or a single sound, Raffles had decamped behind all our backs.
Fortunately the clerk was himself very busy gloating over the horrors of the album; before he looked round I had hidden my astonishment, but not my wrath, of which I had the instinctive sense to make no secret.
'My friend's the most impatient man on earth!' I exclaimed. 'He said he was going to catch a train, and now he's gone without a word!'
'I never heard him,' said the clerk, looking puzzled.
'No more did I; but he did touch me on the shoulder,' I lied, 'and say something or other. I was too deep in this beastly book to pay much attention. He must have meant that he was off. Well, let him be off! I mean to see all that's to be seen.'
And in my nervous anxiety to allay any suspicions aroused by my companion's extraordinary behavior, I outstayed even the eminent detective and his friends, saw them examine the Raffles Relics, heard them discuss me under my own nose, and at last was alone with the an?mic clerk. I put my hand in my pocket, and measured him with a side-long eye. The tipping system is nothing less than a minor bane of my existence. Not that one is a grudging giver, but simply because in so many cases it is so hard to know whom to tip and what to tip him. I know what it is to be the parting guest who has not parted freely enough, and that not from stinginess but the want of a fine instinct on the point. I made no mistake, however, in the case of the clerk, who accepted my pieces of silver without demur, and expressed a hope of seeing the article which I had assured him I was about to write. He has had some years to wait for it, but I flatter myself that these belated pages will occasion more interest than offense if they ever do meet those watery eyes.
Twilight was falling when I reached the street; the sky behind St. Stephen's had flushed and blackened like an angry face; the lamps were lit, and under every one I was unreasonable enough to look for Raffles. Then I made foolishly sure that I should find him hanging about the station, and hung thereabouts myself until one Richmond train had gone without me. In the end I walked over the bridge to Waterloo, and took the first train to Teddington instead. That made a shorter walk of it, but I had to grope my way through a white fog from the river to Ham Common, and it was the hour of our cosy dinner when I reached our place of retirement. There was only a flicker of firelight on the blinds: I was the first to return after all. It was nearly four hours since Raffles had stolen away from my side in the ominous precincts of Scotland Yard. Where could he be? Our landlady wrung her hands over him; she had cooked a dinner after her favorite's heart, and I let it spoil before making one of the most melancholy meals of my life.
Up to midnight there was no sign of him; but long before this time I had reassured our landlady with a voice and face that must have given my words the lie. I told her that Mr. Ralph (as she used to call him) had said something about going to the theatre; that I thought he had given up the idea, but I must have been mistaken, and should certainly sit up for him. The attentive soul brought in a plate of sandwiches before she retired; and I prepared to make a night of it in a chair by the sitting-room fire. Darkness and bed I could not face in my anxiety. In a way I felt as though duty and loyalty called me out into the winter's night; and yet whither should I turn to look for Raffles? I could think of but one place, and to seek him there would be to destroy myself without aiding him. It was my growing conviction that he had been recognized when leaving Scotland Yard, and either taken then and there, or else hunted into some new place of hiding. It would all be in the morning papers; and it was all his own fault. He had thrust his head into the lion's mouth, and the lion's jaws had snapped. Had he managed to withdraw his head in time?
There was a bottle at my elbow, and that night I say deliberately that it was not my enemy but my friend. It procured me at last some surcease from my suspense. I fell fast asleep in my chair before the fire. The lamp was still burning, and the fire red, when I awoke; but I sat very stiff in the iron clutch of a wintry morning. Suddenly I slued round in my chair. And there was Raffles in a chair behind me, with the door open behind him, quietly taking off his boots.
'Sorry to wake you, Bunny,' said he. 'I thought I was behaving like a mouse; but after a three hours' tramp one's feet are all heels.'
I did not get up and fall upon his neck. I sat back in my chair and blinked with bitterness upon his selfish insensibility. He should not know what I had been through on his account.
'Walk out from town?' I inquired, as indifferently as though he were in the habit of doing so.
'From Scotland Yard,' he answered, stretching himself before the fire in his stocking soles.
'Scotland Yard!' I echoed. 'Then I was right; that's where you were all the time; and yet you managed to escape!'
I had risen excitedly in my turn.
'Of course I did,' replied Raffles. 'I never thought there would be much difficulty about that, but there was even less than I anticipated. I did once find myself on one side of a sort of counter, and an officer dozing at his desk at the other side. I thought it safest to wake him up and make inquiries about a mythical purse left in a phantom hansom outside the Carlton. And the way the fellow fired me out of that was another credit to the Metropolitan Police: it's only in the savage countries that they would have troubled to ask how one had got in.'
'And how did you?' I asked. 'And in the Lord's name, Raffles, when and why?'
Raffles looked down on me under raised eyebrows, as he stood with his coat tails to the dying fire.
'How and when, Bunny, you know as well as I do,' said he, cryptically. 'And at last you shall hear the honest why and wherefore. I had more reasons for going to Scotland Yard, my dear fellow, than I had the face to tell you at the time.'
'I don't care why you went there!' I cried. 'I want to know why you stayed, or went back, or whatever it was you may have done. I thought they had got you, and you had given them the slip?'
Raffles smiled as he shook his head.
'No, no, Bunny; I prolonged the visit, as I paid it, of my own accord. As for my reasons, they are far too many for me to tell you them all; they rather weighed upon me as I walked out; but you'll see them for yourself if you turn round.'
I was standing with my back to the chair in which I had been asleep; behind the chair was the round lodging-house table; and there, reposing on the cloth with the whiskey and sandwiches, was the whole collection of Raffles Relics which had occupied the lid of the silver-chest in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard! The chest alone was missing. There was the revolver that I had only once heard fired, and there the blood-stained life-preserver, brace-and-bit, bottle of rock-oil, velvet bag, rope-ladder, walking-stick, gimlets, wedges, and even the empty cartridge-case which had once concealed the gift of a civilized monarch to a potentate of color.
'I was a real Father Christmas,' said Raffles, 'when I arrived. It's a pity you weren't awake to appreciate the scene. It was more edifying than the one I found. You never caught
He thought I had merely fallen asleep in my chair! He could not see that I had been sitting up for him all night long! The hint of a temperance homily, on top of all I had borne, and from Raffles of all mortal men, tried my temper to its last limit—but a flash of late enlightenment enabled me just to keep it.
'Where did you hide?' I asked grimly.
'At the Yard itself.'
'So I gather; but whereabouts at the Yard?'
'Can you ask, Bunny?'
'I am asking.'
'It's where I once hid before.'
'You don't mean in the chest?'
'I do.'
Our eyes met for a minute.
'You may have ended up there,' I conceded. 'But where did you go first when you slipped out behind my back, and how the devil did you know where to go?'
'I never did slip out,' said Raffles, 'behind your back. I slipped in.'
'Into the chest?'
'Exactly.'
I burst out laughing in his face.
'My dear fellow, I saw all these things on the lid just afterward. Not one of them was moved. I watched that detective show them to his friends.
