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THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
[Illustration: "I wonder who can have done it."]
THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
_By_
ERNEST W. HORNUNG
_Author of_
THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN, RAFFLES, ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK SNAPP
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1913
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A SMALL WORLD 1
II SECOND SIGHT 16
III IN THE TRAIN 29
IV DOWN THE RIVER 42
V AN UNTIMELY VISITOR 64
VI VOLUNTARY SERVICE 83
VII AFTER MICHELANGELO 98
VIII FINGER-PRINTS 117
IX FAIR WARNING 134
X THE WEEK OF THEIR LIVES 146
XI IN COUNTRY AND IN TOWN 156
XII THE THOUSANDTH MAN 169
XIII QUID PRO QUO 181
XIV FAITH UNFAITHFUL 205
XV THE PERSON UNKNOWN 214
THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
I
A SMALL WORLD
Cazalet sat up so suddenly that his head hit the woodwork over the upper
berth. His own voice still rang in his startled ears. He wondered how
much he had said, and how far it could have carried above the throb of
the liner's screws and the mighty pounding of the water against her
plates. Then his assembling senses coupled the light in the cabin with
his own clear recollection of having switched it off before turning
over. And then he remembered how he had been left behind at Naples, and
rejoined the _Kaiser Fritz_ at Genoa, only to find that he no longer had
a cabin to himself.
A sniff assured Cazalet that he was neither alone at the moment nor yet
the only one awake; he pulled back the swaying curtain, which he had
taken to keeping drawn at night; and there on the settee, with the
thinnest of cigarettes between his muscular fingers, sat a man with a
strong blue chin and the quizzical solemnity of an animated sphinx.
It was his cabin companion, an American named Hilton Toye, and Cazalet
addressed him with nervous familiarity.
"I say! Have I been talking in my sleep?"
"Why, yes!" replied Hilton Toye, and broke into a smile that made a
human being of him.
Cazalet forced a responsive grin, as he reached for his own cigarettes.
"What did I say?" he asked, with an amused curiosity at variance with
his shaking hand and shining forehead.
Toye took him in from crown to fingertips, with something deep behind
his kindly smile. "I judge," said he, "you were dreaming of some drama
you've been seeing ashore, Mr. Cazalet."
"Dreaming!" said Cazalet, wiping his face. "It was a nightmare! I must
have turned in too soon after dinner. But I should like to know what I
said."
"I can tell you word for word. You said, 'Henry Craven--dead!' and then
you said, 'Dead--dead--Henry Craven!' as if you'd got to have it both
ways to make sure."
"It's true," said Cazalet, shuddering. "I saw him lying dead, in my
dream."
Hilton Toye took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. "Thirteen
minutes to one in the morning," he said, "and now it's September
eighteenth. Take a note of that, Mr. Cazalet. It may be another case of
second sight for your psychical research society."
"I don't care if it is." Cazalet was smoking furiously.
"Meaning it was no great friend you dreamed was dead?"
"No friend at all, dead or alive!"
"I'm kind of wondering," said Toye, winding his watch up slowly, "if
he's by way of being a friend of mine. I know a Henry Craven over in
England. Lives along the river, down Kingston way, in a big house."
"Called Uplands?"
"Yes, sir! That's the man. Little world, isn't it?"
The man in the upper berth had to hold on as his curtains swung clear;
the man tilted back on the settee, all attention all the time, was more
than ever an effective foil to him. Without the kindly smile that went
as quickly as it came, Hilton Toye was somber, subtle and demure.
Cazalet, on the other hand, was of sanguine complexion and impetuous
looks. He was tanned a rich bronze about the middle of the face, but it
broke off across his forehead like the coloring of a meerschaum pipe.
Both men were in their early prime, and each stood roughly for his race
and type: the traveled American who knows the world, and the elemental
Britisher who has made some one loose end of it his own.
"I thought of my Henry Craven," continued Toye, "as soon as ever you
came out with yours. But it seemed a kind of ordinary name. I might
have known it was the same if I'd recollected the name of his firm.
Isn't it Craven & Cazalet, the stockbrokers, down in Tokenhouse Yard?"
"That's it," said Cazalet bitterly. "But there have been none of us in
it since my father died ten years ago."
"But you're Henry Craven's old partner's son?"
"I'm his only son."
"Then no wonder you dream about Henry Craven," cried Toye, "and no
wonder it wouldn't break your heart if your dream came true."
"It wouldn't," said Cazalet through his teeth. "He wasn't a white man to
me or mine--whatever you may have found him."
"Oh! I don't claim to like him a lot," said Toye.
"But you seem to know a good deal about him?"
"I had a little place near his one summer. I know only what I heard down
there."
"What did you hear?" asked Cazalet. "I've been away ten years, ever
since the crash that ruined everybody but the man at the bottom of the
whole thing. It would be a kindness to tell me what you heard."
"Well, I guess you've said it yourself right now. That man seems to have
beggared everybody all around except himself; that's how I make it out,"
said Hilton Toye.
"He did worse," said Cazalet through his teeth. "He killed my poor
father; he banished me to the wilds of Australia; and he sent a better
man than himself to prison for fourteen years!"
Toye opened his dark eyes for once. "Is that so? No. I never heard
that," said he.
