was the load off my mind and hands, but for an extraordinary and most
disconcerting note received late at night from Raffles himself. He was
a man who telegraphed freely, but seldom wrote a letter. Sometimes,
however, he sent a scribbled line by special messenger; and overnight,
evidently in the train, he had scribbled this one to post in the small
hours at Crewe:
"'Ware Prince of Professors! _He was in the offing when I
left._ If slightest cause for uneasiness about bank, withdraw
at once and keep in own rooms like good chap.
"A. J. R.
"_P. S._--Other reasons, as you shall hear."
There was a nice nightcap for a puzzled head! I had made rather an
evening of it, what with increase of funds and decrease of anxiety,
but this cryptic admonition spoiled the remainder of my night. It had
arrived by a late post, and I only wished that I had left it all night
in my letter-box.
What exactly did it mean? And what exactly must I do? These were
questions that confronted me with fresh force in the morning.
The news of Crawshay did not surprise me. I was quite sure that Raffles
had been given good reason to bear him in mind before his journey, even if
he had not again beheld the ruffian in the flesh. That ruffian and that
journey might be more intimately connected than I had yet supposed.
Raffles never told me all. Yet the solid fact held good--held better than
ever--that I had seen his plunder safely planted in my bank. Crawshay
himself could not follow it _there_. I was certain he had not followed my
cab: in the acute self-consciousness induced by that abominable drive, I
should have known it in my bones if he had. I thought of the porter's
friend who had helped me with the chest. No, I remember him as well as I
remembered Crawshay; they were quite different types.
To remove that vile box from the bank, on top of another cab, with no
stronger pretext and no further instructions, was not to be thought of
for a moment. Yet I did think of it, for hours. I was always anxious
to do my part by Raffles; he had done more than his by me, not once or
twice, to-day or yesterday, but again and again from the very first. I
need not state the obvious reasons I had for fighting shy of the
personal custody of his accursed chest. Yet he had run worse risks for
me, and I wanted him to learn that he, too, could depend on a devotion
not unworthy of his own.
In my dilemma I did what I have often done when at a loss for light
and leading. I took hardly any lunch, but went to Northumberland
Avenue and had a Turkish bath instead. I know nothing so cleansing to
mind as well as body, nothing better calculated to put the finest
possible edge on such judgment as one may happen to possess. Even
Raffles, without an ounce to lose or a nerve to soothe, used to own a
sensuous appreciation of the peace of mind and person to be gained in
this fashion when all others failed. For me, the fun began before the
boots were off one's feet; the muffled foot-falls, the thin sound of
the fountain, even the spent swathed forms upon the couches, and the
whole clean, warm, idle atmosphere, were so much unction to my simpler
soul. The half-hour in the hot-rooms I used to count but a strenuous
step to a divine lassitude of limb and accompanying exaltation of
intellect. And yet--and yet--it was in the hottest room of all, in a
temperature of 270 deg. Fahrenheit, that the bolt fell from the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ which I had bought outside the bath.
I was turning over the hot, crisp pages, and positively revelling in
my fiery furnace, when the following headlines and leaded paragraphs
leapt to my eye with the force of a veritable blow:
BANK ROBBERS IN THE WEST END--DARING
AND MYSTERIOUS CRIME
An audacious burglary and dastardly assault have been
committed on the premises of the City and Suburban Bank in
Sloane Street, W. From the details so far to hand, the
robbery appears to have been deliberately planned and
adroitly executed in the early hours of this morning.
A night watchman named Fawcett states that between one and
two o'clock he heard a slight noise in the neighborhood of
the lower strong-room, used as a repository for the plate
and other possessions of various customers of the bank.
Going down to investigate, he was instantly attacked by a
powerful ruffian, who succeeded in felling him to the ground
before an alarm could be raised.
Fawcett is unable to furnish any description of his
assailant or assailants, but is of opinion that more than
one were engaged in the commission of the crime. When the
unfortunate man recovered consciousness, no trace of the
thieves remained, with the exception of a single candle
which had been left burning on the flags of the corridor.
