
+and steal for a square meal and a pair of trousers; it would have been
+more exciting if I had. But what a place! Napoleon couldn’t stand it,
+you remember, but he held on longer than I did. I put in a few weeks in
+their infernal mines, simply to pick up a smattering of Italian; then
+got across to the mainland in a little wooden timber-tramp; and
+ungratefully glad I was to leave Elba blazing in just such another
+sunset as the one you won’t forget.
+
+“The tramp was bound for Naples, but first it touched at Baiæ, where I
+carefully deserted in the night. There are too many English in Naples
+itself, though I thought it would make a first happy hunting-ground
+when I knew the language better and had altered myself a bit more.
+Meanwhile I got a billet of several sorts on one of the loveliest spots
+that ever I struck on all my travels. The place was a vineyard, but it
+overhung the sea, and I got taken on as tame sailorman and emergency
+bottle-washer. The wages were the noble figure of a lira and a half,
+which is just over a bob, a day, but there were lashings of sound wine
+for one and all, and better wine to bathe in. And for eight whole
+months, my boy, I was an absolutely honest man. The luxury of it,
+Bunny! I out-heroded Herod, wouldn’t touch a grape, and went in the
+most delicious danger of being knifed for my principles by the thieving
+crew I had joined.
+
+“It was the kind of place where every prospect pleases—and all the rest
+of it—especially all the rest. But may I see it in my dreams till I
+die—as it was in the beginning—before anything began to happen. It was
+a wedge of rock sticking out into the bay, thatched with vines, and
+with the rummiest old house on the very edge of all, a devil of a
+height above the sea: you might have sat at the windows and dropped
+your Sullivan-ends plumb into blue water a hundred and fifty feet
+below.
+
+“From the garden behind the house—such a garden, Bunny—oleanders and
+mimosa, myrtles, rosemarys and red tangles of fiery, untamed flowers—in
+a corner of this garden was the top of a subterranean stair down to the
+sea; at least there were nearly two hundred steps tunnelled through the
+solid rock; then an iron gate, and another eighty steps in the open
+air; and last of all a cave fit for pirates,
+a-penny-plain-and-two-pence-colored. This cave gave upon the sweetest
+little thing in coves, all deep blue water and honest rocks; and here I
+looked after the vineyard shipping, a pot-bellied tub with a brown
+sail, and a sort of dingy. The tub took the wine to Naples, and the
+dingy was the tub’s tender.
+
+“The house above was said to be on the identical site of a suburban
+retreat of the admirable Tiberius; there was the old sinner’s private
+theatre with the tiers cut clean to this day, the well where he used to
+fatten his lampreys on his slaves, and a ruined temple of those ripping
+old Roman bricks, shallow as dominoes and ruddier than the cherry. I
+never was much of an antiquary, but I could have become one there if
+I’d had nothing else to do; but I had lots. When I wasn’t busy with the
+boats I had to trim the vines, or gather the grapes, or even help make
+the wine itself in a cool, dark, musty vault underneath the temple,
+that I can see and smell as I jaw. And can’t I hear it and feel it too!
+Squish, squash, bubble; squash, squish, guggle; and your feet as though
+you had been wading through slaughter to a throne. Yes, Bunny, you
+mightn’t think it, but this good right foot, that never was on the
+wrong side of the crease when the ball left my hand, has also been
+known to
+
+‘crush the lees of pleasure
+    From sanguine grapes of pain.’”
+
+
+He made a sudden pause, as though he had stumbled on the truth in jest.
+His face filled with lines. We were sitting in the room that had been
+bare when first I saw it; there were basket-chairs and a table in it
+now, all meant ostensibly for me; and hence Raffles would slip to his
+bed, with schoolboy relish, at every tinkle of the bell. This afternoon
+we felt fairly safe, for Theobald had called in the morning, and Mrs.
+Theobald still took up much of his time. Through the open window we
+could hear the piano-organ and “Mar—gar—rì” a few hundred yards further
+on. I fancied Raffles was listening to it while he paused. He shook his
+head abstractedly when I handed him the cigarettes; and his tone
+hereafter was never just what it had been.
+
+“I don’t know, Bunny, whether you’re a believer in transmigration of
+souls. I have often thought it easier to believe than lots of other
+things, and I have been pretty near believing in it myself since I had
+my being on that villa of Tiberius. The brute who had it in my day, if
+he isn’t still running it with a whole skin, was or is as cold-blooded
+a blackguard as the worst of the emperors, but I have often thought he
+had a lot in common with Tiberius. He had the great high sensual Roman
+nose, eyes that were sinks of iniquity in themselves, and that swelled
+with fatness, like the rest of him, so that he wheezed if he walked a
+yard; otherwise rather a fine beast to look at, with a huge gray
+moustache, like a flying gull, and the most courteous manners even to
+his men; but one of the worst, Bunny, one of the worst that ever was.
+It was said that the vineyard was only his hobby; if so, he did his
+best to make his hobby pay. He used to come out from Naples for the
+week-ends—in the tub when it wasn’t too rough for his nerves—and he
+didn’t always come alone. His very name sounded unhealthy—Corbucci. I
+suppose I ought to add that he was a Count, though Counts are
+two-a-penny in Naples, and in season all the year round.
+
+“He had a little English, and liked to air it upon me, much to my
+disgust; if I could not hope to conceal my nationality as yet, I at
+least did not want to have it advertised; and the swine had English
+friends. When he heard that I was bathing in November, when the bay is
+still as warm as new milk, he would shake his wicked old head and say,
+‘You are very audashuss—you are very audashuss!’ and put on no end of
+side before his Italians. By God, he had pitched upon the right word
+unawares, and I let him know it in the end!
+
+“But that bathing, Bunny; it was absolutely the best I ever had
+anywhere. I said just now the water was like wine; in my own mind I
+used to call it blue champagne, and was rather annoyed that I had no
+one to admire the phrase. Otherwise I assure you that I missed my own
+particular kind very little indeed, though I often wished that _you_
+were there, old chap; particularly when I went for my lonesome swim;
+first thing in the morning, when the Bay was all rose-leaves, and last
+thing at night, when your body caught phosphorescent fire! Ah, yes, it
+was a good enough life for a change; a perfect paradise to lie low in;
+another Eden until....
+
+“My poor Eve!”
+
+And he fetched a sigh that took away his words; then his jaws snapped
+together, and his eyes spoke terribly while he conquered his emotion. I
+pen the last word advisedly. I fancy it is one which I have never used
+before in writing of A. J. Raffles, for I cannot at the moment recall
+any other occasion upon which its use would have been justified. On
+resuming, however, he was not only calm, but cold; and this flying for
+safety to the other extreme is the single instance of self-distrust
+which the present Achates can record to the credit of his impious
+Æneas.
+
+“I called the girl Eve,” said he. “Her real name was Faustina, and she
+was one of a vast family who hung out in a hovel on the inland border
+of the vineyard. And Aphrodite rising from the sea was less wonderful
+and not more beautiful than Aphrodite emerging from that hole!
+
+“It was the most exquisite face I ever saw or shall see in this life.
+Absolutely perfect features; a skin that reminded you of old gold, so
+delicate was its bronze; magnificent hair, not black but nearly; and
+such eyes and teeth as would have made the fortune of a face without
+another point. I tell you, Bunny, London would go mad about a girl like
+that. But I don’t believe there’s such another in the world. And there
+she was wasting her sweetness upon that lovely but desolate little
+corner of it! Well, she did not waste it upon me. I would have married
+her, and lived happily ever after in such a hovel as her people’s—with
+her. Only to look at her—only to look at her for the rest of my days—I
+could have lain low and remained dead even to you! And that’s all I’m
+going to tell you about that, Bunny; cursed be he who tells more! Yet
+don’t run away with the idea that this poor Faustina was the only woman
+I ever cared about. I don’t believe in all that ‘only’ rot;
+nevertheless I tell you that she _was_ the one being who ever entirely
+satisfied my sense of beauty; and I honestly believe I could have
+chucked the world and been true to Faustina for that alone.
+
+“We met sometimes in the little temple I told you about, sometimes
+among the vines; now by honest accident, now by flagrant design; and
+found a ready-made rendezvous, romantic as one could wish, in the cave
+down all those subterranean steps. Then the sea would call us—my blue
+champagne—my sparkling cobalt—and there was the dingy ready to our
+hand. Oh, those nights! I never knew which I liked best, the moonlit
+ones when you sculled through silver and could see for miles, or the
+dark nights when the fishermen’s torches stood for the sea, and a red
+zig-zag in the sky for old Vesuvius. We were happy. I don’t mind owning
+it. We seemed not to have a care between us. My mates took no interest
+in my affairs, and Faustina’s family did not appear to bother about
+her. The Count was in Naples five nights of the seven; the other two we
+sighed apart.
+
+“At first it was the oldest story in literature—Eden _plus_ Eve. The
+place had been a heaven on earth before, but now it was heaven itself.
+So for a little; then one night, a Monday night, Faustina burst out
+crying in the boat; and sobbed her story as we drifted without mishap
+by the mercy of the Lord. And that was almost as old a story as the
+other.
+
+“She was engaged—what! Had I never heard of it? Did I mean to upset the
+boat? What was her engagement beside our love? ‘Niente, niente,’
+crooned Faustina, sighing yet smiling through her tears. No, but what
+did matter was that the man had threatened to stab her to the heart—and
+would do it as soon as look at her—that I knew.
+
+“I knew it merely from my knowledge of the Neapolitans, for I had no
+idea who the man might be. I knew it, and yet I took this detail better
+than the fact of the engagement, though now I began to laugh at both.
+As if I was going to let her marry anybody else! As if a hair of her
+lovely head should be touched while I lived to protect her! I had a
+great mind to row away to blazes with her that very night, and never go
+near the vineyard again, or let her either. But we had not a lira
+between us at the time, and only the rags in which we sat barefoot in
+the boat. Besides, I had to know the name of the animal who had
+threatened a woman, and such a woman as this.
+
+“For a long time she refused to tell me, with splendid obduracy; but I
+was as determined as she; so at last she made conditions. I was not to
+go and get put in prison for sticking a knife into him—he wasn’t worth
+it—and I did promise not to stab him in the back. Faustina seemed quite
+satisfied, though a little puzzled by my manner, having herself the
+racial tolerance for cold steel; and next moment she had taken away my
+breath. ‘It is Stefano,’ she whispered, and hung her head.
+
+“And well she might, poor thing! Stefano, of all creatures on God’s
+earth—for her!
+
+“Bunny, he was a miserable little undersized
+wretch—ill-favored—servile—surly—and second only to his master in
+bestial cunning and hypocrisy. His face was enough for me; that was
+what I read in it, and I don’t often make mistakes. He was Corbucci’s
+own confidential body-servant, and that alone was enough to damn him in
+decent eyes: always came out first on the Saturday with the _spese_, to
+have all ready for his master and current mistress, and stayed behind
+on the Monday to clear and lock up. Stefano! That worm! I could well
+understand _his_ threatening a woman with a knife; what beat me was how
+any woman could ever have listened to him; above all, that Faustina
+should be the one! It passed my comprehension. But I questioned her as
+gently as I could; and her explanation was largely the thread-bare one
+you would expect. Her parents were so poor. They were so many in
+family. Some of them begged—would I promise never to tell? Then some of
+them stole—sometimes—and all knew the pains of actual want. She looked
+after the cows, but there were only two of them, and brought the milk
+to the vineyard and elsewhere; but that was not employment for more
+than one; and there were countless sisters waiting to take her place.
+Then he was so rich, Stefano.
+
+“‘Rich!’ I echoed. ‘Stefano?’
+
+“‘Si, Arturo mio.’
+
+“Yes, I played the game on that vineyard, Bunny, even to going my own
+first name.
+
+“‘And how comes he to be rich?’ I asked, suspiciously.
+
+“She did not know; but he had given her such beautiful jewels; the
+family had lived on them for months, she pretending an avocat had taken
+charge of them for her against her marriage. But I cared nothing about
+all that.
+
+“‘Jewels! Stefano!’ I could only mutter.
+
+“‘Perhaps the Count has paid for some of them. He is very kind.’
+
+“‘To you, is he?’
+
+“‘Oh, yes, very kind.’
+
+“‘And you would live in his house afterwards?’
+
+“‘Not now, mia cara—not now!’
+
+“‘No, by God you don’t!’ said I in English. ‘But you would have done
+so, eh?’
+
+“‘Of course. That was arranged. The Count is really very kind.’
+
+“‘Do you see anything of him when he comes here?’
+
+“Yes, he had sometimes brought her little presents, sweetmeats,
+ribbons, and the like; but the offering had always been made through
+this toad of a Stefano. Knowing the men, I now knew all. But Faustina,
+she had the pure and simple heart, and the white soul, by the God who
+made it, and for all her kindness to a tattered scapegrace who made
+love to her in broken Italian between the ripples and the stars. She
+was not to know what I was, remember; and beside Corbucci and his
+henchman I was the Archangel Gabriel come down to earth.
+
+“Well, as I lay awake that night, two more lines of Swinburne came into
+my head, and came to stay:
+
+“God said ‘Let him who wins her take
+    And keep Faustine.’
+
+
+“On that couplet I slept at last, and it was my text and watchword when
+I awoke in the morning. I forget how well you know your Swinburne,
+Bunny; but don’t you run away with the idea that there was anything
+else in common between his Faustine and mine. For the last time let me
+tell you that poor Faustina was the whitest and the best I ever knew.
+
+“Well, I was strung up for trouble when the next Saturday came, and
+I’ll tell you what I had done. I had broken the pledge and burgled
+Corbucci’s villa in my best manner during his absence in Naples. Not
+that it gave me the slightest trouble; but no human being could have
+told that I had been in, when I came out. And I had stolen nothing,
+mark you, but only borrowed a revolver from a drawer in the Count’s
+desk, with one or two trifling accessories; for by this time I had the
+measure of these damned Neapolitans. They are spry enough with a knife,
+but you show them the business end of a shooting-iron, and they’ll
+streak like rabbits for the nearest hole. But the revolver wasn’t for
+my own use. It was for Faustina, and I taught her how to use it in the
+cave down there by the sea, shooting at candles stuck upon the rock.
+The noise in the cave was something frightful, but high up above it
+couldn’t be heard at all, as we proved to each other’s satisfaction
+pretty early in the proceedings. So now Faustina was armed with
+munitions of self-defence; and I knew enough of her character to
+entertain no doubt as to their spirited use upon occasion. Between the
+two of us, in fact, our friend Stefano seemed tolerably certain of a
+warm week-end.
+
+“But the Saturday brought word that the Count was not coming this week,
+being in Rome on business, and unable to return in time; so for a whole
+Sunday we were promised peace; and made bold plans accordingly. There
+was no further merit in hushing this thing up. ‘Let him who wins her
+take and keep Faustine.’ Yes, but let him win her openly, or lose her
+and be damned to him! So on the Sunday I was going to have it out with
+her people—with the Count and Stefano as soon as they showed their
+noses. I had no inducement, remember, ever to return to surreptitious
+life within a cab-fare of Wormwood Scrubbs. Faustina and the Bay of
+Naples were quite good enough for me. And the prehistoric man in me
+rather exulted in the idea of fighting for my desire.
+
+“On the Saturday, however, we were able to meet for the last time as
+heretofore—just once more in secret—down there in the cave—as soon as
+might be after dark. Neither of us minded if we were kept for hours;
+each knew in the end that the other would come; and there was a charm
+of its own even in waiting with such knowledge. But that night I did
+lose patience: not in the cave, but up above, where first on one
+pretext and then on another the direttore kept me going until I smelt a
+rat. He was not given to exacting overtime, this direttore, whose only
+fault was his servile subjection to our common boss. It seemed pretty
+obvious, therefore, that he was acting upon some secret instructions
+from Corbucci himself, and, the moment I suspected this, I asked him to
+his face if it was not the case. And it was; he admitted it with many
+shrugs, being a conveniently weak person, whom one felt almost ashamed
+of bullying as the occasion demanded.
+
+“The fact was, however, that the Count had sent for him on finding he
+had to go to Rome, and had said he was very sorry to go just then, as
+among other things he intended to speak to me about Faustina. Stefano
+had told him all about his row with her, and moreover that it was on my
+account, which Faustina had never told me, though I had guessed as much
+for myself. Well, the Count was going to take his jackal’s part for all
+he was worth, which was just exactly what I had expected him to do. He
+intended going for me on his return, but meanwhile I was not to make
+hay in his absence, and so this tool of a direttore had orders to keep
+me at it night and day. I undertook not to give the poor beast away,
+but at the same time told him I had not the faintest intention of doing
+another stroke of work that night.
+
+“It was very dark, and I remember knocking my head against the oranges
+as I ran up the long, shallow steps which ended the journey between the
+direttore’s lodge and the villa itself. But at the back of the villa
+was the garden I spoke about, and also a bare chunk of the cliff where
+it was bored by that subterranean stair. So I saw the stars close
+overhead, and the fishermen’s torches far below, the coastwise lights
+and the crimson hieroglyph that spelt Vesuvius, before I plunged into
+the darkness of the shaft. And that was the last time I appreciated the
+unique and peaceful charm of this outlandish spot.
+
+“The stair was in two long flights, with an air-hole or two at the top
+of the upper one, but not another pin-prick till you came to the iron
+gate at the bottom of the lower. As you may read of an infinitely
+lighter place, in a finer work of fiction than you are ever likely to
+write, Bunny, it was ‘gloomy at noon, dark as midnight at dusk, and
+black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight.’ I won’t swear to my
+quotation, but I will to those stairs. They were as black that night as
+the inside of the safest safe in the strongest strong-room in the
+Chancery Lane Deposit. Yet I had not got far down them with my bare
+feet before I heard somebody else coming up in boots. You may imagine
+what a turn that gave me! It could not be Faustina, who went barefoot
+three seasons of the four, and yet there was Faustina waiting for me
+down below. What a fright she must have had! And all at once my own
+blood ran cold: for the man sang like a kettle as he plodded up and up.
+It was, it must be, the short-winded Count himself, whom we all
+supposed to be in Rome!
+
+“Higher he came and nearer, nearer, slowly yet hurriedly, now stopping
+to cough and gasp, now taking a few steps by elephantine assault. I
+should have enjoyed the situation if it had not been for poor Faustina
+in the cave; as it was I was filled with nameless fears. But I could
+not resist giving that grampus Corbucci one bad moment on account. A
+crazy hand-rail ran up one wall, so I carefully flattened myself
+against the other, and he passed within six inches of me, puffing and
+wheezing like a brass band. I let him go a few steps higher, and then I
+let him have it with both lungs.
+
+“‘Buona sera, eccellenza, signorì!’ I roared after him. And a scream
+came down in answer—such a scream! A dozen different terrors were in
+it; and the wheezing had stopped, with the old scoundrel’s heart.
+
+“‘Chi sta la?’ he squeaked at last, gibbering and whimpering like a
+whipped monkey, so that I could not bear to miss his face, and got a
+match all ready to strike.
+
+“‘Arturo, signorì.’
+
+“He didn’t repeat my name, nor did he damn me in heaps. He did nothing
+but wheeze for a good minute, and when he spoke it was with insinuating
+civility, in his best English.
+
+“‘Come nearer, Arturo. You are in the lower regions down there. I want
+to speak with you.’
+
+“‘No, thanks. I’m in a hurry,’ I said, and dropped that match back into
+my pocket. He might be armed, and I was not.
+
+“‘So you are in a ’urry!’ and he wheezed amusement. ‘And you thought I
+was still in Rome, no doubt; and so I was until this afternoon, when I
+caught train at the eleventh moment, and then another train from Naples
+to Pozzuoli. I have been rowed here now by a fisherman of Pozzuoli. I
+had not time to stop anywhere in Naples, but only to drive from station
+to station. So I am without Stefano, Arturo, I am without Stefano.’
+
+“His sly voice sounded preternaturally sly in the absolute darkness,
+but even through that impenetrable veil I knew it for a sham. I had
+laid hold of the hand-rail. It shook violently in my hand; he also was
+holding it where he stood. And these suppressed tremors, or rather
+their detection in this way, struck a strange chill to my heart, just
+as I was beginning to pluck it up.
+
+“‘It is lucky for Stefano,’ said I, grim as death.
+
+“‘Ah, but you must not be too ’ard on ’im,’ remonstrated the Count.
+‘You have stole his girl, he speak with me about it, and I wish to
+speak with you. It is very audashuss, Arturo, very audashuss! Perhaps
+you are even going to meet her now, eh?’”
+
+I told him straight that I was.
+
+“‘Then there is no ’urry, for she is not there.’
+
+“‘You didn’t see her in the cave?’ I cried, too delighted at the
+thought to keep it to myself.
+
+“‘I had no such fortune,’ the old devil said.
+
+“‘She is there, all the same.’
+
+“‘I only wish I ’ad known.’
+
+“‘And I’ve kept her long enough!’
+
+“In fact I threw this over my shoulder as I turned and went running
+down.
+
+“‘I ’ope you will find her!’ his malicious voice came croaking after
+me. ‘I ’ope you will—I ’ope so.’
+
+“And find her I did.”
+
+Raffles had been on his feet some time, unable to sit still or to
+stand, moving excitedly about the room. But now he stood still enough,
+his elbows on the cast-iron mantelpiece, his head between his hands.
+
+“Dead?” I whispered.
+
+And he nodded to the wall.
+
+“There was not a sound in the cave. There was no answer to my voice.
+Then I went in, and my foot touched hers, and it was colder than the
+rock ... Bunny, they had stabbed her to the heart. She had fought them,
+and they had stabbed her to the heart!”
+
+“You say ‘they,’” I said gently, as he stood in heavy silence, his back
+still turned. “I thought Stefano had been left behind?”
+
+Raffles was round in a flash, his face white-hot, his eyes dancing
+death.
+
+“He was in the cave!” he shouted. “I saw him—I spotted him—it was broad
+twilight after those stairs—and I went for him with my bare hands. Not
+fists, Bunny; not fists for a thing like that; I meant getting my
+fingers into his vile little heart and tearing it out by the roots. I
+was stark mad. But he had the revolver—hers. He blazed it at arm’s
+length, and missed. And that steadied me. I had smashed his funny-bone
+against the rock before he could blaze again; the revolver fell with a
+rattle, but without going off; in an instant I had it tight, and the
+little swine at my mercy at last.”
+
+“You didn’t show him any?”
+
+“Mercy? With Faustina dead at my feet? I should have deserved none in
+the next world if I had shown him any in this! No, I just stood over
+him, with the revolver in both hands, feeling the chambers with my
+thumb; and as I stood he stabbed at me; but I stepped back to that one,
+and brought him down with a bullet in his guts.
+
+“‘And I can spare you two or three more,’ I said, for my poor girl
+could not have fired a shot. ‘Take that one to hell with you—and
+that—and that!’
+
+“Then I started coughing and wheezing like the Count himself, for the
+place was full of smoke. When it cleared my man was very dead, and I
+tipped him into the sea, to defile that rather than Faustina’s cave.
+And then—and then—we were alone for the last time, she and I, in our
+own pet haunt; and I could scarcely see her, yet I would not strike a
+match, for I knew she would not have me see her as she was. I could say
+good-by to her without that. I said it; and I left her like a man, and
+up the first open-air steps with my head in the air and the stars all
+sharp in the sky; then suddenly they swam, and back I went like a
+lunatic, to see if she was really dead, to bring her back to life ...
+Bunny, I can’t tell you any more.”
+
+“Not of the Count?” I murmured at last.
+
+“Not even of the Count,” said Raffles, turning round with a sigh. “I
+left him pretty sorry for himself; but what was the good of that? I had
+taken blood for blood, and it was not Corbucci who had killed Faustina.
+No, the plan was his, but that was not part of the plan. They had found
+out about our meetings in the cave: nothing simpler than to have me
+kept hard at it overhead and to carry off Faustina by brute force in
+the boat. It was their only chance, for she had said more to Stefano
+than she had admitted to me, and more than I am going to repeat about
+myself. No persuasion would have induced her to listen to him again; so
+they tried force; and she drew Corbucci’s revolver on them, but they
+had taken her by surprise, and Stefano stabbed her before she could
+fire.”
+
+“But how do you know all that?” I asked Raffles, for his tale was going
+to pieces in the telling, and the tragic end of poor Faustina was no
+ending for me.
+
+“Oh,” said he, “I had it from Corbucci at his own revolver’s point. He
+was waiting at his window, and I could have potted him at my ease where
+he stood against the light listening hard enough but not seeing a
+thing. So he asked whether it was Stefano, and I whispered, ‘Si,
+signore’; and then whether he had finished Arturo, and I brought the
+same shot off again. He had let me in before he knew who was finished
+and who was not.”
+
+“And did you finish him?”
+
+“No; that was too good for Corbucci. But I bound and gagged him about
+as tight as man was ever gagged or bound, and I left him in his room
+with the shutters shut and the house locked up. The shutters of that
+old place were six inches thick, and the walls nearly six feet; that
+was on the Saturday night, and the Count wasn’t expected at the
+vineyard before the following Saturday. Meanwhile he was supposed to be
+in Rome. But the dead would doubtless be discovered next day, and I am
+afraid this would lead to his own discovery with the life still in him.
