Part 5

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 one of 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 observe the 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!"

IX

FAIR WARNING

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 the _Kaiser Fritz_, quite a little bit of 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 lunch daily 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 to myself. 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 fine restraint. 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 or _four_, 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 for _them_. 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 exclusive code, 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 sudden consolation 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 an introduction 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.

"_Did_ I 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!"

X

THE WEEK OF THEIR LIVES

"Toye's gone back to Italy," said Cazalet. "He says he may be away only a week. Let's make it the week of our lives!"

The scene was the little room it pleased Blanche to call her parlor, and the time a preposterously early hour of the following forenoon. Cazalet might have 'planed down from the skies into her sunny snuggery, though his brand-new Burberry rather suggested another extravagant taxicab. But Blanche saw only his worn excited face; and her own was not at its best in her sheer amazement.

If she had heard the last two sentences, to understand them at the time she would have felt bound to take them up first, and to ask how on earth Mr. Toye could affect her plans or pleasures. But such was the effect of the preceding statement that all the rest was several moments on the way to her comprehension, where it arrived, indeed, more incomprehensible than ever, but not worth making a fuss about then.

"Italy!" she had ejaculated meanwhile. "_When_ did he go?"

"Nine o'clock last night."

"But"--she checked herself--"I simply can't understand it, that's all!"

"Why? Have you seen him since the other afternoon?"

His manner might have explained those other two remarks, now bothering her when it was too late to notice them; on the other hand, she was by no means sure that it did. He might simply dislike Toye, and that again might explain his extraordinary heat over the argument at Littleford. Blanche began to feel the air somewhat heavily charged with explanations, either demanded or desired; they were things she hated, and she determined not to add to them if she could help it.

"I haven't set eyes on him again," she said. "But he's been seen here--in a taxi."

"Who saw him?"

"Martha--if she's not mistaken."

This was a little disingenuous, as will appear; but that impetuous Sweep was in a merciful hurry to know something else.

"When was this, Blanche?"

"Just about dark--say seven or so. She owns it was about dark," said Blanche, though she felt ashamed of herself.

"Well, it's just possible. He left me about six; said he had to see some one, too, now I think of it. But I'd give a bit to know what he was doing, messing about down here at the last moment!"

Blanche liked this as little as anything that Cazalet had said yet, and he had said nothing that she did like this morning. But there were allowances to be made for him, she knew. And yet to strengthen her knowledge, or rather to let him confirm it for her, either by word or by his silence, she stated a certain case for him aloud.

"Poor old Sweep!" she laughed. "It's a shame that you should have come home to be worried like this."

"I am worried," he said simply.

"I think it's just splendid, all you're doing for that poor man, but especially the way you're doing it."

"I wish to God you wouldn't say that, Blanche!"

He paid her the compliment of speaking exactly as he would have spoken to a man; or rather, she happened to be the woman to take it as a compliment.

"But I do say it, Sweep! I've heard all about it from Charlie. He rang me up last night."

"You're on the telephone, are you?"

"Everybody is in these days. Where have you lived? Oh, I forgot!" And she laughed. Anything to lift this duet of theirs out of the minor key!

"But what does old Charlie really think of the case? That's more to the point," said Cazalet uneasily.

"Well, he seemed to fear there was no chance of bail before the adjourned hearing. But I rather gathered he was not going to be in it himself?"

"No. We decided on one of those sportsmen who love rushing in where a family lawyer like Charlie owns to looking down his nose. I've seen the chap, and primed him up about old Savage, and our find in the foundations. He says he'll make an example of Drinkwater, and Charlie says they call him the Bobby's Bugbear!"

"But surely he'll have to tell his client who's behind him?"

"No. He's just the type who would have rushed in, anyhow. And it'll be time enough to put Scruton under obligations when I've got him off!"

Blanche looked at the troubled eyes avoiding hers, and thought that she had never heard of a fine thing being done so finely. This very shamefacedness appealed to her intensely, and yet last night Charlie had said that old Sweep was in such tremendous spirits about it all! Why was he so down this morning?

She only knew she could have taken his hand, but for a very good reason why she could not. She had even to guard against an equivocally sympathetic voice or manner, as she asked, "How long did they remand him for?"

"Eight days."

"Well, then, you'll know the best or the worst to-day week!"

"Yes!" he said eagerly, almost himself again. "But, whichever way it goes, I'm afraid it means trouble for me, Blanche; some time or other I'll tell you why; but that's why I want this to be the week of our lives."

