Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “At Genoa?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you pretend to know where he’d been?”

  “I guess I do know” — and Toye sighed as he raised his little book. “Cazalet stepped on the train that left Naples six fifty Monday evening, and off the one timed to reach Charing Cross three twenty-five Wednesday.”

  “The day of the m—”

  “Yes. I never called it by the hardest name, myself; but it was seven thirty Wednesday evening that Henry Craven got his death-blow somehow. Well, Walter Cazalet left Charing Cross again by the nine o’clock that night, and was back aboard the Kaiser Fritz on Friday morning — full of his friends in Rome who didn’t exist!”

  The note-book was put away with every symptom of relief.

  “I suppose you can prove what you say?” said Blanche in a voice as dull as her unseeing eyes.

  “I have men to swear to him — ticket-collectors, conductors, waiters on the restaurant-car — all up and down the line. I went over the same ground on the same trains, so that was simple. I can also produce the barber who claims to have taken off his beard in Paris, where he put in hours Thursday morning.”

  Blanche looked up suddenly, not at Toye, but past him toward an overladen side-table against the wall. It was there that Cazalet’s photograph had stood among many others; until this morning she had never missed it, for she seemed hardly to have been in her room all the week; but she had been wondering who had removed it, whether Cazalet himself (who had spoken of doing so, she now knew why), or Martha (whom she would not question about it) in a fit of ungovernable disapproval. And now there was the photograph back in its place, leather frame and all!

  “I know what you did,” said Blanche. “You took that photograph with you — the one on that table — and had him identified by it!”

  Yet she stated the fact, for his bowed head admitted it to be one, as nothing but a fact, in the same dull voice of apathetic acquiescence in an act of which the man himself was ashamed. She could see him wondering at her; she even wondered at herself. Yet if all this were true, what matter how the truth had come to light?

  “It was the night I came down to bid you good-by,” he confessed, “and didn’t have time to wait. I didn’t come down for the photo. I never thought of it till I saw it there. I came down to kind of warn you, Miss Blanche!”

  “Against him?” she said, as if there was only one man left in the world.

  “Yes — I guess I’d already warned Cazalet that I was starting on his tracks.”

  And then Blanche just said, “Poor — old — Sweep!” as one talking to herself. And Toye seized upon the words as she had seized on nothing from him.

  “Have you only pity for the fellow?” he cried; for she was gazing at the bearded photograph without revulsion.

  “Of course,” she answered, hardly attending.

  “Even though he killed this man — even though he came across Europe to kill him?”

  “You don’t think it was deliberate yourself, even if he did do it.”

  “But can you doubt that he did?” cried Toye, quick to ignore the point she had made, yet none the less sincerely convinced upon the other. “I guess you wouldn’t if you’d heard some of the things he said to me on the steamer; and he’s made good every syllable since he landed. Why, it explains every single thing he’s done and left undone. He’ll strain every nerve to have Scruton ably defended, but he won’t see the man he’s defending; says himself that he can’t face him!”

  “Yes. He said so to me,” said Blanche, nodding in confirmation.

  “To you?”

  “I didn’t understand him.”

  “But you’re been seeing him all this while?”

  “Every day,” said Blanche, her soft eyes filling suddenly. “We’ve had — we’ve had the time of our lives!”

  “My God!” said Toye. “The time of your life with a man who’s got another man’s blood on his hands — and that makes no difference to you! The time of your life with the man who knew where to lay hands on the weapon he’d done it with, who went as far as that to save the innocent, but no farther!”

  “He would; he will still, if it’s still necessary. You don’t know him, Mr. Toye; you haven’t known him all your life.”

  “And all this makes no difference to a good and gentle woman — one of the gentlest and the best God ever made?”

  “If you mean me, I won’t go so far as that,” said Blanche. “I must see him first.”

  “See Cazalet?”

