Chapter II: Part 2

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 anglers 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.

"Why, Miss Blanche!" cried a voice. "And your old lady-in-waiting figured I should find you flown!"

Hilton Toye was already a landsman and a Londoner from top to toe. He was perfectly dressed--for Bond Street--and his native simplicity of bearing and address placed him as surely and firmly in the present picture. He did not look the least bit out of it. But Cazalet did, in an instant; his old bush clothes changed at once into a merely shabby suit of despicable cut; the romance dropped out of them and their wearer, as he stood like a trussed turkey-cock, and watched a bunch of hothouse flowers 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 a man again, and making a mighty effort to behave himself because the hour of boy and girl was over.

"Mr. Cazalet," said Toye, "I guess you want to know what in thunder I'm doing on your tracks so soon. It's hog-luck, sir, because I wanted to see you quite a lot, but I never thought I'd strike you right here. Did you hear the news?"

"No! What?"

There was no need to inquire as to the class of news; the immediate past had come back with Toye into Cazalet's life; and even in Blanche's presence, even in her schoolroom, the old days had flown into their proper place and size in the perspective.

"They've made an arrest," said Toye; and Cazalet nodded as though he had quite expected it, which set Blanche off trying to remember something he had said at the other house; but she had not succeeded when she noticed the 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 the other.

"Yes, he does," said Cazalet gloomily. He stared out at the river, seeing nothing in his turn, though one of the anglers was actually busy with 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 police all over! Give a dog a bad name, and trust them to hunt it down and shoot 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 drawing the bead."

"When did you hear of it?" said Cazalet.

"It was on the tape at the Savoy when I got there. So I made an inquiry, and I figured to look in at the Kingston Court on my way to call upon Miss Blanche. You see, I was kind of interested in all you'd told me about the case."

"Well?"

"Well, that was my end of the situation. As luck and management would have 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 Blanche simultaneously.

"He looked like a sick man," said Toye, with something more than his usual deliberation in answering or asking questions. "Yes, Miss Blanche, he had a beard worthy of a free citizen."

"They let them grow one, if they like, before they come out," said Cazalet, with the nod of knowledge.

"Then I guess he was a wise man not to take it off," rejoined Hilton Toye. "That would only prejudice his case, if it's going to be one of identity, with that head gardener playing lead in the witness-stand."

"Old Savage!" snorted Cazalet. "Why, he was a dotard in our time; they couldn'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 the matter some thought, is the evidence of identity." He turned to Cazalet, who had betrayed a quickened interest in his views. "Shall I tell you why? Think how often you're not so sure if you have seen a man before or if you never have! You kind of shrink from nodding, or else you nod wrong; if you didn't ever have that feeling, then you're not like any other 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 the best evidence of identity that money can buy. But circumstantial evidence can't lie, Miss Blanche, if you get enough of it. If the links fit in, to prove that a certain person was in a certain place at a certain time, I guess that's worth all the oaths of all the eye-witnesses that ever saw daylight!"

Cazalet laughed harshly, as for no apparent reason he led the way into the garden. "Mr. Toye's made a study of these things," he fired over his shoulder. "He should have been a Sherlock Holmes, and rather wishes he was 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 you wouldn'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 rather altered the situation?"

VI

VOLUNTARY SERVICE

"And why do you think he can't have done it?"

Cazalet had trundled the old canoe over the rollers, and Blanche was hardly paddling in the glassy strip alongside the weir. Big drops clustered on her idle blades, and made tiny circles as they met themselves in the shining mirror. But below the lock there had been something to do, and Blanche had done it deftly and silently, with almost equal capacity and grace. It had given her a charming flush and sparkle; and, what with the sun's bare hand on her yellow hair, she now looked even bonnier than indoors, yet not quite, quite such a girl. But then every bit of the boy had gone out of Cazalet. So that hour stolen from the past was up forever.

"Why do the police think the other thing?" he retorted. "What have they got to go on? That's what I want to know. I agree with Toye in one thing." Blanche looked up quickly. "I wouldn't trust old Savage an inch. I've been thinking about him and his precious evidence. Do you realize that it's quite dark now soon after seven? It was pretty thick saying his man was bareheaded, with neither hat nor cap left behind to prove it! Yet now it seems he's put a beard to him, and next we shall have the color of his eyes!"

