E. W. Hornung_A J Raffles 03 (19 page)

My immediate part was a little hard after the excitement of those
small hours. I will only say that we had agreed that it would be
wisest for me to lie like a log among the rest for half an hour,
before staggering to my feet and rousing house and police; and that
in that half-hour Barney Maguire crashed to the floor, without
waking either himself or his companions, though not without
bringing my beating heart into the very roof of my mouth.

It was daybreak when I gave the alarm with bell and telephone. In
a few minutes we had the house congested with dishevelled domestics,
irascible doctors, and arbitrary minions of the law. If I told my
story once, I told it a dozen times, and all. on an empty stomach.
But it was certainly a most plausible and consistent tale, even
without that confirmation which none of the other victims was as
yet sufficiently recovered to supply. And in the end I was permitted
to retire from the scene until required to give further information,
or to identify the prisoner whom the good police confidently
expected to make before the day was out.

I drove straight to the flat. The porter flew to help me out of my
hansom. His face alarmed me more than any I had left in Half-moon
Street. It alone might have spelled my ruin.

"Your flat's been entered in the night, sir," he cried. "The
thieves have taken everything they could lay hands on."

"Thieves in my flat!" I ejaculated aghast. There were one or two
incriminating possessions up there, as well as at the Albany.

"The door's been forced with a jimmy," said the porter. "It was
the milkman who found it out. There's a constable up there now."

A constable poking about in my flat of all. others! I rushed
upstairs without waiting for the lift. The invader was moistening
his pencil between laborious notes in a fat pocketbook; he had
penetrated no further than the forced door. I dashed past him in
a fever. I kept my trophies in a wardrobe drawer specially fitted
with a Bramah lock. The lock was broken - the drawer void.

"Something valuable, sir?" inquired the intrusive constable at my
heels.

"Yes, indeed - some old family silver," I answered. It was quite
true. But the family was not mine.

And not till then did the truth flash across my mind. Nothing else
of value had been taken. But there was a meaningless litter in all.
the rooms. I turned to the porter, who had followed me up from the
street; it was his wife who looked after the flat.

"Get rid of this idiot as quick as you can," I whispered. "I'm
going straight to Scotland Yard myself. Let your wife tidy the
place while I'm gone, and have the lock mended before she leaves.
I'm going as I am, this minute!"

And go I did, in the first hansom I could find - but not straight
to Scotland Yard. I stopped the cab in Picadilly on the way.

Old Raffles opened his own door to me. I cannot remember finding
him fresher, more immaculate, more delightful to behold in every
way. Could I paint a picture of Raffles with something other than
my pen, it would be as I saw him that bright March morning, at his
open door in the Albany, a trim, slim figure in matutinal gray,
cool and gay and breezy as incarnate spring.

"What on earth did you do it for?" I asked within.

"It was the only solution," he answered, handing me the cigarettes.
"I saw it the moment I got outside."

"I don't see it yet."

"Why should a burglar call an innocent gentleman away from home?"

"That's what we couldn't make out."

"I tell you I got it directly I had left you. He called you away
in order to burgle you too, of course!"

And Raffles stood smiling upon me in all. his incomparable radiance
and audacity.

"But why me?" I asked. "Why on earth should he burgle me?"

"My dear Bunny, we must leave something to the imagination of the
police. But we will assist them to a fact or two in due season.
It was the dead of night when Maguire first took us to his house;
it was at the Imperial Boxing Club we met him; and you meet queer
fish at the Imperial Boxing Club. You may remember that he
telephoned to his man to prepare supper for us, and that you and
he discussed telephones and treasure as we marched through the
midnight streets. He was certainly bucking about his trophies,
and for the sake of the argument you will be good enough to admit
that you probably bucked about yours. What happens? You are
overheard; you are followed; you are worked into the same scheme,
and robbed on the same night."

"And you really think this will meet the case?"

"I am quite certain of it, Bunny, so far as it rests wit us to
meet the case at all."

