"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 wasperfectly 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 meanthepoor 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 whenI 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 usualdeliberation 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 myopinion, 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?"
"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 possiblyhave killed Mr. Craven, whatever else he might have done in days gone by. So it simplywasimpossible, 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 ofcircumstantial 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 thered 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 andoverlapping 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 mortuisdoesn't apply if you've got to invent thebonum! But Scruton—after ten years—only think of it! Is it conceivable that he should go and do a thing like this thevery 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'dcome 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—whateverhashappened!"
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 wasscreened 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 beenbricked. 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 powerfullybuilt 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 stilllooking 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 occurredto 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?"
"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 beensuspended 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.
The library was a square room of respectable size, but very close and dim with the one French window closed and curtained. But Mr. Drinkwater shut the door as well, and added indescribably to the lighting and atmospheric effects by switching on all the electric lamps; they burned sullenly in the partial daylight, exposed as thin angry bunches of red-hot wire in dusty bulbs.
The electric light had been put in bythe Cravens; all the other fixtures in the room were as Cazalet remembered them. The bookshelves contained different books, and now there were no busts on top. Certain cupboards, grained and varnished in Victorian days, were undeniably improved by being enameled white.
But the former son of the house gave himself no time to waste in sentimental comparisons. He tapped a pair of mahogany doors, like those of a wardrobe let into the wall.
"Have you looked in here?" demanded Cazalet in yet another key. His air was almost authoritative now. Blanche could not understand it, but the experienced Mr. Drinkwater smiled his allowances for a young fellow on his native heath, after more years in the wilderness than were good for young fellows.
"What's the use of looking in a cigarcupboard?" that dangerous man of the world made mild inquiry.
"Cigar cupboard!" echoed Cazalet in disgust. "Did he really only use it for his cigars?"
"A cigar cupboard," repeated Drinkwater, "and locked up at the time it happened. What was it, if I may ask, in Mr. Cazalet's time?"
"I remember!" came suddenly from Blanche; but Cazalet only said, "Oh, well, if you know it was locked there's an end of it."
Drinkwater went to the door and summoned his subordinate. "Just fetch that chap from the pantry, Tom," said he; but the sullen sufferer from police rule took his time, in spite of them, and was sharply rated when he appeared.
"I thought you told me this was a cigar cupboard?" continued Drinkwater, in thebrowbeating tone of his first words to Cazalet outside.
"So it is," said the man.
"Then where's the key?"
"How should I know?Inever kept it!" cried the butler, crowing over his oppressor for a change. "He would keep it on his own bunch; find his watch, and all the other things that were missing from his pockets when your men went through 'em, and you may find his keys, too!"
Drinkwater gave his man a double signal; the door slammed on a petty triumph for the servants' hall; but now both invaders remained within.
"Try your hand on it, Tom," said the superior officer. "I'm a free-lance here," he explained somewhat superfluously to the others, as Tom applied himself to the lock in one mahogany door. "Man's beendrinking, I should say. He'd better be careful, because I don't take to him, drunk or sober. I'm not surprised at his master not trusting him. It's just possible that the placewasopen—he might have been getting out his cigars before dinner—but I can't say I think there's much in it, Mr. Cazalet."
It was open again—broken open—before many minutes; and certainly there was not much in it, to be seen, except cigars. Boxes of these were stacked on what might have been meant for a shallow desk (the whole place was shallow as the wardrobe that the doors suggested, but lighted high up at one end by a little barred window of its own) and according to Cazalet a desk it had really been. His poor father ought never to have been a business man; he ought to have been a poet. Cazalet said this now as simply ashe had said it to Hilton Toye on board theKaiser Fritz. Only he went rather farther for the benefit of the gentlemen from Scotland Yard, who took not the faintest interest in the late Mr. Cazalet, beyond poking their noses into his diminutive sanctum and duly turning them up at what they saw.
"He used to complain that he was never left in peace on Saturdays and Sundays, which of course were his only quiet times for writing," said the son, elaborating his tale with filial piety. "So once when I'd been trying to die of scarlet fever, and my mother brought me back from Hastings after she'd had me there some time, the old governor told us he'd got a place where he could disappear from the district at a moment's notice and yet be back in another moment if we rang the gong. I fancy he'd got to tell her where it was,pretty quick; but I only found out for myself by accident. Years afterward, he told me he'd got the idea from Jean Ingelow's place in Italy somewhere."
