The Thousandth Woman Part 2

They went ash.o.r.e together, and to the same hotel at Southampton for the night. Perhaps neither could have said from which side the initiative came; but midnight found the chance pair with their legs under the same heavy Victorian mahogany, devouring cold beef, ham and pickles as phlegmatically as commercial travelers who had never been off the island in their lives. Yet surely Cazalet was less depressed than he had been before landing; the old English ale in a pewter tankard even elicited a few of those anecdotes and piquant comparisons in which his conversation was at its best. It was at its worst on general questions, or on concrete topics not introduced by himself; and into this category, perhaps not unnaturally, fell such further particulars of the Thames Valley mystery as were to be found in an evening paper at the inn. They included a fragmentary report of the adjourned inquest, and the actual offer of such a reward, by the dead man's firm, for the apprehension of his murderer, as made Toye's eyes glisten in his sagacious head.

But Cazalet, though he had skimmed the many-headed column before sitting down to supper, flatly declined to discuss the tragedy his first night ash.o.r.e.

III

IN THE TRAIN

Discussion was inevitable on the way up to town next morning.

The silly season was by no means over; a sensational inquest was worth every inch that it could fill in most of the morning papers; and the two strange friends, planted opposite each other in the first-cla.s.s smoker, traveled inland simultaneously engrossed in a copious report of the previous day's proceedings at the coroner's court.

Of solid and significant fact, they learned comparatively little that they had been unable to gather or deduce the night before. There was the medical evidence, valuable only as tracing the fatal blow to some such weapon as the missing truncheon; there was the butler's evidence, finally timing the commission of the deed to within ten minutes; there was the head gardener's evidence, confirming and supplementing that of the butler; and there was the evidence of a footman who had answered the telephone an hour or two before the tragedy occurred.

The butler had explained that the dinner-hour was seven thirty; that, not five minutes before, he had seen his master come down-stairs and enter the library, where, at seven fifty-five, on going to ask if he had heard the gong, he had obtained no answer but found the door locked on the inside; that he had then hastened round by the garden, and in through the French window, to discover the deceased gentleman lying in his blood.

The head gardener, who lived in the lodge, had sworn to having seen a bareheaded man rush past his windows and out of the gates about the same hour, as he knew by the sounding of the gong up at the house; they often heard it at the lodge, in warm weather when the windows were open, and the gardener swore that he himself had heard it on this occasion.

The footman appeared to have been less positive as to the time of the telephone call, thought it was between four and five, but remembered the conversation very well. The gentleman had asked whether Mr. Craven was at home, had been told that he was out motoring, asked when he would be back, told he couldn't say, but before dinner some time, and what name should he give, whereupon the gentleman had rung off without answering.

The footman thought he was a gentleman, from the way he spoke. But apparently the police had not yet succeeded in tracing the call.

"Is it a difficult thing to do?" asked Cazalet, touching on this last point early in the discussion, which even he showed no wish to avoid this morning. He had dropped his paper, to find that Toye had already dropped his, and was gazing at the flying English fields with thoughtful puckers about his somber eyes.

"If you ask me," he replied, "I should like to know what wasn't difficult connected with the telephone system in this country! Why, you don't have a system, and that's all there is to it. But it's not at that end they'll put the salt on their man."

"Which end will it be, then?"

"The river end. That hat, or cap. Do you see what the gardener says about the man who ran out bareheaded? That gardener deserves to be cashiered for not getting a move on him in time to catch that man, even if he did think he'd only been swiping flowers. But if he went and left his hat or his cap behind him, that should be good enough in the long run. It's the very worst thing you _can_ leave. Ever hear of Franz Muller?"

Cazalet had not heard of that immortal notoriety, nor did his ignorance appear to trouble him at all, but it was becoming more and more clear that Hilton Toye took an almost unhealthy interest in the theory and practise of violent crime.

"Franz Muller," he continued, "left his hat behind him, only that and nothing more, but it brought him to the gallows even though he got over to the other side first. He made the mistake of taking a slow steamer, and that's just about the one mistake they never did make at Scotland Yard. Give them a nice, long, plain-sailing stern-chase and they get there by bedtime--wireless or no wireless!"