Blanche laughed at his vigor of phrase; this was more like the old, hot-tempered, sometimes rather overbearing Sweep. Something had made him jump to the conclusion that Scruton could not possibly have killed Mr. Craven, whatever else he might have done in days gone by. So it simply _was_ impossible, and anybody who took the other side, or had a word to say for the police, as a force not unknown to look before it leaped, would have to reckon henceforth with Sweep Cazalet.

Mr. Toye already had reckoned with him, in a little debate begun outside the old summer schoolroom at Littleford, and adjourned rather than finished at the iron gate into the road. In her heart of hearts Blanche could not say that Cazalet had the best of the argument, except, indeed, in the matter of heated emphasis and scornful asseveration. It was difficult, however, to know what line he really took; for while he scouted the very notion of uncorroborated identification by old Savage, he discredited with equal warmth all Toye's contentions on behalf of circumstantial evidence. Toye had advanced a general principle with calm ability, but Cazalet could not be shifted from the particular position he was so eager to defend, and would only enter into abstract questions to beg them out of hand.

Blanche rather thought that neither quite understood what the other meant; but she could not blink the fact that the old friend had neither the dialectical mind nor the unfailing courtesy of the new. That being so, with her perception she might have changed the subject; but she could see that Cazalet was thinking of nothing else; and no wonder, since they were approaching the scene of the tragedy and his own old home, with each long dip of her paddle.

It had been his own wish to start upstream; but she could see the wistful pain in his eyes as they fell once more upon the red turrets and the smooth green lawn of Uplands; and she neither spoke nor looked at him again until he spoke to her.

"I see they've got the blinds down still," he said detachedly. "What's happened to Mrs. Craven?"

"I hear she went into a nursing home before the funeral."

"Then there's nobody there?"

"It doesn't look as if there was, does it?" said poor Blanche.

"I expect we should find Savage somewhere. Would you very much mind, Blanche? I should rather like--if it was just setting foot--with you--"

But even that effective final pronoun failed to bring any buoyancy back into his voice; for it was not in the least effective as he said it, and he no longer looked her in the face. But this all seemed natural to Blanche, in the manifold and overlapping circumstances of the case. She made for the inlet at the upper end of the lawn. And her prompt unquestioning acquiescence shamed Cazalet into further and franker explanation, before he could let her land to please him.

"You don't know how I feel this!" he exclaimed quite miserably. "I mean about poor old Scruton; he's gone through so much as it is, whatever he may have done to deserve it long ago. And he wasn't the only one, or the worst; some day I'll tell you how I know, but you may take it from me that's so. The real villain's gone to his account. I won't pretend I'm sorry for him. _De mortuis_ doesn't apply if you've got to invent the _bonum_! But Scruton--after ten years--only think of it! Is it conceivable that he should go and do a thing like this the very moment he gets out? I ask you, is it even conceivable?"

He asked her with something of the ferocity with which he had turned on Toye for suggesting that the police might have something up their sleeves, and be given a chance. But Blanche understood him. And now she showed herself golden to the core, almost as an earnest of her fitness for the fires before her.

"Poor fellow," she cried, "he has a friend in you, at any rate! And I'll help you to help him, if there's any way I can?"

He clutched her hand, but only as he might have clutched a man's.

"You can't do anything; but I won't forget that," he almost choked. "I meant to stand by him in a very different way. He'd been down to the depths, and I'd come up a bit; then he was good to me as a lad, and it was my father's partner who was the ruin of him. I seemed to owe him something, and now--now I'll stand by him whatever happens and--whatever _has_ happened!"

Then they landed in the old, old inlet. Cazalet knew every knot in the post to which he tied Blanche's canoe.

It was a very different place, this Uplands, from poor old Littleford on the lower reach. The grounds were five or six acres instead of about one, and a house in quite another class stood farther back from the river and very much farther from the road.

The inlet began the western boundary, which continued past the boat-house in the shape of a high hedge, a herbaceous border (not what it had been in the old days), and a gravel path. This path was screened from the lawn by a bank of rhododendrons, as of course were the back yard and kitchen premises, past which it led into the front garden, eventually debouching into the drive. It was the path along which Cazalet led the way this afternoon, and Blanche at his heels was so struck by something that she could not help telling him he knew his way very well.

