The Thousandth Woman

Yet she stated the fact, for his bowed head admitted it to be one, as nothing but a fact, in the same dull voice of apathetic acquiescence in an act of which the man himself was ashamed. She could see him wondering at her; she even wondered at herself. Yet if all this were true, what matter how the truth had come to light?

"It was the night I came down to bid you good-by," he confessed, "and didn't have time to wait. I didn't come down for the photo. I never thought of it till I saw it there. I came down to kind of warn you, Miss Blanche!"

"Against him?" she said, as if there was only one man left in the world.

"Yes – I guess I'd already warned Cazalet that I was starting on his tracks."

And then Blanche just said, "Poor – old – Sweep!" as one talking to herself. And Toye seized upon the words as she had seized on nothing from him.

"Have you only pity for the fellow?" he cried; for she was gazing at the bearded photograph without revulsion.

"Of course," she answered, hardly attending.

"Even though he killed this man – even though he came across Europe to kill him?"

"You don't think it was deliberate yourself, even if he did do it."

"But can you doubt that he did?" cried Toye, quick to ignore the point she had made, yet none the less sincerely convinced upon the other. "I guess you wouldn't if you'd heard some of the things he said to me on the steamer; and he's made good every syllable since he landed. Why, it explains every single thing he's done and left undone. He'll strain every nerve to have Scruton ably defended, but he won't see the man he's defending; says himself that he can't face him!"

"Yes. He said so to me," said Blanche, nodding in confirmation.

"To you?"

"I didn't understand him."

"But you're been seeing him all this while?"

"Every day," said Blanche, her soft eyes filling suddenly. "We've had – we've had the time of our lives!"

"My God!" said Toye. "The time of your life with a man who's got another man's blood on his hands – and that makes no difference to you! The time of your life with the man who knew where to lay hands on the weapon he'd done it with, who went as far as that to save the innocent, but no farther!"

"He would; he will still, if it's still necessary. You don't know him, Mr. Toye; you haven't known him all your life."

"And all this makes no difference to a good and gentle woman – one of the gentlest and the best God ever made?"

"If you mean me, I won't go so far as that," said Blanche. "I must see him first."

"See Cazalet?"

Toye had come to his feet, not simply in the horror and indignation which had gradually taken possession of him, but under the stress of some new and sudden resolve.

"Of course," said Blanche; "of course I must see him as soon as possible."

"Never again!" he cried.

"What?"

"You shall never speak to that man again, as long as ever you live," said Toye, with the utmost emphasis and deliberation.

"Who's going to prevent me?"

"I am."

"How?"

"By laying an information against him this minute, unless you promise never to see or to speak to Cazalet again."

Blanche felt cold and sick, but the bit of downright bullying did her good. "I didn't know you were a blackmailer, Mr. Toye!"

"You know I'm not; but I mean to save you from Cazalet, blackmail or white."

"To save me from a mere old friend – nothing more —nothing– all our lives!"

"I believe that," he said, searching her with his smoldering eyes. "You couldn't tell a lie, I guess, not if you tried! But you would do something; it's just a man being next door to hell that would bring a God's angel – " His voice shook.

She was as quick to soften on her side.

"Don't talk nonsense, please," she begged, forcing a smile through her distress. "Will you promise to do nothing if – if I promise?"

"Not to go near him?"

"No."

"Nor to see him here?"

"No."

"Nor anywhere else?"

"No. I give you my word."

"If you break it, I break mine that minute? Is it a deal that way?"

"Yes! Yes! I promise!"

"Then so do I, by God!" said Hilton Toye.

XIV

FAITH UNFAITHFUL

"It's all perfectly true," said Cazalet calmly. "Those were my movements while I was off the ship, except for the five hours and a bit that I was away from Charing Cross. I can't dispute a detail of all the rest. But they'll have to fill in those five hours unless they want another case to collapse like the one against Scruton!"

