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.