"Every inch of it!" he said bitterly. "But so I ought, if anybody does."

"But these rhododendrons weren't here in your time. They're the one improvement. Don't you remember how the path ran round to the other end of the yard? This gate into it wasn't made."

"No more it was," said Cazalet, as they came up to the new gate on the right. It was open, and looking through they could see where the old gateway had been bricked. The rhododendrons topped the yard wall at that point, masking it from the lawn, and making on the whole an improvement of which anybody but a former son of the house might have taken more account.

He said he could see no other change. He pretended to recognize the very blinds that were down and flapping in the kitchen windows facing west. But for the fact that these windows were wide open, the whole place seemed as deserted as Littleford; but just past the windows, and flush with them, was the tradesmen's door, and the two trespassers were barely abreast of it when this door opened and disgorged a man.

The man was at first sight a most incongruous figure for the back premises of any house, especially in the country. He was tall, rather stout, very powerfully built and rather handsome in his way; his top-hat shone like his patent-leather boots, and his gray cutaway suit hung well in front and was duly creased as to the trousers; yet not for one moment was this personage in the picture, in the sense in which Hilton Toye had stepped into the Littleford picture.

"May I ask what you're doing here?" he demanded bluntly of the male intruder.

"No harm, I hope," replied Cazalet, smiling, much to his companion's relief. She had done him an injustice, however, in dreading an explosion when they were both obviously in the wrong, and she greatly admired the tone he took so readily. "I know we've no business here whatever; but it happens to be my old home, and I only landed from Australia last night. I'm on the river for the first time, and simply had to have a look round."

The other big man had looked far from propitiated by the earlier of these remarks, but the closing sentences had worked a change.

"Are you young Mr. Cazalet?" he cried.

"I am, or rather I was," laughed Cazalet, still on his mettle.

"You've read all about the case then, I don't mind betting!" exclaimed the other with a jerk of his topper toward the house behind him.

"I've read all I found in the papers last night and this morning, and such arrears as I've been able to lay my hands on," said Cazalet. "But, as I tell you, my ship only got in from Australia last night, and I came round all the way in her. There was nothing in the English papers when we touched at Genoa."

"I see, I see." The man was still looking him up and down. "Well, Mr. Cazalet, my name's Drinkwater, and I'm from Scotland Yard. I happen to be in charge of the case."

"I guessed as much," said Cazalet, and this surprised Blanche more than anything else from him. Yet nothing about him was any longer like the Sweep of other days, or of any previous part of that very afternoon. And this was also easy to understand on reflection; for if he meant to stand by the hapless Scruton, guilty or not guilty, he could not perhaps begin better than by getting on good terms with the police. But his ready tact, and in that case cunning, were certainly a revelation to one who had known him marvelously as boy and youth.

"I mustn't ask questions," he continued, "but I see you're still searching for things, Mr. Drinkwater."

"Still minding our own job," said Mr. Drinkwater genially. They had sauntered on with him to the corner of the house, and seen a bowler hat bobbing in the shrubbery down the drive. Cazalet laughed like a man.

"Well, I needn't tell you I know every inch of the old place," he said; "that is, barring alterations," as Blanche caught his eye. "But I expect this search is harrowed, rather?"

"Rather," said Mr. Drinkwater, standing still in the drive. He had also taken out a presentation gold half-hunter, suitably inscribed in memory of one of his more bloodless victories. But Cazalet could always be obtuse, and now he refused to look an inch lower than the detective-inspector's bright brown eyes.

"There's just one place that's occurred to me, Mr. Drinkwater, that perhaps may not have occurred to you."

"Where's that, Mr. Cazalet?"

"In the room where--the room itself."

Mr. Drinkwater's long stare ended in an indulgent smile. "You can show me if you like," said he indifferently. "But I suppose you know we've got the man?"

VII

AFTER MICHELANGELO

"I was thinking of his cap," said Cazalet, but only as they returned to the tradesmen's door, and just as Blanche put in her word, "What about me?"

