Mr. Justice Raffles

by Ernest William Hornung

  Mr. Edward had not been seen or heard of at the house. Neither had Miss Belsize arrived; that was the one consolatory feature.

  "Come into the library," said Mr. Garland; and when we were among his books, which were somewhat beautifully bound and cased in glass, he turned to Raffles and added hoarsely: "There's something in all this I haven't been told, and I insist on knowing what it is."

  "But you know as much as I do," protested Raffles. "I went out leaving Teddy asleep and came back to find him flown."

  "What time was that?"

  "Between nine and half-past when I went out. I was away nearly an hour."

  "Why leave him asleep at that time of morning?"

  "I wanted him to have every minute he could get. We had been sitting up rather late."

  "But why, Raffles? What could you have to talk about all night when you were tired and it was Teddy's business to keep fresh for to-day? Why, after all, should he want to see you the moment you got back? He's not the first young fellow who's got rather suddenly engaged to a charming girl; is he in any trouble about it, Raffles?"

  "About his engagement—not that I'm aware."

  "Then he is in some trouble?"

  "He was, Mr. Garland," answered Raffles. "I give you my word that he isn't now."

  Mr. Garland grasped the back of a chair.

  "Was it some money trouble, Raffles? Of course, if my boy has given you his confidence, I have no right simply as his father—"

  "It is hardly that, sir," said Raffles, gently; "it is I who have no right to give him away. But if you don't mind leaving it at that, Mr. Garland, there is perhaps no harm in my saying that it was about some little temporary embarrassment that Teddy was so anxious to see me."

  "And you helped him?" cried the poor man, plainly torn between gratitude and humiliation.

  "Not out of my pocket," replied Raffles, smiling. "The matter was not so serious as Teddy thought; it only required adjustment."

  "God bless you, Raffles!" murmured Mr. Garland, with a catch in his voice. "I won't ask for a single detail. My poor boy went to the right man; he knew better than to come to me. Like father, like son!" he muttered to himself, and dropped into the chair he had been handling, and bent his head over his folded arms.

  He seemed to have forgotten the untoward effect of Teddy's disappearance in the peculiar humiliation of its first cause. Raffles took out his watch, and held up the dial for me to see. It was after the half-hour now; but at this moment a servant entered with a missive, and the master recovered his self-control.

  "This'll be from Teddy!" he cried, fumbling with his glasses. "No; it's for him, and by special messenger. I'd better open it. I don't suppose it's Miss Belsize again."

  "Miss Belsize is in the drawing-room, sir," said the man. "She said you were not to be disturbed."

  "Oh, tell her we shan't be long," said Mr. Garland, with a new strain of trouble in his tone. "Listen to this—listen to this," he went on before the door was shut: "'What has happened? Lost toss. Whipham plays if you don't turn up in time.—J. S.'"

  "Jack Studley," said Raffles, "the Cambridge skipper."

  "I know! I know! And Whipham's reserve man, isn't he?"

  "And another wicket-keeper, worse luck!" exclaimed Raffles. "If he turns out and takes a single ball, and Teddy is only one over late, it will still be too late for him to play."

  "Then it's too late already," said Mr. Garland, sinking back into his chair with a groan.

  "But that note from Studley may have been half-an-hour on the way."

  "No, Raffles, it's not an ordinary note; it's a message telephoned straight from Lord's—probably within the last few minutes—to a messenger office not a hundred yards from this door!"

  Mr. Garland sat staring miserably at the carpet; he was beginning to look ill with perplexity and suspense. Raffles himself, who had turned his back upon us with a shrug of acquiescence in the inevitable, was a monument of discomfiture as he stood gazing through a glass door into the adjoining conservatory. There was no actual window in the library, but this door was a single sheet of plate-glass into which a man might well have walked, and I can still see Raffles in full-length silhouette upon a panel of palms and tree-ferns. I see the silhouette grow tall and straight again before my eyes, the door open, and Raffles listening with an alert lift of the head. I, too, hear something, an elfin hiss, a fairy fusillade, and then the sudden laugh with which Raffles rejoined us in the body of the room.