But Cazalet was in no mind to discuss other crimes, old or new; and he closed the digression by a.s.serting somewhat roundly that neither hat nor cap had been left behind in the only case that interested him.

"Don't be too sure," said Toye. "Even Scotland Yard doesn't show all its hand at once, in the first inquiry that comes along. They don't give out any description of the man that ran away, but you bet it's being circulated around every police office in the United Kingdom."

Cazalet said they would give it out fast enough if they had it to give.

By the way, he was surprised to see that the head gardener was the same who had been at Uplands in his father's time; he must be getting an old man, and no doubt shakier on points of detail than he would be likely to admit. Cazalet instanced the alleged hearing of the gong as in itself an unconvincing statement. It was well over a hundred yards from the gates to the house, and there were no windows to open in the hall where the gong would be rung.

He sighed heavily as in his turn he looked out at the luxuriant little paddocks and the old tiled homesteads after every two or three. But he was not thinking of the weather-board and corrugated iron strewn so spa.r.s.ely over the yellow wilds that he had left behind him. The old English panorama flew by for granted, as he had taken it before ever he went out to Australia. It was as though he had never been out at all.

"I've dreamed of the old spot so often," he said at length. "I'm not thinking of the night before last--I meant in the bush--and now to think of a thing like this happening, there, in the old governor's den, of all places!"

"Seems like a kind of poetic justice," said Hilton Toye.

"It does. It is!" cried Cazalet, fetching moist yet fiery eyes in from the fields. "I said to you the other night that Henry Craven never was a white man, and I won't unsay it now. n.o.body may ever know what he's done to bring this upon him. But those who really knew the man, and suffered for it, can guess the kind of thing!"

"Exactly," murmured Toye, as though he had just said as much himself.

His dark eyes twinkled with deliberation and debate. "How long is it, by the way, that they gave that clerk and friend of yours?"

A keen look pressed the startling question; at least, it startled Cazalet.

"You mean Scruton? What on earth made you think of him?"

"Talking of those who suffered for being the dead man's friends, I guess," said Toye. "Was it fourteen years?"

"That was it."

"But I guess fourteen doesn't mean fourteen, ordinarily, if a prisoner behaves himself?"

"No, I believe not. In fact, it doesn't."

"Do you know how much it would mean?"

"A little more than ten."

"Then Scruton may be out now?"

"Just."

Toye nodded with detestable aplomb. "That gives you something to chew on," said he. "Of course, I don't say he's our man--"

"I should think you didn't!" cried Cazalet, white to the lips with sudden fury.

Toye looked disconcerted and distressed, but at the same time frankly puzzled. He apologized none the less readily, with almost ingenious courtesy and fulness, but he ended by explaining himself in a single sentence, and that told more than the rest of his straightforward eloquence put together.

"If a man had done you down like that, wouldn't you want to kill him the very moment you came out, Cazalet?"

The creature of impulse was off at a tangent. "I'd forgive him if he did it, too!" he exclaimed. "I'd move heaven and earth to save him, guilty or not guilty. Wouldn't you in my place?"

"I don't know," said Hilton Toye. "It depends on the place you're in, I guess!" And the keen dark eyes came drilling into Cazalet's skull like augers.

"I thought I told you?" he explained impatiently. "We were in the office together; he was good to me, winked at the business hours I was inclined to keep, let me down lighter in every way than I deserved. You may say it was part of his game. But I take people as I find them. And then, as I told you, Scruton was ten thousand times more sinned against than sinning."

"Are you sure? If you knew it at the time--"

"I didn't. I told you so the last night."

"Then it came to you in Australia?" said Toye, with a smile as whimsical as the suggestion.

"It did!" cried Cazalet unexpectedly. "In a letter," he added with hesitation.

"Well, I mustn't ask questions," said Hilton Toye, and began folding up his newspaper with even more than his usual deliberation.