Old Savage had wriggled like a venerable worm, in the experienced talons of the Bobby's Bugbear; but then Mr. Drinkwater and his discoveries had come still worse out of a hotter encounter with the truculent attorney; and Cazalet had described the whole thing as only he could describe a given episode, down to the ultimate dismissal of the charge against Scruton, with a gusto the more cynical for the deliberately low pitch of his voice. It was in the little lodging-house sitting-room at Nell Gwynne's Cottages; he stood with his back to the crackling fire that he had just lighted himself, as it were, already at bay; for the folding-doors were in front of his nose, and his eyes roved incessantly from the landing door on one side to the curtained casement on the other. Yet sometimes he paused to gaze at the friend who had come to warn him of his danger; and there was nothing cynical or grim about him then.

Blanche had broken her word for perhaps the first time in her life; but it had never before been extorted from her by duress, and it would be affectation to credit her with much compunction on the point. Her one great qualm lay in the possibility of Toye's turning up at any moment; but this she had obviated to some extent by coming straight to the cottages when he left her – presumably to look for Cazalet in London, since she had been careful not to mention his change of address. Cazalet, to her relief, but also a little to her hurt, she had found at his lodgings in the neighborhood, full of the news he had not managed to communicate to her. But it was no time for taking anything but his peril to heart. And that they had been discussing, almost as man to man, if rather as innocent man to innocent man; for even now, or perhaps now in his presence least of all, Blanche could not bring herself to believe her old friend guilty of a violent crime, however unpremeditated, for which another had been allowed to suffer, for however short a time.

And yet, he seemed to make no secret of it; and yet – it did explain his whole conduct since landing, as Toye had said.

She could only shut her eyes to what must have happened, even as Cazalet himself had shut his all this wonderful week, that she had forgotten all day in her ingratitude, but would never, in all her days, forget again!

"There won't be another case," she heard herself saying, while her thoughts ran ahead or lagged behind like sheep. "It'll never come out – I know it won't."

"Why shouldn't it?" he asked so sharply that she had to account for the words, to herself as well as to him.

"Nobody knows except Mr. Toye, and he means to keep it to himself."

"Why should he?"

"I don't know. He'll tell you himself."

"Are you sure you don't know? What can he have to tell me? Why should he screen me, Blanche?"

His eyes and voice were furious with suspicion, but still the voice was lowered.

"He's a jolly good sort, you know," said Blanche, as if the whole affair was the most ordinary one in the world. But heroics could not have driven the sense of her remark more forcibly home to Cazalet.

"Oh, he is, is he?"

"I've always found him so."

"So have I, the little I've seen of him. And I don't blame him for getting on my tracks, mind you; he's a bit of a detective, I was fair game, and he did warn me in a way. That's why I meant to have the week – " He stopped and looked away.

"I know. And nothing can undo that," she only said; but her voice swelled with thanksgiving. And Cazalet looked reassured; the hot suspicion died out of his eyes, but left them gloomily perplexed.

"Still, I can't understand it. I don't believe it, either! I'm in his hands. What have I done to be saved by Toye? He's probably scouring London for me – if he isn't watching this window at this minute!"

He went to the curtains as he spoke. Simultaneously Blanche sprang up, to entreat him to fly while he could. That had been her first object in coming to him as she had done, and yet, once with him, she had left it to the last! And now it was too late; he was at the window, chuckling significantly to himself; he had opened it, and he was leaning out.

"That you, Toye, down there? Come up and show yourself! I want to see you."

He turned in time to dart in front of the folding-doors as Blanche reached them, white and shuddering. The flush of impulsive bravado fled from his face at the sight of hers.

"You can't go in there. What's the matter?" he whispered. "Why should you be afraid of Hilton Toye?"

How could she tell him? Before she had found a word, the landing door opened, and Hilton Toye was in the room, looking at her.

"Keep your voice down," said Cazalet anxiously. "Even if it's all over with me but the shouting, we needn't start the shouting here!"

He chuckled savagely at his jest; and now Toye stood looking at him.

"I've heard all you've done," continued Cazalet. "I don't blame you a bit. If it had been the other way about, I might have given you less run for your money. I've heard what you've found out about my mysterious movements, and you're absolutely right as far as you go. You don't know why I took the train at Naples, and traveled across Europe without a hand-bag. It wasn't quite the put-up job you may think. But, if it makes you any happier, I may as well tell you that I was at Uplands that night, and I did get out through the foundations!"