  Toye had come to his feet, not simply in the horror and indignation which had gradually taken possession of him, but under the stress of some new and sudden resolve.

  “Of course,” said Blanche; “of course I must see him as soon as possible.”

  “Never again!” he cried.

  “What?”

  “You shall never speak to that man again, as long as ever you live,” said Toye, with the utmost emphasis and deliberation.

  “Who’s going to prevent me?”

  “I am.”

  “How?”

  “By laying an information against him this minute, unless you promise never to see or to speak to Cazalet again.”

  Blanche felt cold and sick, but the bit of downright bullying did her good. “I didn’t know you were a blackmailer, Mr. Toye!”

  “You know I’m not; but I mean to save you from Cazalet, blackmail or white.”

  “To save me from a mere old friend — nothing more — nothing — all our lives!”

  “I believe that,” he said, searching her with his smoldering eyes. “You couldn’t tell a lie, I guess, not if you tried! But you would do something; it’s just a man being next door to hell that would bring a God’s angel—” His voice shook.

  She was as quick to soften on her side.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, please,” she begged, forcing a smile through her distress. “Will you promise to do nothing if — if I promise?”

  “Not to go near him?”

  “No.”

  “Nor to see him here?”

  “No.”

  “Nor anywhere else?”

  “No. I give you my word.”

  “If you break it, I break mine that minute? Is it a deal that way?”

  “Yes! Yes! I promise!”

  “Then so do I, by God!” said Hilton Toye.

  XIV. FAITH UNFAITHFUL

  “It’s all perfectly true,” said Cazalet calmly. “Those were my movements while I was off the ship, except for the five hours and a bit that I was away from Charing Cross. I can’t dispute a detail of all the rest. But they’ll have to fill in those five hours unless they want another case to collapse like the one against Scruton!”

  Old Savage had wriggled like a venerable worm, in the experienced talons of the Bobby’s Bugbear; but then Mr. Drinkwater and his discoveries had come still worse out of a hotter encounter with the truculent attorney; and Cazalet had described the whole thing as only he could describe a given episode, down to the ultimate dismissal of the charge against Scruton, with a gusto the more cynical for the deliberately low pitch of his voice. It was in the little lodging-house sitting-room at Nell Gwynne’s Cottages; he stood with his back to the crackling fire that he had just lighted himself, as it were, already at bay; for the folding-doors were in front of his nose, and his eyes roved incessantly from the landing door on one side to the curtained casement on the other. Yet sometimes he paused to gaze at the friend who had come to warn him of his danger; and there was nothing cynical or grim about him then.

  Blanche had broken her word for perhaps the first time in her life; but it had never before been extorted from her by duress, and it would be affectation to credit her with much compunction on the point. Her one great qualm lay in the possibility of Toye’s turning up at any moment; but this she had obviated to some extent by coming straight to the cottages when he left her — presumably to look for Cazalet in London, since she had been careful not to mention his change of address. Cazale
t, to her relief, but also a little to her hurt, she had found at his lodgings in the neighborhood, full of the news he had not managed to communicate to her. But it was no time for taking anything but his peril to heart. And that they had been discussing, almost as man to man, if rather as innocent man to innocent man; for even now, or perhaps now in his presence least of all, Blanche could not bring herself to believe her old friend guilty of a violent crime, however unpremeditated, for which another had been allowed to suffer, for however short a time.

  And yet, he seemed to make no secret of it; and yet — it did explain his whole conduct since landing, as Toye had said.

  She could only shut her eyes to what must have happened, even as Cazalet himself had shut his all this wonderful week, that she had forgotten all day in her ingratitude, but would never, in all her days, forget again!

  “There won’t be another case,” she heard herself saying, while her thoughts ran ahead or lagged behind like sheep. “It’ll never come out — I know it won’t.”

  “Why shouldn’t it?” he asked so sharply that she had to account for the words, to herself as well as to him.

  “Nobody knows except Mr. Toye, and he means to keep it to himself.”