The strong-room, however, had been opened, and it is feared
the raid on the chests of plate and other valuables may
prove to have been only too successful, in view of the
Easter exodus, which the thieves had evidently taken into
account. The ordinary banking chambers were not even
visited; entry and exit are believed to have been effected
through the coal cellar, which is also situated in the
basement. Up to the present the police have effected no
arrest.
I sat practically paralyzed by this appalling news; and I swear that,
even in that incredible temperature, it was a cold perspiration in
which I sweltered from head to heel. Crawshay, of course! Crawshay
once more upon the track of Raffles and his ill-gotten gains! And once
more I blamed Raffles himself: his warning had come too late: he
should have wired to me at once not to take the box to the bank at
all. He was a madman ever to have invested in so obvious and obtrusive
a receptacle for treasure. It would serve Raffles right if that and no
other was the box which had been broken into by the thieves.
Yet, when I considered the character of his treasure, I fairly
shuddered in my sweat. It was a hoard of criminal relics. Suppose his
chest had indeed been rifled, and emptied of every silver thing but
one; that one remaining piece of silver, seen of men, was quite
enough to cast Raffles into the outer darkness of penal servitude! And
Crawshay was capable of it--of perceiving the insidious revenge--of
taking it without compunction or remorse.
There was only one course for me. I must follow my instructions to the
letter and recover the chest at all hazards, or be taken myself in the
attempt. If only Raffles had left me some address, to which I could
have wired some word of warning! But it was no use thinking of that;
for the rest there was time enough up to four o'clock, and as yet it
was not three. I determined to go through with my bath and make the
most of it. Might it not be my last for years?
But I was past enjoying even a Turkish bath. I had not the patience
for a proper shampoo, or sufficient spirit for the plunge. I weighed
myself automatically, for that was a matter near my heart; but I
forgot to give my man his sixpence until the reproachful intonation of
his adieu recalled me to myself. And my couch in the cooling
gallery--my favorite couch, in my favorite corner, which I had secured
with gusto on coming in--it was a bed of thorns, with hideous visions
of a plank-bed to follow!
I ought to be able to add that I heard the burglary discussed on
adjacent couches before I left. I certainly listened for it, and was
rather disappointed more than once when I had held my breath in vain.
But this is the unvarnished record of an odious hour, and it passed
without further aggravation from without; only, as I drove to Sloane
Street, the news was on all the posters, and on one I read of "a clew"
which spelt for me a doom I was grimly resolved to share.
Already there was something in the nature of a "run" upon the Sloane
Street branch of the City and Suburban. A cab drove away with a chest
of reasonable dimensions as mine drove up, while in the bank itself a
lady was making a painful scene. As for the genial clerk who had
roared at my jokes the day before, he was mercifully in no mood for
any more, but, on the contrary, quite rude to me at sight.
"I've been expecting you all the afternoon," said he. "You needn't
look so pale."
"Is it safe?"
"That Noah's Ark of yours? Yes, so I hear; they'd just got to it when
they were interrupted, and they never went back again."
"Then it wasn't even opened?"
"Only just begun on, I believe."
"Thank God!"
"You may; we don't," growled the clerk. "The manager says he believes
your chest was at the bottom of it all."
"How could it be?" I asked uneasily.
"By being seen on the cab a mile off, and followed," said the clerk.
"Does the manager want to see _me_?" I asked boldly.
"Not unless you want to see him," was the blunt reply. "He's been at
it with others all the afternoon, and they haven't all got off as
cheap as you."
"Then my silver shall not embarrass you any longer," said I grandly.
"I meant to leave it if it was all right, but after all you have said
I certainly shall not. Let your man or men bring up the chest at once.
I dare say they also have been 'at it with others all the afternoon,'
but I shall make this worth their while."
I did not mind driving through the streets with the thing this time.
My present relief was too overwhelming as yet to admit of pangs and
fears for the immediate future. No summer sun had ever shone more
brightly than that rather watery one of early April. There was a
green-and-gold dust of buds and shoots on the trees as we passed the
park. I felt greater things sprouting in my heart. Hansoms passed with
schoolboys just home for the Easter holidays, four-wheelers outward
bound, with bicycles and perambulators atop; none that rode in them
were half so happy as I, with the great load on my cab, but the
greater one off my heart.
