V
AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
She really was one still, for in these days it is an elastic term, andin Blanche's case there was no apparent reason why it should ever ceaseto apply, or to be applied by every decent tongue except her own. If,however, it be conceded that she herself had reached the purely mentalstage of some self-consciousness on the point of girlhood, it can not betoo clearly stated that it was the only point in which Blanche Macnairhad ever been self-conscious in her life.
Much the best tennis-player among the ladies of the neighborhood, shedrove an almost unbecomingly long ball at golf, and never looked betterthan when paddling her old canoe, or punting in the old punt. And yet,this wonderful September afternoon, she did somehow look even betterthan at either or any of those congenial pursuits, and that long beforethey 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 threestages, she looked a more lustrous and a lovelier Blanche than heremembered even of old.
But she was not really lovely in the least; that also must be put beyondthe 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, notgolden, and Cazalet would have given all he had about him to see it downagain as in the oldest of old days; but there was more gold in herskin, 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 hazelof her eyes. But in the dusty shadows of the empty house, moving like asunbeam across its bare boards, standing out against the discoloredwalls 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 tofinger-marks on the panels that were all the walls of the top story, andthey had a laugh in every corner, childish crimes to reconstruct, quitebitter battles to fight over again, but never a lump in either throatthat the other could have guessed was there. And so out upon the leafylawn, shelving abruptly to the river; round first, however, to thedrying-green where the caretakers' garments were indeed dryingunashamed; but they knew each other well enough to laugh aloud, hadpicked each other up much farther back than the point of parting tenyears ago, almost as far as the days of mixed cricket with a toy set, onthat 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; theycould not bring themselves to enter here.
Last of all there was the summer schoolroom over the boat-house, quiteapart from the house itself; scene of such safe yet reckless revels; inits very aura late Victorian!
It lay hidden in ivy at the end of a now neglected path; thebow-windows overlooking the river were framed in ivy, like three matted,whiskered, dirty, happy faces; one, with its lower sash propped open bya broken plant-pot, might have been grinning a toothless welcome to twoonce leading spirits of the place.
Cazalet whittled a twig and wedged that sash up altogether; then he sathimself on the sill, his long legs inside. But his knife had remindedhim of his plug tobacco. And his plug tobacco took him as straight backto the bush as though the unsound floor had changed under their feetinto a magic carpet.
"You simply have it put down to the man's account in the station books.Nobody keeps ready money up at the bush, not even the price of a pluglike this; but the chap I'm telling you about (I can see him now, withhis great red beard and freckled fists) he swore I was charging him forhalf a pound more than he'd ever had. I was station storekeeper, yousee; it was quite the beginning of things, and I'd have had to pay thefew bob myself, and be made to look so small that I shouldn't have had asoul to call my own on the run. So I fought him for the difference; wefought 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 alltruculent suspense and indignation.
"Beat me?" he cried. "Good Lord, no; but there was none too much in it."
Fires died down in her hazel eyes, lay lambent as soft moonlight,flickered into laughter before he had seen the fire.
"I'm afraid you're a very dangerous person," said Blanche.
"You've got to be," he assured her; "it's the only way. Don't take aword from anybody, unless you mean him to wipe his boots on you. I soonfound that out. I'd have given something to have learned the noble artbefore I went out. Did I ever tell you how it was I first came acrossold Venus Potts?"
He had told her at great length, to the exclusion of about every othertopic, in the second of the annual letters; and throughout the seriesthe inevitable name of Venus Potts had seldom cropped up without someallusion to that Homeric encounter. But it was well worth while havingit all over again with the intricate and picaresque embroidery of atongue far mightier than the pen hitherto employed upon the incident.Poor Blanche had almost to hold her nose over the primary cause ofbattle; but the dialogue was delightful, and Cazalet himself made a mostgallant and engaging figure as he sat on the sill and reeled it out. Hehad always been a fluent teller of any happening, and Blanche a readycommentator, capable of raising the general level of the entertainmentat any moment. But after all these centuries it was fun enough to listenas long as he liked to go on; and perhaps she saw that he had more scopewhere they were than he could have had in the boat, or it may have beenan unrealized spell that bound them both to their bare old haunt; butthere they were a good twenty minutes later, and old Venus Potts wasstill on the magic _tapis_, though Cazalet had dropped his boasting fora curiously humble, eager and yet ineffectual vein.
