they swung the gate at the head of the next flight; they swore to
finger-marks on the panels that were all the walls of the top story, and
they had a laugh in every corner, childish crimes to reconstruct, quite
bitter battles to fight over again, but never a lump in either throat
that the other could have guessed was there. And so out upon the leafy
lawn, shelving abruptly to the river; round first, however, to the
drying-green where the caretakers' garments were indeed drying
unashamed; but they knew each other well enough to laugh aloud, had
picked each other up much farther back than the point of parting ten
years ago, almost as far as the days of mixed cricket with a toy set, on
that very green.
Then there was the poor old greenhouse, sagging in every slender timber,
broken as to every other cobwebbed pane, empty and debased within; they
could not bring themselves to enter here.
Last of all there was the summer schoolroom over the boat-house, quite
apart from the house itself; scene of such safe yet reckless revels; in
its very aura late Victorian!
It lay hidden in ivy at the end of a now neglected path; the
bow-windows overlooking the river were framed in ivy, like three matted,
whiskered, dirty, happy faces; one, with its lower sash propped open by
a broken plant-pot, might have been grinning a toothless welcome to two
once leading spirits of the place.
Cazalet whittled a twig and wedged that sash up altogether; then he sat
himself on the sill, his long legs inside. But his knife had reminded
him of his plug tobacco. And his plug tobacco took him as straight back
to the bush as though the unsound floor had changed under their feet
into a magic carpet.
"You simply have it put down to the man's account in the station books.
Nobody keeps ready money up at the bush, not even the price of a plug
like this; but the chap I'm telling you about (I can see him now, with
his great red beard and freckled fists) he swore I was charging him for
half a pound more than he'd ever had. I was station storekeeper, you
see; it was quite the beginning of things, and I'd have had to pay the
few bob myself, and be made to look so small that I shouldn't have had a
soul to call my own on the run. So I fought him for the difference; we
fought for twenty minutes behind the wood-heap; then he gave me best,
but I had to turn in till I could see again."
"You don't mean that he--"
Blanche had looked rather disgusted the moment before; now she was all
truculent suspense and indignation.
"Beat me?" he cried. "Good Lord, no; but there was none too much in it."
Fires died down in her hazel eyes, lay lambent as soft moonlight,
flickered into laughter before he had seen the fire.
"I'm afraid you're a very dangerous person," said Blanche.
"You've got to be," he assured her; "it's the only way. Don't take a
word from anybody, unless you mean him to wipe his boots on you. I soon
found that out. I'd have given something to have learned the noble art
before I went out. Did I ever tell you how it was I first came across
old Venus Potts?"
He had told her at great length, to the exclusion of about every other
topic, in the second of the annual letters; and throughout the series
the inevitable name of Venus Potts had seldom cropped up without some
allusion to that Homeric encounter. But it was well worth while having
it all over again with the intricate and picaresque embroidery of a
tongue far mightier than the pen hitherto employed upon the incident.
Poor Blanche had almost to hold her nose over the primary cause of
battle; but the dialogue was delightful, and Cazalet himself made a most
gallant and engaging figure as he sat on the sill and reeled it out. He
had always been a fluent teller of any happening, and Blanche a ready
commentator, capable of raising the general level of the entertainment
at any moment. But after all these centuries it was fun enough to listen
as long as he liked to go on; and perhaps she saw that he had more scope
where they were than he could have had in the boat, or it may have been
an unrealized spell that bound them both to their bare old haunt; but
there they were a good twenty minutes later, and old Venus Potts was
still on the magic _tapis_, though Cazalet had dropped his boasting for
a curiously humble, eager and yet ineffectual vein.
"Old Venus Potts!" he kept ejaculating. "You couldn't help liking him.
And he'd like you, my word!"
"Is his wife nice?" Blanche wanted to know; but she was looking so
intently out her window, at the opposite end of the bow to Cazalet's,
that a man of the wider world might have thought of something else to
talk about.
Out her window she looked past a willow that had been part of the old
life, in the direction of an equally typical silhouette of patient
anglers anchored in a punt; they had not raised a rod between them
during all this time that Blanche had been out in Australia; but as a
matter of fact she never saw them, since, vastly to the credit of
Cazalet's descriptive powers, she was out in Australia still.
