by John Kendrick Bangs
From
“Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of An Amateur
Crackswoman – Narrated by Bunny” Copyright, 1905, by Harper & Brothers, All
rights reserved. Published October, 1905.
Now that it is all over, I do not know whether she was
really worn-out or by the expert use of powder gave to her cheeks the pallid
look which bore out Mrs. Van Raffles’s statement to me that she needed a
rest. At any rate, one morning in
mid-August, when the
“I just can’t stand it for another minute,
Bunny,” she faltered, real tears coursing down her cheeks. “I haven’t slept a wink of natural sleep for
five days, and yet when night comes it is all I can do to keep my eyes
open. At the Rockerbilt ball last night
I dozed off four times while talking with the Duchess of Snarleyow, and when
the Chinese Ambassador asked me to sit out the gavotte with him I actually
snored in his face. A woman who can’t
keep awake all night and sleep properly by day is not fit for
“Your are very
wise,” I replied, “and I wholly approve of your course. There is no use of trying to do too much and
you have begun to show the strain to which you have been subjecting yourself. Your failure last Friday night to land Mrs.
Gollet’s ruby dog-collar when her French poodle sat in your lap all through the
Gaster musicale is evidence to me that your mind is not as alert as usual. By all means, go away and rest up. I’ll take care of things around here.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said with a
grateful smile. You need a change too,
Bunny. What would you say if I sent all
the servants away too, so that you could have a week of absolute tranquility? It must be awful for a man of your refined
sensibilities to have to associate so constantly with the housemaids, the
under-butlers and the footmen.”
“Nothing would please me better,” I
returned with alacrity; for, to tell the truth, society below stairs was
rapidly becoming caviar to my taste. The
housemaids were all right, and the under-butlers being properly subject to my
control, I could wither when they grew too familiar, but the footmen were
intolerable guyers. On more than one
occasion their quick Irish wit had put me to my trumps to maintain my dignity,
and I had noticed of late that their alleged fun at my expense had made even
the parlor-maid giggle in a most irritating fashion. Henriette’s suggestions promised at least a
week’s immunity from this sort of thing, and as far as
remaining alone in the beautiful Bolivar Lodge was concerned, to a man of my
literary tastes nothing could be more desirable.
“I can put in a week of solitude here very
comfortably,” said I. “The
Constant-Scrappes have a very excellent library and a line of reading in
Abstract Morals in full calf that I should very much like to get at.”
“So be it then,” said Henriette, with a
sigh of relief. “I will take my
departure next Saturday after the Innit’s clam-bake on
“Don’t you bother about that,” said I,
with a laugh. “I lived for months on the
chafing-dish before I found you again.
And I rather think the change from game birds and pate de foie gras to
simple eggs and bread and butter will do me good.”
And so the matter was arranged. The servants were notified that, owing to
Mrs. Van Raffles’s illness, they might take a vacation on full pay for ten
days, and Henriette herself prepared society for her departure by fainting
twice at the Innit’s clam-bake on
No less a person than Mrs. Gaster herself brought her home at
In exhortation to her “dear Mrs. Van Raffles” to be careful
of herself “for all our sakes.” Saturday
morning Henriette departed. Saturday
afternoon the servants followed suit, and I was alone
in my glory----and oh, how I reveled in it!
The beauties of Bolivar Lodge had never so
reveled themselves to me as then; the house as dark as the tomb without, thanks
to the closing of the shutters and the drawing to of all the heavy portieres
before the windows, but a blaze of light within from cellar to roof. I spent whole hours gloating over the
treasures of that Monte-Cristan treasure-house, and all day Sunday and Monday I
spent poring over the books in the library, a marvelous collection, though for
the most part wholly uncut.
Everything moved along serenely until
Wednesday afternoon, when I thought I heard a noise in the cellar, but
investigation revealed the presence of no one but a stray cat which miaowed up
the cellar steps to me in response to my call of “Who’s there.” True, I did not go down to see if any one
were there, not caring to involve myself in a personal encounter with a chance
tramp who might have wandered in, in search of food. The sudden materialization of the cat
satisfactorily explained the noises, and I returned to the library to resume my
reading of The Origin of the Decalogue where I had left off at the
moment of the interruption. That evening
I cooked myself a welsh-rabbit and at eight o’clock, arrayed in my pajamas, I
returned to the library with a book, a bottle of champagne and a box of
Vencedoras, prepared for a quiet evening of absolute luxury. I read in the waning light of the dying
midsummer day for a little while, and then, as darkness came on, I turned to
the switch-board to light the electric lamp.
The lamp would not light.
I pressed and pressed every button in the room, but
with no better results; and then, going through the house I tried every other
button I could find, but everywhere conditions were the same. Apparently there was something the matter
with the electrical service, a fact which I cursed, but not deeply, for it was
a beautiful moonlight night and while of course I was disappointed in my
reading, I realized that after all nothing could be pleasanter than to sit in
the moonlight and smoke and quaff bumpers of champagne until the crack of
doom. This I immediately proceeded to do
and kept at it pretty steadily until I should say about eleven o’clock, when I
head unmistakable signs of a large automobile coming up the drive. It chugged as far as the front-door and then
stood panting like an impatient steam-engine, while the chauffer, a person of
medium height, well muffed in his automobile coat, his features concealed
behind his goggles, and his mouth covered by his collar, rapped loudly on the
front-door, once, and then a second time.
“Who the devil can this be at this hour of
the night, I wonder,” I muttered, as I responded to the summons.
If I sought the name I was not to be
gratified, for the moment I opened the door I found two pistols leveled upon
me, and two very determined eyes peering at me from behind the goggles.
“Not a word, or I shoot,” said the
intruder in a gruff voice, evidently assumed, before I could get a word from my
already somewhat champagne-twisted tongue.
