The State of the Case
Of course I made all decent haste from the distressing scene, and of
course Raffles stayed behind at the solicitation of his unhappy friends.
I was sorry to desert him in view of one aspect of the case; but I was
not sorry to dine quietly at the club after the alarms and excitements
of that disastrous day. The strain had been the greater after sitting up
all night, and I for one could barely realise all that had happened in
the twenty-four hours. It seemed incredible that the same midsummer
night and day should have seen the return of Raffles and our orgy at the
club to which neither of us belonged; the dramatic douche that saluted
us at the Albany; the confessions and conferences of the night, the
overthrow of the money-lender in the morning; and then the untimely
disappearance of Teddy Garland, my day of it at his father's house, and
the rain and the ruse that saved the passing situation, only to
aggravate the crowning catastrophe of the money-lender's triumph over
Raffles and all his friends.
Already a bewildering sequence to look back upon; but it is in the
nature of a retrospect to reverse the order of things, and it was the new
risk run by Raffles that now loomed largest in my mind, and Levy's last
word of warning to him that rang the loudest in my ears. The apparently
complete ruin of the Garlands was still a profound mystery to me. But no
mere mystery can hold the mind against impending peril; and I was less
exercised to account for the downfall of these poor people than in
wondering whether it would be followed by that of their friend and mine.
Had his Carlsbad crime really found him out? Had Levy only refrained from
downright denunciation of Raffles in order to denounce him more
effectually to the police? These were the doubts that dogged me at my
dinner, and on through the evening until Raffles himself appeared in my
corner of the smoking-room, with as brisk a step and as buoyant a
countenance as though the whole world and he were one.
"My dear Bunny! I've never given the matter another thought," said he in
answer to my nervous queries, "and why the deuce should Dan Levy? He has
scored us off quite handsomely as it is; he's not such a fool as to put
himself in the wrong by stating what he couldn't possibly prove. They
wouldn't listen to him at Scotland Yard; it's not their job, in the
first place. And even if it were, no one knows better than our Mr.
Shylock that he hasn't a shred of evidence against me."
"Still," said I, "he happens to have hit upon the truth, and that's half
the battle in a criminal charge."
"Then it's a battle I should love to fight, if the odds weren't all on
Number One! What happens, after all? He recovers his property--he's not a
pin the worse off--but because he has a row with me about something else
he thinks he can identify me with the Teutonic thief! But not in his
heart, Bunny; he's not such a fool as that. Dan Levy's no fool at all,
but the most magnificent knave I've been up against yet. If you want to
hear all about his tactics, come round to the Albany and I'll open your
eyes for you."
His own were radiant with light and life, though he could not have closed
them since his arrival at Charing Cross the night before. But midnight
was his hour. Raffles was at his best when the stars of the firmament are
at theirs; not at Lord's in the light of day, but at dead of night in the
historic chambers to which we now repaired. Certainly he had a congenial
subject in the celebrated Daniel, "a villain after my own black heart,
Bunny! A foeman worthy of Excalibur itself."
And how he longed for the fierce joy of further combat for a bigger
stake! But the stake was big enough for even Raffles to shake a hopeless
head over it. And his face grew grave as he passed from the fascinating
prowess of his enemy to the pitiful position of his friends.
"They said I might tell you, Bunny, but the figures must keep until I
have them in black and white. I've promised to see if there really isn't
a forlorn hope of getting these poor Garlands out of the spider's web.
But there isn't, Bunny, I don't mind telling you."
"What I can't understand," said I, "is how father and son seem to have
walked into the same parlour--and the father a business man!"
"Just what he never was," replied Raffles; "that's at the bottom of the
whole thing. He was born into a big business, but he wasn't born a
business man. So his partners were jolly glad to buy him out some years
ago; and then it was that poor old Garland lashed out into the place
where you spent the day, Bunny. It has been his ruin. The price was
pretty stiff to start with; you might have a house in most squares and
quite a good place in the country for what you've got to pay for a cross
between the two. But the mixture was exactly what attracted these good
people; for it was not only in Mrs. Garland's time, but it seems she was
the first to set her heart upon the place. So she was the first to leave
it for a better world--poor soul--before the glass was on the last
vinery. And the poor old boy was left to pay the shot alone."
"I wonder he didn't get rid of the whole show," said I, "after that."
"I've no doubt he felt like it, Bunny, but you don't get rid of a place
like that in five minutes; it's neither fish nor flesh; the ordinary
house-hunter, with the money to spend, wants to be nearer in or further
out. On the other hand there was a good reason for holding on. That part
of Kensington is being gradually rebuilt; old Garland had bought the
freehold, and sooner or later it was safe to sell at a handsome profit
for building sites. That was the one excuse for his dip; it was really a
fine investment, or would have been if he had left more margin for upkeep
and living expenses. As it was he soon found himself a bit of a beggar on
horseback. And instead of selling his horse at a sacrifice, he put him at
a fence that's brought down many a better rider."
"What was that?"
"South Africans!" replied Raffles succinctly. "Piles were changing hands
over them at the time, and poor old Garland began with a lucky dip
himself; that finished him off. There's no tiger like an old tiger that
never tasted blood before. Our respected brewer became a reckless
gambler, lashed at everything, and in due course omitted to cover his
losses. They were big enough to ruin him, without being enormous.
Thousands were wanted at almost a moment's notice; no time to fix up an
honest mortgage; it was a case of pay, fail, or borrow through the nose!
And old Garland took ten thousand of the best from Dan Levy--and had
another dip!"
"And lost again?"
