Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman, E. W. Hornung [free e reader .TXT] 📗

as Raffles had said; but what would it profit me if some evil had befallen him? And now I was prepared for the worst. A boy came up whistling and leaving papers on the mats; it was getting on for eight o’clock, and the whiskey and soda of half-past twelve stood untouched and stagnant in the tumbler. If the worst had happened to Raffles, I felt that I would either never drink again, or else seldom do anything else.

Meanwhile I could not even break my fast, but roamed the flat in a misery not to be described, my very linen still unchanged, my cheeks and chin now tawny from the unwholesome night. How long would it go on? I wondered for a time. Then I changed my tune: how long could I endure it?

It went on actually until the forenoon only, but my endurance cannot be measured by the time, for to me every hour of it was an arctic night. Yet it cannot have been much after eleven when the ring came at the bell, which I had forgotten to tie up after all. But this was not the doctor; neither, too well I knew, was it the wanderer returned. Our bell was the pneumatic one that tells you if the touch be light or heavy; the hand upon it now was tentative and shy.

The owner of the hand I had never seen before. He was young and ragged, with one eye blank, but the other ablaze with some fell excitement. And straightway he burst into a low torrent of words, of which all I knew was that they were Italian, and therefore news of Raffles, if only I had known the language! But dumb-show might help us somewhat, and in I dragged him, though against his will, a new alarm in his one wild eye.

“Non capite?” he cried when I had him inside and had withstood the torrent.

“No, I’m bothered if I do!” I answered, guessing his question from his tone.

“Vostro amico,” he repeated over and over again; and then, “Poco tempo, poco tempo, poco tempo!”

For once in my life the classical education of my public-school days was of real value. “My pal, my pal, and no time to be lost!” I translated freely, and flew for my hat.

“Ecco, signore!” cried the fellow, snatching the watch from my waistcoat pocket, and putting one black thumb-nail on the long hand, the other on the numeral twelve. “Mezzogiorno—poco tempo—poco tempo!” And again I seized his meaning, that it was twenty past eleven, and we must be there by twelve. But where, but where? It was maddening to be summoned like this, and not to know what had happened, nor to have any means of finding out. But my presence of mind stood by me still, I was improving by seven-league strides, and I crammed my handkerchief between the drum and hammer of the bell before leaving. The doctor could ring now till he was black in the face, but I was not coming, and he need not think it.

I half expected to find a hansom waiting, but there was none, and we had gone some distance down the Earl’s Court Road before we got one; in fact, we had to run to the stand. Opposite is the church with the clock upon it, as everybody knows, and at sight of the dial my companion had wrung his hands; it was close upon the half-hour.

“Poco tempo—pochissimo!” he wailed. “Bloom-buree Ske-warr,” he then cried to the cabman—“numero trentotto!”

“Bloomsbury Square,” I roared on my own account, “I’ll show you the house when we get there, only drive like be-damned!”

My companion lay back gasping in his corner. The small glass told me that my own face was pretty red.

“A nice show!” I cried; “and not a word can you tell me. Didn’t you bring me a note?”

I might have known by this time that he had not, still I went through the pantomime of writing with my finger on my cuff. But he shrugged and shook his head.

“Niente,” said he. “Una quistione di vita, di vita!”

“What’s that?” I snapped, my early training come in again. “Say it slowly—andante—rallentando.”

Thank Italy for the stage instructions in the songs one used to murder! The fellow actually understood.

“Una—quistione—di—vita.”

“Or mors, eh?” I shouted, and up went the trap-door over our heads.

“Avanti, avanti, avanti!” cried the Italian, turning up his one-eyed face.

“Hell-to-leather,” I translated, “and double fare if you do it by twelve o’clock.”

But in the streets of London how is one to know the time? In the Earl’s Court Road it had not been half-past, and at Barker’s in High Street it was but a minute later. A long half-mile a minute, that was going like the wind, and indeed we had done much of it at a gallop. But the next hundred yards took us five minutes by the next clock, and which was one to believe? I fell back upon my own old watch (it was my own), which made it eighteen minutes to the hour as we swung across the Serpentine bridge, and by the quarter we were in the Bayswater Road—not up for once.

“Presto, presto,” my pale guide murmured. “Affretatevi—avanti!”

“Ten bob if you do it,” I cried through the trap, without the slightest notion of what we were to do. But it was “una quistione di vita,” and “vostro amico” must and could only be my miserable Raffles.

What a very godsend is the perfect hansom to the man or woman in a hurry! It had been our great good fortune to jump into a perfect hansom; there was no choice, we had to take the first upon the rank, but it must have deserved its place with the rest nowhere. New tires, superb springs, a horse in a thousand, and a driver up to every trick of his trade! In and out we went like a fast half-back at the Rugby game, yet where the traffic was thinnest, there were we. And how he knew his way! At the Marble Arch he slipped out of the main stream, and so into Wigmore Street, then up and in and out and on until I saw the gold tips of the Museum palisade gleaming between the horse’s ears in the sun. Plop, plop, plop; ting, ling, ling; bell and horse-shoes, horse-shoes and bell, until the colossal figure of C. J. Fox in a grimy toga spelt Bloomsbury Square with my watch still wanting three minutes to the hour.