"You hear it now. He did all that, indirectly, and I don't care who
hears me say so. I didn't realize it at the time. I was too young, and
the whole thing laid me out too flat; but I know it now, and I've known
it long enough. It was worse than a crash. It was a scandal. That was
what finished us off, all but Henry Craven! There'd been a gigantic
swindle--special investments recommended by the firm, bogus certificates
and all the rest of it. We were all to blame, of course. My poor father
ought never to have been a business man at all; he should have been a
poet. Even I--I was only a youngster in the office, but I ought to have
known what was going on. But Henry Craven _did_ know. He was in it up to
the neck, though a fellow called Scruton did the actual job. Scruton
got fourteen years--and Craven got our old house on the river!"
"And feathered it pretty well!" said Toye, nodding. "Yes, I did hear
that. And I can tell you they don't think any better of him, in the
neighborhood, for going to live right there. But how did he stop the
other man's mouth, and--how do you know?"
"Never mind how I know," said Cazalet. "Scruton was a friend of mine,
though an older man; he was good to me, though he was a wrong 'un
himself. He paid for it--paid for two--that I _can_ say! But he was
engaged to Ethel Craven at the time, was going to be taken into
partnership on their marriage, and you can put two and two together for
yourself."
"Did she wait for him?"
"About as long as you'd expect of the breed! She was her father's
daughter. I wonder you didn't come across her and her husband!"
"I didn't see so much of the Craven crowd," replied Hilton Toye. "I
wasn't stuck on them either. Say, Cazalet, I wouldn't be that old man
when Scruton comes out, would you?"
But Cazalet showed that he could hold his tongue when he liked, and his
grim look was not so legible as some that had come and gone before. This
one stuck until Toye produced a big flask from his grip, and the talk
shifted to less painful ground. It was the last night in the Bay of
Biscay, and Cazalet told how he had been in it a fortnight on his way
out by sailing-vessel. He even told it with considerable humor, and hit
off sundry passengers of ten years ago as though they had been aboard
the German boat that night; for he had gifts of anecdote and verbal
portraiture, and in their unpremeditated cups Toye drew him out about
the bush until the shadows passed for minutes from the red-brick face
with the white-brick forehead.
"I remember thinking I would dig for gold," said Cazalet. "That's all I
knew about Australia; that and bushrangers and dust-storms and
bush-fires! But you can have adventures of sorts if you go far enough
up-country for 'em; it still pays you to know how to use your fists out
there. I didn't, but I was picking it up before I'd been out three
months, and in six I was as ready as anybody to take off my coat. I
remember once at a bush shanty they dished up such fruity chops that I
said I'd fight the cook if they'd send _him_ up; and I'm blowed if it
wasn't a fellow I'd been at school with and worshiped as no end of a
swell at games! Potts his name was, old Venus Potts, the best looking
chap in the school among other things; and there he was, cooking carrion
at twenty-five bob a week! Instead of fighting we joined forces, got a
burr-cutting job on a good station, then a better one over shearing, and
after that I wormed my way in as bookkeeper, and my pal became one of
the head overseers. Now we're our own bosses with a share in the show,
and the owner comes up only once a year to see how things are looking."
"I hope he had a daughter," said Toye, "and that you're going to marry
her, if you haven't yet?"
Cazalet laughed, but the shadow had returned. "No. I left that to my
pal," he said. "_He_ did that all right!"
"Then I advise you to go and do likewise," rejoined his new friend with
a geniality impossible to take amiss. "I shouldn't wonder, now, if
there's some girl you left behind you."
Cazalet shook his head. "None who would look on herself in that light,"
he interrupted. It was all he said, but once more Toye was regarding him
as shrewdly as when the night was younger, and the littleness of the
world had not yet made them confidant and boon companion.
Eight bells actually struck before their great talk ended and Cazalet
swore that he missed the "watches aft, sir!" of the sailing-vessel ten
years before; and recalled how they had never changed watch without
putting the ship about, his last time in the bay.
"Say!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, knitting his brows over some nebulous
recollection of his own. "I seem to have heard of you and some of your
yarns before. Didn't you spend nights in a log-hut miles and miles from
any other human being?"
It was as they were turning in at last, but the question spoiled a yawn
for Cazalet.
"Sometimes, at one of our out-stations," said he, looking puzzled.
"I've seen your photograph," said Toye, regarding him with a more
critical stare. "But it was with a beard."
"I had it off when I was ashore the other day," said Cazalet. "I always
meant to, before the end of the voyage."
"I see. It was a Miss Macnair showed me that photograph--Miss Blanche
Macnair lives in a little house down there near your old home. I judge
hers is another old home that's been broken up since your day."
"They've all got married," said Cazalet.
"Except Miss Blanche. You write to her some, Mr. Cazalet?"
"Once a year--regularly. It was a promise. We were kids together," he
explained, as he climbed back into the upper berth.
"Guess you were a lucky kid," said the voice below. "She's one in a
thousand, Miss Blanche Macnair!"
II
SECOND SIGHT
Southampton Water was an ornamental lake dotted with fairy lamps. The
stars above seemed only a far-away reflex of those below; but in their
turn they shimmered on the sleek silken arm of sleeping sea. It was a
midsummer night, lagging a whole season behind its fellows. But already
it was so late that the English passengers on the _Kaiser Fritz_ had
abandoned all thought of catching the last train up to London.