"It's in Florence," said Blanche, laughing. "I've been there and seen it, and it's the exact same thing. But you mean Michelangelo, Sweep!"
"Oh, do I?" he said serenely. "Well, I shall never forget how I found out its existence."
"No more shall I. You told me all about it at the time, as a terrific secret, and I may tell you that I've kept it from that day to this!"
"You would," he said simply. "But think of having the nerve to pull up the governor's floor! It only shows what a boy will do. I wonder if the hole's there still!"
Now all the time the planetarydetective had been watching his satellite engaged in an attempt to render the damage done to the mahogany doors a little less conspicuous. Neither appeared to be taking any further interest in the cigar cupboard, or paying the slightest attention to Cazalet's reminiscences. But Mr. Drinkwater happened to have heard every word, and in the last sentence there was one that caused him to prick up his expert ears instinctively.
"What's that about a hole?" said he, turning round.
"I was reminding Miss Macnair how the place first came to be—"
"Yes, yes. But what about some hole in the floor?"
"I made one myself with one of those knives that contain all sorts of things, including a saw. It was one Saturday afternoon in the summer holidays. Icame in here from the garden as my father went out by that door into the hall, leaving one of these mahogany doors open by mistake. It was the chance of my life; in I slipped to have a look. He came back for something, saw the very door you've broken standing ajar, and shut it without looking in. So there I was in a nice old trap! I simply daren't call out and give myself away. There was a bit of loose oilcloth on the floor—"
"There is still," said the satellite, pausing in his task.
"I moved the oilcloth, in the end; howked up one end of the board (luckily they weren't groove and tongue), sawed through the next one to it, had it up, too, and got through into the foundations, leaving everything much as I had found it. The place is so small that the oilcloth was obliged to fall in place if it fellanywhere. But I had plenty of time, because my people had gone in to dinner."
"You ought to have been a burglar, sir," said Mr. Drinkwater ironically. "So you covered up a sin with a crime, like half the gentlemen who go through my hands for the first and last time! But how did you get out of the foundations?"
"Oh, that was as easy as pie; I'd often explored them. Do you remember the row I got into, Blanche, for taking you with me once and simply ruining your frock?"
"I remember the frock!" said Blanche.
It was her last contribution to the conversation; immediate developments not only put an end to the further exchange of ancient memories, but rendered it presently impossible by removing Cazalet from the scene with the two detectives. Almost without warning, as in theharlequinade of which they might have been the rascal heroes, all three disappeared down the makeshift trap-door cut by one of them as a schoolboy in his father's floor; and Blanche found herself in sole possession of the stage, a very envious Columbine, indeed!
She hardly even knew how it happened. The satellite must have popped back into the Michelangelo cigar cupboard. He might have called to Mr. Drinkwater, but the only summons that Blanche could remember hearing was almost a sharp one from Drinkwater to Cazalet. A lot of whispering followed in the little place; it was so small that she never saw the hole until it had engulfed two of the trio; the third explorer, Mr. Drinkwater himself, had very courteously turned her out of the library before following the others. And he had said so very little beforehand forher to hear, and so quickly prevented Cazalet from saying anything at all, that she simply could not think what any of them were doing under the floor.
Under her very feet she heard them moving as she waited a bit in the hall; then she left the house by way of the servants' quarters, of course without holding any communication with those mutineers, and only indignant that Mr. Drinkwater should have requested her not to do so.
It was a long half-hour that followed for Blanche Macnair, but she passed it characteristically, and not in morbid probings of the many changes that had come over one young man in less than the course of a summer's day. He was excited at getting back, he had stumbled into a still more exciting situation, so no wonder he was one thing one momentand another the next. That was all that Blanche allowed herself to think of Sweep Cazalet—just then.
She turned her wholesome mind to dogs, which in some ways she knew better and trusted further than men. She had, of course, a dog of her own, but it happened to be on a visit to the doctor or no doubt it would have been in the way all the afternoon. But there was a dog at Uplands, and as yet she had seen nothing of him; he lived in a large kennel in the yard, for he was a large dog and rather friendless. But Blanche knew him by sight, and had felt always sorry for him.
