E. W. Hornung_A J Raffles 03 (6 page)

"You let me think he was in the air again," I said. "But it wouldn't
surprise me to find that you had never heard of him since the day of
his escape through your window."

"I never even thought of him, Bunny, until you came to see me the
day before yesterday, and put him into my head with your first words.
The whole point was to make you as genuinely anxious about the plate
as you must have seemed all. along the line."

"Of course I see your point," I rejoined; "but mine is that you
labored it. You needn't have written me a downright lie about the
fellow."

"Nor did I, Bunny."

"Not about the 'prince of professors' being 'in the offing' when
you left?"

"My dear Bunny, but so he was!" cried Raffles. "Time was when I
was none too pure an amateur. But after this I take leave to
consider myself a professor of the professors. And I should like
to see one more capable of skippering their side!"

I had not seen Raffles for a month or more, and I was sadly in need
of his advice. My life was being made a burden to me by a wretch
who had obtained a bill of sale over the furniture in Mount Street,
and it was only by living elsewhere that I could keep the vulpine
villain from my door. This cost ready money, and my balance at the
bank was sorely in need of another lift from Raffles. Yet, had he
been in my shoes, he could not have vanished more effectually than
he had done, both from the face of the town and from the ken of all.
who knew him.

It was late in August; he never played first-class cricket after
July, when, a scholastic understudy took his place in the Middlesex
eleven. And in vain did I scour my Field and my Sportsman for the
country-house matches with which he wilfully preferred to wind up
the season; the matches were there, but never the magic name of A.
J. Raffles. Nothing was known of him at the Albany; he had left no
instructions about his letters, either there or at the club. I
began to fear that some evil had overtaken him. I scanned the
features of captured criminals in the illustrated Sunday papers;
on each occasion I breathed again; nor was anything worthy of Raffles
going on. I will not deny that I was less anxious on his account
than on my own. But it was a double relief to me when he gave a
first characteristic sign of life.

I had called at the Albany for the fiftieth time, and returned to
Piccadilly in my usual despair, when a street sloucher sidled up to
me in furtive fashion and inquired if my name was what it is.

"'Cause this 'ere's for you," he rejoined to my affirmative, and
with that I felt a crumpled note in my palm.

It was from Raffles. I smoothed out the twisted scrap of paper,
and on it were just a couple of lines in pencil:

"Meet me in Holland Walk at dark to-night.
Walk up and down till
I come. A. J. R."

That was all.! Not another syllable after all. these weeks, and the
few words scribbled in a wild caricature of his scholarly and
dainty hand! I was no longer to be alarmed by this sort of thing;
it was all. so like the Raffles I loved least; and to add to my
indignation, when at length I looked up from the mysterious missive,
the equally mysterious messenger had disappeared in a manner worthy
of the whole affair. He was, however, the first creature I espied
under the tattered trees of Holland Walk that evening.

"Seen 'im yet?" he inquired confidentially, blowing a vile cloud
from his horrid pipe.

"No, I haven't; and I want to know where you've seen him," I replied
sternly. "Why did you run away like that the moment you had given
me his note?"

"Orders, orders," was the reply. "I ain't such a juggins as to go
agen a toff as makes it worf while to do as I'm bid an' 'old me
tongue."

"And who may you be?" I asked jealously. "And what are you to Mr.
Raffles?"

"You silly ass, Bunny, don't tell all. Kensington that I'm in town!"
replied my tatterdemalion, shooting up and smoothing out into a
merely shabby Raffles. "Here, take my arm - I'm not so beastly as
I look. But neither am I in town, nor in England, nor yet on the
face of the earth, for all. that's known of me to a single soul but
you."

"Then where are you," I asked, "between ourselves?"

"I've taken a house near here for the holidays, where I'm going
in for a Rest Cure of my own description. Why? Oh, for lots of
reasons, my dear Bunny; among others, I have long had a wish to
grow my own beard; under the next lamppost you will agree that
it's training on very nicely. Then, you mayn't know it, but there's
a canny man at Scotland Yard who has had a quiet eye on me longer
than I like. I thought it about time to have an eye on him, and I
stared him in the face outside the Albany this very morning. That
was when I saw you go in, and scribbled a line to give you when you
came out. If he had caught us talking he would have spotted me at
once."

