Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  He cut her to it, none the less; he could not have inflicted a deeper wound. The blood leapt to her face and neck; she cried out at the insult, the indignity, the outrage of it all; and crying she darted to the door.

  It was locked.

  She turned on Stingaree.

  “You dared to lock the door — you dared! Give me the key this instant.”

  “I refuse.”

  “Very well! You have heard my voice; you shall hear it again!”

  Her pale lips made the perfect round, her grand teeth gleamed in the electric light.

  He arrested her, not with violence, but a shrug.

  “I shall jump out of the window and break my neck. They don’t take me twice — alive.”

  She glared at him in anger and contempt. He meant it. Then let him do it. Her eyes told him all that; but as they flashed, stabbing him, their expression altered, and in a trice her ear was to the keyhole.

  “Something has happened,” she whispered, turning a scared face up to him. “I hear your name. They have traced you here. They are coming! Oh! what are we to do?”

  He strode over to the door.

  “If you fear a scandal I can give myself up this moment and explain all.”

  He spoke eagerly. The thought was sudden. She rose up, looking in his eyes.

  “No, you shall not,” she said. Her hand flew out behind her, and in two seconds the brilliant room had click-clicked into a velvet darkness.

  “Stand like a mouse,” she whispered, and he heard her reach the inner door, where she stood like another.

  Steps and voices came along the landing at a quick crescendo.

  “Miss Bouverie! Miss Bouverie! Miss Bouverie!”

  It was his Excellency’s own gay voice. And it continued until with much noise Miss Bouverie flung her bedroom door wide open, put on the light within, ran across the boudoir, put on the boudoir light, and stooped to parley through the keyhole.

  “The bushranger Stingaree has been traced to Government House.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “One of your windows was seen open.”

  “He had not come in through it.”

  “Then you were heard raising your voice.”

  “That was to my maid. This is all through her. I don’t know how to tell you, but she leaves me in the morning. Yes, yes, there was a man, but it was not Stingaree. I saw him myself through coming up early, but I let him go as he had come, to save a fuss.”

  “Through the window?”

  “I am so ashamed!”

  “Not a bit, Miss Bouverie. I am ashamed of bothering you. Confound the police!”

  When the voices and steps had died away, Hilda Bouverie turned to Stingaree, her whole face shining, her deep blue eyes alight.

  “There!” said she. “Could you have done that better yourself?”

  “Not half so well.”

  “And you thought I could forget!”

  “I thought nothing. I only came to you in my scrape.”

  After years of imprisonment he could speak of this life-and-death hazard as a scrape! She looked at him with admiring eyes; her personal triumph had put an end to her indignation.

  “My poor Lea! I wonder how much she has heard? I shall have to tell her nearly all; she can wait for me at Melbourne or Adelaide, and I can pick her up on my voyage home. It will be no joke without her until then. I give her up for your sake!”

  Stingaree hung his head. He was a changed man.

  “And I,” he said grimly — not pathetically— “and I am a convict who escaped by violence this afternoon.”

  Hilda smiled.

  “I met Mr. Brady the other day,” she said, “and I heard of him to-night. He is not going to die!”

  He stared at her unscrupulous radiance.

  “Do you wonder at me?” she said. “Did you never hear that musical people had no morals?”

  And her smile bewitched him more and more.

  “It explains us both!” declared Miss Bouverie. “But do you know what I have kept all these years?” she went on. “Do you know what has been my mascot, what I have had about me whenever I have sung in public, since and including that time at Yallarook? Can’t you guess?”

  He could not. She turned her back, he heard some gussets give, and the next moment she was holding a strange trophy in both hands.

  It was a tiny silken bandolier, containing six revolver cartridges, with bullet and cap intact.

  “Can’t you guess now?” she gloried.

  “No. I never missed them; they are not like any I ever had.”

