“I am not very fond of Mr. Sikes,” announced the barrister, like a man who had got his cue.
“But he was prehistoric,” rejoined my lord. “A lot of blood has flowed under the razor since the days of Sweet William.”
“True; we have had Peace,” said Parrington, and launched out into such glowing details of that criminal’s last moments that I began to hope the diversion might prove permanent. But Lord Thornaby was not to be denied.
“William and Charles are both dead monarchs,” said he. “The reigning king in their department is the fellow who gutted poor Danby’s place in Bond Street.”
There was a guilty silence on the part of the three conspirators — for I had long since persuaded myself that Ernest was not in their secret — and then my blood froze.
“I know him well,” said Raffles, looking up.
Lord Thornaby stared at him in consternation. The smile on the Napoleonic countenance of the barrister looked forced and frozen for the first time during the evening. Our author, who was nibbling cheese from a knife, left a bead of blood upon his beard. The futile Ernest alone met the occasion with a hearty titter.
“What!” cried my lord. “You know the thief?”
“I wish I did,” rejoined Raffles, chuckling. “No, Lord Thornaby, I only meant the jeweller, Danby. I go to him when I want a wedding present.”
I heard three deep breaths drawn as one before I drew my own.
“Rather a coincidence,” observed our host dryly, “for I believe you also know the Milchester people, where Lady Melrose had her necklace stolen a few months afterward.”
“I was staying there at the time,” said Raffles eagerly. No snob was ever quicker to boast of basking in the smile of the great.
“We believe it to be the same man,” said Lord Thornaby, speaking apparently for the Criminologists’ Club, and with much less severity of voice.
“I only wish I could come across him,” continued Raffles heartily. “He’s a criminal much more to my mind than your murderers who swear on the drop or talk cricket in the condemned cell!”
“He might be in the house now,” said Lord Thornaby, looking Raffles in the face. But his manner was that of an actor in an unconvincing part and a mood to play it gamely to the bitter end; and he seemed embittered, as even a rich man may be in the moment of losing a bet.
“What a joke, if he were!” cried the Wild West writer.
“Absit omen!” murmured Raffles, in better taste.
“Still, I think you’ll find it’s a favorite time,” argued Kingsmill, Q.C. “And it would be quite in keeping with the character of this man, so far as it is known, to pay a little visit to the president of the Criminologists’ Club, and to choose the evening on which he happens to be entertaining the other members.”
There was more conviction in this sally than in that of our noble host; but this I attributed to the trained and skilled dissimulation of the bar. Lord Thornaby, however, was not to be amused by the elaboration of his own idea, and it was with some asperity that he called upon the butler, now solemnly superintending the removal of the cloth.
“Leggett! Just send upstairs to see if all the doors are open and the rooms in proper order. That’s an awful idea of yours, Kingsmill, or of mine!” added my lord, recovering the courtesy of his order by an effort that I could follow. “We should look fools. I don’t know which of us it was, by the way, who seduced the rest from the main stream of blood into this burglarious backwater. Are you familiar with De Quincey’s masterpiece on ‘Murder as a Fine Art,’ Mr. Raffles?”
“I believe I once read it,” replied Raffles doubtfully.
“You must read it again,” pursued the earl. “It is the last word on a great subject; all we can hope to add is some baleful illustration or blood-stained footnote, not unworthy of De Quincey’s text. Well, Leggett?”
The venerable butler stood wheezing at his elbow. I had not hitherto observed that the man was an asthmatic.
“I beg your lordship’s pardon, but I think your lordship must have forgotten.”
The voice came in rude gasps, but words of reproach could scarcely have achieved a finer delicacy.
“Forgotten, Leggett! Forgotten what, may I ask?”
“Locking your lordship’s dressing-room door behind your lordship, my lord,” stuttered the unfortunate Leggett, in the short spurts of a winded man, a few stertorous syllables at a time. “Been up myself, my lord. Bedroom door — dressing-room door — both locked inside!”
