The week was to end with a trumpery match on the Saturday, which two or three of us intended abandoning early in order to return to town that night. The match, however, was never played. In the small hours of the Saturday morning a tragedy took place at Milchester Abbey.
Let me tell of the thing as I saw and heard it. My room opened upon the central gallery, and was not even on the same floor as that on which Raffles—and I think all the other men—were quartered. I had been put, in fact, into the dressing-room of one of the grand suites, and my too near neighbors were old Lady Melrose and my host and hostess. Now, by the Friday evening the actual festivities were at an end, and, for the first time that week, I must have been sound asleep since midnight, when all at once I found myself sitting up breathless. A heavy thud had come against my door, and now I heard hard breathing and the dull stamp of muffled feet.
“I’ve got ye,” muttered a voice. “It’s no use struggling.”
It was the Scotch detective, and a new fear turned me cold. There was no reply, but the hard breathing grew harder still, and the muffled feet beat the floor to a quicker measure. In sudden panic I sprang out of bed and flung open my door. A light burnt low on the landing, and by it I could see Mackenzie swaying and staggering in a silent tussle with some powerful adversary.
“Hold this man!” he cried, as I appeared. “Hold the rascal!”
But I stood like a fool until the pair of them backed into me, when, with a deep breath I flung myself on the fellow, whose face I had seen at last. He was one of the footmen who waited at table; and no sooner had I pinned him than the detective loosed his hold.
“Hang on to him,” he cried. “There’s more of ’em below.”
And he went leaping down the stairs, as other doors opened and Lord Amersteth and his son appeared simultaneously in their pyjamas. At that my man ceased struggling; but I was still holding him when Crowley turned up the gas.
“What the devil’s all this?” asked Lord Amersteth, blinking. “Who was that ran downstairs?”
“Mac—Clephane!” said I hastily.
“Aha!” said he, turning to the footman. “So you’re the scoundrel, are you? Well done! Well done! Where was he caught?”
I had no idea.
“Here’s Lady Melrose’s door open,” said Crowley. “Lady Melrose! Lady Melrose!”
“You forget she’s deaf,” said Lord Amersteth. “Ah! that’ll be her maid.”
An inner door had opened; next instant there was a little shriek, and a white figure gesticulated on the threshold.
“Ou donc est l’ecrin de Madame la Marquise? La fenetre est ouverte. Il a disparu!”
“Window open and jewel-case gone, by Jove!” exclaimed Lord Amersteth. “Mais comment est Madame la Marquise? Est elle bien?”
“Oui, milor. Elle dort.”
“Sleeps through it all,” said my lord. “She’s the only one, then!”
“What made Mackenzie—Clephane—bolt?” young Crowley asked me.
“Said there were more of them below.”
“Why the devil couldn’t you tell us so before?” he cried, and went leaping downstairs in his turn.
He was followed by nearly all the cricketers, who now burst upon the scene in a body, only to desert it for the chase. Raffles was one of them, and I would gladly have been another, had not the footman chosen this moment to hurl me from him, and to make a dash in the direction from which they had come. Lord Amersteth had him in an instant; but the fellow fought desperately, and it took the two of us to drag him downstairs, amid a terrified chorus from half-open doors. Eventually we handed him over to two other footmen who appeared with their nightshirts tucked into their trousers, and my host was good enough to compliment me as he led the way outside.
“I thought I heard a shot,” he added. “Didn’t you?”
“I thought I heard three.”
And out we dashed into the darkness.
I remember how the gravel pricked my feet, how the wet grass numbed them as we made for the sound of voices on an outlying lawn. So dark was the night that we were in the cricketers’ midst before we saw the shimmer of their pyjamas; and then Lord Amersteth almost trod on Mackenzie as he lay prostrate in the dew.
“Who’s this?” he cried. “What on earth’s happened?”
“It’s Clephane,” said a man who knelt over him. “He’s got a bullet in him somewhere.”
