But all that was at an end; the man was shaken to the core by his perfectly legitimate attempt at my destruction. He looked dreadfully old and hideous as he got bodily back into the bunk of his own accord. There, when I had yielded to his further importunities, and the flask was empty, he fell at length into a sleep as genuine as the last was not; and I was still watching over the poor devil, keeping the flies off him, and sometimes fanning him with a flag, less perhaps from humane motives than to keep him quiet as long as possible, when Raffles returned to light up the tableau like a sinister sunbeam.
Raffles had had his own adventures in town, and I soon had reason to feel thankful that I had not gone up instead of him. It seemed he had foreseen from the first the possibility of trouble at the bank over a large and absolutely open cheque. So he had gone first to the Chelsea studio in which he played the painter who never painted but kept a whole wardrobe of disguises for the models he never hired. Thence he had issued on this occasion in the living image of a well-known military man about town who was also well known to be a client of Dan Levy’s. Raffles said the cashier stared at him, but the cheque was cashed without a word. The unfortunate part of it was that in returning to his cab he had encountered an acquaintance both of his own and of the spendthrift soldier, and had been greeted evidently in the latter capacity.
“It was a jolly difficult little moment, Bunny. I had to say there was some mistake, and I had to remember to say it in a manner equally unlike my own and the other beggar’s! But all’s well that ends well; and if you’ll do exactly what I tell you I think we may flatter ourselves that a happy issue is at last in sight.”
“What am I to do now?” I asked with some misgiving.
“Clear out of this, Bunny, and wait for me in town. You’ve done jolly well, old fellow, and so have I in my own department of the game. Everything’s in order, down to those fifteen hundred guineas which are now concealed about my person in as hard cash as I can carry. I’ve seen old Garland and given him back his promissory note myself, with Levy’s undertaking about the mortgage. It was a pretty trying interview, as you can understand; but I couldn’t help wondering what the poor old boy would say if he dreamt what sort of pressure I’ve been applying on his behalf! Well, it’s all over now except our several exits from the surreptitious stage. I can’t make mine without our sleeping partner, but you would really simplify matters, Bunny, by not waiting for us.”
There was a good deal to be said for such a course, though it went not a little against my grain. Raffles had changed his clothes and had a bath in town, to say nothing of his luncheon. I was by this time indescribably dirty and dishevelled, besides feeling fairly famished now that mental relief allowed a thought for one’s lower man. Raffles had foreseen my plight, and had actually prepared a way of escape for me by the front door in broad daylight. I need not recapitulate the elaborate story he had told the caretaking gardener across the road; but he had borrowed the gardener’s keys as a probable purchaser of the property, who had to meet his builder and a business friend at the house during the course of the afternoon. I was to be the builder, and in that capacity to give the gardener an ingenious message calculated to leave Raffles and Levy in uninterrupted possession until my return. And of course I was never to return at all.
The whole thing seemed to me a super-subtle means to a far simpler end than the one we had achieved by stealth in the dead of the previous night. But it was Raffles all over and I ultimately acquiesced, on the understanding that we were to meet again in the Albany at seven o’clock, preparatory to dining somewhere in final celebration of the whole affair.
But much was to happen before seven o’clock, and it began happening. I shook the dust of that derelict tower from my feet; for one of them trod on something at the darkest point of the descent; and the thing went tinkling down ahead on its own account, until it lay shimmering in the light on a lower landing, where I picked it up.
Now I had not said much to Raffles about my hitherto inexplicable experience with the revolver, when I thought it had gone through the banisters, but found it afterwards in my hand. Raffles said it would not have gone through, that I must have been all but over the banisters myself when I grasped the butt as it protruded through them on the level of the floor. This he said (like many another thing) as though it made an end of the matter. But it was not the end of the matter in my own mind; and now I could have told him what the explanation was, or at least to what conclusion I had jumped. I had half a mind to climb all the way up again on purpose to put him in the wrong upon the point. Then I remembered how anxious he had seemed to get rid of me, and for other reasons also I decided to let him wait a bit for his surprise.
Meanwhile my own plans were altered, and when I had delivered my egregious message to the gardener across the road, I sought the nearest shops on my way to the nearest station; and at one of the shops I got me a clean collar, at another a tooth-brush; and all I did at the station was to utilise my purchases in the course of such scanty toilet as the lavatory accommodation would permit.
A few minutes later I was inquiring my way to a house which it took me another twenty or twenty-five to find.
CHAPTER XVII
A Secret Service
This house also was on the river, but it was very small bricks-and-mortar compared with the other two. One of a semi-detached couple built close to the road, with narrow strips of garden to the river’s brim, its dingy stucco front and its green Venetian blinds conveyed no conceivable attraction beyond that of a situation more likely to prove a drawback three seasons out of the four. The wooden gate had not swung home behind me before I was at the top of a somewhat dirty flight of steps, contemplating blistered paint and ground glass fit for a bathroom window, and listening to the last reverberations of an obsolete type of bell. There was indeed something oppressively and yet prettily Victorian about the riparian retreat to which Lady Laura Belsize had retired in her impoverished widowhood.