"Then give me another cigarette, my dear fellow, and let me push
on to Scotland Yard."

Raffles held up both hands in admiring horror. "Scotland Yard!"

"To give a false description of what you took from that drawer in
my wardrobe."

"A false description! Bunny, you have no more to learn from me.
Time was when I wouldn't have let you go there without me to
retrieve a lost umbrella - let alone a lost cause!"

And for once I was not sorry for Raffles to have the last unworthy
word, as he stood once more at his outer door and gayly waved me
down the stairs.

There was one deed of those days which deserved a place in our
original annals. It is the deed of which I am personally most
ashamed. I have traced the course of a score of felonies, from
their source in the brain of Raffles to their issue in his hands.
I have omitted all. mention of the one which emanated from my own
miserable mind. But in these supplementary memoirs, wherein I
pledged myself to extenuate nothing more that I might have to tell
of Raffles, it is only fair that I should make as clean a breast
of my own baseness. It was I, then, and I alone, who outraged
natural sentiment, and trampled the expiring embers of elementary
decency, by proposing and planning the raid upon my own old home.

I would not accuse myself the more vehemently by making excuses at
this point. Yet I feel bound to state that it was already many
years since the place had passed from our possession into that of
an utter alien, against whom I harbored a prejudice which was some
excuse in itself. He had enlarged and altered the dear old place
out of knowledge; nothing had been good enough for him as it stood
in our day. The man was a hunting maniac, and where my dear father
used to grow prize peaches under glass, this vandal was soon
stabling his hothouse thoroughbreds, which took prizes in their
turn at all. the country shows. It was a southern county, and I
never went down there without missing another greenhouse and noting
a corresponding extension to the stables. Not that I ever set foot
in the grounds from the day we left; but for some years I used to
visit old friends in the neighborhood, and could never resist the
temptation to reconnoiter the scenes of my childhood. And so far
as could be seen from the road - which it stood too near - the house
itself appeared to be the one thing that the horsey purchaser had
left much as he found it.

My only other excuse may be none at all. in any eyes but mine. It
was my passionate desire at this period to "keep up my end" with
Raffles in every department of the game felonious. He would insist
upon an equal division of all. proceeds; it was for me to earn my
share. So far I had been useful only at a pinch; the whole credit
of any real success belonged invariably to Raffles. It had always
been his idea. That was the tradition which I sought to end, and
no means could compare with that of my unscrupulous choice. There
was the one house in England of which I knew every inch, and Raffles
only what I told him. For once I must lead, and Raffles follow,
whether he liked it or not. He saw that himself; and I think he
liked it better than he liked me for the desecration in view; but
I had hardened my heart, and his feelings were too fine for actual
remonstrance on such a point.

I, in my obduracy, went to foul extremes. I drew plans of all. the
floors from memory. I actually descended upon my friends in the
neighborhood, with the sole object of obtaining snap-shots over our
own old garden wall. Even Raffles could not keep his eyebrows down
when I showed him the prints one morning in the Albany. But he
confined his open criticisms to the house.

"Built in the late 'sixties, I see," said Raffles, "or else very
early in the 'seventies."

"Exactly when it was built," I replied. "But that's worthy of a
sixpenny detective, Raffles! How on earth did you know?"

"That slate tower bang over the porch, with the dormer windows and
the iron railing and flagstaff atop makes us a present of the period.
You see them on almost every house of a certain size built about
thirty years ago. They are quite the most useless excrescences I
know."

"Ours wasn't," I answered, with some warmth. "It was my sanctum
sanctorum in the holidays. I smoked my first pipe up there, and
wrote my first verses."

Raffles laid a kindly hand upon my shoulder - "Bunny, Bunny, you
can rob the old place, and yet you can't hear a word against it?"

"That's different," said I relentlessly. "The tower was there in
my time, but the man I mean to rob was not."

"You really do mean to do it, Bunny?"

"By myself, if necessary? I averred.

