The Thousandth Woman Part 4

"Yes. I know."

Her chair creaked as she leaned forward with an enthusiastic solemnity that would have made her shriek if she had seen herself; but it had no such effect on Cazalet.

"I wonder who can have done it!"

"So do the police, and they don't look much like finding out!"

"It must have been for his watch and money, don't you think? And yet they say he had so many enemies!" Cazalet kept silence; but she thought he winced. "Of course it must have been the man who ran out of the drive," she concluded hastily. "Where were you when it happened, Sweep?"

Somewhat hoa.r.s.ely he was recalling the Mediterranean movements of the _Kaiser Fritz_, when at the first mention of the vessel's name he was firmly heckled.

"Sweep, you _don't_ mean to say you came by a German steamer?"

"I do. It was the first going, and why should I waste a week? Besides, you can generally get a cabin to yourself on the German line."

"So that's why you're here before the end of the month," said Blanche.

"Well, I call it most unpatriotic; but the cabin to yourself was certainly some excuse."

"That reminds me!" he exclaimed. "I hadn't it to myself all the way; there was another fellow in with me from Genoa; and the last night on board it came out that he knew you!"

"_Who_ can it have been?"

"Toye, his name was. Hilton Toye."

"An American man! Oh, but I know him very well," said Blanche in a tone both strained and cordial. "He's great fun, Mr. Toye, with his delightful Americanisms, and the perfectly delightful way he says them!"

Cazalet puckered like the primitive man he was, when taken at all by surprise; and that anybody, much less Blanche, should think Toye, of all people, either "delightful" or "great fun" was certainly a surprise to him, if it was nothing else. Of course it was nothing else, to his immediate knowledge; still, he was rather ready to think that Blanche was blushing, but forgot, if indeed he had been in a fit state to see it at the time, that she had paid himself the same high compliment across the gate. On the whole, it may be said that Cazalet was ruffled without feeling seriously disturbed as to the essential issue which alone leaped to his mind.

"Where did you meet the fellow?" he inquired, with the suitable admixture of confidence and amus.e.m.e.nt.

"In the first instance, at Engelberg."

"Engelberg! Where's that?"

"Only one of those places in Switzerland where everybody goes nowadays for what they call winter sports."

She was not even smiling at his arrogant ignorance; she was merely explaining one geographical point and another of general information. A close observer might have thought her almost anxious not to identify herself too closely with a popular craze.

"I dare say you mentioned it," said Cazalet, but rather as though he was wondering why she had not.

"I dare say I didn't! Everything won't go into an annual letter. It was the winter before last--I went out with Betty and her husband."

"And after that he took a place down here?"

"Yes. Then I met him on the river the following summer, and found he'd got rooms in one of the Nell Gwynne Cottages, if you call that a place."

"I see."

But there was no more to see; there never had been much, but now Blanche was standing up and gazing out of the balcony into the belt of singing sunshine between the opposite side of the road and the invisible river acres away.

"Why shouldn't we go down to Littleford and get out the boat if you're really going to make an afternoon of it?" she said. "But you simply must see Martha first; and while she's making herself fit to be seen, you must take something for the good of the house. I'll bring it to you on a lordly tray."

She brought him siphon, stoppered bottle, a silver biscuit-box of ancient memories, and left him alone with them some little time; for the young mistress, like her old retainer in another minute, was simply dying to make herself more presentable. Yet when she had done so, and came back like snow, in a shirt and skirt just home from the laundry, she saw that he did not see the difference. His devouring eyes shone neither more nor less; but he had also devoured every biscuit in the box, though he had begun by vowing that he had lunched in town, and stuck to the fable still.

Old Martha had known him all his life, but best at the period when he used to come to nursery tea at Littleford. She declared she would have known him anywhere as he was, but she simply hadn't recognized him in that photograph with his beard.

"I can see where it's been," said Martha, looking him in the lower temperate zone. "But I'm so glad you've had it off, Mr. Cazalet."

"There you are, Blanchie!" crowed Cazalet. "You said she'd be disappointed, but Martha's got better taste."