  "It's raining!" he cried, waving a hand above his head. "Have you a barometer, Mr. Garland?"

  "That's an aneroid under the lamp-bracket."

  "How often do you set the indicator?"

  "Last thing every night. I remember it was between Fair and Change when I went to bed. It made me anxious."

  "It may make you thankful now. It's between Change and Rain this morning. And the rain's begun, and while there's rain there's hope!"

  In a twinkling Raffles had regained all his own irresistible buoyancy and assurance. But the older man was not capable of so prompt a recovery.

  "Something has happened to my boy!"

  "But not necessarily anything terrible."

  "If I knew what, Raffles—if only I knew what!"

  Raffles eyed the pale and twitching face with sidelong solicitude. He himself had the confident expression which always gave me confidence; the rattle on the conservatory roof was growing louder every minute.

  "I intend to find out," said he; "and if the rain goes on long enough, we may still see Teddy playing when it stops. But I shall want your help, sir."

  "I am ready to go with you anywhere, Raffles."

  "You can only help me, Mr. Garland, by staying where you are."

  "Where I am?"

  "In the house all day," said Raffles firmly. "It is absolutely essential to my idea."

  "And that is, Raffles?"

  "To save Teddy's face, in the first instance. I shall drive straight up to Lord's, in your brougham if I may. I know Studley rather well; he shall keep Teddy's place open till the last possible moment."

  "But how shall you account for his absence?" I asked.

  "I shall account for it all right," said Raffles darkly. "I can save his face for the time being, at all events at Lord's."

  "But that's the only place that matters," said I.

  "On the contrary, Bunny, this very house matters even more as long as Miss Belsize is here. You forget that they're engaged, and that she's in the next room now."

  "Good God!" whispered Mr. Garland. "I had forgotten that myself."

  "She is the last who must know of this affair," said Raffles, with, I thought, undue authority. "And you are the only one who can keep it from her, sir."

  "I?"

  "Miss Belsize mustn't go up to Lord's this morning. She would only spoil her things, and you may tell her from me that there would be no play for an hour after this, even if it stopped this minute, which it won't. Meanwhile let her think that Teddy's weatherbound with the rest of them in the pavilion; but she mustn't come until you hear from me again; and the best way to keep her here is to stay with her yourself."

  "And when may I expect to hear?" asked Mr. Garland as Raffles held out his hand.

  "Let me see. I shall be at Lord's in less than twenty minutes; another five or ten should polish off Studley; and then I shall barricade myself in the telephone-box and ring up every hospital in town! You see, it may be an accident after all, though I don't think so. You won't hear from me on the point unless it is; the fewer messengers flying about the better, if you agree with me as to the wisdom of keeping the matter dark at this end."

  "Oh, yes, I agree with you, Raffles; but it will be a terribly hard task for me!"

  "It will, indeed, Mr. Garland. Yet no news is always good news, and I promise to come straight to you the moment I have news of any kind."

  With that they shook hands, our host with an obvious reluctance that turned to a less understandable dismay as I also prepared to take my leave of h
im.

  "What!" cried he, "am I to be left quite alone to hoodwink that poor girl and hide my own anxiety?"

  "There's no reason why you should come, Bunny," said Raffles to me. "If either of them is a one-man job, it's mine."

  Our host said no more, but he looked at me so wistfully that I could not but offer to stay with him if he wished it; and when at length the drawing-room door had closed upon him and his son's fiancee, I took an umbrella from the stand and saw Raffles through the providential downpour into the brougham.

  "I'm sorry, Bunny," he muttered between the butler in the porch and the coachman on the box. "This sort of thing is neither in my line nor yours, but it serves us right for straying from the path of candid crime. We should have opened a safe for that seven hundred."

  "But what do you really think is at the bottom of this extraordinary disappearance?"

  "Some madness or other, I'm afraid; but if that boy is still in the land of the living, I shall have him before the sun goes down on his insanity."

