Raffles eyed the pale and twitching face with sidelong solicitude. He himself had the confident expression which always gave me confidence; the rattle on the conservatory roof was growing louder every minute.
“I intend to find out,” said he; “and if the rain goes on long enough, we may still see Teddy playing when it stops. But I shall want your help, sir.”
“I am ready to go with you anywhere, Raffles.”
“You can only help me, Mr. Garland, by staying where you are.”
“Where I am?”
“In the house all day,” said Raffles firmly. “It is absolutely essential to my idea.”
“And that is, Raffles?”
“To save Teddy’s face, in the first instance. I shall drive straight up to Lord’s, in your brougham if I may. I know Studley rather well; he shall keep Teddy’s place open till the last possible moment.”
“But how shall you account for his absence?” I asked.
“I shall account for it all right,” said Raffles darkly. “I can save his face for the time being, at all events at Lord’s.”
“But that’s the only place that matters,” said I.
“On the contrary, Bunny, this very house matters even more as long as Miss Belsize is here. You forget that they’re engaged, and that she’s in the next room now.”
“Good God!” whispered Mr. Garland. “I had forgotten that myself.”
“She is the last who must know of this affair,” said Raffles, with, I thought, undue authority. “And you are the only one who can keep it from her, sir.”
“I?”
“Miss Belsize mustn’t go up to Lord’s this morning. She would only spoil her things, and you may tell her from me that there would be no play for an hour after this, even if it stopped this minute, which it won’t. Meanwhile let her think that Teddy’s weatherbound with the rest of them in the pavilion; but she mustn’t come until you hear from me again; and the best way to keep her here is to stay with her yourself.”
“And when may I expect to hear?” asked Mr. Garland as Raffles held out his hand.
“Let me see. I shall be at Lord’s in less than twenty minutes; another five or ten should polish off Studley; and then I shall barricade myself in the telephone-box and ring up every hospital in town! You see, it may be an accident after all, though I don’t think so. You won’t hear from me on the point unless it is; the fewer messengers flying about the better, if you agree with me as to the wisdom of keeping the matter dark at this end.”
“Oh, yes, I agree with you, Raffles; but it will be a terribly hard task for me!”
“It will, indeed, Mr. Garland. Yet no news is always good news, and I promise to come straight to you the moment I have news of any kind.”
With that they shook hands, our host with an obvious reluctance that turned to a less understandable dismay as I also prepared to take my leave of him.
“What!” cried he, “am I to be left quite alone to hoodwink that poor girl and hide my own anxiety?”
“There’s no reason why you should come, Bunny,” said Raffles to me. “If either of them is a one-man job, it’s mine.”
Our host said no more, but he looked at me so wistfully that I could not but offer to stay with him if he wished it; and when at length the drawing-room door had closed upon him and his son’s fiancee, I took an umbrella from the stand and saw Raffles through the providential downpour into the brougham.
“I’m sorry, Bunny,” he muttered between the butler in the porch and the coachman on the box. “This sort of thing is neither in my line nor yours, but it serves us right for straying from the path of candid crime. We should have opened a safe for that seven hundred.”
“But what do you really think is at the bottom of this extraordinary disappearance?”
“Some madness or other, I’m afraid; but if that boy is still in the land of the living, I shall have him before the sun goes down on his insanity.”
“And what about this engagement of his?” I pursued. “Do you disapprove of it?”
“Why on earth should I?” asked Raffles, rather sharply, as he plunged from under my umbrella into the brougham.
“Because you never told me when he told you,” I replied. “Is the girl beneath him?”
Raffles looked at me inscrutably with his clear blue eyes.
“You’d better find out for yourself,” said he. “Tell the coachman to hurry up to Lord’s — and pray that this rain may last!”