  “Why should he?”

  “I don’t know. He’ll tell you himself.”

  “Are you sure you don’t know? What can he have to tell me? Why should he screen me, Blanche?”

  His eyes and voice were furious with suspicion, but still the voice was lowered.

  “He’s a jolly good sort, you know,” said Blanche, as if the whole affair was the most ordinary one in the world. But heroics could not have driven the sense of her remark more forcibly home to Cazalet.

  “Oh, he is, is he?”

  “I’ve always found him so.”

  “So have I, the little I’ve seen of him. And I don’t blame him for getting on my tracks, mind you; he’s a bit of a detective, I was fair game, and he did warn me in a way. That’s why I meant to have the week—” He stopped and looked away.

  “I know. And nothing can undo that,” she only said; but her voice swelled with thanksgiving. And Cazalet looked reassured; the hot suspicion died out of his eyes, but left them gloomily perplexed.

  “Still, I can’t understand it. I don’t believe it, either! I’m in his hands. What have I done to be saved by Toye? He’s probably scouring London for me — if he isn’t watching this window at this minute!”

  He went to the curtains as he spoke. Simultaneously Blanche sprang up, to entreat him to fly while he could. That had been her first object in coming to him as she had done, and yet, once with him, she had left it to the last! And now it was too late; he was at the window, chuckling significantly to himself; he had opened it, and he was leaning out.

  “That you, Toye, down there? Come up and show yourself! I want to see you.”

  He turned in time to dart in front of the folding-doors as Blanche reached them, white and shuddering. The flush of impulsive bravado fled from his face at the sight of hers.

  “You can’t go in there. What’s the matter?” he whispered. “Why should you be afraid of Hilton Toye?”

  How could she tell him? Before she had found a word, the landing door opened, and Hilton Toye was in the room, looking at her.

  “Keep your voice down,” said Cazalet anxiously. “Even if it’s all over with me but the shouting, we needn’t start the shouting here!”

  He chuckled savagely at his jest; and now Toye stood looking at him.

  “I’ve heard all you’ve done,” continued Cazalet. “I don’t blame you a bit. If it had been the other way about, I might have given you less run for your money. I’ve heard what you’ve found out about my mysterious movements, and you’re absolutely right as far as you go. You don’t know why I took the train at Naples, and traveled across Europe without a hand-bag. It wasn’t quite the put-up job you may think. But, if it makes you any happier, I may as well tell you that I was at Uplands that night, and I did get out through the foundations!”

  The insane impetuosity of the man was his master now. He was a living fire of impulse that had burst into a blaze. His voice was raised in spite of his warning to the others, and the very first sound of Toye’s was to remind him that he was forgetting his own advice. Toye had not looked a second time at Blanche; nor did he now; but he took in the silenced Cazalet from head to heel, by inches.

  “I always guessed you might be crazy, and I now know it,” said Hilton Toye. “Still, I judge you’re not so crazy as to deny that while you were in that house you struck down Henry Craven, and left him for dead?”

  Cazalet stood like a red-hot stone.

  “Miss Blanche,” said Toye, turning to her rather shyly, “I guess I can’t do what I said just yet. I haven’t breathed a word, not yet, and perhaps I never will, if you’ll come away with me now — back to your home — and never see Henry Craven’s murderer again!”

  “And who may he be?” cried a voice that brought all three face-about.

  The folding-doors had opened, and a fourth figure was standing between the two rooms.

  XV. THE PERSON UNKNOWN

  The intruder was a shaggy elderly man, of so cadaverous an aspect that his face alone cried for his death-bed; and his gaunt frame took up the cry, as it swayed upon the threshold in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers that Toye instantly recognized as belonging to Cazalet. The man had a shock of almost white hair, and a less gray beard clipped roughly to a point. An unwholesome pallor marked the fallen features; and the envenomed eyes burned low in their sockets, as they dealt with Blanche but fastened on Hilton Toye.

