"Who made the stand?"
"Raffles, for one. He was 62 not out at close of play!"
And the note of admiration rang in my voice, though I tried in my
self-consciousness to keep it out. But young Medlicott's enthusiasm
proved an ample cloak for mine; it was he who might have been the
personal friend of Raffles; and in his delight he chuckled till he
puffed and blew again.
"Good old Raffles!" he panted in every pause. "After being chosen
last, and as a bowler-man! That's the cricketer for me, sir; by Jove,
we must have another drink in his honor! Funny thing, asthma; your
liquor affects your head no more than it does a man with a snake-bite;
but it eases everything else, and sees you through. Doctors will tell
you so, but you've got to ask 'em first; they're no good for asthma!
I've only known one who could stop an attack, and he knocked me
sideways with nitrite of amyl. Funny complaint in other ways; raises
your spirits, if anything. You can't look beyond the next breath.
Nothing else worries you. Well, well, here's luck to A. J. Raffles,
and may he get his century in the morning!"
And he struggled to his feet for the toast; but I drank it sitting
down. I felt unreasonably wroth with Raffles, for coming into the
conversation as he had done--for taking centuries in Test Matches as
he was doing, without bothering his head about me. A failure would
have been in better taste; it would have shown at least some
imagination, some anxiety on one's account. I did not reflect that
even Raffles could scarcely be expected to picture me in my cups with
the son of the house that I had come to rob; chatting with him,
ministering to him; admiring his cheery courage, and honestly
attempting to lighten his load! Truly it was an infernal position:
how could I rob him or his after this? And yet I had thrust myself
into it; and Raffles would never, never understand!
Even that was not the worst. I was not quite sure that young Medlicott
was sure of me. I had feared this from the beginning, and now (over
the second glass that could not possibly affect a man in his
condition) he practically admitted as much to me. Asthma was such a
funny thing (he insisted) that it would not worry him a bit to
discover that I had come to take the presents instead of to take care
of them! I showed a sufficiently faint appreciation of the jest. And
it was presently punished as it deserved, by the most violent paroxysm
that had seized the sufferer yet: the fight for breath became faster
and more furious, and the former weapons of no more avail. I prepared
a cigarette, but the poor brute was too breathless to inhale. I poured
out yet more whiskey, but he put it from him with a gesture.
"Amyl--get me amyl!" he gasped. "The tin on the table by my bed."
I rushed into his room, and returned with a little tin of tiny
cylinders done up like miniature crackers in scraps of calico; the
spent youth broke one in his handkerchief, in which he immediately
buried his face. I watched him closely as a subtle odor reached my
nostrils; and it was like the miracle of oil upon the billows. His
shoulders rested from long travail; the stertorous gasping died away
to a quick but natural respiration; and in the sudden cessation of the
cruel contest, an uncanny stillness fell upon the scene. Meanwhile the
hidden face had flushed to the ears, and, when at length it was raised
to mine, its crimson calm was as incongruous as an optical illusion.
"It takes the blood from the heart," he murmured, "and clears the
whole show for the moment. If it only lasted! But you can't take two
without a doctor; one's quite enough to make you smell the
brimstone.... I say, what's up? You're listening to something! If it's
the policeman we'll have a word with him."
It was not the policeman; it was no out-door sound that I had caught
in the sudden cessation of the bout for breath. It was a noise, a
footstep, in the room below us. I went to the window and leaned out:
right underneath, in the conservatory, was the faintest glimmer of a
light in the adjoining room.
"One of the rooms where the presents are!" whispered Medlicott at my
elbow. And as we withdrew together, I looked him in the face as I had
not done all night.
I looked him in the face like an honest man, for a miracle was to make
me one once more. My knot was cut--my course inevitable. Mine, after
all, to prevent the very thing that I had come to do! My gorge had
long since risen at the deed; the unforeseen circumstances had
rendered it impossible from the first; but now I could afford to
recognize the impossibility, and to think of Raffles and the asthmatic
alike without a qualm. I could play the game by them both, for it was
one and the same game. I could preserve thieves' honor, and yet regain
some shred of that which I had forfeited as a man!