At Mount Street it just went into the lift; that was a stroke of luck;
and the lift-man and I between us carried it into my flat. It seemed a
featherweight to me now. I felt a Samson in the exaltation of that
hour. And I will not say what my first act was when I found myself
alone with my white elephant in the middle of the room; enough that
the siphon was still doing its work when the glass slipped through my
fingers to the floor.
"Bunny!"
It was Raffles. Yet for a moment I looked about me quite in vain. He
was not at the window; he was not at the open door. And yet Raffles it
had been, or at all events his voice, and that bubbling over with fun
and satisfaction, be his body where it might. In the end I dropped my
eyes, and there was his living face in the middle of the lid of the
chest, like that of the saint upon its charger.
But Raffles was alive, Raffles was laughing as though his vocal cords
would snap--there was neither tragedy nor illusion in the apparition
of Raffles. A life-size Jack-in-the-box, he had thrust his head
through a lid within the lid, cut by himself between the two iron
bands that ran round the chest like the straps of a portmanteau. He
must have been busy at it when I found him pretending to pack, if not
far into that night, for it was a very perfect piece of work; and even
as I stared without a word, and he crouched laughing in my face, an
arm came squeezing out, keys in hand; one was turned in either of the
two great padlocks, the whole lid lifted, and out stepped Raffles like
the conjurer he was.
"So you were the burglar!" I exclaimed at last. "Well, I am just as
glad I didn't know."
He had wrung my hand already, but at this he fairly mangled it in his.
"You dear little brick," he cried, "that's the one thing of all things
I longed to hear you say! How could you have behaved as you've done if
you had known? How could any living man? How could you have acted, as
the polar star of all the stages could not have acted in your place?
Remember that I have heard a lot, and as good as seen as much as I've
heard. Bunny, I don't know where you were greatest: at the Albany,
here, or at your bank!"
"I don't know where I was most miserable," I rejoined, beginning to
see the matter in a less perfervid light. "I know you don't credit me
with much finesse, but I would undertake to be in the secret and to do
quite as well; the only difference would be in my own peace of mind,
which, of course, doesn't count."
But Raffles wagged away with his most charming and disarming smile; he
was in old clothes, rather tattered and torn, and more than a little
grimy as to the face and hands, but, on the surface, wonderfully
little the worse for his experience. And, as I say, his smile was the
smile of the Raffles I loved best.
"You would have done your damnedest, Bunny! There is no limit to your
heroism; but you forget the human equation in the pluckiest of the
plucky. I couldn't afford to forget it, Bunny; I couldn't afford to
give a point away. Don't talk as though I hadn't trusted you! I
trusted my very life to your loyal tenacity. What do you suppose would
have happened to me if you had let me rip in that strong-room? Do you
think I would ever have crept out and given myself up? Yes, I'll have
a peg for once; the beauty of all laws is in the breaking, even of the
kind we make unto ourselves."
I had a Sullivan for him, too; and in another minute he was spread out
on my sofa, stretching his cramped limbs with infinite gusto, a
cigarette between his fingers, a yellow bumper at hand on the chest of
his triumph and my tribulation.
"Never mind when it occurred to me, Bunny; as a matter of fact, it was
only the other day, when I had decided to go away for the real reasons
I have already given you. I may have made more of them to you than I
do in my own mind, but at all events they exist. And I really did want
the telephone and the electric light."
"But where did you stow the silver before you went?"
"Nowhere; it was my luggage--a portmanteau, cricket-bag, and suit-case
full of very little else--and by the same token I left the lot at
Euston, and one of us must fetch them this evening."
"I can do that," said I. "But did you really go all the way to Crewe?"
"Didn't you get my note? I went all the way to Crewe to post you those
few lines, my dear Bunny! It's no use taking trouble if you don't take
trouble enough; I wanted you to show the proper set of faces at the
bank and elsewhere, and I know you did. Besides, there was an up-train
four minutes after mine got in. I simply posted my letter in Crewe
station, and changed from one train to the other."
"At two in the morning!"
"Nearer three, Bunny. It was after seven when I slung in with the
_Daily Mail_. The milk had beaten me by a short can. But even so I had
two very good hours before you were due."