Mr. Drinkwater eyed the trim white figure standing in the sun. "The more the merrier!" his grim humor had it. "I dare say you'll be able to teach us a thing or two as well, miss."

She could not help nudging Cazalet in recognition of this shaft. But Cazalet did not look round; he had now set foot in his old home.

It was all strangely still and inactive, as though domestic animation had been suspended indefinitely. Yet the open kitchen door revealed a female form in mufti; a sullen face looked out of the pantry as they passed; and through the old green door (only now it was a red one) they found another bowler hat bent over a pink paper at the foot of the stairs. There was a glitter of eyes under the bowler's brim as Mr. Drinkwater conducted his friends into the library.

The library was a square room of respectable size, but very close and dim with the one French window closed and curtained. But Mr. Drinkwater shut the door as well, and added indescribably to the lighting and atmospheric effects by switching on all the electric lamps; they burned sullenly in the partial daylight, exposed as thin angry bunches of red-hot wire in dusty bulbs.

The electric light had been put in by the Cravens; all the other fixtures in the room were as Cazalet remembered them. The bookshelves contained different books, and now there were no busts on top. Certain cupboards, grained and varnished in Victorian days, were undeniably improved by being enameled white.

But the former son of the house gave himself no time to waste in sentimental comparisons. He tapped a pair of mahogany doors, like those of a wardrobe let into the wall.

"Have you looked in here?" demanded Cazalet in yet another key. His air was almost authoritative now. Blanche could not understand it, but the experienced Mr. Drinkwater smiled his allowances for a young fellow on his native heath, after more years in the wilderness than were good for young fellows.

"What's the use of looking in a cigar cupboard?" that dangerous man of the world made mild inquiry.

"Cigar cupboard!" echoed Cazalet in disgust. "Did he really only use it for his cigars?"

"A cigar cupboard," repeated Drinkwater, "and locked up at the time it happened. What was it, if I may ask, in Mr. Cazalet's time?"

"I remember!" came suddenly from Blanche; but Cazalet only said, "Oh, well, if you know it was locked there's an end of it."

Drinkwater went to the door and summoned his subordinate. "Just fetch that chap from the pantry, Tom," said he; but the sullen sufferer from police rule took his time, in spite of them, and was sharply rated when he appeared.

"I thought you told me this was a cigar cupboard?" continued Drinkwater, in the browbeating tone of his first words to Cazalet outside.

"So it is," said the man.

"Then where's the key?"

"How should I know? _I_ never kept it!" cried the butler, crowing over his oppressor for a change. "He would keep it on his own bunch; find his watch, and all the other things that were missing from his pockets when your men went through 'em, and you may find his keys, too!"

Drinkwater gave his man a double signal; the door slammed on a petty triumph for the servants' hall; but now both invaders remained within.

"Try your hand on it, Tom," said the superior officer. "I'm a free-lance here," he explained somewhat superfluously to the others, as Tom applied himself to the lock in one mahogany door. "Man's been drinking, I should say. He'd better be careful, because I don't take to him, drunk or sober. I'm not surprised at his master not trusting him. It's just possible that the place _was_ open--he might have been getting out his cigars before dinner--but I can't say I think there's much in it, Mr. Cazalet."

It was open again--broken open--before many minutes; and certainly there was not much in it, to be seen, except cigars. Boxes of these were stacked on what might have been meant for a shallow desk (the whole place was shallow as the wardrobe that the doors suggested, but lighted high up at one end by a little barred window of its own) and according to Cazalet a desk it had really been. His poor father ought never to have been a business man; he ought to have been a poet. Cazalet said this now as simply as he had said it to Hilton Toye on board the _Kaiser Fritz_. Only he went rather farther for the benefit of the gentlemen from Scotland Yard, who took not the faintest interest in the late Mr. Cazalet, beyond poking their noses into his diminutive sanctum and duly turning them up at what they saw.

"He used to complain that he was never left in peace on Saturdays and Sundays, which of course were his only quiet times for writing," said the son, elaborating his tale with filial piety. "So once when I'd been trying to die of scarlet fever, and my mother brought me back from Hastings after she'd had me there some time, the old governor told us he'd got a place where he could disappear from the district at a moment's notice and yet be back in another moment if we rang the gong. I fancy he'd got to tell her where it was, pretty quick; but I only found out for myself by accident. Years afterward, he told me he'd got the idea from Jean Ingelow's place in Italy somewhere."