The insane impetuosity of the man was his master now. He was a living fire of impulse that had burst into a blaze. His voice was raised in spite of his warning to the others, and the very first sound of Toye's was to remind him that he was forgetting his own advice. Toye had not looked a second time at Blanche; nor did he now; but he took in the silenced Cazalet from head to heel, by inches.

"I always guessed you might be crazy, and I now know it," said Hilton Toye. "Still, I judge you're not so crazy as to deny that while you were in that house you struck down Henry Craven, and left him for dead?"

Cazalet stood like a red-hot stone.

"Miss Blanche," said Toye, turning to her rather shyly, "I guess I can't do what I said just yet. I haven't breathed a word, not yet, and perhaps I never will, if you'll come away with me now – back to your home – and never see Henry Craven's murderer again!"

"And who may he be?" cried a voice that brought all three face-about.

The folding-doors had opened, and a fourth figure was standing between the two rooms.

XV

THE PERSON UNKNOWN

The intruder was a shaggy elderly man, of so cadaverous an aspect that his face alone cried for his death-bed; and his gaunt frame took up the cry, as it swayed upon the threshold in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers that Toye instantly recognized as belonging to Cazalet. The man had a shock of almost white hair, and a less gray beard clipped roughly to a point. An unwholesome pallor marked the fallen features; and the envenomed eyes burned low in their sockets, as they dealt with Blanche but fastened on Hilton Toye.

"What do you know about Henry Craven's murderer?" he demanded in a voice between a croak and a crow. "Have they run in some other poor devil, or were you talking about me? If so, I'll start a libel action, and call Cazalet and that lady as witnesses!"

"This is Scruton," explained Cazalet, "who was only liberated this evening after being detained a week on a charge that ought never to have been brought, as I've told you both all along." Scruton thanked him with a bitter laugh. "I've brought him here," concluded Cazalet, "because I don't think he's fit enough to be about alone."

"Nice of him, isn't it?" said Scruton bitterly. "I'm so fit that they wanted to keep me somewhere else longer than they'd any right; that may be why they lost no time in getting hold of me again. Nice, considerate, kindly country! Ten years isn't long enough to have you as a dishonored guest. 'Won't you come back for another week, and see if we can't arrange a nice little sudden death and burial for you?' But they couldn't you see, blast 'em!"

He subsided into the best chair in the room, which Blanche had wheeled up behind him; a moment later he looked round, thanked her curtly, and lay back with closed eyes until suddenly he opened them on Cazalet.

"And what was that you were saying – that about traveling across Europe and being at Uplands that night? I thought you came round by sea? And what night do you mean?"

"The night it all happened," said Cazalet steadily.

"You mean the night some person unknown knocked Craven on the head?"

"Yes."

The sick man threw himself forward in the chair. "You never told me this!" he cried suspiciously; both the voice and the man seemed stronger.

"There was no point in telling you."

"Did you see the person?"

"Yes."

"Then he isn't unknown to you?"

"I didn't see him well."

Scruton looked sharply at the two mute listeners. They were very intent, indeed. "Who are these people, Cazalet? No! I know one of 'em," he answered himself in the next breath. "It's Blanche Macnair, isn't it? I thought at first it must be a younger sister grown up like her. You'll forgive prison manners, Miss Macnair, if that's still your name. You look a woman to trust – if there is one – and you gave me your chair. Anyhow, you've been in for a penny and you can stay in for a pound, as far as I care! But who's your Amer'can friend, Cazalet?"

"Mr. Hilton Toye, who spotted that I'd been all the way to Uplands and back when I claimed to have been in Rome!"

There was a touch of Scruton's bitterness in Cazalet's voice; and by some subtle process it had a distinctly mollifying effect on the really embittered man.

"What on earth were you doing at Uplands?" he asked, in a kind of confidential bewilderment.

"I went down to see a man."

Toye himself could not have cut and measured more deliberate monosyllables.

"Craven?" suggested Scruton.

"No; a man I expected to find at Craven's."

"The writer of the letter you found at Cook's office in Naples the night you landed there, I guess!"

It really was Toye this time, and there was no guesswork in his tone. Obviously he was speaking by his little book, though he had not got it out again.

"How do you know I went to Cook's?"