“Is he alive?”
“Barely.”
“Good God! Where’s Crowley?”
“Here I am,” called a breathless voice. “It’s no good, you fellows. There’s nothing to show which way they’ve gone. Here’s Raffles; he’s chucked it, too.” And they ran up panting.
“Well, we’ve got one of them, at all events,” muttered Lord Amersteth. “The next thing is to get this poor fellow indoors. Take his shoulders, somebody. Now his middle. Join hands under him. All together, now; that’s the way. Poor fellow! Poor fellow! His name isn’t Clephane at all. He’s a Scotland Yard detective, down here for these very villains!”
Raffles was the first to express surprise; but he had also been the first to raise the wounded man. Nor had any of them a stronger or more tender hand in the slow procession to the house.
In a little we had the senseless man stretched on a sofa in the library. And there, with ice on his wound and brandy in his throat, his eyes opened and his lips moved.
Lord Amersteth bent down to catch the words.
“Yes, yes,” said he; “we’ve got one of them safe and sound. The brute you collared upstairs.” Lord Amersteth bent lower. “By Jove! Lowered the jewel-case out of the window, did he? And they’ve got clean away with it! Well, well! I only hope we’ll be able to pull this good fellow through. He’s off again.”
An hour passed: the sun was rising.
It found a dozen young fellows on the settees in the billiard-room, drinking whiskey and soda-water in their overcoats and pyjamas, and still talking excitedly in one breath. A time-table was being passed from hand to hand: the doctor was still in the library. At last the door opened, and Lord Amersteth put in his head.
“It isn’t hopeless,” said he, “but it’s bad enough. There’ll be no cricket today.”
Another hour, and most of us were on our way to catch the early train; between us we filled a compartment almost to suffocation. And still we talked all together of the night’s event; and still I was a little hero in my way, for having kept my hold of the one ruffian who had been taken; and my gratification was subtle and intense. Raffles watched me under lowered lids. Not a word had we had together; not a word did we have until we had left the others at Paddington, and were skimming through the streets in a hansom with noiseless tires and a tinkling bell.
“Well, Bunny,” said Raffles, “so the professors have it, eh?”
“Yes,” said I. “And I’m jolly glad!”
“That poor Mackenzie has a ball in his chest?”
“That you and I have been on the decent side for once.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re hopeless, Bunny, quite hopeless! I take it you wouldn’t have refused your share if the boodle had fallen to us? Yet you positively enjoy coming off second best—for the second time running! I confess, however, that the professors’ methods were full of interest to me. I, for one, have probably gained as much in experience as I have lost in other things. That lowering the jewel-case out of the window was a very simple and effective expedient; two of them had been waiting below for it for hours.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I saw them from my own window, which was just above the dear old lady’s. I was fretting for that necklace in particular, when I went up to turn in for our last night—and I happened to look out of my window. In point of fact, I wanted to see whether the one below was open, and whether there was the slightest chance of working the oracle with my sheet for a rope. Of course I took the precaution of turning my light off first, and it was a lucky thing I did. I saw
the pros. right down below, and they never saw me. I saw a little tiny luminous disk just for an instant, and then again for an instant a few minutes later. Of course I knew what it was, for I have my own watch-dial daubed with luminous paint; it makes a lantern of sorts when you can get no better. But these fellows were not using theirs as a lantern. They were under the old lady’s window. They were watching the time. The whole thing was arranged with their accomplice inside. Set a thief to catch a thief: in a minute I had guessed what the whole thing proved to be.”
“And you did nothing!” I exclaimed.
“On the contrary, I went downstairs and straight into Lady Melrose’s room—”
“You did?”
“Without a moment’s hesitation. To save her jewels. And I was prepared to yell as much into her ear-trumpet for all the house to hear. But the dear lady is too deaf and too fond of her dinner to wake easily.”
“Well?”
“She didn’t stir.”