“What number?” cried the good fellow over-head.

“Trentotto, trentotto,” said my guide, but he was looking to the right, and I bundled him out to show the house on foot. I had not half-a-sovereign after all, but I flung our dear driver a whole one instead, and only wish that it had been a hundred.

Already the Italian had his latch-key in the door of 38, and in another moment we were rushing up the narrow stairs of as dingy a London house as prejudiced countryman can conceive. It was panelled, but it was dark and evil-smelling, and how we should have found our way even to the stairs but for an unwholesome jet of yellow gas in the hall, I cannot myself imagine. However, up we went pell-mell, to the right-about on the half-landing, and so like a whirlwind into the drawing-room a few steps higher. There the gas was also burning behind closed shutters, and the scene is photographed upon my brain, though I cannot have looked upon it for a whole instant as I sprang in at my leader’s heels.

This room also was panelled, and in the middle of the wall on our left, his hands lashed to a ring-bolt high above his head, his toes barely touching the floor, his neck pinioned by a strap passing through smaller ring-bolts under either ear, and every inch of him secured on the same principle, stood, or rather hung, all that was left of Raffles, for at the first glance I believed him dead. A black ruler gagged him, the ends lashed behind his neck, the blood upon it caked to bronze in the gaslight. And in front of him, ticking like a sledge-hammer, its only hand upon the stroke of twelve, stood a simple, old-fashioned, grandfather’s clock—but not for half an instant longer—only until my guide could hurl himself upon it and send the whole thing crashing into the corner. An ear-splitting report accompanied the crash, a white cloud lifted from the fallen clock, and I saw a revolver smoking in a vice screwed below the dial, an arrangement of wires sprouting from the dial itself, and the single hand at once at its zenith and in contact with these.

“Tumble to it, Bunny?”

He was alive; these were his first words; the Italian had the blood-caked ruler in his hand, and with his knife was reaching up to cut the thongs that lashed the hands. He was not tall enough, I seized him and lifted him up, then fell to work with my own knife upon the straps. And Raffles smiled faintly upon us through his blood-stains.

“I want you to tumble to it,” he whispered; “the neatest thing in revenge I ever knew, and another minute would have fixed it. I’ve been waiting for it twelve hours, watching the clock round, death at the end of the lap! Electric connection. Simple enough. Hour-hand only—O Lord!”

We had cut the last strap. He could not stand. We supported him between us to a horsehair sofa, for the room was furnished, and I begged him not to speak, while his one-eyed deliverer was at the door before Raffles recalled him with a sharp word in Italian.

“He wants to get me a drink, but that can wait,” said he, in firmer voice; “I shall enjoy it the more when I’ve told you what happened. Don’t let him go, Bunny; put your back against the door. He’s a decent soul, and it’s lucky for me I got a word with him before they trussed me up. I’ve promised to set him up in life, and I will, but I don’t want him out of my sight for the moment.”

“If you squared him last night,” I exclaimed, “why the blazes didn’t he come to me till the eleventh hour?”

“Ah, I knew he’d have to cut it fine though I hoped not quite so fine as all that. But all’s well that ends well, and I declare I don’t feel so much the worse. I shall be sore about the gills for a bit—and what do you think?”

He pointed to the long black ruler with the bronze stain; it lay upon the floor; he held out his hand for it, and I gave it to him.

“The same one I gagged him with,” said Raffles, with his still ghastly smile; “he was a bit of an artist, old Corbucci, after all!”

“Now let’s hear how you fell into his clutches,” said I, briskly, for I was as anxious to hear as he seemed to tell me, only for my part I could have waited until we were safe in the flat.

“I do want to get it off my chest, Bunny,” old Raffles admitted, “and yet I hardly can tell you after all. I followed your friend with the velvet eyes. I followed him all the way here. Of course I came up to have a good look at the house when he’d let himself in, and damme if he hadn’t left the door ajar! Who could resist that? I had pushed it half open and had just one foot on the mat when I got such a crack on the head as I hope never to get again. When I came to my wits they were hauling me up to that ring-bolt by the hands, and old Corbucci himself was bowing to me, but how he got here I don’t know yet.”

“I can tell you that,” said I, and told how I had seen the Count for myself on the pavement underneath our windows. “Moreover,” I continued, “I saw him spot you, and five minutes after in Earl’s Court Road I was told he’d driven off in a cab. He would see you following his man, drive home ahead, and catch you by having the door left open in the way you describe.”

“Well,” said Raffles, “he deserved to catch me somehow, for he’d come from Naples on purpose, ruler and all, and the ring-bolts were ready fixed, and even this house taken furnished for nothing else! He meant catching me before he’d done, and scoring me off in exactly the same way that I scored off him, only going one better of course. He told me so himself, sitting where I am sitting now, at three o’clock this morning, and smoking a most abominable cigar that I’ve smelt ever