"I know every step you took between the Kaiser Fritz and Charing Cross and Charing Cross and the Kaiser Fritz!"

Scruton listened to this interchange with keen attention, hanging on each man's lips with his sunken eyes; both took it calmly, but Scruton's surprise was not hidden by a sardonic grin.

"You've evidently had a stern chase with a Yankee clipper!" said he. "If he's right about the letter, Cazalet, I should say so; presumably it wasn't from Craven himself?"

"No."

"Yet it brought you across Europe to Craven's house?"

"Well – to the back of his house! I expected to meet my man on the river."

"Was that how you missed him more or less?"

"I suppose it was."

Scruton ruminated a little, broke into his offensive laugh, and checked it instantly of his own accord. "This is really interesting," he croaked. "You get to London – at what time was it?"

"Nominally three twenty-five; but the train ran thirteen minutes late," said Hilton Toye.

"And you're on the river by what time?" Scruton asked Cazalet.

"I walked over Hungerford Bridge, took the first train to Surbiton, got a boat there, and just dropped down with the stream. I don't suppose the whole thing took me very much more than an hour."

"Aren't you forgetting something?" said Toye.

"Yes, I was. It was I who telephoned to the house and found that Craven was out motoring; so there was no hurry."

"Yet you weren't going to see Henry Craven?" murmured Toye.

Cazalet did not answer. His last words had come in a characteristic burst; now he had his mouth shut tight, and his eyes were fast to Scruton. He might have been in the witness-box already, a doomed wretch cynically supposed to be giving evidence on his own behalf, but actually only baring his neck by inches to the rope, under the joint persuasion of judge and counsel. But he had one friend by him still, one who had edged a little nearer in the pause.

"But you did see the man you went to see?" said Scruton.

Cazalet paused. "I don't know. Eventually somebody brushed past me in the dark. I did think then – but I can't swear to him even now!"

"Tell us about it."

"Do you mean that, Scruton? Do you insist on hearing all that happened? I'm not asking Toye; he can do what he likes. But you, Scruton – you've been through a lot, you know – you ought to have stopped in bed – do you really want this on top of all?"

"Go ahead," said Scruton. "I'll have a drink when you've done; somebody give me a cigarette meanwhile."

Cazalet supplied the cigarette, struck the match, and held it with unfaltering hand. The two men's eyes met strangely across the flame.

"I'll tell you all exactly what happened; you can believe me or not as you like. You won't forget that I knew every inch of the ground – except one altered bit that explained itself." Cazalet turned to Blanche with a significant look, but she only drew an inch nearer still. "Well, it was in the little creek, where the boat-house is, that I waited for my man. He never came – by the river. I heard the motor, but it wasn't Henry Craven that I wanted to see, but the man who was coming to see him. Eventually I thought I must have made a mistake, or he might have changed his mind and come by road. The dressing-gong had gone; at least I supposed it was that by the time. It was almost quite dark, and I landed and went up the path past the back premises to the front of the house. So far I hadn't seen a soul, or been seen by one, evidently; but the French windows were open in what used to be my father's library, the room was all lit up, and just as I got there a man ran out into the flood of light and – "

"I thought you said he brushed by you in the dark?" interrupted Toye.

"I was in the dark; so was he in another second; and no power on earth would induce me to swear to him. Do you want to hear the rest, Scruton, or are you another unbeliever?"

"I want to hear every word – more than ever!"

Toye cocked his head at both question and answer, but inclined it quickly as Cazalet turned to him before proceeding.

"I went in and found Henry Craven lying in his blood. That's gospel – it was so I found him – lying just where he had fallen in a heap out of the leather chair at his desk. The top right-hand drawer of his desk was open, the key in it and the rest of the bunch still swinging! A revolver lay as it had dropped upon the desk – it had upset the ink – and there were cartridges lying loose in the open drawer, and the revolver was loaded. I swept it back into the drawer, turned the key and removed it with the bunch. But there was something else on the desk – that silver-mounted truncheon – and a man's cap was lying on the floor. I picked them both up. My first instinct, I confess it, was to remove every sign of manslaughter and to leave the scene to be reconstructed into one of accident – seizure – anything but what it was!"