So I thought as we stood face to face, our ears straining for the
least movement below, our eyes locked in a common anxiety. Another
muffled foot-fall--felt rather than heard--and we exchanged grim nods
of simultaneous excitement. But by this time Medlicott was as helpless
as he had been before; the flush had faded from his face, and his
breathing alone would have spoiled everything. In dumb show I had to
order him to stay where he was, to leave my man to me. And then it was
that in a gusty whisper, with the same shrewd look that had
disconcerted me more than once during our vigil, young Medlicott
froze and fired my blood by turns.
"I've been unjust to you," he said, with his right hand in his
dressing-gown pocket. "I thought for a bit--never mind what I
thought--I soon saw I was wrong. But--I've had this thing in my pocket
all the time!"
And he would have thrust his revolver upon me as a peace-offering, but
I would not even take his hand, as I tapped the life-preserver in my
pocket, and crept out to earn his honest grip or to fall in the
attempt. On the landing I drew Raffles's little weapon, slipped my
right wrist through the leathern loop, and held it in readiness over
my right shoulder. Then, down-stairs I stole, as Raffles himself had
taught me, close to the wall, where the planks are nailed. Nor had I
made a sound, to my knowledge; for a door was open, and a light was
burning, and the light did not flicker as I approached the door. I
clenched my teeth and pushed it open; and there was the veriest
villain waiting for me, his little lantern held aloft.
"You blackguard!" I cried, and with a single thwack I felled the
ruffian to the floor.
There was no question of a foul blow. He had been just as ready to
pounce on me; it was simply my luck to have got the first blow home.
Yet a fellow-feeling touched me with remorse, as I stood over the
senseless body, sprawling prone, and perceived that I had struck an
unarmed man. The lantern only had fallen from his hands; it lay on one
side, smoking horribly; and a something in the reek caused me to set
it up in haste and turn the body over with both hands.
Shall I ever forget the incredulous horror of that moment?
It was Raffles himself!
How it was possible, I did not pause to ask myself; if one man on
earth could annihilate space and time, it was the man lying senseless
at my feet; and that was Raffles, without an instant's doubt. He was
in villainous guise, which I knew of old, now that I knew the unhappy
wearer. His face was grimy, and dexterously plastered with a growth of
reddish hair; his clothes were those in which he had followed cabs
from the London termini; his boots were muffled in thick socks; and I
had laid him low with a bloody scalp that filled my cup of horror. I
groaned aloud as I knelt over him and felt his heart. And I was
answered by a bronchial whistle from the door.
"Jolly well done!" cheered my asthmatical friend. "I heard the whole
thing--only hope my mother didn't. We must keep it from her if we
can."
I could have cursed the creature's mother from my full heart; yet even
with my hand on that of Raffles, as I felt his feeble pulse, I told
myself that this served him right. Even had I brained him, the fault
had been his, not mine. And it was a characteristic, an inveterate
fault, that galled me for all my anguish: to trust and yet distrust me
to the end, to race through England in the night, to spy upon me at
his work--to do it himself after all!
"Is he dead?" wheezed the asthmatic coolly.
"Not he," I answered, with an indignation that I dared not show.
"You must have hit him pretty hard," pursued young Medlicott, "but I
suppose it was a case of getting first knock. And a good job you got
it, if this was his," he added, picking up the murderous little
life-preserver which poor Raffles had provided for his own
destruction.
"Look here," I answered, sitting back on my heels. "He isn't dead, Mr.
Medlicott, and I don't know how long he'll be as much as stunned. He's
a powerful brute, and you're not fit to lend a hand. But that
policeman of yours can't be far away. Do you think you could struggle
out and look for him?"
"I suppose I am a bit better than I was," he replied doubtfully. "The
excitement seems to have done me good. If you like to leave me on
guard with my revolver, I'll undertake that he doesn't escape me."
I shook my head with an impatient smile.
"I should never hear the last of it," said I. "No, in that case all I
can do is to handcuff the fellow and wait till morning if he won't go
quietly; and he'll be a fool if he does, while there's a fighting
chance."
Young Medlicott glanced upstairs from his post on the threshold. I
refrained from watching him too keenly, but I knew what was in his
mind.
