The Great Ruby Robbery - Classic Mystery Sleep Story

Taesha Glasgow (0:01)

Tonight, I will be reading The Great Ruby Robbery by Grant Allen 1 Purses Remenade was an American heiress. As she justly remarked, this was a commonplace profession for a young woman nowadays. For almost everybody of late years, has been an American and an heiress. A poor Californian indeed would be a charming novelty in London society. But London society so far has had to go without one.

Purses Remenade was on her way back from the Wilcox's ball. She was stopping, of course, with Sir Everard and Lady McClure at their house at Hansted.

I say, of course, advisedly, because if you or I go to see New York, we have to put up at our own expense five dollars a day without wine or extras at the Windsor or the Fifth Avenue. But when the pretty American comes to London, then every American girl is ex officio pretty, in Europe at least. I suppose they keep their ugly ones at home for domestic consumption. She is invariably the guest either of a dowager duchess or of a royal academician, like Sir Everard, of the first distinction.

Yankees visit Europe in fact to see, among other things, our art and our nobility. And by dint of native persistence, they get into places that you and I can never succeed in penetrating unless we devoted all the energies of a long and blameless life to securing an invitation.

Purses hadn't been to the Wilcoxes with Lady McClure, however. The McClure's were too really great to know such people as the Wilcoxes, who were something tremendous to the city, but didn't buy pictures. And academicians, you know, don't care to cultivate city people, unless they're customers.

Patrons, the academicians more usually call them, but I prefer the simple business word myself as being a deal less patronizing.

So, Purses had accepted an invitation for Mrs. Duncan Harrison, the wife of the well-known member for the Hackness Division of Almanchur, to take a seat in her carriage to and from the Wilcoxes. Mrs. Harrison knew the habits and manners of American heiresses too well to offer to chaperon Purses, and indeed, Purses, as a freeborn American citizen, was quite as well able to take care of herself the wide world over as any three ordinary married Englishwomen.

Now Mrs. Harrison had a brother, an Irish baronet, Sir Justin O'Byrne, late of the Eighth Hussars, who had been with them to the Wilcoxes, and who accompanied them home to Hampstead on the back seat of the carriage.

Sir Justin was one of those charming, ineffective, elusive Irishmen whom everybody likes and everybody disapproves of. He had been everywhere and done everything except to earn an honest livelihood. A total absence of rent during the 60s and 70s never prevented his father, old Sir Terence O'Byrne, who sat so long for Connemara in the unreformed parliament, from sending his son Justin in state to Eton, and afterwards to Fashtonville College at Oxford.

He gave me the education of a gentleman, Sir Justin was warned regretfully to observe, but he admitted to give me also the income to keep it up with.

Nevertheless, society felt O'Byrne was the sort of man who must be kept afloat somehow, and it kept him afloat accordingly in those mysterious ways that only society understands, and that you and I, who are not society, could never get to the bottom of if we tried for a century.

Sir Justin himself had stayed parliament too, where he sat for a while behind the Great Parnell, without for a moment for fitting society's regard, even in those early days, when it was held as a prime article of faith by the world, and no gentleman could possibly call himself a home ruler. It was only one of O'Byrne's wild Irish tricks, society said. Complacently with that singular indulgence, it always extends to its special favorites, and which is, in fact, the correlative of that unsparing cruelty, it shows in turn to those who happen to offend against its unwritten precepts.

If Sir Justin had blown up a czar or two in a fit of political exuberance, society would only have regarded the escapade as one of O'Byrne's eccentricities. He had also held a commission for a while in the Calvary Regiment, which he left, it was understood, owing to a difference of opinion about a lady with a colonel. And he was now a gentleman of, at large, un-London society, supposed by those who know more about everyone than one knows about oneself, to be on the lookout for a nice girl with a little money.

Sir Justin had paid Pursus a great deal of attention that particular evening. In point of fact, he had paid her a great deal of attention from the very first whenever he met her. And on the way home from the dance, he had kept his eyes fixed on Pursus' face to an extent that was almost embarrassing.