"Nelly Potts?" he said. "Oh, a jolly good sort; you'd be awful pals."
"Should we?" said Blanche, just smiling at her invisible anglers.
"I know you would," he assured her with immense conviction. "Of course
she can't do the things you do; but she can ride, my word! So she ought
to, when she's lived there all her life. The rooms aren't much, but the
verandas are what count most; they're better than any rooms. There are
two distinct ends to the station--it's like two houses; but of course
the barracks were good enough just for me."
She knew about the bachelors' barracks; the annual letter had been
really very full; and then she was still out there, cultivating Nelly
Potts on a very deep veranda, though her straw hat and straw hair
remained in contradictory evidence against a very dirty window on the
Middlesex bank of the Thames. It was a shame of the September sun to
show the dirt as it was doing; not only was there a great steady pool of
sunlight on the unspeakable floor, but a doddering reflection from the
river on the disreputable ceiling. Cazalet looked rather desperately
from one to the other, and both the calm pool and the rough were broken
by shadows, one more impressionistic than the other, of a straw hat over
a stack of straw hair, that had not gone out to Australia--yet.
And of course just then a step sounded outside somewhere on some gravel.
Confound those caretakers! What were _they_ doing, prowling about?
"I say, Blanchie!" he blurted out. "I do believe you'd like it out
there, a sportswoman like you! I believe you'd take to it like a duck to
water."
He had floundered to his feet as well. He was standing over her,
feeling his way like a great fatuous coward, so some might have thought.
But it really looked as though Blanche was not attending to what he did
say; yet neither was she watching her little anglers stamped in jet upon
a silvery stream, nor even seeing any more of Nelly Potts in the
Australian veranda. She had come home from Australia, and come in from
the river, and she was watching the open door at the other end of the
old schoolroom, listening to those confounded steps coming nearer and
nearer--and Cazalet was gazing at her as though he really had said
something that deserved an answer.
"Why, Miss Blanche!" cried a voice. "And your old lady-in-waiting
figured I should find you flown!"
Hilton Toye was already a landsman and a Londoner from top to toe. He
was perfectly dressed--for Bond Street--and his native simplicity of
bearing and address placed him as surely and firmly in the present
picture. He did not look the least bit out of it. But Cazalet did, in an
instant; his old bush clothes changed at once into a merely shabby suit
of despicable cut; the romance dropped out of them and their wearer, as
he stood like a trussed turkey-cock, and watched a bunch of hothouse
flowers presented to the lady with a little gem of a natural, courteous,
and yet characteristically racy speech.
To the lady, mark you; for she was one, on the spot; and Cazalet was a
man again, and making a mighty effort to behave himself because the hour
of boy and girl was over.
"Mr. Cazalet," said Toye, "I guess you want to know what in thunder I'm
doing on your tracks so soon. It's hog-luck, sir, because I wanted to
see you quite a lot, but I never thought I'd strike you right here. Did
you hear the news?"
"No! What?"
There was no need to inquire as to the class of news; the immediate past
had come back with Toye into Cazalet's life; and even in Blanche's
presence, even in her schoolroom, the old days had flown into their
proper place and size in the perspective.
"They've made an arrest," said Toye; and Cazalet nodded as though he had
quite expected it, which set Blanche off trying to remember something he
had said at the other house; but she had not succeeded when she noticed
the curious pallor of his chin and forehead.
"Scruton?" he just asked.
"Yes, sir! This morning," said Hilton Toye.
"You don't mean _the_ poor man?" cried Blanche, looking from one to the
other.
"Yes, he does," said Cazalet gloomily. He stared out at the river,
seeing nothing in his turn, though one of the anglers was actually busy
with his reel.
"But I thought Mr. Scruton was still--" Blanche remembered him,
remembered dancing with him; she did not like to say, "in prison."
"He came out the other day," sighed Cazalet. "But how like the police
all over! Give a dog a bad name, and trust them to hunt it down and
shoot it at sight!"
"I judge it's not so bad as all that in this country," said Hilton Toye.
"That's more like the police theory about Scruton, I guess, bar drawing
the bead."
"When did you hear of it?" said Cazalet.
"It was on the tape at the Savoy when I got there. So I made an
inquiry, and I figured to look in at the Kingston Court on my way to
call upon Miss Blanche. You see, I was kind of interested in all you'd
told me about the case."
