With this he lighted a fresh cigar and turned to a perusal of my statement, which, I am glad to say, was a good one, owing to the great success of my book, Wild Animals I Have Never Met—the seventh-best seller at Rochester, Watertown, and Miami in June and July, 1905.
I went out into the dining room and mixed the coolers. As you may imagine, I was not long at it, for my curiosity over my visitor lent wings to my corkscrew, and in five minutes I was back with the tempting beverages in the tall glasses, the lemon curl giving it the vertebrate appearance that all stiff drinks should have, and the ice tinkling refreshingly upon the sultry air.
“There,” said I, placing his glass before him. “Drink hearty, and then to business. Who are you?”
“There is my card,” he replied, swallowing a goodly half of the cooler and smacking his lips appreciatively, and tossing a visiting card across to me on the other side of the table. I picked up the card and read as follows: “Mr. Raffles Holmes, London and New York.”
“Raffles Holmes?” I cried in amazement.
“The same, Mr. Jenkins,” said he. “I am the son of Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective, and grandson of A. J. Raffles, the distinguished—er—ah—cricketer, sir.”
I gazed at him, dumb with astonishment.
“You’ve heard of my father, Sherlock Holmes?” asked my visitor.
I confessed that the name of the gentleman was not unfamiliar to me.
“And Mr. Raffles, my grandfather?” he persisted.
“If there ever was a story of that fascinating man that I have not read, Mr. Holmes,” said I, “I beg you will let me have it.”
“Well, then,” said he with that quick, nervous manner which proved him a true son of Sherlock Holmes, “did it never occur to you as an extraordinary happening, as you read of my father’s wonderful powers as a detective, and of Raffles’ equally wonderful prowess as a—er—well, let us not mince words—as a thief, Mr. Jenkins, the two men operating in England at the same time, that no story ever appeared in which Sherlock Holmes’s genius was pitted against the subtly planned misdeeds of Mr. Raffles? Is it not surprising that with two such men as they were, working out their destinies in almost identical grooves of daily action, they should never have crossed each other’s paths as far as the public is the wiser, and in the very nature of the conflicting interests of their respective lines of action as foemen, the one pursuing, the other pursued, they should to the public’s knowledge never have clashed?”
“Now that you speak of it,” said I, “it was rather extraordinary that nothing of the sort happened. One would think that the sufferers from the depredations of Raffles would immediately have gone to Holmes for assistance in bringing the other to justice. Truly, as you intimate, it was strange that they never did.”
“Pardon me, Jealous,” put in my visitor. “I never intimated anything of the sort. What I intimated was that no story of any such conflict ever came to light. As a matter of fact, Sherlock Holmes was put upon a Raffles case in 1883, and while success attended upon every step of it, and my grandfather was run to earth by him as easily as was ever any other criminal in Holmes’s grip, a little naked god called Cupid stepped in, saved Raffles from jail, and wrote the word failure across Holmes’s docket of the case. I, sir, am the only tangible result of Lord Dorrington’s retainers to Sherlock Holmes.”
“You speak enigmatically, after the occasional fashion of your illustrious father,” said I. “The Dorrington case is unfamiliar to me,”
“Naturally so,” said my vis-à-vis. “Because, save to my father, my grandfather, and myself, the details are unknown to anybody. Not even my mother knew of the incident, and as for Dr. Watson and Bunny, the scribes through whose industry the adventures of those two great men were respectively narrated to an absorbed world, they didn’t even know there had ever been a Dorrington case, because Sherlock Holmes never told Watson and Raffles never told Bunny. But they both told me, and now that I am satisfied that there is a demand for your books, I am willing to tell it to you with the understanding that we share and share alike in the profits if perchance you think well enough of it to write it up.”
“Go on!” I said. “I’ll whack up with you square and honest.”
