“Now what?” I whispered, trembling with excitement.
“They’ll be clearing away. Yes, here come their shadows. The drawing-room windows open on the lawn. Bunny, it’s the psychological moment. Where’s that mask?”
I produced it with a hand whose trembling I tried in vain to still, and could have died for Raffles when he made no comment on what he could not fail to notice. His own hands were firm and cool as he adjusted my mask for me, and then his own.
“By Jove, old boy,” he whispered cheerily, “you look about the greatest ruffian I ever saw! These masks alone will down a nigger, if we meet one. But I’m glad I remembered to tell you not to shave. You’ll pass for Whitechapel if the worst comes to the worst and you don’t forget to talk the lingo. Better sulk like a mule if you’re not sure of it, and leave the dialogue to me; but, please our stars, there will be no need. Now, are you ready?”
“Quite.”
“Got your gag?”
“Yes.”
“Shooter?”
“Yes.”
“Then follow me.”
In an instant we were over the wall, in another on the lawn behind the house. There was no moon. The very stars in their courses had veiled themselves for our benefit. I crept at my leader’s heels to some French windows opening upon a shallow veranda. He pushed. They yielded.
“Luck again,” he whispered; “nothing but luck! Now for a light.”
And the light came!
A good score of electric burners glowed red for the fraction of a second, then rained merciless white beams into our blinded eyes. When we found our sight four revolvers covered us, and between two of them the colossal frame of Reuben Rosenthall shook with a wheezy laughter from head to foot.
“Good-evening, boys,” he hiccoughed. “Glad to see ye at last. Shift foot or finger, you on the left, though, and you’re a dead boy. I mean you, you greaser!” he roared out at Raffles. “I know you. I’ve been waitin’ for you. I’ve been watchin’ you all this week! Plucky smart you thought yerself, didn’t you? One day beggin’, next time shammin’ tight, and next one o’ them old pals from Kimberley what never come when I’m in. But you left the same tracks every day, you buggins, an’ the same tracks every night, all round the blessed premises.”
“All right, guv’nor,” drawled Raffles; “don’t excite. It’s a fair cop. We don’t sweat to know ’ow you brung it orf. On’y don’t you go for to shoot, ’cos we ’int awmed, s’help me Gord!”
“Ah, you’re a knowin’ one,” said Rosenthall, fingering his triggers. “But you’ve struck a knowin’er.”
“Ho, yuss, we know all abaht thet! Set a thief to ketch a thief—ho, yuss.”
My eyes had torn themselves from the round black muzzles, from the accursed diamonds that had been our snare, the pasty pig-face of the over-fed pugilist, and the flaming cheeks and hook nose of Rosenthall himself. I was looking beyond them at the doorway filled with quivering silk and plush, black faces, white eyeballs, woolly pates. But a sudden silence recalled my attention to the millionaire. And only his nose retained its color.
“What d’ye mean?” he whispered with a hoarse oath. “Spit it out, or, by Christmas, I’ll drill you!”
“Whort price thet brikewater?” drawled Raffles coolly.
“Eh?”
Rosenthall’s revolvers were describing widening orbits.
“Whort price thet brikewater—old I.D.B.?”
“Where in hell did you get hold o’ that?” asked Rosenthall, with a rattle in his thick neck, meant for mirth.
“You may well arst,” says Raffles. “It’s all over the plice w’ere I come from.”
“Who can have spread such rot?”
“I dunno,” says Raffles; “arst the gen’leman on yer left; p’r’aps ’E knows.”
The gentleman on his left had turned livid with emotion. Guilty conscience never declared itself in plainer terms. For a moment his small eyes bulged like currants in the suet of his face; the next, he had pocketed his pistols on a professional instinct, and was upon us with his fists.
“Out o’ the light—out o’ the light!” yelled Rosenthall in a frenzy.
He was too late. No sooner had the burly pugilist obstructed his fire than Raffles was through the window at a bound; while I, for standing still and saying nothing, was scientifically felled to the floor.
I cannot have been many moments without my senses. When I recovered them there was a great to-do in the garden, but I had the drawing-room to myself. I sat up. Rosenthall and Purvis were rushing about outside, cursing the Kaffirs and nagging at each other.
“Over that wall, I tell yer!”
“I tell you it was this one. Can’t you whistle for the police?”
“Police be damned! I’ve had enough of the blessed police.”
“Then we’d better get back and make sure of the other rotter.”
“Oh, make sure o’ yer skin. That’s what you’d better do. Jala, you black hog, if I catch you skulkin’.…”
I never heard the threat. I was creeping from the drawing-room on my hands and knees, my own revolver swinging by its steel ring from my teeth.
For an instant I thought that the hall also was deserted. I was wrong, and I crept upon a Kaffir on all fours. Poor devil, I could not bring myself to deal him a base blow, but I threatened him most hideously with my revolver, and left the white teeth chattering in his black head as I took the stairs three at a time. Why I went upstairs in that decisive fashion, as though it were my only course, I cannot explain. But garden and ground floor seemed alive with men, and I might have done worse.