"Well?"
"Well, that was my end of the situation. As luck and management would
have it between them, I was in time to hear your man--"
"Not my man, please! You thought of him yourself," said Cazalet sharply.
"Well, anyway, I was in time to hear the proceedings opened against him.
They were all over in about a minute. He was remanded till next week."
"How did he look?" and, "Had he a beard?" demanded Cazalet and Blanche
simultaneously.
"He looked like a sick man," said Toye, with something more than his
usual deliberation in answering or asking questions. "Yes, Miss
Blanche, he had a beard worthy of a free citizen."
"They let them grow one, if they like, before they come out," said
Cazalet, with the nod of knowledge.
"Then I guess he was a wise man not to take it off," rejoined Hilton
Toye. "That would only prejudice his case, if it's going to be one of
identity, with that head gardener playing lead in the witness-stand."
"Old Savage!" snorted Cazalet. "Why, he was a dotard in our time; they
couldn't hang a dog on his evidence!"
"Still," said Blanche, "I'd rather have it than circumstantial evidence,
wouldn't you, Mr. Toye?"
"No, Miss Blanche, I would not," replied Toye, with unhesitating candor.
"The worst evidence in the world, in my opinion, and I've given the
matter some thought, is the evidence of identity." He turned to Cazalet,
who had betrayed a quickened interest in his views. "Shall I tell you
why? Think how often you're not so sure if you have seen a man before or
if you never have! You kind of shrink from nodding, or else you nod
wrong; if you didn't ever have that feeling, then you're not like any
other man I know."
"I have!" cried Cazalet. "I've had it all my life, even in the wilds;
but I never thought of it before."
"Think of it now," said Toye, "and you'll see there may be flaws in the
best evidence of identity that money can buy. But circumstantial
evidence can't lie, Miss Blanche, if you get enough of it. If the links
fit in, to prove that a certain person was in a certain place at a
certain time, I guess that's worth all the oaths of all the
eye-witnesses that ever saw daylight!"
Cazalet laughed harshly, as for no apparent reason he led the way into
the garden. "Mr. Toye's made a study of these things," he fired over his
shoulder. "He should have been a Sherlock Holmes, and rather wishes he
was one!"
"Give me time," said Toye, laughing. "I may come along that way yet."
Cazalet faced him in a frame of tangled greenery. "You told me you
wouldn't!"
"I did, sir, but that was before they put salt on this poor old crook.
If you're right, and he's not the man, shouldn't you say that rather
altered the situation?"
VI
VOLUNTARY SERVICE
"And why do you think he can't have done it?"
Cazalet had trundled the old canoe over the rollers, and Blanche was
hardly paddling in the glassy strip alongside the weir. Big drops
clustered on her idle blades, and made tiny circles as they met
themselves in the shining mirror. But below the lock there had been
something to do, and Blanche had done it deftly and silently, with
almost equal capacity and grace. It had given her a charming flush and
sparkle; and, what with the sun's bare hand on her yellow hair, she now
looked even bonnier than indoors, yet not quite, quite such a girl. But
then every bit of the boy had gone out of Cazalet. So that hour stolen
from the past was up forever.
"Why do the police think the other thing?" he retorted. "What have they
got to go on? That's what I want to know. I agree with Toye in one
thing." Blanche looked up quickly. "I wouldn't trust old Savage an inch.
I've been thinking about him and his precious evidence. Do you realize
that it's quite dark now soon after seven? It was pretty thick saying
his man was bareheaded, with neither hat nor cap left behind to prove
it! Yet now it seems he's put a beard to him, and next we shall have the
color of his eyes!"
Blanche laughed at his vigor of phrase; this was more like the old,
hot-tempered, sometimes rather overbearing Sweep. Something had made him
jump to the conclusion that Scruton could not possibly have killed Mr.
Craven, whatever else he might have done in days gone by. So it simply
_was_ impossible, and anybody who took the other side, or had a word to
say for the police, as a force not unknown to look before it leaped,
would have to reckon henceforth with Sweep Cazalet.