"It's in Florence," said Blanche, laughing. "I've been there and seen it, and it's the exact same thing. But you mean Michelangelo, Sweep!"

"Oh, do I?" he said serenely. "Well, I shall never forget how I found out its existence."

"No more shall I. You told me all about it at the time, as a terrific secret, and I may tell you that I've kept it from that day to this!"

"You would," he said simply. "But think of having the nerve to pull up the governor's floor! It only shows what a boy will do. I wonder if the hole's there still!"

Now all the time the planetary detective had been watching his satellite engaged in an attempt to render the damage done to the mahogany doors a little less conspicuous. Neither appeared to be taking any further interest in the cigar cupboard, or paying the slightest attention to Cazalet's reminiscences. But Mr. Drinkwater happened to have heard every word, and in the last sentence there was one that caused him to prick up his expert ears instinctively.

"What's that about a hole?" said he, turning round.

"I was reminding Miss Macnair how the place first came to be--"

"Yes, yes. But what about some hole in the floor?"

"I made one myself with one of those knives that contain all sorts of things, including a saw. It was one Saturday afternoon in the summer holidays. I came in here from the garden as my father went out by that door into the hall, leaving one of these mahogany doors open by mistake. It was the chance of my life; in I slipped to have a look. He came back for something, saw the very door you've broken standing ajar, and shut it without looking in. So there I was in a nice old trap! I simply daren't call out and give myself away. There was a bit of loose oilcloth on the floor--"

"There is still," said the satellite, pausing in his task.

"I moved the oilcloth, in the end; howked up one end of the board (luckily they weren't groove and tongue), sawed through the next one to it, had it up, too, and got through into the foundations, leaving everything much as I had found it. The place is so small that the oilcloth was obliged to fall in place if it fell anywhere. But I had plenty of time, because my people had gone in to dinner."

"You ought to have been a burglar, sir," said Mr. Drinkwater ironically. "So you covered up a sin with a crime, like half the gentlemen who go through my hands for the first and last time! But how did you get out of the foundations?"

"Oh, that was as easy as pie; I'd often explored them. Do you remember the row I got into, Blanche, for taking you with me once and simply ruining your frock?"

"I remember the frock!" said Blanche.

It was her last contribution to the conversation; immediate developments not only put an end to the further exchange of ancient memories, but rendered it presently impossible by removing Cazalet from the scene with the two detectives. Almost without warning, as in the harlequinade of which they might have been the rascal heroes, all three disappeared down the makeshift trap-door cut by one of them as a schoolboy in his father's floor; and Blanche found herself in sole possession of the stage, a very envious Columbine, indeed!

She hardly even knew how it happened. The satellite must have popped back into the Michelangelo cigar cupboard. He might have called to Mr. Drinkwater, but the only summons that Blanche could remember hearing was almost a sharp one from Drinkwater to Cazalet. A lot of whispering followed in the little place; it was so small that she never saw the hole until it had engulfed two of the trio; the third explorer, Mr. Drinkwater himself, had very courteously turned her out of the library before following the others. And he had said so very little beforehand for her to hear, and so quickly prevented Cazalet from saying anything at all, that she simply could not think what any of them were doing under the floor.

Under her very feet she heard them moving as she waited a bit in the hall; then she left the house by way of the servants' quarters, of course without holding any communication with those mutineers, and only indignant that Mr. Drinkwater should have requested her not to do so.

It was a long half-hour that followed for Blanche Macnair, but she passed it characteristically, and not in morbid probings of the many changes that had come over one young man in less than the course of a summer's day. He was excited at getting back, he had stumbled into a still more exciting situation, so no wonder he was one thing one moment and another the next. That was all that Blanche allowed herself to think of Sweep Cazalet--just then.

She turned her wholesome mind to dogs, which in some ways she knew better and trusted further than men. She had, of course, a dog of her own, but it happened to be on a visit to the doctor or no doubt it would have been in the way all the afternoon. But there was a dog at Uplands, and as yet she had seen nothing of him; he lived in a large kennel in the yard, for he was a large dog and rather friendless. But Blanche knew him by sight, and had felt always sorry for him.

