“And the best catch!” cried Raffles. “Come on, Bunny; that’s my nunc dimittis for the day. There would be nothing to compare with it if I could stop to see every ball bowled, and I mustn’t see another.”
“But why?” I asked, as I followed Raffles into the press behind the carriages.
“I’ve already told you why,” said he.
I got as close to him as one could in that crowd.
“You’re not thinking of doing it tonight, A.J.?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ll let me know?”
“Not if I can help it, Bunny; didn’t I promise not to drag you any further through this particular mire?”
“But if I can help you?” I whispered, after a momentary separation in the throng.
“Oh! if I can’t get on without you,” said Raffles, not nicely, “I’ll let you know fast enough. But do drop the subject now; here come old Garland and Camilla Belsize!”
They did not see us quite so soon as we saw them, and for a moment one felt a spy; but it was an interesting moment even to a person smarting from a snub. The ruined man looked haggard, ill, unfit to be about, the very embodiment of the newspaper report concerning him. But the spirit beamed through the shrinking flesh, the poor old fellow was alight with pride and love, exultant in spite of himself and his misfortunes. He had seen his boy’s great catch; he had heard the cheers, he would hear them till his dying hour. Camilla Belsize had also seen and heard, but not with the same exquisite appreciation. Cricket was a game to her, it was not that quintessence and epitome of life it would seem to be to some of its devotees; and real life was pressing so heavily upon her that the trivial consolation which had banished her companion’s load could not lighten hers. So at least I thought as they approached, the man so worn and radiant, the girl so pensive for all her glorious youth and beauty: his was the old head bowed with sorrow, his also the simpler and the younger heart.
“That catch will console me for a lot,” I heard him say quite heartily to Raffles. But Camilla’s comment was altogether perfunctory; indeed, I wondered that so sophisticated a person did not affect some little enthusiasm. She seemed more interested, however, in the crowd than in the cricket. And that was usual enough.
Raffles was already saying he must go, with an explanatory murmur to Mr. Garland, who clasped his hand with a suddenly clouded countenance. But Miss Belsize only bowed, and scarcely took her eyes off a couple of outwardly inferior men, who had attracted my attention through hers, until they also passed out of the ground.
Mr. Garland was on tip-toes watching the game again with mercurial ardour.
“Mr. Manders will look after me,” she said to him, “won’t you, Mr. Manders?” I made some suitable asseveration, and she added: “Mr. Garland’s a member, you know, and dying to go into the Pavilion.”
“Only just to hear what they think of Teddy,” the poor old boy confessed; and when we had arranged where to meet in the interval, away he hurried with his keen, worn face.
Miss Belsize turned to me the moment he was gone.
“I want to speak to you, Mr. Manders,” she said quickly but without embarrassment. “Where can we talk?”
“And watch as well?” I suggested, thinking of the young man at his best behind the sticks.
“I want to speak to you first,” she said, “where we shan’t be overheard. It’s about Mr. Raffles!” added Miss Belsize as she met my stare.
About Raffles again! About Raffles, after all that she had learnt the day before! I did not enjoy the prospect as I led the way past the ivy-mantled tennis-court of those days to the practice-ground, turned for the nonce into a tented lawn.
“And what about Raffles?” I asked as we struck out for ourselves across the grass.
“I’m afraid he’s in some danger,” replied Miss Belsize. And she stopped in her walk and confronted me as frankly as though we had the animated scene to ourselves.
“Danger!” I repeated, guiltily enough, no doubt. “What makes you think that, Miss Belsize?”
My companion hesitated for the first time.
“You won’t tell him I told you, Mr. Manders?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” said I, taken aback more by her manner than by the request itself.
“You promise me that?”
“Certainly.”
“Then tell me, did you notice two men who passed close to us just after we had all met?”
“There are so many men to notice,” said I to gain time.
“But these were not the sort one expects to see here today.”
“Did they wear bowlers and short coats?”
“You did notice them!”
“Only because I saw you watching them,” said I, recalling the whole scene.
“They wanted watching,” rejoined Miss Belsize dryly. “They followed Mr. Raffles out of the ground!”
“So they did!” I reflected aloud in my alarm.
“They were following you both when you met us.”
“The dickens they were! Was that the first you saw of them?”
“No; the first time was over there at the nets before play began. I noticed those two men behind Teddy’s net. They were not watching him; that called my attention to them. It’s my belief they were lying in wait for Mr. Raffles; at any rate, when he came they moved away. But they followed us afterwards across the ground.”
“You are sure of that?”
“I looked round to see,” said Miss Belsize, avoiding my eyes for the first time.
“Did you think the men—detectives?”
And I forced a laugh.
“I was afraid they might be, Mr. Manders, though I have never seen one off the stage.”
“Still,” I pursued, with painfully sustained amusement, “you were ready to find A.J. Raffles being shadowed here at Lord’s of all places in the world?”
“I was ready for anything, anywhere,” said Miss Belsize, “after all I heard yesterday afternoon.”
“You mean about poor Mr. Garland and his affairs?”
It was an ingenuously disingenuous suggestion; it brought my companion’s eyes back to mine, with something of the scorn that I deserved.
