“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!”
“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. Lifelon
g 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!”
Toye accepted his fate with a ready resignation, little short of alacrity. There was a gleam in his somber eyes, and his blue chin came up with a jerk. “That’s talking!” said he. “Now will you promise me never to marry Cazalet?”
“Mr. Toye!”
“That’s talking, too, and I guess I mean it to be. It’s not all dog-in-the-manger, either. I want that promise a lot more than I want the other. You needn’t marry me, Miss Blanche, but you mustn’t marry Cazalet.”
Blanche was blazing. “But this is simply outrageous—”
“I claim there’s an outrageous cause for it. Are you prepared to swear what I ask, and trust me as I’ll trust you, or am I to tell you the whole thing right now?”
“You won’t force me to listen to another word from you, if you’re a gentleman, Mr. Toye!”
“It’s not what I am that counts. Swear that to me, and I swear, on my side, that I won’t give him away to you or any one else. But it must be the most solemn contract man and woman ever made.”
The silver teapot arrived at this juncture, and not inopportunely. She had to give him his tea, with her young maid’s help, and to play a tiny part in which he supported her really beautifully. She had time to think, almost coolly; and one thought brought a thrill. If it was a question of her marrying or not marrying Walter Cazalet, then he must be free, and only the doer of some dreadful deed!
“What has he done?” she begged, with a pathetic abandonment of her previous attitude, the moment they were by themselves.
“Must I tell you?” His reluctance rang genuine.
“I insist upon it!” she flashed again.
“Well, it’s a long story.”
“Never mind. I can listen.”
“You know, I had to go back to Italy—”
“Had you?”
“Well, I did go.” He had slurred the first statement; this one was characteristically deliberate. “I did go, and before I went I asked Cazalet for an introduction to some friends of his down in Rome.”
“I didn’t know he had any,” said Blanche. She was not listening so very well; she was, in fact, instinctively prepared to challenge every statement, on Cazalet’s behalf; and here her instinct defeated itself.
“No more he has,” said Toye, “but he claimed to have some. He left the Kaiser Fritz the other day at Naples — just when I came aboard. I guess he told you?”
“No. I understood he came round to Southampton. Surely you shared a cabin?”
“Only from Genoa; that’s where Cazalet rejoined the steamer.”
“Well?”
“He claimed to have spent the interval mostly with friends in Rome. Those friends don’t exist, Miss Blanche,” said Toye.
“Is that any business of mine?” she asked him squarely.
“Why, yes, I’m afraid it’s going to be. That is, unless you’ll still trust me—”
“Go on, please.”
“Why, he never stayed in Rome at all, nor yet in Italy any longer than it takes to come through on the train. Your attention for one moment!” He took out a neat pocketbook. Blanche had opened her lips, but she did not interrupt; she just grasped the arms of her chair, as though about to bear physical pain. “The Kaiser Fritz” — Toye was speaking from his book— “got to Naples late Monday afternoon, September eighth. She was overdue, and I was mad about it, and madder still when I went aboard and she never sailed till morning. I guess I’d wasted—”
“Do tell me about Walter Cazalet!” cried Blanche. It was like small talk from a dentist at the last moment.
“I want you to understand about the steamer first,” said Toye. “She waited Monday night in the Bay of Naples, only sailed Tuesday morning, only reached Genoa Wednesday morning, and lay there forty-eight hours, as the German boats do, anyhow. That brings us to Friday morning before the Kaiser Fritz gets quit of Italy, doesn’t it?”
“Yes — do tell me about Walter!”
“He was gone ashore Monday evening before I came aboard at Naples. I never saw him till he scrambled aboard again Friday, about the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 376