+I believe he figured on that himself, for he sat threatening me gamely
+till the last. You never saw such a sight as he was, with his head
+split in two by a ruler tied at the back of it, and his great moustache
+pushed up into his bulging eyes. But I locked him up in the dark
+without a qualm, and I wished and still wish him every torment of the
+damned.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“The night was still young, and within ten miles there was the best of
+ports in a storm, and hundreds of holds for the humble stowaway to
+choose from. But I didn’t want to go further than Genoa, for by this
+time my Italian would wash, so I chose the old Norddeutscher Lloyd, and
+had an excellent voyage in one of the boats slung in-board over the
+bridge. That’s better than any hold, Bunny, and I did splendidly on
+oranges brought from the vineyard.”
+
+“And at Genoa?”
+
+“At Genoa I took to my wits once more, and have been living on nothing
+else ever since. But there I had to begin all over again, and at the
+very bottom of the ladder. I slept in the streets. I begged. I did all
+manner of terrible things, rather hoping for a bad end, but never
+coming to one. Then one day I saw a white-headed old chap looking at me
+through a shop-window—a window I had designs upon—and when I stared at
+him he stared at me—and we wore the same rags. So I had come to that!
+But one reflection makes many. I had not recognized myself; who on
+earth would recognize me? London called me—and here I am. Italy had
+broken my heart—and there it stays.”
+
+Flippant as a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of
+the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt
+the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him for
+a right appreciation of those last words. That they were no mere words
+I know full well. That, but for the tragedy of his Italian life, that
+life would have sufficed him for years, if not for ever, I did and do
+still believe. But I alone see him as I saw him then, the lines upon
+his face, and the pain behind the lines; how they came to disappear,
+and what removed them, you will never guess. It was the one thing you
+would have expected to have the opposite effect, the thing indeed that
+had forced his confidence, the organ and the voice once more beneath
+our very windows:
+
+“Margarita de Parete,
+    era a’ sarta d’ e’ signore;
+    se pugneva sempe e ddete
+    pe penzare a Salvatore!
+“Mar—ga—rì,
+    e perzo e Salvatore!
+Mar—ga—rì,
+    Ma l’ommo è cacciatore!
+Mar—ga—rì,
+    Nun ce aje corpa tu!
+Chello ch’ è fatto, è fatto, un ne parlammo cchieù!”
+
+
+I simply stared at Raffles. Instead of deepening, his lines had
+vanished. He looked years younger, mischievous and merry and alert as I
+remembered him of old in the breathless crisis of some madcap escapade.
+He was holding up his finger; he was stealing to the window; he was
+peeping through the blind as though our side street were Scotland Yard
+itself; he was stealing back again, all revelry, excitement, and
+suspense.
+
+“I half thought they were after me before,” said he. “That was why I
+made you look. I daren’t take a proper look myself, but what a jest if
+they were! What a jest!”
+
+“Do you mean the police?” said I.
+
+“The police! Bunny, do you know them and me so little that you can look
+me in the face and ask such a question? My boy, I’m dead to them—off
+their books—a good deal deader than being off the hooks! Why, if I went
+to Scotland Yard this minute, to give myself up, they’d chuck me out
+for a harmless lunatic. No, I fear an enemy nowadays, and I go in
+terror of the sometime friend, but I have the utmost confidence in the
+dear police.”
+
+“Then whom do you mean?”
+
+“The Camorra!”
+
+I repeated the word with a different intonation. Not that I had never
+heard of that most powerful and sinister of secret societies; but I
+failed to see on what grounds Raffles should jump to the conclusion
+that these everyday organ-grinders belonged to it.
+
+“It was one of Corbucci’s threats,” said he. “If I killed him the
+Camorra would certainly kill me; he kept on telling me so; it was like
+his cunning not to say that he would put them on my tracks whether or
+no.”
+
+“He is probably a member himself!”
+
+“Obviously, from what he said.”
+
+“But why on earth should you think that these fellows are?” I demanded,
+as that brazen voice came rasping through a second verse.
+
+“I don’t think. It was only an idea. That thing is so thoroughly
+Neapolitan, and I never heard it on a London organ before. Then again,
+what should bring them back here?”
+
+I peeped through the blind in my turn; and, to be sure, there was the
+fellow with the blue chin and the white teeth watching our windows, and
+ours only, as he bawled.
+
+“And why?” cried Raffles, his eyes dancing when I told him. “Why should
+they come sneaking back to _us?_ Doesn’t that look suspicious, Bunny;
+doesn’t that promise a lark?”
+
+“Not to me,” I said, having the smile for once. “How many people,
+should you imagine, toss them five shilling for as many minutes of
+their infernal row? You seem to forget that’s what you did an hour
+ago!”
+
+Raffles had forgotten. His blank face confessed the fact. Then suddenly
+he burst outlaughing at himself.
+
+“Bunny,” said he, “you’ve no imagination, and I never knew I had so
+much! Of course you’re right. I only wish you were not, for there’s
+nothing I should enjoy more than taking on another Neapolitan or two.
+You see, I owe them something still! I didn’t settle in full. I owe
+them more than ever I shall pay them on this side Styx!”
+
+He had hardened even as he spoke: the lines and the years had come
+again, and his eyes were flint and steel, with an honest grief behind
+the glitter.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST LAUGH
+
+
+As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, the pick of our exploits,
+from a frankly criminal point of view, are of least use for the
+comparatively pure purposes of these papers. They might be appreciated
+in a trade journal (if only that want could be supplied), by skilled
+manipulators of the jemmy and the large light bunch; but, as records of
+unbroken yet insignificant success, they would be found at once too
+trivial and too technical, if not sordid and unprofitable into the
+bargain. The latter epithets, and worse, have indeed already been
+applied, if not to Raffles and all his works, at least to mine upon
+Raffles, by more than one worthy wielder of a virtuous pen. I need not
+say how heartily I disagree with that truly pious opinion. So far from
+admitting a single word of it, I maintain it is the liveliest warning
+that I am giving to the world. Raffles was a genius, and he could not
+make it pay! Raffles had invention, resource, incomparable audacity,
+and a nerve in ten thousand. He was both strategian and tactician, and
+we all now know the difference between the two. Yet for months he had
+been hiding like a rat in a hole, unable to show even his altered face
+by night or day without risk, unless another risk were courted by three
+inches of conspicuous crepe. Then thus far our rewards had oftener than
+not been no reward at all. Altogether it was a very different story
+from the old festive, unsuspected, club and cricket days, with their
+_noctes ambrosianæ_ at the Albany.
+
+And now, in addition to the eternal peril of recognition, there was yet
+another menace of which I knew nothing. I thought no more of our
+Neapolitan organ-grinders, though I did often think of the moving page
+that they had torn for me out of my friend’s strange life in Italy.
+Raffles never alluded to the subject again, and for my part I had
+entirely forgotten his wild ideas connecting the organ-grinders with
+the Camorra, and imagining them upon his own tracks. I heard no more of
+it, and thought as little, as I say. Then one night in the autumn—I
+shrink from shocking the susceptible for nothing—but there was a
+certain house in Palace Gardens, and when we got there Raffles would
+pass on. I could see no soul in sight, no glimmer in the windows. But
+Raffles had my arm, and on we went without talking about it. Sharp to
+the left on the Notting Hill side, sharper still up Silver Street, a
+little tacking west and south, a plunge across High Street, and
+presently we were home.
+
+“Pyjamas first,” said Raffles, with as much authority as though it
+mattered. It was a warm night, however, though September, and I did not
+mind until I came in clad as he commanded to find the autocrat himself
+still booted and capped. He was peeping through the blind, and the gas
+was still turned down. But he said that I could turn it up, as he
+helped himself to a cigarette and nothing with it.
+
+“May I mix you one?” said I.
+
+“No, thanks.”
+
+“What’s the trouble?”
+
+“We were followed.”
+
+“Never!”
+
+“You never saw it.”
+
+“But _you_ never looked round.”
+
+“I have an eye at the back of each ear, Bunny.”
+
+I helped myself and I fear with less moderation than might have been
+the case a minute before.
+
+“So that was why—”
+
+“That was why,” said Raffles, nodding; but he did not smile, and I put
+down my glass untouched.
+
+“They were following us then!”
+
+“All up Palace Gardens.”
+
+“I thought you wound about coming back over the hill.”
+
+“Nevertheless, one of them’s in the street below at this moment.”
+
+No, he was not fooling me. He was very grim. And he had not taken off a
+thing; perhaps he did not think it worth while.
+
+“Plain clothes?” I sighed, following the sartorial train of thought,
+even to the loathly arrows that had decorated my person once already
+for a little aeon. Next time they would give me double. The skilly was
+in my stomach when I saw Raffles’s face.
+
+“Who said it was the police, Bunny?” said he. “It’s the Italians.
+They’re only after me; they won’t hurt a hair of _your_ head, let alone
+cropping it! Have a drink, and don’t mind me. I shall score them off
+before I’m done.”
+
+“And I’ll help you!”
+
+“No, old chap, you won’t. This is my own little show. I’ve known about
+it for weeks. I first tumbled to it the day those Neapolitans came back
+with their organs, though I didn’t seriously suspect things then; they
+never came again, those two, they had done their part. That’s the
+Camorra all over, from all accounts. The Count I told you about is
+pretty high up in it, by the way he spoke, but there will be grades and
+grades between him and the organ-grinders. I shouldn’t be surprised if
+he had every low-down Neapolitan ice-creamer in the town upon my
+tracks! The organization’s incredible. Then do you remember the
+superior foreigner who came to the door a few days afterwards? You said
+he had velvet eyes.”
+
+“I never connected him with those two!”
+
+“Of course you didn’t, Bunny, so you threatened to kick the fellow
+downstairs, and only made them keener on the scent. It was too late to
+say anything when you told me. But the very next time I showed my nose
+outside I heard a camera click as I passed, and the fiend was a person
+with velvet eyes. Then there was a lull—that happened weeks ago. They
+had sent me to Italy for identification by Count Corbucci.”
+
+“But this is all theory,” I exclaimed. “How on earth can you know?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Raffles, “but I should like to bet. Our friend the
+bloodhound is hanging about the corner near the pillar-box; look
+through my window, it’s dark in there, and tell me who he is.”
+
+The man was too far away for me to swear to his face, but he wore a
+covert-coat of un-English length, and the lamp across the road played
+steadily on his boots; they were very yellow, and they made no noise
+when he took a turn. I strained my eyes, and all at once I remembered
+the thin-soled, low-heeled, splay yellow boots of the insidious
+foreigner, with the soft eyes and the brown-paper face, whom I had
+turned from the door as a palpable fraud. The ring at the bell was the
+first I had heard of him, there had been no warning step upon the
+stairs, and my suspicious eye had searched his feet for rubber soles.
+
+“It’s the fellow,” I said, returning to Raffles, and I described his
+boots.
+
+Raffles was delighted.
+
+“Well done, Bunny; you’re coming on,” said he. “Now I wonder if he’s
+been over here all the time, or if they sent him over expressly? You
+did better than you think in spotting those boots, for they can only
+have been made in Italy, and that looks like the special envoy. But
+it’s no use speculating. I must find out.”
+
+“How can you?”
+
+“He won’t stay there all night.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“When he gets tired of it I shall return the compliment and follow
+_him_.”
+
+“Not alone,” said I, firmly.
+
+“Well, we’ll see. We’ll see at once,” said Raffles, rising. “Out with
+the gas, Bunny, while I take a look. Thank you. Now wait a bit ... yes!
+He’s chucked it; he’s off already; and so am I!”
+
+But I slipped to our outer door, and held the passage.
+
+“I don’t let you go alone, you know.”
+
+“You can’t come with me in pyjamas.”
+
+“Now I see why you made me put them on!”
+
+“Bunny, if you don’t shift I shall have to shift you. This is my very
+own private one-man show. But I’ll be back in an hour—there!”
+
+“You swear?”
+
+“By all my gods.”
+
+I gave in. How could I help giving in? He did not look the man that he
+had been, but you never knew with Raffles, and I could not have him lay
+a hand on me. I let him go with a shrug and my blessing, then ran into
+his room to see the last of him from the window.
+
+The creature in the coat and boots had reached the end of our little
+street, where he appeared to have hesitated, so that Raffles was just
+in time to see which way he turned. And Raffles was after him at an
+easy pace, and had himself almost reached the corner when my attention
+was distracted from the alert nonchalance of his gait. I was marvelling
+that it alone had not long ago betrayed him, for nothing about him was
+so unconsciously characteristic, when suddenly I realized that Raffles
+was not the only person in the little lonely street. Another pedestrian
+had entered from the other end, a man heavily built and clad, with an
+astrakhan collar to his coat on this warm night, and a black slouch hat
+that hid his features from my bird’s-eye view. His steps were the short
+and shuffling ones of a man advanced in years and in fatty
+degeneration, but of a sudden they stopped beneath my very eyes. I
+could have dropped a marble into the dinted crown of the black felt
+hat. Then, at the same moment, Raffles turned the corner without
+looking round, and the big man below raised both his hands and his
+face. Of the latter I saw only the huge white moustache, like a flying
+gull, as Raffles had described it; for at a glance I divined that this
+was his arch-enemy, the Count Corbucci himself.
+
+I did not stop to consider the subtleties of the system by which the
+real hunter lagged behind while his subordinate pointed the quarry like
+a sporting dog. I left the Count shuffling onward faster than before,
+and I jumped into some clothes as though the flats were on fire. If the
+Count was going to follow Raffles in his turn, then I would follow the
+Count in mine, and there would be a midnight procession of us through
+the town. But I found no sign of him in the empty street, and no sign
+in the Earl’s Court Road, that looked as empty for all its length, save
+for a natural enemy standing like a waxwork figure with a glimmer at
+his belt.
+
+“Officer,” I gasped, “have you seen anything of an old gentleman with a
+big white mustache?”
+
+The unlicked cub of a common constable seemed to eye me the more
+suspiciously for the flattering form of my address.
+
+“Took a hansom,” said he at length.
+
+A hansom! Then he was not following the others on foot; there was no
+guessing his game. But something must be said or done.
+
+“He’s a friend of mine,” I explained, “and I want to overtake him. Did
+you hear where he told the fellow to drive?”
+
+A curt negative was the policeman’s reply to that; and if ever I take
+part in a night assault-at-arms, revolver _versus_ baton, in the back
+kitchen, I know which member of the Metropolitan Police Force I should
+like for my opponent.
+
+If there was no overtaking the Count, however, it should be a
+comparatively simple matter in the case of the couple on foot, and I
+wildly hailed the first hansom that crawled into my ken. I must tell
+Raffles who it was that I had seen; the Earl’s Court Road was long, and
+the time since he vanished in it but a few short minutes. I drove down
+the length of that useful thoroughfare, with an eye apiece on either
+pavement, sweeping each as with a brush, but never a Raffles came into
+the pan. Then I tried the Fulham Road, first to the west, then to the
+east, and in the end drove home to the flat as bold as brass. I did not
+realize my indiscretion until I had paid the man and was on the stairs.
+Raffles never dreamt of driving all the way back; but I was hoping now
+to find him waiting up above. He had said an hour. I had remembered it
+suddenly. And now the hour was more than up. But the flat was as empty
+as I had left it; the very light that had encouraged me, pale though it
+was, as I turned the corner in my hansom, was but the light that I
+myself had left burning in the desolate passage.
+
+I can give you no conception of the night that I spent. Most of it I
+hung across the sill, throwing a wide net with my ears, catching every
+footstep afar off, every hansom bell farther still, only to gather in
+some alien whom I seldom even landed in our street. Then I would listen
+at the door.
+
+He might come over the roof; and eventually some one did; but now it
+was broad daylight, and I flung the door open in the milkman’s face,
+which whitened at the shock as though I had ducked him in his own pail.
+
+“You’re late,” I thundered as the first excuse for my excitement.
+
+“Beg your pardon,” said he, indignantly, “but I’m half an hour before
+my usual time.”
+
+“Then I beg yours,” said I; “but the fact is, Mr. Maturin has had one
+of his bad nights, and I seem to have been waiting hours for milk to
+make him a cup of tea.”
+
+This little fib (ready enough for Raffles, though I say it) earned me
+not only forgiveness but that obliging sympathy which is a branch of
+the business of the man at the door. The good fellow said that he could
+see I had been sitting up all night, and he left me pluming myself upon
+the accidental art with which I had told my very necessary
+tarra-diddle. On reflection I gave the credit to instinct, not
+accident, and then sighed afresh as I realized how the influence of the
+master was sinking into me, and he Heaven knew where! But my punishment
+was swift to follow, for within the hour the bell rang imperiously
+twice, and there was Dr. Theobald on our mat; in a yellow Jaeger suit,
+with a chin as yellow jutting over the flaps that he had turned up to
+hide his pyjamas.
+
+“What’s this about a bad night?” said he.
+
+“He couldn’t sleep, and he wouldn’t let me,” I whispered, never
+loosening my grasp of the door, and standing tight against the other
+wall. “But he’s sleeping like a baby now.”
+
+“I must see him.”
+
+“He gave strict orders that you should not.”
+
+“I’m his medical man, and I—”
+
+“You know what he is,” I said, shrugging; “the least thing wakes him,
+and you will if you insist on seeing him now. It will be the last time,
+I warn you! I know what he said, and you don’t.”
+
+The doctor cursed me under his fiery moustache.
+
+“I shall come up during the course of the morning,” he snarled.
+
+“And I shall tie up the bell,” I said, “and if it doesn’t ring he’ll be
+sleeping still, but I will not risk waking him by coming to the door
+again.”
+
+And with that I shut it in his face. I was improving, as Raffles had
+said; but what would it profit me if some evil had befallen him? And
+now I was prepared for the worst. A boy came up whistling and leaving
+papers on the mats; it was getting on for eight o’clock, and the
+whiskey and soda of half-past twelve stood untouched and stagnant in
+the tumbler. If the worst had happened to Raffles, I felt that I would
+either never drink again, or else seldom do anything else.
+
+Meanwhile I could not even break my fast, but roamed the flat in a
+misery not to be described, my very linen still unchanged, my cheeks
+and chin now tawny from the unwholesome night. How long would it go on?
+I wondered for a time. Then I changed my tune: how long could I endure
+it?
+
+It went on actually until the forenoon only, but my endurance cannot be
+measured by the time, for to me every hour of it was an arctic night.
+Yet it cannot have been much after eleven when the ring came at the
+bell, which I had forgotten to tie up after all. But this was not the
+doctor; neither, too well I knew, was it the wanderer returned. Our
+bell was the pneumatic one that tells you if the touch be light or
+heavy; the hand upon it now was tentative and shy.
+
+The owner of the hand I had never seen before. He was young and ragged,
+with one eye blank, but the other ablaze with some fell excitement. And
+straightway he burst into a low torrent of words, of which all I knew
+was that they were Italian, and therefore news of Raffles, if only I
+had known the language! But dumb-show might help us somewhat, and in I
+dragged him, though against his will, a new alarm in his one wild eye.
+
+“Non capite?” he cried when I had him inside and had withstood the
+torrent.
+
+“No, I’m bothered if I do!” I answered, guessing his question from his
+tone.
+
+“Vostro amico,” he repeated over and over again; and then, “Poco tempo,
+poco tempo, poco tempo!”
+
+For once in my life the classical education of my public-school days
+was of real value. “My pal, my pal, and no time to be lost!” I
+translated freely, and flew for my hat.
+
+“Ecco, signore!” cried the fellow, snatching the watch from my
+waistcoat pocket, and putting one black thumb-nail on the long hand,
+the other on the numeral twelve. “Mezzogiorno—poco tempo—poco tempo!”
+And again I seized his meaning, that it was twenty past eleven, and we
+must be there by twelve. But where, but where? It was maddening to be
+summoned like this, and not to know what had happened, nor to have any
+means of finding out. But my presence of mind stood by me still, I was
+improving by seven-league strides, and I crammed my handkerchief
+between the drum and hammer of the bell before leaving. The doctor
+could ring now till he was black in the face, but I was not coming, and
+he need not think it.
+
+I half expected to find a hansom waiting, but there was none, and we
+had gone some distance down the Earl’s Court Road before we got one; in
+fact, we had to run to the stand. Opposite is the church with the clock
+upon it, as everybody knows, and at sight of the dial my companion had
+wrung his hands; it was close upon the half-hour.
+
+“Poco tempo—pochissimo!” he wailed. “Bloom-buree Ske-warr,” he then
+cried to the cabman—“numero trentotto!”
+
+“Bloomsbury Square,” I roared on my own account, “I’ll show you the
+house when we get there, only drive like be-damned!”
+
+My companion lay back gasping in his corner. The small glass told me
+that my own face was pretty red.
+
+“A nice show!” I cried; “and not a word can you tell me. Didn’t you
+bring me a note?”
+
+I might have known by this time that he had not, still I went through
+the pantomime of writing with my finger on my cuff. But he shrugged and
+shook his head.
+
+“Niente,” said he. “Una quistione di vita, di vita!”
+
+“What’s that?” I snapped, my early training come in again. “Say it
+slowly—andante—rallentando.”
+
+Thank Italy for the stage instructions in the songs one used to murder!
+The fellow actually understood.
+
+“Una—quistione—di—vita.”
+
+“Or mors, eh?” I shouted, and up went the trap-door over our heads.
+
+“Avanti, avanti, avanti!” cried the Italian, turning up his one-eyed
+face.
+
+“Hell-to-leather,” I translated, “and double fare if you do it by
+twelve o’clock.”
+
+But in the streets of London how is one to know the time? In the Earl’s
+Court Road it had not been half-past, and at Barker’s in High Street it
+was but a minute later. A long half-mile a minute, that was going like
+the wind, and indeed we had done much of it at a gallop. But the next
+hundred yards took us five minutes by the next clock, and which was one
+to believe? I fell back upon my own old watch (it was my own), which
+made it eighteen minutes to the hour as we swung across the Serpentine
+bridge, and by the quarter we were in the Bayswater Road—not up for
+once.
+
+“Presto, presto,” my pale guide murmured. “Affretatevi—avanti!”
+
+“Ten bob if you do it,” I cried through the trap, without the slightest
+notion of what we were to do. But it was “una quistione di vita,” and
+“vostro amico” must and could only be my miserable Raffles.
+
+What a very godsend is the perfect hansom to the man or woman in a
+hurry! It had been our great good fortune to jump into a perfect
+hansom; there was no choice, we had to take the first upon the rank,
+but it must have deserved its place with the rest nowhere. New tires,
+superb springs, a horse in a thousand, and a driver up to every trick
+of his trade! In and out we went like a fast half-back at the Rugby
+game, yet where the traffic was thinnest, there were we. And how he
+knew his way! At the Marble Arch he slipped out of the main stream, and
+so into Wigmore Street, then up and in and out and on until I saw the
+gold tips of the Museum palisade gleaming between the horse’s ears in
+the sun. Plop, plop, plop; ting, ling, ling; bell and horse-shoes,
+horse-shoes and bell, until the colossal figure of C. J. Fox in a grimy
+toga spelt Bloomsbury Square with my watch still wanting three minutes
+to the hour.
+
+“What number?” cried the good fellow over-head.
+
+“Trentotto, trentotto,” said my guide, but he was looking to the right,
+and I bundled him out to show the house on foot. I had not
+half-a-sovereign after all, but I flung our dear driver a whole one
+instead, and only wish that it had been a hundred.
+
+Already the Italian had his latch-key in the door of 38, and in another
+moment we were rushing up the narrow stairs of as dingy a London house
+as prejudiced countryman can conceive. It was panelled, but it was dark
+and evil-smelling, and how we should have found our way even to the
+stairs but for an unwholesome jet of yellow gas in the hall, I cannot
+myself imagine. However, up we went pell-mell, to the right-about on
+the half-landing, and so like a whirlwind into the drawing-room a few
+steps higher. There the gas was also burning behind closed shutters,
+and the scene is photographed upon my brain, though I cannot have
+looked upon it for a whole instant as I sprang in at my leader’s heels.
+
+This room also was panelled, and in the middle of the wall on our left,
+his hands lashed to a ring-bolt high above his head, his toes barely
+touching the floor, his neck pinioned by a strap passing through
+smaller ring-bolts under either ear, and every inch of him secured on
+the same principle, stood, or rather hung, all that was left of
+Raffles, for at the first glance I believed him dead. A black ruler
+gagged him, the ends lashed behind his neck, the blood upon it caked to
+bronze in the gaslight. And in front of him, ticking like a
+sledge-hammer, its only hand upon the stroke of twelve, stood a simple,
+old-fashioned, grandfather’s clock—but not for half an instant
+longer—only until my guide could hurl himself upon it and send the
+whole thing crashing into the corner. An ear-splitting report
+accompanied the crash, a white cloud lifted from the fallen clock, and
+I saw a revolver smoking in a vice screwed below the dial, an
+arrangement of wires sprouting from the dial itself, and the single
+hand at once at its zenith and in contact with these.
+
+“Tumble to it, Bunny?”
+
+He was alive; these were his first words; the Italian had the
+blood-caked ruler in his hand, and with his knife was reaching up to
+cut the thongs that lashed the hands. He was not tall enough, I seized
+him and lifted him up, then fell to work with my own knife upon the
+straps. And Raffles smiled faintly upon us through his blood-stains.