But by this time the noble master was in worse case than the man. His fine forehead was a tangle of livid cords; his baggy jowl filled out like a balloon. In another second he had abandoned his place as our host and fled the room; and in yet another we had forgotten ours as his guests and rushed headlong at his heels.
Raffles was as excited as any of us now: he outstripped us all. The cherubic little lawyer and I had a fine race for the last place but one, which I secured, while the panting butler and his satellites brought up a respectful rear. It was our unconventional author, however, who was the first to volunteer his assistance and advice.
“No use pushing, Thornaby!” cried he. “If it’s been done with a wedge and gimlet, you may smash the door, but you’ll never force it. Is there a ladder in the place?”
“There’s a rope-ladder somewhere, in case of fire, I believe,” said my lord vaguely, as he rolled a critical eye over our faces. “Where is it kept, Leggett?”
“William will fetch it, my lord.”
And a pair of noble calves went flashing to the upper regions.
“What’s the good of bringing it down,” cried Parrington, who had thrown back to the wilds in his excitement. “Let him hang it out of the window above your own, and let me climb down and do the rest! I’ll undertake to have one or other of these doors open in two twos!”
Raffles was as excited as any of us now; he outstripped us all.
The fastened doors were at right angles on the landing which we filled between us. Lord Thornaby smiled grimly on the rest of us, when he had nodded and dismissed the author like a hound from the leash.
“It’s a good thing we know something about our friend Parrington,” said my lord. “He takes more kindly to all this than I do, I can tell you.”
“It’s grist to his mill,” said Raffles charitably.
“Exactly! We shall have the whole thing in his next book.”
“I hope to have it at the Old Bailey first,” remarked Kingsmill, Q.C.
“Refreshing to find a man of letters such a man of action too!”
It was Raffles who said this, and the remark seemed rather trite for him, but in the tone there was a something that just caught my private ear. And for once I understood: the officious attitude of Parrington, without being seriously suspicious in itself, was admirably calculated to put a previously suspected person in a grateful shade. This literary adventurer had elbowed Raffles out of the lime-light, and gratitude for the service was what I had detected in Raffles’s voice. No need to say how grateful I felt myself. But my gratitude was shot with flashes of unwonted insight. Parrington was one of those who suspected Raffles, or, at all events, one who was in the secret of those suspicions. What if he had traded on the suspect’s presence in the house? What if he were a deep villain himself, and the villain of this particular piece? I had made up my mind about him, and that in a tithe of the time I take to make it up as a rule, when we heard my man in the dressing-room. He greeted us with an impudent shout; in a few moments the door was open, and there stood Parrington, flushed and dishevelled, with a gimlet in one hand and a wedge in the other.
Within was a scene of eloquent disorder. Drawers had been pulled out, and now stood on end, their contents heaped upon the carpet. Ward-robe doors stood open; empty stud-cases strewed the floor; a clock, tied up in a towel, had been tossed into a chair at the last moment. But a long tin lid protruded from an open cupboard in one corner. And one had only to see Lord Thornaby’s wry face behind the lid to g
uess that it was bent over a somewhat empty tin trunk.
“What a rum lot to steal!” said he, with a twitch of humor at the corners of his canine mouth. “My peer’s robes, with coronet complete!”
We rallied round him in a seemly silence. I thought our scribe would put in his word. But even he either feigned or felt a proper awe.
“You may say it was a rum place to keep ‘em,” continued Lord Thornaby. “But where would you gentlemen stable your white elephants? And these were elephants as white as snow; by Jove, I’ll job them for the future!”
And he made merrier over his loss than any of us could have imagined the minute before; but the reason dawned on me a little later, when we all trooped down-stairs, leaving the police in possession of the theatre of crime. Lord Thornaby linked arms with Raffles as he led the way. His step was lighter, his gayety no longer sardonic; his very looks had improved. And I divined the load that had been lifted from the hospitable heart of our host.
“I only wish,” said he, “that this brought us any nearer to the identity of the gentleman we were discussing at dinner, for, of course, we owe it to all our instincts to assume that it was he.”
