Part 6

The next day they went over the Hog's Back, and the next day right through London into Hertfordshire. This was a tremendous experience. The car was a good one from a good firm, and the chauffeur drove like an angel through the traffic, so that the teeming city opened before them from end to end. Then the Hertfordshire hedges and meadows and timber were the very things after the Hog's Back and Hindhead; not so wonderful, of course, but more like old England and less like the bush; and before the day was out they had seen, through dodging London on the way back, the Harrow boys like a lot of young butlers who had changed hats with the maids, and Eton boys as closely resembling a convocation of slack curates.

Then there was their Buckinghamshire day--Chalfont St. Giles and Hughenden--and almost detached experiences such as the churchyard at Stoke Poges, where Cazalet repeated astounding chunks of its _Elegy_, learned as long ago as his preparatory school-days, and the terrible disillusion of Hounslow Heath and its murderous trams.

Then there was the wood they found where gipsies had been camping, where they resolved that moment to do the same, just exactly in every detail as Cazalet had so often done it in the bush; so that flesh and flour were fetched from the neighboring village, and he sat on his heels and turned them into mutton and damper in about a minute; and after that a real camp-fire till long after dark, and a shadowy chauffeur smoking his pipe somewhere in the other shadows, and thinking them, of course, quite mad. The critic on the hearth at home thought even worse of them than that. But Blanche only told the truth when she declared that the whole thing had been her idea; and she might have added, a bitter disappointment to her, because Walter simply would not talk about the bush itself, and never had since that first hour in the old empty schoolroom at Littleford.

(By the way, she had taken to calling him Walter to his face.)

Of other conversation, however, there was not and never had been the slightest dearth between them; but it was, perhaps, a sad case of quantity. These were two outdoor souls, and the one with the interesting life no longer spoke about it. Neither was a great reader, even of the papers, though Blanche liked poetry as she liked going to church; but each had the mind that could batten quite amiably on other people. So there was a deal of talk about neighbors down the river, and some of it was scandal, and all was gossip; and there was a great deal about what Blanche called their stone-age days, but again far less about themselves when young than there had been at Littleford, that first day. And so much for their conversation, once for all; it was frankly that of two very ordinary persons, placed in an extraordinary position to which they had shut their eyes for a week.

They must have had between them, however, some rudimentary sense of construction; for their final fling, if not just the most inspiring, was at least unlike all the rest. It was almost as new to Blanche, and now much more so to Cazalet; it appealed as strongly to their common stock of freshness and simplicity. Yet cause and effect were alike undeniably lacking in distinction. It began with cartloads of new clothes from Cazalet's old tailor, and it ended in a theater and the Carlton.

Martha surpassed herself, of course; she had gone about for days (or rather mornings and evenings) in an aggressive silence, her lips provocatively pursed; but now the time had come for her to speak out, and that she did. If Miss Blanche had no respect for herself, there were those who had some for her, just as there were others who seemed to have forgotten the meaning of the word. The euphemistic plural disappeared at the first syllable from Blanche. It was nothing to Martha that she had been offered a place in the car (beside that forward young man) more days than one; well did Mr. Cazalet know her feelings about motors before he made her the offer. But she was not saying anything about what was past. _This_ was the limit; an expression which only sullied Martha's lips because Blanche had just applied it to her interference. It was not behaving as a gentleman; it was enough to work unpleasant miracles in her poor parents' graves; and though Martha herself would die sooner than inform Mr. Charlie or the married sisters, other people were beginning to talk, and when this came out she knew who would get the blame.

So Blanche seemed rather flushed and very spirited at the short and early dinner at Dieudonne's; but it was a fact that the motoring had affected her skin, besides making her eyes look as though she had been doing what she simply never did. It had also toned up the lower part of Cazalet's face to match the rest; otherwise he was more like a meerschaum pipe than ever, with the white frieze across his forehead (but now nothing else) to stamp him from the wilds. And soon nobody was laughing louder at Mr. Payne and Mr. Grossmith; nobody looked better qualified for his gaiety stall, nobody less like a predestined figure in impending melodrama.

So also at the Carlton later; more champagne, of course, and the jokes of the evening to replenish a dwindling store, and the people at the other tables to give a fresh fillip to the game of gossip. Blanche looked as well as any of them in a fresher way than most, and Cazalet a noble creature in all his brand-new glory; and she winced with pride at the huge tip she saw him give the waiter; for an old friend may be proud of an old friend, surely! Then they got a good place for watching more people in the lounge; and the fiddling conductor proved the best worth watching of the lot, and was pronounced the very best performer that Cazalet had ever heard in all his life. Many other items were praised in the same fervent formula, which Blanche confirmed about everything except his brandy and cigar.