“And yet you allowed the professors, as you call them, to take her jewels, case and all!”
“All but this,” said Raffles, thrusting his fist into my lap. “I would have shown it you before, but really, old fellow, your face all day has been worth a fortune to the firm!”
And he opened his fist, to shut it next instant on the bunch of diamonds and of sapphires that I had last seen encircling the neck of Lady Melrose.
LE PREMIER PAS
That night he told me the story of his earliest crime. Not since the fateful morning of the Ides of March, when he had just mentioned it as an unreported incident of a certain cricket tour, had I succeeded in getting a word out of Raffles on the subject. It was not for want of trying; he would shake his head, and watch his cigarette smoke thoughtfully; a subtle look in his eyes, half cynical, half wistful, as though the decent honest days that were no more had had their merits after all. Raffles would plan a fresh enormity, or glory in the last, with the unmitigated enthusiasm of the artist. It was impossible to imagine one throb or twitter of compunction beneath those frankly egotistic and infectious transports. And yet the ghost of a dead remorse seemed still to visit him with the memory of his first felony, so that I had given the story up long before the night of our return from Milchester. Cricket, however, was in the air, and Raffles’s cricket-bag back where he sometimes kept it, in the fender, with the remains of an Orient label still adhering to the leather. My eyes had been on this label for some time, and I suppose his eyes had been on mine, for all at once he asked me if I still burned to hear that yarn.
“It’s no use,” I replied. “You won’t spin it. I must imagine it for myself.”
“How can you?”
“Oh, I begin to know your methods.”
“You take it I went in with my eyes open, as I do now, eh?”
“I can’t imagine your doing otherwise.”
“My dear Bunny, it was the most unpremeditated thing I ever did in my life!”
His chair wheeled back into the books as he sprang up with sudden energy. There was quite an indignant glitter in his eyes.
“I can’t believe that,” said I craftily. “I can’t pay you such a poor compliment!”
“Then you must be a fool—”
He broke off, stared hard at me, and in a trice stood smiling in his own despite.
“Or a better knave than I thought you, Bunny, and by Jove it’s the knave! Well—I suppose I’m fairly drawn; I give you best, as they say out there. As a matter of fact I’ve been thinking of the thing myself; last night’s racket reminds me of it in one or two respects. I tell you what, though, this is an occasion in any case, and I’m going to celebrate it by breaking the one good rule of my life. I’m going to have a second drink!”
The whiskey tinkled, the syphon fizzed, the ice plopped home; and seated there in his pyjamas, with the inevitable cigarette, Raffles told me the story that I had given up hoping to hear. The windows were wide open; the sounds of Piccadilly floated in at first. Long before he finished, the last wheels had rattled, the last brawler was removed, we alone broke the quiet of the summer night.
“…No, they do you very well, indeed. You pay for nothing but drinks, so to speak, but I’m afraid mine were of a comprehensive character. I had started in a hole, I ought really to have refused the invitation; then we all went to the Melbourne Cup, and I had the certain winner that didn’t win, and that’s not the only way you can play the fool in Melbourne. I wasn’t the steady old stager I am now, Bunny; my analysis was a confession in itself. But the others didn’t know how hard up I was, and I swore they shouldn’t. I tried the Jews, but they’re extra fly out there. Then I thought of a kinsman of sorts, a second cousin of my father’s whom none of us knew anything about, except that he was supposed to be in one or other of the Colonies. If he was a rich man, well and good, I would work him; if not there would be no harm done. I tried to get on his tracks, and, as luck would have it, I succeeded (or thought I had) at the very moment when I happened to have a few days to myself. I was cut over on the hand, just before the big Christmas match, and couldn’t have bowled a ball if they had played me.