CHAPTER VI
Camilla Belsize
It would be hard to find a better refuge on a rainy day than the amphibious retreat described by Raffles as a “country house in Kensington.” There was a good square hall, full of the club comforts so welcome in a home, such as magazines and cigarettes, and a fire when the rain set in. The usual rooms opened off the hall, and the library was not the only one that led on into the conservatory; the drawing-room was another, in which I heard voices as I lit a cigarette among the palms and tree-ferns. It struck me that poor Mr. Garland was finding it hard work to propitiate the lady whom Raffles had deemed unworthy of mention overnight. But I own I was in no hurry to take over the invidious task. To me it need prove nothing more; to him, anguish; but I could not help feeling that even as matters stood I was quite sufficiently embroiled in these people’s affairs. Their name had been little more than a name to me until the last few hours. Only yesterday I might have hesitated to nod to Teddy Garland at the club, so seldom had we met. Yet here was I helping Raffles to keep the worst about the son from the father’s knowledge, and on the point of helping that father to keep what might easily prove worse still from his daughter-in-law to be. And all the time there was the worst of all to be hidden from everybody concerning Raffles and me!
Meanwhile I explored a system of flower-houses and vineries that ran out from the conservatory in a continuous chain — each link with its own temperature and its individual scent — and not a pane but rattled and streamed beneath the timely torrent. It was in a fernery where a playing fountain added its tuneful drop to the noisy deluge that the voices of the drawing-room sounded suddenly at my elbow, and I was introduced to Miss Belsize before I could recover from my surprise. My foolish face must have made her smile in spite of herself, for I did not see quite the same smile again all day; but it made me her admirer on the spot, and I really think she warmed to me for amusing her even for a moment.
So we began rather well; and that was a mercy in the light of poor Mr. Garland’s cynically prompt departure; but we did not go on quite as well as we had begun. I do not say that Miss Belsize was in a bad temper, but emphatically she was not pleased, and I for one had the utmost sympathy with her displeasure. She was simply but exquisitely dressed, with unostentatious touches of Cambridge blue and a picture hat that really was a picture. Yet on a perfect stranger in a humid rockery she was wasting what had been meant for mankind at Lord’s. The only consolation I could suggest was that by this time Lord’s would be more humid still.
“And so there’s something to be said for being bored to tears under shelter, Miss Belsize.” Miss Belsize did not deny that she was bored.
“But there’s plenty of shelter there,” said she.
“Packed with draggled dresses and squelching shoes! You might swim for it before they admitted you to that Pavilion, you know.”
“But if the ground’s under water, how can they play to-day?”
“They can’t, Miss Belsize, I don’t mind betting.”
That was a rash remark.
“Then why doesn’t Teddy come back?”
“Oh, well, you know,” I hedged, “you can never be quite absolutely sure. It might clear up. They’re bound to give it a chance until the afternoon. And the players can’t leave till stumps are drawn.”
“I should have thought Teddy could have come home to lunch,” said Miss Belsize, “even if he had to go back afterwards.”
“I shouldn’t wonder if he did come,” said I, conceiving the bare possibility: “and A
.J. with him.”
“Do you mean Mr. Raffles?”
“Yes, Miss Belsize; he’s the only A.J. that counts!”
Camilla Belsize turned slightly in the basket-chair to which she had confided her delicate frock, and our eyes met almost for the first time. Certainly we had not exchanged so long a look before, for she had been watching the torpid goldfish in the rockery pool, and I admiring her bold profile and the querulous poise of a fine head as I tried to argue her out of all desire for Lord’s. Suddenly our eyes met, as I say, and hers dazzled me; they were soft and yet brilliant, tender and yet cynical, calmly reckless, audaciously sentimental — all that and more as I see them now on looking back; but at the time I was merely dazzled.
“So you and Mr. Raffles are great friends?” said Miss Belsize, harking back to a remark of Mr. Garland’s in introducing us.
“Rather!” I replied.
“Are you as great a friend of his as Teddy is?”
I liked that, but simply said I was an older friend. “Raffles and I were at school together,” I added loftily.