Above all was it delightful to feel that their beloved car was waiting for them outside, to whirl them out of all this racket just as late as they liked; for quite early in the week (and this was a glaring aggravation in Martha's eyes) Cazalet had taken lodgings for himself and driver in those very Nell Gwynne Cottages where Hilton Toye had stayed before him.

All the evening nothing had been better of its kind than this music at the very end; and, of course, it was the kind for Blanche and Cazalet, who for his part liked anything with a tune, but could never remember one to save his life. Yet when they played an aged waltz, actually in its second decade, just upon half past twelve, even Cazalet cocked his head and frowned, as though he had heard the thing before.

"I seem to know that," he said. "I believe I've danced to it."

"I have," said Blanche. "Often," she added suddenly; and then, "I suppose you sometimes dance in the bush, Walter?"

"Sometimes."

"That's where it was, then."

"I don't think so. You couldn't get that tremendous long note on a piano. There it goes again--bars and bars of it! That's what I seem to remember."

Blanche's face never changed. "Now, that's the end. They're beginning to put the lights out, Walter. Don't you think we'd better go?"

XII

THE THOUSANDTH MAN

It had been new life to them, but now it was all over. It was the last evening of their week, and they were spending it rather silently on Blanche's balcony.

"I make it at least three hundred," said Cazalet, and knocked out a pipe that might have been a gag. "You see, we were very seldom under fifty!"

"Speak for yourself, please! My longevity's a tender point," said Blanche, who looked as though she had no business to have her hair up, as she sat in a pale cross-fire between a lamp-post and her lighted room.

Cazalet protested that he had only meant their mileage in the car; he made himself extremely intelligible now, as he often would when she rallied him in a serious voice. Evidently that was not the way to rouse him up to-night, and she wanted to cheer him after all that he had done for her. Better perhaps not to burke the matter that she knew was on his mind.

"Well, it's been a heavenly time," she assured him just once more. "And to-morrow it's pretty sure to come all right about Scruton, isn't it?"

"Yes! To-morrow we shall probably have Toye back," he answered with grim inconsequence.

"What has that to do with it, Walter?"

"Oh, nothing, of course."

But still his tone was grim and heavy, with a schoolboy irony that he would not explain but could not keep to himself. So Mr. Toye must be turned out of the conversation, though it was not Blanche who had dragged him in. She wished people would stick to their point. She meant to make people, just for once and for their own good; but it took time to find so many fresh openings, and he only cutting up another pipeful of that really rather objectionable bush tobacco.

"There's one thing I've rather wanted to ask you," she began.

"Yes?" said Cazalet.

"You said the other day that it would mean worry for you in any case--after to-morrow--whether the charge is dismissed or not!"

His wicker chair creaked under him.

"I don't see why it should," she persisted, "if the case falls through."

"Well, that's where I come in," he had to say.

"Surely you mean just the other way about? If they commit the man for trial, then you do come in, I know. It's like your goodness."

"I wish you wouldn't say that! It hurts me!"

"Then will you explain yourself? It's not fair to tell me so much, and then to leave out just the bit that's making you miserable!"

The trusty, sisterly, sensible voice, half bantering but altogether kind, genuinely interested if the least bit inquisitive, too, would have gone to a harder or more hardened heart than beat on Blanche's balcony that night. Yet as Cazalet lighted his pipe he looked old enough to be her father.

"I'll tell you some time," he puffed.

"It's only a case of two heads," said Blanche. "I know you're bothered, and I should like to help, that's all."

"You couldn't."

"How do you know? I believe you're going to devote yourself to this poor man--if you can get him off--I mean, when you do."

"Well?" he said.

"Surely I could help you there! Especially if he's ill," cried Blanche, encouraged by his silence. "I'm not half a bad nurse, really!"

"I'm certain you're not."

"Does he _look_ very ill?"

She had been trying to avoid the direct question as far as possible, but this one seemed so harmless. Yet it was received in a stony silence unlike any that had gone before. It was as though Cazalet neither moved nor breathed, whereas he had been all sighs and fidgets just before. His pipe was out already--that was the one merit of bush tobacco, it required constant attention--and he did not look like lighting it again.

Until to-night they had not mentioned Scruton since the motoring began. That had been a tacit rule of the road, of wayside talk and indoor orgy. But Blanche had always assumed that Cazalet had been to see him in the prison; and now he told her that he never had.

"I can't face him," he cried under his breath, "and that's the truth! Let me get him out of this hole, and I'm his man forever; but until I do, while there's a chance of failing, I simply can't face the fellow. It isn't as if he'd asked to see me. Why should I force myself upon him?"