I turned into the first room I came to. It was a bedroom—empty, though lit up; and never shall I forget how I started as I entered, on encountering the awful villain that was myself at full length in a pier-glass! Masked, armed, and ragged, I was indeed fit carrion for a bullet or the hangman, and to one or the other I made up my mind. Nevertheless, I hid myself in the wardrobe behind the mirror; and there I stood shivering and cursing my fate, my folly, and Raffles most of all—Raffles first and last—for I daresay half an hour. Then the wardrobe door was flung suddenly open; they had stolen into the room without a sound; and I was hauled downstairs, an ignominious captive.
Gross scenes followed in the hall; the ladies were now upon the stage, and at sight of the desperate criminal they screamed with one accord. In truth I must have given them fair cause, though my mask was now torn away and hid nothing but my left ear. Rosenthall answered their shrieks with a roar for silence; the woman with the bath-sponge hair swore at him shrilly in return; the place became a Babel impossible to describe. I remember wondering how long it would be before the police appeared. Purvis and the ladies were for calling them in and giving me in charge without delay. Rosenthall would not hear of it. He swore that he would shoot man or woman who left his sight. He had had enough of the police. He was not going to have them coming there to spoil sport; he was going to deal with me in his own way. With that he dragged me from all other hands, flung me against a door, and sent a bullet crashing through the wood within an inch of my ear.
“You drunken fool! It’ll be murder!” shouted Purvis, getting in the way a second time.
“Wha’ do I care? He’s armed, isn’t he? I shot him in self-defence. It’ll be a warning to others. Will you stand aside, or d’ye want it yourself?”
“You’re drunk,” said Purvis, still between us. “I saw you take a neat tumblerful since you come in, and it’s made you drunk as a fool. Pull yourself together, old man. You ain’t a-going to do what you’ll be sorry for.”
“Then I won’t shoot at him, I’ll only shoot roun’ an’ roun’ the beggar. You’re quite right, ole feller. Wouldn’t hurt him. Great mishtake. Roun’ an’ roun’. There—like that!”
His freckled paw shot up over
Purvis’s shoulder, mauve lightning came from his ring, a red flash from his revolver, and shrieks from the women as the reverberations died away. Some splinters lodged in my hair.
Next instant the prize-fighter disarmed him; and I was safe from the devil, but finally doomed to the deep sea. A policeman was in our midst. He had entered through the drawing-room window; he was an officer of few words and creditable promptitude. In a twinkling he had the handcuffs on my wrists, while the pugilist explained the situation, and his patron reviled the force and its representative with impotent malignity. A fine watch they kept; a lot of good they did; coming in when all was over and the whole household might have been murdered in their sleep. The officer only deigned to notice him as he marched me off.
“We know all about you, sir,” said he contemptuously, and he refused the sovereign Purvis proffered. “You will be seeing me again, sir, at Marylebone.”
“Shall I come now?”
“As you please, sir. I rather think the other gentleman requires you more, and I don’t fancy this young man means to give much trouble.”
“Oh, I’m coming quietly,” I said.
And I went.
In silence we traversed perhaps a hundred yards. It must have been midnight. We did not meet a soul. At last I whispered:
“How on earth did you manage it?”
“Purely by luck,” said Raffles. “I had the luck to get clear away through knowing every brick of those back-garden walls, and the double luck to have these togs with the rest over at Chelsea. The helmet is one of a collection I made up at Oxford; here it goes over this wall, and we’d better carry the coat and belt before we meet a real officer. I got them once for a fancy ball—ostensibly—and thereby hangs a yarn. I always thought they might come in useful a second time. My chief crux tonight was getting rid of the hansom that brought me back. I sent him off to Scotland Yard with ten bob and a special message to good old Mackenzie. The whole detective department will be at Rosenthall’s in about half an hour. Of course, I speculated on our gentleman’s hatred of the police—another huge slice of luck. If you’d got away, well and good; if not, I felt he was the man to play with his mouse as long as possible. Yes, Bunny, it’s been more of a costume piece than I intended, and we’ve come out of it with a good deal less credit. But, by Jove, we’re jolly lucky to have come out of it at all!”
CONSTANCE DUNLAP, by Arthur B. Reeve
CHAPTER I
THE FORGERS
There was something of the look of the hunted animal brought to bay at last in Carlton Dunlap’s face as he let himself into his apartment late one night toward the close of the year.
On his breath was the lingering odor of whisky, yet in his eye and hand none of the effects. He entered quietly, although there was no apparent reason for such excessive caution. Then he locked the door with the utmost care, although there was no apparent reason for caution about that, either.
Even when he had thus barricaded himself, he paused to listen with all the elemental fear of the cave man who dreaded the footsteps of his pursuers. In the dim light of the studio apartment he looked anxiously for the figure of his wife. Constance was not there, as she had been on other nights, uneasily awaiting his return. What was the matter? His hand shook a trifle now as he turned the knob of the bedroom door and pushed it softly open.
She was asleep. He leaned over, not realizing that her every faculty was keenly alive to his presence, that she was acting a part.
“Throw something around yourself, Constance,” he whispered hoarsely into her ear, as she moved with a little well-feigned start at being suddenly wakened, “and come into the studio. There is something I must tell you tonight, my dear.”