"And to think," I murmured, "how you deceived me there!"
"With your own assistance," said Raffles laughing. "If you had looked
it up you would have seen there was no such train in the morning, and
I never said there was. But I meant you to be deceived, Bunny, and I
won't say I didn't--it was all for the sake of the side! Well, when
you carted me away with such laudable despatch, I had rather an
uncomfortable half-hour, but that was all just then. I had my candle,
I had matches, and lots to read. It was quite nice in that strong-room
until a very unpleasant incident occurred."
"Do tell me, my dear fellow!"
"I must have another Sullivan--thank you--and a match. The unpleasant
incident was steps outside and a key in the lock! I was disporting
myself on the lid of the trunk at the time. I had barely time to knock
out my light and slip down behind it. Luckily it was only another box
of sorts; a jewel-case, to be more precise; you shall see the
contents in a moment. The Easter exodus has done me even better than I
dared to hope."
His words reminded me of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, which I had brought
in my pocket from the Turkish bath. I fished it out, all wrinkled and
bloated by the heat of the hottest room, and handed it to Raffles with
my thumb upon the leaded paragraphs.
"Delightful!" said he when he had read them. "More thieves than one,
and the coal-cellar of all places as a way in! I certainly tried to
give it that appearance. I left enough candle-grease there to make
those coals burn bravely. But it looked up into a blind backyard,
Bunny, and a boy of eight couldn't have squeezed through the trap.
Long may that theory keep them happy at Scotland Yard!"
"But what about the fellow you knocked out?" I asked. "That was not
like you, Raffles."
Raffles blew pensive rings as he lay back on my sofa, his black hair
tumbled on the cushion, his pale profile as clear and sharp against
the light as though slashed out with the scissors.
[Illustration: Raffles in the strong-room.]
"I know it wasn't, Bunny," he said regretfully. "But things like that,
as the poet will tell you, are really inseparable from victories like
mine. It had taken me a couple of hours to break out of that
strong-room; I was devoting a third to the harmless task of simulating
the appearance of having broken in; and it was then I heard the
fellow's stealthy step. Some might have stood their ground and killed
him; more would have bolted into a worse corner than they were in
already. I left my candle where it was, crept to meet the poor devil,
flattened myself against the wall, and let him have it as he passed. I
acknowledge the foul blow, but here's evidence that it was mercifully
struck. The victim has already told his tale."
As he drained his glass, but shook his head when I wished to replenish
it, Raffles showed me the flask which he had carried in his pocket: it
was still nearly full; and I found that he had otherwise provisioned
himself over the holidays. On either Easter Day or Bank Holiday, had I
failed him, it had been his intention to make the best escape he
could. But the risk must have been enormous, and it filled my glowing
skin to think that he had not relied on me in vain.
As for his gleanings from such jewel-cases as were spending the Easter
recess in the strong-room of my bank, without going into rhapsodies or
even particulars on the point, I may mention that they realized
enough for me to join Raffles on his deferred holiday in Scotland,
besides enabling him to play more regularly for Middlesex in the
ensuing summer than had been the case for several seasons. In fine,
this particular exploit entirely justified itself in my eyes, in spite
of the superfluous (but invariable) secretiveness which I could seldom
help resenting in my heart. I never thought less of it than in the
present instance; and my one mild reproach was on the subject of the
phantom Crawshay.
"You let me think he was in the air again," I said. "But it wouldn't
surprise me to find that you had never heard of him since the day of
his escape through your window."
"I never even thought of him, Bunny, until you came to see me the day
before yesterday, and put him into my head with your first words. The
whole point was to make you as genuinely anxious about the plate as
you must have seemed all along the line."
"Of course I see your point," I rejoined; "but mine is that you
labored it. You needn't have written me a downright lie about the
fellow."
"Nor did I, Bunny."
"Not about the 'prince of professors' being 'in the offing' when you
left?"
"My dear Bunny, but so he was!" cried Raffles. "Time was when I was
none too pure an amateur. But after this I take leave to consider
myself a professor of the professors. And I should like to see one
more capable of skippering their side!"