They tramped the deck in their noisy, shiny, shore-going boots; they
manned the rail in lazy inarticulate appreciation of the nocturne in
blue stippled with green and red and countless yellow lights. Some
delivered themselves of the patriotic platitudes which become the homing
tourist who has seen no foreign land to touch his own. But one who had
seen more than sights and cities, one who had been ten years buried in
the bush, one with such yarns to spin behind those outpost lights of
England, was not even on deck to hail them back into his ken. Achilles
in his tent was no more conspicuous absentee than Cazalet in his cabin
as the _Kaiser Fritz_ steamed sedately up Southampton Water.
He had finished packing; the stateroom floor was impassable with the
baggage that Cazalet had wanted on the five-weeks' voyage. There was
scarcely room to sit down, but in what there was sat Cazalet like a soul
in torment. All the vultures of the night before, of his dreadful dream,
and of the poignant reminiscences to which his dream had led, might
have been gnawing at his vitals as he sat there waiting to set foot once
more in the land from which a bitter blow had driven him.
Yet the bitterness might have been allayed by the consciousness that he,
at any rate, had turned it to account. It had been, indeed, the making
of him; thanks to that stern incentive, even some of the sweets of a
deserved success were already his. But there was no hint of complacency
in Cazalet's clouded face and heavy attitude. He looked as if he had not
slept, after all, since his nightmare; almost as if he could not trust
himself to sleep again. His face was pale, even in that torrid zone
between the latitudes protected in the bush by beard and wide-awake. And
he jumped to his feet as suddenly as the screw stopped for the first
time; but that might have been just the curious shock which its
cessation always causes after days at sea. Only the same thing happened
again and yet again, as often as ever the engines paused before the end.
Cazalet would spring up and watch his stateroom door with clenched fists
and haunted eyes. But it was some long time before the door flew open,
and then slammed behind Hilton Toye.
Toye was in a state of excitement even more abnormal than Cazalet's
nervous despondency, which indeed it prevented him from observing. It
was instantaneously clear that Toye was astounded, thrilled, almost
triumphant, but as yet just drawing the line at that. A newspaper
fluttered in his hand.
"Second sight?" he ejaculated, as though it were the night before and
Cazalet still shaken by his dream. "I guess you've got it in full
measure, pressed down and running over, Mr. Cazalet!"
It was a sorry sample of his talk. Hilton Toye did not usually mix the
ready metaphors that nevertheless had to satisfy an inner censor, of
some austerity, before they were allowed to leave those deliberate lips.
As a rule there was dignity in that deliberation; it never for a moment,
or for any ordinary moment, suggested want of confidence, for example.
It could even dignify some outworn modes of transatlantic speech which
still preserved a perpetual freshness in the mouth of Hilton Toye. Yet
now, in his strange excitement, word and tone alike were on the level of
the stage American's. It was not less than extraordinary.
"You don't mean about--" Cazalet seemed to be swallowing.
"I do, sir!" cried Hilton Toye.
"--about Henry Craven?"
"Sure."
"Has--something or other--happened to him?"
"Yep."
"You don't mean to say he's--dead?"
"Last Wednesday night!" Toye looked at his paper. "No, I guess I'm
wrong. Seems it happened Wednesday, but he only passed away Sunday
morning."
Cazalet still sat staring at him--there was not room for two of them on
their feet--but into his heavy stare there came a gleam of leaden
wisdom. "This was Thursday morning," he said, "so I didn't dream of it
when it happened, after all."
"You dreamed you saw him lying dead, and so he was," said Toye. "The
funeral's been to-day. I don't know, but that seems to me just about the
next nearest thing to seeing the crime perpetrated in a vision."
"Crime!" cried Cazalet. "What crime?"
"Murder, sir!" said Hilton Toye. "Wilful, brutal, bloody murder! Here's
the paper; better read it for yourself. I'm glad he wasn't a friend of
yours, or mine either, but it's a bad end even for your worst enemy."
The paper fluttered in Cazalet's clutch as it had done in Toye's; but
that was as natural as his puzzled frown over the cryptic allusions of a
journal that had dealt fully with the ascertainable facts in previous
issues. Some few emerged between the lines. Henry Craven had received
his fatal injuries on the Wednesday of the previous week. The thing had
happened in his library, at or about half past seven in the evening; but
how a crime, which was apparently a profound mystery, had been timed to
within a minute of its commission did not appear among the latest
particulars. No arrest had been made. No clue was mentioned, beyond the
statement that the police were still searching for a definite instrument
with which it was evidently assumed that the deed had been committed.
There was in fact a close description of an unusual weapon, a special
constable's very special truncheon. It had hung as a cherished trophy on
the library wall, from which it was missing, while the very imprint of a
silver shield, mounted on the thick end of the weapon, was stated to
have been discovered on the scalp of the fractured skull. But that was a
little bit of special reporting, typical of the enterprising sheet that
Toye had procured. The inquest, merely opened on the Monday, had been
adjourned to the day of issue.
"We must get hold of an evening paper," said Cazalet. "Fancy his own
famous truncheon! He had it mounted and inscribed himself, so that it
shouldn't be forgotten how he'd fought for law and order at Trafalgar
Square! That was the man all over!"
His voice and manner achieved the excessive indifference which the
English type holds due from itself after any excess of feeling. Toye
also was himself again, his alert mind working keenly yet darkly in his
acute eyes.
