E. W. Hornung_A J Raffles 03 (24 page)

"How and when, Bunny, you know as well as I do," said he,
cryptically. "And at last you shall hear the honest why and
wherefore. I had more reasons for going to Scotland Yard, my dear
fellow, than I had the face to tell you at the time."

"I don't care why you went there!" I cried. "I want to know why
you stayed, or went back, or whatever it was you may have done. I
thought they had got you, and you had given them the slip!"

Raffles smiled as he shook his head.

"No, no, Bunny; I prolonged the visit, as I paid it, of my own
accord. As for my reasons, they are far too many for me to tell
you them all.; they rather weighed upon me as I walked out; but
you'll see them for yourself if you turn round."

I was standing with my back to the chair in which I had been asleep;
behind the chair was the round lodging-house table; and there,
reposing on the cloth with the whiskey and sandwiches, was the whole
collection of Raffles Relics which had occupied the lid of the
silver-chest in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard! The chest alone
was missing. There was the revolver that I had only once heard
fired, and there the blood-stained life-preserver, brace-and-bit,
bottle of rock-oil, velvet bag, rope-ladder, walking-stick, gimlets,
wedges, and even the empty cartridge-case which had once concealed
the gift of a civilized monarch to a potentate of color.

"I was a real Father Christmas," said Raffles, "when I arrived.
It's a pity you weren't awake to appreciate the scene. It was
more edifying than the one I found. You never caught me asleep in
my chair, Bunny!"

He thought I had merely fallen asleep in my chair! He could not
see that I had been sitting up for him all. night long! The hint
of a temperance homily, on top of all. I had borne, and from Raffles
of all. mortal men, tried my temper to its last limit - but a flash
of late enlightenment enabled me just to keep it.

"Where did you hide?" I asked grimly.

"At the Yard itself."

"So I gather; but whereabouts at the Yard?"

"Can you ask, Bunny?"

"I am asking."

"It's where I once hid before."

"You don't mean in the chest?"

"I do."

Our eyes met for a minute.

"You may have ended up there," I conceded. "But where did you go
first when you slipped out behind my back, and how the devil did
you know where to go?"

"I never did slip out," said Raffles, "behind your back. I slipped
in."

"Into the chest?"

"Exactly."

I burst out laughing in his face.

"My dear fellow, I saw all. these things on the lid just afterward.
Not one of them was moved. I watched that detective show them to
his friends."

"And I heard him."

"But not from the inside of the chest?"

"From the inside of the chest, Bunny. Don't look like that - it's
foolish. Try to recall a few words that went before, between the
idiot in the collar and me. Don't you remember my asking him if
there was anything in the chest?"

"Yes."

"One had to be sure it was empty, you see. Then I asked if there
was a backdoor to the chest as well as a skylight."

"I remember."

"I suppose you thought all. that meant nothing?"

"I didn't look for a meaning."

"You wouldn't; it would never occur to you that I might want to
find out whether anybody at the Yard had found out that there was
something precisely in the nature of a sidedoor - it isn't a
backdoor - to that chest. Well, there is one; there was one soon
after I took the chest back from your rooms to mine, in the good
old days. You push one of the handles down - which no one ever
does - and the whole of that end opens like the front of a doll's
house. I saw that was what I ought to have done at first: it's
so much simpler than the trap at the top; and one likes to get a
thing perfect for its own sake. Besides, the trick had not been
spotted at the bank, and I thought I might bring it off again
some day; meanwhile, in one's bedroom, with lots of things on top,
what a port in a sudden squall!"

I asked why I had never heard of the improvement before, not so
much at the time it was made, but in these later days, when there
were fewer secrets between us, and this one could avail him no more.
But I did not put the question out of pique. I put it out of sheer
obstinate incredulity. And Raffles looked at me without replying,
until I read the explanation in his look.

"I see," I said. "You used to get into it to hide from me!"

"My dear Bunny, I am not always a very genial man," he answered;
"but when you let me have a key of your rooms I could not very
well refuse you one of mine, although I picked your pocket of it
in the end. I will only say that when I had no wish to see you,
Bunny, I must have been quite unfit for human society, and it was
the act of a friend to deny you mine. I don't think it happened
more than once or twice. You can afford to forgive a fellow after
all. these years?

"That, yes," I replied bitterly; "but not this, Raffles."

"Why not? I really hadn't made up my mind to do what I did. I
had merely thought of it. It was that smart officer in the same
room that made me do it without thinking twice."

"And we never even heard you!" I murmured, in a voice of involuntary
admiration which vexed me with myself. "But we might just as well!"
I was as quick to add in my former tone.

"Why, Bunny?"

"We shall be traced in no time through our ticket of admission."

"Did they collect it?"

"No; but you heard how very few are issued."

"Exactly. They sometimes go weeks on end without a regular visitor.
It was I who extracted that piece of information, Bunny, and I did
nothing rash until I had. Don't you see that with any luck it will
be two or three weeks before they are likely to discover their loss?"

I was beginning to see.

"And then, pray, how are they going to bring it home to us? Why
should they even suspect us, Bunny? I left early; that's all. I did.
You took my departure admirably; you couldn't have said more or
less if I had coached you myself. I relied on you, Bunny, and you
never more completely justified my confidence. The sad thing is
that you have ceased to rely on me. Do you really think that I
would leave the place in such a state that the first person who came
in with a duster would see that there had been a robbery?"

I denied the thought with all. energy, though it perished only as I
spoke.