  “What do you know about Henry Craven’s murderer?” he demanded in a voice between a croak and a crow. “Have they run in some other poor devil, or were you talking about me? If so, I’ll start a libel action, and call Cazalet and that lady as witnesses!”

  “What do you know about Henry Craven’s murderer?”

  “This is Scruton,” explained Cazalet, “who was only liberated this evening after being detained a week on a charge that ought never to have been brought, as I’ve told you both all along.” Scruton thanked him with a bitter laugh. “I’ve brought him here,” concluded Cazalet, “because I don’t think he’s fit enough to be about alone.”

  “Nice of him, isn’t it?” said Scruton bitterly. “I’m so fit that they wanted to keep me somewhere else longer than they’d any right; that may be why they lost no time in getting hold of me again. Nice, considerate, kindly country! Ten years isn’t long enough to have you as a dishonored guest. ‘Won’t you come back for another week, and see if we can’t arrange a nice little sudden death and burial for you?’ But they couldn’t you see, blast ‘em!”

  He subsided into the best chair in the room, which Blanche had wheeled up behind him; a moment later he looked round, thanked her curtly, and lay back with closed eyes until suddenly he opened them on Cazalet.

  “And what was that you were saying — that about traveling across Europe and being at Uplands that night? I thought you came round by sea? And what night do you mean?”

  “The night it all happened,” said Cazalet steadily.

  “You mean the night some person unknown knocked Craven on the head?”

  “Yes.”

  The sick man threw himself forward in the chair. “You never told me this!” he cried suspiciously; both the voice and the man seemed stronger.

  “There was no point in telling you.”

  “Did you see the person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he isn’t unknown to you?”

  “I didn’t see him well.”

  Scruton looked sharply at the two mute listeners. They were very intent, indeed. “Who are these people, Cazalet? No! I know one of ‘em,” he answered himself in the next breath. “It’s Blanche Macnair, isn’t it? I thought at first it must be a younger sister grown up like her. You’ll forgive prison manners, Miss Macnair, if that’s still your name. You look a woman to trust — if there is one —
and you gave me your chair. Anyhow, you’ve been in for a penny and you can stay in for a pound, as far as I care! But who’s your Amer’can friend, Cazalet?”

  “Mr. Hilton Toye, who spotted that I’d been all the way to Uplands and back when I claimed to have been in Rome!”

  There was a touch of Scruton’s bitterness in Cazalet’s voice; and by some subtle process it had a distinctly mollifying effect on the really embittered man.

  “What on earth were you doing at Uplands?” he asked, in a kind of confidential bewilderment.

  “I went down to see a man.”

  Toye himself could not have cut and measured more deliberate monosyllables.

  “Craven?” suggested Scruton.

  “No; a man I expected to find at Craven’s.”

  “The writer of the letter you found at Cook’s office in Naples the night you landed there, I guess!”

  It really was Toye this time, and there was no guesswork in his tone. Obviously he was speaking by his little book, though he had not got it out again.

  “How do you know I went to Cook’s?”

  “I know every step you took between the Kaiser Fritz and Charing Cross and Charing Cross and the Kaiser Fritz!”

  Scruton listened to this interchange with keen attention, hanging on each man’s lips with his sunken eyes; both took it calmly, but Scruton’s surprise was not hidden by a sardonic grin.

  “You’ve evidently had a stern chase with a Yankee clipper!” said he. “If he’s right about the letter, Cazalet, I should say so; presumably it wasn’t from Craven himself?”

  “No.”

  “Yet it brought you across Europe to Craven’s house?”

  “Well — to the back of his house! I expected to meet my man on the river.”

  “Was that how you missed him more or less?”

  “I suppose it was.”

  Scruton ruminated a little, broke into his offensive laugh, and checked it instantly of his own accord. “This is really interesting,” he croaked. “You get to London — at what time was it?”