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

“You’ll be interested to hear, Bunny,” said he, “that I am now living in Seven Dials, and Bill Sikes couldn’t hold a farthing dip to me. Bless you, she had my old police record at her fingers’ ends, but it was fit to frame compared with the one I gave her. I had sunk as low as they dig. I divided my nights between the open parks and a thieves’ kitchen in Seven Dials. If I was decently dressed it was because I had stolen the suit down the Thames Valley beat the night before last. I was on my way back when first that sleepy square, and then her open window, proved too much for me. You should have heard me beg her to let me push on to the devil in my own way; there I spread myself, for I meant every word; but I swore the final stage would be a six-foot drop.”

“You did lay it on,” said I.

“It was necessary, and that had its effect. She let me go. But at the last moment she said she didn’t believe I was so black as I painted myself, and then there was the balcony scene you missed.”

So that was all. I could not help telling him that he had got out of it better than he deserved for ever getting in. Next moment I regretted the remark.

“If I have got out of it,” said Raffles, doubtfully. “We are dreadfully near neighbors, and I can’t move in a minute, with old Theobald taking a grave view of my case. I suppose I had better lie low, and thank the gods again for putting her off the scent for the time being.”

No doubt our conversation was carried beyond this point, but it certainly was not many minutes later, nor had we left the subject, when the electric bell thrilled us both to a sudden silence.

“The doctor?” I queried, hope fighting with my horror.

“It was a single ring.”

“The last post?”

“You know he knocks, and it’s long past his time.”

The electric bell rang again, but now as though it never would stop.

“You go, Bunny,” said Raffles, with decision. His eyes were sparkling. His smile was firm.

“What am I to say?”

“If it’s the lady let her in.”

It was the lady, still in her evening cloak, with her fine dark head half-hidden by the hood, and an engaging contempt of appearances upon her angry face. She was even handsomer than I had thought, and her beauty of a bolder type, but she was also angrier than I had anticipated when I came so readily to the door. The passage into which it opened was an exceedingly narrow one, as I have often said, but I never dreamt of barring this woman’s way, though not a word did she stoop to say to me. I was only too glad to flatten myself against the wall, as the rustling fury strode past me into the lighted room with the open door.

“So this is your thieves’ kitchen!” she cried, in high-pitched scorn.

I was on the threshold myself, and Raffles glanced towards me with raised eyebrows.

“I have certainly had better quarters in my day,” said he, “but you need not call them absurd names before my man.”

“Then send your ‘man’ about his business,” said Jacques Saillard, with an unpleasant stress upon the word indicated.

But when the door was shut I heard Raffles assuring her that I knew nothing, that he was a real invalid overcome by a sudden mad temptation, and all he had told her of his life a lie to hide his whereabouts, but all he was telling her now she could prove for herself without leaving that building. It seemed, however, that she had proved it already by going first to the porter below stairs. Yet I do not think she cared one atom which story was the truth.

“So you thought I could pass you in your chair,” she said, “or ever in this world again, without hearing from my heart that it was you!”

“Bunny,” said Raffles, “I’m awfully sorry, old chap, but you’ve got to go.”

It was some weeks since the first untimely visitation of Jacques Saillard, but there had been many others at all hours of the day, while Raffles had been induced to pay at least one to her studio in the neighboring square. These intrusions he had endured at first with an air of humorous resignation which imposed upon me less than he imagined. The woman meant well, he said, after all, and could be trusted to keep his secret loyally. It was plain to me, however, that Raffles did not trust her, and that his pretence upon the point was a deliberate pose to conceal the extent to which she had him in her power. Otherwise there would have been little point in hiding anything from the one person in possession of the cardinal secret of his identity.

But Raffles thought it worth his while to hoodwink Jacques Saillard in the subsidiary matter of his health, in which Dr. Theobald lent him unwitting assistance, and, as we have seen, to impress upon her that I was actually his attendant, and as ignorant of his past as the doctor himself. “So you’re all right, Bunny,” he had assured me; “she thinks you knew nothing the other night. I told you she wasn’t a clever woman outside her work. But hasn’t she a will!” I told Raffles it was very considerate of him to keep me out of it, but that it seemed to me like tying up the bag when the cat had escaped. His reply was an admission that one must be on the defensive with such a woman and in such a case. Soon after this, Raffles, looking far from well, fell back upon his own last line of defence, namely, his bed; and now, as always in the end, I could see some sense in his subtleties, since it was comparatively easy for me to turn even Jacques Saillard from the door, with Dr. Theobald’s explicit injunctions, and with my own honesty unquestioned. So for a day we had peace once more. Then came letters, then the doctor again and again, and finally my dismissal in the incredible words which have necessitated these explanations.

“Go?” I echoed. “Go where?”

“It’s that ass Theobald,” said Raffles. “He insists.”

“On my going altogether?”