So he really meant what he had said before. The phrase had been no careless misuse of words; but neither, after all, did it necessarily apply to Mr. Toye. That was something. It made it easier for Blanche not to ask questions.

Cazalet had gone out on the balcony; now he called to her; and there was no taxi, but a smart open car, waiting in the road, its brasses blazing in the sun, an immaculate chauffeur at the wheel.

"Whose is that, Sweep?"

"Mine, for the week I'm talking about! I mean ours, if you'd only buck up and get ready to come out! A week doesn't last forever, you know!"

Blanche ran off to Martha, who fussed and hindered her with the best intentions. It would have been difficult to say which was the more excited of the two. But the old nurse would waste time in perfectly fatuous reminiscences of the very earliest expeditions in which Mr. Cazalet had lead and Blanche had followed, and what a bonny pair they had made even then, etc. Severely snubbed on that subject, she took to peering at her mistress, once her bairn, with furtive eagerness and impatience; for Blanche, on her side, looked as though she had something on her mind, and, indeed, had made one or two attempts to get it off. She had to force it even in the end.

"There's just one thing I want to say before I go, Martha."

"Yes, dearie, yes?"

"You know when Mr. Toye called yesterday, and I was out?"

"Oh, Mr. Toye; yes, I remember, Miss Blanche."

"Well, I don't want you to say that he came in and waited half an hour in vain; in fact, not that he came in at all, or that you're even sure you saw him, unless, of course, you're asked."

"Who should ask me, I wonder?"

"Well, I don't know, but there seems to be a little bad blood between Mr. Toye and Mr. Cazalet."

Martha looked for a moment as though she were about to weep, and then for another moment as though she would die of laughing. But a third moment she celebrated by making an utter old fool of herself, as she would have been told to her face by anybody but Blanche, whose yellow hair was being disarranged by the very hands that had helped to imprison it under that motor-hat and veil.

"Oh, Blanchie, is that all you have to tell me?" said Martha.

And then the week of their lives began.

XI

IN COUNTRY AND IN TOWN

The weather was true to them, and this was a larger matter than it might have been. They were not making love. They were "not out for that," as Blanche herself actually told Martha, with annihilating scorn, when the old dear looked both knowing and longing-to-know at the end of the first day's run. They were out to enjoy themselves, and that seemed shocking to Martha "unless something was coming of it." She had just sense enough to keep her conditional clause to herself.

Yet if they were only out to enjoy themselves, in the way Miss Blanche vowed and declared (more shame for her), they certainly had done wonders for a start. Martha could hardly credit all they said they had done, and as an embittered pedestrian there was nothing that she would "put past" one of those nasty motors. It said very little for Mr. Cazalet, by the way, in Martha's private opinion, that he should take her Miss Blanche out in a car at all; if he had turned out as well as she had hoped, and "meant anything," a nice boat on the river would have been better for them both than all that tearing through the air in a cloud of smoky dust; it would also have been much less expensive, and far more "the thing".

But, there, to see and hear the child after the first day! She looked so bonny that for a time Martha really believed that Mr. Cazalet had "spoken," and allowed herself to admire him also as he drove off later with his wicked lamps alight. But Blanche would only go on and on about her day, the glories of the Ripley Road and the grandeur of Hindhead. She had brought back heaps of heather and bunches of leaves just beginning to turn; they were all over the little house before Cazalet had been gone ten minutes. But Blanche hadn't forgotten her poor old Martha; she was not one to forget people, especially when she loved and yet had to snub them. Martha's portion was picture post-cards of the Gibbet and other landmarks of the day.

"And if you're good," said Blanche, "you shall have some every day, and an album to keep them in forever and ever. And won't that be nice when it's all over, and Mr. Cazalet's gone back to Australia?"

Crueller anticlimax was never planned, but Martha's face had brought it on her; and now it remained to make her see for herself what an incomparably good time they were having so far.

"It was a simply splendid lunch at the Beacon, and _such_ a tea at Byfleet, coming back another way," explained Blanche, who was notoriously indifferent about her food, but also as a rule much hungrier than she seemed to-night. "It must be that tea, my dear. It was _too_ much. To-morrow I'm to take the _Sirram_, and I want Walter to see if he can't get a billy and show me how they make tea in the bush; but he says it simply couldn't be done without methylated."