The large kennel was just outside the back door, which was at the top of the cellar steps and at the bottom of two or three leading into the scullery; but Blanche, of course, went round by the garden. She found the poor old dog quitedisconsolate in a more canine kennel in a corner of the one that was really worthy of the more formidable carnivora. There was every sign of his being treated as the dangerous dog that Blanche, indeed, had heard he was; the outer bars were further protected by wire netting, which stretched like a canopy over the whole cage; but Blanche let herself in with as little hesitation as she proceeded to beard the poor brute in his inner lair. And he never even barked at her; he just lay whimpering with his tearful nose between his two front paws, as though his dead master had not left him to the servants all his life.
Blanche coaxed and petted him until she almost wept herself; then suddenly and without warning the dog showed his worst side. Out he leaped from wooden sanctuary, almost knocking her down, andbarking horribly, but not at Blanche. She followed his infuriated eyes; and the back doorway framed a dusty and grimy figure, just climbing into full length on the cellar stairs, which Blanche had some difficulty in identifying with that of Cazalet.
"Well, you reallyarea Sweep!" she cried when she had slipped out just in time, and the now savage dog was still butting and clawing at his bars. "How did you come out, and where are the enemy?"
"The old way," he answered. "I left them down there."
"And what did you find?"
"I'll tell you later. I can't hear my voice for that infernal dog."
The dreadful barking followed them out of the yard, and round to the right, past the tradesmen's door, to the verge of the drive. Here they met an elderlyman in a tremendous hurry—an unstable dotard who instantly abandoned whatever purpose he had formed, and came to anchor in front of them with rheumy eyes and twitching wrinkles.
"Why, if that isn't Miss Blanche!" he quavered. "Do you hear our Roy, miss? I ha'n't heard that go on like that since the night that happened!"
Then Cazalet introduced himself to the old gardener whom he had known all his life; and by rights the man should have wept outright, or else emitted a rustic epigram laden with wise humor. But old Savage hailed from silly Suffolk, and all his life he had belied his surname, but never the alliterative libel on his native country. He took the wanderer's return very much as a matter of course, very much as though he had never been away at all, and was demonstrative only in hisfurther use of the East Anglian pronoun.
"That's a long time since we fared to see you, Mus' Walter," said he; "that's a right long time! And now here's a nice kettle of fish for you to find! But I seen the man, Mus' Walter, and we'll bring that home to him, never you fear!"
"Are you sure that you saw him?" asked Blanche, already under Cazalet's influence on this point.
Savage looked cautiously toward the house before replying; then he lowered his voice dramatically. "Sure, Miss Blanche. Why, I see him that night as plain as I fare to see Mus' Walter now!"
"I should have thought it was too dark to see anybody properly," said Blanche, and Cazalet nodded vigorously to himself.
"Dark, Miss Blanche? Why, that was broad daylight, and if that wasn't there were the lodge lights on to see him by!"His stage voice fell a sepulchral semitone. "But I see him again at the station this very afternoon, I did! I promised not to talk about that—you'll keep that a secret if I tell 'e somethin'?—but I picked him out of half a dozen at the first time of askin'!"
Savage said this with a pleased and vacuous grin, looking Cazalet full in the face; his rheumy eyes were red as the sunset they faced; and Cazalet drew a deep breath as Blanche and he turned back toward the river.
"First time of prompting, I expect!" he whispered. "But there's hope if Savage is their strongest witness."
"Only listen to that dog," said Blanche, as they passed the yard.
Hilton Toye was the kind of American who knew London as well as most Londoners, and some other capitals a good deal better than their respective citizens of corresponding intelligence. His travels were mysteriously but enviably interwoven with business; he had an air of enjoying himself, and at the same time making money to pay for his enjoyment, wherever he went. His hotel days were much the same all over Europe: many appointments, but abundant leisure. As, however, he never spoke about his own affairs unless they were also those of the listener—and notalways then—half his acquaintances had no idea how he made his money, and the other half wondered how he spent his time. Of his mere interests, which were many, Toye made no such secret; but it was quite impossible to deduce a main industry from the by-products of his level-headed versatility.