“No, Mr. Manders, I meant after what we all heard between Mr. Levy and Mr. Raffles; and you knew very well what I meant,” added Miss Belsize severely.
“But surely you didn’t take all that seriously?” said I, without denying the just impeachment.
“How could I help it? The insinuation was serious enough, in all conscience!” exclaimed Camilla Belsize.
“That is,” said I, since she was not to be wilfully misunderstood, “that poor old Raffles had something to do with this jewel robbery at Carlsbad?”
“If it was a robbery.”
She winced at the word.
“Do you mean it might have been a trick?” said I, recalling the victim’s own make-believe at the Albany. And not only did Camilla appear to embrace that theory with open arms; she had the nerve to pretend that it really was what she had meant.
“Obviously!” says she, with an impromptu superiority worthy of Raffles himself. “I wonder you never thought of that, Mr. Manders, when you know what a trick you both played Mr. Levy only yesterday. Mr. Raffles himself told us all about that; and I’m very grateful to you both; you must know I am—for Teddy’s sake,” added Miss Belsize, with one quick remorseful glance towards the great arena. “Still it only shows what Mr. Raffles is—and—and it’s what I meant when we were talking about him yesterday.”
“I don’t remember,” said I, remembering fast enough.
“In the rockery,” she reminded me. “When you asked what people said about him, and I said that about living on his wits.”
“And being a paid amateur!”
“But the other was the worst.”
“I’m not so sure,” said I. “But his wits wouldn’t carry him very far if he only took necklaces and put them back again.”
“But it was all a joke,”
she reminded us both with a bit of a start. “It must have been a joke, if Mr. Raffles did it at all. And it would be dreadful if anything happened to him because of a wretched practical joke!”
There was no mistake about her feeling now; she really felt that it would be “dreadful if anything happened” to the man whom yesterday she had seemed both to dislike and to distrust. Her voice vibrated with anxiety. A bright film covered the fine eyes, and they were finer than ever as they continued to face me unashamed; but I was fool enough to speak my mind, and at that they flashed themselves dry.
“I thought you didn’t like him?” had been my remark, and “Who says I do?” was hers. “But he has done a lot for Teddy,” she went on, “and never more than yesterday,” with her hand for an instant on my arm, “when you helped him! I am dreadfully sorry for Mr. Garland, sorrier than I am for poor Teddy. But Mr. Raffles is more than sorry. I know he means to do what he can. He seems to think there must be something wrong; he spoke of bringing that brute to reason—if not to justice. It would be too dreadful if such a creature could turn the tables on Mr. Raffles by trumping up any charge against him!”
There was an absolute echo of my own tone in “trumping up any charge,” and I thought the echo sounded even more insincere. But at least it showed me where we were. Miss Belsize was not deceived; she only wanted me to think she was. Miss Belsize had divined what I knew, but neither of us would admit to the other that the charge against Raffles would be true enough.
“But why should these men follow him?” said I, really wondering why they should. “If there were anything definite against old Raffles, don’t you think he would be arrested?”
“Oh! I don’t know,” was the slightly irritable answer. “I only think he should be warned that he is being followed.”
“Whatever he has done?” I ventured.
“Yes!” said she. “Whatever he has done—after what he did for Teddy yesterday!”
“You want me to warn him?”
“Yes—but not from me!”
“And suppose he really did take Mrs. Levy’s necklace?”
“That’s just what we are supposing.”
“But suppose it wasn’t for a joke at all?”
I spoke as one playfully plumbing the abysmally absurd; what I did desire to sound was the loyalty of this new, unexpected, and still captious ally. And I thought myself strangely successful at the first cast; for Miss Belsize looked me in the face as I was looking her, and I trusted her before she spoke.
“Well, after yesterday,” she said, “I should warn him all the same!”
“You would back your Raffles right or wrong?” I murmured, perceiving that Camilla Belsize was, after all, like all the rest of us.
“Against a vulgar extortioner, most decidedly!” she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. “It doesn’t follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between you for Teddy yesterday.”
We had continued our stroll some time ago, and now it was I who stood still. I looked at my watch. It still wanted some minutes to the luncheon interval.
“If Raffles took a cab to his rooms,” I said, “he must be nearly there and I must telephone to him.”
“Is there a call-office on the ground?”
“Only in the pavilion, I believe, for the use of the members.”
“Then you must go to the nearest one outside.”
“And what about you?”
Miss Belsize brightened with her smile of perfect and unconscious independence.
“Oh, I shall be all right,” she said. “I know where to find Mr. Garland, even if I don’t pick up an escort on the way.”
But it was she who escorted me to the tall turnstile nearest Wellington Road.
“And you do see why I want to put Mr. Raffles on his guard?” she said pointedly as we shook hands. “It’s only because you and he have done so much for Teddy!”
And because she did not end by reminding me of my promise, I was all the more reluctantly determined to keep it to the letter, even though Raffles should think as ill as ever of one who was at least beginning to think better of him.