+
+“I want you to tumble to it,” he whispered; “the neatest thing in
+revenge I ever knew, and another minute would have fixed it. I’ve been
+waiting for it twelve hours, watching the clock round, death at the end
+of the lap! Electric connection. Simple enough. Hour-hand only—O Lord!”
+
+We had cut the last strap. He could not stand. We supported him between
+us to a horsehair sofa, for the room was furnished, and I begged him
+not to speak, while his one-eyed deliverer was at the door before
+Raffles recalled him with a sharp word in Italian.
+
+“He wants to get me a drink, but that can wait,” said he, in firmer
+voice; “I shall enjoy it the more when I’ve told you what happened.
+Don’t let him go, Bunny; put your back against the door. He’s a decent
+soul, and it’s lucky for me I got a word with him before they trussed
+me up. I’ve promised to set him up in life, and I will, but I don’t
+want him out of my sight for the moment.”
+
+“If you squared him last night,” I exclaimed, “why the blazes didn’t he
+come to me till the eleventh hour?”
+
+“Ah, I knew he’d have to cut it fine though I hoped not quite so fine
+as all that. But all’s well that ends well, and I declare I don’t feel
+so much the worse. I shall be sore about the gills for a bit—and what
+do you think?”
+
+He pointed to the long black ruler with the bronze stain; it lay upon
+the floor; he held out his hand for it, and I gave it to him.
+
+“The same one I gagged him with,” said Raffles, with his still ghastly
+smile; “he was a bit of an artist, old Corbucci, after all!”
+
+“Now let’s hear how you fell into his clutches,” said I, briskly, for I
+was as anxious to hear as he seemed to tell me, only for my part I
+could have waited until we were safe in the flat.
+
+“I do want to get it off my chest, Bunny,” old Raffles admitted, “and
+yet I hardly can tell you after all. I followed your friend with the
+velvet eyes. I followed him all the way here. Of course I came up to
+have a good look at the house when he’d let himself in, and damme if he
+hadn’t left the door ajar! Who could resist that? I had pushed it half
+open and had just one foot on the mat when I got such a crack on the
+head as I hope never to get again. When I came to my wits they were
+hauling me up to that ring-bolt by the hands, and old Corbucci himself
+was bowing to me, but how _he_ got here I don’t know yet.”
+
+“I can tell you that,” said I, and told how I had seen the Count for
+myself on the pavement underneath our windows. “Moreover,” I continued,
+“I saw him spot you, and five minutes after in Earl’s Court Road I was
+told he’d driven off in a cab. He would see you following his man,
+drive home ahead, and catch you by having the door left open in the way
+you describe.”
+
+“Well,” said Raffles, “he deserved to catch me somehow, for he’d come
+from Naples on purpose, ruler and all, and the ring-bolts were ready
+fixed, and even this house taken furnished for nothing else! He meant
+catching me before he’d done, and scoring me off in exactly the same
+way that I scored off him, only going one better of course. He told me
+so himself, sitting where I am sitting now, at three o’clock this
+morning, and smoking a most abominable cigar that I’ve smelt ever
+since. It appears he sat twenty-four hours when I left _him_ trussed
+up, but he said twelve would content him in my case, as there was
+certain death at the end of them, and I mightn’t have life enough left
+to appreciate my end if he made it longer. But I wouldn’t have trusted
+him if he could have got the clock to go _twice_ round without firing
+off the pistol. He explained the whole mechanism of that to me; he had
+thought it all out on the vineyard I told you about; and then he asked
+if I remembered what he had promised me in the name of the Camorra. I
+only remembered some vague threats, but he was good enough to give me
+so many particulars of that institution that I could make a European
+reputation by exposing the whole show if it wasn’t for my unfortunate
+resemblance to that infernal rascal Raffles. Do you think they would
+know me at the Yard, Bunny, after all this time? Upon my soul I’ve a
+good mind to risk it!”
+
+I offered no opinion on the point. How could it interest me then? But
+interested I was in Raffles, never more so in my life. He had been
+tortured all night and half a day, yet he could sit and talk like this
+the moment we cut him down; he had been within a minute of his death,
+yet he was as full of life as ever; ill-treated and defeated at the
+best, he could still smile through his blood as though the boot were on
+the other leg. I had imagined that I knew my Raffles at last. I was not
+likely so to flatter myself again.
+
+“But what has happened to these villains?” I burst out, and my
+indignation was not only against them for their cruelty, but also
+against their victim for his phlegmatic attitude toward them. It was
+difficult to believe that this was Raffles.
+
+“Oh,” said he, “they were to go off to Italy _instanter;_ they should
+be crossing now. But do listen to what I am telling you; it’s
+interesting, my dear man. This old sinner Corbucci turns out to have
+been no end of a boss in the Camorra—says so himself. One of the _capi
+paranze_, my boy, no less; and the velvety Johnny a_ giovano onorato_,
+Anglicé, fresher. This fellow here was also in it, and I’ve sworn to
+protect him from them evermore; and it’s just as I said, half the
+organ-grinders in London belong, and the whole lot of them were put on
+my tracks by secret instructions. This excellent youth manufactures
+iced poison on Saffron Hill when he’s at home.”
+
+“And why on earth didn’t he come to me quicker?”
+
+“Because he couldn’t talk to you, he could only fetch you, and it was
+as much as his life was worth to do that before our friends had
+departed. They were going by the eleven o’clock from Victoria, and that
+didn’t leave much chance, but he certainly oughtn’t to have run it as
+fine as he did. Still you must remember that I had to fix things up
+with him in the fewest possible words, in a single minute that the
+other two were indiscreet enough to leave us alone together.”
+
+The ragamuffin in question was watching us with all his solitary eye,
+as though he knew that we were discussing him. Suddenly he broke out in
+agonized accents, his hands clasped, and a face so full of fear that
+every moment I expected to see him on his knees. But Raffles answered
+kindly, reassuringly, I could tell from his tone, and then turned to me
+with a compassionate shrug.
+
+“He says he couldn’t find the mansions, Bunny, and really it’s not to
+be wondered at. I had only time to tell him to hunt you up and bring
+you here by hook or crook before twelve to-day, and after all he has
+done that. But now the poor devil thinks you’re riled with him, and
+that we’ll give him away to the Camorra.”
+
+“Oh, it’s not with him I’m riled,” I said frankly, “but with those
+other blackguards, and—and with you, old chap, for taking it all as you
+do, while such infamous scoundrels have the last laugh, and are safely
+on their way to France!”
+
+Raffles looked up at me with a curiously open eye, an eye that I never
+saw when he was not in earnest. I fancied he did not like my last
+expression but one. After all, it was no laughing matter to him.
+
+“But are they?” said he. “I’m not so sure.”
+
+“You said they were!”
+
+“I said they should be.”
+
+“Didn’t you hear them go?”
+
+“I heard nothing but the clock all night. It was like Big Ben striking
+at the last—striking nine to the fellow on the drop.”
+
+And in that open eye I saw at last a deep glimmer of the ordeal through
+which he had passed.
+
+“But, my dear old Raffles, if they’re still on the premises—”
+
+The thought was too thrilling for a finished sentence.
+
+“I hope they are,” he said grimly, going to the door. “There’s a gas
+on! Was that burning when you came in?”
+
+Now that I thought of it, yes, it had been.
+
+“And there’s a frightfully foul smell,” I added, as I followed Raffles
+down the stairs. He turned to me gravely with his hand upon the
+front-room door, and at the same moment I saw a coat with an astrakhan
+collar hanging on the pegs.
+
+“They are in here, Bunny,” he said, and turned the handle.
+
+The door would only open a few inches. But a detestable odor came out,
+with a broad bar of yellow gaslight. Raffles put his handkerchief to
+his nose. I followed his example, signing to our ally to do the same,
+and in another minute we had all three squeezed into the room.
+
+The man with the yellow boots was lying against the door, the Count’s
+great carcass sprawled upon the table, and at a glance it was evident
+that both men had been dead some hours. The old Camorrist had the stem
+of a liqueur-glass between his swollen blue fingers, one of which had
+been cut in the breakage, and the livid flesh was also brown with the
+last blood that it would ever shed. His face was on the table, the huge
+moustache projecting from under either leaden cheek, yet looking itself
+strangely alive. Broken bread and scraps of frozen macaroni lay upon
+the cloth and at the bottom of two soup-plates and a tureen; the
+macaroni had a tinge of tomato; and there was a crimson dram left in
+the tumblers, with an empty fiasco to show whence it came. But near the
+great gray head upon the table another liqueur-glass stood, unbroken,
+and still full of some white and stinking liquid; and near that a tiny
+silver flask, which made me recoil from Raffles as I had not from the
+dead; for I knew it to be his.
+
+“Come out of this poisonous air,” he said sternly, “and I will tell you
+how it has happened.”
+
+So we all three gathered together in the hall. But it was Raffles who
+stood nearest the street-door, his back to it, his eyes upon us two.
+And though it was to me only that he spoke at first, he would pause
+from point to point, and translate into Italian for the benefit of the
+one-eyed alien to whom he owed his life.
+
+“You probably don’t even know the name, Bunny,” he began, “of the
+deadliest poison yet known to science. It is cyanide of cacodyl, and I
+have carried that small flask of it about with me for months. Where I
+got it matters nothing; the whole point is that a mere sniff reduces
+flesh to clay. I have never had any opinion of suicide, as you know,
+but I always felt it worth while to be forearmed against the very
+worst. Well, a bottle of this stuff is calculated to stiffen an
+ordinary roomful of ordinary people within five minutes; and I
+remembered my flask when they had me as good as crucified in the small
+hours of this morning. I asked them to take it out of my pocket. I
+begged them to give me a drink before they left me. And what do you
+suppose they did?”
+
+I thought of many things but suggested none, while Raffles turned this
+much of his statement into sufficiently fluent Italian. But when he
+faced me again his face was still flaming.
+
+“That beast Corbucci!” said he—“how can I pity him? He took the flask;
+he would give me none; he flicked me in the face instead. My idea was
+that he, at least, should go with me—to sell my life as dearly as
+that—and a sniff would have settled us both. But no, he must tantalize
+and torment me; he thought it brandy; he must take it downstairs to
+drink to my destruction! Can you have any pity for a hound like that?”
+
+“Let us go,” I at last said, hoarsely, as Raffles finished speaking in
+Italian, and his second listener stood open-mouthed.
+
+“We will go,” said Raffles, “and we will chance being seen; if the
+worst comes to the worst this good chap will prove that I have been
+tied up since one o’clock this morning, and the medical evidence will
+decide how long those dogs have been dead.”
+
+But the worst did not come to the worst, more power to my unforgotten
+friend the cabman, who never came forward to say what manner of men he
+had driven to Bloomsbury Square at top speed on the very day upon which
+the tragedy was discovered there, or whence he had driven them. To be
+sure, they had not behaved like murderers, whereas the evidence at the
+inquest all went to show that the defunct Corbucci was little better.
+His reputation, which transpired with his identity, was that of a
+libertine and a renegade, while the infernal apparatus upstairs
+revealed the fiendish arts of the anarchist to boot. The inquiry
+resulted eventually in an open verdict, and was chiefly instrumental in
+killing such compassion as is usually felt for the dead who die in
+their sins.
+
+But Raffles would not have passed this title for this tale.
+
+
+
+
+TO CATCH A THIEF
+
+I
+
+Society persons are not likely to have forgotten the series of
+audacious robberies by which so many of themselves suffered in turn
+during the brief course of a recent season. Raid after raid was made
+upon the smartest houses in town, and within a few weeks more than one
+exalted head had been shorn of its priceless tiara. The Duke and
+Duchess of Dorchester lost half the portable pieces of their historic
+plate on the very night of their Graces’ almost equally historic
+costume ball. The Kenworthy diamonds were taken in broad daylight,
+during the excitement of a charitable meeting on the ground floor, and
+the gifts of her belted bridegroom to Lady May Paulton while the outer
+air was thick with a prismatic shower of _confetti_. It was obvious
+that all this was the work of no ordinary thief, and perhaps inevitable
+that the name of Raffles should have been dragged from oblivion by
+callous disrespecters of the departed and unreasoning apologists for
+the police. These wiseacres did not hesitate to bring a dead man back
+to life because they knew of no living one capable of such feats; it is
+their heedless and inconsequent calumnies that the present paper is
+partly intended to refute. As a matter of fact, our joint innocence in
+this matter was only exceeded by our common envy, and for a long time,
+like the rest of the world, neither of us had the slightest clew to the
+identity of the person who was following in our steps with such
+irritating results.
+
+“I should mind less,” said Raffles, “if the fellow were really playing
+my game. But abuse of hospitality was never one of my strokes, and it
+seems to me the only shot he’s got. When we took old Lady Melrose’s
+necklace, Bunny, we were not staying with the Melroses, if you
+recollect.”
+
+We were discussing the robberies for the hundredth time, but for once
+under conditions more favorable to animated conversation than our
+unique circumstances permitted in the flat. We did not often dine out.
+Dr. Theobald was one impediment, the risk of recognition was another.
+But there were exceptions, when the doctor was away or the patient
+defiant, and on these rare occasions we frequented a certain
+unpretentious restaurant in the Fulham quarter, where the cooking was
+plain but excellent, and the cellar a surprise. Our bottle of ’89
+champagne was empty to the label when the subject arose, to be touched
+by Raffles in the reminiscent manner indicated above. I can see his
+clear eye upon me now, reading me, weighing me. But I was not so
+sensitive to his scrutiny at the time. His tone was deliberate,
+calculating, preparatory; not as I heard it then, through a head full
+of wine, but as it floats back to me across the gulf between that
+moment and this.
+
+“Excellent fillet!” said I, grossly. “So you think this chap is as much
+in society as we were, do you?”
+
+I preferred not to think so myself. We had cause enough for jealousy
+without that. But Raffles raised his eyebrows an eloquent half-inch.
+
+“As much, my dear Bunny? He is not only in it, but of it; there’s no
+comparison between us there. Society is in rings like a target, and we
+never were in the bull’s-eye, however thick you may lay on the ink! I
+was asked for my cricket. I haven’t forgotten it yet. But this fellow’s
+one of themselves, with the right of entrée into the houses which we
+could only ‘enter’ in a professional sense. That’s obvious unless all
+these little exploits are the work of different hands, which they as
+obviously are not. And it’s why I’d give five hundred pounds to put
+salt on him to-night!”
+
+“Not you,” said I, as I drained my glass in festive incredulity.
+
+“But I would, my dear Bunny. Waiter! another half-bottle of this,” and
+Raffles leant across the table as the empty one was taken away. “I
+never was more serious in my life,” he continued below his breath.
+“Whatever else our successor may be, he’s not a dead man like me, or a
+marked man like you. If there’s any truth in my theory he’s one of the
+last people upon whom suspicion is ever likely to rest; and oh, Bunny,
+what a partner he would make for you and me!”
+
+Under less genial influences the very idea of a third partner would
+have filled my soul with offence; but Raffles had chosen his moment
+unerringly, and his arguments lost nothing by the flowing accompaniment
+of the extra pint. They were, however, quite strong in themselves. The
+gist of them was that thus far we had remarkably little to show for
+what Raffles would call “our second innings.” This even I could not
+deny. We had scored a few “long singles,” but our “best shots” had gone
+“straight to hand,” and we were “playing a deuced slow game.” Therefore
+we needed a new partner—and the metaphor failed Raffles. It had served
+its turn. I already agreed with him. In truth I was tired of my false
+position as hireling attendant, and had long fancied myself an object
+of suspicion to that other impostor the doctor. A fresh, untrammelled
+start was a fascinating idea to me, though two was company, and three
+in our case might be worse than none. But I did not see how we could
+hope, with our respective handicaps, to solve a problem which was
+already the despair of Scotland Yard.
+
+“Suppose I have solved it,” observed Raffles, cracking a walnut in his
+palm.
+
+“How could you?” I asked, without believing for an instant that he had.
+
+“I have been taking the _Morning Post_ for some time now.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“You have got me a good many odd numbers of the less base society
+papers.”
+
+“I can’t for the life of me see what you’re driving at.”
+
+Raffles smiled indulgently as he cracked another nut.
+
+“That’s because you’ve neither observation nor imagination, Bunny—and
+yet you try to write! Well, you wouldn’t think it, but I have a fairly
+complete list of the people who were at the various functions under
+cover of which these different little coups were brought off.”
+
+I said very stolidly that I did not see how that could help him. It was
+the only answer to his good-humored but self-satisfied contempt; it
+happened also to be true.
+
+“Think,” said Raffles, in a patient voice.
+
+“When thieves break in and steal,” said I, “upstairs, I don’t see much
+point in discovering who was downstairs at the time.”
+
+“Quite,” said Raffles—“when they do break in.”
+
+“But that’s what they have done in all these cases. An upstairs door
+found screwed up, when things were at their height below; thief gone
+and jewels with him before alarm could be raised. Why, the trick’s so
+old that I never knew you condescend to play it.”
+
+“Not so old as it looks,” said Raffles, choosing the cigars and handing
+me mine. “Cognac or Benedictine, Bunny?”
+
+“Brandy,” I said, coarsely.
+
+“Besides,” he went on, “the rooms were not screwed up; at Dorchester
+House, at any rate, the door was only locked, and the key missing, so
+that it might have been done on either side.”
+
+“But that was where he left his rope-ladder behind him!” I exclaimed in
+triumph; but Raffles only shook his head.
+
+“I don’t believe in that rope-ladder, Bunny, except as a blind.”
+
+“Then what on earth do you believe?”
+
+“That every one of these so-called burglaries has been done from the
+inside, by one of the guests; and what’s more I’m very much mistaken if
+I haven’t spotted the right sportsman.”
+
+I began to believe that he really had, there was such a wicked gravity
+in the eyes that twinkled faintly into mine. I raised my glass in
+convivial congratulation, and still remember the somewhat anxious eye
+with which Raffles saw it emptied.
+
+“I can only find one likely name,” he continued, “that figures in all
+these lists, and it is anything but a likely one at first sight. Lord
+Ernest Belville was at all those functions. Know anything about him,
+Bunny?”
+
+“Not the Rational Drink fanatic?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That’s all I want to know.”
+
+“Quite,” said Raffles; “and yet what could be more promising? A man
+whose views are so broad and moderate, and so widely held already
+(saving your presence, Bunny), does not bore the world with them
+without ulterior motives. So far so good. What are this chap’s motives?
+Does he want to advertise himself? No, he’s somebody already. But is he
+rich? On the contrary, he’s as poor as a rat for his position, and
+apparently without the least ambition to be anything else; certainly he
+won’t enrich himself by making a public fad of what all sensible people
+are agreed upon as it is. Then suddenly one gets one’s own old idea—the
+alternative profession! My cricket—his Rational Drink! But it is no use
+jumping to conclusions. I must know more than the newspapers can tell
+me. Our aristocratic friend is forty, and unmarried. What has he been
+doing all these years? How the devil was I to find out?”
+
+“How did you?” I asked, declining to spoil my digestion with a
+conundrum, as it was his evident intention that I should.
+
+“Interviewed him!” said Raffles, smiling slowly on my amazement.
+
+“You—interviewed him?” I echoed. “When—and where?”
+
+“Last Thursday night, when, if you remember, we kept early hours,
+because I felt done. What was the use of telling you what I had up my
+sleeve, Bunny? It might have ended in fizzle, as it still may. But Lord
+Ernest Belville was addressing the meeting at Exeter Hall; I waited for
+him when the show was over, dogged him home to King John’s Mansions,
+and interviewed him in his own rooms there before he turned in.”
+
+My journalistic jealousy was piqued to the quick. Affecting a
+scepticism I did not feel (for no outrage was beyond the pale of his
+impudence), I inquired dryly which journal Raffles had pretended to
+represent. It is unnecessary to report his answer. I could not believe
+him without further explanation.
+
+“I should have thought,” he said, “that even you would have spotted a
+practice I never omit upon certain occasions. I always pay a visit to
+the drawing-room, and fill my waistcoat pocket from the card-tray. It
+is an immense help in any little temporary impersonation. On Thursday
+night I sent up the card of a powerful writer connected with a powerful
+paper; if Lord Ernest had known him in the flesh I should have been
+obliged to confess to a journalistic ruse; luckily he didn’t—and I had
+been sent by my editor to get the interview for next morning. What
+could be better—for the alternative profession?”
+
+I inquired what the interview had brought forth.
+
+“Everything,” said Raffles. “Lord Ernest has been a wanderer these
+twenty years. Texas, Fiji, Australia. I suspect him of wives and
+families in all three. But his manners are a liberal education. He gave
+me some beautiful whiskey, and forgot all about his fad. He is strong
+and subtle, but I talked him off his guard. He is going to the
+Kirkleathams’ to-night—I saw the card stuck up. I stuck some wax into
+his keyhole as he was switching off the lights.”
+
+And, with an eye upon the waiters, Raffles showed me a skeleton key,
+newly twisted and filed; but my share of the extra pint (I am afraid no
+fair share) had made me dense. I looked from the key to Raffles with
+puckered forehead—for I happened to catch sight of it in the mirror
+behind him.
+
+“The Dowager Lady Kirkleatham,” he whispered, “has diamonds as big as
+beans, and likes to have ’em all on—and goes to bed early—and happens
+to be in town!”
+
+And now I saw.
+
+“The villain means to get them from her!”
+
+“And I mean to get them from the villain,” said Raffles; “or, rather,
+your share and mine.”
+
+“Will he consent to a partnership?”
+
+“We shall have him at our mercy. He daren’t refuse.”
+
+Raffles’s plan was to gain access to Lord Ernest’s rooms before
+midnight; there we were to lie in wait for the aristocratic rascal, and
+if I left all details to Raffles, and simply stood by in case of a
+rumpus, I should be playing my part and earning my share. It was a part
+that I had played before, not always with a good grace, though there
+had never been any question about the share. But to-night I was nothing
+loath. I had had just champagne enough—how Raffles knew my measure!—and
+I was ready and eager for anything. Indeed, I did not wish to wait for
+the coffee, which was to be especially strong by order of Raffles. But
+on that he insisted, and it was between ten and eleven when at last we
+were in our cab.
+
+“It would be fatal to be too early,” he said as we drove; “on the other
+hand, it would be dangerous to leave it too late. One must risk
+something. How I should love to drive down Piccadilly and see the
+lights! But unnecessary risks are another story.”
+
+II
+
+King John’s Mansions, as everybody knows, are the oldest, the ugliest,
+and the tallest block of flats in all London. But they are built upon a
+more generous scale than has since become the rule, and with a less
+studious regard for the economy of space. We were about to drive into
+the spacious courtyard when the gate-keeper checked us in order to let
+another hansom drive out.
+
+It contained a middle-aged man of the military type, like ourselves in
+evening dress. That much I saw as his hansom crossed our bows, because
+I could not help seeing it, but I should not have given the incident a
+second thought if it had not been for his extraordinary effect upon
+Raffles. In an instant he was out upon the curb, paying the cabby, and
+in another he was leading me across the street, away from the mansions.
+
+“Where on earth are you going?” I naturally exclaimed.
+
+“Into the park,” said he. “We are too early.”
+
+His voice told me more than his words. It was strangely stern.
+
+“Was that him—in the hansom?”
+
+“It was.”
+
+“Well, then, the coast’s clear,” said I, comfortably. I was for turning
+back then and there, but Raffles forced me on with a hand that hardened
+on my arm.
+
+“It was a nearer thing than I care about,” said he. “This seat will do;
+no, the next one’s further from a lamp-post. We will give him a good
+half-hour, and I don’t want to talk.”
+
+We had been seated some minutes when Big Ben sent a languid chime over
+our heads to the stars. It was half-past ten, and a sultry night.
+Eleven had struck before Raffles awoke from his sullen reverie, and
+recalled me from mine with a slap on the back. In a couple of minutes
+we were in the lighted vestibule at the inner end of the courtyard of
+King John’s Mansions.
+
+“Just left Lord Ernest at Lady Kirkleatham’s,” said Raffles. “Gave me
+his key and asked us to wait for him in his rooms. Will you send us up
+in the lift?”
+
+In a small way, I never knew old Raffles do anything better. There was
+not an instant’s demur. Lord Ernest Belville’s rooms were at the top of
+the building, but we were in them as quickly as lift could carry and
+page-boy conduct us. And there was no need for the skeleton key after
+all; the boy opened the outer door with one of his own, and switched on
+the lights before leaving us.
+
+“Now that’s interesting,” said Raffles, as soon as we were alone; “they
+can come in and clean when he is out. What if he keeps his swag at the
+bank? By Jove, that’s an idea for him! I don’t believe he’s getting rid
+of it; it’s all lying low somewhere, if I’m not mistaken, and he’s not
+a fool.”
+
+While he spoke he was moving about the sitting-room, which was
+charmingly furnished in the antique style, and making as many remarks
+as though he were an auctioneer’s clerk with an inventory to prepare
+and a day to do it in, instead of a cracksman who might be surprised in
+his crib at any moment.
+
+“Chippendale of sorts, eh, Bunny? Not genuine, of course; but where can
+you get genuine Chippendale now, and who knows it when they see it?