Criminology, for example, was an obvious by-product; it was no morbid taste in Hilton Toye, but a scientific hobby that appealed to his mental subtlety. And subtle he was, yet with strange simplicities; grave and dignified, yet addicted to the expressive phraseology of his less enlightened countrymen; naturally sincere, and yet always capable of some ingenuous duplicity.
The appeal of a Blanche Macnair to such a soul needs no analysis. She had struck through all complexities to thecore, such as it was or as she might make it. As yet she could only admire the character the man had shown, though it had upset her none the less. At Engelberg he had proposed to her "inside of two weeks," as he had admitted without compunction at the time. It had taken him, he said, about two minutes to make up his mind; but the following summer he had laid more deliberate siege, in accordance with some old idea that she had let fall to soften her first refusal. The result had been the same, only more explicit on both sides. She had denied him the least particle of hope, and he had warned her that she had not heard the last of him by any means, and never would till she married another man. This had incensed her at the time, but a great deal less on subsequent reflection; and such was the position between that pair when Toye andCazalet landed in England from the same steamer.
On this second day ashore, as Cazalet sat over a late breakfast in Jermyn Street, Toye sent in his card and was permitted to follow it, rather to his surprise. He found his man frankly divided between kidneys-and-bacon and the morning paper, but in a hearty mood, indicative of amends for his great heat in yesterday's argument. A plainer indication was the downright yet sunny manner in which Cazalet at once returned to the contentious topic.
"Well, my dear Toye, what do you think of it now?"
What do you think of it now
"What do you think of it now?"
"I was going to ask you what you thought, but I guess I can see from your face."
"I think the police are rotters for not setting him free last night!"
"Scruton?"
"Yes. Of course, the case'll break down when it comes on next week, but they oughtn't to wait for that. They've no right to detain a man in custody when the bottom's out of their case already."
"But—but the papers claim they've found the very things they were searching for." Toye looked nonplused, as well he might, by an apparently perverse jubilation over such intelligence.
"They haven't found the missing cap!" crowed Cazalet. "What they have found is Craven's watch and keys, and the silver-mounted truncheon that killed him. But they found them in a place where they couldn't possibly have been put by the man identified as Scruton!"
"Say, where was that?" asked Toye with great interest. "My paper only says the things were found, not where."
"No more does mine, but I can tell you, because I helped to find 'em."
"You don't say!"
"You'll never grasp where," continued Cazalet. "In the foundations under the house!"
Details followed in all fulness; the listener might have had a part in the Uplands act of yesterday's drama, might have played in the library scene with his adored Miss Blanche, so vividly was every minute of that crowded hour brought home to him. He also had seen the original writing-cupboard in Michelangelo's old Florentine house; he remembered it perfectly, and said that he could see the replica, with its shelf of a desk stacked with cigars, and the hole in its floor. He was not so sure that he had any very definite conception of the foundations of an English house.
"Ours were like ever so many little tiny rooms," said Cazalet, "where I couldn't stand nearly upright even as a small boy without giving my head a crack against the ground floors. They led into one another by a lot of little manholes—tight fits even for a boy, but nearly fatal to the boss policeman yesterday! I used to get in through one with a door, at the back of a slab in the cellars where they used to keep empty bottles; they keep 'em there still, because that's how I led my party out last night."
Cazalet's little gift of description was not ordered by an equal sense of selection. Hilton Toye, edging in his word in a pause for a gulp of coffee, said he guessed he visualized—but just where had those missing things been found?
"Three or four compartments from the first one under the library," said Cazalet.
"Did you find them?"
"Well, I kicked against the truncheon, but Drinkwater dug it up. The watch and keys were with it."
"Say, were they buried?"
"Only in the loose rubble and brick-dusty stuff that you get in foundations."
"Say, that's bad! That murderer must have known something, or else it's a bully fluke in his favor."
"I don't follow you, Toye."
"I'm thinking of finger-prints. If he'd just've laid those things right down, he'd have left the print of his hand as large as life for Scotland Yard."
"The devil he would!" exclaimed Cazalet. "I wish you'd explain," he added; "remember I'm a wild man from the woods, and only know of these things by the vaguest kind of hearsay and stray paragraphs in the papers. I never knewyou could leave your mark so easily as all that."
Toye took the breakfast menu and placed it face downward on the tablecloth. "Lay your hand on that, palm down," he said, "and don't move it for a minute."