  “Don’t you remember the man who chased you out and misfired at you six times? He was the overseer on the station; his name may come back to me, but his face I shall never forget. He had a revolver in his pocket, but he dared not lower a hand. I took it out of his pocket and was to hand it up to him when I got the chance. Until then I was to keep it under my shawl. That was when I managed to unload every chamber. These are the cartridges I took out, and they have been my mascot ever since.”

  She looked years younger than she had seemed even singing in the Town Hall; but the lines deepened on the bushranger’s face, and he stepped back from her a pace.

  “So you saved my life,” he said. “You had saved my life all the time. And yet I came to ask you to do as much for me as I had done for you!”

  He turned away; his hands were clenched behind his back.

  “I will do more,” she cried, “if more could be done by one person for another. Here are jewels.” She stripped her neck of its rope of pearls. “And here are notes.” She dived into a bureau and thrust a handful upon him. “With these alone you should be able to get to England or America; and if you want more when you get there, write to Hilda Bouverie! As long as she has any, there will be some for you!”

  Tears filled her eyes. The simplicity of her girlhood had come back to the seasoned woman of the world, at once spoiled and satiated with success. This was the other side of the artistic temperament which had enslaved her soul. She would swing from one extreme of wounded and vindictive vanity to this length of lawless nobility; now she could think of none but self, and now not of herself at all. Stingaree glanced toward the window.

  “I can’t go yet, I’m afraid.”

  “You sha’n’t! Why should you?”

  “But I still fear they may not be satisfied downstairs. I am ashamed to ask it — but will you do one little thing more for me?”

  “Name it!”

  “It is only to make assurance doubly sure. Go downstairs and let them see you; tell them more details, if you like. Go down as you are, and say that without your maid you could not find anything else to put on. I promise not to vanish with everything in your absence.”

  “You do promise?”

  “On my — liberty!”

  She looked in his face with a very wistful sweetness.

  “If they were to find me out,” she said, “I wonder how many years they would give me? I neither know nor care; it would be worth a few. I thought I had lived since I saw you last . . . but this is the best fun I have ever had . . . since Yallarook!”

  She stood for a moment before opening the door that he unlocked for her, stood before him in all her flushed and brilliant radiance, and blew a kiss to him before she went.

  The Governor was easily found. He was grieved at her troubling to descend at such an hour, and did not detain her five minutes in all. He thought she was in a fever, but that the fever became her beyond belief. Reassured on every point, Miss Bouverie was back in her room but a very few minutes after she had left it.

  It was empty. She searched all over, first behind the curtains, then between the pedestals of the bureau, but Stingaree was nowhere in the room, and the bedroom door was still locked. It was a second look behind the curtains that revealed an open window and the scratch of a boot upon the white enamel. It was no breakneck drop into the shrubs.

  So he had gone without a word, but also without breaking his word; for,
with wet eyes and a white face, between anger and admiration, Hilda Bouverie had already discovered her bundle of notes and her rope of pearls.

  There are no more tales of Stingaree; tongue never answered to the name again, nor was face ever recognized as his. He may have died that night; it is not very likely, since the young married man in the well-appointed bungalow, which had been broken into earlier in the day, missed a suit of clothes indeed, but not his evening clothes, which were found hung up neatly where he had left them; and it is regrettable to add that his opera-glasses were not the only article of a marketable character which could never be found on his return. There is none the less reason to believe that this was the last professional incident in one of the most incredible criminal careers of which there is any record in Australia. Whether he be dead or alive, back in the old country or still in the new, or, what is less likely, in prison under some other name, the gratifying fact remains that neither in Australia nor elsewhere has there been a second series of crimes bearing the stamp of Stingaree.

  Transcriber’s Note:

  The following typographical errors present in the original edition have been corrected. No other changes have been made to the text.

  In Chapter I, a quotation mark was removed after “could that be possible?”, “You had beter play this yourself” was changed to “You had better play this yourself”, and a quotation mark was added after “And hangs below her waist”.

  In Chapter III, “You might, prehaps, have preferred” has been changed to “You might, perhaps, have preferred”.