"I wonder if it was a murder?" he speculated. "I bet it wasn't a
deliberate murder."
"What else could it have been?"
"Kind of manslaughter. Deliberate murderers don't trust to chance
weapons hanging on their victims' walls."
"You forget," said Cazalet, "that he was robbed as well."
"Do they claim that?" said Hilton Toye. "I guess I skipped some. Where
does it say anything about his being robbed?"
"Here!" Cazalet had scanned the paper eagerly; his finger drummed upon
the place. "'The police,'" he read out, in some sort of triumph, "'have
now been furnished with a full description of the missing watch and
trinkets and the other articles believed to have been taken from the
pockets of the deceased.' What's that but robbery?"
"You're dead right," said Toye. "I missed that somehow. Yet who in
thunder tracks a man down to rob and murder him in his own home? But
when you've brained a man, because you couldn't keep your hands off him,
you might deliberately do all the rest to make it seem like the work of
thieves."
Hilton Toye looked a judge of deliberation as he measured his
irrefutable words. He looked something more. Cazalet could not tear his
blue eyes from the penetrating pair that met them with a somber twinkle,
an enlightened gusto, quite uncomfortably suggestive at such a moment.
"You aren't a detective, by any chance, are you?" cried Cazalet, with
rather clumsy humor.
"No, sir! But I've often thought I wouldn't mind being one," said Toye,
chuckling. "I rather figure I might do something at it. If things don't
go my way in your old country, and they put up a big enough reward, why,
here's a man I knew and a place I know, and I might have a mind to try
my hand."
They went ashore together, and to the same hotel at Southampton for the
night. Perhaps neither could have said from which side the initiative
came; but midnight found the chance pair with their legs under the same
heavy Victorian mahogany, devouring cold beef, ham and pickles as
phlegmatically as commercial travelers who had never been off the island
in their lives. Yet surely Cazalet was less depressed than he had been
before landing; the old English ale in a pewter tankard even elicited a
few of those anecdotes and piquant comparisons in which his conversation
was at its best. It was at its worst on general questions, or on
concrete topics not introduced by himself; and into this category,
perhaps not unnaturally, fell such further particulars of the Thames
Valley mystery as were to be found in an evening paper at the inn. They
included a fragmentary report of the adjourned inquest, and the actual
offer of such a reward, by the dead man's firm, for the apprehension of
his murderer, as made Toye's eyes glisten in his sagacious head.
But Cazalet, though he had skimmed the many-headed column before sitting
down to supper, flatly declined to discuss the tragedy his first night
ashore.
III
IN THE TRAIN
Discussion was inevitable on the way up to town next morning.
The silly season was by no means over; a sensational inquest was worth
every inch that it could fill in most of the morning papers; and the two
strange friends, planted opposite each other in the first-class smoker,
traveled inland simultaneously engrossed in a copious report of the
previous day's proceedings at the coroner's court.
Of solid and significant fact, they learned comparatively little that
they had been unable to gather or deduce the night before. There was the
medical evidence, valuable only as tracing the fatal blow to some such
weapon as the missing truncheon; there was the butler's evidence,
finally timing the commission of the deed to within ten minutes; there
was the head gardener's evidence, confirming and supplementing that of
the butler; and there was the evidence of a footman who had answered the
telephone an hour or two before the tragedy occurred.
The butler had explained that the dinner-hour was seven thirty; that,
not five minutes before, he had seen his master come down-stairs and
enter the library, where, at seven fifty-five, on going to ask if he had
heard the gong, he had obtained no answer but found the door locked on
the inside; that he had then hastened round by the garden, and in
through the French window, to discover the deceased gentleman lying in
his blood.
The head gardener, who lived in the lodge, had sworn to having seen a
bareheaded man rush past his windows and out of the gates about the same
hour, as he knew by the sounding of the gong up at the house; they often
heard it at the lodge, in warm weather when the windows were open, and
the gardener swore that he himself had heard it on this occasion.
The footman appeared to have been less positive as to the time of the
telephone call, thought it was between four and five, but remembered the
conversation very well. The gentleman had asked whether Mr. Craven was
at home, had been told that he was out motoring, asked when he would be
back, told he couldn't say, but before dinner some time, and what name
should he give, whereupon the gentleman had rung off without answering.
The footman thought he was a gentleman, from the way he spoke. But
apparently the police had not yet succeeded in tracing the call.
"Is it a difficult thing to do?" asked Cazalet, touching on this last
point early in the discussion, which even he showed no wish to avoid
this morning. He had dropped his paper, to find that Toye had already
dropped his, and was gazing at the flying English fields with thoughtful
puckers about his somber eyes.
"If you ask me," he replied, "I should like to know what wasn't
difficult connected with the telephone system in this country! Why, you
don't have a system, and that's all there is to it. But it's not at that
end they'll put the salt on their man."
"Which end will it be, then?"
"The river end. That hat, or cap. Do you see what the gardener says
about the man who ran out bareheaded? That gardener deserves to be
cashiered for not getting a move on him in time to catch that man, even
if he did think he'd only been swiping flowers. But if he went and left
his hat or his cap behind him, that should be good enough in the long
run. It's the very worst thing you _can_ leave. Ever hear of Franz
Mueller?"