"Not again, Bunny, not again," rejoined Raffles, laughing as he
shook his head. "But do you think the man has enough to make it
worth our while to go so far afield?"

"Far afield! It's not forty miles on the London and Brighton."

"Well, that's as bad as a hundred on most lines. And when did you
say it was to be?"

"Friday week."

"I don't much like a Friday, Bunny. Why make it one?"

"It's the night of their Hunt Point-to-Point. They wind up the
season with it every year; and the bloated Guillemard usually sweeps
the board with his fancy flyers."

"You mean the man in your old house?"

"Yes; and he tops up with no end of dinner there," I went on, "to
his hunting pals and the bloods who ride for him. If the festive
board doesn't groan under a new regiment of challenge cups, it will
be no fault of theirs, and old Guillemard will have to do them
top-hole all. the same."

"So it's a case of common pot-hunting," remarked Raffles, eyeing me
shrewdly through the cigarette smoke.

"Not for us, my dear fellow," I made answer in his own tone. "I
wouldn't ask you to break into the next set of chambers here in the
Albany for a few pieces of modern silver, Raffles. Not that we need
scorn the cups if we get a chance of lifting them, and if Guillemard
does so in the first instance. It's by no means certain that he will.
But it is pretty certain to be a lively night for him and his pals
- and a vulnerable one for the best bedroom!"

"Capital!" said Raffles, throwing coils of smoke between his smiles.
"Still, if it's a dinner-party, the hostess won't leave her jewels
upstairs. She'll wear them, my boy."

"Not all. of them, Raffles; she has far too many for that. Besides,
it isn't an ordinary dinner-party; they say Mrs. Guillemard is
generally the only lady there, and that she's quite charming in
herself. Now, no charming woman would clap on all. sail in jewels
for a roomful of fox-hunters."

"It depends what jewels she has."

"Well, she might wear her rope of pearls."

"I should have said so."

"And, of course, her rings."

"Exactly, Bunny."

"But not necessarily her diamond tiara - "

"Has she got one?"

" - and certainly not her emerald and diamond necklace on top of
all.!"

Raffles snatched the Sullivan from his lips, and his eyes burned
like its end.

"Bunny, do you mean to tell me there are all. these things?"

"Of course I do," said I. "They are rich people, and he's not
such a brute as to spend everything on his stable. Her jewels
are as much the talk as his hunters. My friends told me all.
about both the other day when I was down making inquiries. They
thought my curiosity as natural as my wish for a few snapshots of
the old place. In their opinion the emerald necklace alone must
be worth thousands of pounds."

Raffles rubbed his hands in playful pantomime.

"I only hope you didn't ask too many questions, Bunny! But if your
friends are such old friends, you will never enter their heads when
they hear what has happened, unless you are seen down there on the
night, which might be fatal. Your approach will require some
thought: if you like I can work out the shot for you. I shall go
down independently, and the best thing may be to meet outside the
house itself on the night of nights. But from that moment I am in
your hands."

And on these refreshing lines our plan of campaign was gradually
developed and elaborated into that finished study on which Raffles
would rely like any artist of the footlights. None were more
capable than he of coping with the occasion as it rose, of rising
himself with the emergency of the moment, of snatching a victory
from the very dust of defeat. Yet, for choice, every detail was
premeditated, and an alternative expedient at each finger's end for
as many bare and awful possibilities. In this case, however, the
finished study stopped short at the garden gate or wall; there I
was to assume command; and though Raffles carried the actual tools
of trade of which he alone was master, it was on the understanding
that for once I should control and direct their use.

I had gone down in evening-clothes by an evening train, but had
carefully overshot old landmarks, and alighted at a small station
some miles south of the one where I was still remembered. This
committed me to a solitary and somewhat lengthy tramp; but the
night was mild and starry, and I marched into it with a high
stomach; for this was to be no costume crime, and yet I should
have Raffles at my elbow all. the night. Long before I reached my
destination, indeed, he stood in wait for me on the white highway,
and we finished with linked arms.