“Lead me to the dining-room.”
Well, there I was. Defenceless, taken by surprise, unarmed, not
too wide awake, comfortably filled with champagne and in no particularly
fighting mood. What could I do but
yield? To call for help would have
brought at least two bullets crashing into my brain, even if any one could have
heard my cries. To assault a scoundrel
so well-armed would have been the height of folly, and to tell the truth so
imbued was I with the politer spirit of the gentle art of house-breaking that
the sudden confrontation with the ruder, rough-house methods of the highwayman
left me entirely unable to cope with the situation.
“Certainly,” said I, turning and ushering
him down the hall to the great dining-room where the marvelous plate of the
Constant-Scrappes
shone effulgently upon the side-board
--or
at least such of it as there was no room for in the massive safe.
“Get me some rope,” commanded the
intruder. Still under the range of those
dreadful pistols, I obeyed.
“Sit down in that chair, and, by the
leaping Gladstone, if you move an inch I’ll blow your face off feature by
feature,” growled the intruder.
“Who’s moving?” I retorted, angrily.
“Well, see that whoever else is you are
not,” he retorted, winding the rope three times around my waist and fastening
me securely to the back of the chair.
“Now hold out your hands.”
I obeyed, and he bound them as tightly as
though there were fastened together with rods of iron. A moment later my feet and knees were
similarly bound and I was as fast in the toils as Gulliver, when the
Liliputians fell upon him in his sleep and bound him to the earth.
And then I was a mute witness to as keen
and high-handed a performance as I ever witnessed. One by one every item of the Constant-Scrappe’s
silver service, valued at ninety thousand dollars, was removed from the
sideboard and taken along the hall and placed in the tonneau of the
automobile. Next the safe in which lay
not only the famous gold service used only at the very swellest functions, said
to have cost one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for the gold alone,
to say nothing of the exquisite workmanship, but---it made me gnash my teeth in
impotent rage to see it—Henriette’s own jewel-box containing a hundred thousand
dollars worth of her own gems and some thirty thousand dollars in cash rifled
of its contents and disposed of similarly to the silver in the gaping maw of
that damned automobile tonneau.
“Now,” said the intruder, loosening my
feet and releasing me from the chair, “take me to my lady’s boudoir. There is room in the car for a few more
objects of virtu.”
I obeyed on the instant and a few moments
later the scene of below-stairs was repeated, with me powerless to resist. Pictures, bric-a-brac, and other things to
the tune of twenty thousand dollars more were removed, as calmly and as coolly
as though there were no law against that sort of thing in the world.
“There!” cried the highwayman, as he
returned after the last item of his loot had been stowed away in the
vehicle. “That’ll make an interesting
tale for Friday morning’s papers. It’s
the biggest haul I’ve made in forty-eight years. Good-night, sir. When I am safely out of town I’ll telegraph
the police to come and rescue you from your present awkward position. And let me tell you, if you give them the
slightest hint of my personal appearance, by the hopping Harcourt, I’ll come
back and kill you. See?”
And with that he made off, closing the
door behind him, and a moment later I heard his infernal automobile chugging
down the drive at full speed. Twelve
hours later, in response to a long-distance telephone call message from New
York, the police came bounding around the house, and found me tied up and
unconscious. The highwayman had at least
been true to his word, and, as he had prophesied, the morning papers on Friday
were full of the story of the most daring robbery of the century. Accurate stories in detail under huge
scare-type headlines appear in all the papers, narrating the losses of the
Constant-Scrappes, as well as the rape of the jewels and money of Mrs. Van
Raffles. The whole country rang with it,
and the afternoon train brought not only detectives by the score, but the
representative of the Constant-Scrappes and Henriette herself. She was highly hysterical over the loss not
only of her own property but that of her landlord as well, but nobody blamed
me. The testimony of the police as to my
condition when found fully substantiated my story and was accepted as ample
evidence that I had no criminal connection with the robbery. This was a great relief to me, but it was
greater when Henriette stroked my hand and called me “poor old Bunny,” for I
must say I was worried as to what she would think of me for having proven so
poor a guardian of her property.
Since then months have passed and not a
vestige of the stolen property had been recovered. The Constant-Scrappes bore their loss with
equanimity, as became them, since no one could have foreseen such a misfortune
as overtook them; and as for Mrs. Van Raffles, she never mentioned the matter
again to me, save once, and that set me to thinking.
“He was a clever rascal you say, Bunny?”
she asked me one morning.
“Yes,” said I. “One of the best in the business, I fancy.”
“A
big fellow?” She grinned with a queer
smile.
“Oh, about your height,” said I.
“Well, by the hopping Harcourt,” she
retorted, quizzically, “if you give them the slightest hint of my
personal appearance, I’ll come back and kill you. See?”
The
man’s very words! And then she
laughed.
“What?” I cried. “It was—you!”
“Was it?” she returned airily.
“Why the devil you should go to all that
trouble, when you had the stuff right here is what puzzles me,” said I.
“Oh. It wasn’t any trouble,” she
replied. “Just sport---you looked so
funny sitting up there in your pajamas; and, besides a material fact such as
that hold-up is apt to be more convincing to the police, to say nothing of the Constant-Scrappes,
than any mere story we could invent.”
“Well, you’d better be careful,
Henriette,” I said with a shiver. “The
detectives are clever---“
“True, Bunny,” she answered, gravely. “But you see the highwayman was a man---well,
I’m a woman, dear. I can prove an alibi. By the way, you left the cellar-door unlocked
that Wednesday. I found it open when I
sneaked in to cut off the electric lights.
You mustn’t be so careless, dear, or we may have to divvy up our spoil
with others.”
Marvelous woman, that Henriette!