+There’s no merit in mere antiquity. Yet the way people pose on the
+subject! If a thing’s handsome and useful, and good cabinet-making,
+it’s good enough for me.”
+
+“Hadn’t we better explore the whole place?” I suggested nervously. He
+had not even bolted the outer door. Nor would he when I called his
+attention to the omission.
+
+“If Lord Ernest finds his rooms locked up he’ll raise Cain,” said
+Raffles; “we must let him come in and lock up for himself before we
+corner him. But he won’t come yet; if he did it might be awkward, for
+they’d tell him down below what I told them. A new staff comes on at
+midnight. I discovered that the other night.”
+
+“Supposing he does come in before?”
+
+“Well, he can’t have us turned out without first seeing who we are, and
+he won’t try it on when I’ve had one word with him. Unless my
+suspicions are unfounded, I mean.”
+
+“Isn’t it about time to test them?”
+
+“My good Bunny, what do you suppose I’ve been doing all this while? He
+keeps nothing in here. There isn’t a lock to the Chippendale that you
+couldn’t pick with a penknife, and not a loose board in the floor, for
+I was treading for one before the boy left us. Chimney’s no use in a
+place like this where they keep them swept for you. Yes, I’m quite
+ready to try his bedroom.”
+
+There was but a bathroom besides; no kitchen, no servant’s room;
+neither are necessary in King John’s Mansions. I thought it as well to
+put my head inside the bathroom while Raffles went into the bedroom,
+for I was tormented by the horrible idea that the man might all this
+time be concealed somewhere in the flat. But the bathroom blazed void
+in the electric light. I found Raffles hanging out of the starry square
+which was the bedroom window, for the room was still in darkness. I
+felt for the switch at the door.
+
+“Put it out again!” said Raffles fiercely. He rose from the sill, drew
+blind and curtains carefully, then switched on the light himself. It
+fell upon a face creased more in pity than in anger, and Raffles only
+shook his head as I hung mine.
+
+“It’s all right, old boy,” said he; “but corridors have windows too,
+and servants have eyes; and you and I are supposed to be in the other
+room, not in this. But cheer up, Bunny! This is _the_ room; look at the
+extra bolt on the door; he’s had that put on, and there’s an iron
+ladder to his window in case of fire! Way of escape ready against the
+hour of need; he’s a better man than I thought him, Bunny, after all.
+But you may bet your bottom dollar that if there’s any boodle in the
+flat it’s in this room.”
+
+Yet the room was very lightly furnished; and nothing was locked. We
+looked everywhere, but we looked in vain. The wardrobe was filled with
+hanging coats and trousers in a press, the drawers with the softest
+silk and finest linen. It was a camp bedstead that would not have
+unsettled an anchorite; there was no place for treasure there. I looked
+up the chimney, but Raffles told me not to be a fool, and asked if I
+ever listened to what he said. There was no question about his temper
+now. I never knew him in a worse.
+
+“Then he has got it in the bank,” he growled. “I’ll swear I’m not
+mistaken in my man!”
+
+I had the tact not to differ with him there. But I could not help
+suggesting that now was our time to remedy any mistake we might have
+made. We were on the right side of midnight still.
+
+“Then we stultify ourselves downstairs,” said Raffles. “No, I’ll be
+shot if I do! He may come in with the Kirkleatham diamonds! You do what
+you like, Bunny, but I don’t budge.”
+
+“I certainly shan’t leave you,” I retorted, “to be knocked into the
+middle of next week by a better man than yourself.”
+
+I had borrowed his own tone, and he did not like it. They never do. I
+thought for a moment that Raffles was going to strike me—for the first
+and last time in his life. He could if he liked. My blood was up. I was
+ready to send him to the devil. And I emphasized my offence by nodding
+and shrugging toward a pair of very large Indian clubs that stood in
+the fender, on either side of the chimney up which I had presumed to
+glance.
+
+In an instant Raffles had seized the clubs, and was whirling them about
+his gray head in a mixture of childish pique and puerile bravado which
+I should have thought him altogether above.
+
+And suddenly as I watched him his face changed, softened, lit up, and
+he swung the clubs gently down upon the bed.
+
+“They’re not heavy enough for their size,” said he rapidly; “and I’ll
+take my oath they’re not the same weight!”
+
+He shook one club after the other, with both hands, close to his ear;
+then he examined their butt-ends under the electric light. I saw what
+he suspected now, and caught the contagion of his suppressed
+excitement. Neither of us spoke. But Raffles had taken out the portable
+tool-box that he called a knife, and always carried, and as he opened
+the gimlet he handed me the club he held. Instinctively I tucked the
+small end under my arm, and presented the other to Raffles.
+
+“Hold him tight,” he whispered, smiling. “He’s not only a better man
+than I thought him, Bunny; he’s hit upon a better dodge than ever I
+did, of its kind. Only I should have weighted them evenly—to a hair.”
+
+He had screwed the gimlet into the circular butt, close to the edge,
+and now we were wrenching in opposite directions. For a moment or more
+nothing happened. Then all at once something gave, and Raffles swore an
+oath as soft as any prayer. And for the minute after that his hand went
+round and round with the gimlet, as though he were grinding a
+piano-organ, while the end wormed slowly out on its delicate thread of
+fine hard wood.
+
+The clubs were as hollow as drinking-horns, the pair of them, for we
+went from one to the other without pausing to undo the padded packets
+that poured out upon the bed. These were deliciously heavy to the hand,
+yet thickly swathed in cotton-wool, so that some stuck together,
+retaining the shape of the cavity, as though they had been run out of a
+mould. And when we did open them—but let Raffles speak.
+
+He had deputed me to screw in the ends of the clubs, and to replace the
+latter in the fender where we had found them. When I had done the
+counterpane was glittering with diamonds where it was not shimmering
+with pearls.
+
+“If this isn’t that tiara that Lady May was married in,” said Raffles,
+“and that disappeared out of the room she changed in, while it rained
+confetti on the steps, I’ll present it to her instead of the one she
+lost.... It was stupid to keep these old gold spoons, valuable as they
+are; they made the difference in the weight.... Here we have probably
+the Kenworthy diamonds.... I don’t know the history of these pearls....
+This looks like one family of rings—left on the basin-stand,
+perhaps—alas, poor lady! And that’s the lot.”
+
+Our eyes met across the bed.
+
+“What’s it all worth?” I asked, hoarsely.
+
+“Impossible to say. But more than all we ever took in all our lives.
+That I’ll swear to.”
+
+“More than all—”
+
+My tongue swelled with the thought.
+
+“But it’ll take some turning into cash, old chap!”
+
+“And—must it be a partnership?” I asked, finding a lugubrious voice at
+length.
+
+“Partnership be damned!” cried Raffles, heartily. “Let’s get out
+quicker than we came in.”
+
+We pocketed the things between us, cotton-wool and all, not because we
+wanted the latter, but to remove all immediate traces of our really
+meritorious deed.
+
+“The sinner won’t dare to say a word when he does find out,” remarked
+Raffles of Lord Ernest; “but that’s no reason why he should find out
+before he must. Everything’s straight in here, I think; no, better
+leave the window open as it was, and the blind up. Now out with the
+light. One peep at the other room. That’s all right, too. Out with the
+passage light, Bunny, while I open—”
+
+His words died away in a whisper. A key was fumbling at the lock
+outside.
+
+“Out with it—out with it!” whispered Raffles in an agony; and as I
+obeyed he picked me off my feet and swung me bodily but silently into
+the bedroom, just as the outer door opened, and a masterful step strode
+in.
+
+The next five were horrible minutes. We heard the apostle of Rational
+Drink unlock one of the deep drawers in his antique sideboard, and
+sounds followed suspiciously like the splash of spirits and the steady
+stream from a siphon. Never before or since did I experience such a
+thirst as assailed me at that moment, nor do I believe that many
+tropical explorers have known its equal. But I had Raffles with me, and
+his hand was as steady and as cool as the hand of a trained nurse. That
+I know because he turned up the collar of my overcoat for me, for some
+reason, and buttoned it at the throat. I afterwards found that he had
+done the same to his own, but I did not hear him doing it. The one
+thing I heard in the bedroom was a tiny metallic click, muffled and
+deadened in his overcoat pocket, and it not only removed my last
+tremor, but strung me to a higher pitch of excitement than ever. Yet I
+had then no conception of the game that Raffles was deciding to play,
+and that I was to play with him in another minute.
+
+It cannot have been longer before Lord Ernest came into his bedroom.
+Heavens, but my heart had not forgotten how to thump! We were standing
+near the door, and I could swear he touched me; then his boots creaked,
+there was a rattle in the fender—and Raffles switched on the light.
+
+Lord Ernest Belville crouched in its glare with one Indian club held by
+the end, like a footman with a stolen bottle. A good-looking,
+well-built, iron-gray, iron-jawed man; but a fool and a weakling at
+that moment, if he had never been either before.
+
+“Lord Ernest Belville,” said Raffles, “it’s no use. This is a loaded
+revolver, and if you force me I shall use it on you as I would on any
+other desperate criminal. I am here to arrest you for a series of
+robberies at the Duke of Dorchester’s, Sir John Kenworthy’s, and other
+noblemen’s and gentlemen’s houses during the present season. You’d
+better drop what you’ve got in your hand. It’s empty.”
+
+Lord Ernest lifted the club an inch or two, and with it his
+eyebrows—and after it his stalwart frame as the club crashed back into
+the fender. And as he stood at his full height, a courteous but ironic
+smile under the cropped moustache, he looked what he was, criminal or
+not.
+
+“Scotland Yard?” said he.
+
+“That’s our affair, my lord.”
+
+“I didn’t think they’d got it in them,” said Lord Ernest. “Now I
+recognize you. You’re my interviewer. No, I didn’t think any of you
+fellows had got all that in you. Come into the other room, and I’ll
+show you something else. Oh, keep me covered by all means. But look at
+this!”
+
+On the antique sideboard, their size doubled by reflection in the
+polished mahogany, lay a coruscating cluster of precious stones, that
+fell in festoons about Lord Ernest’s fingers as he handed them to
+Raffles with scarcely a shrug.
+
+“The Kirkleatham diamonds,” said he. “Better add ’em to the bag.”
+
+Raffles did so without a smile; with his overcoat buttoned up to the
+chin, his tall hat pressed down to his eyes, and between the two his
+incisive features and his keen, stern glance, he looked the ideal
+detective of fiction and the stage. What _I_ looked God knows, but I
+did my best to glower and show my teeth at his side. I had thrown
+myself into the game, and it was obviously a winning one.
+
+“Wouldn’t take a share, I suppose?” Lord Ernest said casually.
+
+Raffles did not condescend to reply. I rolled back my lips like a
+bull-pup.
+
+“Then a drink, at least!”
+
+My mouth watered, but Raffles shook his head impatiently.
+
+“We must be going, my lord, and you will have to come with us.”
+
+I wondered what in the world we should do with him when we had got him.
+
+“Give me time to put some things together? Pair of pyjamas and
+tooth-brush, don’t you know?”
+
+“I cannot give you many minutes, my lord, but I don’t want to cause a
+disturbance here, so I’ll tell them to call a cab if you like. But I
+shall be back in a minute, and you must be ready in five. Here,
+inspector, you’d better keep this while I am gone.”
+
+And I was left alone with that dangerous criminal! Raffles nipped my
+arm as he handed me the revolver, but I got small comfort out of that.
+
+“‘Sea-green Incorruptible?’” inquired Lord Ernest as we stood face to
+face.
+
+“You don’t corrupt me,” I replied through naked teeth.
+
+“Then come into my room. I’ll lead the way. Think you can hit me if I
+misbehave?”
+
+I put the bed between us without a second’s delay. My prisoner flung a
+suit-case upon it, and tossed things into it with a dejected air;
+suddenly, as he was fitting them in, without raising his head (which I
+was watching), his right hand closed over the barrel with which I
+covered him.
+
+“You’d better not shoot,” he said, a knee upon his side of the bed; “if
+you do it may be as bad for you as it will be for me!”
+
+I tried to wrest the revolver from him.
+
+“I will if you force me,” I hissed.
+
+“You’d better not,” he repeated, smiling; and now I saw that if I did I
+should only shoot into the bed or my own legs. His hand was on the top
+of mine, bending it down, and the revolver with it. The strength of it
+was as the strength of ten of mine; and now both his knees were on the
+bed; and suddenly I saw his other hand, doubled into a fist, coming up
+slowly over the suit-case.
+
+“Help!” I called feebly.
+
+“Help, forsooth! I begin to believe _you are_ from the Yard,” he
+said—and his upper-cut came with the “Yard.” It caught me under the
+chin.
+
+It lifted me off my legs. I have a dim recollection of the crash that I
+made in falling.
+
+III
+
+Raffles was standing over me when I recovered consciousness. I lay
+stretched upon the bed across which that blackguard Belville had struck
+his knavish blow. The suit-case was on the floor, but its dastardly
+owner had disappeared.
+
+“Is he gone?” was my first faint question.
+
+“Thank God you’re not, anyway!” replied Raffles, with what struck me
+then as mere flippancy. I managed to raise myself upon one elbow.
+
+“I meant Lord Ernest Belville,” said I, with dignity. “Are you quite
+sure that he’s cleared out?”
+
+Raffles waved a hand towards the window, which stood wide open to the
+summer stars.
+
+“Of course,” said he, “and by the route I intended him to take; he’s
+gone by the iron-ladder, as I hoped he would. What on earth should we
+have done with him? My poor, dear Bunny, I thought you’d take a bribe!
+But it’s really more convincing as it is, and just as well for Lord
+Ernest to be convinced for the time being.”
+
+“Are you sure he is?” I questioned, as I found a rather shaky pair of
+legs.
+
+“Of course!” cried Raffles again, in the tone to make one blush for the
+least misgiving on the point. “Not that it matters one bit,” he added,
+airily, “for we have him either way; and when he does tumble to it, as
+he may any minute, he won’t dare to open his mouth.”
+
+“Then the sooner we clear out the better,” said I, but I looked askance
+at the open window, for my head was spinning still.
+
+“When you feel up to it,” returned Raffles, “we shall _stroll_ out, and
+I shall do myself the honor of ringing for the lift. The force of habit
+is too strong in you, Bunny. I shall shut the window and leave
+everything exactly as we found it. Lord Ernest will probably tumble
+before he is badly missed; and then he may come back to put salt on us;
+but I should like to know what he can do even if he succeeds! Come,
+Bunny, pull yourself together, and you’ll be a different man when
+you’re in the open air.”
+
+And for a while I felt one, such was my relief at getting out of those
+infernal mansions with unfettered wrists; this we managed easily
+enough; but once more Raffles’s performance of a small part was no less
+perfect than his more ambitious work upstairs, and something of the
+successful artist’s elation possessed him as we walked arm-in-arm
+across St. James’s Park. It was long since I had known him so pleased
+with himself, and only too long since he had had such reason.
+
+“I don’t think I ever had a brighter idea in my life,” he said; “never
+thought of it till he was in the next room; never dreamt of its coming
+off so ideally even then, and didn’t much care, because we had him all
+ways up. I’m only sorry you let him knock you out. I was waiting
+outside the door all the time, and it made me sick to hear it. But I
+once broke my own head, Bunny, if you remember, and not in half such an
+excellent cause!”
+
+Raffles touched all his pockets in his turn, the pockets that contained
+a small fortune apiece, and he smiled in my face as we crossed the
+lighted avenues of the Mall. Next moment he was hailing a hansom—for I
+suppose I was still pretty pale—and not a word would he let me speak
+until we had alighted as near as was prudent to the flat.
+
+“What a brute I’ve been, Bunny!” he whispered then, “but you take half
+the swag, old boy, and right well you’ve earned it. No, we’ll go in by
+the wrong door and over the roof; it’s too late for old Theobald to be
+still at the play, and too early for him to be safely in his cups.”
+
+So we climbed the many stairs with cat-like stealth, and like cats
+crept out upon the grimy leads. But to-night they were no blacker than
+their canopy of sky; not a chimney-stack stood out against the starless
+night; one had to feel one’s way in order to avoid tripping over the
+low parapets of the L-shaped wells that ran from roof to basement to
+light the inner rooms. One of these wells was spanned by a flimsy
+bridge with iron handrails that felt warm to the touch as Raffles led
+the way across! A hotter and a closer night I have never known.
+
+“The flat will be like an oven,” I grumbled, at the head of our own
+staircase.
+
+“Then we won’t go down,” said Raffles, promptly; “we’ll slack it up
+here for a bit instead. No, Bunny, you stay where you are! I’ll fetch
+you a drink and a deck-chair, and you shan’t come down till you feel
+more fit.”
+
+And I let him have his way, I will not say as usual, for I had even
+less than my normal power of resistance that night. That villainous
+upper-cut! My head still sang and throbbed, as I seated myself on one
+of the aforesaid parapets, and buried it in my hot hands. Nor was the
+night one to dispel a headache; there was distinct thunder in the air.
+Thus I sat in a heap, and brooded over my misadventure, a pretty figure
+of a subordinate villain, until the step came for which I waited; and
+it never struck me that it came from the wrong direction.
+
+“You have been quick,” said I, simply.
+
+“Yes,” hissed a voice I recognized; “and you’ve got to be quicker
+still! Here, out with your wrists; no, one at a time; and if you utter
+a syllable you’re a dead man.”
+
+It was Lord Ernest Belville; his close-cropped, iron-gray moustache
+gleamed through the darkness, drawn up over his set teeth. In his hand
+glittered a pair of handcuffs, and before I knew it one had snapped its
+jaws about my right wrist.
+
+“Now come this way,” said Lord Ernest, showing me a revolver also, “and
+wait for your friend. And, recollect, a single syllable of warning will
+be your death!”
+
+With that the ruffian led me to the very bridge I had just crossed at
+Raffles’s heels, and handcuffed me to the iron rail midway across the
+chasm. It no longer felt warm to my touch, but icy as the blood in all
+my veins.
+
+So this high-born hypocrite had beaten us at our game and his, and
+Raffles had met his match at last! That was the most intolerable
+thought, that Raffles should be down in the flat on my account, and
+that I could not warn him of his impending fate; for how was it
+possible without making such an outcry as should bring the mansions
+about our ears? And there I shivered on that wretched plank, chained
+like Andromeda to the rock, with a black infinity above and below; and
+before my eyes, now grown familiar with the peculiar darkness, stood
+Lord Ernest Belville, waiting for Raffles to emerge with full hands and
+unsuspecting heart! Taken so horribly unawares, even Raffles must fall
+an easy prey to a desperado in resource and courage scarcely second to
+himself, but one whom he had fatally underrated from the beginning. Not
+that I paused to think how the thing had happened; my one concern was
+for what was to happen next.
+
+And what did happen was worse than my worst foreboding, for first a
+light came flickering into the sort of companion-hatch at the head of
+the stairs, and finally Raffles—in his shirt-sleeves! He was not only
+carrying a candle to put the finishing touch to him as a target; he had
+dispensed with coat and waistcoat downstairs, and was at once
+full-handed and unarmed.
+
+“Where are you, old chap?” he cried, softly, himself blinded by the
+light he carried; and he advanced a couple of steps towards Belville.
+“This isn’t you, is it?”
+
+And Raffles stopped, his candle held on high, a folding chair under the
+other arm.
+
+“No, I am not your friend,” replied Lord Ernest, easily; “but kindly
+remain standing exactly where you are, and don’t lower that candle an
+inch, unless you want your brains blown into the street.”
+
+Raffles said never a word, but for a moment did as he was bid; and the
+unshaken flame of the candle was testimony alike to the stillness of
+the night and to the finest set of nerves in Europe. Then, to my
+horror, he coolly stooped, placing candle and chair on the leads, and
+his hands in his pockets, as though it were but a popgun that covered
+him.
+
+“Why didn’t you shoot?” he asked insolently as he rose. “Frightened of
+the noise? I should be, too, with an old-pattern machine like that. All
+very well for service in the field—but on the house-tops at dead of
+night!”
+
+“I shall shoot, however,” replied Lord Ernest, as quietly in his turn,
+and with less insolence, “and chance the noise, unless you instantly
+restore my property. I am glad you don’t dispute the last word,” he
+continued after a slight pause. “There is no keener honor than that
+which subsists, or ought to subsist, among thieves; and I need hardly
+say that I soon spotted you as one of the fraternity. Not in the
+beginning, mind you! For the moment I did think you were one of these
+smart detectives jumped to life from some sixpenny magazine; but to
+preserve the illusion you ought to provide yourself with a worthier
+lieutenant. It was he who gave your show away,” chuckled the wretch,
+dropping for a moment the affected style of speech which seemed
+intended to enhance our humiliation; “smart detectives don’t go about
+with little innocents to assist them. You needn’t be anxious about him,
+by the way; it wasn’t necessary to pitch him into the street; he is to
+be seen though not heard, if you look in the right direction. Nor must
+you put all the blame upon your friend; it was not he, but you, who
+made so sure that I had got out by the window. You see, I was in my
+bathroom all the time—with the door open.”
+
+“The bathroom, eh?” Raffles echoed with professional interest. “And you
+followed us on foot across the park?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“And then in a cab?”
+
+“And afterwards on foot once more.”
+
+“The simplest skeleton would let you in down below.”
+
+I saw the lower half of Lord Ernest’s face grinning in the light of the
+candle set between them on the ground.
+
+“You follow every move,” said he; “there can be no doubt you are one of
+the fraternity; and I shouldn’t wonder if we had formed our style upon
+the same model. Ever know A. J. Raffles?”
+
+The abrupt question took my breath away; but Raffles himself did not
+lose an instant over his answer.
+
+“Intimately,” said he.
+
+“That accounts for you, then,” laughed Lord Ernest, “as it does for me,
+though I never had the honor of the master’s acquaintance. Nor is it
+for me to say which is the worthier disciple. Perhaps, however, now
+that your friend is handcuffed in mid-air, and you yourself are at my
+mercy, you will concede me some little temporary advantage?”
+
+And his face split in another grin from the cropped moustache downward,
+as I saw no longer by candlelight but by a flash of lightning which
+tore the sky in two before Raffles could reply.
+
+“You have the bulge at present,” admitted Raffles; “but you have still
+to lay hands upon your, or our, ill-gotten goods. To shoot me is not
+necessarily to do so; to bring either one of us to a violent end is
+only to court a yet more violent and infinitely more disgraceful one
+for yourself. Family considerations alone should rule that risk out of
+your game. Now, an hour or two ago, when the exact opposite—”
+
+The remainder of Raffles’s speech was drowned from my ears by the
+belated crash of thunder which the lightning had foretold. So loud,
+however, was the crash when it came, that the storm was evidently
+approaching us at a high velocity; yet as the last echo rumbled away, I
+heard Raffles talking as though he had never stopped.
+
+“You offered us a share,” he was saying; “unless you mean to murder us
+both in cold blood, it will be worth your while to repeat that offer.
+We should be dangerous enemies; you had far better make the best of us
+as friends.”
+
+“Lead the way down to your flat,” said Lord Ernest, with a flourish of
+his service revolver, “and perhaps we may talk about it. It is for me
+to make the terms, I imagine, and in the first place I am not going to
+get wet to the skin up here.”
+
+The rain was beginning in great drops, even as he spoke, and by a
+second flash of lightning I saw Raffles pointing to me.
+
+“But what about my friend?” said he.
+
+And then came the second peal.
+
+“Oh, _he’s_ all right,” the great brute replied; “do him good! You
+don’t catch me letting myself in for two to one!”
+
+“You will find it equally difficult,” rejoined Raffles, “to induce me
+to leave my friend to the mercy of a night like this. He has not
+recovered from the blow you struck him in your own rooms. I am not such
+a fool as to blame you for that, but you are a worse sportsman than I
+take you for if you think of leaving him where he is. If he stays,
+however, so do I.”
+
+And, just as it ceased, Raffles’s voice seemed distinctly nearer to me;
+but in the darkness and the rain, which was now as heavy as hail, I
+could see nothing clearly. The rain had already extinguished the
+candle. I heard an oath from Belville, a laugh from Raffles, and for a
+second that was all. Raffles was coming to me, and the other could not
+even see to fire; that was all I knew in the pitchy interval of
+invisible rain before the next crash and the next flash.
+
+And then!
+
+This time they came together, and not till my dying hour shall I forget
+the sight that the lightning lit and the thunder applauded. Raffles was
+on one of the parapets of the gulf that my foot-bridge spanned, and in
+the sudden illumination he stepped across it as one might across a
+garden path. The width was scarcely greater, but the depth! In the
+sudden flare I saw to the concrete bottom of the well, and it looked no
+larger than the hollow of my hand. Raffles was laughing in my ear; he
+had the iron railing fast; it was between us, but his foothold was as
+secure as mine. Lord Ernest Belville, on the contrary, was the fifth of
+a second late for the light, and half a foot short in his spring.
+Something struck our plank bridge so hard as to set it quivering like a
+harp-string; there was half a gasp and half a sob in mid-air beneath
+our feet; and then a sound far below that I prefer not to describe. I
+am not sure that I could hit upon the perfect simile; it is more than
+enough for me that I can hear it still. And with that sickening sound
+came the loudest clap of thunder yet, and a great white glare that
+showed us our enemy’s body far below, with one white hand spread like a
+starfish, but the head of him mercifully twisted underneath.