"Old Venus Potts!" he kept ejaculating. "You couldn't help liking him.And he'd like you, my word!"
"Is his wife nice?" Blanche wanted to know; but she was looking sointently out her window, at the opposite end of the bow to Cazalet's,that a man of the wider world might have thought of something else totalk about.
Out her window she looked past a willow that had been part of the oldlife, in the direction of an equally typical silhouette of patientanglers anchored in a punt; they had not raised a rod between themduring all this time that Blanche had been out in Australia; but as amatter of fact she never saw them, since, vastly to the credit ofCazalet's descriptive powers, she was out in Australia still.
"Nelly Potts?" he said. "Oh, a jolly good sort; you'd be awful pals."
"Should we?" said Blanche, just smiling at her invisible anglers.
"I know you would," he assured her with immense conviction. "Of courseshe can't do the things you do; but she can ride, my word! So she oughtto, when she's lived there all her life. The rooms aren't much, but theverandas are what count most; they're better than any rooms. There aretwo distinct ends to the station--it's like two houses; but of coursethe barracks were good enough just for me."
She knew about the bachelors' barracks; the annual letter had beenreally very full; and then she was still out there, cultivating NellyPotts on a very deep veranda, though her straw hat and straw hairremained in contradictory evidence against a very dirty window on theMiddlesex bank of the Thames. It was a shame of the September sun toshow the dirt as it was doing; not only was there a great steady pool ofsunlight on the unspeakable floor, but a doddering reflection from theriver on the disreputable ceiling. Cazalet looked rather desperatelyfrom one to the other, and both the calm pool and the rough were brokenby shadows, one more impressionistic than the other, of a straw hat overa stack of straw hair, that had not gone out to Australia--yet.
And of course just then a step sounded outside somewhere on some gravel.Confound those caretakers! What were _they_ doing, prowling about?
"I say, Blanchie!" he blurted out. "I do believe you'd like it outthere, a sportswoman like you! I believe you'd take to it like a duck towater."
He had floundered to his feet as well
. He was standing over her,feeling his way like a great fatuous coward, so some might have thought.But it really looked as though Blanche was not attending to what he didsay; yet neither was she watching her little anglers stamped in jet upona silvery stream, nor even seeing any more of Nelly Potts in theAustralian veranda. She had come home from Australia, and come in fromthe river, and she was watching the open door at the other end of theold schoolroom, listening to those confounded steps coming nearer andnearer--and Cazalet was gazing at her as though he really had saidsomething that deserved an answer.
"Why, Miss Blanche!" cried a voice. "And your old lady-in-waitingfigured I should find you flown!"
Hilton Toye was already a landsman and a Londoner from top to toe. Hewas perfectly dressed--for Bond Street--and his native simplicity ofbearing and address placed him as surely and firmly in the presentpicture. He did not look the least bit out of it. But Cazalet did, in aninstant; his old bush clothes changed at once into a merely shabby suitof despicable cut; the romance dropped out of them and their wearer, ashe stood like a trussed turkey-cock, and watched a bunch of hothouseflowers presented to the lady with a little gem of a natural, courteous,and yet characteristically racy speech.
To the lady, mark you; for she was one, on the spot; and Cazalet was aman again, and making a mighty effort to behave himself because the hourof boy and girl was over.
"Mr. Cazalet," said Toye, "I guess you want to know what in thunder I'mdoing on your tracks so soon. It's hog-luck, sir, because I wanted tosee you quite a lot, but I never thought I'd strike you right here. Didyou hear the news?"
