"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."
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 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.