The large kennel was just outside the back door, which was at the top of the cellar steps and at the bottom of two or three leading into the scullery; but Blanche, of course, went round by the garden. She found the poor old dog quite disconsolate in a more canine kennel in a corner of the one that was really worthy of the more formidable carnivora. There was every sign of his being treated as the dangerous dog that Blanche, indeed, had heard he was; the outer bars were further protected by wire netting, which stretched like a canopy over the whole cage; but Blanche let herself in with as little hesitation as she proceeded to beard the poor brute in his inner lair. And he never even barked at her; he just lay whimpering with his tearful nose between his two front paws, as though his dead master had not left him to the servants all his life.

Blanche coaxed and petted him until she almost wept herself; then suddenly and without warning the dog showed his worst side. Out he leaped from wooden sanctuary, almost knocking her down, and barking horribly, but not at Blanche. She followed his infuriated eyes; and the back doorway framed a dusty and grimy figure, just climbing into full length on the cellar stairs, which Blanche had some difficulty in identifying with that of Cazalet.

"Well, you really _are_ a Sweep!" she cried when she had slipped out just in time, and the now savage dog was still butting and clawing at his bars. "How did you come out, and where are the enemy?"

"The old way," he answered. "I left them down there."

"And what did you find?"

"I'll tell you later. I can't hear my voice for that infernal dog."

The dreadful barking followed them out of the yard, and round to the right, past the tradesmen's door, to the verge of the drive. Here they met an elderly man in a tremendous hurry--an unstable dotard who instantly abandoned whatever purpose he had formed, and came to anchor in front of them with rheumy eyes and twitching wrinkles.

"Why, if that isn't Miss Blanche!" he quavered. "Do you hear our Roy, miss? I ha'n't heard that go on like that since the night that happened!"

Then Cazalet introduced himself to the old gardener whom he had known all his life; and by rights the man should have wept outright, or else emitted a rustic epigram laden with wise humor. But old Savage hailed from silly Suffolk, and all his life he had belied his surname, but never the alliterative libel on his native country. He took the wanderer's return very much as a matter of course, very much as though he had never been away at all, and was demonstrative only in his further use of the East Anglian pronoun.

"That's a long time since we fared to see you, Mus' Walter," said he; "that's a right long time! And now here's a nice kettle of fish for you to find! But I seen the man, Mus' Walter, and we'll bring that home to him, never you fear!"

"Are you sure that you saw him?" asked Blanche, already under Cazalet's influence on this point.

Savage looked cautiously toward the house before replying; then he lowered his voice dramatically. "Sure, Miss Blanche. Why, I see him that night as plain as I fare to see Mus' Walter now!"

"I should have thought it was too dark to see anybody properly," said Blanche, and Cazalet nodded vigorously to himself.

"Dark, Miss Blanche? Why, that was broad daylight, and if that wasn't there were the lodge lights on to see him by!" His stage voice fell a sepulchral semitone. "But I see him again at the station this very afternoon, I did! I promised not to talk about that--you'll keep that a secret if I tell 'e somethin'?--but I picked him out of half a dozen at the first time of askin'!"

Savage said this with a pleased and vacuous grin, looking Cazalet full in the face; his rheumy eyes were red as the sunset they faced; and Cazalet drew a deep breath as Blanche and he turned back toward the river.

"First time of prompting, I expect!" he whispered. "But there's hope if Savage is their strongest witness."

"Only listen to that dog," said Blanche, as they passed the yard.

VIII

FINGER-PRINTS

Hilton Toye was the kind of American who knew London as well as most Londoners, and some other capitals a good deal better than their respective citizens of corresponding intelligence. His travels were mysteriously but enviably interwoven with business; he had an air of enjoying himself, and at the same time making money to pay for his enjoyment, wherever he went. His hotel days were much the same all over Europe: many appointments, but abundant leisure. As, however, he never spoke about his own affairs unless they were also those of the listener--and not always then--half his acquaintances had no idea how he made his money, and the other half wondered how he spent his time. Of his mere interests, which were many, Toye made no such secret; but it was quite impossible to deduce a main industry from the by-products of his level-headed versatility.