+
+“It was all his own fault, Bunny. Poor devil! May he and all of us be
+forgiven; but pull yourself together for your own sake. Well, you can’t
+fall; stay where you are a minute.”
+
+I remember the uproar of the elements while Raffles was gone; no other
+sound mingled with it; not the opening of a single window, not the
+uplifting of a single voice. Then came Raffles with soap and water, and
+the gyve was wheedled from one wrist, as you withdraw a ring for which
+the finger has grown too large. Of the rest, I only remember shivering
+till morning in a pitch-dark flat, whose invalid occupier was for once
+the nurse, and I his patient.
+
+And that is the true ending of the episode in which we two set
+ourselves to catch one of our own kidney, albeit in another place I
+have shirked the whole truth. It is not a grateful task to show Raffles
+as completely at fault as he really was on that occasion; nor do I
+derive any subtle satisfaction from recounting my own twofold
+humiliation, or from having assisted never so indirectly in the death
+of a not uncongenial sinner. The truth, however, has after all a merit
+of its own, and the great kinsfolk of poor Lord Ernest have but little
+to lose by its divulgence. It would seem that they knew more of the
+real character of the apostle of Rational Drink than was known at
+Exeter Hall. The tragedy was indeed hushed up, as tragedies only are
+when they occur in such circles. But the rumor that did get abroad, as
+to the class of enterprise which the poor scamp was pursuing when he
+met his death, cannot be too soon exploded, since it breathed upon the
+fair fame of some of the most respectable flats in Kensington.
+
+
+
+
+AN OLD FLAME
+
+I
+
+The square shall be nameless, but if you drive due west from Piccadilly
+the cab-man will eventually find it on his left, and he ought to thank
+you for two shillings. It is not a fashionable square, but there are
+few with a finer garden, while the studios on the south side lend
+distinction of another sort. The houses, however, are small and dingy,
+and about the last to attract the expert practitioner in search of a
+crib. Heaven knows it was with no such thought I trailed Raffles
+thither, one unlucky evening at the latter end of that same season,
+when Dr. Theobald had at last insisted upon the bath-chair which I had
+foreseen in the beginning. Trees whispered in the green garden
+aforesaid, and the cool, smooth lawns looked so inviting that I
+wondered whether some philanthropic resident could not be induced to
+lend us the key. But Raffles would not listen to the suggestion, when I
+stopped to make it, and what was worse, I found him looking wistfully
+at the little houses instead.
+
+“Such balconies, Bunny! A leg up, and there you would be!”
+
+I expressed a conviction that there would be nothing worth taking in
+the square, but took care to have him under way again as I spoke.
+
+“I daresay you’re right,” sighed Raffles. “Rings and watches, I
+suppose, but it would be hard luck to take them from people who live in
+houses like these. I don’t know, though. Here’s one with an extra
+story. Stop, Bunny; if you don’t stop I’ll hold on to the railings!
+This is a good house; look at the knocker and the electric bell.
+They’ve had that put in. There’s some money here, my rabbit! I dare bet
+there’s a silver-table in the drawing-room; and the windows are wide
+open. Electric light, too, by Jove!”
+
+Since stop I must, I had done so on the other side of the road, in the
+shadow of the leafy palings, and as Raffles spoke the ground floor
+windows opposite had flown alight, showing as pretty a little
+dinner-table as one could wish to see, with a man at his wine at the
+far end, and the back of a lady in evening dress toward us. It was like
+a lantern-picture thrown upon a screen. There were only the pair of
+them, but the table was brilliant with silver and gay with flowers, and
+the maid waited with the indefinable air of a good servant. It
+certainly seemed a good house.
+
+“She’s going to let down the blind!” whispered Raffles, in high
+excitement. “No, confound them, they’ve told her not to. Mark down her
+necklace, Bunny, and invoice his stud. What a brute he looks! But I
+like the table, and that’s her show. She has the taste; but he must
+have money. See the festive picture over the sideboard? Looks to me
+like a Jacques Saillard. But that silver-table would be good enough for
+me.”
+
+“Get on,” said I. “You’re in a bath-chair.”
+
+“But the whole square’s at dinner! We should have the ball at our feet.
+It wouldn’t take two twos!”
+
+“With those blinds up, and the cook in the kitchen underneath?”
+
+He nodded, leaning forward in the chair, his hands upon the wraps about
+his legs.
+
+“You must be mad,” said I, and got back to my handles with the word,
+but when I tugged the chair ran light.
+
+“Keep an eye on the rug,” came in a whisper from the middle of the
+road; and there stood my invalid, his pale face in a quiver of pure
+mischief, yet set with his insane resolve. “I’m only going to see
+whether that woman has a silver-table—”
+
+“We don’t want it—”
+
+“It won’t take a minute—”
+
+“It’s madness, madness—”
+
+“Then don’t you wait!”
+
+It was like him to leave me with that, and this time I had taken him at
+his last word, had not my own given me an idea. Mad I had called him,
+and mad I could declare him upon oath if necessary. It was not as
+though the thing had happened far from home. They could learn all about
+us at the nearest mansions. I referred them to Dr. Theobald; this was a
+Mr. Maturin, one of his patients, and I was his keeper, and he had
+never given me the slip before. I heard myself making these
+explanations on the doorstep, and pointing to the deserted bath-chair
+as the proof, while the pretty parlor maid ran for the police. It would
+be a more serious matter for me than for my charge. I should lose my
+place. No, he had never done such a thing before, and I would answer
+for it that he never should again.
+
+I saw myself conducting Raffles back to his chair, with a firm hand and
+a stern tongue. I heard him thanking me in whispers on the way home. It
+would be the first tight place I had ever got him out of, and I was
+quite anxious for him to get into it, so sure was I of every move. My
+whole position had altered in the few seconds that it took me to follow
+this illuminating train of ideas; it was now so strong that I could
+watch Raffles without much anxiety. And he was worth watching.
+
+He had stepped boldly but softly to the front door, and there he was
+still waiting, ready to ring if the door opened or a face appeared in
+the area, and doubtless to pretend that he had rung already. But he had
+not to ring at all; and suddenly I saw his foot in the letter-box, his
+left hand on the lintel overhead. It was thrilling, even to a hardened
+accomplice with an explanation up his sleeve! A tight grip with that
+left hand of his, as he leant backward with all his weight upon those
+five fingers; a right arm stretched outward and upward to its last
+inch; and the base of the low, projecting balcony was safely caught.
+
+I looked down and took breath. The maid was removing the crumbs in the
+lighted room, and the square was empty as before. What a blessing it
+was the end of the season! Many of the houses remained in darkness. I
+looked up again, and Raffles was drawing his left leg over the balcony
+railing. In another moment he had disappeared through one of the French
+windows which opened upon the balcony, and in yet another he had
+switched on the electric light within. This was bad enough, for now I,
+at least, could see everything he did; but the crowning folly was still
+to come. There was no point in it; the mad thing was done for my
+benefit, as I knew at once and he afterward confessed; but the lunatic
+reappeared on the balcony, bowing like a mountebank—in his crape mask!
+
+I set off with the empty chair, but I came back. I could not desert old
+Raffles, even when I would, but must try to explain away his mask as
+well, if he had not the sense to take it off in time. It would be
+difficult, but burglaries are not usually committed from a bath-chair,
+and for the rest I put my faith in Dr. Theobald. Meanwhile Raffles had
+at least withdrawn from the balcony, and now I could only see his head
+as he peered into a cabinet at the other side of the room. It was like
+the opera of _Aïda_, in which two scenes are enacted simultaneously,
+one in the dungeon below, the other in the temple above. In the same
+fashion my attention now became divided between the picture of Raffles
+moving stealthily about the upper room, and that of the husband and
+wife at table underneath. And all at once, as the man replenished his
+glass with a shrug of the shoulders, the woman pushed back her chair
+and sailed to the door.
+
+Raffles was standing before the fireplace upstairs. He had taken one of
+the framed photographs from the chimney-piece, and was scanning it at
+suicidal length through the eye-holes in the hideous mask which he
+still wore. He would need it after all. The lady had left the room
+below, opening and shutting the door for herself; the man was filling
+his glass once more. I would have shrieked my warning to Raffles, so
+fatally engrossed overhead, but at this moment (of all others) a
+constable (of all men) was marching sedately down our side of the
+square. There was nothing for it but to turn a melancholy eye upon the
+bath-chair, and to ask the constable the time. I was evidently to be
+kept there all night, I remarked, and only realized with the words that
+they disposed of my other explanations before they were uttered. It was
+a horrible moment for such a discovery. Fortunately the enemy was on
+the pavement, from which he could scarcely have seen more than the
+drawing-room ceiling, had he looked; but he was not many houses distant
+when a door opened and a woman gasped so that I heard both across the
+road. And never shall I forget the subsequent tableaux in the lighted
+room behind the low balcony and the French windows.
+
+Raffles stood confronted by a dark and handsome woman whose profile, as
+I saw it first in the electric light, is cut like a cameo in my memory.
+It had the undeviating line of brow and nose, the short upper lip, the
+perfect chin, that are united in marble oftener than in the flesh; and
+like marble she stood, or rather like some beautiful pale bronze; for
+that was her coloring, and she lost none of it that I could see,
+neither trembled; but her bosom rose and fell, and that was all. So she
+stood without flinching before a masked ruffian, who, I felt, would be
+the first to appreciate her courage; to me it was so superb that I
+could think of it in this way even then, and marvel how Raffles himself
+could stand unabashed before so brave a figure. He had not to do so
+long. The woman scorned him, and he stood unmoved, a framed photograph
+still in his hand. Then, with a quick, determined movement she turned,
+not to the door or to the bell, but to the open window by which Raffles
+had entered; and this with that accursed policeman still in view. So
+far no word had passed between the pair. But at this point Raffles said
+something, I could not hear what, but at the sound of his voice the
+woman wheeled. And Raffles was looking humbly in her face, the crape
+mask snatched from his own.
+
+“Arthur!” she cried; and that might have been heard in the middle of
+the square garden.
+
+Then they stood gazing at each other, neither unmoved any more, and
+while they stood the street-door opened and banged. It was her husband
+leaving the house, a fine figure of a man, but a dissipated face, and a
+step even now distinguished by the extreme caution which precedes
+unsteadiness. He broke the spell. His wife came to the balcony, then
+looked back into the room, and yet again along the road, and this time
+I saw her face. It was the face of one glancing indeed from Hyperion to
+a satyr. And then I saw the rings flash, as her hand fell gently upon
+Raffles’s arm.
+
+They disappeared from that window. Their heads showed for an instant in
+the next. Then they dipped out of sight, and an inner ceiling flashed
+out under a new light; they had gone into the back drawing-room, beyond
+my ken. The maid came up with coffee, her mistress hastily met her at
+the door, and once more disappeared. The square was as quiet as ever. I
+remained some minutes where I was. Now and then I thought I heard their
+voices in the back drawing-room. I was seldom sure.
+
+My state of mind may be imagined by those readers who take an interest
+in my personal psychology. It does not amuse me to look back upon it.
+But at length I had the sense to put myself in Raffles’s place. He had
+been recognized at last, he had come to life. Only one person knew as
+yet, but that person was a woman, and a woman who had once been fond of
+him, if the human face could speak. Would she keep his secret? Would he
+tell her where he lived? It was terrible to think we were such
+neighbors, and with the thought that it was terrible came a little
+enlightenment as to what could still be done for the best. He would not
+tell her where he lived. I knew him too well for that. He would run for
+it when he could, and the bath-chair and I must not be there to give
+him away. I dragged the infernal vehicle round the nearer corner. Then
+I waited—there could be no harm in that—and at last he came.
+
+He was walking briskly, so I was right, and he had not played the
+invalid to her; yet I heard him cry out with pleasure as he turned the
+corner, and he flung himself into the chair with a long-drawn sigh that
+did me good.
+
+“Well done, Bunny—well done! I am on my way to Earl’s Court, she’s
+capable of following me, but she won’t look for me in a bath-chair.
+Home, home, home, and not another word till we get there!”
+
+Capable of following him? She overtook us before we were past the
+studios on the south side of the square, the woman herself, in a hooded
+opera-cloak. But she never gave us a glance, and we saw her turn safely
+in the right direction for Earl’s Court, and the wrong one for our
+humble mansions. Raffles thanked his gods in a voice that trembled, and
+five minutes later we were in the flat. Then for once it was Raffles
+who filled the tumblers and found the cigarettes, and for once (and
+once only in all my knowledge of him) did he drain his glass at a
+draught.
+
+“You didn’t see the balcony scene?” he asked at length; and they were
+his first words since the woman passed us on his track.
+
+“Do you mean when she came in?”
+
+“No, when I came down.”
+
+“I didn’t.”
+
+“I hope nobody else saw it,” said Raffles devoutly. “I don’t say that
+Romeo and Juliet were brother and sister to us. But you might have said
+so, Bunny!”
+
+He was staring at the carpet with as wry a face as lover ever wore.
+
+“An old flame?” said I, gently.
+
+“A married woman,” he groaned.
+
+“So I gathered.”
+
+“But she always was one, Bunny,” said he, ruefully. “That’s the
+trouble. It makes all the difference in the world!”
+
+I saw the difference, but said I did not see how it could make any now.
+He had eluded the lady, after all; had we not seen her off upon a scent
+as false as scent could be? There was occasion for redoubled caution in
+the future, but none for immediate anxiety. I quoted the bedside
+Theobald, but Raffles did not smile. His eyes had been downcast all
+this time, and now, when he raised them, I perceived that my comfort
+had been administered to deaf ears.
+
+“Do you know who she is?” said he.
+
+“Not from Eve.”
+
+“Jacques Saillard,” he said, as though now I must know.
+
+But the name left me cold and stolid. I had heard it, but that was all.
+It was lamentable ignorance, I am aware, but I had specialized in
+Letters at the expense of Art.
+
+“You must know her pictures,” said Raffles, patiently; “but I suppose
+you thought she was a man. They would appeal to you, Bunny; that
+festive piece over the sideboard was her work. Sometimes they risk her
+at the Academy, sometimes they fight shy. She has one of those studios
+in the same square; they used to live up near Lord’s.”
+
+My mind was busy brightening a dim memory of nymphs reflected in woody
+pools. “Of course!” I exclaimed, and added something about “a clever
+woman.” Raffles rose at the phrase.
+
+“A clever woman!” he echoed, scornfully; “if she were only that I
+should feel safe as houses. Clever women can’t forget their cleverness,
+they carry it as badly as a boy does his wine, and are about as
+dangerous. I don’t call Jacques Saillard clever outside her art, but
+neither do I call her a woman at all. She does man’s work over a man’s
+name, has the will of any ten men I ever knew, and I don’t mind telling
+you that I fear her more than any person on God’s earth. I broke with
+her once,” said Raffles, grimly, “but I know her. If I had been asked
+to name the one person in London by whom I was keenest _not_ to be
+bowled out, I should have named Jacques Saillard.”
+
+That he had never before named her to me was as characteristic as the
+reticence with which Raffles spoke of their past relations, and even of
+their conversation in the back drawing-room that evening.
+
+It was a question of principle with him, and one that I like to
+remember. “Never give a woman away, Bunny,” he used to say; and he said
+it again to-night, but with a heavy cloud upon him, as though his
+chivalry was sorely tried.
+
+“That’s all right,” said I, “if you’re not going to be given away
+yourself.”
+
+“That’s just it, Bunny! That’s just—”
+
+The words were out of him, it was too late to recall them. I had hit
+the nail upon the head.
+
+“So she threatened you,” I said, “did she?”
+
+“I didn’t say so,” he replied, coldly.
+
+“And she is mated with a clown!” I pursued.
+
+“How she ever married him,” he admitted, “is a mystery to me.”
+
+“It always is,” said I, the wise man for once, and rather enjoying the
+role.
+
+“Southern blood?”
+
+“Spanish.”
+
+“She’ll be pestering you to run off with her, old chap,” said I.
+
+Raffles was pacing the room. He stopped in his stride for half a
+second. So she had begun pestering him already! It is wonderful how
+acute any fool can be in the affairs of his friend. But Raffles resumed
+his walk without a syllable, and I retreated to safer ground.
+
+“So you sent her to Earl’s Court,” I mused aloud; and at last he
+smiled.
+
+“You’ll be interested to hear, Bunny,” said he, “that I am now living
+in Seven Dials, and Bill Sikes couldn’t hold a farthing dip to me.
+Bless you, she had my old police record at her fingers’ ends, but it
+was fit to frame compared with the one I gave her. I had sunk as low as
+they dig. I divided my nights between the open parks and a thieves’
+kitchen in Seven Dials. If I was decently dressed it was because I had
+stolen the suit down the Thames Valley beat the night before last. I
+was on my way back when first that sleepy square, and then her open
+window, proved too much for me. You should have heard me beg her to let
+me push on to the devil in my own way; there I spread myself, for I
+meant every word; but I swore the final stage would be a six-foot
+drop.”
+
+“You did lay it on,” said I.
+
+“It was necessary, and that had its effect. She let me go. But at the
+last moment she said she didn’t believe I was so black as I painted
+myself, and then there was the balcony scene you missed.”
+
+So that was all. I could not help telling him that he had got out of it
+better than he deserved for ever getting in. Next moment I regretted
+the remark.
+
+“If I have got out of it,” said Raffles, doubtfully. “We are dreadfully
+near neighbors, and I can’t move in a minute, with old Theobald taking
+a grave view of my case. I suppose I had better lie low, and thank the
+gods again for putting her off the scent for the time being.”
+
+No doubt our conversation was carried beyond this point, but it
+certainly was not many minutes later, nor had we left the subject, when
+the electric bell thrilled us both to a sudden silence.
+
+“The doctor?” I queried, hope fighting with my horror.
+
+“It was a single ring.”
+
+“The last post?”
+
+“You know he knocks, and it’s long past his time.”
+
+The electric bell rang again, but now as though it never would stop.
+
+“You go, Bunny,” said Raffles, with decision. His eyes were sparkling.
+His smile was firm.
+
+“What am I to say?”
+
+“If it’s the lady let her in.”
+
+It was the lady, still in her evening cloak, with her fine dark head
+half-hidden by the hood, and an engaging contempt of appearances upon
+her angry face. She was even handsomer than I had thought, and her
+beauty of a bolder type, but she was also angrier than I had
+anticipated when I came so readily to the door. The passage into which
+it opened was an exceedingly narrow one, as I have often said, but I
+never dreamt of barring this woman’s way, though not a word did she
+stoop to say to me. I was only too glad to flatten myself against the
+wall, as the rustling fury strode past me into the lighted room with
+the open door.
+
+“So this is your thieves’ kitchen!” she cried, in high-pitched scorn.
+
+I was on the threshold myself, and Raffles glanced towards me with
+raised eyebrows.
+
+“I have certainly had better quarters in my day,” said he, “but you
+need not call them absurd names before my man.”
+
+“Then send your ‘man’ about his business,” said Jacques Saillard, with
+an unpleasant stress upon the word indicated.
+
+But when the door was shut I heard Raffles assuring her that I knew
+nothing, that he was a real invalid overcome by a sudden mad
+temptation, and all he had told her of his life a lie to hide his
+whereabouts, but all he was telling her now she could prove for herself
+without leaving that building. It seemed, however, that she had proved
+it already by going first to the porter below stairs. Yet I do not
+think she cared one atom which story was the truth.
+
+“So you thought I could pass you in your chair,” she said, “or ever in
+this world again, without hearing from my heart that it was you!”
+
+II
+
+“Bunny,” said Raffles, “I’m awfully sorry, old chap, but you’ve got to
+go.”
+
+It was some weeks since the first untimely visitation of Jacques
+Saillard, but there had been many others at all hours of the day, while
+Raffles had been induced to pay at least one to her studio in the
+neighboring square. These intrusions he had endured at first with an
+air of humorous resignation which imposed upon me less than he
+imagined. The woman meant well, he said, after all, and could be
+trusted to keep his secret loyally. It was plain to me, however, that
+Raffles did not trust her, and that his pretence upon the point was a
+deliberate pose to conceal the extent to which she had him in her
+power. Otherwise there would have been little point in hiding anything
+from the one person in possession of the cardinal secret of his
+identity.
+
+But Raffles thought it worth his while to hoodwink Jacques Saillard in
+the subsidiary matter of his health, in which Dr. Theobald lent him
+unwitting assistance, and, as we have seen, to impress upon her that I
+was actually his attendant, and as ignorant of his past as the doctor
+himself. “So you’re all right, Bunny,” he had assured me; “she thinks
+you knew nothing the other night. I told you she wasn’t a clever woman
+outside her work. But hasn’t she a will!” I told Raffles it was very
+considerate of him to keep me out of it, but that it seemed to me like
+tying up the bag when the cat had escaped. His reply was an admission
+that one must be on the defensive with such a woman and in such a case.
+Soon after this, Raffles, looking far from well, fell back upon his own
+last line of defence, namely, his bed; and now, as always in the end, I
+could see some sense in his subtleties, since it was comparatively easy
+for me to turn even Jacques Saillard from the door, with Dr. Theobald’s
+explicit injunctions, and with my own honesty unquestioned. So for a
+day we had peace once more. Then came letters, then the doctor again
+and again, and finally my dismissal in the incredible words which have
+necessitated these explanations.
+
+“Go?” I echoed. “Go where?”
+
+“It’s that ass Theobald,” said Raffles. “He insists.”
+
+“On my going altogether?”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“And you mean to let him have his way?”
+
+I had no language for my mortification and disgust, though neither was
+as yet quite so great as my surprise. I had foreseen almost every
+conceivable consequence of the mad act which brought all this trouble
+to pass, but a voluntary division between Raffles and me had certainly
+never entered my calculations. Nor could I think that it had occurred
+to him before our egregious doctor’s last visit, this very morning.
+Raffles had looked irritated as he broke the news to me from his
+pillow, and now there was some sympathy in the way he sat up in bed, as
+though he felt the thing himself.
+
+“I am obliged to give in to the fellow,” said he. “He’s saving me from
+my friend, and I’m bound to humor him. But I can tell you that we’ve
+been arguing about you for the last half hour, Bunny. It was no use;
+the idiot has had his knife in you from the first; and he wouldn’t see
+me through on any other conditions.”
+
+“So he is going to see you through, is he?”
+
+“It tots up to that,” said Raffles, looking at me rather hard. “At all
+events he has come to my rescue for the time being, and it’s for me to
+manage the rest. You don’t know what it has been, Bunny, these last few
+weeks; and gallantry forbids that I should tell you even now. But would
+you rather elope against your will, or have your continued existence
+made known to the world in general and the police in particular? That
+is practically the problem which I have had to solve, and the temporary
+solution was to fall ill. As a matter of fact, I am ill; and now what
+do you think? I owe it to you to tell you, Bunny, though it goes
+against the grain. She would take me ‘to the dear, warm underworld,
+where the sun really shines,’ and she would ‘nurse me back to life and
+love!’ The artistic temperament is a fearsome thing, Bunny, in a woman
+with the devil’s own will!”
+
+Raffles tore up the letter from which he had read these piquant
+extracts, and lay back on the pillows with the tired air of the
+veritable invalid which he seemed able to assume at will. But for once
+he did look as though bed was the best place for him; and I used the
+fact as an argument for my own retention in defiance of Dr. Theobald.
+The town was full of typhoid, I said, and certainly that autumnal
+scourge was in the air. Did he want me to leave him at the very moment
+when he might be sickening for a serious illness?
+
+“You know I don’t, my good fellow,” said Raffles, wearily; “but
+Theobald does, and I can’t afford to go against him now. Not that I
+really care what happens to me now that that woman knows I’m in the
+land of the living; she’ll let it out, to a dead certainty, and at the
+best there’ll be a hue and cry, which is the very thing I have escaped
+all these years. Now, what I want you to do is to go and take some
+quiet place somewhere, and then let me know, so that I may have a port
+in the storm when it breaks.”
+
+“Now you’re talking!” I cried, recovering my spirits. “I thought you
+meant to go and drop a fellow altogether!”
+
+“Exactly the sort of thing you would think,” rejoined Raffles, with a
+contempt that was welcome enough after my late alarm. “No, my dear
+rabbit, what you’ve got to do is to make a new burrow for us both. Try
+down the Thames, in some quiet nook that a literary man would naturally
+select. I’ve often thought that more use might be made of a boat, while
+the family are at dinner, than there ever has been yet. If Raffles is
+to come to life, old chap, he shall go a-Raffling for all he’s worth!
+There’s something to be done with a bicycle, too. Try Ham Common or
+Roehampton, or some such sleepy hollow a trifle off the line; and say
+you’re expecting your brother from the colonies.”
+
+Into this arrangement I entered without the slightest hesitation, for
+we had funds enough to carry it out on a comfortable scale, and Raffles
+placed a sufficient share at my disposal for the nonce. Moreover, I for
+one was only too glad to seek fresh fields and pastures new—a phrase
+which I determined to interpret literally in my choice of fresh
+surroundings. I was tired of our submerged life in the poky little
+flat, especially now that we had money enough for better things. I
+myself of late had dark dealings with the receivers, with the result
+that poor Lord Ernest Belville’s successes were now indeed ours.