Cazalet looked at him a moment before complying; then his fine, shapely, sunburnt hand lay still as plaster under their eyes until Toye told him he might take it up. Of course there was no mark whatever, and Cazalet laughed.
"You should have caught me when I came up from those foundations, not fresh from my tub!" said he.
"You wait," replied Hilton Toye, taking the menu gingerly by the edge, and putting it out of harm's way in the empty toast-rack. "You can't see anything now, but if you come round to the Savoy I'll show you something."
"What?"
"Your prints, sir! I don't say I'm Scotland Yard at the game, but I can do it well enough to show you how it's done. You haven't left your mark upon the paper, but I guess you've left the sweat of your hand; if I snow a little French chalk over it, the chalk'll stick where your hand did, and blow off easily everywhere else. The rest's as simple as all big things. It's hanged a few folks already, but I judge it doesn't have much chance with things that have lain buried in brick-dust. Say, come round to lunch and I'll have your prints ready for you. I'd like awfully to show you how it's done. It would really be a great pleasure."
Cazalet excused himself with decision. He had a full morning in front of him. He was going to see Miss Macnair's brother, son of the late head of his father's old firm of solicitors, and now oneof the partners, to get them either to take up Scruton's case themselves, or else to recommend a firm perhaps more accustomed to criminal practise. Cazalet was always apt to be elaborate in the first person singular, either in the past or in the future tense; but he was more so than usual in explaining his considered intentions in this matter that lay so very near his heart.
"Going to see Scruton, too?" said Toye.
"Not necessarily," was the short reply. But it also was elaborated by Cazalet on a moment's consideration. The fact was that he wanted first to know if it were not possible, by the intervention of a really influential lawyer, to obtain the prisoner's immediate release, at any rate on bail. If impossible, he might hesitate to force himself on Scruton in the prison, but he would see.
"It's a perfect scandal that he should be there at all," said Cazalet, as he rose first and ushered Toye out into the lounge. "Only think: our old gardener saw him run out of the drive at half past seven, when the gong went, when the real murderer must have been shivering in the Michelangelo cupboard, wondering how the devil he was ever going to get out again."
"Then you think old man Craven—begging his poor pardon—was getting out some cigars when the man, whoever he was, came in and knocked him on the head?"
Cazalet nodded vigorously. "That's the likeliest thing of all!" he cried. "Then the gong went—there may even have come a knock at the door—and there was that cupboard standing open at his elbow."
"With a hole in the floor that might have been made for him?"
"As it happens, yes; he'd search every inch like a rat in a trap, you see; and there it was as I'd left it twenty years before."
"Well, it's a wonderful yarn!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, and he lighted the cigar that Cazalet had given him.
"I think it may be thought one if the police ever own how they made their find," agreed Cazalet, laughing and looking at his watch. Toye had never heard him laugh so often. "By the way, Drinkwater doesn't want any of all this to come out until he's dragged his man before the beak again."
"Which you mean to prevent?"
"If only I can! I more or less promised not to talk, however, and I'm sure you won't. You knew so much already,you may just as well know the rest this week as well as next, if you don't mind keeping it to yourself."
Nobody could have minded this particular embargo less than Hilton Toye; and in nothing was he less like Cazalet, who even now had the half-regretful and self-excusing air of the impulsive person who has talked too freely and discovered it too late. But he had been perfectly delightful to Hilton Toye, almost too appreciative, if anything, and now very anxious to give him a lift in his taxi. Toye, however, had shopping to do in the very street that they were in, and he saw Cazalet off with a smile that was as yet merely puzzled, and not unfriendly until he had time to recall Miss Blanche's part in the strange affair of the previous afternoon.
Say, weren't they rather intimate,those two, even if they had known each other all their lives? He had it from Blanche (with her second refusal) that she was not, and never had been, engaged. And a fellow who only wrote to her once in a year—still, they must have been darned intimate, and this funny affair would bring them together again quicker than anything.
Say, what a funny affair it was when you came to think of it! Funny all through, it now struck Toye; beginning on board ship with that dream of Cazalet's about the murdered man, leading to all that talk of the old grievance against him, and culminating in his actually finding the implements of the crime in his inspired efforts to save the man of whose innocence he was so positive. Say, if that Cazalet had not been on his way home from Australia at the time!