  In Chapter V, a quotation mark was added after “I was just thinking the same thing”, and “succeded at the most humiliating moment” was changed to “succeeded at the most humiliating moment”.

  In Chapter VI, a quotation mark was added before “He may have wished to clear his character.”

  In Chapter VII, “Stingareee was perfectly right” was changed to “Stingaree was perfectly right”.

  In Chapter VIII, a quotation mark was added after “it was just about here it happened”, and “seemed the samest policy” was changed to “seemed the safest policy”.

  In Chapter IX, “allowed to proceeed on a pressing journey” was changed to “allowed to proceed on a pressing journey”, “when the spirit had beeen wine” was changed to “when the spirit had been wine”, and “The Bishop seeemed nettled and annoyed” was changed to “The Bishop seemed nettled and annoyed”.

  In Chapter X, “whenever I have sung in jublic” has been changed to “whenever I have sung in public”.

  A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

  CONTENTS

  Out of Paradise

  The Chest of Silver

  The Rest Cure

  The Criminologists’ Club

  The Field of Philippi

  A Bad Night

  A Trap to Catch a Cracksman

  The Spoils of Sacrilege

  The Raffles Relics

  The Last Word

  The original frontispiece

  Out of Paradise

  If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but go back to our earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left by discretion in existing annals. In so doing I may indeed fill some small part of an infinitely greater blank, across which you may conceive me to have stretched my canvas for the first frank portrait of my friend. The whole truth cannot harm him now. I shall paint in every wart. Raffles was a villain, when all is written; it is no service to his memory to gloze the fact; yet I have done so myself before to-day. I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dwelt unduly on the redeeming side. And this I may do again, blinded even as I write by the gallant glamour that made my villain more to me than any hero. But at least there shall be no more reservations, and as an earnest I shall make no further secret of the greatest wrong that even Raffles ever did me.

  I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as I still would be to my friend, and yet remembering as I must those Ides of March when he led me blindfold into temptation and crime. That was an ugly office, if you will. It was a moral bagatelle to the treacherous trick he was to play me a few weeks later. The second offence, on the other hand, was to prove the less serious of the two against society, and might in itself have been published to the world years ago. There have been private reasons for my reticence. The affair was not only too intimately mine, and too discreditable to Raffles. One other was involved in it, one dearer to me than Raffles himself, one whose name shall not even now be sullied by association with ours.

  Suffice it that I had been engaged to her before that mad March deed. True, her people called it “an understanding,” and frowned even upon that, as well they might. But their authority was not direct; we bowed to it as an act of politic grace; between us, all was well but my unworthiness. That may be gauged when I confess that this was how the matter stood on the night I gave a worthless check for my losses at baccarat, and afterward turned to Raffles in my need. Even after that I saw her sometimes. But I let her guess that there was more upon my soul than she must ever share, and at last I had written to end it all. I remember that week so well! It was the close of such a May as we had never had since, and I was too miserable even to follow the heavy scoring in the papers. Raffles was the only man who could get a wicket up at Lord’s, and I never once went to see him play. Against Yorkshire, however, he helped himself to a hundred runs as well; and that brought Raffles round to me, on his way home to the Albany.

  “We must dine and celebrate the rare event,” said he. “A century takes it out of one at my time of life; and you, Bunny, you look quite as much in need of your end of a worthy bottle. Suppose we make it the Café Royal, and eight sharp? I’ll be there first to fix up the table and the wine.”

  And at the Café Royal I incontinently told him of the trouble I was in. It was the first he had ever heard of my affair, and I told him all, though not before our bottle had been succeeded by a pint of the same exemplary brand. Raffles heard me out with grave attention. His sympathy was the more grateful for the tactful brevity with which it was indicated rather than expressed. He only wished that I had told him of this complication in the beginning; as I had not, he agreed with me that the only course was a candid and complete renunciation. It was not as though my divinity had a penny of her own, or I could earn an honest one. I had explained to Raffles that she was an orphan, who spent most of her time with an aristocratic aunt in the country, and the remainder under the repressive roof of a pompous politician in Palace Gardens. The aunt had, I believed, still a sneaking softness for me, but her illustrious brother had set his face against me from the first.