+Subsequent complications had been the more galling on that account,
+while the wanton way in which they had been created was the most
+irritating reflection of all. But it had brought its own punishment
+upon Raffles, and I fancied the lesson would prove salutary when we
+again settled down.
+
+“If ever we do, Bunny!” said he, as I took his hand and told him how I
+was already looking forward to the time.
+
+“But of course we will!” I cried, concealing the resentment at leaving
+him which his tone and his appearance renewed in my breast.
+
+“I’m not so sure of it,” he said, gloomily. “I’m in somebody’s
+clutches, and I’ve got to get out of them first.”
+
+“I’ll sit tight until you do.”
+
+“Well,” he said, “if you don’t see me in ten days you never will.”
+
+“Only ten days?” I echoed. “That’s nothing at all.”
+
+“A lot may happen in ten days,” replied Raffles, in the same depressing
+tone, so very depressing in him; and with that he held out his hand a
+second time, and dropped mine suddenly after as sudden a pressure for
+farewell.
+
+I left the flat in considerable dejection after all, unable to decide
+whether Raffles was really ill, or only worried as I knew him to be.
+And at the foot of the stairs the author of my dismissal, that
+confounded Theobald, flung open his door and waylaid me.
+
+“Are you going?” he demanded.
+
+The traps in my hands proclaimed that I was, but I dropped them at his
+feet to have it out with him then and there.
+
+“Yes,” I answered fiercely, “thanks to you!”
+
+“Well, my good fellow,” he said, his full-blooded face lightening and
+softening at the same time, as though a load were off his mind, “it’s
+no pleasure to me to deprive any man of his billet, but you never were
+a nurse, and you know that as well as I do.”
+
+I began to wonder what he meant, and how much he did know, and my
+speculations kept me silent. “But come in here a moment,” he continued,
+just as I decided that he knew nothing at all. And, leading me into his
+minute consulting-room, Dr. Theobald solemnly presented me with a
+sovereign by way of compensation, which I pocketed as solemnly, and
+with as much gratitude as if I had not fifty of them distributed over
+my person as it was. The good fellow had quite forgotten my social
+status, about which he himself had been so particular at our earliest
+interview; but he had never accustomed himself to treat me as a
+gentleman, and I do not suppose he had been improving his memory by the
+tall tumbler which I saw him poke behind a photograph as we entered.
+
+“There’s one thing I should like to know before I go,” said I, turning
+suddenly on the doctor’s mat, “and that is whether Mr. Maturin is
+really ill or not!”
+
+I meant, of course, at the present moment, but Dr. Theobald braced
+himself like a recruit at the drill-sergeant’s voice.
+
+“Of course he is,” he snapped—“so ill as to need a nurse who can nurse,
+by way of a change.”
+
+With that his door shut in my face, and I had to go my way, in the dark
+as to whether he had mistaken my meaning, and was telling me a lie, or
+not.
+
+But for my misgivings upon this point I might have extracted some very
+genuine enjoyment out of the next few days. I had decent clothes to my
+back, with money, as I say, in most of the pockets, and more freedom to
+spend it than was possible in the constant society of a man whose
+personal liberty depended on a universal supposition that he was dead.
+Raffles was as bold as ever, and I as fond of him, but whereas he would
+run any risk in a professional exploit, there were many innocent
+recreations still open to me which would have been sheer madness in
+him. He could not even watch a match, from the sixpenny seats, at
+Lord’s cricket-ground, where the Gentlemen were every year in a worse
+way without him. He never travelled by rail, and dining out was a risk
+only to be run with some ulterior object in view. In fact, much as it
+had changed, Raffles could no longer show his face with perfect
+impunity in any quarter or at any hour. Moreover, after the lesson he
+had now learnt, I foresaw increased caution on his part in this
+respect. But I myself was under no such perpetual disadvantage, and,
+while what was good enough for Raffles was quite good enough for me so
+long as we were together, I saw no harm in profiting by the present
+opportunity of “doing myself well.”
+
+Such were my reflections on the way to Richmond in a hansom cab.
+Richmond had struck us both as the best centre of operations in search
+of the suburban retreat which Raffles wanted, and by road, in a
+well-appointed, well-selected hansom, was certainly the most agreeable
+way of getting there. In a week or ten days Raffles was to write to me
+at the Richmond post-office, but for at least a week I should be “on my
+own.” It was not an unpleasant sensation as I leant back in the
+comfortable hansom, and rather to one side, in order to have a good
+look at myself in the bevelled mirror that is almost as great an
+improvement in these vehicles as the rubber tires. Really I was not an
+ill-looking youth, if one may call one’s self such at the age of
+thirty. I could lay no claim either to the striking cast of countenance
+or to the peculiar charm of expression which made the face of Raffles
+like no other in the world. But this very distinction was in itself a
+danger, for its impression was indelible, whereas I might still have
+been mistaken for a hundred other young fellows at large in London.
+Incredible as it may appear to the moralists, I had sustained no
+external hallmark by my term of imprisonment, and I am vain enough to
+believe that the evil which I did had not a separate existence in my
+face. This afternoon, indeed, I was struck by the purity of my fresh
+complexion, and rather depressed by the general innocence of the visage
+which peered into mine from the little mirror. My straw-colored
+moustache, grown in the flat after a protracted holiday, again
+preserved the most disappointing dimensions, and was still invisible in
+certain lights without wax. So far from discerning the desperate
+criminal who has “done time” once, and deserved it over and over again,
+the superior but superficial observer might have imagined that he
+detected a certain element of folly in my face.
+
+At all events it was not the face to shut the doors of a first-class
+hotel against me, without accidental evidence of a more explicit kind,
+and it was with no little satisfaction that I directed the man to drive
+to the Star and Garter. I also told him to go through Richmond Park,
+though he warned me that it would add considerably to the distance and
+his fare. It was autumn, and it struck me that the tints would be fine.
+And I had learnt from Raffles to appreciate such things, even amid the
+excitement of an audacious enterprise.
+
+If I dwell upon my appreciation of this occasion it is because, like
+most pleasures, it was exceedingly short-lived. I was very comfortable
+at the Star and Garter, which was so empty that I had a room worthy of
+a prince, where I could enjoy the finest of all views (in patriotic
+opinion) every morning while I shaved. I walked many miles through the
+noble park, over the commons of Ham and Wimbledon, and one day as far
+as that of Esher, where I was forcibly reminded of a service we once
+rendered to a distinguished resident in this delightful locality. But
+it was on Ham Common, one of the places which Raffles had mentioned as
+specially desirable, that I actually found an almost ideal retreat.
+This was a cottage where I heard, on inquiry, that rooms were to be let
+in the summer. The landlady, a motherly body, of visible excellence,
+was surprised indeed at receiving an application for the winter months;
+but I have generally found that the title of “author,” claimed with an
+air, explains every little innocent irregularity of conduct or
+appearance, and even requires something of the kind to carry conviction
+to the lay intelligence. The present case was one in point, and when I
+said that I could only write in a room facing north, on mutton chops
+and milk, with a cold ham in the wardrobe in case of nocturnal
+inspiration, to which I was liable, my literary character was
+established beyond dispute. I secured the rooms, paid a month’s rent in
+advance at my own request, and moped in them dreadfully until the week
+was up and Raffles due any day. I explained that the inspiration would
+not come, and asked abruptly if the mutton was New Zealand.
+
+Thrice had I made fruitless inquiries at the Richmond post-office; but
+on the tenth day I was in and out almost every hour. Not a word was
+there for me up to the last post at night. Home I trudged to Ham with
+horrible forebodings, and back again to Richmond after breakfast next
+morning. Still there was nothing. I could bear it no more. At ten
+minutes to eleven I was climbing the station stairs at Earl’s Court.
+
+It was a wretched morning there, a weeping mist shrouding the long,
+straight street, and clinging to one’s face in clammy caresses. I felt
+how much better it was down at Ham, as I turned into our side street,
+and saw the flats looming like mountains, the chimney-pots hidden in
+the mist. At our entrance stood a nebulous conveyance, that I took at
+first for a tradesman’s van; to my horror it proved to be a hearse; and
+all at once the white breath ceased upon my lips.
+
+I had looked up at our windows and the blinds were down!
+
+I rushed within. The doctor’s door stood open. I neither knocked nor
+rang, but found him in his consulting-room with red eyes and a blotchy
+face. Otherwise he was in solemn black from head to heel.
+
+“Who is dead?” I burst out. “Who is dead?”
+
+The red eyes looked redder than ever as Dr. Theobald opened them at the
+unwarrantable sight of me; and he was terribly slow in answering. But
+in the end he did answer, and did not kick me out as he evidently had a
+mind.
+
+“Mr. Maturin,” he said, and sighed like a beaten man.
+
+I said nothing. It was no surprise to me. I had known it all these
+minutes. Nay, I had dreaded this from the first, had divined it at the
+last, though to the last also I had refused to entertain my own
+conviction. Raffles dead! A real invalid after all! Raffles dead, and
+on the point of burial!
+
+“What did he die of?” I asked, unconsciously drawing on that fund of
+grim self-control which the weakest of us seem to hold in reserve for
+real calamity.
+
+“Typhoid,” he answered. “Kensington is full of it.”
+
+“He was sickening for it when I left, and you knew it, and could get
+rid of me then!”
+
+“My good fellow, I was obliged to have a more experienced nurse for
+that very reason.”
+
+The doctor’s tone was so conciliatory that I remembered in an instant
+what a humbug the man was, and became suddenly possessed with the vague
+conviction that he was imposing upon me now.
+
+“Are you sure it was typhoid at all?” I cried fiercely to his face.
+“Are you sure it wasn’t suicide—or murder?”
+
+I confess that I can see little point in this speech as I write it
+down, but it was what I said in a burst of grief and of wild suspicion;
+nor was it without effect upon Dr. Theobald, who turned bright scarlet
+from his well-brushed hair to his immaculate collar.
+
+“Do you want me to throw you out into the street?” he cried; and all at
+once I remembered that I had come to Raffles as a perfect stranger, and
+for his sake might as well preserve that character to the last.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” I said, brokenly. “He was so good to me—I became
+so attached to him. You forget I am originally of his class.”
+
+“I did forget it,” replied Theobald, looking relieved at my new tone,
+“and I beg _your_ pardon for doing so. Hush! They are bringing him
+down. I must have a drink before we start, and you’d better join me.”
+
+There was no pretence about his drink this time, and a pretty stiff one
+it was, but I fancy my own must have run it hard. In my case it cast a
+merciful haze over much of the next hour, which I can truthfully
+describe as one of the most painful of my whole existence. I can have
+known very little of what I was doing. I only remember finding myself
+in a hansom, suddenly wondering why it was going so slowly, and once
+more awaking to the truth. But it was to the truth itself more than to
+the liquor that I must have owed my dazed condition. My next
+recollection is of looking down into the open grave, in a sudden
+passionate anxiety to see the name for myself. It was not the name of
+my friend, of course, but it was the one under which he had passed for
+many months.
+
+I was still stupefied by a sense of inconceivable loss, and had not
+raised my eyes from that which was slowly forcing me to realize what
+had happened, when there was a rustle at my elbow, and a shower of
+hothouse flowers passed before them, falling like huge snowflakes where
+my gaze had rested. I looked up, and at my side stood a majestic figure
+in deep mourning. The face was carefully veiled, but I was too close
+not to recognize the masterful beauty whom the world knew as Jacques
+Saillard. I had no sympathy with her; on the contrary, my blood boiled
+with the vague conviction that in some way she was responsible for this
+death. Yet she was the only woman present—there were not a half a dozen
+of us altogether—and her flowers were the only flowers.
+
+The melancholy ceremony was over, and Jacques Saillard had departed in
+a funeral brougham, evidently hired for the occasion. I had watched her
+drive away, and the sight of my own cabman, making signs to me through
+the fog, had suddenly reminded me that I had bidden him to wait. I was
+the last to leave, and had turned my back upon the grave-diggers,
+already at their final task, when a hand fell lightly but firmly upon
+my shoulder.
+
+“I don’t want to make a scene in a cemetery,” said a voice, in a not
+unkindly, almost confidential whisper. “Will you get into your own cab
+and come quietly?”
+
+“Who on earth are you?” I exclaimed.
+
+I now remembered having seen the fellow hovering about during the
+funeral, and subconsciously taking him for the undertaker’s head man.
+He had certainly that appearance, and even now I could scarcely believe
+that he was anything else.
+
+“My name won’t help you,” he said, pityingly. “But you will guess where
+I come from when I tell you I have a warrant for your arrest.”
+
+My sensations at this announcement may not be believed, but I solemnly
+declare that I have seldom experienced so fierce a satisfaction. Here
+was a new excitement in which to drown my grief; here was something to
+think about; and I should be spared the intolerable experience of a
+solitary return to the little place at Ham. It was as though I had lost
+a limb and some one had struck me so hard in the face that the greater
+agony was forgotten. I got into the hansom without a word, my captor
+following at my heels, and giving his own directions to the cabman
+before taking his seat. The word “station” was the only one I caught,
+and I wondered whether it was to be Bow Street again. My companion’s
+next words, however, or rather the tone in which he uttered them,
+destroyed my capacity for idle speculation.
+
+“Mr. Maturin!” said he. “Mr. Maturin indeed!”
+
+“Well,” said I, “what about him?”
+
+“Do you think we don’t know who he was?”
+
+“Who was he?” I asked, defiantly.
+
+“You ought to know,” said he. “You got locked up through him the other
+time, too. His favorite name was Raffles then.”
+
+“It was his real name,” I said, indignantly. “And he has been dead for
+years.”
+
+My captor simply chuckled.
+
+“He’s at the bottom of the sea, I tell you!”
+
+But I do not know why I should have told him with such spirit, for what
+could it matter to Raffles now? I did not think; instinct was still
+stronger than reason, and, fresh from his funeral, I had taken up the
+cudgels for my dead friend as though he were still alive. Next moment I
+saw this for myself, and my tears came nearer the surface than they had
+been yet; but the fellow at my side laughed outright.
+
+“Shall I tell you something else?” said he.
+
+“As you like.”
+
+“He’s not even at the bottom of that grave! He’s no more dead than you
+or I, and a sham burial is his latest piece of villainy!”
+
+I doubt whether I could have spoken if I had tried. I did not try. I
+had no use for speech. I did not even ask him if he was sure, I was so
+sure myself. It was all as plain to me as riddles usually are when one
+has the answer. The doctor’s alarms, his unscrupulous venality, the
+simulated illness, my own dismissal, each fitted in its obvious place,
+and not even the last had power as yet to mar my joy in the one central
+fact to which all the rest were as tapers to the sun.
+
+“He is alive!” I cried. “Nothing else matters—he is alive!”
+
+At last I did ask whether they had got him too; but thankful as I was
+for the greater knowledge, I confess that I did not much care what
+answer I received. Already I was figuring out how much we might each
+get, and how old we should be when we came out. But my companion tilted
+his hat to the back of his head, at the same time putting his face
+close to mine, and compelling my scrutiny. And my answer, as you have
+already guessed, was the face of Raffles himself, superbly disguised
+(but less superbly than his voice), and yet so thinly that I should
+have known him in a trice had I not been too miserable in the beginning
+to give him a second glance.
+
+Jacques Saillard had made his life impossible, and this was the one
+escape. Raffles had bought the doctor for a thousand pounds, and the
+doctor had bought a “nurse” of his own kidney, on his own account; me,
+for some reason, he would not trust; he had insisted upon my dismissal
+as an essential preliminary to his part in the conspiracy. Here the
+details were half-humorous, half-grewsome, each in turn as Raffles told
+me the story. At one period he had been very daringly drugged indeed,
+and, in his own words, “as dead as a man need be”; but he had left
+strict instructions that nobody but the nurse and “my devoted
+physician” should “lay a finger on me” afterwards; and by virtue of
+this proviso a library of books (largely acquired for the occasion) had
+been impiously interred at Kensal Green. Raffles had definitely
+undertaken not to trust me with the secret, and, but for my untoward
+appearance at the funeral (which he had attended for his own final
+satisfaction), I was assured and am convinced that he would have kept
+his promise to the letter. In explaining this he gave me the one
+explanation I desired, and in another moment we turned into Praed
+Street, Paddington.
+
+“And I thought you said Bow Street!” said I. “Are you coming straight
+down to Richmond with me?”
+
+“I may as well,” said Raffles, “though I did mean to get my kit first,
+so as to start in fair and square as the long-lost brother from the
+bush. That’s why I hadn’t written. The function was a day later than I
+calculated. I was going to write to-night.”
+
+“But what are we to do?” said I, hesitating when he had paid the cab.
+“I have been playing the colonies for all they are worth!”
+
+“Oh, I’ve lost my luggage,” said he, “or a wave came into my cabin and
+spoilt every stitch, or I had nothing fit to bring ashore. We’ll settle
+that in the train.”
+
+
+
+
+THE WRONG HOUSE
+
+
+My brother Ralph, who now lived with me on the edge of Ham Common, had
+come home from Australia with a curious affection of the eyes, due to
+long exposure to the glare out there, and necessitating the use of
+clouded spectacles in the open air. He had not the rich complexion of
+the typical colonist, being indeed peculiarly pale, but it appeared
+that he had been confined to his berth for the greater part of the
+voyage, while his prematurely gray hair was sufficient proof that the
+rigors of bush life had at last undermined an originally tough
+constitution. Our landlady, who spoilt my brother from the first, was
+much concerned on his behalf, and wished to call in the local doctor;
+but Ralph said dreadful things about the profession, and quite
+frightened the good woman by arbitrarily forbidding her ever to let a
+doctor inside her door. I had to apologize to her for the painful
+prejudices and violent language of “these colonists,” but the old soul
+was easily mollified. She had fallen in love with my brother at first
+sight, and she never could do too much for him. It was owing to our
+landlady that I took to calling him Ralph, for the first time in our
+lives, on her beginning to speak of and to him as “Mr. Raffles.”
+
+“This won’t do,” said he to me. “It’s a name that sticks.”
+
+“It must be my fault! She must have heard it from me,” said I
+self-reproachfully.
+
+“You must tell her it’s the short for Ralph.”
+
+“But it’s longer.”
+
+“It’s the short,” said he; “and you’ve got to tell her so.”
+
+Henceforth I heard as much of “Mr. Ralph,” his likes and dislikes, what
+he would fancy and what he would not, and oh, what a dear gentleman he
+was, that I often remembered to say “Ralph, old chap,” myself.
+
+It was an ideal cottage, as I said when I found it, and in it our
+delicate man became rapidly robust. Not that the air was also ideal,
+for, when it was not raining, we had the same faithful mist from
+November to March. But it was something to Ralph to get any air at all,
+other than night-air, and the bicycle did the rest. We taught
+ourselves, and may I never forget our earlier rides, through and
+through Richmond Park when the afternoons were shortest, upon the
+incomparable Ripley Road when we gave a day to it. Raffles rode a
+Beeston Humber, a Royal Sunbeam was good enough for me, but he insisted
+on our both having Dunlop tires.
+
+“They seem the most popular brand. I had my eye on the road all the way
+from Ripley to Cobham, and there were more Dunlop marks than any other
+kind. Bless you, yes, they all leave their special tracks, and we don’t
+want ours to be extra special; the Dunlop’s like a rattlesnake, and the
+Palmer leaves telegraph-wires, but surely the serpent is more in our
+line.”
+
+That was the winter when there were so many burglaries in the Thames
+Valley from Richmond upward. It was said that the thieves used bicycles
+in every case, but what is not said? They were sometimes on foot to my
+knowledge, and we took a great interest in the series, or rather
+sequence of successful crimes. Raffles would often get his devoted old
+lady to read him the latest local accounts, while I was busy with my
+writing (much I wrote) in my own room. We even rode out by night
+ourselves, to see if we could not get on the tracks of the thieves, and
+never did we fail to find hot coffee on the hob for our return. We had
+indeed fallen upon our feet. Also, the misty nights might have been
+made for the thieves. But their success was not so consistent, and
+never so enormous as people said, especially the sufferers, who lost
+more valuables than they had ever been known to possess. Failure was
+often the caitiffs’ portion, and disaster once; owing, ironically
+enough, to that very mist which should have served them. But as I am
+going to tell the story with some particularity, and perhaps some
+gusto, you will see why who read.
+
+The right house stood on high ground near the river, with quite a drive
+(in at one gate and out at the other) sweeping past the steps. Between
+the two gates was a half-moon of shrubs, to the left of the steps a
+conservatory, and to their right the walk leading to the tradesmen’s
+entrance and the back premises; here also was the pantry window, of
+which more anon. The right house was the residence of an opulent
+stockbroker who wore a heavy watch-chain and seemed fair game. There
+would have been two objections to it had I been the stockbroker. The
+house was one of a row, though a goodly row, and an army-crammer had
+established himself next door. There is a type of such institutions in
+the suburbs; the youths go about in knickerbockers, smoking pipes,
+except on Saturday nights, when they lead each other home from the last
+train. It was none of our business to spy upon these boys, but their
+manners and customs fell within the field of observation. And we did
+not choose the night upon which the whole row was likely to be kept
+awake.
+
+The night that we did choose was as misty as even the Thames Valley is
+capable of making them. Raffles smeared vaseline upon the plated parts
+of his Beeston Humber before starting, and our dear landlady cosseted
+us both, and prayed we might see nothing of the nasty burglars, not
+denying as the reward would be very handy to them that got it, to say
+nothing of the honor and glory. We had promised her a liberal
+perquisite in the event of our success, but she must not give other
+cyclists our idea by mentioning it to a soul. It was about midnight
+when we cycled through Kingston to Surbiton, having trundled our
+machines across Ham Fields, mournful in the mist as those by Acheron,
+and so over Teddington Bridge.
+
+I often wonder why the pantry window is the vulnerable point of nine
+houses out of ten. This house of ours was almost the tenth, for the
+window in question had bars of sorts, but not the right sort. The only
+bars that Raffles allowed to beat him were the kind that are let into
+the stone outside; those fixed within are merely screwed to the
+woodwork, and you can unscrew as many as necessary if you take the
+trouble and have the time. Barred windows are usually devoid of other
+fasteners worthy the name; this one was no exception to that foolish
+rule, and a push with the pen-knife did its business. I am giving
+householders some valuable hints, and perhaps deserving a good mark
+from the critics. These, in any case, are the points that I would see
+to, were I a rich stockbroker in a riverside suburb. In giving good
+advice, however, I should not have omitted to say that we had left our
+machines in the semi-circular shrubbery in front, or that Raffles had
+most ingeniously fitted our lamps with dark slides, which enabled us to
+leave them burning.
+
+It proved sufficient to unscrew the bars at the bottom only, and then
+to wrench them to either side. Neither of us had grown stout with
+advancing years, and in a few minutes we both had wormed through into
+the sink, and thence to the floor. It was not an absolutely noiseless
+process, but once in the pantry we were mice, and no longer blind mice.
+There was a gas-bracket, but we did not meddle with that. Raffles went
+armed these nights with a better light than gas; if it were not
+immoral, I might recommend a dark-lantern which was more or less his
+patent. It was that handy invention, the electric torch, fitted by
+Raffles with a dark hood to fulfil the functions of a slide. I had held
+it through the bars while he undid the screws, and now he held it to
+the keyhole, in which a key was turned upon the other side.
+
+There was a pause for consideration, and in the pause we put on our
+masks. It was never known that these Thames Valley robberies were all
+committed by miscreants decked in the livery of crime, but that was
+because until this night we had never even shown our masks. It was a
+point upon which Raffles had insisted on all feasible occasions since
+his furtive return to the world. To-night it twice nearly lost us
+everything—but you shall hear.
+
+There is a forceps for turning keys from the wrong side of the door,
+but the implement is not so easy of manipulation as it might be.
+Raffles for one preferred a sharp knife and the corner of the panel.
+You go through the panel because that is thinnest, of course in the
+corner nearest the key, and you use a knife when you can, because it
+makes least noise. But it does take minutes, and even I can remember
+shifting the electric torch from one hand to the other before the
+aperture was large enough to receive the hand and wrist of Raffles.
+
+He had at such times a motto of which I might have made earlier use,
+but the fact is that I have only once before described a downright
+burglary in which I assisted, and that without knowing it at the time.
+The most solemn student of these annals cannot affirm that he has cut
+through many doors in our company, since (what was to me) the maiden
+effort to which I allude. I, however, have cracked only too many a crib
+in conjunction with A. J. Raffles, and at the crucial moment he would
+whisper “Victory or Wormwood Scrubbs, Bunny!” or instead of Wormwood
+Scrubbs it might be Portland Bill. This time it was neither one nor the
+other, for with that very word “victory” upon his lips, they whitened
+and parted with the first taste of defeat.
+
+“My hand’s held!” gasped Raffles, and the white of his eyes showed all
+round the iris, a rarer thing than you may think.
+
+At the same moment I heard the shuffling feet and the low, excited
+young voices on the other side of the door, and a faint light shone
+round Raffles’s wrist.
+
+“Well done, Beefy!”
+
+“Hang on to him!”
+
+“Good old Beefy!”
