The Thousandth Woman Part 14

I'm a worse case than ever, if that makes any difference."

Blanche shook her yellow head. "Nothing can," she said. "There must be no possible mistake about it this time, because I want you to be very good and never ask me again. And I'm glad you didn't make all the proper speeches, because I needn't either, Mr. Toye! But--I know my own mind better than I ever did until this very minute--and I could simply never marry you!"

Toye accepted his fate with a ready resignation, little short of alacrity. There was a gleam in his somber eyes, and his blue chin came up with a jerk. "That's talking!" said he. "Now will you promise me never to marry Cazalet?"

"Mr. Toye!"

"That's talking, too, and I guess I mean it to be. It's not all dog-in-the-manger, either. I want that promise a lot more than I want the other. You needn't marry me, Miss Blanche, but you mustn't marry Cazalet."

Blanche was blazing. "But this is simply outrageous--"

"I claim there's an outrageous cause for it. Are you prepared to swear what I ask, and trust me as I'll trust you, or am I to tell you the whole thing right now?"

"You won't force me to listen to another word from you, if you're a gentleman, Mr. Toye!"

"It's not what I am that counts. Swear that to me, and I swear, on my side, that I won't give him away to you or any one else. But it must be the most solemn contract man and woman ever made."

The silver teapot arrived at this juncture, and not inopportunely. She had to give him his tea, with her young maid's help, and to play a tiny part in which he supported her really beautifully. She had time to think, almost coolly; and one thought brought a thrill. If it was a question of her marrying or not marrying Walter Cazalet, then he must be free, and only the doer of some dreadful deed!

"What _has_ he done?" she begged, with a pathetic abandonment of her previous att.i.tude, the moment they were by themselves.

"Must I tell you?" His reluctance rang genuine.

"I insist upon it!" she flashed again.

"Well, it's a long story."

"Never mind. I can listen."

"You know, I had to go back to Italy--"

"Had you?"

"Well, I did go." He had slurred the first statement; this one was characteristically deliberate. "I did go, and before I went I asked Cazalet for an introduction to some friends of his down in Rome."

"I didn't know he had any," said Blanche. She was not listening so very well; she was, in fact, instinctively prepared to challenge every statement, on Cazalet's behalf; and here her instinct defeated itself.

"No more he has," said Toye, "but he claimed to have some. He left the _Kaiser Fritz_ the other day at Naples--just when I came aboard. I guess he told you?"

"No. I understood he came round to Southampton. Surely you shared a cabin?"

"Only from Genoa; that's where Cazalet rejoined the steamer."

"Well?"

"He claimed to have spent the interval mostly with friends in Rome.

Those friends don't exist, Miss Blanche," said Toye.

"Is that any business of mine?" she asked him squarely.

"Why, yes, I'm afraid it's going to be. That is, unless you'll still trust me--"

"Go on, please."

"Why, he never stayed in Rome at all, nor yet in Italy any longer than it takes to come through on the train. Your attention for one moment!"

He took out a neat pocketbook. Blanche had opened her lips, but she did not interrupt; she just grasped the arms of her chair, as though about to bear physical pain. "The _Kaiser Fritz_"--Toye was speaking from his book--"got to Naples late Monday afternoon, September eighth. She was overdue, and I was mad about it, and madder still when I went aboard and she never sailed till morning. I guess I'd wasted--"

"Do tell me about Walter Cazalet!" cried Blanche. It was like small talk from a dentist at the last moment.

"I want you to understand about the steamer first," said Toye. "She waited Monday night in the Bay of Naples, only sailed Tuesday morning, only reached Genoa Wednesday morning, and lay there forty-eight hours, as the German boats do, anyhow. That brings us to Friday morning before the _Kaiser Fritz_ gets quit of Italy, doesn't it?"

"Yes--do tell me about Walter!"

"He was gone ash.o.r.e Monday evening before I came aboard at Naples. I never saw him till he scrambled aboard again Friday, about the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour."

"At Genoa?"

"Sure."

"And you pretend to know where he'd been?"

"I guess I do know"--and Toye sighed as he raised his little book.

"Cazalet stepped on the train that left Naples six fifty Monday evening, and off the one timed to reach Charing Cross three twenty-five Wednesday."

"The day of the m--"

"Yes. I never called it by the hardest name, myself; but it was seven thirty Wednesday evening that Henry Craven got his death-blow somehow.

Well, Walter Cazalet left Charing Cross again by the nine o'clock that night, and was back aboard the _Kaiser Fritz_ on Friday morning--full of his friends in Rome who didn't exist!"

The note-book was put away with every symptom of relief.

"I suppose you can prove what you say?" said Blanche in a voice as dull as her unseeing eyes.

"I have men to swear to him--ticket-collectors, conductors, waiters on the restaurant-car--all up and down the line. I went over the same ground on the same trains, so that was simple. I can also produce the barber who claims to have taken off his beard in Paris, where he put in hours Thursday morning."

Blanche looked up suddenly, not at Toye, but past him toward an overladen side-table against the wall. It was there that Cazalet's photograph had stood among many others; until this morning she had never missed it, for she seemed hardly to have been in her room all the week; but she had been wondering who had removed it, whether Cazalet himself (who had spoken of doing so, she now knew why), or Martha (whom she would not question about it) in a fit of ungovernable disapproval.

And now there was the photograph back in its place, leather frame and all!

"I know what you did," said Blanche. "You took that photograph with you--the one on that table--and had him identified by it!"

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.