“Which is more than either Watson or Bunny ever did with my father or my grandfather, else I should not be in the business which now occupies my time and attention,” said Raffles Holmes with a cold snap to his eyes which I took as an admonition to hew strictly to the line of honor, or to subject myself to terrible consequences. “With that understanding, Jenkins, I’ll tell you the story of the Dorrington Ruby Seal, in which some crime, a good deal of romance, and my ancestry are involved.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DORRINGTON RUBY SEAL
“Lord Dorrington, as you may have heard,” said Raffles Holmes, leaning back in my easychair and gazing reflectively up at the ceiling, “was chiefly famous in England as a sporting peer. His vast estates, in five counties, were always open to any sportsman of renown, or otherwise, as long as he was a true sportsman. So open, indeed, was the house that he kept that, whether he was there or not, little weekend parties of members of the sporting fraternity used to be got up at a moment’s notice to run down to Dorrington Castle, Devonshire; to Dorrington Lodge on the Isle of Wight; to Dorrington Hall, near Dublin, or to any of his other country places for over Sunday.
“Sometimes there’d be a lot of turf people; sometimes a dozen or more devotees of the prize-ring; not infrequently a gathering of the best known cricketers of the time, among whom, of course, my grandfather, A. J. Raffles, was conspicuous. For the most part, the cricketers never partook of Dorrington’s hospitality save when his lordship was present, for your cricket-player is a bit more punctilious in such matters than your turfmen or ring-side habitués. It so happened one year, however, that his lordship was absent from England for the better part of eight months, and, when the time came for the annual cricket gathering at his Devonshire place, he cabled his London representative to see to it that everything was carried on just as if he were present, and that everyone should be invited for the usual week’s play and pleasure at Dorrington Castle. His instructions were carried out to the letter and, save for the fact that the genial host was absent, the house-party went through to perfection. My grandfather, as usual, was the life of the occasion, and all went merry as a marriage bell. Seven months later, Lord Dorrington returned, and, a week after that, the loss of the Dorrington jewels from the Devonshire strong-boxes was a matter of common knowledge. When, or by whom, they had been taken was an absolute mystery. As far as anybody could find out, they might have been taken the night before his return, or the night after his departure. The only fact in sight was that they were gone—Lady Dorrington’s diamonds, a half dozen valuable jeweled rings belonging to his lordship, and, most irremediable of losses, the famous ruby seal which George IV had given to Dorrington’s grandfather, Sir Arthur Deering, as a token of his personal esteem during the period of the Regency. This was a flawless ruby, valued at some six or seven thousand pounds sterling, in which had been cut the Deering arms surrounded by a garter upon which were engraved the words, ‘Deering Ton,’ which the family, upon Sir Arthur’s elevation to the peerage in 1836, took as its title, or Dorrington. His lordship was almost prostrated by the loss. The diamonds and the rings, although valued at thirty thousand pounds, he could easily replace, but the personal associations of the seal were such that nothing, no amount of money, could duplicate the lost ruby.”
“So that his first act,” I broke in, breathlessly, “was to send for—”
“Sherlock Holmes, my father,” said Raffles Holmes. “Yes, Mr. Jenkins, the first thing Lord Dorrington did was to telegraph to London for Sherlock Holmes, requesting him to come immediately to Dorrington Castle and assume charge of the case. Needless to say, Mr. Holmes dropped everything else and came. He inspected the gardens, measured the road from the railway station to the castle, questioned all the servants; was particularly insistent upon
knowing where the parlor-maid was on the 13th of January; secured accurate information as to the personal habits of his lordship’s dachshund Nicholas; subjected the chef to a cross-examination that covered every point of his life, from his remote ancestry to his receipt for baking apples; gathered up three suitcases of sweepings from his lordship’s private apartment, and two boxes containing three each of every variety of cigars that Lord Dorrington had laid down in his cellar. As you are aware, Sherlock Holmes, in his prime, was a great master of detail. He then departed for London, taking with him an impression in wax of the missing seal, which Lord Dorrington happened to have preserved in his escritoire.