+
+“Beefy’s got him!”
+
+“So have I—so have I!”
+
+And Raffles caught my arm with his one free hand. “They’ve got me
+tight,” he whispered. “I’m done.”
+
+“Blaze through the door,” I urged, and might have done it had I been
+armed. But I never was. It was Raffles who monopolized that risk.
+
+“I can’t—it’s the boys—the wrong house!” he whispered. “Curse the
+fog—it’s done me. But you get out, Bunny, while you can; never mind me;
+it’s my turn, old chap.”
+
+His one hand tightened in affectionate farewell. I put the electric
+torch in it before I went, trembling in every inch, but without a word.
+
+Get out! His turn! Yes, I would get out, but only to come in again, for
+it was my turn—mine—not his. Would Raffles leave me held by a hand
+through a hole in a door? What he would have done in my place was the
+thing for me to do now. I began by diving head-first through the pantry
+window and coming to earth upon all fours. But even as I stood up, and
+brushed the gravel from the palms of my hands and the knees of my
+knickerbockers, I had no notion what to do next. And yet I was halfway
+to the front door before I remembered the vile crape mask upon my face,
+and tore it off as the door flew open and my feet were on the steps.
+
+“He’s into the next garden,” I cried to a bevy of pyjamas with bare
+feet and young faces at either end of them.
+
+“Who? Who?” said they, giving way before me.
+
+“Some fellow who came through one of your windows head-first.”
+
+“The other Johnny, the other Johnny,” the cherubs chorused.
+
+“Biking past—saw the light—why, what have you there?”
+
+Of course it was Raffles’s hand that they had, but now I was in the
+hall among them. A red-faced barrel of a boy did all the holding, one
+hand round the wrist, the other palm to palm, and his knees braced up
+against the panel. Another was rendering ostentatious but ineffectual
+aid, and three or four others danced about in their pyjamas. After all,
+they were not more than four to one. I had raised my voice, so that
+Raffles might hear me and take heart, and now I raised it again. Yet to
+this day I cannot account for my inspiration, that proved nothing less.
+
+“Don’t talk so loud,” they were crying below their breath; “don’t wake
+’em upstairs, this is our show.”
+
+“Then I see you’ve got one of them,” said I, as desired. “Well, if you
+want the other you can have him, too. I believe he’s hurt himself.”
+
+“After him, after him!” they exclaimed as one.
+
+“But I think he got over the wall—”
+
+“Come on, you chaps, come on!”
+
+And there was a soft stampede to the hall door.
+
+“Don’t all desert me, I say!” gasped the red-faced hero who held
+Raffles prisoner.
+
+“We must have them both, Beefy!”
+
+“That’s all very well—”
+
+“Look here,” I interposed, “I’ll stay by you. I’ve a friend outside,
+I’ll get him too.”
+
+“Thanks awfully,” said the valiant Beefy.
+
+The hall was empty now. My heart beat high.
+
+“How did you hear them?” I inquired, my eye running over him.
+
+“We were down having drinks—game o’ Nap—in there.”
+
+Beefy jerked his great head toward an open door, and the tail of my eye
+caught the glint of glasses in the firelight, but the rest of it was
+otherwise engaged.
+
+“Let me relieve you,” I said, trembling.
+
+“No, I’m all right.”
+
+“Then I must insist.”
+
+And before he could answer I had him round the neck with such a will
+that not a gurgle passed my fingers, for they were almost buried in his
+hot, smooth flesh. Oh, I am not proud of it; the act was as vile as act
+could be; but I was not going to see Raffles taken, my one desire was
+to be the saving of him, and I tremble even now to think to what
+lengths I might have gone for its fulfilment. As it was, I squeezed and
+tugged until one strong hand gave way after the other and came feeling
+round for me, but feebly because they had held on so long. And what do
+you suppose was happening at the same moment? The pinched white hand of
+Raffles, reddening with returning blood, and with a clot of blood upon
+the wrist, was craning upward and turning the key in the lock without a
+moment’s loss.
+
+“Steady on, Bunny!”
+
+And I saw that Beefy’s ears were blue; but Raffles was feeling in his
+pockets as he spoke. “Now let him breathe,” said he, clapping his
+handkerchief over the poor youth’s mouth. An empty vial was in his
+other hand, and the first few stertorous breaths that the poor boy took
+were the end of him for the time being. Oh, but it was villainous, my
+part especially, for he must have been far gone to go the rest of the
+way so readily. I began by saying I was not proud of this deed, but its
+dastardly character has come home to me more than ever with the penance
+of writing it out. I see in myself, at least my then self, things that
+I never saw quite so clearly before. Yet let me be quite sure that I
+would not do the same again. I had not the smallest desire to throttle
+this innocent lad (nor did I), but only to extricate Raffles from the
+most hopeless position he was ever in; and after all it was better than
+a blow from behind. On the whole, I will not alter a word, nor whine
+about the thing any more.
+
+We lifted the plucky fellow into Raffles’s place in the pantry, locked
+the door on him, and put the key through the panel. Now was the moment
+for thinking of ourselves, and again that infernal mask which Raffles
+swore by came near the undoing of us both. We had reached the steps
+when we were hailed by a voice, not from without but from within, and I
+had just time to tear the accursed thing from Raffles’s face before he
+turned.
+
+A stout man with a blonde moustache was on the stairs, in his pyjamas
+like the boys.
+
+“What are you doing here?” said he.
+
+“There has been an attempt upon your house,” said I, still spokesman
+for the night, and still on the wings of inspiration.
+
+“Your sons—”
+
+“My pupils.”
+
+“Indeed. Well, they heard it, drove off the thieves, and have given
+chase.”
+
+“And where do you come in?” inquired the stout man, descending.
+
+“We were bicycling past, and I actually saw one fellow come head-first
+through your pantry window. I think he got over the wall.”
+
+Here a breathless boy returned.
+
+“Can’t see anything of him,” he gasped.
+
+“It’s true, then,” remarked the crammer.
+
+“Look at that door,” said I.
+
+But unfortunately the breathless boy looked also, and now he was being
+joined by others equally short of wind.
+
+“Where’s Beefy?” he screamed. “What on earth’s happened to Beefy?”
+
+“My good boys,” exclaimed the crammer, “will one of you be kind enough
+to tell me what you’ve been doing, and what these gentlemen have been
+doing for you? Come in all, before you get your death. I see lights in
+the class-room, and more than lights. Can these be signs of a carouse?”
+
+“A very innocent one, sir,” said a well set-up youth with more
+moustache than I have yet.
+
+“Well, Olphert, boys will be boys. Suppose you tell me what happened,
+before we come to recriminations.”
+
+The bad old proverb was my first warning. I caught two of the youths
+exchanging glances under raised eyebrows. Yet their stout, easy-going
+mentor had given me such a reassuring glance of side-long humor, as
+between man of the world and man of the world, that it was difficult to
+suspect him of suspicion. I was nevertheless itching to be gone.
+
+Young Olphert told his story with engaging candor. It was true that
+they had come down for an hour’s Nap and cigarettes; well, and there
+was no denying that there was whiskey in the glasses. The boys were now
+all back in their class-room, I think entirely for the sake of warmth;
+but Raffles and I were in knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets, and very
+naturally remained without, while the army-crammer (who wore bedroom
+slippers) stood on the threshold, with an eye each way. The more I saw
+of the man the better I liked and the more I feared him. His chief
+annoyance thus far was that they had not called him when they heard the
+noise, that they had dreamt of leaving him out of the fun. But he
+seemed more hurt than angry about that.
+
+“Well, sir,” concluded Olphert, “we left old Beefy Smith hanging on to
+his hand, and this gentleman with him, so perhaps he can tell us what
+happened next?”
+
+“I wish I could,” I cried with all their eyes upon me, for I had had
+time to think. “Some of you must have heard me say I’d fetch my friend
+in from the road?”
+
+“Yes, I did,” piped an innocent from within.
+
+“Well, and when I came back with him things were exactly as you see
+them now. Evidently the man’s strength was too much for the boy’s; but
+whether he ran upstairs or outside I know no more than you do.”
+
+“It wasn’t like that boy to run either way,” said the crammer, cocking
+a clear blue eye on me.
+
+“But if he gave chase!”
+
+“It wasn’t like him even to let go.”
+
+“I don’t believe Beefy ever would,” put in Olphert. “That’s why we gave
+him the billet.”
+
+“He may have followed him through the pantry window,” I suggested
+wildly.
+
+“But the door’s shut,” put in a boy.
+
+“I’ll have a look at it,” said the crammer.
+
+And the key no longer in the lock, and the insensible youth within! The
+key would be missed, the door kicked in; nay, with the man’s eye still
+upon me, I thought I could smell the chloroform.
+
+I thought I could hear a moan, and prepared for either any moment. And
+how he did stare! I have detested blue eyes ever since, and blonde
+moustaches, and the whole stout easy-going type that is not such a fool
+as it looks. I had brazened it out with the boys, but the first grown
+man was too many for me, and the blood ran out of my heart as though
+there was no Raffles at my back. Indeed, I had forgotten him. I had so
+longed to put this thing through by myself! Even in my extremity it was
+almost a disappointment to me when his dear, cool voice fell like a
+delicious draught upon my ears. But its effect upon the others is more
+interesting to recall. Until now the crammer had the centre of the
+stage, but at this point Raffles usurped a place which was always his
+at will. People would wait for what he had to say, as these people
+waited now for the simplest and most natural thing in the world.
+
+“One moment!” he had begun.
+
+“Well?” said the crammer, relieving me of his eyes at last.
+
+“I don’t want to lose any of the fun—”
+
+“Nor must you,” said the crammer, with emphasis.
+
+“But we’ve left our bikes outside, and mine’s a Beeston Humber,”
+continued Raffles. “If you don’t mind, we’ll bring ’em in before these
+fellows get away on them.”
+
+And out he went without a look to see the effect of his words, I after
+him with a determined imitation of his self-control. But I would have
+given something to turn round. I believe that for one moment the shrewd
+instructor was taken in, but as I reached the steps I heard him asking
+his pupils whether any of them had seen any bicycles outside.
+
+That moment, however, made the difference. We were in the shrubbery,
+Raffles with his electric torch drawn and blazing, when we heard the
+kicking at the pantry door, and in the drive with our bicycles before
+man and boys poured pell-mell down the steps.
+
+We rushed our machines to the nearer gate, for both were shut, and we
+got through and swung it home behind us in the nick of time. Even I
+could mount before they could reopen the gate, which Raffles held
+against them for half an instant with unnecessary gallantry. But he
+would see me in front of him, and so it fell to me to lead the way.
+
+Now, I have said that it was a very misty night (hence the whole
+thing), and also that these houses were on a hill. But they were not
+nearly on the top of the hill, and I did what I firmly believe that
+almost everybody would have done in my place. Raffles, indeed, said he
+would have done it himself, but that was his generosity, and he was the
+one man who would not. What I did was to turn in the opposite direction
+to the other gate, where we might so easily have been cut off, and to
+pedal for my life—up-hill!
+
+“My God!” I shouted when I found it out.
+
+“Can you turn in your own length?” asked Raffles, following loyally.
+
+“Not certain.”
+
+“Then stick to it. You couldn’t help it. But it’s the devil of a hill!”
+
+“And here they come!”
+
+“Let them,” said Raffles, and brandished his electric torch, our only
+light as yet.
+
+A hill seems endless in the dark, for you cannot see the end, and with
+the patter of bare feet gaining on us, I thought this one could have no
+end at all. Of course the boys could charge up it quicker than we could
+pedal, but I even heard the voice of their stout instructor growing
+louder through the mist.
+
+“Oh, to think I’ve let you in for this!” I groaned, my head over the
+handle-bars, every ounce of my weight first on one foot and then on the
+other. I glanced at Raffles, and in the white light of his torch he was
+doing it all with his ankles, exactly as though he had been riding in a
+Gymkhana.
+
+“It’s the most sporting chase I was ever in,” said he.
+
+“All my fault!”
+
+“My dear Bunny, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”
+
+Nor would he forge ahead of me, though he could have done so in a
+moment, he who from his boyhood had done everything of the kind so much
+better than anybody else. No, he must ride a wheel’s length behind me,
+and now we could not only hear the boys running, but breathing also.
+And then of a sudden I saw Raffles on my right striking with his torch;
+a face flew out of the darkness to meet the thick glass bulb with the
+glowing wire enclosed; it was the face of the boy Olphert, with his
+enviable moustache, but it vanished with the crash of glass, and the
+naked wire thickened to the eye like a tuning-fork struck red-hot.
+
+I saw no more of that. One of them had crept up on my side also; as I
+looked, hearing him pant, he was grabbing at my left handle, and I
+nearly sent Raffles into the hedge by the sharp turn I took to the
+right. His wheel’s length saved him. But my boy could run, was
+overhauling me again, seemed certain of me this time, when all at once
+the Sunbeam ran easily; every ounce of my weight with either foot once
+more, and I was over the crest of the hill, the gray road reeling out
+from under me as I felt for my brake. I looked back at Raffles. He had
+put up his feet. I screwed my head round still further, and there were
+the boys in their pyjamas, their hands upon their knees, like so many
+wicket-keepers, and a big man shaking his fist. There was a lamp-post
+on the hill-top, and that was the last I saw.
+
+We sailed down to the river, then on through Thames Ditton as far as
+Esher Station, when we turned sharp to the right, and from the dark
+stretch by Imber Court came to light in Molesey, and were soon
+pedalling like gentlemen of leisure through Bushey Park, our lights
+turned up, the broken torch put out and away. The big gates had long
+been shut, but you can manoeuvre a bicycle through the others. We had
+no further adventures on the way home, and our coffee was still warm
+upon the hob.
+
+“But I think it’s an occasion for Sullivans,” said Raffles, who now
+kept them for such. “By all my gods, Bunny, it’s been the most sporting
+night we ever had in our lives! And do you know which was the most
+sporting part of it?”
+
+“That up-hill ride?”
+
+“I wasn’t thinking of it.”
+
+“Turning your torch into a truncheon?”
+
+“My dear Bunny! A gallant lad—I hated hitting him.”
+
+“I know,” I said. “The way you got us out of the house!”
+
+“No, Bunny,” said Raffles, blowing rings. “It came before that, you
+sinner, and you know it!”
+
+“You don’t mean anything I did?” said I, self-consciously, for I began
+to see that this was what he did mean. And now at latest it will also
+be seen why this story has been told with undue and inexcusable gusto;
+there is none other like it for me to tell; it is my one ewe-lamb in
+all these annals. But Raffles had a ruder name for it.
+
+“It was the Apotheosis of the Bunny,” said he, but in a tone I never
+shall forget.
+
+“I hardly knew what I was doing or saying,” I said. “The whole thing
+was a fluke.”
+
+“Then,” said Raffles, “it was the kind of fluke I always trusted you to
+make when runs were wanted.”
+
+And he held out his dear old hand.
+
+
+
+
+THE KNEES OF THE GODS
+
+I
+
+“The worst of this war,” said Raffles, “is the way it puts a fellow off
+his work.”
+
+It was, of course, the winter before last, and we had done nothing
+dreadful since the early autumn. Undoubtedly the war was the cause. Not
+that we were among the earlier victims of the fever. I took
+disgracefully little interest in the Negotiations, while the Ultimatum
+appealed to Raffles as a sporting flutter. Then we gave the whole thing
+till Christmas. We still missed the cricket in the papers. But one
+russet afternoon we were in Richmond, and a terrible type was shouting
+himself hoarse with “’Eavy British lorsses—orful slorter o’ the
+Bo-wers! Orful slorter! Orful slorter! ’Eavy British lorsses!” I
+thought the terrible type had invented it, but Raffles gave him more
+than he asked, and then I held the bicycle while he tried to pronounce
+Eland’s Laagte. We were never again without our sheaf of evening
+papers, and Raffles ordered three morning ones, and I gave up mine in
+spite of its literary page. We became strategists. We knew exactly what
+Buller was to do on landing, and, still better, what the other Generals
+should have done. Our map was the best that could be bought, with flags
+that deserved a better fate than standing still. Raffles woke me to
+hear _The Absent-Minded Beggar_ on the morning it appeared; he was one
+of the first substantial subscribers to the fund. By this time our dear
+landlady was more excited than we. To our enthusiasm for Thomas she
+added a personal bitterness against the Wild Boars, as she persisted in
+calling them, each time as though it were the first. I could linger
+over our landlady’s attitude in the whole matter. That was her only
+joke about it, and the true humorist never smiled at it herself. But
+you had only to say a syllable for a venerable gentleman, declared by
+her to be at the bottom of it all, to hear what she could do to him if
+she caught him. She could put him in a cage and go on tour with him,
+and make him howl and dance for his food like a debased bear before a
+fresh audience every day. Yet a more kind-hearted woman I have never
+known. The war did not uplift our landlady as it did her lodgers.
+
+But presently it ceased to have that precise effect upon us. Bad was
+being made worse and worse; and then came more than Englishmen could
+endure in that black week across which the names of three African
+villages are written forever in letters of blood. “All three pegs,”
+groaned Raffles on the last morning of the week; “neck-and-crop,
+neck-and-crop!” It was his first word of cricket since the beginning of
+the war.
+
+We were both depressed. Old school-fellows had fallen, and I know
+Raffles envied them; he spoke so wistfully of such an end. To cheer him
+up I proposed to break into one of the many more or less royal
+residences in our neighborhood; a tough crib was what he needed; but I
+will not trouble you with what he said to me. There was less crime in
+England that winter than for years past; there was none at all in
+Raffles. And yet there were those who could denounce the war!
+
+So we went on for a few of those dark days, Raffles very glum and grim,
+till one fine morning the Yeomanry idea put new heart into us all. It
+struck me at once as the glorious scheme it was to prove, but it did
+not hit me where it hit others. I was not a fox-hunter, and the
+gentlemen of England would scarcely have owned me as one of them. The
+case of Raffles was in that respect still more hopeless (he who had
+even played for them at Lord’s), and he seemed to feel it. He would not
+speak to me all the morning; in the afternoon he went for a walk alone.
+It was another man who came home, flourishing a small bottle packed in
+white paper.
+
+“Bunny,” said he, “I never did lift my elbow; it’s the one vice I never
+had. It has taken me all these years to find my tipple, Bunny; but here
+it is, my panacea, my elixir, my magic philtre!”
+
+I thought he had been at it on the road, and asked him the name of the
+stuff.
+
+“Look and see, Bunny.”
+
+And if it wasn’t a bottle of ladies’ hair-dye, warranted to change any
+shade into the once fashionable yellow within a given number of
+applications!
+
+“What on earth,” said I, “are you going to do with this?”
+
+“Dye for my country,” he cried, swelling. “Dulce et decorum est, Bunny,
+my boy!”
+
+“Do you mean that you are going to the front?”
+
+“If I can without coming to it.”
+
+I looked at him as he stood in the firelight, straight as a dart, spare
+but wiry, alert, laughing, flushed from his wintry walk; and as I
+looked, all the years that I had known him, and more besides, slipped
+from him in my eyes. I saw him captain of the eleven at school. I saw
+him running with the muddy ball on days like this, running round the
+other fifteen as a sheep-dog round a flock of sheep. He had his cap on
+still, and but for the gray hairs underneath—but here I lost him in a
+sudden mist. It was not sorrow at his going, for I did not mean to let
+him go alone. It was enthusiasm, admiration, affection, and also, I
+believe, a sudden regret that he had not always appealed to that part
+of my nature to which he was appealing now. It was a little thrill of
+penitence. Enough of it.
+
+“I think it great of you,” I said, and at first that was all.
+
+How he laughed at me! He had had his innings; there was no better way
+of getting out. He had scored off an African millionaire, the Players,
+a Queensland Legislator, the Camorra, the late Lord Ernest Belville,
+and again and again off Scotland Yard. What more could one man do in
+one lifetime? And at the worst it was the death to die: no bed, no
+doctor, no temperature—and Raffles stopped himself.
+
+“No pinioning, no white cap,” he added, “if you like that better.”
+
+“I don’t like any of it,” I cried, cordially; “you’ve simply got to
+come back.”
+
+“To what?” he asked, a strange look on him. And I wondered—for one
+instant—whether my little thrill had gone through him. He was not a man
+of little thrills.
+
+Then for a minute I was in misery. Of course I wanted to go too—he
+shook my hand without a word—but how could I? They would never have me,
+a branded jailbird, in the Imperial Yeomanry! Raffles burst out
+laughing; he had been looking very hard at me for about three seconds.
+
+“You rabbit,” he cried, “even to think of it! We might as well offer
+ourselves to the Metropolitan Police Force. No, Bunny, we go out to the
+Cape on our own, and that’s where we enlist. One of these regiments of
+irregular horse is the thing for us; you spent part of your pretty
+penny on horse-flesh, I believe, and you remember how I rode in the
+bush! We’re the very men for them, Bunny, and they won’t ask to see our
+birthmarks out there. I don’t think even my hoary locks would put them
+off, but it would be too conspicuous in the ranks.”
+
+Our landlady first wept on hearing our determination, and then longed
+to have the pulling of certain whiskers (with the tongs, and they
+should be red-hot); but from that day, and for as many as were left to
+us, the good soul made more of us than ever. Not that she was at all
+surprised; dear brave gentlemen who could look for burglars on their
+bicycles at dead of night, it was only what you might expect of them,
+bless their lion hearts. I wanted to wink at Raffles, but he would not
+catch my eye. He was a ginger-headed Raffles by the end of January, and
+it was extraordinary what a difference it made. His most elaborate
+disguises had not been more effectual than this simple expedient, and,
+with khaki to complete the subdual of his individuality, he had every
+hope of escaping recognition in the field. The man he dreaded was the
+officer he had known in old days; there were ever so many of him at the
+Front; and it was to minimize this risk that we went out second-class
+at the beginning of February.
+
+It was a weeping day, a day in a shroud, cold as clay, yet for that
+very reason an ideal day upon which to leave England for the sunny
+Front. Yet my heart was heavy as I looked my last at her; it was heavy
+as the raw, thick air, until Raffles came and leant upon the rail at my
+side.
+
+“I know what you are thinking, and you’ve got to stop,” said he. “It’s
+on the knees of the gods, Bunny, whether we do or we don’t, and
+thinking won’t make us see over their shoulders.”
+
+II
+
+Now I made as bad a soldier (except at heart) as Raffles made a good
+one, and I could not say a harder thing of myself. My ignorance of
+matters military was up to that time unfathomable, and is still
+profound. I was always a fool with horses, though I did not think so at
+one time, and I had never been any good with a gun. The average Tommy
+may be my intellectual inferior, but he must know some part of his work
+better than I ever knew any of mine. I never even learnt to be killed.
+I do not mean that I ever ran away. The South African Field Force might
+have been strengthened if I had.
+
+The foregoing remarks do not express a pose affected out of superiority
+to the usual spirit of the conquering hero, for no man was keener on
+the war than I, before I went to it. But one can only write with gusto
+of events (like that little affair at Surbiton) in which one has
+acquitted oneself without discredit, and I cannot say that of my part
+in the war, of which I now loathe the thought for other reasons. The
+battlefield was no place for me, and neither was the camp. My
+ineptitude made me the butt of the looting, cursing, swash-buckling lot
+who formed the very irregular squadron which we joined; and it would
+have gone hard with me but for Raffles, who was soon the darling devil
+of them all, but never more loyally my friend. Your fireside fire-eater
+does not think of these things. He imagines all the fighting to be with
+the enemy. He will probably be horrified to hear that men can detest
+each other as cordially in khaki as in any other wear, and with a
+virulence seldom inspired by the bearded dead-shot in the opposite
+trench. To the fireside fire-eater, therefore (for you have seen me one
+myself), I dedicate the story of Corporal Connal, Captain Bellingham,
+the General, Raffles, and myself.
+
+I must be vague, for obvious reasons. The troop is fighting as I write;
+you will soon hear why I am not; but neither is Raffles, nor Corporal
+Connal. They are fighting as well as ever, those other hard-living,
+harder-dying sons of all soils; but I am not going to say where it was
+that we fought with them. I believe that no body of men of equal size
+has done half so much heroic work. But they had got themselves a bad
+name off the field, so to speak; and I am not going to make it worse by
+saddling them before the world with Raffles and myself, and that
+ruffian Connal.
+
+The fellow was a mongrel type, a Glasgow Irishman by birth and
+upbringing, but he had been in South Africa for years, and he certainly
+knew the country very well. This circumstance, coupled with the fact
+that he was a very handy man with horses, as all colonists are, had
+procured him the first small step from the ranks which facilitates
+bullying if a man be a bully by nature, and is physically fitted to be
+a successful one. Connal was a hulking ruffian, and in me had ideal
+game. The brute was offensive to me from the hour I joined. The details
+are of no importance, but I stood up to him at first in words, and
+finally for a few seconds on my feet. Then I went down like an ox, and
+Raffles came out of his tent. Their fight lasted twenty minutes, and
+Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully conventional, for
+the bully was a bully no more.
+
+But I began gradually to suspect that he was something worse. All this
+time we were fighting every day, or so it seems when I look back. Never
+a great engagement, and yet never a day when we were wholly out of
+touch with the enemy. I had thus several opportunities of watching the
+other enemy under fire, and had almost convinced myself of the
+systematic harmlessness of his own shooting, when a more glaring
+incident occurred.