It was not for Lady Laura that I asked, however, but for Miss Belsize, and the almost slatternly maid really couldn’t say whether Miss Belsize was in or whether she wasn’t. She might be in the garden, or she might be on the river. Would I step inside and wait a minute? I would and did, but it was more minutes than one that I was kept languishing in an interior as dingy as the outside of the house. I had time to take the whole thing in. There were massive remnants of deservedly unfashionable furniture. The sofa I can still see in my mind’s eye, and the steel fire-irons, and the crystal chandelier. An aged and gigantic Broadwood occupied nearly half the room; and in a cheap frame thereon, inviting all sorts of comparisons and contrasts, stood a full-length portrait of Camilla Belsize resplendent in contemporary court kit.
I was still studying that frankly barbaric paraphernalia — the feather, the necklace, the coiled train — and wondering what noble kinsman had come to the rescue for the great occasion, and why Camilla should have looked so bored with her finery, when the door opened and she herself entered — not even very smartly dressed — and looking anything but bored, although I say it.
But she did seem astonished, anxious, indignant, reproachful, and to my mind still more nervous and distressed, though this hardly showed through the loopholes of her pride. And as for her white serge coat and skirt, they looked as though they had seen considerable service on the river, and I immediately perceived that one of the large enamel buttons was missing from the coat.
Up to that moment, I may now confess, I had been suffering from no slight nervous anxiety of my own. But all qualms were lost in sheer excitement when I spoke.
“You may well wonder at this intrusion,” I began. “But I thought this must be yours, Miss Belsize.”
And from my waistcoat pocket I produced the missing button of enamel.
“Where did you find it?” inquired Miss Belsize, with an admirably slight increase of astonishment in voice and look. “And how did you know it was mine?” came quickly in the next breath.
“I didn’t kn
ow,” I answered. “I guessed. It was the shot of my life!”
“But you don’t say where you found it?”
“In an empty house not far from here.”
She had held her breath; now I felt it like the lightest zephyr. And quite unconsciously I had retained the enamel button.
“Well, Mr. Manders? I’m very much obliged to you. But may I have it back again?”
I returned her property. We had been staring at each other all the time. I stared still harder as she repeated her perfunctory thanks.
“So it was you!” I said, and was sorry to see her looking purposely puzzled at that, but thankful when the reckless light outshone all the rest in those chameleon eyes of hers.
“Who did you think it was?” she asked me with a frosty little smile.
“I didn’t know if it was anybody at all. I didn’t know what to think,” said I, quite candidly. “I simply found his pistol in my hand.”
“Whose pistol?”
“Dan Levy’s.”
“Good!” she said grimly. “That makes it all the better.”
“You saved my life.”
“I thought you had taken his — and I’d collaborated!”
There was not a tremor in her voice; it was cautious, eager, daring, intense, but absolutely her own voice now.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t shoot the fellow, but I made him think I had.”
“You made me think so too, until I heard what you said to him.”
“Yet you never made a sound yourself.”
“I should think not! I made myself scarce instead.”
“But, Miss Belsize, I shall go perfectly mad if you don’t tell me how you happened to be there at all!”
“Don’t you think it’s for you to tell me that about yourself and — all of you?”
“Oh, I don’t mind which of us fires first!” said I, excitedly.
“Then I will,” she said at once, and took me to the dreadful sofa at the inner end of the room, and sat down as though it were the most ordinary experience she had to relate. Nor could I believe the things that had really happened, and all so recently, as we talked them over in that commonplace environment of faded gentility. There was a window behind us, overlooking the ribbon of lawn and the cord of gravel, and the bunch of willows that hedged them from the Thames. It all looked unreal to me, unreal in its very realism as the scene of our incredible conversation.
“You know what happened the other afternoon — I mean the day they couldn’t play,” began Miss Belsize, “because you were there; and though you didn’t stay to hear all that came out afterwards, I expect you know everything now. Mr. Raffles would be sure to tell you; in fact, I heard poor dear Mr. Garland give him leave. It’s a dreadful story from every point of view. Nobody comes out of it with flying colours, but what nice person could cope with a horrid money-lender? Mr. Raffles, perhaps — if you call him nice!”
I said that was about the worst thing I called him. I mentioned some of the other things. Miss Belsize listened to them with exemplary patience.
“Well,” she resumed, “he was quite nice about this. I will say that for him. He said he knew Mr. Levy pretty well, and would see what could be done. But he spoke like an executioner who was going to see what could be done with the condemned man! And all the time I was wondering what had been done already at Carlsbad — what exactly that horrid creature meant when he was talking at Mr. Raffles before us all. Well, of course, I knew what he meant us to think he meant; but was there, could there be, anything in it?”
Miss Belsize looked at me as though she expected an answer, only to stop me the moment I opened my mouth to speak.