The Rest Cure
I had not seen Raffles for a month or more, and I was sadly in need of
his advice. My life was being made a burden to me by a wretch who had
obtained a bill of sale over the furniture in Mount Street, and it was
only by living elsewhere that I could keep the vulpine villain from my
door. This cost ready money, and my balance at the bank was sorely in
need of another lift from Raffles. Yet, had he been in my shoes, he
could not have vanished more effectually than he had done, both from
the face of the town and from the ken of all who knew him.
It was late in August; he never played first-class cricket after July,
when, a scholastic understudy took his place in the Middlesex eleven.
And in vain did I scour my _Field_ and my _Sportsman_ for the
country-house matches with which he wilfully preferred to wind up the
season; the matches were there, but never the magic name of A. J.
Raffles. Nothing was known of him at the Albany; he had left no
instructions about his letters, either there or at the club. I began
to fear that some evil had overtaken him. I scanned the features of
captured criminals in the illustrated Sunday papers; on each occasion
I breathed again; nor was anything worthy of Raffles going on. I will
not deny that I was less anxious on his account than on my own. But it
was a double relief to me when he gave a first characteristic sign of
life.
I had called at the Albany for the fiftieth time, and returned to
Piccadilly in my usual despair, when a street sloucher sidled up to me
in furtive fashion and inquired if my name was what it is.
"'Cause this 'ere's for you," he rejoined to my affirmative, and with
that I felt a crumpled note in my palm.
It was from Raffles. I smoothed out the twisted scrap of paper, and on
it were just a couple of lines in pencil:
"Meet me in Holland Walk at dark to-night. Walk up and down
till I come.
A. J. R."
That was all! Not another syllable after all these weeks, and the few
words scribbled in a wild caricature of his scholarly and dainty hand!
I was no longer to be alarmed by this sort of thing; it was all so
like the Raffles I loved least; and to add to my indignation, when at
length I looked up from the mysterious missive, the equally
mysterious messenger had disappeared in a manner worthy of the whole
affair. He was, however, the first creature I espied under the
tattered trees of Holland Walk that evening.
"Seen 'im yet?" he inquired confidentially, blowing a vile cloud from
his horrid pipe.
"No, I haven't; and I want to know where you've seen him," I replied
sternly. "Why did you run away like that the moment you had given me
his note?"
"Orders, orders," was the reply. "I ain't such a juggins as to go agen
a toff as makes it worf while to do as I'm bid an' 'old me tongue."
"And who may you be?" I asked jealously. "And what are you to Mr.
Raffles?"
"You silly ass, Bunny, don't tell all Kensington that I'm in town!"
replied my tatterdemalion, shooting up and smoothing out into a merely
shabby Raffles. "Here, take my arm--I'm not so beastly as I look. But
neither am I in town, nor in England, nor yet on the face of the
earth, for all that's known of me to a single soul but you."
"Then where are you," I asked, "between ourselves?"
"I've taken a house near here for the holidays, where I'm going in
for a Rest Cure of my own description. Why? Oh, for lots of reasons,
my dear Bunny; among others, I have long had a wish to grow my own
beard; under the next lamp-post you will agree that it's training on
very nicely. Then, you mayn't know it, but there's a canny man at
Scotland Yard who has had a quiet eye on me longer than I like. I
thought it about time to have an eye on him, and I stared him in the
face outside the Albany this very morning. That was when I saw you go
in, and scribbled a line to give you when you came out. If he had
caught us talking he would have spotted me at once."
"So you are lying low out here!"
"I prefer to call it my Rest Cure," returned Raffles, "and it's really
nothing else. I've got a furnished house at a time when no one else
would have dreamed of taking one in town; and my very neighbors don't
know I'm there, though I'm bound to say there are hardly any of them
at home. I don't keep a servant, and do everything for myself. It's
the next best fun to a desert island. Not that I make much work, for
I'm really resting, but I haven't done so much solid reading for
years. Rather a joke, Bunny: the man whose house I've taken is one of
her Majesty's inspectors of prisons, and his study's a storehouse of
criminology. It has been quite amusing to lie on one's back and have a
good look at one's self as others fondly imagine they see one."
"But surely you get some exercise?" I asked; for he was leading me at
a good rate through the leafy byways of Campden Hill; and his step was
as springy and as light as ever.