  "And what about this engagement of his?" I pursued. "Do you disapprove of it?"

  "Why on earth should I?" asked Raffles, rather sharply, as he plunged from under my umbrella into the brougham.

  "Because you never told me when he told you," I replied. "Is the girl beneath him?"

  Raffles looked at me inscrutably with his clear blue eyes.

  "You'd better find out for yourself," said he. "Tell the coachman to hurry up to Lord's—and pray that this rain may last!"

  CHAPTER VI

  Camilla Belsize

  It would be hard to find a better refuge on a rainy day than the amphibious retreat described by Raffles as a "country house in Kensington." There was a good square hall, full of the club comforts so welcome in a home, such as magazines and cigarettes, and a fire when the rain set in. The usual rooms opened off the hall, and the library was not the only one that led on into the conservatory; the drawing-room was another, in which I heard voices as I lit a cigarette among the palms and tree-ferns. It struck me that poor Mr. Garland was finding it hard work to propitiate the lady whom Raffles had deemed unworthy of mention overnight. But I own I was in no hurry to take over the invidious task. To me it need prove nothing more; to him, anguish; but I could not help feeling that even as matters stood I was quite sufficiently embroiled in these people's affairs. Their name had been little more than a name to me until the last few hours. Only yesterday I might have hesitated to nod to Teddy Garland at the club, so seldom had we met. Yet here was I helping Raffles to keep the worst about the son from the father's knowledge, and on the point of helping that father to keep what might easily prove worse still from his daughter-in-law to be. And all the time there was the worst of all to be hidden from everybody concerning Raffles and me!

  Meanwhile I explored a system of flower-houses and vineries that ran out from the conservatory in a continuous chain—each link with its own temperature and its individual scent—and not a pane but rattled and streamed beneath the timely torrent. It was in a fernery where a playing fountain added its tuneful drop to the noisy deluge that the voices of the drawing-room sounded suddenly at my elbow, and I was introduced to Miss Belsize before I could recover from my surprise. My foolish face must have made her smile in spite of herself, for I did not see quite the same smile again all day; but it made me her admirer on the spot, and I really think she warmed to me for amusing her even for a moment.

  So we began rather well; and that was a mercy in the light of poor Mr. Garland's cynically prompt departure; but we did not go on quite as well as we had begun. I do not say that Miss Belsize was in a bad temper, but emphatically she was not pleased, and I for one had the utmost sympathy with her displeasure. She was simply but exquisitely dressed, with unostentatious touches of Cambridge blue and a picture hat that really was a picture. Yet on a perfect stranger in a humid rockery she was wasting what had been meant for mankind at Lord's. The only consolation I could suggest was that by this time Lord's would be more humid still.

  "And so there's something to be said for being bored to tears under shelter, Miss Belsize." Miss Belsize did not deny that she was bored.

  "But there's plenty of shelter there," said she.

  "Packed with draggled dresses and squelching shoes! You might swim for it before they admitted you to that Pavilion, you know."

  "But if the ground's under water, how can they play to-day?"

  "They can't, Miss Belsize, I don't mind betting."

  That was a rash remark.

  "Then why doesn't Teddy come back?"

  "Oh, well, you know," I hedged, "you can never be quite absolutely sure. It might clear up. They're bound to give it a chance until the afternoon. And the players can't leave till stumps are drawn."

  "I should have thought Teddy could have come home to lunch," said Miss Belsize, "even if he had to go back afterwards."

  "I shouldn't wonder if he did come," said I, conceiving the bare possibility: "and A.J. with him."

  "Do you mean Mr. Raffles?"

  "Yes, Miss Belsize; he's the only A.J. that counts!"

  Camilla Belsize turned slightly in the basket-chair to which she had confided her delicate frock, and our eyes met almost for the first time. Certainly we had not exchanged so long a look before, for she had been watching the torpid goldfish in the rockery pool, and I admiring her bold profile and the querulous poise of a fine head as I tried to argue her out of all desire for Lord's. Suddenly our eyes met, as I say, and hers dazzled me; they were soft and yet brilliant, tender and yet cynical, calmly reckless, audaciously sentimental—all that and more as I see them now on looking back; but at the time I was merely dazzled.