"No! What?"
There was no need to inquire as to the class of news; the immediate pasthad come back with Toye into Cazalet's life; and even in Blanche'spresence, even in her schoolroom, the old days had flown into theirproper place and size in the perspective.
"They've made an arrest," said Toye; and Cazalet nodded as though he hadquite expected it, which set Blanche off trying to remember something hehad said at the other house; but she had not succeeded when she noticedthe curious pallor of his chin and forehead.
"Scruton?" he just asked.
"Yes, sir! This morning," said Hilton Toye.
"You don't mean _the_ poor man?" cried Blanche, looking from one to theother.
"Yes, he does," said Cazalet gloomily. He stared out at the river,seeing nothing in his turn, though one of the anglers was actually busywith his reel.
"But I thought Mr. Scruton was still--" Blanche remembered him,remembered dancing with him; she did not like to say, "in prison."
"He came out the other day," sighed Cazalet. "But how like the policeall over! Give a dog a bad name, and trust them to hunt it down andshoot it at sight!"
"I judge it's not so bad as all that in this country," said Hilton Toye."That's more like the police theory about Scruton, I guess, bar drawingthe bead."
"When did you hear of it?" said Cazalet.
"It was on the tape at the Savoy when I got there. So I made aninquiry, and I figured to look in at the Kingston Court on my way tocall upon Miss Blanche. You see, I was kind of interested in all you'dtold me about the case."
"Well?"
"Well, that was my end of the situation. As luck and management wouldhave it between them, I was in time to hear your man--"
"Not my man, please! You thought of him yourself," said Cazalet sharply.
"Well, anyway, I was in time to hear the proceedings opened against him.They were all over in about a minute. He was remanded till next week."
"How did he look?" and, "Had he a beard?" demanded Cazalet and Blanchesimultaneously.
"He looked like a sick man," said Toye, with something more than hisusual deliberation in answering or asking questions. "Yes, MissBlanche, he had a beard worthy of a free citizen."
"They let them grow one, if they like, before they come out," saidCazalet, with the nod of knowledge.
"Then I guess he was a wise man not to take it off," rejoined HiltonToye. "That would only prejudice his case, if it's going to be one ofidentity, with that head gardener playing lead in the witness-stand."
"Old Savage!" snorted Cazalet. "Why, he was a dotard in our time; theycouldn't hang a dog on his evidence!"
"Still," said Blanche, "I'd rather have it than circumstantial evidence,wouldn't you, Mr. Toye?"
"No, Miss Blanche, I would not," replied Toye, with unhesitating candor."The worst evidence in the world, in my opinion, and I've given thematter some thought, is the evidence of identity." He turned to Cazalet,who had betrayed a quickened interest in his views. "Shall I tell youwhy? Think how often you're not so sure if you have seen a man before orif you never have! You kind of shrink from nodding, or else you nodwrong; if you didn't ever have that feeling, then you're not like anyother man I know."
"I have!" cried Cazalet. "I've had it all my life, even in the wilds;but I never thought of it before."
"Think of it now," said Toye, "and you'll see there may be flaws in thebest evidence of identity that money can buy. But circumstantialevidence can't lie, Miss Blanche, if you get enough of it. If the linksfit in, to prove that a certain person was in a certain place at acertain time, I guess that's worth all the oaths of all theeye-witnesses that ever saw daylight!"
Cazalet laughed harshly, as for no apparent reason he led the way intothe garden. "Mr. Toye's made a study of these things," he fired over hisshoulder. "He should have been a Sherlock Holmes, and rather wishes hewas one!"
"Give me time," said Toye, laughing. "I may come along that way yet."
Cazalet faced him in a frame of tangled greenery. "You told me youwouldn't!"
"I did, sir, but that was before they put salt on this poor old crook.If you're right, and he's not the man, shouldn't you say that ratheraltered the situation?"