"It isn't that, sir," said Martha earnestly. "It's because the dreadful man who was seen running out of the drive, at your old home, _he_ had a beard! It's in all the notices about him, and that's what's put me against them, and makes me glad you've had yours off."

Blanche turned to him with too ready a smile; but then she was really not such a great age as she pretended, and she had never been in better spirits in her life.

"You hear, Sweep! I call it rather lucky for you that you were--"

But just then she saw his face, and remembered the things that had been said about Henry Craven by the Cazalets' friends, even ten years ago, when she really had been a girl.

V

AN UNTIMELY VISITOR

She really was one still, for in these days it is an elastic term, and in Blanche's case there was no apparent reason why it should ever cease to apply, or to be applied by every decent tongue except her own. If, however, it be conceded that she herself had reached the purely mental stage of some self-consciousness on the point of girlhood, it can not be too clearly stated that it was the only point in which Blanche Macnair had ever been self-conscious in her life.

Much the best tennis-player among the ladies of the neighborhood, she drove an almost unbecomingly long ball at golf, and never looked better than when paddling her old canoe, or punting in the old punt. And yet, this wonderful September afternoon, she did somehow look even better than at either or any of those congenial pursuits, and that long before they reached the river; in the empty house, which had known her as baby, child and grown-up girl, to the companion of some part of all three stages, she looked a more l.u.s.trous and a lovelier Blanche than he remembered even of old.

But she was not really lovely in the least; that also must be put beyond the pale of misconception. Her hair was beautiful, and perhaps her skin, and, in some lights, her eyes; the rest was not. It was yellow hair, not golden, and Cazalet would have given all he had about him to see it down again as in the oldest of old days; but there was more gold in her skin, for so the sun had treated it; and there was even hint or glint (in certain lights, be it repeated) of gold mingling with the pure hazel of her eyes. But in the dusty shadows of the empty house, moving like a sunbeam across its bare boards, standing out against the discolored walls in the place of remembered pictures not to be compared with her, it was there that she was all golden and still a girl.

They poked their noses into the old bogy-hole under the nursery stairs; they swung the gate at the head of the next flight; they swore to finger-marks on the panels that were all the walls of the top story, and they had a laugh in every corner, childish crimes to reconstruct, quite bitter battles to fight over again, but never a lump in either throat that the other could have guessed was there. And so out upon the leafy lawn, shelving abruptly to the river; round first, however, to the drying-green where the caretakers' garments were indeed drying unashamed; but they knew each other well enough to laugh aloud, had picked each other up much farther back than the point of parting ten years ago, almost as far as the days of mixed cricket with a toy set, on that very green.

Then there was the poor old greenhouse, sagging in every slender timber, broken as to every other cobwebbed pane, empty and debased within; they could not bring themselves to enter here.

Last of all there was the summer schoolroom over the boat-house, quite apart from the house itself; scene of such safe yet reckless revels; in its very aura late Victorian!

It lay hidden in ivy at the end of a now neglected path; the bow-windows overlooking the river were framed in ivy, like three matted, whiskered, dirty, happy faces; one, with its lower sash propped open by a broken plant-pot, might have been grinning a toothless welcome to two once leading spirits of the place.

Cazalet whittled a twig and wedged that sash up altogether; then he sat himself on the sill, his long legs inside. But his knife had reminded him of his plug tobacco. And his plug tobacco took him as straight back to the bush as though the unsound floor had changed under their feet into a magic carpet.

"You simply have it put down to the man's account in the station books.

n.o.body keeps ready money up at the bush, not even the price of a plug like this; but the chap I'm telling you about (I can see him now, with his great red beard and freckled fists) he swore I was charging him for half a pound more than he'd ever had. I was station storekeeper, you see; it was quite the beginning of things, and I'd have had to pay the few bob myself, and be made to look so small that I shouldn't have had a soul to call my own on the run. So I fought him for the difference; we fought for twenty minutes behind the wood-heap; then he gave me best, but I had to turn in till I could see again."

"You don't mean that he--"

Blanche had looked rather disgusted the moment before; now she was all truculent suspense and indignation.