“Really? I should have thought he was before your time.”
“No, only senior to me. I happened to be his fag.”
“And what sort of a schoolboy was Mr. Raffles?” inquired Miss Belsize, not by any means in the tone of a devotee. But I reflected that her own devotion was bespoke, and not improbably tainted with some little jealousy of Raffles.
“He was the most Admirable Crichton who was ever at the school,” said I: “captain of the eleven, the fastest man in the fifteen, athletic champion, and an ornament of the Upper Sixth.”
“And you worshipped him, I suppose?”
“Absolutely.”
My companion had been taking renewed interest in the goldfish; now she looked at me again with the cynical light full on in her eyes.
“You must be rather disappointed in him now!”
“Disappointed! Why?” I asked with much outward amusement. But I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Of course I don’t know much about him,” remarked Miss Belsize as though she cared less.
“But does anybody know anything of Mr. Raffles except as a cricketer?”
“I do,” said I, with injudicious alacrity.
“Well,” said Miss Belsize, “what else is he?”
“The best fellow in the world, among other things.”
“But what other things?”
“Ask Teddy!” I said unluckily.
“I have,” replied Miss Belsize. “But Teddy doesn’t know. He often wonders how Mr. Raffles can afford to play so much cricket without doing any work.”
“Does he, indeed!”
“Many people do.”
“And what do they say about him?”
Miss Belsize hesitated, watching me for a moment and the goldfish rather longer. The rain sounded louder, and the fountain as though it had been turned on again, before she answered:
“More than their prayers, no doubt!”
“Do you mean,” I almost gasped, “as to the way Raffles gets his living?”
“Yes.”
“You might tell me the kind of things they say, Miss Belsize!”
“But if there’s no truth in them?”
“I’ll soon tell you if there is or not.”
“But suppose I don’t care either way?” said Miss Belsize with a brilliant smile.
“Then I care so much that I should be extremely grateful to you.”
“Mind, I don’t believe it myself, Mr. Manders.”
“You don’t believe—”
“That Mr. Raffles lives by his wits and — his cricket!”
I jumped to my feet.
“Is that all they say about him?” I cried.
“Isn’t it enough?” asked Miss Belsize, astonished in her turn at my demeanour.
“Oh, quite enough, quite enough!” said I. “It’s only the most scandalously unfair and utterly untrue report that ever got about — that’s all!”
This heavy irony was, of course, intended to convey the impression that one’s first explosion of relief had been equally ironical. But I was to discover that Camilla Belsize was never easily deceived; it was unpleasantly apparent in her bold eyes before she opened her firm mouth.
“Yet you seemed to expect something worse,” she said at length.
“What could be worse?” I asked, my back against the wall of my own indiscretion. “Why, a man like A.J. Raffles would rather be any mortal thing than a paid amateur!”
“But you haven’t told me what he is, Mr. Manders.”
“And you haven’t told me, Miss Belsize, why you’re so interested in A. J. after all!” I retorted, getting home for once, and sitting down again on the strength of it.
But Miss Belsize was my superior to the last; in the single moment of my ascendency she made me blush for it and for myself. She would be quite frank with me: my friend Mr. Raffles did interest her rather more than she cared to say. It was because Teddy thought so much of him, that was the only reason, and her one excuse for all inquisitive questions and censorious remarks. I must have thought her very rude; but now I knew. Mr. Raffles had been such a friend to Teddy; sometimes she wondered whether he was quite a good friend; and there I had “the whole thing in a nutshell.”
I had indeed! And I knew the nut, and had tasted its bitter kernel too often to make any mistake about it. Jealousy was its other name. But I did not care how jealous Miss Belsize became of Raffles as long as jealousy did not beget suspicion; and my mind was not entirely relieved on that point.
