expostulation? I was used to such ebullitions from the altered Raffles
of these later days, and I could well understand them. All the
inconvenience of the new conditions fell on him. I had purged my known
offences by imprisonment, whereas Raffles was merely supposed to have
escaped punishment in death. The result was that I could rush in where
Raffles feared to tread, and was his plenipotentiary in all honest
dealings with the outer world. It could not but gall him to be so
dependent upon me, and it was for me to minimize the humiliation by
scrupulously avoiding the least semblance of an abuse of that power
which I now had over him. Accordingly, though with much misgiving, I
did his ticklish behest in Fleet Street, where, despite my past, I was
already making a certain lowly footing for myself. Success followed as
it will when one longs to fail; and one fine evening I returned to Ham
Common with a card from the Convict Supervision Office, New Scotland
Yard, which I treasure to this day. I am surprised to see that it was
undated, and might still almost "Admit Bearer to see the Museum," to
say nothing of the bearer's friends, since my editor's name "and
party" is scrawled beneath the legend.
"But he doesn't want to come," as I explained to Raffles. "And it
means that we can both go, if we both like."
Raffles looked at me with a wry smile; he was in good enough humor
now.
"It would be rather dangerous, Bunny. If they spotted you, they might
think of me."
"But you say they'll never know you now."
"I don't believe they will. I don't believe there's the slightest
risk; but we shall soon see. I've set my heart on seeing, Bunny, but
there's no earthly reason why I should drag you into it."
"You do that when you present this card," I pointed out. "I shall hear
of it fast enough if anything happens."
"Then you may as well be there to see the fun?"
"It will make no difference if the worst comes to the worst."
"And the ticket is for a party, isn't it?"
"It is."
"It might even look peculiar if only one person made use of it?"
"It might."
"Then we're both going, Bunny! And I give you my word," cried Raffles,
"that no real harm shall come of it. But you mustn't ask to see the
Relics, and you mustn't take too much interest in them when you do see
them. Leave the questioning to me: it really will be a chance of
finding out whether they've any suspicion of one's resurrection at
Scotland Yard. Still I think I can promise you a certain amount of
fun, old fellow, as some little compensation for your pangs and
fears!"
The early afternoon was mild and hazy, and unlike winter but for the
prematurely low sun struggling through the haze, as Raffles and I
emerged from the nether regions at Westminster Bridge, and stood for
one moment to admire the infirm silhouettes of Abbey and Houses in
flat gray against a golden mist. Raffles murmured of Whistler and of
Arthur Severn, and threw away a good Sullivan because the smoke would
curl between him and the picture. It is perhaps the picture that I can
now see clearest of all the set scenes of our lawless life. But at the
time I was filled with gloomy speculation as to whether Raffles would
keep his promise of providing an entirely harmless entertainment for
my benefit at the Black Museum.
We entered the forbidding precincts; we looked relentless officers in
the face, and they almost yawned in ours as they directed us through
swing doors and up stone stairs. There was something even sinister in
the casual character of our reception. We had an arctic landing to
ourselves for several minutes, which Raffles spent in an instinctive
survey of the premises, while I cooled my heels before the portrait of
a late commissioner.
"Dear old gentleman!" exclaimed Raffles, joining me. "I have met him
at dinner, and discussed my own case with him, in the old days. But we
can't know too little about ourselves in the Black Museum, Bunny. I
remember going to the old place in Whitehall, years ago, and being
shown round by one of the tip-top 'tecs. And this may be another."
But even I could see at a glance that there was nothing of the
detective and everything of the clerk about the very young man who had
joined us at last upon the landing. His collar was the tallest I have
ever seen, and his face was as pallid as his collar. He carried a
loose key, with which he unlocked a door a little way along the
passage, and so ushered us into that dreadful repository which
perhaps has fewer visitors than any other of equal interest in the
world. The place was cold as the inviolate vault; blinds had to be
drawn up, and glass cases uncovered, before we could see a thing
except the row of murderers' death-masks--the placid faces with the
swollen necks--that stood out on their shelves to give us ghostly
greeting.
"This fellow isn't formidable," whispered Raffles, as the blinds went
up; "still, we can't be too careful. My little lot are round the
corner, in the sort of recess; don't look till we come to them in
their turn."
So we began at the beginning, with the glass case nearest the door;
and in a moment I discovered that I knew far more about its contents
than our pallid guide. He had some enthusiasm, but the most inaccurate
smattering of his subject. He mixed up the first murderer with quite
the wrong murder, and capped his mistake in the next breath with an
intolerable libel on the very pearl of our particular tribe.
