E. W. Hornung_A J Raffles 03 Read Free Page B

cupboard under the stairs, where
hats and coats were hung; and it was she who shut the door on me with
a sob.
    Doors were already opening overhead, voices calling, voices
answering, the alarm running like wildfire from room to room. Soft
feet pattered in the gallery and down the stairs about my very ears.
I do not know what made me put on my own shoes as I heard them, but
I think that I was ready and even longing to walk out and give
myself up. I need not say what and who it was that alone restrained
me. I heard her name. I heard them crying to her as though she had
fainted. I recognized the detested voice of my bete noir, Alick
Carruthers, thick as might be expected of the dissipated dog, yet
daring to stutter out her name. And then I heard, without catching,
her low reply; it was in answer to the somewhat stern questioning of
quite another voice; and from what followed I knew that she had never
fainted at all.
    "Upstairs, miss, did he? Are you sure?"
    I did not hear her answer. I conceive her as simply pointing up the
stairs. In any case, about my very ears once more, there now
followed such a patter and tramp of bare and booted feet as renewed
in me a base fear for my own skin. But voices and feet passed over
my head, went up and up, higher and higher; and I was wondering
whether or not to make a dash for it, when one light pair came
running down again, and in very despair I marched out to meet my
preserver, looking as little as I could like the abject thing I felt.
    "Be quick!" she cried in a harsh whisper, and pointed peremptorily
to the porch.
    But I stood stubbornly before her, my heart hardened by her hardness,
and perversely indifferent to all else. And as I stood I saw the
letter she had written, in the hand with which she pointed, crushed
into a ball.
    "Quickly!" She stamped her foot. "Quickly - if you ever cared!"
    This in a whisper, without bitterness, without contempt, but with
a sudden wild entreaty that breathed upon the dying embers of my
poor manhood. I drew myself together for the last time in her
sight. I turned, and left her as she wished - for her sake, not
for mine. And as I went I heard her tearing her letter into little
pieces, and the little pieces falling on the floor.
    Then I remembered Raffles, and could have killed him for what he
had done. Doubtless by this time he was safe and snug in the Albany:
what did my fate matter to him? Never mind; this should be the end
between him and me as well; it was the end of everything, this dark
night's work! I would go and tell him so. I would jump into a cab
and drive there and then to his accursed rooms. But first I must
escape from the trap in which he had been so ready to leave me. And
on the very steps I drew back in despair. They were searching the
shrubberies between the drive and the road; a policeman's lantern
kept flashing in and out among the laurels, while a young man in
evening-clothes directed him from the gravel sweep. It was this
young man whom I must dodge, but at my first step in the gravel he
wheeled round, and it was Raffles himself.
    "Hulloa!" he cried. "So you've come up to join the dance as well!
Had a look inside, have you? You'll be better employed in helping
to draw the cover in front here. It's all right, officer - only
another gentleman from the Empress Rooms."
    And we made a brave show of assisting in the futile search, until
the arrival of more police, and a broad hint from an irritable
sergeant, gave us an excellent excuse for going off arm-in-arm.
But it was Raffles who had thrust his arm through mine. I shook him
off as we left the scene of shame behind.
    "My dear Bunny!" he exclaimed. "Do you know what brought me back?"
    I answered savagely that I neither knew nor cared.
    "I had the very devil of a squeak for it," he went on. "I did the
hurdles over two or three garden-walls, but so did the flyer who
was on my tracks, and he drove me back into the straight and down to
High Street like any lamplighter. If he had only had the