“I don’t want to know, Mr. Manders! Of course you know all about Mr. Raffles” — there was a touch of feeling in this— “but it’s nothing to me, though in this case I should certainly have been on his side. You said yourself that it could only have been a practical joke, if there was anything in it at all, and so I tried to think in spite of those horrid men who were following him about at Lord’s, even in spite of the way he vanished with them after him. But he never came near the match again — though he had travelled all the way from Carlsbad to see it! Why had he ever been there? What had he really done there? And what could he possibly do to rescue anybody from Mr. Levy, if he himself was already in Levy’s power?”
“You don’t know Raffles,” said I, promptly enough this time. “He never was in any man’s power for many minutes. I would back him to save the most desperate situation you could devise.”
“You mean by some desperate deed? That’s what I feared,” declared Miss Belsize, rather strenuously. “Something really had happened at Carlsbad; something worse was by way of happening next. For Teddy’s sake,” she whispered, “and his poor father’s!”
I agreed that old Raffles stuck at nothing for his friends, and Miss Belsize again said that was what she had feared. Her tone had completely altered about Raffles, as well it might. I thought it would have broken with gratitude when she spoke of the unlucky father and son.
“And I was right!” she exclaimed, with that other kind of feeling to which I found it harder to put a name. “I came home miserable from the match on Saturday—”
“Though Teddy had done so well!” I was fool enough to interject.
“I couldn’t help thinking about Mr. Raffles,” replied Camilla, with a flash of her frank eyes, “and wondering, and wondering, what had happened. And then on Sunday I saw him on the river.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“He didn’t know I recognised him; he was disguised — absolutely!” said Camilla Belsize under her breath. “But he couldn’t disguise himself from me,” she added as though glorying in her perspicacity.
“Did you tell him so, Miss Belsize?”
“Not I, indeed! I didn’t speak to him; it was no business of mine. But there he was, at the bottom of Mr. Levy’s garden, having a good look at the boathouse when nobody was about. Why? What could his object be? And why disguise himself? I thought of the affair at Carlsbad, and I felt certain that something of the kind was going to happen again!”
“Well?”
“What could I do? Should I do anything at all? Was it any business of mine? You may imagine the way I cross-questioned myself, and you may imagine the crooked answers I got! I won’t bore you with the psychology of the thing; it’s pretty obvious after all. It was not so much a case of doing the best as of knowing the worst. All day yesterday there were no developments of any sort, and there was no sign of Mr. Raffles; nothing had happened in the night, or we should have heard of it; but that made me all the more certain that something or other would happen last night. The week’s grace was nearly up — you know what I mean — their last week at their own house. If anything was to be done, it was about time, and I knew Mr. Raffles was going to do something. I wanted to know what — that was all.”
“Quite right, too!” I murmured. But I doubt if Miss Belsize heard me; she was in no need of my encouragement or my approval. The old light — her own light — the reckless light — was burning away in her brilliant eyes!
“The night before,” she went on, “I hardly slept a wink; last night I preferred not to go to bed at all. I told you I sometimes did weird things that astonished the natives of these suburban shores. Well, last night, if it wasn’t early this morning, I made my weirdest effort yet. I have a canoe, you know; just now I almost live in it. Last night I went out unbeknowns after midnight, partly to reassure myself, partly — I beg your pardon, Mr. Manders?”
“I didn’t speak.”
“Your face shouted!”
“I’d rather you went on.”
“But if you know what I’m going to say?”
Of course I knew, but I dragged it from her none the less. The nebulous white-shirted figure in the canoe, that had skimmed past Dan Levy’s frontage as we were trying to get him aboard his own pleasure-boat, and again past the empty house when we were in the act of disembarking him there,
that figure was the trim and slim one now at my side. She had seen us — searched for us — each time. Our voices she had heard and recognised; only our actions, or rather that midnight deed of ours, had she misinterpreted. She would not admit it to me, but I still believe she feared it was a dead body that we had shipped at dead of night to hide away in that desolate tower.
Yet I cannot think she thought it in her heart. I rather fancy (what she indeed averred) that some vague inkling of the truth flashed across her at least as often as that monstrous hypothesis. But know she must; therefore, after boldly ascertaining that nothing was known of the master’s whereabouts at Levy’s house, but that no uneasiness was entertained on his account, this young woman, true to the audacity which I had seen in her eyes from the first, had taken the still bolder step of landing on the rank lawn and entering the empty tower to discover its secret, for herself. Her stealthy step upon the spiral stair had been the signal for my mortal struggle with Dan Levy. She had heard the whole, and even seen a little of that; in fact, she had gathered enough from Levy’s horrible imprecations to form later a rough but not incorrect impression of the situation between him and Raffles and me. As for the moneylender’s language, it was with a welcome gleam of humour that Miss Belsize assured me she had “gone too straight to hounds” in her time to be as completely paralysed by it as her mother’s neighbours might have been. And as for the revolver, it had fallen at her feet, and first she thought I was going to follow it over the banisters, and before she could think again she had restored the weapon to my wildly clutching hand!
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 313