“On his return to London, Holmes inspected the seal carefully under a magnifying glass, and was instantly impressed with the fact that it was not unfamiliar to him. He had seen it somewhere before, but where? That was now the question uppermost in his mind. Prior to this, he had never had any communication with Lord Dorrington, so that, if it was in his correspondence that the seal had formerly come to him, most assuredly the person who had used it had come by it dishonestly. Fortunately, at that time, it was a habit of my father’s never to destroy papers of any sort. Every letter that he ever received was classified and filed, envelope and all. The thing to do, then, was manifestly to run over the files and find the letter, if indeed it was in or on a letter that the seal had first come to his attention. It was a herculean job, but that never fazed Sherlock Holmes, and he went at it tooth and nail. Finally his effort was rewarded. Under ‘Applications for Autograph’ he found a daintily scented little missive from a young girl living at Goring-Streatley on the Thames, the daughter, she said, of a retired missionary—the Reverend James Tattersby—asking him if he would not kindly write his autograph upon the enclosed slip for her collection. It was the regular stock application that truly distinguished men receive in every mail. The only thing to distinguish it from other applications was the beauty of the seal on the fly of the envelope, which attracted his passing notice and was then filed away with the other letters of similar import.
“‘Ho! ho!’ quoth Holmes, as he compared the two impressions and discovered that they were identical. ‘An innocent little maiden who collects autographs, and a retired missionary in possession of the Dorrington seal, eh? Well, that is interesting. I think I shall run down to Goring-Streatley over Sunday and meet Miss Marjorie Tattersby and her reverend father. I’d like to see to what style of people I have intrusted my autograph.’
“To decide was to act with Sherlock Holmes, and the following Saturday, hiring a canoe at Windsor, he made his way up the river until he came to the pretty little hamlet, snuggling in the Thames Valley, if such it may be called, where the young lady and her good father were dwelling. Fortune favored him in that his prey was still there—both much respected by the whole community; the father a fine looking, really splendid specimen of a man whose presence alone carried a conviction of integrity and lofty mind; the daughter—well, to see her was to love her, and the moment the eyes of Sherlock fell upon her face, that great heart of his, that had ever been adamant to beauty, a very Gibraltar against the wiles of the other sex, went down in the chaos of a first and overwhelming passion. So hard hit was he by Miss Tattersby’s beauty that his chief thought now was to avert rather than to direct suspicion towards her. After all, she might have come into possession of the jewel honestly, though how the daughter of a retired missionary, considering its intrinsic value, could manage such a thing, was pretty hard to understand, and he fled back to London to think it over. Arrived there, he found an invitation to visit Dorrington Castle again incog. Lord Dorrington was to have a mixed weekend party over the following Sunday, and this, he thought, would give Holmes an opportunity to observe the characteristics of Dorrington’s visitors and possibly gain some clue as to the light-fingered person from whose depredations his lordship had suffered. The idea commended itself to Holmes, and in the disguise of a young American clergyman, whom Dorrington had met in the States, the following Friday found him at Dorrington Castle.
“Well, to make a long story short,” said Raffles Holmes, “the young clergyman was introduced to many of the leading sportsmen of the hour, and, for the most part, they passed muster, but one of them did not, and that was the well known cricketer A. J. Raffles, for the moment Raffles entered the room, jovially greeting everybody about him, and was presented to Lord Dorrington’s new guest, Sherlock Holmes recognized in him no less a person than the Reverend James Tattersby, retired missionary of Goring-Streatley-on-Thames, and the father of the woman who had filled his soul with love and yearning of the truest sort. The problem was solved. Raffles was, to all intents and purposes, caught with the goods on. Holmes could have exposed him then and there had he chosen to do so, but every time it came to the point the lovely face of Marjorie Tattersby came between him and his purpose. How could he inflict the pain and shame which the exposure of her father’s misconduct would certainly entail upon that fair woman, whose beauty and fresh innocence had taken so strong a hold upon his heart? No—that was out of the question. The thing to do, clearly, was to visit Miss Tattersby during her father’s absence and, if possible, ascertain from her just how she had come into possession of the seal, before taking further steps in the matter. This he did. Making sure, to begin with, that Raffles was to remain at Dorrington Hall