“I wonder!” said old Raffles, with a foolhardy glance at me.
“But I’m sure of it, my dear sir,” cried my lord. “The audacity is his and his alone. I look no further than the fact of his honoring me on the one night of the year when I endeavor to entertain my brother Criminologists. That’s no coincidence, sir, but a deliberate irony, which would have occurred to no other criminal mind in England.”
“You may be right,” Raffles had the sense to say this time, though I flattered myself it was my face that made him.
“What is still more certain,” resumed our host, “is that no other criminal in the world would have crowned so delicious a conception with so perfect an achievement. I feel sure the inspector will agree with us.”
The policeman in command had knocked and been admitted to the library as Lord Thornaby spoke.
“I didn’t hear what you said, my lord.”
“Merely that the perpetrator of this amusing outrage can be no other than the swell mobsman who relieved Lady Melrose of her necklace and poor Danby of half his stock a year or two ago.”
“I believe your lordship has hit the nail on the head.”
“The man who took the Thimblely diamonds and returned them to Lord Thimblely, you know.”
“Perhaps he’ll treat your lordship the same.”
“Not he! I don’t mean to cry over my spilt milk. I only wish the fellow joy of all he had time to take. Anything fresh upstairs by the way?”
“Yes, my lord: the robbery took place between a quarter past eight and the half-hour.”
“How on earth do you know?”
“The clock that was tied up in the towel had stopped at twenty past.”
“Have you interviewed my man?”
“I have, my lord. He was in your lordship’s room until close on the quarter, and all was as it should be when he left it.”
“Then do you suppose the burglar was in hiding in the house?”
“It’s impossible to say, my lord. He’s not in the house now, for he could only be in your lordship’s bedroom or dressing-room, and we have searched every inch of both.”
Lord Thornaby turned to us when the inspector had retreated, caressing his peaked cap.
“I told him to clear up these points first,” he explained, jerking his head toward the door. “I had reason to think my man had been neglecting his duties up there. I am glad to find myself mistaken.”
I ought to have been no less glad to see my own mistake. My suspicions of our officious author were thus proved to have been as wild as himself. I owed the man no grudge, and yet in my human heart I felt vaguely disappointed. My theory had gained color from his behavior ever since he had admitted us to the dressing-room; it had changed all at once from the familiar to the morose; and only now was I just enough to remember that Lord Thornaby, having tolerated those familiarities as long as they were connected with useful service, had administered a relentless snub the moment that service had been well and truly performed.
But if Parrington was exonerated in my mind, so also was Raffles reinstated in the regard of those who had entertained a far graver and more dangerous hypothesis. It was a miracle of good luck, a coincidence among coincidences, which had white-washed him in their sight at the very moment when they were straining the expert eye to sift him through and through. But the miracle had been performed, and its effect was visible in every face and audible in every voice. I except Ernest, who could never have been in the secret; moreover, that gay Criminologist had been palpably shaken by his first little experience of crime. But the other three vied among themselves to do honor where they had done injustice. I heard Kingsmill, Q.C., telling Raffles the best time to catch him at chambers, and promising a seat in court for any trial he might ever like to hear. Parrington spoke of a presentation set of his books, and in doing homage to Raffles made his peace with our host. As for Lord Thornaby, I did overhear the name of the Athenæum Club, a reference to his friends on the committee, and a whisper (as I thought) of Rule II.
The police were still in possession when we went our several ways, and it was all that I could do to drag Raffles up to my rooms, though, as I have said, they were just round the corner. He consented at last as a lesser evil than talking of the burglary in the street; and in my rooms I told him of his late danger and my own dilemma, of the few words I had overheard in the beginning, of the thin ice on which he had cut fancy figures without a crack. It was all very well for him. He had never realized his peril. But let him think of me — listening, watching, yet unable to lift a finger — unable to say one warning word.
Raffles suffered me to finish, but a weary sigh followed the last symmetrical whiff of a Sullivan which he flung into my fire before he spoke.