Like many deliberate speakers, Toye thought like lightning, and had reached this point before he was a hundred yards from the hotel; then he thought of something else, and retraced his steps. He retraced them even to the table at which he had sat with Cazalet not very many minutes ago; the waiter was only now beginning to clear away.
"Say, waiter, what have you done with the menu that was in that toast-rack? There was something on it that we rather wanted to keep."
"I thought there was, sir," said the English waiter at that admirable hotel. Toye, however, prepared to talk to him like an American uncle of Dutch extraction.
"You thought that, and you took it away?"
"Not at all, sir. I 'appened to observethe other gentleman put the menu in his pocket, behind your back as you were getting up, because I passed a remark about it to the head waiter at the time!"
It was much more than a map of the metropolis that Toye carried in his able head. He knew the right places for the right things, from his tailor's at one end of Jermyn Street to his hatter's at the other, and from the man for collars and dress shirts, in another of St. James', to the only man for soft shirts, on Piccadilly. Hilton Toye visited them all in turn this fine September morning, and found the select team agreeably disengaged, readier than ever to suit him. Then he gazed critically at his boots. He was not so dead sure that he had struck the only man for boots. There had been a young fellow aboard theKaiser Fritz, quite a little bitof a military blood, who had come ashore in a pair of cloth tops that had rather unsettled Mr. Toye's mind just on that one point.
He thought of this young fellow when he was through with the soft-shirt man on Piccadilly. They had diced for a drink or two in the smoking-room, and Captain Aylmer had said he would like to have Toye see his club any time he was passing and cared to look in for lunch. He had said so as though he would like it a great deal, and suddenly Toye had a mind to take him at his word right now. The idea began with those boots with cloth tops, but that was not all there was to it; there was something else that had been at the back of Toye's mind all morning, and now took charge in front.
Aylmer had talked some about a job in the war office that enabled him to lunchdaily at the Rag; but what his job had been aboard a German steamer Toye did not know and was not the man to inquire. It was no business of his, anyway. Reference to a card, traded for his own in Southampton Water, and duly filed in his cigarette-case, reminded him of the Rag's proper style and title. And there he was eventually entertained to a sound, workmanlike, rather expeditious meal.
"Say, did you see the cemetery at Genoa?" suddenly inquired the visitor on their way back through the hall. A martial bust had been admired extravagantly before the question.
"Never want to see it again, or Genoa either," said Captain Aylmer. "The smoking-room's this way."
"I judge you didn't care a lot about the city?" pursued Toye as they found a corner.
"Genoa? Oh, I liked it all right, but you get fed up in a couple of days neither ashore nor afloat. It's a bit amphibious. Of course you can go to a hotel, if you like; but not if you're only a poor British soldier."
"Did you say you were there two days?" Toye was cutting his cigar as though it were a corn.
"Two whole days, and we'd had a night in the Bay of Naples just before."
"Is that so? I only came aboard at Genoa. I guess I was wise," added Toye, as though he was thinking of something else. There was no sort of feeling in his voice, but he was sucking his left thumb.
"I say, you've cut yourself!"
"I guess it's nothing. Knife too sharp; please don't worry, Captain Aylmer. I was going to say I only got on at Genoa, and they couldn't give me a room tomyself. I had to go in with Cazalet; that's how I saw so much of him."
It was Toye's third separate and independent attempt to introduce the name and fame of Cazalet as a natural topic of conversation. Twice his host had listened with adamantine politeness; this time he was enjoying quite the second-best liqueur brandy to be had at the Rag; and he leaned back in his chair.
"You were rather impressed with him, weren't you?" said Captain Aylmer. "Well, frankly, I wasn't, but it may have been my fault. It does rather warp one's judgment to be shot out to Aden on a potty job at this time o' year."
So that was where he had been? Yes, and by Jove he had to see a man about it all at three o'clock.
"One of the nuts," explained Captain Aylmer, keeping his chair with finerestraint. Toye rose with finer alacrity. "I hope you won't think me rude," said the captain, "but I'm afraid I really mustn't keep him waiting."