+
+One night three troops of our squadron were ordered to a certain point
+whither they had patrolled the previous week; but our own particular
+troop was to stay behind, and in charge of no other than the villanous
+corporal, both our officer and sergeant having gone into hospital with
+enteric. Our detention, however, was very temporary, and Connal would
+seem to have received the usual vague orders to proceed in the early
+morning to the place where the other three companies had camped. It
+appeared that we were to form an escort to two squadron-wagons
+containing kits, provisions, and ammunition.
+
+Before daylight Connal had reported his departure to the commanding
+officer, and we passed the outposts at gray dawn. Now, though I was
+perhaps the least observant person in the troop, I was not the least
+wideawake where Corporal Connal was concerned, and it struck me at once
+that we were heading in the wrong direction. My reasons are not
+material, but as a matter of fact our last week’s patrol had pushed its
+khaki tentacles both east and west; and eastward they had met with
+resistance so determined as to compel them to retire; yet it was
+eastward that we were travelling now. I at once spurred alongside
+Raffles, as he rode, bronzed and bearded, with warworn wideawake over
+eyes grown keen as a hawk’s, and a cutty-pipe sticking straight out
+from his front teeth. I can see him now, so gaunt and grim and
+debonair, yet already with much of the nonsense gone out of him, though
+I thought he only smiled on my misgivings.
+
+“Did he get the instructions, Bunny, or did we? Very well, then; give
+the devil a chance.”
+
+There was nothing further to be said, but I felt more crushed than
+convinced; so we jogged along into broad daylight, until Raffles
+himself gave a whistle of surprise.
+
+“A white flag, Bunny, by all my gods!”
+
+I could not see it; he had the longest sight in all our squadron; but
+in a little the fluttering emblem, which had gained such a sinister
+significance in most of our eyes, was patent even to mine. A little
+longer, and the shaggy Boer was in our midst upon his shaggy pony, with
+a half-scared, half-incredulous look in his deep-set eyes. He was on
+his way to our lines with some missive, and had little enough to say to
+us, though frivolous and flippant questions were showered upon him from
+most saddles.
+
+“Any Boers over there?” asked one, pointing in the direction in which
+we were still heading.
+
+“Shut up!” interjected Raffles in crisp rebuke.
+
+The Boer looked stolid but sinister.
+
+“Any of our chaps?” added another.
+
+The Boer rode on with an open grin.
+
+And the incredible conclusion of the matter was that we were actually
+within their lines in another hour; saw them as large as life within a
+mile and a half on either side of us; and must every man of us have
+been taken prisoner had not every man but Connal refused to go one inch
+further, and had not the Boers themselves obviously suspected some
+subtle ruse as the only conceivable explanation of so madcap a
+manoeuvre. They allowed us to retire without firing a shot; and retire
+you may be sure we did, the Kaffirs flogging their teams in a fury of
+fear, and our precious corporal sullen but defiant.
+
+I have said this was the conclusion of the matter, and I blush to
+repeat that it practically was. Connal was indeed wheeled up before the
+colonel, but his instructions were not written instructions, and he
+lied his way out with equal hardihood and tact.
+
+“You said ‘over there,’ sir,” he stoutly reiterated; and the vagueness
+with which such orders were undoubtedly given was the saving of him for
+the time being.
+
+I need not tell you how indignant I felt, for one.
+
+“The fellow is a spy!” I said to Raffles, with no nursery oath, as we
+strolled within the lines that night.
+
+He merely smiled in my face.
+
+“And have you only just found it out, Bunny? I have known it almost
+ever since we joined; but this morning I did think we had him on
+toast.”
+
+“It’s disgraceful that we had not,” cried I. “He ought to have been
+shot like a dog.”
+
+“Not so loud, Bunny, though I quite agree; but I don’t regret what has
+happened as much as you do. Not that I am less bloodthirsty than you
+are in this case, but a good deal more so! Bunny, I’m mad-keen on
+bowling him out with my own unaided hand—though I may ask you to take
+the wicket. Meanwhile, don’t wear all your animosity upon your sleeve;
+the fellow has friends who still believe in him; and there is no need
+for you to be more openly his enemy than you were before.”
+
+Well, I can only vow that I did my best to follow this sound advice;
+but who but a Raffles can control his every look? It was never my
+forte, as you know, yet to this day I cannot conceive what I did to
+excite the treacherous corporal’s suspicions. He was clever enough,
+however, not to betray them, and lucky enough to turn the tables on us,
+as you shall hear.
+
+III
+
+Bloemfontein had fallen since our arrival, but there was plenty of
+fight in the Free Staters still, and I will not deny that it was these
+gentry who were showing us the sport for which our corps came in.
+Constant skirmishing was our portion, with now and then an action that
+you would know at least by name, did I feel free to mention them. But I
+do not, and indeed it is better so. I have not to describe the war even
+as I saw it, I am thankful to say, but only the martial story of us two
+and those others of whom you wot. Corporal Connal was the dangerous
+blackguard you have seen. Captain Bellingham is best known for his
+position in the batting averages a year or two ago, and for his
+subsequent failure to obtain a place in any of the five Test Matches.
+But I only think of him as the officer who recognized Raffles.
+
+We had taken a village, making quite a little name for it and for
+ourselves, and in the village our division was reinforced by a fresh
+brigade of the Imperial troops. It was a day of rest, our first for
+weeks, but Raffles and I spent no small part of it in seeking high and
+low for a worthy means of quenching the kind of thirst which used to
+beset Yeomen and others who had left good cellars for the veldt. The
+old knack came back to us both, though I believe that I alone was
+conscious of it at the time; and we were leaving the house, splendidly
+supplied, when we almost ran into the arms of an infantry officer, with
+a scowl upon his red-hot face, and an eye-glass flaming at us in the
+sun.
+
+“Peter Bellingham!” gasped Raffles under his breath, and then we
+saluted and tried to pass on, with the bottles ringing like
+church-bells under our khaki. But Captain Bellingham was a hard man.
+
+“What have you men been doin’?” drawled he.
+
+“Nothing, sir,” we protested, like innocence with an injury.
+
+“Lootin’ ’s forbidden,” said he. “You had better let me see those
+bottles.”
+
+“We are done,” whispered Raffles, and straightway we made a sideboard
+of the stoop across which he had crept at so inopportune a moment. I
+had not the heart to raise my eyes again, yet it was many moments
+before the officer broke silence.
+
+“Uam Var!” he murmured reverentially at last. “And Long John of Ben
+Nevis! The first drop that’s been discovered in the whole psalm-singing
+show! What lot do you two belong to?”
+
+I answered.
+
+“I must have your names.”
+
+In my agitation I gave my real one. Raffles had turned away, as though
+in heart-broken contemplation of our lost loot. I saw the officer
+studying his half-profile with an alarming face.
+
+“What’s _your_ name?” he rapped out at last.
+
+But his strange, low voice said plainly that he knew, and Raffles faced
+him with the monosyllable of confession and assent. I did not count the
+seconds until the next word, but it was Captain Bellingham who uttered
+it at last.
+
+“I thought you were dead.”
+
+“Now you see I am not.”
+
+“But you are at your old games!”
+
+“I am not,” cried Raffles, and his tone was new to me. I have seldom
+heard one more indignant. “Yes,” he continued, “this is loot, and the
+wrong ’un will out. That’s what you’re thinking, Peter—I beg your
+pardon—sir. But he isn’t let out in the field! We’re playing the game
+as much as you are, old—sir.”
+
+The plural number caused the captain to toss me a contemptuous look.
+“Is this the fellah who was taken when you swam for it?” he inquired,
+relapsing into his drawl. Raffles said I was, and with that took a
+passionate oath upon our absolute rectitude as volunteers. There could
+be no doubting him; but the officer’s eyes went back at the bottles on
+the stoop.
+
+“But look at those,” said he; and as he looked himself the light eye
+melted in his fiery face. “And I’ve got Sparklets in my tent,” he
+sighed. “You make it in a minute!”
+
+Not a word from Raffles, and none, you may be sure, from me. Then
+suddenly Bellingham told me where his tent was, and, adding that our
+case was one for serious consideration, strode in its direction without
+another word until some sunlit paces separated us.
+
+“You can bring that stuff with you,” he then flung over a
+shoulder-strap, “and I advise you to put it where you had it before.”
+
+A trooper saluted him some yards further on, and looked evilly at us as
+we followed with our loot. It was Corporal Connal of ours, and the
+thought of him takes my mind off the certainly gallant captain who only
+that day had joined our division with the reinforcements. I could not
+stand the man myself. He added soda-water to our whiskey in his tent,
+and would only keep a couple of bottles when we came away. Softened by
+the spirit, to which disuse made us all a little sensitive, our officer
+was soon convinced of the honest part that we were playing for once,
+and for fifty minutes of the hour we spent with him he and Raffles
+talked cricket without a break. On parting they even shook hands; that
+was Long John in the captain’s head; but the snob never addressed a
+syllable to me.
+
+And now to the gallows-bird who was still corporal of our troop: it was
+not long before Raffles was to have his wish and the traitor’s wicket.
+We had resumed our advance, or rather our humble part in the great
+surrounding movement then taking place, and were under pretty heavy
+fire once more, when Connal was shot in the hand. It was a curious
+casualty in more than one respect, and nobody seems to have seen it
+happen. Though a flesh wound, it was a bloody one, and that may be why
+the surgeon did not at once detect those features which afterwards
+convinced him that the injury had been self-inflicted. It was the right
+hand, and until it healed the man could be of no further use in the
+firing line; nor was the case serious enough for admission to a crowded
+field-hospital; and Connal himself offered his services as custodian of
+a number of our horses which we were keeping out of harm’s way in a
+donga. They had come there in the following manner: That morning we had
+been heliographed to reinforce the C.M.R., only to find that the enemy
+had the range to a nicety when we reached the spot. There were trenches
+for us men, but no place of safety for our horses nearer than this long
+and narrow donga which ran from within our lines towards those of the
+Boers. So some of us galloped them thither, six-in-hand, amid the whine
+of shrapnel and the whistle of shot. I remember the man next me being
+killed by a shell with all his team, and the tangle of flying harness,
+torn horseflesh, and crimson khaki, that we left behind us on the
+veldt; also that a small red flag, ludicrously like those used to
+indicate a putting-green, marked the single sloping entrance to the
+otherwise precipitous donga, which I for one was duly thankful to reach
+alive.
+
+The same evening Connal, with a few other light casualties to assist
+him, took over the charge for which he had volunteered and for which he
+was so admirably fitted by his knowledge of horses and his general
+experience of the country; nevertheless, he managed to lose three or
+four fine chargers in the course of the first night; and, early in the
+second, Raffles shook me out of a heavy slumber in the trenches where
+we had been firing all day.
+
+“I have found the spot, Bunny,” he whispered; “we ought to out him
+before the night is over.”
+
+“Connal?”
+
+Raffles nodded.
+
+“You know what happened to some of his horses last night? Well, he let
+them go himself.”
+
+“Never!”
+
+“I’m as certain of it,” said Raffles, “as though I’d seen him do it;
+and if he does it again I shall see him. I can even tell you how it
+happened. Connal insisted on having one end of the donga to himself,
+and of course his end is the one nearest the Boers. Well, then, he
+tells the other fellows to go to sleep at their end—I have it direct
+from one of them—and you bet they don’t need a second invitation. The
+rest I hope to see to-night.”
+
+“It seems almost incredible,” said I.
+
+“Not more so than the Light Horseman’s dodge of poisoning the troughs;
+that happened at Ladysmith before Christmas; and two kind friends did
+for that blackguard what you and I are going to do for this one, and a
+firing-party did the rest. Brutes! A mounted man’s worth a file on foot
+in this country, and well they know it. But this beauty goes one better
+than the poison; that was wilful waste; but I’ll eat my wideawake if
+our loss last night wasn’t the enemy’s double gain! What we’ve got to
+do, Bunny, is to catch him in the act. It may mean watching him all
+night, but was ever game so well worth the candle?”
+
+One may say in passing that, at this particular point of contact, the
+enemy were in superior force, and for once in a mood as aggressive as
+our own. They were led with a dash, and handled with a skill, which did
+not always characterize their commanders at this stage of the war.
+Their position was very similar to ours, and indeed we were to spend
+the whole of next day in trying with an equal will to turn each other
+out. The result will scarcely be forgotten by those who recognize the
+occasion from these remarks. Meanwhile it was the eve of battle (most
+evenings were), and there was that villain with the horses in the
+donga, and here were we two upon his track.
+
+Raffles’s plan was to reconnoitre the place, and then take up a
+position from which we could watch our man and pounce upon him if he
+gave us cause. The spot that we eventually chose and stealthily
+occupied was behind some bushes through which we could see down into
+the donga; there were the precious horses; and there sure enough was
+our wounded corporal, sitting smoking in his cloak, some glimmering
+thing in his lap.
+
+“That’s his revolver, and it’s a Mauser,” whispered Raffles. “He shan’t
+have a chance of using it on us; either we must be on him before he
+knows we are anywhere near, or simply report. It’s easily proved once
+we are sure; but I should like to have the taking of him too.”
+
+There was a setting moon. Shadows were sharp and black. The man smoked
+steadily, and the hungry horses did what I never saw horses do before;
+they stood and nibbled at each other’s tails. I was used to sleeping in
+the open, under the jewelled dome that seems so much vaster and grander
+in these wide spaces of the earth. I lay listening to the horses, and
+to the myriad small strange voices of the veldt, to which I cannot even
+now put a name, while Raffles watched. “One head is better than two,”
+he said, “when you don’t want it to be seen.” We were to take watch and
+watch about, however, and the other might sleep if he could; it was not
+my fault that I did nothing else; it was Raffles who could trust nobody
+but himself. Nor was there any time for recriminations when he did
+rouse me in the end.
+
+But a moment ago, as it seemed to me, I had been gazing upward at the
+stars and listening to the dear, minute sounds of peace; and in another
+the great gray slate was clean, and every bone of me set in plaster of
+Paris, and sniping beginning between pickets with the day. It was an
+occasional crack, not a constant crackle, but the whistle of a bullet
+as it passed us by, or a tiny transitory flame for the one bit of
+detail on a blue hill-side, was an unpleasant warning that we two on
+ours were a target in ourselves. But Raffles paid no attention to their
+fire; he was pointing downward through the bushes to where Corporal
+Connal stood with his back to us, shooing a last charger out of the
+mouth of the donga towards the Boer trenches.
+
+“That’s his third,” whispered Raffles, “but it’s the first I’ve seen
+distinctly, for he waited for the blind spot before the dawn. It’s
+enough to land him, I fancy, but we mustn’t lose time. Are you ready
+for a creep?”
+
+I stretched myself, and said I was; but I devoutly wished it was not
+quite so early in the morning.
+
+“Like cats, then, till he hears, and then into him for all we’re worth.
+He’s stowed his iron safe away, but he mustn’t have time even to feel
+for it. You take his left arm, Bunny, and hang on to that like a
+ferret, and I’ll do the rest. Ready? Then now!”
+
+And in less time than it would take to tell, we were over the lip of
+the donga and had fallen upon the fellow before he could turn his head;
+nevertheless, for a few instants he fought like a wild beast, striking,
+kicking, and swinging me off my feet as I obeyed my instructions to the
+letter, and stuck to his left like a leech. But he soon gave that up,
+panting and blaspheming, demanded explanations in his hybrid tongue
+that had half a brogue and half a burr. What were we doing? What had he
+done? Raffles at his back, with his right wrist twisted round and
+pinned into the small of it, soon told him that, and I think the words
+must have been the first intimation that he had as to who his
+assailants were.
+
+“So it’s you two!” he cried, and a light broke over him. He was no
+longer trying to shake us off, and now he dropped his curses also, and
+stood chuckling to himself instead. “Well,” he went on, “you’re bloody
+liars both, but I know something else that you are, so you’d better let
+go.”
+
+A coldness ran through me, and I never saw Raffles so taken aback. His
+grip must have relaxed for a fraction of time, for our captive broke
+out in a fresh and desperate struggle, but now we pinned him tighter
+than ever, and soon I saw him turning green and yellow with the pain.
+
+“You’re breaking my wrist!” he yelled at last.
+
+“Then stand still and tell us who we are.”
+
+And he stood still and told us our real names. But Raffles insisted on
+hearing how he had found us out, and smiled as though he had known what
+was coming when it came. I was dumbfounded.
+
+The accursed hound had followed us that evening to Captain Bellingham’s
+tent, and his undoubted cleverness in his own profession of spy had
+done the rest.
+
+“And now you’d better let me go,” said the master of the situation, as
+I for one could not help regarding him.
+
+“I’ll see you damned,” said Raffles, savagely.
+
+“Then you’re damned and done for yourself, my cocky criminal. Raffles
+the burglar! Raffles the society thief! Not dead after all, but ’live
+and ’listed. Send him home and give him fourteen years, and won’t he
+like ’em, that’s all!”
+
+“I shall have the pleasure of hearing you shot first,” retorted
+Raffles, through his teeth, “and that alone will make them bearable.
+Come on, Bunny, let’s drive the swine along and get it over.”
+
+And drive him we did, he cursing, cajoling, struggling, gloating, and
+blubbering by turns. But Raffles never wavered for an instant, though
+his face was tragic, and it went to my heart, where that look stays
+still. I remember at the time, though I never let my hold relax, there
+was a moment when I added my entreaties to those of our prisoner.
+Raffles did not even reply to me. But I was thinking of him, I swear. I
+was thinking of that gray set face that I never saw before or after.
+
+“Your story will be tested,” said the commanding officer, when Connal
+had been marched to the guard-tent. “Is there any truth in his?”
+
+“It is perfectly true, sir.”
+
+“And the notorious Raffles has been alive all these years, and you are
+really he?”
+
+“I am, sir.”
+
+“And what are you doing at the front?”
+
+Somehow I thought that Raffles was going to smile, but the grim set of
+his mouth never altered, neither was there any change in the ashy
+pallor which had come over him in the donga when Connal mouthed his
+name. It was only his eyes that lighted up at the last question.
+
+“I am fighting, sir,” said he, as simply as any subaltern in the army.
+
+The commanding officer inclined a grizzled head perceptibly, and no
+more. He was not one of any school, our General; he had his own ways,
+and we loved both him and them; and I believe that he loved the rough
+but gallant corps that bore his name. He once told us that he knew
+something about most of us, and there were things that Raffles had done
+of which he must have heard. But he only moved his grizzled head.
+
+“Did you know he was going to give you away?” he asked at length, with
+a jerk of it toward the guard-tent.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“But you thought it worth while, did you?”
+
+“I thought it necessary, sir.”
+
+The General paused, drumming on his table, making up his mind. Then his
+chin came up with the decision that we loved in him.
+
+“I shall sift all this,” said he. “An officer’s name was mentioned, and
+I shall see him myself. Meanwhile you had better go on—fighting.”
+
+IV
+
+Corporal Connal paid the penalty of his crime before the sun was far
+above the hill held by the enemy. There was abundance of circumstantial
+evidence against him, besides the direct testimony of Raffles and
+myself, and the wretch was shot at last with little ceremony and less
+shrift. And that was the one good thing that happened on the day that
+broke upon us hiding behind the bushes overlooking the donga; by noon
+it was my own turn.
+
+I have avoided speaking of my wound before I need, and from the
+preceding pages you would not gather that I am more or less lame for
+life. You will soon see now why I was in no hurry to recall the
+incident. I used to think of a wound received in one’s country’s
+service as the proudest trophy a man could acquire. But the sight of
+mine depresses me every morning of my life; it was due for one thing to
+my own slow eye for cover, in taking which (to aggravate my case) our
+hardy little corps happened to excel.
+
+The bullet went clean through my thigh, drilling the bone, but happily
+missing the sciatic nerve; thus the mere pain was less than it might
+have been, but of course I went over in a light-brown heap. We were
+advancing on our stomachs to take the hill, and thus extend our
+position, and it was at this point that the fire became too heavy for
+us, so that for hours (in the event) we moved neither forward nor back.
+But it was not a minute before Raffles came to me through the whistling
+scud, and in another I was on my back behind a shallow rock, with him
+kneeling over me and unrolling my bandage in the teeth of that
+murderous fire. It was on the knees of the gods, he said, when I begged
+him to bend lower, but for the moment I thought his tone as changed as
+his face had been earlier in the morning. To oblige me, however, he
+took more care; and, when he had done all that one comrade could for
+another, he did avail himself of the cover he had found for me. So
+there we lay together on the veldt, under blinding sun and withering
+fire, and I suppose it is the veldt that I should describe, as it swims
+and flickers before wounded eyes. I shut mine to bring it back, but all
+that comes is the keen brown face of Raffles, still a shade paler than
+its wont; now bending to sight and fire; now peering to see results,
+brows raised, eyes widened; anon turning to me with the word to set my
+tight lips grinning. He was talking all the time, but for my sake, and
+I knew it. Can you wonder that I could not see an inch beyond him? He
+was the battle to me then; he is the whole war to me as I look back
+now.
+
+“Feel equal to a cigarette? It will buck you up, Bunny. No, that one in
+the silver paper, I’ve hoarded it for this. Here’s a light; and so
+Bunny takes the Sullivan! All honor to the sporting rabbit!”
+
+“At least I went over like one,” said I, sending the only clouds into
+the blue, and chiefly wishing for their longer endurance. I was as hot
+as a cinder from my head to one foot; the other leg was ceasing to
+belong to me.
+
+“Wait a bit,” says Raffles, puckering; “there’s a gray felt hat at deep
+long-on, and I want to add it to the bag for vengeance.... Wait—yes—no,
+no luck! I must pitch ’em up a bit more. Hallo! Magazine empty. How
+goes the Sullivan, Bunny? Rum to be smoking one on the veldt with a
+hole in your leg!”
+
+“It’s doing me good,” I said, and I believe it was. But Raffles lay
+looking at me as he lightened his bandolier.
+
+“Do you remember,” he said softly, “the day we first began to think
+about the war? I can see the pink, misty river light, and feel the
+first bite there was in the air when one stood about; don’t you wish we
+had either here! ‘Orful slorter, orful slorter;’ that fellow’s face, I
+see it too; and here we have the thing he cried. Can you believe it’s
+only six months ago?”
+
+“Yes,” I sighed, enjoying the thought of that afternoon less than he
+did; “yes, we were slow to catch fire at first.”
+
+“Too slow,” he said quickly.
+
+“But when we did catch,” I went on, wishing we never had, “we soon
+burnt up.”
+
+“And then went out,” laughed Raffles gayly. He was loaded up again.
+“Another over at the gray felt hat,” said he; “by Jove, though, I
+believe he’s having an over at me!”
+
+“I wish you’d be careful,” I urged. “I heard it too.”
+
+“My dear Bunny, it’s on the knees you wot of. If anything’s down in the
+specifications surely that is. Besides—that was nearer!”
+
+“To you?”
+
+“No, to him. Poor devil, he has his specifications too; it’s comforting
+to think that.... I can’t see where that one pitched; it may have been
+a wide; and it’s very nearly the end of the over again. Feeling worse,
+Bunny?”
+
+“No, I’ve only closed my eyes. Go on talking.”
+
+“It was I who let you in for this,” he said, at his bandolier again.
+
+“No, I’m glad I came out.”
+
+And I believe I still was, in a way; for it _was_ rather fine to be
+wounded, just then, with the pain growing less; but the sensation was
+not to last me many minutes, and I can truthfully say that I have never
+felt it since.
+
+“Ah, but you haven’t had such a good time as I have!”
+
+“Perhaps not.”
+
+Had his voice vibrated, or had I imagined it? Pain-waves and loss of
+blood were playing tricks with my senses; now they were quite dull, and
+my leg alive and throbbing; now I had no leg at all, but more than all
+my ordinary senses in every other part of me. And the devil’s orchestra
+was playing all the time, and all around me, on every class of fiendish
+instrument, which you have been made to hear for yourselves in every
+newspaper. Yet all that I heard was Raffles talking.
+
+“I have had a good time, Bunny.”
+
+Yes, his voice was sad; but that was all; the vibration must have been
+in me.
+
+“I know you have, old chap,” said I.
+
+“I am grateful to the General for giving me to-day. It may be the last.
+Then I can only say it’s been the best—by Jove!”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+And I opened my eyes. His were shining. I can see them now.
+
+“Got him—got the hat! No, I’m hanged if I have; at least he wasn’t in
+it. The crafty cuss, he must have stuck it up on purpose. Another over
+... scoring’s slow.... I wonder if he’s sportsman enough to take a
+hint? His hat-trick’s foolish. Will he show his face if I show mine?”
+
+I lay with closed ears and eyes. My leg had come to life again, and the
+rest of me was numb.
+
+“Bunny!”
+
+His voice sounded higher. He must have been sitting upright.
+
+“Well?”
+
+But it was not well with me; that was all I thought as my lips made the
+word.
+
+“It’s not only been the best time I ever had, old Bunny, but I’m not
+half sure—”
+
+Of what I can but guess; the sentence was not finished, and never could
+be in this world.
+
+
+
+
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