Criminology, for example, was an obvious by-product; it was no morbid taste in Hilton Toye, but a scientific hobby that appealed to his mental subtlety. And subtle he was, yet with strange simplicities; grave and dignified, yet addicted to the expressive phraseology of his less enlightened countrymen; naturally sincere, and yet always capable of some ingenuous duplicity.

The appeal of a Blanche Macnair to such a soul needs no analysis. She had struck through all complexities to the core, such as it was or as she might make it. As yet she could only admire the character the man had shown, though it had upset her none the less. At Engelberg he had proposed to her "inside of two weeks," as he had admitted without compunction at the time. It had taken him, he said, about two minutes to make up his mind; but the following summer he had laid more deliberate siege, in accordance with some old idea that she had let fall to soften her first refusal. The result had been the same, only more explicit on both sides. She had denied him the least particle of hope, and he had warned her that she had not heard the last of him by any means, and never would till she married another man. This had incensed her at the time, but a great deal less on subsequent reflection; and such was the position between that pair when Toye and Cazalet landed in England from the same steamer.

On this second day ashore, as Cazalet sat over a late breakfast in Jermyn Street, Toye sent in his card and was permitted to follow it, rather to his surprise. He found his man frankly divided between kidneys-and-bacon and the morning paper, but in a hearty mood, indicative of amends for his great heat in yesterday's argument. A plainer indication was the downright yet sunny manner in which Cazalet at once returned to the contentious topic.

"Well, my dear Toye, what do you think of it now?"

"I was going to ask you what you thought, but I guess I can see from your face."

"I think the police are rotters for not setting him free last night!"

"Scruton?"

"Yes. Of course, the case'll break down when it comes on next week, but they oughtn't to wait for that. They've no right to detain a man in custody when the bottom's out of their case already."

"But--but the papers claim they've found the very things they were searching for." Toye looked nonplused, as well he might, by an apparently perverse jubilation over such intelligence.

"They haven't found the missing cap!" crowed Cazalet. "What they have found is Craven's watch and keys, and the silver-mounted truncheon that killed him. But they found them in a place where they couldn't possibly have been put by the man identified as Scruton!"

"Say, where was that?" asked Toye with great interest. "My paper only says the things were found, not where."

"No more does mine, but I can tell you, because I helped to find 'em."

"You don't say!"

"You'll never grasp where," continued Cazalet. "In the foundations under the house!"

Details followed in all fulness; the listener might have had a part in the Uplands act of yesterday's drama, might have played in the library scene with his adored Miss Blanche, so vividly was every minute of that crowded hour brought home to him. He also had seen the original writing-cupboard in Michelangelo's old Florentine house; he remembered it perfectly, and said that he could see the replica, with its shelf of a desk stacked with cigars, and the hole in its floor. He was not so sure that he had any very definite conception of the foundations of an English house.

"Ours were like ever so many little tiny rooms," said Cazalet, "where I couldn't stand nearly upright even as a small boy without giving my head a crack against the ground floors. They led into one another by a lot of little manholes--tight fits even for a boy, but nearly fatal to the boss policeman yesterday! I used to get in through one with a door, at the back of a slab in the cellars where they used to keep empty bottles; they keep 'em there still, because that's how I led my party out last night."

Cazalet's little gift of description was not ordered by an equal sense of selection. Hilton Toye, edging in his word in a pause for a gulp of coffee, said he guessed he visualized--but just where had those missing things been found?

"Three or four compartments from the first one under the library," said Cazalet.

"Did you find them?"

"Well, I kicked against the truncheon, but Drinkwater dug it up. The watch and keys were with it."

"Say, were they buried?"

"Only in the loose rubble and brick-dusty stuff that you get in foundations."

"Say, that's bad! That murderer must have known something, or else it's a bully fluke in his favor."

"I don't follow you, Toye."

"I'm thinking of finger-prints. If he'd just've laid those things right down, he'd have left the print of his hand as large as life for Scotland Yard."