"This revawlver," he began, "belonged to the celebrited burgular,
Chawles Peace. These are his spectacles, that's his jimmy, and this
here knife's the one that Chawley killed the policeman with."
Now I like accuracy for its own sake, strive after it myself, and am
sometimes guilty of forcing it upon others. So this was more than I
could pass.
"That's not quite right," I put in mildly. "He never made use of the
knife."
The young clerk twisted his head round in its vase of starch.
"Chawley Peace killed two policemen," said he.
"No, he didn't; only one of them was a policeman; and he never killed
anybody with a knife."
The clerk took the correction like a lamb. I could not have refrained
from making it, to save my skin. But Raffles rewarded me with as
vicious a little kick as he could administer unobserved. "Who was
Charles Peace?" he inquired, with the bland effrontery of any judge
upon the bench.
The clerk's reply came pat and unexpected.
"The greatest burgular we ever had," said he, "till good old Raffles
knocked him out!"
"The greatest of the pre-Raffleites," the master murmured, as we
passed on to the safer memorials of mere murder. There were misshapen
bullets and stained knives that had taken human life; there were
lithe, lean ropes which had retaliated after the live letter of the
Mosaic law. There was one bristling broadside of revolvers under the
longest shelf of closed eyes and swollen throats. There were festoons
of rope-ladders--none so ingenious as ours--and then at last there was
something that the clerk knew all about. It was a small tin
cigarette-box, and the name upon the gaudy wrapper was not the name of
Sullivan. Yet Raffles and I knew even more about this exhibit than the
clerk.
"There, now," said our guide, "you'll never guess the history of that!
I'll give you twenty guesses, and the twentieth will be no nearer than
the first."
"I'm sure of it, my good fellow," rejoined Raffles, a discreet twinkle
in his eye. "Tell us about it, to save time."
And he opened, as he spoke, his own old twenty-five tin of purely
popular cigarettes; there were a few in it still, but between the
cigarettes were jammed lumps of sugar wadded with cotton-wool. I saw
Raffles weighing the lot in his hand with subtle satisfaction. But the
clerk saw merely the mystification which he desired to create.
"I thought that'd beat you, sir," said he. "It was an American dodge.
Two smart Yankees got a jeweller to take a lot of stuff to a private
room at Kellner's, where they were dining, for them to choose from.
When it came to paying, there was some bother about a remittance; but
they soon made that all right, for they were far too clever to suggest
taking away what they'd chosen but couldn't pay for. No, all they
wanted was that what they'd chosen might be locked up in the safe and
considered theirs until their money came for them to pay for it. All
they asked was to seal the stuff up in something; the jeweller was to
take it away and not meddle with it, nor yet break the seals, for a
week or two. It seemed a fair enough thing, now, didn't it, sir?"
"Eminently fair," said Raffles sententiously.
"So the jeweller thought," crowed the clerk. "You see, it wasn't as if
the Yanks had chosen out the half of what he'd brought on appro.;
they'd gone slow on purpose, and they'd paid for all they could on the
nail, just for a blind. Well, I suppose you can guess what happened in
the end? The jeweller never heard of those Americans again; and these
few cigarettes and lumps of sugar were all he found."
"Duplicate boxes!" I cried, perhaps a thought too promptly.
"Duplicate boxes!" murmured Raffles, as profoundly impressed as a
second Mr. Pickwick.
"Duplicate boxes!" echoed the triumphant clerk. "Artful beggars, these
Americans, sir! You've got to crawss the 'Erring Pond to learn a
trick worth one o' that!"
"I suppose so," assented the grave gentleman with the silver hair.
"Unless," he added, as if suddenly inspired, "unless it was that man
Raffles."
"It couldn't 've bin," jerked the clerk from his conning-tower of a
collar. "He'd gone to Davy Jones long before."
"Are you sure?" asked Raffles. "Was his body ever found?"
"Found and buried," replied our imaginative friend. "Malter, I think
it was; or it may have been Giberaltar. I forget which."
"Besides," I put in, rather annoyed at all this wilful work, yet not
indisposed to make a late contribution--"besides, Raffles would never
have smoked those cigarettes. There was only one brand for him. It
was--let me see----"
"Sullivans!" cried the clerk, right for once. "It's all a matter of
'abit," he went on, as he replaced the twenty-five tin box with the
vulgar wrapper. "I tried them once, and I didn't like 'em myself. It's
all a question of tiste. Now, if you want a good smoke, and cheaper,
give me a Golden Gem at quarter of the price."
