“Weren’t you! I call it mean.”
Her scrutiny became severe, but softened again at the sight of his clutched wide-awake and curiously characterless, shapeless suit.
“You may well look!” he cried, delighted that she should. “They’re awful old duds, I know, but you would think them a wonder if you saw where they came from: a regular roadside shanty in a forsaken township at the back of beyond. Extraordinary cove, the chap who made them; puts in every stitch himself, learns Shakespeare while he’s at it, knew Lindsay Gordon and Marcus Clarke—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Blanche, laughing, “but there’s your taxi ticking up twopence every quarter of an hour, and I can’t let it go on without warning you. Where have you come from?”
He told her with a grin, was roundly reprimanded for his extravagance, but brazened it out by giving the smart young man a sovereign before her eyes. After that, she said he had better come in before the neighbors came out and mobbed him for a millionaire. And he followed her indoors and up-stairs, into a little new den crowded with some of the big old things he could remember in a very different setting. But if the room was small it had a balcony that was hardly any smaller, on top of that unduly imposing porch; and out there, overlooking the fine grounds opposite, were basket chairs and a table, hot with the Indian summer sun.
“I hope you are not shocked at my abode,” said Blanche. “I’m afraid I can’t help it if you are. It’s just big enough for Martha and me; you remember old Martha, don’t you? You’ll have to come and see her, but she’ll be horribly disappointed about your beard!”
Coming through the room, stopping to greet a picture and a bookcase (filling a wall each) as old friends, Cazalet had descried a photograph of himself with that appendage. He had threatened to take the beastly thing away, and Blanche had told him he had better not. But it did not occur to Cazalet that it was the photograph to which Hilton Toye had referred, or that Toye must have been in this very room to see it. In these few hours he had forgotten the man’s existence, at least in so far as it associated itself with Blanche Macnair.
“The others all wanted me to live near them,” she continued, “but as no two of them are in the same county it would have meant a caravan. Besides, I wasn’t going to be transplanted at my age. Here one has everybody one ever knew, except those who escape by emigrating, simply at one’s mercy on a bicycle. There’s more golf and tennis than I can find time to play; and I still keep the old boat in the old boat-house at Littleford, because it hasn’t let or sold yet, I’m sorry to say.”
“So I saw as I passed,” said Cazalet. “That board hit me hard!”
“The place being empty hits me harder,” rejoined the last of the Macnairs. “It’s going down in value every day like all the other property about here, except this sort. Mind where you throw that match, Sweep! I don’t want you to set fire to my pampas-grass; it’s the only tree I’ve got!”
Cazalet laughed; she was making him laugh quite often. But the pampas-grass, like the rest of the ridiculous little garden in front, was obscured if not overhung by the balcony on which they sat. And the subject seemed one to change.
“It was simply glorious coming down,” he said. “I wouldn’t swap that three-quarters of an hour for a bale of wool; but, I say, there are some changes! The whole show in the streets is different. I could have spotted it with my eyes and ears shut. They used to smell like a stable, and now they smell like a lamp. And I used to think the old cabbies could drive, but their job was child’s play to the taximan’s! We were at Hammersmith before I could light my pipe, and almost down here before it went out! But you can’t think how every mortal thing on the way appealed to me. The only blot was a funeral at Barnes; it seemed such a sin to be buried on a day like this, and a fellow like me just coming home to enjoy himself!”
He had turned grave, but not graver than at the actual moment coming down. Indeed, he was simply coming down again, for her benefit and his own, without an ulterior trouble until Blanche took him up with a long face of her own.
“We’ve had a funeral here. I suppose you know?”
“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 hoarsely 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 amusement.
“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 lustrous 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. Nobody 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.
“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 a word from anybody, unless you mean him to wipe his boots on you. I soon found that out. I’d have given something to have learned the noble art before I went out. Did I ever tell you how it was I first came across old Venus Potts?”
He had told her at great length, to the exclusion of about every other topic, in the second of the annual letters; and throughout the series the inevitable name of Venus Potts had seldom cropped up without some allusion to that Homeric encounter. But it was well worth while having it all over again with the intricate and picaresque embroidery of a tongue far mightier than the pen hitherto employed upon the incident. Poor Blanche had almost to hold her nose over the primary cause of battle; but the dialogue was delightful, and Cazalet himself made a most gallant and engaging figure as he sat on the sill and reeled it out. He had always been a fluent teller of any happening, and Blanche a ready commentator, capable of raising the general level of the entertainment at any moment. But after all these centuries it was fun enough to listen as long as he liked to go on; and perhaps she saw that he had more scope where they were than he could have had in the boat, or it may have been an unrealized spell that bound them both to their bare old haunt; but there they were a good twenty minutes later, and old Venus Potts was still on the magic tapis, though Cazalet had dropped his boasting for a 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 so intently 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 to talk about.
Out her window she looked past a willow that had been part of the old life, in the direction of an equally typical silhouette of patient an
glers anchored in a punt; they had not raised a rod between them during all this time that Blanche had been out in Australia; but as a matter of fact she never saw them, since, vastly to the credit of Cazalet’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 course she can’t do the things you do; but she can ride, my word! So she ought to, when she’s lived there all her life. The rooms aren’t much, but the verandas are what count most; they’re better than any rooms. There are two distinct ends to the station — it’s like two houses; but of course the barracks were good enough just for me.”
She knew about the bachelors’ barracks; the annual letter had been really very full; and then she was still out there, cultivating Nelly Potts on a very deep veranda, though her straw hat and straw hair remained in contradictory evidence against a very dirty window on the Middlesex bank of the Thames. It was a shame of the September sun to show the dirt as it was doing; not only was there a great steady pool of sunlight on the unspeakable floor, but a doddering reflection from the river on the disreputable ceiling. Cazalet looked rather desperately from one to the other, and both the calm pool and the rough were broken by shadows, one more impressionistic than the other, of a straw hat over a 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 out there, a sportswoman like you! I believe you’d take to it like a duck to water.”
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 did say; yet neither was she watching her little anglers stamped in jet upon a silvery stream, nor even seeing any more of Nelly Potts in the Australian veranda. She had come home from Australia, and come in from the river, and she was watching the open door at the other end of the old schoolroom, listening to those confounded steps coming nearer and nearer — and Cazalet was gazing at her as though he really had said something that deserved an answer.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 371