He nodded.

“And you mean to let him have his way?”

I had no language for my mortification and disgust, though neither was as yet quite so great as my surprise. I had foreseen almost every conceivable consequence of the mad act which brought all this trouble to pass, but a voluntary division between Raffles and me had certainly never entered my calculations. Nor could I think that it had occurred to him before our egregious doctor’s last visit, this very morning. Raffles had looked irritated as he broke the news to me from his pillow, and now there was some sympathy in the way he sat up in bed, as though he felt the thing himself.

“I am obliged to give in to the fellow,” said he. “He’s saving me from my friend, and I’m bound to humor him. But I can tell you that we’ve been arguing about you for the last half hour, Bunny. It was no use; the idiot has had his knife in you from the first; and he wouldn’t see me through on any other conditions.”

“So he is going to see you through, is he?”

“It tots up to that,” said Raffles, looking at me rather hard. “At all events he has come to my rescue for the time being, and it’s for me to manage the rest. You don’t know what it has been, Bunny, these last few weeks; and gallantry forbids that I should tell you even now. But would you rather elope against your will, or have your continued existence made known to the world in general and the police in particular? That is practically the problem which I have had to solve, and the temporary solution was to fall ill. As a matter of fact, I am ill; and now what do you think? I owe it to you to tell you, Bunny, though it goes against the grain. She would take me ‘to the dear, warm underworld, where the sun really shines,’ and she would ‘nurse me back to life and love!’ The artistic temperament is a fearsome thing, Bunny, in a woman with the devil’s own will!”

Raffles tore up the letter from which he had read these piquant extracts, and lay back on the pillows with the tired air of the veritable invalid which he seemed able to assume at will. But for once he did look as though bed was the best place for him; and I used the fact as an argument for my own retention in defiance of Dr. Theobald. The town was full of typhoid, I said, and certainly that autumnal scourge was in the air. Did he want me to leave him at the very moment when he might be sickening for a serious illness?

“You know I don’t, my good fellow,” said Raffles, wearily; “but Theobald does, and I can’t afford to go against him now. Not that I really care what happens to me now that that woman knows I’m in the land of the living; she’ll let it out, to a dead certainty, and at the best there’ll be a hue and cry, which is the very thing I have escaped all these years. Now, what I want you to do is to go and take some quiet place somewhere, and then let me know, so that I may have a port in the storm when it breaks.”

“Now you’re talking!” I cried, recovering my spirits. “I thought you meant to go and drop a fellow altogether!”

“Exactly the sort of thing you would think,” rejoined Raffles, with a contempt that was welcome enough after my late alarm. “No, my dear rabbit, what you’ve got to do is to make a new burrow for us both. Try down the Thames, in some quiet nook that a literary man would naturally select. I’ve often thought that more use might be made of a boat, while the family are at dinner, than there ever has been yet. If Raffles is to come to life, old chap, he shall go a-Raffling for all he’s worth! There’s something to be done with a bicycle, too. Try Ham Common or Roehampton, or some such sleepy hollow a trifle off the line; and say you’re expecting your brother from the colonies.”

Into this arrangement I entered without the slightest hesitation, for we had funds enough to carry it out on a comfortable scale, and Raffles placed a sufficient share at my disposal for the nonce. Moreover, I for one was only too glad to seek fresh fields and pastures new—a phrase which I determined to interpret literally in my choice of fresh surroundings. I was tired of our submerged life in the poky little flat, especially now that we had money enough for better things. I myself of late had dark dealings with the receivers, with the result that poor Lord Ernest Belville’s successes were now indeed ours. Subsequent complications had been the more galling on that account, while the wanton way in which they had been created was the most irritating reflection of all. But it had brought its own punishment upon Raffles, and I fancied the lesson would prove salutary when we again settled down.

“If ever we do, Bunny!” said he, as I took his hand and told him how I was already looking forward to the time.

“But of course we will!” I cried, concealing the resentment at leaving him which his tone and his appearance renewed in my breast.

“I’m not so sure of it,” he said, gloomily. “I’m in somebody’s clutches, and I’ve got to get out of them first.”

“I’ll sit tight until you do.”

“Well,” he said, “if you don’t see me in ten days you never will.”

“Only ten days?” I echoed. “That’s nothing at all.”

“A lot may happen in ten days,” replied Raffles, in the same depressing tone, so very depressing in him; and with that he held out his hand a second time, and dropped mine suddenly after as sudden a pressure for farewell.

I left the flat in considerable dejection after all, unable to decide whether Raffles was really ill, or only worried as I knew him to be. And at the foot of the stairs the author of my dismissal, that confounded Theobald, flung open his door and waylaid me.

“Are you going?” he demanded.

The traps in my hands proclaimed that I was, but I dropped them at his feet to have it out with him then and there.

“Yes,” I answered fiercely, “thanks