"I'll go," he said hurriedly. "I'll go as I am, before my mother is
disturbed and frightened out of her life. I owe you something, too,
not only for what you've done for me, but for what I was fool enough
to think about you at the first blush. It's entirely through you that
I feel as fit as I do for the moment. So I'll take your tip, and go
just as I am, before my poor old pipes strike up another tune."
I scarcely looked up until the good fellow had turned his back upon
the final tableau of watchful officer and prostrate prisoner and gone
out wheezing into the night. But I was at the door to hear the last of
him down the path and round the corner of the house. And when I rushed
back into the room, there was Raffles sitting cross-legged on the
floor, and slowly shaking his broken head as he stanched the blood.
"Et tu, Bunny!" he groaned. "Mine own familiar friend!"
"Then you weren't even stunned!" I exclaimed. "Thank God for that!"
"Of course I was stunned," he murmured, "and no thanks to you that I
wasn't brained. Not to know me in the kit you've seen scores of times!
You never looked at me, Bunny; you didn't give me time to open my
mouth. I was going to let you run me in so prettily! We'd have walked
off arm-in-arm; now it's as tight a place as ever we were in, though
you did get rid of old blow-pipes rather nicely. But we shall have the
devil's own run for our money!"
Raffles had picked himself up between his mutterings, and I had
followed him to the door into the garden, where he stood busy with the
key in the dark, having blown out his lantern and handed it to me. But
though I followed Raffles, as my nature must, I was far too embittered
to answer him again. And so it was for some minutes that might
furnish forth a thrilling page, but not a novel one to those who know
their Raffles and put up with me. Suffice it that we left a locked
door behind us, and the key on the garden wall, which was the first of
half a dozen that we scaled before dropping into a lane that led to a
foot-bridge higher up the backwater. And when we paused upon the
foot-bridge, the houses along the bank were still in peace and
darkness.
Knowing _my_ Raffles as I did, I was not surprised when he dived under
one end of this bridge, and came up with his Inverness cape and opera
hat, which he had hidden there on his way to the house. The thick
socks were peeled from his patent-leathers, the ragged trousers
stripped from an evening pair, bloodstains and Newgate fringe removed
at the water's edge, and the whole sepulchre whited in less time than
the thing takes to tell. Nor was that enough for Raffles, but he must
alter me as well, by wearing my overcoat under his cape, and putting
his Zingari scarf about my neck.
"And now," said he, "you may be glad to hear there's a 3:12 from
Surbiton, which we could catch on all fours. If you like we'll go
separately, but I don't think there's the slightest danger now, and
I begin to wonder what's happening to old blow-pipes."
[Illustration: The ragged trousers stripped from an evening pair.]
So, indeed, did I, and with no small concern, until I read of his
adventures (and our own) in the newspapers. It seemed that he had made
a gallant spurt into the road, and there paid the penalty of his
rashness by a sudden incapacity to move another inch. It had
eventually taken him twenty minutes to creep back to locked doors, and
another ten to ring up the inmates. His description of my personal
appearance, as reported in the papers, is the only thing that
reconciles me to the thought of his sufferings during that half-hour.
But at the time I had other thoughts, and they lay too deep for idle
words, for to me also it was a bitter hour. I had not only failed in
my self-sought task; I had nearly killed my comrade into the bargain.
I had meant well by friend and foe in turn, and I had ended in doing
execrably by both. It was not all my fault, but I knew how much my
weakness had contributed to the sum. And I must walk with the man
whose fault it was, who had travelled two hundred miles to obtain this
last proof of my weakness, to bring it home to me, and to make our
intimacy intolerable from that hour. I must walk with him to Surbiton,
but I need not talk; all through Thames Ditton I had ignored his
sallies; nor yet when he ran his arm through mine, on the river front,
when we were nearly there, would I break the seal my pride had set
upon my lips.
"Come, Bunny," he said at last, "I have been the one to suffer most,
when all's said and done, and I'll be the first to say that I deserved
it. You've broken my head; my hair's all glued up in my gore; and what
yarn I'm to put up at Manchester, or how I shall take the field at
all, I really don't know. Yet I don't blame you, Bunny, and I do blame
myself. Isn't it rather hard luck if I am to go unforgiven into the
bargain? I admit that I made a mistake; but, my dear fellow, I made it
entirely for your sake."
"For my sake!" I echoed bitterly.
Raffles was more generous; he ignored my tone.