"What we really do want," remarked Raffles mildly, "is to see
something else as clever as that last."
"Then come this way," said the clerk, and led us into a recess almost
monopolized by the iron-clamped chest of thrilling memory, now a mere
platform for the collection of mysterious objects under a dust-sheet
on the lid. "These," he continued, unveiling them with an air, "are
the Raffles Relics, taken from his rooms in the Albany after his death
and burial, and the most complete set we've got. That's his
centre-bit, and this is the bottle of rock-oil he's supposed to have
kept dipping it in to prevent making a noise. Here's the revawlver he
used when he shot at a gentleman on the roof down Horsham way; it was
afterward taken from him on the P. & O. boat before he jumped
overboard."
I could not help saying I understood that Raffles had never shot at
anybody. I was standing with my back to the nearest window, my hat
jammed over my brows and my overcoat collar up to my ears.
"That's the only time we know about," the clerk admitted; "and it
couldn't be brought 'ome, or his precious pal would have got more than
he did. This empty cawtridge is the one he 'id the Emperor's pearl in,
on the Peninsular and Orient. These gimlets and wedges were what he
used for fixin' doors. This is his rope-ladder, with the telescope
walking-stick he used to hook it up with; he's said to have 'ad it
with him the night he dined with the Earl of Thornaby, and robbed the
house before dinner. That's his life-preserver; but no one can make
out what this little thick velvet bag's for, with the two holes and
the elawstic round each. Perhaps you can give a guess, sir?"
Raffles had taken up the bag that he had invented for the noiseless
filing of keys. Now he handled it as though it were a tobacco-pouch,
putting in finger and thumb, and shrugging over the puzzle with a
delicious face; nevertheless, he showed me a few grains of steel
filing as the result of his investigations, and murmured in my ear,
"These sweet police!" I, for my part, could not but examine the
life-preserver with which I had once smitten Raffles himself to the
ground: actually, there was his blood upon it still; and seeing my
horror, the clerk plunged into a characteristically garbled version of
that incident also. It happened to have come to light among others at
the Old Bailey, and perhaps had its share in promoting the quality of
mercy which had undoubtedly been exercised on my behalf. But the
present recital was unduly trying, and Raffles created a noble
diversion by calling attention to an early photograph of himself,
which may still hang on the wall over the historic chest, but which I
had carefully ignored. It shows him in flannels, after some great feat
upon the tented field. I am afraid there is a Sullivan between his
lips, a look of lazy insolence in the half-shut eyes. I have since
possessed myself of a copy, and it is not Raffles at his best; but the
features are clean-cut and regular; and I often wish that I had lent
it to the artistic gentlemen who have battered the statue out of all
likeness to the man.
[Illustration: No one can make out what this little thick velvet bag's
for.]
"You wouldn't think it of him, would you?" quoth the clerk. "It makes
you understand how no one ever did think it of him at the time."
The youth was looking full at Raffles, with the watery eyes of
unsuspecting innocence. I itched to emulate the fine bravado of my
friend.
"You said he had a pal," I observed, sinking deeper into the collar of
my coat. "Haven't you got a photograph of him?"
The pale clerk gave such a sickly smile, I could have smacked some
blood into his pasty face.
"You mean Bunny?" said the familiar fellow. "No, sir, he'd be out of
place; we've only room for real criminals here. Bunny was neither one
thing nor the other. He could follow Raffles, but that's all he could
do. He was no good on his own. Even when he put up the low-down job of
robbing his old 'ome, it's believed he hadn't the 'eart to take the
stuff away, and Raffles had to break in a second time for it. No, sir,
we don't bother our heads about Bunny; we shall never hear no more of
'im. He was a harmless sort of rotter, if you awsk me."
I had not asked him, and I was almost foaming under the respirator
that I was making of my overcoat collar. I only hoped that Raffles
would say something, and he did.
"The only case I remember anything about," he remarked, tapping the
clamped chest with his umbrella, "was this; and that time, at all
events, the man outside must have had quite as much to do as the one
inside. May I ask what you keep in it?"
"Nothing, sir."
"I imagined more relics inside. Hadn't he some dodge of getting in and
out without opening the lid?"