"So you are lying low out here!"

"I prefer to call it my Rest Cure," returned Raffles, "and it's
really nothing else. I've got a furnished house at a time when no
one else would have dreamed of taking one in town; and my very
neighbors don't know I'm there, though I'm bound to say there are
hardly any of them at home. I don't keep a servant, and do
everything for myself. It's the next best fun to a desert island.
Not that I make much work, for I'm really resting, but I haven't
done so much solid reading for years. Rather a joke, Bunny: the
man whose house I've taken is one of her Majesty's inspectors of
prisons, and his study's a storehouse of criminology. It has been
quite amusing to lie on one's back and have a good look at one's
self as others fondly imagine they see one."

"But surely you get some exercise?" I asked; for he was leading me
at a good rate through the leafy byways of Camp den Hill; and his
step was as springy and as light as ever.

"The best exercise I ever had in my life," said Raffles; "and you
would never live to guess what it is. It's one of the reasons why
I went in for this seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn
out about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King's Cross;
that is, of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run
my three or four miles for a bob or less. And it not only keeps
you in the very pink: if you're good they let you carry the trunks
up-stairs; and I've taken notes from the inside of more than one
commodious residence which will come in useful in the autumn. In
fact, Bunny, what with these new Rowton houses, my beard, and my
otherwise well-spent holiday, I hope to have quite a good autumn
season before the erratic Raffles turns up in town."

I felt it high time to wedge in a word about my own far less
satisfactory affairs. But it was not necessary for me to recount
half my troubles. Raffles could be as full of himself as many a
worse man, and I did not like his society the less for these human
outpourings. They had rather the effect of putting me on better
terms with myself, through bringing him down to my level for the
time being. But his egoism was not even skin-deep; it was rather
a cloak, which Raffles could cast off quicker than any man I ever
knew, as he did not fail to show me now.

"Why, Bunny, this is the very thing!" he cried. "You must come and
stay with me, and we'll lie low side by side. Only remember it
really is a Rest Cure. I want to keep literally as quiet as I was
without you. What do you say to forming ourselves at once into a
practically Silent Order? You agree? Very well, then, here's the
street and that's the house."

It was ever such a quiet little street, turning out of one of those
which climb right over the pleasant hill. One side was monopolized
by the garden wall of an ugly but enviable mansion standing in its
own ground; opposite were a solid file of smaller but taller houses;
on neither side were there many windows alight, nor a solitary soul
on the pavement or in the road. Raffles led the way to one of the
small tall houses. It stood immediately behind a lamppost, and I
could not but notice that a love-lock of Virginia creeper was
trailing almost to the step, and that the bow-window on the ground
floor was closely shuttered. Raffles admitted himself with his
latch-key, and I squeezed past him into a very narrow hall. I did
not hear him shut the door, but we were no longer in the lamplight,
and he pushed softly past me in his turn.

"I'll get a light," he muttered as he went; but to let him pass I
had leaned against some electric switches, and while 'his back was
turned I tried one of these without thinking. In an instant hall
and staircase were flooded with light; in another Raffles was upon
me in a fury, and, all. was dark once more. He had not said a word,
but I heard him breathing through his teeth.

Nor was there anything to tell me now. The mere flash of electric
light upon a hail of chaos and uncarpeted stairs, and on the face
of Raffles as he sprang to switch it off, had been enough even
for me.

"So this is how you have taken the house," said I in his own
undertone. "'Taken' is good; 'taken' is beautiful!"

"Did you think I'd done it through an agent?" he snarled. "Upon my
word, Bunny, I did you the credit of supposing you saw the joke all.
the time!"

"Why shouldn't you take a house," I asked, "and pay for it?"

"Why should I," he retorted, "within three miles of the Albany?
Besides, I should have had no peace; and I meant every word I said
about my Rest Cure."

"You are actually staying in a house where you've broken in to
steal?"

"Not to steal, Bunny! I haven't stolen a thing. But staying here
I certainly am, and having the most complete rest a busy man could
wish."