CHAPTER XI
A Dash in the Dark
In a few lines which I found waiting for me at the club, and have somewhat imprudently preserved, Raffles professes to have known he was being shadowed even before we met at Lord’s: “but it was no use talking about it until the foe were in the cart.” He goes on to explain the simple means by which he reduced the gentlemen in billycocks to the pitch of discomfiture implied in his metaphor. He had taken a hansom to the Burlington Gardens entrance to the Albany, and kept it waiting while he went in and changed his clothes; then he had sent Barraclough to pay off the cab, and himself marched out into Piccadilly, what time the billycock brims were still shading watchful eyes in Burlington Gardens. There, to be sure, I myself had spotted one of the precious pair when I drove up after vain exertions at the call-office outside Lord’s; but by that time his confederate was on guard at the Piccadilly end, and Raffles had not only shown a clean pair of wings, but left the poor brutes to watch an empty cage. He dismisses them not unfairly with the epithet “amateurish.” Thus I was the more surprised, but not the less relieved, to learn that he was “running down into the country for the weekend, to be out of their way”; but he would be back on the Monday night, “to keep an engagement you wot of, Bunny. And if you like you may meet me under the clock at Waterloo (in flannel kit and tennis-shoes for choice) at the witching hour of twelve sharp.”
If I liked! I had a premature drink in honour of an invitation more gratifying to my vanity than any compliment old Raffles had paid me yet; for I could still hear his ironical undertaking to let me know if he could not do without me, and there was obviously no irony in this delightfully early intimation of that very flattering fact. It altered my whole view of the case. I might disapprove of the risks Raffles was running for his other friends, but the more I was allowed to share in them the less critical I was inclined to be. Besides I was myself clearly implicated in the issue as between my own friend and the common enemy; it was no more palatable to me than it was to Raffles, to be beaten by Dan Levy after our initial victory over him. So I drank like a man to his destruction, and subsequently stole forth to spy upon his foolish myrmidons, who flattered themselves that they were spying on Raffles. The imbeciles were at it still! The one hanging about Burlington Gardens looked unutterably bored, but with his blots of whisker and his grimy jowl, as flagrant a detective officer as ever I saw, even if he had not so considerately dressed the part. The other bruiser was an equally distinctive type, with a formidable fighting face and a chest like a barrel; but in Piccadilly he seemed to me less occupied in taking notice than in avoiding it. In innocuous futility one could scarcely excel the other; and between them they raised my spirits to the zenith.
I spent the rest of the afternoon at their own game, dogging Miss Belsize about Lord’s until at last I had an opportunity of informing her that Raffles was quite safe. It may be that I made my report with too much gusto when my chance came; at any rate, it was only the fact that appeared to interest Miss Belsize; the details, over which I gloated, seemed to inspire in her a repugnance consistent with the prejudice she had displayed against Raffles yesterday, but not with her grateful solicitude on his behalf as revealed to me that very morning. I could only feel that gratitude was the beginning and the end of her new regard for him. Raffles had never fascinated this young girl as he did the rest of us; ordinarily engaged to an ordinary man, she was proof against the glamour that dazzled us. Nay, though she would not admit it even to me his friend, though like Levy she pretended to embrace the theory of the practical joke, making it the pretext for her anxiety, I felt more certain than ever that she now guessed, and had long suspected, what manner of man Raffles really was, and that her natural antipathy was greater even than before. Still more certain was I that she would never betray him by word or deed; that, whatever harm might come of his present pro
ceedings, it would not be through Camilla Belsize.
But I was now determined to do my own utmost to minimise the dangers, to be a real help to Raffles in the act of altruistic depravity to which he had committed himself, and not merely a fifth wheel to his dashing chariot. Accordingly I went into solemn training for the event before us: a Turkish bath on the Saturday, a quiet Sunday between Mount Street and the club, and most of Monday lying like a log in cold-blooded preparation for the night’s work. And when night fell I took it upon me to reconnoitre the ground myself before meeting Raffles at Waterloo.
Another cool and starry evening seemed to have tempted all the town and his wife into the streets. The great streams of traffic were busier than ever, the backwaters emptier, and Gray’s Inn a basin drained to the last dreg of visible humanity. In one moment I passed through gateway and alley from the voices and lights of Holborn into a perfectly deserted square of bare ground and bright stars. The contrast was altogether startling, for I had never been there before; but for the same reason I had already lost my bearings, believing myself to be in Gray’s Inn Square when I was only in South Square, Gray’s Inn. Here I entered upon a hopeless search for the offices of Burroughs and Burroughs. Door after door had I tried in vain, and was beginning to realise my mistake, when a stray molecule of the population drifted in from Holborn as I had done, but with the quick step of the man who knows his way. I darted from a doorway to inquire mine, but he was across the square before I could cut him off, and as he passed through the rays of a lamp beside a second archway, I fell back thanking Providence and Raffles for my rubber soles. The man had neither seen nor heard me, but at the last moment I had recognised him as the burlier of the two blockheads who had shadowed Raffles three days before.
He passed under the arch without looking round. I flattened myself against the wall on my side of the arch; and in so standing I was all but eye-witness of a sudden encounter in the square beyond.
The quick steps stopped, and there was a “Here you are!” on one side, and a “Well! Where is he?” on the other, both very eager and below the breath.
The Raffles Megapack Page 60