Mr. Toye already had reckoned with him, in a little debate begun outside
the old summer schoolroom at Littleford, and adjourned rather than
finished at the iron gate into the road. In her heart of hearts Blanche
could not say that Cazalet had the best of the argument, except, indeed,
in the matter of heated emphasis and scornful asseveration. It was
difficult, however, to know what line he really took; for while he
scouted the very notion of uncorroborated identification by old Savage,
he discredited with equal warmth all Toye's contentions on behalf of
circumstantial evidence. Toye had advanced a general principle with
calm ability, but Cazalet could not be shifted from the particular
position he was so eager to defend, and would only enter into abstract
questions to beg them out of hand.
Blanche rather thought that neither quite understood what the other
meant; but she could not blink the fact that the old friend had neither
the dialectical mind nor the unfailing courtesy of the new. That being
so, with her perception she might have changed the subject; but she
could see that Cazalet was thinking of nothing else; and no wonder,
since they were approaching the scene of the tragedy and his own old
home, with each long dip of her paddle.
It had been his own wish to start upstream; but she could see the
wistful pain in his eyes as they fell once more upon the red turrets
and the smooth green lawn of Uplands; and she neither spoke nor looked
at him again until he spoke to her.
"I see they've got the blinds down still," he said detachedly. "What's
happened to Mrs. Craven?"
"I hear she went into a nursing home before the funeral."
"Then there's nobody there?"
"It doesn't look as if there was, does it?" said poor Blanche.
"I expect we should find Savage somewhere. Would you very much mind,
Blanche? I should rather like--if it was just setting foot--with you--"
But even that effective final pronoun failed to bring any buoyancy back
into his voice; for it was not in the least effective as he said it, and
he no longer looked her in the face. But this all seemed natural to
Blanche, in the manifold and overlapping circumstances of the case. She
made for the inlet at the upper end of the lawn. And her prompt
unquestioning acquiescence shamed Cazalet into further and franker
explanation, before he could let her land to please him.
"You don't know how I feel this!" he exclaimed quite miserably. "I mean
about poor old Scruton; he's gone through so much as it is, whatever he
may have done to deserve it long ago. And he wasn't the only one, or the
worst; some day I'll tell you how I know, but you may take it from me
that's so. The real villain's gone to his account. I won't pretend I'm
sorry for him. _De mortuis_ doesn't apply if you've got to invent the
_bonum_! But Scruton--after ten years--only think of it! Is it
conceivable that he should go and do a thing like this the very moment
he gets out? I ask you, is it even conceivable?"
He asked her with something of the ferocity with which he had turned on
Toye for suggesting that the police might have something up their
sleeves, and be given a chance. But Blanche understood him. And now she
showed herself golden to the core, almost as an earnest of her fitness
for the fires before her.
"Poor fellow," she cried, "he has a friend in you, at any rate! And I'll
help you to help him, if there's any way I can?"
He clutched her hand, but only as he might have clutched a man's.
"You can't do anything; but I won't forget that," he almost choked. "I
meant to stand by him in a very different way. He'd been down to the
depths, and I'd come up a bit; then he was good to me as a lad, and it
was my father's partner who was the ruin of him. I seemed to owe him
something, and now--now I'll stand by him whatever happens and--whatever
_has_ happened!"
Then they landed in the old, old inlet. Cazalet knew every knot in the
post to which he tied Blanche's canoe.
It was a very different place, this Uplands, from poor old Littleford on
the lower reach. The grounds were five or six acres instead of about
one, and a house in quite another class stood farther back from the
river and very much farther from the road.
The inlet began the western boundary, which continued past the
boat-house in the shape of a high hedge, a herbaceous border (not what
it had been in the old days), and a gravel path. This path was screened
from the lawn by a bank of rhododendrons, as of course were the back
yard and kitchen premises, past which it led into the front garden,
eventually debouching into the drive. It was the path along which
Cazalet led the way this afternoon, and Blanche at his heels was so
struck by something that she could not help telling him he knew his way
very well.
"Every inch of it!" he said bitterly. "But so I ought, if anybody does."
"But these rhododendrons weren't here in your time. They're the one
improvement. Don't you remember how the path ran round to the other end
of the yard? This gate into it wasn't made."
"No more it was," said Cazalet, as they came up to the new gate on the
right. It was open, and looking through they could see where the old
gateway had been bricked. The rhododendrons topped the yard wall at
that point, masking it from the lawn, and making on the whole an
improvement of which anybody but a former son of the house might have
taken more account.