"I was miserable about you--frankly--miserable!" he went on. "I
couldn't get it out of my head that somehow you would be laid by the
heels. It was not your pluck that I distrusted, my dear fellow, but it
was your very pluck that made me tremble for you. I couldn't get you
out of my head. I went in when runs were wanted, but I give you my
word that I was more anxious about you; and no doubt that's why I
helped to put on some runs. Didn't you see it in the paper, Bunny?
It's the innings of my life, so far."
"Yes," I said, "I saw that you were in at close of play. But I don't
believe it was you--I believe you have a double who plays your cricket
for you!"
And at the moment that seemed less incredible than the fact.
"I'm afraid you didn't read your paper very carefully," said Raffles,
with the first trace of pique in his tone. "It was rain that closed
play before five o'clock. I hear it was a sultry day in town, but at
Manchester we got the storm, and the ground was under water in ten
minutes. I never saw such a thing in my life. There was absolutely not
the ghost of a chance of another ball being bowled. But I had changed
before I thought of doing what I did. It was only when I was on my way
back to the hotel, by myself, because I couldn't talk to a soul for
thinking of you, that on the spur of the moment I made the man take me
to the station instead, and was under way in the restaurant car before
I had time to think twice about it. I am not sure that of all the mad
deeds I have ever done, this was not the maddest of the lot!"
"It was the finest," I said in a low voice; for now I marvelled more
at the impulse which had prompted his feat, and at the circumstances
surrounding it, than even at the feat itself.
"Heaven knows," he went on, "what they are saying and doing in
Manchester! But what can they say? What business is it of theirs? I
was there when play stopped, and I shall be there when it starts
again. We shall be at Waterloo just after half-past three, and that's
going to give me an hour at the Albany on my way to Euston, and
another hour at Old Trafford before play begins. What's the matter
with that? I don't suppose I shall notch any more, but all the better
if I don't; if we have a hot sun after the storm, the sooner they get
in the better; and may I have a bowl at them while the ground bites!"
"I'll come up with you," I said, "and see you at it."
"My dear fellow," replied Raffles, "that was my whole feeling about
you. I wanted to 'see you at it'--that was absolutely all. I wanted to
be near enough to lend a hand if you got tied up, as the best of us
will at times. I knew the ground better than you, and I simply
couldn't keep away from it. But I didn't mean you to know that I was
there; if everything had gone as I hoped it might, I should have
sneaked back to town without ever letting you know I had been up. You
should never have dreamt that I had been at your elbow; you would have
believed in yourself, and in my belief in you, and the rest would have
been silence till the grave. So I dodged you at Waterloo, and I tried
not to let you know that I was following you from Esher station. But
you suspected somebody was; you stopped to listen more than once;
after the second time I dropped behind, but gained on you by taking
the short cut by Imber Court and over the foot-bridge where I left my
coat and hat. I was actually in the garden before you were. I saw you
smoke your Sullivan, and I was rather proud of you for it, though you
must never do that sort of thing again. I heard almost every word
between you and the poor devil upstairs. And up to a certain point,
Bunny, I really thought you played the scene to perfection."
The station lights were twinkling ahead of us in the fading velvet of
the summer's night. I let them increase and multiply before I spoke.
"And where," I asked, "did you think I first went wrong?"
"In going in-doors at all," said Raffles. "If I had done that, I
should have done exactly what you did from that point on. You couldn't
help yourself, with that poor brute in that state. And I admired you
immensely, Bunny, if that's any comfort to you now."
Comfort! It was wine in every vein, for I knew that Raffles meant what
he said, and with his eyes I soon saw myself in braver colors. I
ceased to blush for the vacillations of the night, since he condoned
them. I could even see that I had behaved with a measure of decency,
in a truly trying situation, now that Raffles seemed to think so. He
had changed my whole view of his proceedings and my own, in every
incident of the night but one. There was one thing, however, which he
might forgive me, but which I felt that I could forgive neither
Raffles nor myself. And that was the contused scalp wound over which I
shuddered in the train.
"And to think that I did that," I groaned, "and that you laid yourself
open to it, and that we have neither of us got another thing to show
for our night's work! That poor chap said it was as bad a night as he
had ever had in his life; but I call it the very worst that you and I
ever had in ours."