We dropped the whole subject, however, with some abruptness; and the rest of our conversation in the rockery, and in the steaming orchid-house and further vineries which we proceeded to explore together, was quite refreshingly tame. Yet I think it was on this desultory tour, to the still incessant accompaniment of rain on the glasshouses, that Camilla’s mother took shape in my mind as the Lady Laura Belsize, an apparently impecunious widow reduced to “semi-detachment down the river” and suburban neighbours whose manners and customs my companion hit off with vivacious intolerance. She told me how she had shocked them by smoking cigarettes in the back garden, and pronounced a gratuitous conviction that I of all people would have been no less scandalised! That was in the uttermost vinery, and in another minute two Sullivans were in full blast under the vines. I remember discovering that the great brand was not unfamiliar to Miss Belsize, and even gathering that it was Raffles himself who had made it known to her. Raffles, whom she did not “know much about,” or consider “quite a good friend” for Teddy Garland!
I was becoming curious to see this antagonistic pair together; but it was the middle of the afternoon before Raffles reappeared, though Mr. Garland told me he had received an optimistic note from him by special messenger earlier in the day. I felt I might have been told a little more, considering the intimate part I was already playing as a stranger in a strange house. But I was only too thankful to find that Raffles had so far infected our host with his confidence as to tide us through luncheon with far fewer embarrassments than before; nor did Mr. Garland desert us again until the butler with a visitor’s card brought about his abrupt departure from the conservatory.
Then my troubles began afresh. It stopped raining at last; if Miss Belsize could have had her way we should all have started for Lord’s that minute. I took her into the garden to show her the state of the lawns, coldly scintillant with standing water and rimmed by regular canals. Lord’s would be like them, only fifty times worse; play had no doubt been abandoned on that quagmire for the day. Miss Belsize was not so sure about that; why should we not drive over and find out? I said that was the surest way of missing Teddy. She said a hansom would take us there and back in a half-an-hour. I gained time disputing that statement, but said if we went at all I was sure Mr. Garland would want to go with us, and that in his own brougham. All this on the crown of a sloppy path, and when Miss Belsize asked me how many more times I was going to change my gro
und, I could not help looking at her absurd shoes sinking into the softened gravel, and saying I thought it was for her to do that. Miss Belsize took my advice to the extent of turning upon a submerged heel, though with none too complimentary a smile; and then it was that I saw what I had been curious to see all day. Raffles was coming down the path towards us. And I saw Miss Belsize hesitate and stiffen before shaking hands with him.
“They’ve given it up as a bad job at last,” said he. “I’ve just come from Lord’s, and Teddy won’t be very long.”
“Why didn’t you bring him with you?” asked Miss Belsize pertinently.
“Well, I thought you ought to know the worst at once,” said Raffles, rather lamely for him; “and then a man playing in a ‘Varsity match is never quite his own master, you know. Still, he oughtn’t to keep you waiting much longer.”
It was perhaps unfortunately put; at any rate Miss Belsize took it pretty plainly amiss, and I saw her colour rise as she declared she had been waiting in the hope of seeing some cricket. Since that was at an end she must be thinking of getting home, and would just say good-bye to Mr. Garland. This sudden decision took me as much by surprise as I believe it took Miss Belsize herself; but having announced her intention, however hot-headedly, she proceeded to action by way of the conservatory and the library door, while Raffles and I went through into the hall the other way.
“I’m afraid I’ve put my foot in it,” said he to me. “But it’s just as well, since I needn’t tell you there’s no sign of Teddy up at Lord’s.”
“Have you been there all day?” I asked him under my breath.
“Except when I went to the office of this rag,” replied Raffles, brandishing an evening paper that ill deserved his epithet. “See what they say about Teddy here.”
And I held my breath while Raffles showed me a stupendous statement in the stop-press column: it was to the effect that E.M. Garland (Eton and Trinity) might be unable to keep wicket for Cambridge after all, “owing to the serious illness of his father.”
“His father!” I exclaimed. “Why, his father’s closeted with somebody or other at this very moment behind the door you’re looking at!”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 301