"And lost again, and borrowed again, this time on the security of his
house; and the long and short of it is that he and every stick, brick and
branch he is supposed to possess have been in Dan Levy's hands for months
and years."
"On a sort of mortgage?"
"On a perfectly nice and normal mortgage so far as interest went, only
with a power to call in the money after six months. But old Garland is
being bled to the heart for iniquitous interest on the first ten
thousand, and of course he can't meet the call for another fifteen when
it comes; but he thinks it's all right because Levy doesn't press for the
dibs. Of course it's all wrong from that moment. Levy has the right to
take possession whenever he jolly well likes; but it doesn't suit him to
have the place empty on his hands, it might depreciate a rising property,
and so poor old Garland is deliberately lulled into a false sense of
security. And there's no saying how long that state of things might have
lasted if we hadn't taken a rise out of old Shylock this morning."
"Then it's our fault, A.J.?"
"It's mine," said Raffles remorsefully. "The idea, I believe, was
altogether mine, Bunny; that's why I'd give my bowing hand to take the
old ruffian at his word, and save the governor as we did the boy!"
"But how _do_ you account for his getting them both into his toils?" I
asked. "What was the point of lending heavily to the son when the father
already owed more than he could pay?"
"There are so many points," said Raffles. "They love you to owe more than
you can pay; it's not their principal that they care about nearly so much
as your interest; what they hate is to lose you when once they've got
you. In this case Levy would see how frightfully keen poor old Garland
was about his boy--to do him properly and, above all, not to let him see
what an effort it's become. Levy would find out something about the boy;
that he's getting hard up himself, that he's bound to discover the old
man's secret, and capable of making trouble and spoiling things when he
does. 'Better give him the same sort of secret of his own to keep,' says
Levy, 'then they'll both hold their tongues, and I'll have one of 'em
under each thumb till all's blue.' So he goes for Teddy till he gets him,
and finances father and son in watertight compartments until this libel
case comes along and does make things look a bit blue for once. Not blue
enough, mind you, to compel the sale of a big rising property at a
sacrifice; but the sort of thing to make a man squeeze his small
creditors all round, while still nursing his top class. So you see how it
all fits in. They say the old blackguard is briefing Mr. Attorney
himself; that along with all the rest to scale, will run him into
thousands even if he wins his case."
"May he lose it!" said I, drinking devoutly, while Raffles lit the
inevitable Egyptian. I gathered that this plausible exposition of Mr.
Levy's tactics had some foundation in the disclosures of his hapless
friends; but his ready grasp of an alien subject was highly
characteristic of Raffles. I said I supposed Miss Belsize had not
remained to hear the whole humiliating story, but Raffles replied briefly
that she had. By putting the words into his mouth, I now learnt that she
had taken the whole trouble as finely as I should somehow have expected
from those fearless eyes of hers; that Teddy had offered to release her
on the spot, and that Camilla Belsize had refused to be released; but
when I applauded her spirit, Raffles was ostentatiously irresponsive.
Nothing, indeed, could have been more marked than the contrast between
his reluctance to discuss Miss Belsize and the captious gusto with which
she had discussed him. But in each case the inference was that there was
no love lost between the pair; and in each case I could not help
wondering why.
There was, however, another subject upon which Raffles exercised a much
more vexatious reserve. Had I been more sympathetically interested in
Teddy Garland, no doubt I should have sought an earlier explanation of
his sensational disappearance, instead of leaving it to the last. My
interest in the escapade, however, was considerably quickened by the
prompt refusal of Raffles to tell me a word about it.
"No, Bunny," said he, "I'm not going to give the boy away. His father
knows, and I know--and that's enough."
"Was it your paragraph in the papers that brought him back?"
Raffles paused, cigarette between fingers, in a leonine perambulation of
his cage; and his smile was a sufficient affirmative.
"I mustn't talk about it, really, Bunny," was his actual reply. "It
wouldn't be fair."
"I don't think it's conspicuously fair on me," I retorted, "to set me to
cover up your pal's tracks, to give me a lie like that to act all day,
and then not to take one into the secret when he does turn up. I call it
trading on a fellow's good-nature--not that I care a curse!"
"Then that's all right, Bunny," said Raffles genially. "If you cared I
should feel bound to apologise to you for the very rotten way you've been
treated all round; as it is I give you my word not to take you in with me
if I have another dip at Dan Levy."
"But you're not seriously thinking of it, Raffles?"
"I am if I see half a chance of squaring him short of wilful murder."
"You mean a chance of settling his account against the Garlands?"
"To say nothing of my own account against Dan Levy! I'm spoiling for
another round with that sportsman, Bunny, for its own sake quite apart
from these poor pals of mine."
"And you really think the game would be worth a candle that might fire
the secret mine of your life and blow your character to blazes?"
One could not fraternise with Raffles without contracting a certain
facility in fluent and florid metaphor; and this parody of his lighter
manner drew a smile from my model. But it was the bleak smile of a man
thinking of other things, and I thought he nodded rather sadly. He was
standing by the open window; he turned and leant out as I had done that
interminable twenty-four hours ago; and I longed to know his thoughts,
to guess what it was that I knew he had not told me, that I could not
divine for myself. There was something behind his mask of gay
pugnacity; nay, there was something behind the good Garlands and their
culpably commonplace misfortunes. They were the pretext. But could they
be the Cause?
The night was as still as the night before. In another moment a flash
might have enlightened me. But, in the complete cessation of sound in
the room, I suddenly heard one, soft and stealthy but quite distinct,
outside the door.