"Of putting his head out, you mean," returned the clerk, whose
knowledge of Raffles and his Relics was really most comprehensive on
the whole. He moved some of the minor memorials and with his penknife
raised the trap-door in the lid.
"Only a skylight," remarked Raffles, deliciously unimpressed.
"Why, what else did you expect?" asked the clerk, letting the
trap-door down again, and looking sorry that he had taken so much
trouble.
"A backdoor, at least!" replied Raffles, with such a sly look at me
that I had to turn aside to smile. It was the last time I smiled that
day.
The door had opened as I turned, and an unmistakable detective had
entered with two more sight-seers like ourselves. He wore the hard,
round hat and the dark, thick overcoat which one knows at a glance as
the uniform of his grade; and for one awful moment his steely eye was
upon us in a flash of cold inquiry. Then the clerk emerged from the
recess devoted to the Raffles Relics, and the alarming interloper
conducted his party to the window opposite the door.
"Inspector Druce," the clerk informed us in impressive whispers, "who
had the Chalk Farm case in hand. _He'd_ be the man for Raffles, if
Raffles was alive to-day!"
"I'm sure he would," was the grave reply. "I should be very sorry to
have a man like that after _me_. But what a run there seems to be
upon your Black Museum!"
"There isn't reelly, sir," whispered the clerk. "We sometimes go weeks
on end without having regular visitors like you two gentlemen. I think
those are friends of the Inspector's, come to see the Chalk Farm
photographs, that helped to hang his man. We've a lot of interesting
photographs, sir, if you like to have a look at them."
"If it won't take long," said Raffles, taking out his watch; and as
the clerk left our side for an instant he gripped my arm. "This is a
bit too hot," he whispered, "but we mustn't cut and run like rabbits.
That might be fatal. Hide your face in the photographs, and leave
everything to me. I'll have a train to catch as soon as ever I dare."
I obeyed without a word, and with the less uneasiness as I had time to
consider the situation. It even struck me that Raffles was for once
inclined to exaggerate the undeniable risk that we ran by remaining in
the same room with an officer whom both he and I knew only too well by
name and repute. Raffles, after all, had aged and altered out of
knowledge; but he had not lost the nerve that was equal to a far more
direct encounter than was at all likely to be forced upon us. On the
other hand, it was most improbable that a distinguished detective
would know by sight an obscure delinquent like myself; besides, this
one had come to the front since my day. Yet a risk it was, and I
certainly did not smile as I bent over the album of horrors produced
by our guide. I could still take an interest in the dreadful
photographs of murderous and murdered men; they appealed to the morbid
element in my nature; and it was doubtless with degenerate unction
that I called Raffles's attention to a certain scene of notorious
slaughter. There was no response. I looked round. There was no Raffles
to respond. We had all three been examining the photographs at one of
the windows; at another three newcomers were similarly engrossed; and
without one word, or a single sound, Raffles had decamped behind all
our backs.
Fortunately the clerk was himself very busy gloating over the horrors
of the album; before he looked round I had hidden my astonishment, but
not my wrath, of which I had the instinctive sense to make no secret.
"My friend's the most impatient man on earth!" I exclaimed. "He said
he was going to catch a train, and now he's gone without a word!"
"I never heard him," said the clerk, looking puzzled.
"No more did I; but he did touch me on the shoulder," I lied, "and say
something or other. I was too deep in this beastly book to pay much
attention. He must have meant that he was off. Well, let him be off! I
mean to see all that's to be seen."
And in my nervous anxiety to allay any suspicions aroused by my
companion's extraordinary behavior, I outstayed even the eminent
detective and his friends, saw them examine the Raffles Relics, heard
them discuss me under my own nose, and at last was alone with the
anaemic clerk. I put my hand in my pocket, and measured him with a
side-long eye. The tipping system is nothing less than a minor bane of
my existence. Not that one is a grudging giver, but simply because in
so many cases it is so hard to know whom to tip and what to tip him. I
know what it is to be the parting guest who has not parted freely
enough, and that not from stinginess but the want of a fine instinct
on the point. I made no mistake, however, in the case of the clerk,
who accepted my pieces of silver without demur, and expressed a hope
of seeing the article which I had assured him I was about to write. He
has had some years to wait for it, but I flatter myself that these
belated pages will occasion more interest than offense if they ever do
meet those watery eyes.
Twilight was falling when I reached the street; the sky behind St.