“The surgeon who fixed me up happened to ask me if I was any relation of Raffles of the National Bank, and the pure luck of it almost took my breath away. A relation who was a high official in one of the banks, who would finance me on my mere name—could anything be better? I made up my mind that this Raffles was the man I wanted, and was awfully sold to find next moment that he wasn’t a high official at all. Nor had the doctor so much as met him, but had merely read of him in connection with a small sensation at the suburban branch which my namesake managed; an armed robber had been rather pluckily beaten off, with a bullet in him, by this Raffles; and the sort of thing was so common out there that this was the first I had heard of it! A suburban branch—my financier had faded into some excellent fellow with a billet to lose if he called his soul his own. Still a manager was a manager, and I said I would soon see whether this was the relative I was looking for, if he would be good enough to give me the name of that branch.
“‘I’ll do more,’ says the doctor. ‘I’ll get you the name of the branch he’s been promoted to, for I think I heard they’d moved him up one already.’ And the next day he brought me the name of the township of Yea, some fifty miles north of Melbourne; but, with the vagueness which characterized all his information, he was unable to say whether I should find my relative there or not.
“‘He’s a single man, and his initials are W. F.,’ said the doctor, who was certain enough of the immaterial points. ‘He left his old post several days ago, but it appears he’s not due at the new one till the New Year. No doubt he’ll go before then to take things over and settle in. You might find him up there and you might not. If I were you I should write.’
“‘That’ll lose two days,’ said I, ‘and more if he isn’t there,’ for I’d grown quite keen on this up-country manager, and I felt that if I could get at him while the holidays were still on, a little conviviality might help matters considerably.
“‘Then,’ said the doctor, ‘I should get a quiet horse and ride. You needn’t use that hand.’
“‘Can’t I go by train?’
“‘You can and you can’t. You would still have to ride. I suppose you’re a horseman?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Then I should certainly ride all the way. It’s a delightful road, through Whittlesea and over the Plenty Ranges. It’ll give you some idea of the bush, Mr. Raffles, and you’ll see the sources of the water supply of this city, sir. You’ll see where every drop of it comes from, the pure Yan Yean! I wish I had time to ride with you.’
“‘But where can I get a horse?’
“The doctor thought a moment.
“‘I’ve a mare of my own that’s as fat as butter for want of work,’ said he. ‘It would be a charity to me to sit on her back for a hundred miles or so, and then I should know you’d have no temptation to use that hand.’
“‘You’re far to
o good!’ I protested.
“‘You’re A. J. Raffles,’ he said.
“And if ever there was a prettier compliment, or a finer instance of even Colonial hospitality, I can only say, Bunny, that I never heard of either.”
He sipped his whiskey, threw away the stump of his cigarette, and lit another before continuing.
“Well, I managed to write a line to W. F. with my own hand, which, as you will gather, was not very badly wounded; it was simply this third finger that was split and in splints; and next morning the doctor packed me off on a bovine beast that would have done for an ambulance. Half the team came up to see me start; the rest were rather sick with me for not stopping to see the match out, as if I could help them to win by watching them. They little knew the game I’d got on myself, but still less did I know the game I was going to play.
“It was an interesting ride enough, especially after passing the place called Whittlesea, a real wild township on the lower slope of the ranges, where I recollect having a deadly meal of hot mutton and tea, with the thermometer at three figures in the shade. The first thirty miles or so was a good metal road, too good to go half round the world to ride on, but after Whittlesea it was a mere track over the ranges, a track I often couldn’t see and left entirely to the mare. Now it dipped into a gully and ran through a creek, and all the time the local color was inches thick; gum-trees galore and parrots all colors of the rainbow. In one place a whole forest of gums had been ring-barked, and were just as though they had been painted white, without a leaf or a living thing for miles. And the first living thing I did meet was the sort to give you the creeps; it was a riderless horse coming full tilt through the bush, with the saddle twisted round and the stirrup-irons ringing. Without thinking, I had a shot at heading him with the doctor’s mare, and blocked him just enough to allow a man who came galloping after to do the rest.
The Raffles Megapack Page 7