Raffles was smiling under the double lamps of the first-class
compartment that we had to ourselves.
"I wouldn't say that, Bunny. We have done worse."
"Do you mean to tell me that you did anything at all?"
"My dear Bunny," replied Raffles, "you should remember how long I had
been maturing this felonious little plan, what a blow it was to me to
have to turn it over to you, and how far I had travelled to see that
you did it and yourself as well as might be. You know what I did see,
and how well I understood. I tell you again that I should have done
the same thing myself, in your place. But I was not in your place,
Bunny. My hands were not tied like yours. Unfortunately, most of the
jewels have gone on the honeymoon with the happy pair; but these
emerald links are all right, and I don't know what the bride was doing
to leave this diamond comb behind. Here, too, is the old silver skewer
I've been wanting for years--they make the most charming paper-knives
in the world--and this gold cigarette-case will just do for your
smaller Sullivans."
Nor were these the only pretty things that Raffles set out in
twinkling array upon the opposite cushions. But I do not pretend that
this was one of our heavy hauls, or deny that its chief interest still
resides in the score of the Second Test Match of that Australian
tour.
A Trap to Catch a Cracksman
I was just putting out my light when the telephone rang a furious
tocsin in the next room. I flounced out of bed more asleep than awake;
in another minute I should have been past ringing up. It was one
o'clock in the morning, and I had been dining with Swigger Morrison at
his club.
"Hulloa!"
"That you, Bunny?"
"Yes--are you Raffles?"
"What's left of me! Bunny, I want you--quick."
And even over the wire his voice was faint with anxiety and
apprehension.
"What on earth has happened?"
"Don't ask! You never know----"
"I'll come at once. Are you there, Raffles?"
"What's that?"
"Are you there, man?"
"Ye--e--es."
"At the Albany?"
"No, no; at Maguire's."
"You never said so. And where's Maguire?"
"In Half-moon Street."
"I know that. Is he there now?"
"No--not come in yet--and I'm caught."
"Caught!"
"In that trap he bragged about. It serves me right. I didn't believe
in it. But I'm caught at last ... caught ... at last!"
"When he told us he set it every night! Oh, Raffles, what sort of a
trap is it? What shall I do? What shall I bring?"
But his voice had grown fainter and wearier with every answer, and now
there was no answer at all. Again and again I asked Raffles if he was
there; the only sound to reach me in reply was the low metallic hum of
the live wire between his ear and mine. And then, as I sat gazing
distractedly at my four safe walls, with the receiver still pressed to
my head, there came a single groan, followed by the dull and dreadful
crash of a human body falling in a heap.
In utter panic I rushed back into my bedroom, and flung myself into
the crumpled shirt and evening clothes that lay where I had cast them
off. But I knew no more what I was doing than what to do next. I
afterward found that I had taken out a fresh tie, and tied it rather
better than usual; but I can remember thinking of nothing but Raffles
in some diabolical man-trap, and of a grinning monster stealing in to
strike him senseless with one murderous blow. I must have looked in
the glass to array myself as I did; but the mind's eye was the seeing
eye, and it was filled with this frightful vision of the notorious
pugilist known to fame and infamy as Barney Maguire.
It was only the week before that Raffles and I had been introduced to
him at the Imperial Boxing Club. Heavy-weight champion of the United
States, the fellow was still drunk with his sanguinary triumphs on
that side, and clamoring for fresh conquests on ours. But his
reputation had crossed the Atlantic before Maguire himself; the
grandiose hotels had closed their doors to him; and he had already
taken and sumptuously furnished the house in Half-moon Street which
does not re-let to this day. Raffles had made friends with the
magnificent brute, while I took timid stock of his diamond studs, his
jewelled watch-chain, his eighteen-carat bangle, and his six-inch
lower jaw. I had shuddered to see Raffles admiring the gewgaws in his
turn, in his own brazen fashion, with that air of the cool connoisseur
which had its double meaning for me. I for my part would as lief have
looked a tiger in the teeth. And when we finally went home with
Maguire to see his other trophies, it seemed to me like entering the
tiger's lair. But an astounding lair it proved, fitted throughout by
one eminent firm, and ringing to the rafters with the last word on
fantastic furniture.