He said he could see no other change. He pretended to recognize the very
blinds that were down and flapping in the kitchen windows facing west.
But for the fact that these windows were wide open, the whole place
seemed as deserted as Littleford; but just past the windows, and flush
with them, was the tradesmen's door, and the two trespassers were barely
abreast of it when this door opened and disgorged a man.
The man was at first sight a most incongruous figure for the back
premises of any house, especially in the country. He was tall, rather
stout, very powerfully built and rather handsome in his way; his
top-hat shone like his patent-leather boots, and his gray cutaway suit
hung well in front and was duly creased as to the trousers; yet not for
one moment was this personage in the picture, in the sense in which
Hilton Toye had stepped into the Littleford picture.
"May I ask what you're doing here?" he demanded bluntly of the male
intruder.
"No harm, I hope," replied Cazalet, smiling, much to his companion's
relief. She had done him an injustice, however, in dreading an explosion
when they were both obviously in the wrong, and she greatly admired the
tone he took so readily. "I know we've no business here whatever; but it
happens to be my old home, and I only landed from Australia last night.
I'm on the river for the first time, and simply had to have a look
round."
The other big man had looked far from propitiated by the earlier of
these remarks, but the closing sentences had worked a change.
"Are you young Mr. Cazalet?" he cried.
"I am, or rather I was," laughed Cazalet, still on his mettle.
"You've read all about the case then, I don't mind betting!" exclaimed
the other with a jerk of his topper toward the house behind him.
"I've read all I found in the papers last night and this morning, and
such arrears as I've been able to lay my hands on," said Cazalet. "But,
as I tell you, my ship only got in from Australia last night, and I came
round all the way in her. There was nothing in the English papers when
we touched at Genoa."
"I see, I see." The man was still looking him up and down. "Well, Mr.
Cazalet, my name's Drinkwater, and I'm from Scotland Yard. I happen to
be in charge of the case."
"I guessed as much," said Cazalet, and this surprised Blanche more than
anything else from him. Yet nothing about him was any longer like the
Sweep of other days, or of any previous part of that very afternoon. And
this was also easy to understand on reflection; for if he meant to stand
by the hapless Scruton, guilty or not guilty, he could not perhaps begin
better than by getting on good terms with the police. But his ready
tact, and in that case cunning, were certainly a revelation to one who
had known him marvelously as boy and youth.
"I mustn't ask questions," he continued, "but I see you're still
searching for things, Mr. Drinkwater."
"Still minding our own job," said Mr. Drinkwater genially. They had
sauntered on with him to the corner of the house, and seen a bowler hat
bobbing in the shrubbery down the drive. Cazalet laughed like a man.
"Well, I needn't tell you I know every inch of the old place," he said;
"that is, barring alterations," as Blanche caught his eye. "But I expect
this search is harrowed, rather?"
"Rather," said Mr. Drinkwater, standing still in the drive. He had also
taken out a presentation gold half-hunter, suitably inscribed in memory
of one of his more bloodless victories. But Cazalet could always be
obtuse, and now he refused to look an inch lower than the
detective-inspector's bright brown eyes.
"There's just one place that's occurred to me, Mr. Drinkwater, that
perhaps may not have occurred to you."
"Where's that, Mr. Cazalet?"
"In the room where--the room itself."
Mr. Drinkwater's long stare ended in an indulgent smile. "You can show
me if you like," said he indifferently. "But I suppose you know we've
got the man?"
VII
AFTER MICHELANGELO
"I was thinking of his cap," said Cazalet, but only as they returned to
the tradesmen's door, and just as Blanche put in her word, "What about
me?"
Mr. Drinkwater eyed the trim white figure standing in the sun. "The more
the merrier!" his grim humor had it. "I dare say you'll be able to teach
us a thing or two as well, miss."
She could not help nudging Cazalet in recognition of this shaft. But
Cazalet did not look round; he had now set foot in his old home.
It was all strangely still and inactive, as though domestic animation
had been suspended indefinitely. Yet the open kitchen door revealed a
female form in mufti; a sullen face looked out of the pantry as they
passed; and through the old green door (only now it was a red one) they
found another bowler hat bent over a pink paper at the foot of the
stairs. There was a glitter of eyes under the bowler's brim as Mr.
Drinkwater conducted his friends into the library.