  “Hector Carruthers!” murmured Raffles, repeating the detested name with his clear, cold eye on mine. “I suppose you haven’t seen much of him?”

  “Not a thing for ages,” I replied. “I was at the house two or three days last year, but they’ve neither asked me since nor been at home to me when I’ve called. The old beast seems a judge of men.”

  And I laughed bitterly in my glass.

  “Nice house?” said Raffles, glancing at himself in his silver cigarette-case.

  “Top shelf,” said I. “You know the houses in Palace Gardens, don’t you?”

  “Not so well as I should like to know them, Bunny.”

  “Well, it’s about the most palatial of the lot. The old ruffian is as rich as Crœsus. It’s a country-place in town.”

  “What about the window-fastenings?” asked Raffles casually.

  I recoiled from the open cigarette-case that he proffered as he spoke. Our eyes met; and in his there was that starry twinkle of mirth and mischief, that sunny beam of audacious devilment, which had been my undoing two months before, which was to undo me as often as he chose until the chapter’s end. Yet for once I withstood its glamour; for once I turned aside that luminous glance with front of steel. There was no need for Raffles to voice his plans. I read them all between the strong lines of his smiling, eager face. And I pushed back my chair in the equal eagerness of my own re
solve.

  “Not if I know it!” said I. “A house I’ve dined in — a house I’ve seen her in — a house where she stays by the month together! Don’t put it into words, Raffles, or I’ll get up and go.”

  “You mustn’t do that before the coffee and liqueur,” said Raffles laughing. “Have a small Sullivan first: it’s the royal road to a cigar. And now let me observe that your scruples would do you honor if old Carruthers still lived in the house in question.”

  “Do you mean to say he doesn’t?”

  Raffles struck a match, and handed it first to me. “I mean to say, my dear Bunny, that Palace Gardens knows the very name no more. You began by telling me you had heard nothing of these people all this year. That’s quite enough to account for our little misunderstanding. I was thinking of the house, and you were thinking of the people in the house.”

  “But who are they, Raffles? Who has taken the house, if old Carruthers has moved, and how do you know that it is still worth a visit?”

  “In answer to your first question — Lord Lochmaben,” replied Raffles, blowing bracelets of smoke toward the ceiling. “You look as though you had never heard of him; but as the cricket and racing are the only part of your paper that you condescend to read, you can’t be expected to keep track of all the peers created in your time. Your other question is not worth answering. How do you suppose that I know these things? It’s my business to get to know them, and that’s all there is to it. As a matter of fact, Lady Lochmaben has just as good diamonds as Mrs. Carruthers ever had; and the chances are that she keeps them where Mrs. Carruthers kept hers, if you could enlighten me on that point.”

  As it happened, I could, since I knew from his niece that it was one on which Mr. Carruthers had been a faddist in his time. He had made quite a study of the cracksman’s craft, in a resolve to circumvent it with his own. I remembered myself how the ground-floor windows were elaborately bolted and shuttered, and how the doors of all the rooms opening upon the square inner hall were fitted with extra Yale locks, at an unlikely height, not to be discovered by one within the room. It had been the butler’s business to turn and to collect all these keys before retiring for the night. But the key of the safe in the study was supposed to be in the jealous keeping of the master of the house himself. That safe was in its turn so ingeniously hidden that I never should have found it for myself. I well remember how one who showed it to me (in the innocence of her heart) laughed as she assured me that even her little trinkets were solemnly locked up in it every night. It had been let into the wall behind one end of the book-case, expressly to preserve the barbaric splendor of Mrs. Carruthers; without a doubt these Lochmabens would use it for the same purpose; and in the altered circumstances I had no hesitation in giving Raffles all the information he desired. I even drew him a rough plan of the ground-floor on the back of my menu-card.