for the coming ten days, Holmes had himself telegraphed for and returned to London. There he wrote himself a letter of introduction to the Reverend James Tattersby, on the paper of the Anglo-American Missionary Society, a sheet of which he secured in the public writing-room of that institution, armed with which he returned to the beautiful little spot on the Thames where the Tattersbys abode. He spent the night at the inn, and, in conversation with the landlord and boatmen, learned much that was interesting concerning the Reverend James. Among other things, he discovered that this gentleman and his daughter had been respected residents of the place for three years; that Tattersby was rarely seen in the daytime about the place; that he was unusually fond of canoeing at night, which, he said, gave him the quiet and solitude necessary for that reflection which is so essential to the spiritual being of a minister of grace; that he frequently indulged in long absences, during which time it was supposed that he was engaged in the work of his calling. He appeared to be a man of some, but not of lavish, means. The most notable and suggestive thing, however, that Holmes ascertained in his conversation with the boatmen was that, at the time of the famous Cliveden robbery, when several thousand pounds’ worth of plate had been taken from the great hall, that later fell into the possession of a well known American hotel-keeper, Tattersby, who happened to be on the river late that night, was, according to his own statement, the unconscious witness of the escape of the thieves on board a mysterious steam-launch, which the police were never able afterwards to locate. They had nearly upset his canoe with the wash of their rapidly moving craft as they sped past him after having stowed their loot safely on board. Tattersby had supposed them to be employees of the estate and never gave the matter another thought until three days later, when the news of the robbery was published to the world. He had immediately communicated the news of what he had seen to the police, and had done all that lay in his power to aid them in locating the robbers, but all to no purpose. From that day to this the mystery of the Cliveden plot had never been solved.
“The following day Holmes called at the Tattersby cottage, and was fortunate enough to find Miss Tattersby at home. His previous impression as to her marvelous beauty was more than confirmed, and each moment that he talked to her she revealed new graces of manner that completed the capture of his hither-to unsusceptible heart. Miss Tattersby regretted her father’s absence. He had gone, she said, to attend a secret missionary conference at Pentwllycod in Wales and was not expected back for a week, all of which quite suited Sherlock Holmes. Convinced that, after years of waiting, his affinity had at last crossed his path, he was in no hurry for the return of that parent, who would put an instant quietu
s upon this affair of the heart. Manifestly the thing for him to do was to win the daughter’s hand and then intercept the father, acquaint him with his aspirations, and compel acquiescence by the force of his knowledge of Raffles’s misdeed. Hence, instead of taking his departure immediately, he remained at the Goring-Streatley Inn, taking care each day to encounter Miss Tattersby on one pretext or another, hoping that their acquaintance would ripen into friendship, and then into something warmer. Nor was the hope a vain one, for when the fair Marjorie learned that it was the visitor’s intention to remain in the neighborhood until her father’s return, she herself bade him to make use of the old gentleman’s library, to regard himself always as a welcome daytime guest. She even suggested pleasant walks through the neighboring country and little canoe trips up and down the Thames which they might take together, to all of which Holmes promptly availed himself, with the result that, at the end of six days, both realized that they were designed for each other, and a passionate declaration followed which opened new vistas of happiness for both. Hence it was that, when the Reverend James Tattersby arrived at Goring-Streatley the following Monday night, unexpectedly, he was astounded to find sitting together in the moonlight, in the charming little English garden at the rear of his dwelling, two persons, one of whom was his daughter Marjorie and the other a young American curate to whom he had already been introduced as A. J. Raffles.
“‘We have met before, I think,’ said Raffles coldly, as his eye fell upon Holmes.
“‘I—er—do not recall the fact,’ replied Holmes, meeting the steely stare of the homecomer with one of his own flinty glances.
“‘H’m!’ said Raffles, nonplused at the other’s failure to recognize him. Then he shivered slightly. ‘Suppose we go indoors, it is a trifle chilly out here in the night air.’
“The whole thing, the greeting, the meeting, Holmes’s demeanor and all, was so admirably handled that Marjorie Tattersby never guessed the truth, never even suspected the intense dramatic quality of the scene she had just gazed upon.
The Raffles Megapack Page 89