Toye said the proper things all the way to the hat-stand, and there took frontal measures as a last resort. "I was only going to ask you one thing about Mr. Cazalet," he said, "and I guess I've a reason for asking, though there's no time to state it now. What did you think of him, Captain Aylmer, on the whole?"
"Ah, there you have me. 'On the whole' is just the difficulty," said Aylmer, answering the straight question readily enough. "I thought he was a very good chap as far as Naples, but after Genoa he was another being. I've sometimes wondered what happened in his three or four days ashore."
"Three orfour, did you say?"
And at the last moment Toye would have played Wedding Guest to Aylmer's Ancient Mariner.
"Yes; you see, he knew these German boats waste a couple of days at Genoa, so he landed at Naples and did his Italy overland. Rather a good idea, I thought, especially as he said he had friends in Rome; but we never heard of 'em beforehand, and I should have let the whole thing strike me a bit sooner if I'd been Cazalet. Soon enough to take a hand-bag and a tooth-brush, eh? And I don't think I should have run it quite so fine at Genoa, either. But there are rum birds in this world, and always will be!"
Toye felt one himself as he picked his way through St. James' Square. If it had not been just after lunch, he would have gone straight and had a cocktail, for of course he knew the only place forthem.What he did was to slue round out of the square, and to obtain for the asking, at another old haunt, on Cockspur Street, the latest little time-table of continental trains. This he carried, not on foot but in a taxi, to the Savoy Hotel, where it kept him busy in his own room for the best part of another hour. But by that time Hilton Toye looked more than an hour older than on sitting down at his writing-table with pencil, paper and the little book of trains; he looked horrified, he looked distressed, and yet he looked crafty, determined and immensely alive. He proceeded, however, to take some of the life out of himself, and to add still more to his apparent age, by repairing for more inward light and leading to a Turkish bath.
Now the only Turkish bath, according to Hilton Toye's somewhat exclusivecode, was not even a hundred yards from Cazalet's hotel; and there the visitor of the morning again presented himself before the afternoon; now merely a little worn, as a man will look after losing a stone an hour on a warm afternoon, and a bit blue again about the chin, which of course looked a little deeper and stronger on that account.
Cazalet was not in; his friend would wait, and in fact waited over an hour in the little lounge. An evening paper was offered to him; he took it listlessly, scarcely looked at it at first, then tore it in his anxiety to find something he had quite forgotten—from the newspaper end. But he was waiting as stoically as before when Cazalet arrived in tremendous spirits.
"Stop and dine!" he cried out at once.
"Sorry I can't; got to go and see somebody," said Hilton Toye.
"Then you must have a drink."
"No, I thank you," said Toye, with the decisive courtesy of a total abstainer.
"You look as if you wanted one; you don't look a bit fit," said Cazalet most kindly.
"Nor am I, sir!" exclaimed Toye. "I guess London's no place for me in the fall. Just as well, too, I judge, since I've got to light out again straight away."
"You haven't!"
"Yes, sir, this very night. That's the worst of a business that takes you to all the capitals of Europe in turn. It takes you so long to flit around that you never know when you've got to start in again."
"Which capital is it this time?" said Cazalet. His exuberant geniality had been dashed very visibly for the moment. But already his high spirits were reasserting themselves; indeed, a cynic with an ear might have caught the note of suddenconsolation in the question that Cazalet asked so briskly.
"Got to go down to Rome," said Toye, watching the effect of his words.
"But you've just come back from there!" Cazalet looked no worse than puzzled.
"No, sir, I missed Rome out; that was my mistake, and here's this situation been developing behind my back."
"What situation?"
"Oh, why, it wouldn't interest you! But I've got to go down to Rome, whether I like it or not, and I don't like it any, because I don't have any friends there. And that's what I'm doing right here. I was wondering if you'd do something for me, Cazalet?"
"If I can," said Cazalet, "with pleasure." But his smiles were gone.
"I was wondering if you'd give me anintroduction to those friends of yours in Rome!"
There was a little pause, and Cazalet's tongue just showed between his lips, moistening them. It was at that moment the only touch of color in his face.
"DidI tell you I'd any friends there?"
The sound of his voice was perhaps less hoarse than puzzled. Toye made himself chuckle as he sat looking up out of somber eyes.
"Well, if you didn't," said he, "I guess I must have dreamed it!"