Cazalet had not heard of that immortal notoriety, nor did his ignorance
appear to trouble him at all, but it was becoming more and more clear
that Hilton Toye took an almost unhealthy interest in the theory and
practise of violent crime.
"Franz Mueller," he continued, "left his hat behind him, only that and
nothing more, but it brought him to the gallows even though he got over
to the other side first. He made the mistake of taking a slow steamer,
and that's just about the one mistake they never did make at Scotland
Yard. Give them a nice, long, plain-sailing stern-chase and they get
there by bedtime--wireless or no wireless!"
But Cazalet was in no mind to discuss other crimes, old or new; and he
closed the digression by asserting somewhat roundly that neither hat nor
cap had been left behind in the only case that interested him.
"Don't be too sure," said Toye. "Even Scotland Yard doesn't show all its
hand at once, in the first inquiry that comes along. They don't give out
any description of the man that ran away, but you bet it's being
circulated around every police office in the United Kingdom."
Cazalet said they would give it out fast enough if they had it to give.
By the way, he was surprised to see that the head gardener was the same
who had been at Uplands in his father's time; he must be getting an old
man, and no doubt shakier on points of detail than he would be likely to
admit. Cazalet instanced the alleged hearing of the gong as in itself an
unconvincing statement. It was well over a hundred yards from the gates
to the house, and there were no windows to open in the hall where the
gong would be rung.
He sighed heavily as in his turn he looked out at the luxuriant little
paddocks and the old tiled homesteads after every two or three. But he
was not thinking of the weather-board and corrugated iron strewn so
sparsely over the yellow wilds that he had left behind him. The old
English panorama flew by for granted, as he had taken it before ever he
went out to Australia. It was as though he had never been out at all.
"I've dreamed of the old spot so often," he said at length. "I'm not
thinking of the night before last--I meant in the bush--and now to think
of a thing like this happening, there, in the old governor's den, of all
places!"
"Seems like a kind of poetic justice," said Hilton Toye.
"It does. It is!" cried Cazalet, fetching moist yet fiery eyes in from
the fields. "I said to you the other night that Henry Craven never was a
white man, and I won't unsay it now. Nobody may ever know what he's done
to bring this upon him. But those who really knew the man, and suffered
for it, can guess the kind of thing!"
"Exactly," murmured Toye, as though he had just said as much himself.
His dark eyes twinkled with deliberation and debate. "How long is it, by
the way, that they gave that clerk and friend of yours?"
A keen look pressed the startling question; at least, it startled
Cazalet.
"You mean Scruton? What on earth made you think of him?"
"Talking of those who suffered for being the dead man's friends, I
guess," said Toye. "Was it fourteen years?"
"That was it."
"But I guess fourteen doesn't mean fourteen, ordinarily, if a prisoner
behaves himself?"
"No, I believe not. In fact, it doesn't."
"Do you know how much it would mean?"
"A little more than ten."
"Then Scruton may be out now?"
"Just."
Toye nodded with detestable aplomb. "That gives you something to chew
on," said he. "Of course, I don't say he's our man--"
"I should think you didn't!" cried Cazalet, white to the lips with
sudden fury.
Toye looked disconcerted and distressed, but at the same time frankly
puzzled. He apologized none the less readily, with almost ingenious
courtesy and fulness, but he ended by explaining himself in a single
sentence, and that told more than the rest of his straightforward
eloquence put together.
"If a man had done you down like that, wouldn't you want to kill him the
very moment you came out, Cazalet?"
The creature of impulse was off at a tangent. "I'd forgive him if he did
it, too!" he exclaimed. "I'd move heaven and earth to save him, guilty
or not guilty. Wouldn't you in my place?"
"I don't know," said Hilton Toye. "It depends on the place you're in, I
guess!" And the keen dark eyes came drilling into Cazalet's skull like
augers.
"I thought I told you?" he explained impatiently. "We were in the office
together; he was good to me, winked at the business hours I was inclined
to keep, let me down lighter in every way than I deserved. You may say
it was part of his game. But I take people as I find them. And then, as
I told you, Scruton was ten thousand times more sinned against than
sinning."
"Are you sure? If you knew it at the time--"
"I didn't. I told you so the last night."
"Then it came to you in Australia?" said Toye, with a smile as whimsical
as the suggestion.
"It did!" cried Cazalet unexpectedly. "In a letter," he added with
hesitation.
"Well, I mustn't ask questions," said Hilton Toye, and began folding up
his newspaper with even more than his usual deliberation.
"Oh, I'll tell you!" cried Cazalet ungraciously. "It's my own fault for
telling you so much. It was in a letter from Scruton himself that I
heard the whole thing. I'd written to him--toward the end--suggesting
things. He managed to get an answer through that would never have passed
the prison authorities. And--and that's why I came home just when I
did," concluded Cazalet; "that's why I didn't wait till after shearing.
He's been through about enough, and I've had more luck than I deserved.
I meant to take him back with me, to keep the books on our station, if
you want to know!" The brusk voice trembled.
Toye let his newspaper slide to the floor. "But that was fine!" he
exclaimed simply. "That's as fine an action as I've heard of in a long
time."
"If it comes off," said Cazalet in a gloomy voice.
"Don't you worry. It'll come off. Is he out yet, for sure? I mean, do
you know that he is?"
"Scruton? Yes--since you press it--he wrote to tell me that he was
coming out even sooner than he expected."