  "So you and Mr. Raffles are great friends?" said Miss Belsize, harking back to a remark of Mr. Garland's in introducing us.

  "Rather!" I replied.

  "Are you as great a friend of his as Teddy is?"

  I liked that, but simply said I was an older friend. "Raffles and I were at school together," I added loftily.

  "Really? I should have thought he was before your time."

  "No, only senior to me. I happened to be his fag."

  "And what sort of a schoolboy was Mr. Raffles?" inquired Miss Belsize, not by any means in the tone of a devotee. But I reflected that her own devotion was bespoke, and not improbably tainted with some little jealousy of Raffles.

  "He was the most Admirable Crichton who was ever at the school," said I: "captain of the eleven, the fastest man in the fifteen, athletic champion, and an ornament of the Upper Sixth."

  "And you worshipped him, I suppose?"

  "Absolutely."

  My companion had been taking renewed interest in the goldfish; now she looked at me again with the cynical light full on in her eyes.

  "You must be rather disappointed in him now!"

  "Disappointed! Why?" I asked with much outward amusement. But I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

  "Of course I don't know much about him," remarked Miss Belsize as though she cared less.

  "But does anybody know anything of Mr. Raffles except as a cricketer?"

  "I do," said I, with injudicious alacrity.

  "Well," said Miss Belsize, "what else is he?"

  "The best fellow in the world, among other things."

  "But what other things?"

  "Ask Teddy!" I said unluckily.

  "I have," replied Miss Belsize. "But Teddy doesn't know. He often wonders how Mr. Raffles can afford to play so much cricket without doing any work."

  "Does he, indeed!"

  "Many people do."

  "And what do they say about him?"

  Miss Belsize hesitated, watching me for a moment and the goldfish rather longer. The rain sounded louder, and the fountain as though it had been turned on again, before she answered:

  "More than their prayers, no doubt!"

  "Do you mean," I almost gasped, "as to the way Raffles gets his living?"

  "Yes."

  "You might tell me the kind of thin
gs they say, Miss Belsize!"

  "But if there's no truth in them?"

  "I'll soon tell you if there is or not."

  "But suppose I don't care either way?" said Miss Belsize with a brilliant smile.

  "Then I care so much that I should be extremely grateful to you."

  "Mind, I don't believe it myself, Mr. Manders."

  "You don't believe—"

  "That Mr. Raffles lives by his wits and—his cricket!"

  I jumped to my feet.

  "Is that all they say about him?" I cried.

  "Isn't it enough?" asked Miss Belsize, astonished in her turn at my demeanour.

  "Oh, quite enough, quite enough!" said I. "It's only the most scandalously unfair and utterly untrue report that ever got about—that's all!"

  This heavy irony was, of course, intended to convey the impression that one's first explosion of relief had been equally ironical. But I was to discover that Camilla Belsize was never easily deceived; it was unpleasantly apparent in her bold eyes before she opened her firm mouth.

  "Yet you seemed to expect something worse," she said at length.

  "What could be worse?" I asked, my back against the wall of my own indiscretion. "Why, a man like A.J. Raffles would rather be any mortal thing than a paid amateur!"

  "But you haven't told me what he is, Mr. Manders."

  "And you haven't told me, Miss Belsize, why you're so interested in A. J. after all!" I retorted, getting home for once, and sitting down again on the strength of it.

  But Miss Belsize was my superior to the last; in the single moment of my ascendency she made me blush for it and for myself. She would be quite frank with me: my friend Mr. Raffles did interest her rather more than she cared to say. It was because Teddy thought so much of him, that was the only reason, and her one excuse for all inquisitive questions and censorious remarks. I must have thought her very rude; but now I knew. Mr. Raffles had been such a friend to Teddy; sometimes she wondered whether he was quite a good friend; and there I had "the whole thing in a nutshell."