"There'll be no rest for me!"

Raffles laughed as he struck a match. I had followed him into what
would have been the back drawing-room in the ordinary little London
house; the inspector of prisons had converted it into a separate
study by filling the folding doors with book-shelves, which I scanned
at once for the congenial works of which Raffles had spoken. I was
not able to carry my examination very far. Raffles had lighted a
candle, stuck (by its own grease) in the crown of an opera hat, which
he opened the moment the wick caught. The light thus struck the
ceiling in an oval shaft, which left the rest of the room almost as
dark as it had been before.

"Sorry, Bunny!" said Raffles, sitting on one pedestal of a desk from
which the top had been removed, and setting his makeshift lantern on
the other. "In broad daylight, when it can't be spotted from the
outside, you shall have as much artificial light as you like. If
you want to do some writing, that's the top of the desk on end
against the mantlepiece. You'll never have a better chance so far
as interruption goes. But no midnight oil or electricity! You
observe that their last care was to fix up these shutters; they
appear to have taken the top off the desk to get at 'em without
standing on it; but the beastly things wouldn't go all. the way up,
and the strip they leave would give us away to the backs of the other
houses if we lit up after dark. Mind that telephone! If you touch
the receiver they will know at the exchange that the house is not
empty, and I wouldn't put it past the colonel to have told them
exactly how long he was going to be away. He's pretty particular:
look at the strips of paper to keep the dust off his precious books!"

"Is he a colonel?" I asked, perceiving that Raffles referred to the
absentee householder.

"Of sappers," he replied, "and a V.C. into the bargain, confound him!
Got it at Rorke's Drift; prison governor or inspector ever since;
favorite recreation, what do you think? Revolver shooting! You can
read all. about him in his own Who's Who. A devil of a chap to tackle,
Bunny, when he's at home!"

"And where is he now?" I asked uneasily. And do you know he isn't
on his way home?"

"Switzerland," replied Raffles, chuckling; "he wrote one too many
labels, and was considerate enough to leave it behind for our
guidance. Well, no one ever comes back from Switzerland at the
beginning of September, you know; and nobody ever thinks of coming
back before the servants. When they turn up they won't get in. I
keep the latch jammed, but the servants will think it's jammed
itself, and while they're gone for the locksmith we shall walk out
like gentlemen - if we haven't done so already."

"As you walked in, I suppose?"

Raffles shook his head in the dim light to which my sight was
growing inured.

"No, Bunny, I regret to say I came in through the dormer window.
They were painting next door but one. I never did like ladder work,
but it takes less time than in picking a lock in the broad light of
a street lamp."

"So they left you a latch-key as well as everything else!"

"No, Bunny. I was just able to make that for myself. I am playing
at 'Robinson Crusoe,' not 'The Swiss Family Robinson.' And now, my
dear Friday, if you will kindly take off those boots, we can explore
the island before we turn in for the night."

The stairs were very steep and narrow, and they creaked alarmingly
as Raffles led the way up, with the single candle in the crown of
the colonel's hat. He blew it out before we reached the half-landing,
where a naked window stared upon the backs of the houses in the next
road, but lit it again at the drawing-room door. I just peeped in
upon a semi-grand swathed in white and a row of water colors mounted
in gold. An excellent bathroom broke our journey to the second
floor.

"I'll have one to-night," said I, taking heart of a luxury unknown
in my last sordid sanctuary.

"You'll do no such thing," snapped Raffles. "Have the goodness to
remember that our island is one of a group inhabited by hostile
tribes. You can fill the bath quietly if you try, but it empties
under the study window, and makes the very devil of a noise about
it. No, Bunny, I bale out every drop and pour it away through the
scullery sink, so you will kindly consult me before you turn a tap.
Here's your room; hold the light outside while I draw the curtains;
it's the old chap's dressing-room. Now you can bring the glim.
How's that for a jolly wardrobe? And look at his coats on their
cross-trees inside: dapper old dog, shouldn't you say? Mark the
boots on the shelf above, and the little brass rail for his ties!
Didn't I tell you he was particular? And wouldn't he simply love
to catch us at his kit?"