"Then he can stop out for me," said Hilton Toye. "I guess I'm not
running for that reward!"
IV
DOWN THE RIVER
At Waterloo the two men parted, with a fair exchange of fitting
speeches, none of which rang really false. And yet Cazalet found himself
emphatically unable to make any plans at all for the next few days;
also, he seemed in two minds now about a Jermyn Street hotel previously
mentioned as his immediate destination; and his step was indubitably
lighter as he went off first of all to the loop-line, to make sure of
some train or other that he might have to take before the day was out.
In the event he did not take that train or any other; for the new
miracle of the new traffic, the new smell of the horseless streets, and
the newer joys of the newest of new taxicabs, all worked together and so
swiftly upon Cazalet's organism that he had a little colloquy with his
smart young driver instead of paying him in Jermyn Street. He nearly did
pay him off, and with something more than his usual impetuosity, as
either a liar or a fool with no sense of time or space.
"But that's as quick as the train, my good fellow!" blustered Cazalet.
"Quicker," said the smart young fellow without dipping his cigarette,
"if you were going by the old Southwestern!"
The very man, and especially the manners that made or marred him, was
entirely new to Cazalet as a product of the old country. But he had come
from the bush, and he felt as though he might have been back there but
for the smell of petrol and the cry of the motor-horn from end to end
of those teeming gullies of bricks and mortar.
He had accompanied his baggage just as far as the bureau of the Jermyn
Street hotel. Any room they liked, and he would be back some time before
midnight; that was his card, they could enter his name for themselves.
He departed, pipe in mouth, open knife in one hand, plug tobacco in the
other; and remarks were passed in Jermyn Street as the taxi bounced out
west in ballast.
But indeed it was too fine a morning to waste another minute indoors,
even to change one's clothes, if Cazalet had possessed any better than
the ones he wore and did not rather glory in his rude attire. He was not
wearing leggings, and he did wear a collar, but he quite saw that even
so he might have cut an ignominious figure on the flags of Kensington
Gore; no, now it was the crowded High Street, and now it was humble
Hammersmith. He had told his smart young man to be sure and go that way.
He had been at St. Paul's school as a boy--with old Venus Potts--and he
wanted to see as many landmarks as he could. This one towered and was
gone as nearly in a flash as a great red mountain could. It seemed to
Cazalet, but perhaps he expected it to seem, that the red was a little
mellower, the ivy a good deal higher on the great warm walls. He noted
the time by the ruthless old clock. It was after one already; he would
miss his lunch. What did that matter?
Lunch?
Drunken men do not miss their meals, and Cazalet was simply and
comfortably drunk with the delight of being back. He had never dreamed
of its getting into his head like this; at the time he did not realize
that it had. That was the beauty of his bout. He knew well enough what
he was doing and seeing, but inwardly he was literally blind. Yesterday
was left behind and forgotten like the Albert Memorial, and to-morrow
was still as distant as the sea, if there were such things as to-morrow
and the sea.
Meanwhile what vivid miles of dazzling life, what a subtle autumn flavor
in the air; how cool in the shadows, how warm in the sun; what a
sparkling old river it was, to be sure; and yet, if those weren't the
first of the autumn tints on the trees in Castlenau.
There went a funeral, on its way to Mortlake! The taxi overhauled it at
a callous speed. Cazalet just had time to tear off his great soft hat.
It was actually the first funeral he had seen since his own father's;
no wonder his radiance suffered a brief eclipse. But in another moment
he was out on Barnes' Common. Then, in the Lower Richmond Road, the
smart young man began to change speed and crawl, and at once there was
something fresh to think about. The Venture and its team of grays,
Oxford and London, was trying to pass a motor-bus just ahead, and a gray
leader was behaving as though it also had just landed from the bush.
Cazalet thought of a sailing-ship and a dreadnought, and the
sailing-ship thrown up into the wind. Then he wondered how one of Cobb's
bush coaches would have behaved, and thought it might have played the
barge!
It had been the bicycle age when he went away; now it was the motor age,
and the novelty and contrast were endless to a simple mind under the
influence of forgotten yet increasingly familiar scenes. But nothing was
lost on Cazalet that great morning; even a milk-float entranced him,
itself enchanted, with its tall can turned to gold and silver in the
sun. But now he was on all but holy ground. It was not so holy with
these infernal electric trams; still he knew every inch of it; and now,
thank goodness, he was off the lines at last.
"Slower!" he shouted to his smart young man. He could not say that no
notice was taken of the command. But a wrought-iron gate on the left,
with a covered way leading up to the house, and the garden (that he
could not see) leading down to the river, and the stables (that he
could) across the road--all that was past and gone in a veritable
twinkling. And though he turned round and looked back, it was only to
get a sightless stare from sightless windows, to catch on a board "_This
Delightful Freehold Residence with Grounds and Stabling_," and to echo
the epithet with an appreciative grunt.
Five or six minutes later the smart young man was driving really slowly
along a narrow road between patent wealth and blatant semi-gentility; on
the left good grounds, shaded by cedar and chestnut, and on the right a
row of hideous little houses, as pretentious as any that ever let for
forty pounds within forty minutes of Waterloo.
"This can't be it!" shouted Cazalet. "It can't be here--stop! _Stop!_ I
tell you!"