"The devil he would!" exclaimed Cazalet. "I wish you'd explain," he added; "remember I'm a wild man from the woods, and only know of these things by the vaguest kind of hearsay and stray paragraphs in the papers. I never knew you could leave your mark so easily as all that."

Toye took the breakfast menu and placed it face downward on the tablecloth. "Lay your hand on that, palm down," he said, "and don't move it for a minute."

Cazalet looked at him a moment before complying; then his fine, shapely, sunburnt hand lay still as plaster under their eyes until Toye told him he might take it up. Of course there was no mark whatever, and Cazalet laughed.

"You should have caught me when I came up from those foundations, not fresh from my tub!" said he.

"You wait," replied Hilton Toye, taking the menu gingerly by the edge, and putting it out of harm's way in the empty toast-rack. "You can't see anything now, but if you come round to the Savoy I'll show you something."

"What?"

"Your prints, sir! I don't say I'm Scotland Yard at the game, but I can do it well enough to show you how it's done. You haven't left your mark upon the paper, but I guess you've left the sweat of your hand; if I snow a little French chalk over it, the chalk'll stick where your hand did, and blow off easily everywhere else. The rest's as simple as all big things. It's hanged a few folks already, but I judge it doesn't have much chance with things that have lain buried in brick-dust. Say, come round to lunch and I'll have your prints ready for you. I'd like awfully to show you how it's done. It would really be a great pleasure."

Cazalet excused himself with decision. He had a full morning in front of him. He was going to see Miss Macnair's brother, son of the late head of his father's old firm of solicitors, and now one of the partners, to get them either to take up Scruton's case themselves, or else to recommend a firm perhaps more accustomed to criminal practise. Cazalet was always apt to be elaborate in the first person singular, either in the past or in the future tense; but he was more so than usual in explaining his considered intentions in this matter that lay so very near his heart.

"Going to see Scruton, too?" said Toye.

"Not necessarily," was the short reply. But it also was elaborated by Cazalet on a moment's consideration. The fact was that he wanted first to know if it were not possible, by the intervention of a really influential lawyer, to obtain the prisoner's immediate release, at any rate on bail. If impossible, he might hesitate to force himself on Scruton in the prison, but he would see.

"It's a perfect scandal that he should be there at all," said Cazalet, as he rose first and ushered Toye out into the lounge. "Only think: our old gardener saw him run out of the drive at half past seven, when the gong went, when the real murderer must have been shivering in the Michelangelo cupboard, wondering how the devil he was ever going to get out again."

"Then you think old man Craven--begging his poor pardon--was getting out some cigars when the man, whoever he was, came in and knocked him on the head?"

Cazalet nodded vigorously. "That's the likeliest thing of all!" he cried. "Then the gong went--there may even have come a knock at the door--and there was that cupboard standing open at his elbow."

"With a hole in the floor that might have been made for him?"

"As it happens, yes; he'd search every inch like a rat in a trap, you see; and there it was as I'd left it twenty years before."

"Well, it's a wonderful yarn!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, and he lighted the cigar that Cazalet had given him.

"I think it may be thought one if the police ever own how they made their find," agreed Cazalet, laughing and looking at his watch. Toye had never heard him laugh so often. "By the way, Drinkwater doesn't want any of all this to come out until he's dragged his man before the beak again."

"Which you mean to prevent?"

"If only I can! I more or less promised not to talk, however, and I'm sure you won't. You knew so much already, you may just as well know the rest this week as well as next, if you don't mind keeping it to yourself."

Nobody could have minded this particular embargo less than Hilton Toye; and in nothing was he less like Cazalet, who even now had the half-regretful and self-excusing air of the impulsive person who has talked too freely and discovered it too late. But he had been perfectly delightful to Hilton Toye, almost too appreciative, if anything, and now very anxious to give him a lift in his taxi. Toye, however, had shopping to do in the very street that they were in, and he saw Cazalet off with a smile that was as yet merely puzzled, and not unfriendly until he had time to recall Miss Blanche's part in the strange affair of the previous afternoon.

Say, weren't they rather intimate, those two, even if they had known each other all their lives? He had it from Blanche (with her second refusal) that she was not, and never had been, engaged. And a fellow who only wrote to her once in a year--still, they must have been darned intimate, and this funny affair would bring them together again quicker than anything.