"He hasn't asked to see you because he doesn't know what you're doing for him!" Blanche leaned forward as eagerly as she was speaking, all her repressed feelings coming to their own in her for just a moment. "He doesn't know because I do believe you wouldn't have him told that you'd arrived, lest he should suspect! You _are_ a brick, Sweep, you really are!"

He was too much of one to sit still under the name. He sprang up, beating his hands. "Why shouldn't I be--to him--to a poor devil who's been through all he's been through? Ten years! Just think of it; no, it's unthinkable to you or me. And it all started in our office; we were to blame for not keeping our eyes open; things couldn't have come to such a pass if we'd done our part, my poor old father for one--I can't help saying it--and I myself for another. Talk about contributory negligence! We were negligent, as well as blind. We didn't know a villain when we saw one, and we let him make another villain under our noses; and the second one was the only one we could see in his true colors, even then. Do you think we owe him nothing now? Don't you think _I_ owe him something, as the only man left to pay?"

But Blanche made no attempt to answer his passionate questions. He had let himself go at last; it relieved her also in a way, for it was the natural man back again on her balcony. But he had set Blanche off thinking on other lines than he intended.

"I'm thinking of what _he_ must have felt he owed Mr. Craven and--and Ethel!" she owned.

"I don't bother my head over either of them," returned Cazalet harshly. "He was never a white man in his lifetime, and she was every inch his daughter. Scruton's the one I pity--because--because I've suffered so much from that man myself."

"But you don't think he did it!" Blanche was sharp enough to interrupt.

"No--no--but if he had!"

"You'd still stand by him?"

"I've told you so before. I meant to take him back to Australia with me--I never told you that--but I meant to take him, and not a soul out there to know who he was." He sighed aloud over the tragic stopper on that plan.

"And would you still?" she asked.

"If I could get him off."

"Guilty or not guilty?"

"Rather!"

There was neither shame, pose, nor hesitation about that. Blanche went through into the room without a word, but her eyes shone finely in the lamplight. Then she returned with a book, and stood half in the balcony, framed as in a panel, looking for a place.

"You remind me of _The Thousandth Man_," she told him as she found it.

"Who was he?"

"He's every man who does a thousandth part of what you're doing!" said Blanche with confidence. And then she read, rather shyly and not too well:

"'One man in a thousand, Solomon says, Will stick more close than a brother. And it's worth while seeking him half your days If you find him before the other. Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend On what the world sees in you, But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend With the whole round world agin you.'"

"I should hope he would," said Cazalet, "if he's a man at all."

"But this is the bit for you," said Blanche:

"'His wrong's your wrong, and his right's your right, In season or out of season. Stand up and back it in all men's sight-- With _that_ for your only reason! Nine hundred and ninety-nine can't bide The shame or mocking or laughter, But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side _To the gallows-foot_--and after!'"

The last italics were in Blanche's voice, and it trembled, but so did Cazalet's as he cried out in his formula:

"That's the finest thing I ever heard in all my life! But it's true, and so it should be. _I_ don't take any credit for it."

"Then you're all the more the thousandth man!"

He caught her suddenly by the shoulders. His rough hands trembled; his jaw worked. "Look here, Blanchie! If _you_ had a friend, wouldn't you do the same?"

"Yes, if I'd such a friend as all that," she faltered.

"You'd stand by his side 'to the gallows-foot'--if he was swine enough to let you?"

"I dare say I might."

"However bad a thing it was--murder, if you like--and however much he was mixed up in it--not like poor Scruton?"

"I'd try to stick to him," she said simply.

"Then you're the thousandth woman," said Cazalet. "God bless you, Blanchie!"

He turned on his heel in the balcony, and a minute later found the room behind him empty. He entered, stood thinking, and suddenly began looking all over for the photograph of himself, with a beard, which he had seen there a week before.

XIII

QUID PRO QUO

It was his blessing that had done it; up to then she had controlled her feelings in a fashion worthy of the title just bestowed upon her. If only he had stopped at that, and kept his blessing to himself! It sounded so very much more like a knell that Blanche had begun first to laugh, and then to make such a fool of herself (as she herself reiterated) that she was obliged to run away in the worst possible order.

But that was not the end of those four superfluous words of final benediction; before the night was out they had solved, to Blanche's satisfaction, the hitherto impenetrable mystery of Cazalet's conduct.

He had done something in Australia, something that fixed a gulf between him and her. Blanche did not mean something wrong, much less a crime, least of all any sort of complicity in the great crime which had been committed while he was on his way home. Obviously he could have had no connection with that, until days afterward as the accused man's friend. Yet he had on his conscience some act or other of which he was ashamed to speak. It might even itself be shameful; that was what his whole manner had suggested, but what Blanche was least ready and at the same time least unwilling to believe. She felt she could forgive such an old friend almost anything. But she believed the worst he had done was to emulate his friend Mr. Potts, and to get engaged or perhaps actually married to somebody in the bush.