"Have you forgotten the duster that was over these things, Bunny?
Have you forgotten all. the other revolvers and life preservers that
there were to choose from? I chose most carefully, and I replaced
my relics with a mixed assortment of other people's which really
look just as well. The rope-ladder that now supplants mine is, of
course, no patch upon it, but coiled up on the chest it really looks
much the same. To be sure, there was no second velvet bag; but I
replaced my stick with another quite like it, and I even found an
empty cartridge to understudy the setting of the Polynesian pearl.
You see the sort of fellow they have to show people round: do you
think he's the kind to see the difference next time, or to connect
it with us if he does? One left much the same things, lying much
as he left them, under a dust-sheet which is only taken off for
the benefit of the curious, who often don't turn up for weeks on
end."

I admitted that we might be safe for three or four weeks. Raffles
held out his hand.

"Then let us be friends about it, Bunny, and smoke the cigarette
of Sullivan and peace! A lot may happen in three or four weeks;
and what should you say if this turned out to be the last as well
as the least of all. my crimes? I must own that it seems to me
their natural and fitting end, though I might have stopped more
characteristically than with a mere crime of sentiment. No, I
make no promises, Bunny; now I have got these things, I may be
unable to resist using them once more. But with this war one gets
all. the excitement one requires - and rather more than usual may
happen in three or four weeks?"

Was he thinking even then of volunteering for the front? Had he
already set his heart on the one chance of some atonement for his
life - nay, on the very death he was to die? I never knew, and
shall never know. Yet his words were strangely prophetic, even to
the three or four weeks in which those events happened that
imperilled the fabric of our empire, and rallied her sons from the
four winds to fight beneath her banner on the veldt. It all. seems
very ancient history now. But I remember nothing better or more
vividly than the last words of Raffles upon his last crime, unless
it be the pressure of his hand as he said them, or the rather sad
twinkle in his tired eyes.

The last of all these tales of Raffles is from a fresher and a
sweeter pen. I give it exactly as it came to me, in a letter which
meant more to me than it can possibly mean to any other reader.
And yet, it may stand for something with those for whom these pale
reflections have a tithe of the charm that the real man had for me;
and it is to leave such persons thinking yet a little better of him
(and not wasting another thought on me) that I am permitted to
retail the very last word about their hero and mine.

The letter was my first healing after a chance encounter and a
sleepless night; and I print every word of it except the last.

"39 CAMPDEN GROVE COURT, W.,
"June 28, 1900.

"DEAR HARRY: You may have wondered at the very few words I could
find to say to you when we met so strangely yesterday. I did not
mean to be unkind. I was grieved to see you so cruelly hurt and
lame. I could not grieve when at last I made you tell me how it
happened. I honor and envy every man of you - every name in those
dreadful lists that fill the papers every day. But I knew about
Mr. Raffles, and I did not know about you, and there was something
I longed to tell you about him, something I could not tell you in
a minute in the street, or indeed by word of mouth at all. That
is why I asked you for your address.

"You said I spoke as if I had known Mr. Raffles. Of course I
have often seen him playing cricket, and heard about him and you.
But I only once met him, and that was the night after you and I
met last. I have always supposed that you knew all. about our
meeting. Yesterday I could see that you knew nothing. So I
have made up my mind to tell you every word.

"That night - I mean the next night - they were all. going out to
several places, but I stayed behind at Palace Gardens. I had
gone up to the drawing-room after dinner, and was just putting on
the lights, when in walked Mr. Raffles from the balcony. I knew
him at once, because I happened to have watched him make his
hundred at Lord's only the day before. He seemed surprised that
no one had told me he was there, but the whole thing was such a
surprise that I hardly thought of that. I am afraid I must say
that it was not a very pleasant surprise. I felt instinctively
that he had come from you, and I confess that for the moment it
made me very angry indeed. Then in a breath he assured me that
you knew nothing of his coming, that you would never have allowed
him to come, but that he had taken it upon himself as your intimate
friend and one who would be mine as well. (I said that I would
tell you every word.)

"Well, we stood looking at each other for some time, and I was never
more convinced of anybody's straightness and sincerity; but he was
straight and sincere with me, and true to you that night, whatever
he may have been before and after. So I asked him why he had come,
and what had happened; and he said it was not what had happened, but
what might happen next; so I asked him if he was thinking of you,
and he just nodded, and told me that I knew very well what you had
done. But I began to wonder whether Mr. Raffles himself knew, and
I tried to get him to tell me what you had done, and he said I knew
as well as he did that you were one of the two men who had come to
the house the night before. I took some time to answer. I was
quite mystified by his manner. At last I asked him how he knew. I
can hear his answer now.

"'Because I was the other man,' he said quite quietly; 'because I
led him blindfold into the whole business, and would rather pay the
shot than see poor Bunny suffer for it.'

"Those were his words, but as he said them he made their meaning
clear by going over to the bell, and waiting with his finger ready
to ring for whatever assistance or protection I desired. Of course
I would not let him ring at all.; in fact, at first I refused to
believe him. Then he led me out into the balcony, and showed me
exactly how he had got up and in. He had broken in for the second
night running, and all. to tell me that the first night he had
brought you with him on false pretences. He had to tell me a
great deal more before I could quite believe him. But before he
went (as he had come) I was the one woman in the world who knew that
A. J. Raffles, the great cricketer, and the so-called 'amateur
cracksman' of equal notoriety, were one and the same person.

"He had told me his secret, thrown himself on my mercy, and put
his liberty if not his life in my hands, but all. for your sake,
Harry, to right you in my eyes at his own expense. And yesterday
I could see that you knew nothing whatever about it, that your
friend had died without telling you of his act of real and yet vain
self-sacrifice! Harry, I can only say that now I understand your
friendship, and the dreadful lengths to which it carried you. How
many in your place would not have gone as far for such a friend?
Since that night, at any rate, I for one have understood. It has
grieved me more than I can tell you, Harry, but I have always
understood.