He paused as if waiting for a question. None was asked. Toye's mouth might have been sewn up, his eyes were like hatpins driven into his head. The other two simply stared.

"It was a mad idea, but I had gone mad," continued Cazalet. "I had hated the victim alive, and it couldn't change me that he was dead or dying; that didn't make him a white man, and neither did it necessarily blacken the poor devil who had probably suffered from him like the rest of us and only struck him down in self-defense. The revolver on the desk made that pretty plain. It was out of the way, but now I saw blood all over the desk as well; it was soaking into the blotter, and it knocked the bottom out of my idea. What was to be done? I had meddled already; how could I give the alarm without giving myself away to that extent, and God knows how much further? The most awful moment of the lot came as I hesitated – the dinner-gong went off in the hall outside the door! I remember watching the thing on the floor to see if it would move.

"Then I lost my head – absolutely. I turned the key in the door, to give myself a few seconds' grace or start; it reminded me of the keys in my hands. One of them was one of those little round bramah keys. It seemed familiar to me even after so many years. I looked up, and there was my father's Michelangelo closet, with its little round bramah keyhole. I opened it as the outer door was knocked at and then tried. But my mad instinct of altering every possible appearance, to mislead the police, stuck to me to the last. And I took the man's watch and chain into the closet with me, as well as the cap and truncheon that I had picked up before.

"I don't know how long I was above ground, so to speak, but one of my father's objects had been to make his retreat sound-tight, and I could scarcely hear what was going on in the room. That encouraged me; and two of you don't need telling how I got out through the foundations, because you know all about the hole I made myself as a boy in the floor under the oilcloth. It took some finding with single matches; but the fear of your neck gives you eyes in your finger-ends, and gimlets, too, by Jove! The worst part was getting out at the other end, into the cellars; there were heaps of empty bottles to move, one by one, before there was room to open the manhole door and to squirm out over the slab; and I thought they rang like a peal of bells, but I put them all back again, and apparently … nobody overheard in the scullery.

"The big dog barked at me like blazes – he did again the other day – but nobody seemed to hear him either. I got to my boat, tipped a fellow on the towing path to take it back and pay for it – why haven't the police got hold of him? – and ran down to the bridge over the weir. I stopped a big car with a smart shaver smoking his pipe at the wheel. I should have thought he'd have come forward for the reward that was put up; but I pretended I was late for dinner I had in town, and I let him drop me at the Grand Hotel. He cost me a fiver, but I had on a waistcoat lined with notes, and I'd more than five minutes in hand at Charing Cross. If you want to know, it was the time in hand that gave me the whole idea of doubling back to Genoa; I must have been half-way up to town before I thought of it!"

He had told the whole thing as he always could tell an actual experience; that was one reason why it rang so true to one listener at every point. But the sick man's sunken eyes had advanced from their sockets in cumulative amazement. And Hilton Toye laughed shortly when the end was reached.

"You figure some on our credulity!" was his first comment.

"I don't figure on anything from you, Toye, except a pair of handcuffs as a first instalment!"

Toye rose in prompt acceptance of the challenge. "Seriously, Cazalet, you ask us to believe that you did all this to screen a man you didn't have time to recognize?"

"I've told you the facts."

"Well, I guess you'd better tell them to the police." Toye took his hat and stick. Scruton was struggling from his chair. Blanche stood petrified, a dove under a serpent's spell, as Toye made her a sardonic bow from the landing door. "You broke your side of the contract, Miss Blanche! I guess it's up to me to complete."

"Wait!"

It was Scruton's raven croak; he had tottered to his feet.

"Sure," said Toye, "if you've anything you want to say as an interested party."

"Only this – he's told the truth!"

"Well, can he prove it?"

"I don't know," said Scruton. "But I can!"

"You?" Blanche chimed in there.

"Yes, I'd like that drink first, if you don't mind, Cazalet." It was Blanche who got it for him, in an instant. "Thank you! I'd say more if my blessing was worth having – but here's something that is. Listen to this, you American gentleman: I was the man who wrote to him in Naples. Leave it at that a minute; it was my second letter to him; the first was to Australia, in answer to one from him. It was the full history of my downfall. I got a warder to smuggle it out. That letter was my one chance."