“My dear!” she exclaimed bitterly, now seeming to rouse herself with an effort and pretending to put back a stray wisp of her dark hair in order to hide from him the tears that still lingered on her flushed cheeks. “You can say that, Carlton, when it has been every night the same old threadbare excuse of working at the office until midnight?”
She set her face in hard lines, but could not catch his eye.
“Carlton Dunlap,” she added in a tone that rasped his very soul, “I am nobody’s fool. I may not know much about bookkeeping and accounting, but I can add—and two and two, when the same man but different women compose each two, do not make four, according to my arithmetic, but three, from which,”—she finished almost hysterically the little speech she had prepared, but it seemed to fall flat before the man’s curiously altered manner—“from which I shall subtract one.”
She burst into tears.
“Listen,” he urged, taking her arm gently to lead her to an easy-chair.
“No, no, no!” she cried, now thoroughly aroused, with eyes that again snapped accusation and defiance at him, “don’t touch me. Talk to me, if you want to, but don’t, don’t come near me.” She was now facing him, standing in the high-ceilinged “studio,” as they called the room where she had kept up in a desultory manner for her own amusement the art studies which had interested her before her marriage. “What is it that you want to say? The other nights you said nothing at all. Have you at last thought up an excuse? I hope it is at least a clever one.”
“Constance,” he remonstrated, looking fearfully about. Instinctively she felt that her accusation was unjust. Not even that had dulled the hunted look in his face. “Perhaps—perhaps if it were that of which you suspect me, we could patch it up. I don’t know. But, Constance, I—I must leave for the west on the first train in the morning.” He did not pause to notice her startled look, but raced on. “I have worked every night this week trying to straighten out those accounts of mine by the first of the year and—and I can’t do it. An expert begins on them in a couple of days. You must call up the office to-morrow and tell them that I am ill, tell them anything. I must get at least a day or two start before they—”
“Carlton,” she interrupted, “what is the matter? What have you—”
She checked herself in surprise. He had been fumbling in his pocket and now laid down a pile of green and yellow banknotes on the table.
“I have scraped together every last cent I can spare,” he continued, talking jerkily to suppress his emotion. “They cannot take those away from you, Constance. And—when I am settled—in a new life,” he swallowed hard and averted his eyes further from her startled gaze, “under a new name, somewhere, if you have just a little spot in your heart that still responds to me, I—I—no, it is too much even to hope. Constance, the accounts will not come out right because I am—I am an embezzler.”
He bit off the word viciously and then sank his head into his hands and bowed it to a depth that alone could express his shame.
Why did she not say something, do something? Some women would have fainted. Some would have denounced him. But she stood there and he dared not look up to read what was written in her face. He felt alone, all alone, with every man’s hand against him, he who had never in all his life felt so or had done anything to make him feel so before. He groaned as the sweat of his mental and physical agony poured coldly out on his forehead. All that he knew was that she was standing there, silent, looking him through and through, as cold as a statue. Was she the personification of justice? Was this but a foretaste of the ostracism of the world?
“When we were first married, Constance,” he began sadly, “I was only a clerk for Green & Co., at two thousand a year. We talked it over. I stayed and in time became cashier at five thousand. But you know as well as I that five thousand does not meet the social obligations laid on us by our position in the circle in which we are forced to move.”
His voice had become cold and hard, but he did not allow himself to be betrayed into adding, as he might well have done in justice to himself, that to her even a thousand dollars a month would have been only a beginning. It was not that she had been accustomed to so much in the
station of life from which he had taken her. The plain fact was that New York had had an over-tonic effect on her.
“You were not a nagging woman, Constance,” he went on in a somewhat softened tone. “In fact you have been a good wife; you have never thrown it up to me that I was unable to make good to the degree of many of our friends in purely commercial lines. All you have ever said is the truth. A banking house pays low for its brains. My God!” he cried stiffening out in the chair and clenching his fists, “it pays low for its temptations, too.”
There had been nothing in the world Carlton would not have given to make happy the woman who stood now, leaning on the table in cold silence, with averted head, regarding neither him nor the pile of greenbacks.
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through my hands every week,” he resumed. “That business owed me for my care of it. It was taking the best in me and in return was not paying what other businesses paid for the best in other men. When a man gets thinking that way, with a woman whom he loves as I love you—something happens.”
He paused in the bitterness of his thoughts. She moved as if to speak. “No, no,” he interrupted. “Hear me out first. All I asked was a chance to employ a little of the money that I saw about me—not to take it, but to employ it for a little while, a few days, perhaps only a few hours. Money breeds money. Why should I not use some of this idle money to pay me what I ought to have?
“When Mr. Green was away last summer I heard some inside news about a certain stock. So it happened that I began to juggle the accounts. It is too long a story to tell how I did it. Anybody in my position could have done it—for a time. It would not interest you anyhow. But I did it. The first venture was successful. Also the spending of the money was very successful, in its way. That was the money that took us to the fashionable hotel in Atlantic City where we met so many people. Instead of helping me, it got me in deeper.
The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales Page 187