“No, I won’t have another, thank you. I’m going to talk to you, Bunny. Do you really suppose I didn’t see through these wiseacres from the first?”
I flatly refused to believe he had done so before that evening. Why had he never mentioned his idea to me? It had been quite the other way, as I indignantly reminded Raffles. Did he mean me to believe he was the man to thrust his head into the lion’s mouth for fun? And what point would there be in dragging me there to see the fun?
“I might have wanted you, Bunny. I very nearly did.”
“For my face?”
“It has been my fortune before to-night, Bunny. It has also given me more confidence than you are likely to believe at this time of day. You stimulate me more than you think.”
“Your gallery and your prompter’s box in one?”
“Capital, Bunny! But it was no joking matter with, me either, my dear fellow; it was touch-and-go at the time. I might have called on you at any moment, and it was something to know I should not have called in vain.”
“But what to do, Raffles?”
“Fight our way out and bolt!” he answered, with a mouth that meant it, and a fine gay glitter of the eyes.
I shot out of my chair.
“You don’t mean to tell me you had a hand in the job?”
“I had the only hand in it, my dear Bunny.”
“Nonsense! You were sitting at table at the time. No, but you may have taken some other fellow into the show. I always thought you would!”
“One’s quite enough, Bunny,” said Raffles dryly; he leaned back in his chair and took out another cigarette. And I accepted of yet another from his case; for it was no use losing one’s temper with Raffles; and his incredible statement was not, after all, to be ignored.
“Of course,” I went on, “if you really had brought off this thing on your own, I should be the last to criticise your means of reaching such an end. You have not only scored off a far superior force, which had laid itself out to score off you, but you have put them in the wrong about you, and they’ll eat out of your hand for the rest of their days. But
don’t ask me to believe that you’ve done all this alone! By George,” I cried, in a sudden wave of enthusiasm, “I don’t care how you’ve done it or who has helped you. It’s the biggest thing you ever did in your life!”
And certainly I had never seen Raffles look more radiant, or better pleased with the world and himself, or nearer that elation which he usually left to me.
“Then you shall hear all about it, Bunny, if you’ll do what I ask you.”
“Ask away, old chap, and the thing’s done.”
“Switch off the electric lights.”
“All of them?”
“I think so.”
“There, then.”
“Now go to the back window and up with the blind.”
“Well?”
“I’m coming to you. Splendid! I never had a look so late as this. It’s the only window left alight in the house!”
His cheek against the pane, he was pointing slightly downward and very much aslant through a long lane of mews to a little square light like a yellow tile at the end. But I had opened the window and leaned out before I saw it for myself.
“You don’t mean to say that’s Thornaby House?”
I was not familiar with the view from my back windows.
“Of course I do, you rabbit! Have a look through your own race-glass. It has been the most useful thing of all.”
But before I had the glass in focus more scales had fallen from my eyes; and now I knew why I had seen so much of Raffles these last few weeks, and why he had always come between seven and eight o’clock in the evening, and waited at this very window, with these very glasses at his eyes. I saw through them sharply now. The one lighted window pointed out by Raffles came tumbling into the dark circle of my vision. I could not see into the actual room, but the shadows of those within were quite distinct on the lowered blind. I even thought a black thread still dangled against the square of light. It was, it must be, the window to which the intrepid Parrington had descended from the one above.
“Exactly!” said Raffles in answer to my exclamation. “And that’s the window I have been watching these last few weeks. By daylight you can see the whole lot above the ground floor on this side of the house; and by good luck one of them is the room in which the master of the house arrays himself in all his nightly glory. It was easily spotted by watching at the right time. I saw him shaved one morning before you were up! In the evening his valet stays behind to put things straight; and that has been the very mischief. In the end I had to find out something about the man, and wire to him from his girl to meet her outside at eight o’clock. Of course he pretends he was at his post at the time: that I foresaw, and did the poor fellow’s work before my own. I folded and put away every garment before I permitted myself to rag the room.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 488