A young woman had appeared in one of the overpowering wooden porticoes;
two or three swinging strides were bringing her down the silly little
path to the wicket-gate with the idiotic name; there was no time to
open it before Cazalet blundered up, and shot his hand across to get a
grasp as firm and friendly as he gave.
"Blanchie!"
"Sweep!"
They were their two nursery names, hers no improvement on the proper
monosyllable, and his a rather dubious token of pristine proclivities.
But out both came as if they were children still, and children who had
been just long enough apart to start with a good honest mutual stare.
"You aren't a bit altered," declared the man of thirty-three, with a
note not entirely tactful in his admiring voice. But his old chum only
laughed.
"Fiddle!" she cried. "But you're not altered enough. Sweep, I'm
disappointed in you. Where's your beard?"
"I had it off the other day. I always meant to," he explained, "before
the end of the voyage. I wasn't going to land like a wild man of the
woods, you know!"
"Weren't you! I call it mean."
Her scrutiny became severe, but softened again at the sight of his
clutched wide-awake and curiously characterless, shapeless suit.
"You may well look!" he cried, delighted that she should. "They're awful
old duds, I know, but you would think them a wonder if you saw where
they came from: a regular roadside shanty in a forsaken township at the
back of beyond. Extraordinary cove, the chap who made them; puts in
every stitch himself, learns Shakespeare while he's at it, knew Lindsay
Gordon and Marcus Clarke--"
"I'm sorry to interrupt," said Blanche, laughing, "but there's your taxi
ticking up twopence every quarter of an hour, and I can't let it go on
without warning you. Where have you come from?"
He told her with a grin, was roundly reprimanded for his extravagance,
but brazened it out by giving the smart young man a sovereign before her
eyes. After that, she said he had better come in before the neighbors
came out and mobbed him for a millionaire. And he followed her indoors
and up-stairs, into a little new den crowded with some of the big old
things he could remember in a very different setting. But if the room
was small it had a balcony that was hardly any smaller, on top of that
unduly imposing porch; and out there, overlooking the fine grounds
opposite, were basket chairs and a table, hot with the Indian summer
sun.
"I hope you are not shocked at my abode," said Blanche. "I'm afraid I
can't help it if you are. It's just big enough for Martha and me; you
remember old Martha, don't you? You'll have to come and see her, but
she'll be horribly disappointed about your beard!"
Coming through the room, stopping to greet a picture and a bookcase
(filling a wall each) as old friends, Cazalet had descried a photograph
of himself with that appendage. He had threatened to take the beastly
thing away, and Blanche had told him he had better not. But it did not
occur to Cazalet that it was the photograph to which Hilton Toye had
referred, or that Toye must have been in this very room to see it. In
these few hours he had forgotten the man's existence, at least in so far
as it associated itself with Blanche Macnair.
"The others all wanted me to live near them," she continued, "but as no
two of them are in the same county it would have meant a caravan.
Besides, I wasn't going to be transplanted at my age. Here one has
everybody one ever knew, except those who escape by emigrating, simply
at one's mercy on a bicycle. There's more golf and tennis than I can
find time to play; and I still keep the old boat in the old boat-house
at Littleford, because it hasn't let or sold yet, I'm sorry to say."
"So I saw as I passed," said Cazalet. "That board hit me hard!"
"The place being empty hits me harder," rejoined the last of the
Macnairs. "It's going down in value every day like all the other
property about here, except this sort. Mind where you throw that match,
Sweep! I don't want you to set fire to my pampas-grass; it's the only
tree I've got!"
Cazalet laughed; she was making him laugh quite often. But the
pampas-grass, like the rest of the ridiculous little garden in front,
was obscured if not overhung by the balcony on which they sat. And the
subject seemed one to change.
"It was simply glorious coming down," he said. "I wouldn't swap that
three-quarters of an hour for a bale of wool; but, I say, there are some
changes! The whole show in the streets is different. I could have
spotted it with my eyes and ears shut. They used to smell like a stable,
and now they smell like a lamp. And I used to think the old cabbies
could drive, but their job was child's play to the taximan's! We were at
Hammersmith before I could light my pipe, and almost down here before it
went out! But you can't think how every mortal thing on the way appealed
to me. The only blot was a funeral at Barnes; it seemed such a sin to be
buried on a day like this, and a fellow like me just coming home to
enjoy himself!"
He had turned grave, but not graver than at the actual moment coming
down. Indeed, he was simply coming down again, for her benefit and his
own, without an ulterior trouble until Blanche took him up with a long
face of her own.
"We've had a funeral here. I suppose you know?"
"Yes. I know."
Her chair creaked as she leaned forward with an enthusiastic solemnity
that would have made her shriek if she had seen herself; but it had no
such effect on Cazalet.
"I wonder who can have done it!"
"So do the police, and they don't look much like finding out!"
"It must have been for his watch and money, don't you think? And yet
they say he had so many enemies!" Cazalet kept silence; but she thought
he winced. "Of course it must have been the man who ran out of the
drive," she concluded hastily. "Where were you when it happened, Sweep?"
Somewhat hoarsely he was recalling the Mediterranean movements of the
_Kaiser Fritz_, when at the first mention of the vessel's name he was
firmly heckled.
"Sweep, you _don't_ mean to say you came by a German steamer?"
"I do. It was the first going, and why should I waste a week? Besides,
you can generally get a cabin to yourself on the German line."