There was no reason why he should not; there never had been any sort or kind of understanding between herself and him; it was only as lifelong friends that they had written to each other, and that only once a year. Lifelong friendships are traditionally fatal to romance. Blanche could remember only one occasion on which their friendship had risen to something more--or fallen to something less! She knew which it had been to her; especially just afterward, when all his troubles had come and he had gone away without another word of that kind. He had resolved not to let her tie herself, and so had tied her all the tighter, if not tighter still by never stating his resolve. But to go as far as this is to go two or three steps further than Blanche went in her perfectly rational retrospect: she simply saw, as indeed she had always seen, that they had both been free as air; and if he was free no longer, she had absolutely no cause for complaint, even if she was fool enough to feel it.

All this she saw quite clearly in her very honest heart. And yet, he might have told her; he need not have flown to see her, the instant he landed, or seemed so overjoyed, and such a boy again, or made so much of her and their common memories! He need not have begun begging her, in a minute, to go out to Australia, and then never have mentioned it again; he might just as well have told her if he had or hoped to have a wife to welcome her! Of course he saw it afterward, himself; that was why the whole subject of Australia had been dropped so suddenly and for good. Most likely he had married beneath him; if so, she was very sorry, but he might have said that he was married. Had Blanche been analyzing herself, and not just the general position of things, she would have had hereabouts to account to her conscience for a not unpleasing spasm at the sudden thought of his being unhappily married all the time.

One proof was that he had utterly forgotten all about the waltz of _Eldorado_--even its name! No; it had some vague associations for him, and that was worse than none at all. Blanche had its long note (not "bars and bars," though, Sweep) wailing in her head all night. And so for him their friendship had only fallen to something lower, to that hateful haunting tune that he could not even decently forget!

Curiously enough, it was over Martha that she felt least able to forgive him. Martha would say nothing, but her unspoken denunciations of Cazalet would be only less intolerable than her unspoken sympathy with Blanche. Martha had been perfectly awful about the whole thing. And Martha had committed the final outrage of being perfectly right, from her idiotic point of view.

Now among all these meditations of a long night, and of a still longer day, in which nobody even troubled to send her word of the case at Kingston, it would be too much to say that no thought of Hilton Toye ever entered the mind of Blanche. She could not help liking him; he amused her immensely; and he had proposed to her twice, and warned her he would again. She felt the force of his warning, because she felt his force of character and will. She literally felt these forces, as actual emanations from the strongest personality that had ever impinged upon her own. Not only was he strong, but capable and cultivated; and he knew the whole world as most people only knew some hole or corner of it; and could be most interesting without ever talking about himself or other people.

In the day of reaction, such considerations were bound to steal in as single spies, each with a certain consolation, not altogether innocent of comparisons. But the battalion of Toye's virtues only marched on Blanche when Martha came to her, on the little green rug of a lawn behind the house, to say that Mr. Toye himself had called and was in the drawing-room.

Blanche stole up past the door, and quickly made herself smarter than she had ever done by day for Walter Cazalet; at least she put on a "dressy" blouse, her calling skirt (which always looked new), and did what she could to her hair. All this was only because Mr. Toye always came down as if it were Mayfair, and it was rotten to make people feel awkward if you could help it. So in sailed Blanche, in her very best for the light of day, to be followed as soon as possible by the silver teapot, though she had just had tea herself. And there stood Hilton Toye, chin blue and collar black, his trousers all knees and no creases, exactly as he had jumped out of the boat-train.

"I guess I'm not fit to speak to you," he said, "but that's just what I've come to do--for the third time!"

"Oh, Mr. Toye!" cried Blanche, really frightened by the face that made his meaning clear. It relaxed a little as she shrank involuntarily, but the compassion in his eyes and mouth did not lessen their steady determination.

"I didn't have time to make myself presentable," he explained. "I thought you wouldn't have me waste a moment if you understood the situation. I want your promise to marry me right now!"

Blanche began to breathe again. Evidently he was on the eve of yet another of his journeys, probably back to America, and he wanted to go over engaged; at first she had thought he had bad news to break to her, but this was no worse than she had heard before. Only it was more difficult to cope with him; everything was different, and he so much more pressing and precipitate. She had never met this Hilton Toye before. Yes; she was distinctly frightened by him. But in a minute she had ceased to be frightened of herself; she knew her own mind once more, and spoke it much as he had spoken his, quite compassionately, but just as tersely to the point.

"One moment," he interrupted. "I said nothing about my feelings, because they're a kind of stale proposition by this time; but for form's sake I may state there's no change there, except in the only direction I guess a person's feelings are liable to change toward you, Miss Blanche! 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!"