Stephen's had flushed and blackened like an angry face; the lamps were
lit, and under every one I was unreasonable enough to look for
Raffles. Then I made foolishly sure that I should find him hanging
about the station, and hung thereabouts myself until one Richmond
train had gone without me. In the end I walked over the bridge to
Waterloo, and took the first train to Teddington instead. That made a
shorter walk of it, but I had to grope my way through a white fog from
the river to Ham Common, and it was the hour of our cosy dinner when I
reached our place of retirement. There was only a flicker of firelight
on the blinds: I was the first to return after all. It was nearly four
hours since Raffles had stolen away from my side in the ominous
precincts of Scotland Yard. Where could he be? Our landlady wrung her
hands over him; she had cooked a dinner after her favorite's heart,
and I let it spoil before making one of the most melancholy meals of
my life.
Up to midnight there was no sign of him; but long before this time I
had reassured our landlady with a voice and face that must have given
my words the lie. I told her that Mr. Ralph (as she used to call him)
had said something about going to the theatre; that I thought he had
given up the idea, but I must have been mistaken, and should certainly
sit up for him. The attentive soul brought in a plate of sandwiches
before she retired; and I prepared to make a night of it in a chair by
the sitting-room fire. Darkness and bed I could not face in my
anxiety. In a way I felt as though duty and loyalty called me out into
the winter's night; and yet whither should I turn to look for Raffles?
I could think of but one place, and to seek him there would be to
destroy myself without aiding him. It was my growing conviction that
he had been recognized when leaving Scotland Yard, and either taken
then and there, or else hunted into some new place of hiding. It would
all be in the morning papers; and it was all his own fault. He had
thrust his head into the lion's mouth, and the lion's jaws had
snapped. Had he managed to withdraw his head in time?
There was a bottle at my elbow, and that night I say deliberately that
it was not my enemy but my friend. It procured me at last some
surcease from my suspense. I fell fast asleep in my chair before the
fire. The lamp was still burning, and the fire red, when I awoke; but
I sat very stiff in the iron clutch of a wintry morning. Suddenly I
slued round in my chair. And there was Raffles in a chair behind me,
with the door open behind him, quietly taking off his boots.
"Sorry to wake you, Bunny," said he. "I thought I was behaving like a
mouse; but after a three hours' tramp one's feet are all heels."
I did not get up and fall upon his neck. I sat back in my chair and
blinked with bitterness upon his selfish insensibility. He should not
know what I had been through on his account.
"Walk out from town?" I inquired, as indifferently as though he were
in the habit of doing so.
"From Scotland Yard," he answered, stretching himself before the fire
in his stocking soles.
"Scotland Yard!" I echoed. "Then I was right; that's where you were
all the time; and yet you managed to escape!"
I had risen excitedly in my turn.
"Of course I did," replied Raffles. "I never thought there would be
much difficulty about that, but there was even less than I
anticipated. I did once find myself on one side of a sort of counter,
and an officer dozing at his desk at the other side. I thought it
safest to wake him up and make inquiries about a mythical purse left
in a phantom hansom outside the Carlton. And the way the fellow fired
me out of that was another credit to the Metropolitan Police: it's
only in the savage countries that they would have troubled to ask how
one had got in."
"And how did you?" I asked. "And in the Lord's name, Raffles, when and
why?"
Raffles looked down on me under raised eyebrows, as he stood with his
coat tails to the dying fire.
"How and when, Bunny, you know as well as I do," said he, cryptically.
"And at last you shall hear the honest why and wherefore. I had more
reasons for going to Scotland Yard, my dear fellow, than I had the
face to tell you at the time."
"I don't care why you went there!" I cried. "I want to know why you
stayed, or went back, or whatever it was you may have done. I thought
they had got you, and you had given them the slip?"
Raffles smiled as he shook his head.
"No, no, Bunny; I prolonged the visit, as I paid it, of my own accord.
As for my reasons, they are far too many for me to tell you them all;
they rather weighed upon me as I walked out; but you'll see them for
yourself if you turn round."
I was standing with my back to the chair in which I had been asleep;
behind the chair was the round lodging-house table; and there,
reposing on the cloth with the whiskey and sandwiches, was the whole
collection of Raffles Relics which had occupied the lid of the
silver-chest in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard! The chest alone was
missing. There was the revolver that I had only once heard fired, and
there the blood-stained life-preserver, brace-and-bit, bottle of
rock-oil, velvet bag, rope-ladder, walking-stick, gimlets, wedges, and
even the empty cartridge-case which had once concealed the gift of a
civilized monarch to a potentate of color.