"So that's why you're here before the end of the month," said Blanche.
"Well, I call it most unpatriotic; but the cabin to yourself was
certainly some excuse."
"That reminds me!" he exclaimed. "I hadn't it to myself all the way;
there was another fellow in with me from Genoa; and the last night on
board it came out that he knew you!"
"_Who_ can it have been?"
"Toye, his name was. Hilton Toye."
"An American man! Oh, but I know him very well," said Blanche in a tone
both strained and cordial. "He's great fun, Mr. Toye, with his
delightful Americanisms, and the perfectly delightful way he says them!"
Cazalet puckered like the primitive man he was, when taken at all by
surprise; and that anybody, much less Blanche, should think Toye, of all
people, either "delightful" or "great fun" was certainly a surprise to
him, if it was nothing else. Of course it was nothing else, to his
immediate knowledge; still, he was rather ready to think that Blanche
was blushing, but forgot, if indeed he had been in a fit state to see it
at the time, that she had paid himself the same high compliment across
the gate. On the whole, it may be said that Cazalet was ruffled without
feeling seriously disturbed as to the essential issue which alone leaped
to his mind.
"Where did you meet the fellow?" he inquired, with the suitable
admixture of confidence and amusement.
"In the first instance, at Engelberg."
"Engelberg! Where's that?"
"Only one of those places in Switzerland where everybody goes nowadays
for what they call winter sports."
She was not even smiling at his arrogant ignorance; she was merely
explaining one geographical point and another of general information. A
close observer might have thought her almost anxious not to identify
herself too closely with a popular craze.
"I dare say you mentioned it," said Cazalet, but rather as though he was
wondering why she had not.
"I dare say I didn't! Everything won't go into an annual letter. It was
the winter before last--I went out with Betty and her husband."
"And after that he took a place down here?"
"Yes. Then I met him on the river the following summer, and found he'd
got rooms in one of the Nell Gwynne Cottages, if you call that a place."
"I see."
But there was no more to see; there never had been much, but now Blanche
was standing up and gazing out of the balcony into the belt of singing
sunshine between the opposite side of the road and the invisible river
acres away.
"Why shouldn't we go down to Littleford and get out the boat if you're
really going to make an afternoon of it?" she said. "But you simply must
see Martha first; and while she's making herself fit to be seen, you
must take something for the good of the house. I'll bring it to you on a
lordly tray."
She brought him siphon, stoppered bottle, a silver biscuit-box of
ancient memories, and left him alone with them some little time; for the
young mistress, like her old retainer in another minute, was simply
dying to make herself more presentable. Yet when she had done so, and
came back like snow, in a shirt and skirt just home from the laundry,
she saw that he did not see the difference. His devouring eyes shone
neither more nor less; but he had also devoured every biscuit in the
box, though he had begun by vowing that he had lunched in town, and
stuck to the fable still.
Old Martha had known him all his life, but best at the period when he
used to come to nursery tea at Littleford. She declared she would have
known him anywhere as he was, but she simply hadn't recognized him in
that photograph with his beard.
"I can see where it's been," said Martha, looking him in the lower
temperate zone. "But I'm so glad you've had it off, Mr. Cazalet."
"There you are, Blanchie!" crowed Cazalet. "You said she'd be
disappointed, but Martha's got better taste."
"It isn't that, sir," said Martha earnestly. "It's because the dreadful
man who was seen running out of the drive, at your old home, _he_ had a
beard! It's in all the notices about him, and that's what's put me
against them, and makes me glad you've had yours off."
Blanche turned to him with too ready a smile; but then she was really
not such a great age as she pretended, and she had never been in better
spirits in her life.
"You hear, Sweep! I call it rather lucky for you that you were--"
But just then she saw his face, and remembered the things that had been
said about Henry Craven by the Cazalets' friends, even ten years ago,
when she really had been a girl.
V
AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
She really was one still, for in these days it is an elastic term, and
in Blanche's case there was no apparent reason why it should ever cease
to apply, or to be applied by every decent tongue except her own. If,
however, it be conceded that she herself had reached the purely mental
stage of some self-consciousness on the point of girlhood, it can not be
too clearly stated that it was the only point in which Blanche Macnair
had ever been self-conscious in her life.
Much the best tennis-player among the ladies of the neighborhood, she
drove an almost unbecomingly long ball at golf, and never looked better
than when paddling her old canoe, or punting in the old punt. And yet,
this wonderful September afternoon, she did somehow look even better
than at either or any of those congenial pursuits, and that long before
they reached the river; in the empty house, which had known her as baby,
child and grown-up girl, to the companion of some part of all three
stages, she looked a more lustrous and a lovelier Blanche than he
remembered even of old.
But she was not really lovely in the least; that also must be put beyond
the pale of misconception. Her hair was beautiful, and perhaps her skin,
and, in some lights, her eyes; the rest was not. It was yellow hair, not
golden, and Cazalet would have given all he had about him to see it down
again as in the oldest of old days; but there was more gold in her
skin, for so the sun had treated it; and there was even hint or glint
(in certain lights, be it repeated) of gold mingling with the pure hazel
of her eyes. But in the dusty shadows of the empty house, moving like a
sunbeam across its bare boards, standing out against the discolored
walls in the place of remembered pictures not to be compared with her,
it was there that she was all golden and still a girl.