Bluebeard's Chamber

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Bluebeard's Chamber

It held a world of horrors, but more than a world of Love. The story of the way Love triumphed is a Masterpiece of Fiction

By I. A. R. Wylie

Part I

(In Two Parts—Part One)

A STRANGER was a rare object. And there were few people, strangers or natives, who would have strode into the teeth of the storm with such an air of enjoying themselves. Miss Elroy leaned her back against the wind to watch him. Her lonely walk and the desolation of her surroundings made her more than usually impressionable. She felt there was something pathetic and splendid about this human being—something significant. The moorland, swept naked save for the sombrely glowing heather, made him seem ridiculously minute. And yet he was not ridiculous, but gallant-looking and adventuresome. His head was up, and though he was too far off for her to see his face, she was sure that he was smiling to himself, as she had done, for the sheer love and fun of the fight. Probably he was lost and had no idea where he was heading. But that didn't really matter. It was the fight that mattered.

Miss Elroy loved fighting. While the war was on she had wanted terribly to be a man—a grown man and not a useless chit of a twelve-year-old girl. The idea of being killed hadn't daunted her. All the Elroys had fought. Even her father in his own way. And her brother, Peter. He had been killed—almost at the end—but he had so gloried in his job, his few years had been so close packed with life, that you couldn't be sorry for him, though your own heart were broken. Such a clean and gallant end!

Miss Elroy was thinking of Peter when the stranger came up to her. It was as though there were some connection between them. And now it was inevitable that they should speak to each other. She had almost waited for him. As he reached the level ground beside her, he lifted his hat—a soaked and ancient Homburg— and she was aware of a faint shock of disappointment. She had expected some one younger—more robust—more like Peter. It was just because Peter had been so vividly in her mind. This man's hair, black and thick and short, was already gray at the temples. And if he was still young, it was with a fine-drawn youthfulness that was fiery and yet controlled like a sharp, well-handled weapon. He wore glasses, which he removed to rub clear of the rain, and she saw his eyes. They smiled at her, radiating humorous crow's-feet from their corners, and changing their whole expression. Miss Elroy did not like men to wear glasses. And yet this man's eyes pleased her out of her general disapproval of physical defect. Their shortsightedness was a veil over their burning hazel. They looked, like the rest of him, cool and passionate, steady and rather reckless.

“You know—” he began conversationally—“I never expected to be so pleased to see any one in my life. I'm fairly lost.”

Miss Elroy pushed the flying hair out of her own eyes to smile back at him. But she felt slightly offended. People were always and naturally pleased to see her.

“And trespassing,” she said.

“What—?” He waved his stick at the moorland and low-flying clouds. “Does all this belong to some one?”

“To Sir John Elroy.”

“Then I'm not a trespasser. I'm a guest.”

“Is my—is Sir John expecting you then?”

“At three-thirty. He sent a car to meet me. But I wanted the walk. I hadn't expected to lose myself. It's three now. Do you think I shall be very late?”

“It depends. If you go on being lost—”

“Doesn't that depend on you?”

She laughed. “I suppose it does. I'm on the way to Knaresholm. You'd better come along with me.”

He gave her an odd little bow. It occurred to her that though he wasn't in the least shy, he was unaccustomed to women, and she felt suddenly rather gentle and protective.

“It's very kind of you,” he said.

They walked side by side in the teeth of the wind. Sometimes the roughness of the track separated them. And once the wind, meeting them with a roar as they reached the summit of a hill, threw them against each other. They laughed. It was extraordinary how friendly their laughter sounded. And the long silence was friendly, too. Usually Miss Elroy hated walking with people. You had to talk to them because you didn't like them well enough to be silent.

But presently he asked her a question.

“I suppose, if you live round here, you know Sir John? I've never set eyes on him. Perhaps you could warn me—”

“Of course, I can. I'm his daughter.”

He turned sharp round, walking for a moment with his back to the wind so that he could stare unabashedly. “Good Lord—I never thought of him like that.”

“I'm not my father,” she remarked rather stiffly. “Besides—how did you think of him?”

“Oh, I don't know. How does one think of millionaire-politicians? Well—as something supernormal—terrific. I've never been able to imagine them having colds in the head or toothache—much less beautiful daughters. It wouldn't have seemed quite respectful. But then I'm so far from being a millionaire myself.”

She knew that she ought to be offended. But he obviously was simply saying what he thought. And somehow, if you were out on the moors in a storm, you couldn't be annoyed with honesty.

“Perhaps I might as well ask who you are, then?” she suggested.

“Of course. I'm sorry. My name's Napier—Robert Napier. I'm a scientist—in fact, I'm fairly well known. Only I haven't any chair. You see—I'm on the track of something that will revolutionize modern thought, and an official position would simply hinder me—”

He seemed aware of some change in her. “I'm afraid you don't like that sort of thing,” he said gravely.

Miss Elroy did not. She had never met it. But the very name of scientist conjured up everything that was alien to her temperament. She realized now that though his clothes were well cut, they were distinctly shabby. She liked well dressed, soldierly men.

“I must say it sounds—well, awfully—unadventuring,” she said.

He thought that over. “You mean you like exciting, dangerous living?”

She nodded.

“So do I. That's why I am what I am. The adventures you can have with your body, they're pale stuff. I know. I was in the war, and I know. It's the adventures of your mind.” He stopped and looked round, smiling at her. “Can you imagine what they're like?”

“No,” she said, “I can't. But then I'm not clever.”

“You don't need to be. Only courageous. Of course, my adventures are different. You have to be a trained fighter to go where I go. You have to have nerve. You have to cut loose and throw off everything that stands for safety and what other people call happiness. And patience. It's like standing before a dark, silent fortress. There's not a soul to tell you who are inside. Every door and window is barred. And when with endless toil you break down one door and let the prisoner out, there's always another waiting for you. And you never know there may be nothing—there may be everything—you might tumble into the very arms of God.”

A quick, responsive emotion clutched at her throat. She understood. It was like the climbing of Mount Everest. The story of that adventure had made her cry—not for grief, but for the sheer glory of the thing. And this man had touched her heart in the same place. But a moment after she was conscious of something chill and uneasy creeping over her. It might have been the darkening landscape—a new bitterness in the storm and a growing weariness. Or it might have been the stirring of some undefinable memory.

“It might not be God at all,” she stammered. “It might be the devil—a sort of Bluebeard's chamber—something horrible.”

He shook his head. “Knowledge can't be horrible,” he said. “The truth to a scientific mind must always be beautiful.” He laughed. “What a sententious beggar! And, after all, what do I know?”

They strode on for a while in silence. Her weariness increased, and she was glad of the hand he stretched out to her over the swollen brook. She liked the feel of his hand. She kept on speculating about him.

“I wonder why I didn't know you were coming,” she said. “It's not usual for my father to see any one at Knaresholm. And I should have thought he would have told me.”

“I expect he was ashamed of giving way. I badgered him into seeing me. He didn't want to. But I wanted his help. And my want was the stronger.”

“How could he help you?”

“Millionaires who are Prime Ministers are useful people, Miss Elroy. My partner and I are on the verge of what we believe to be a big thing. Another year or two might see us through. But we're at the end of our private resources. Somebody's got to stand by. Somebody ought to be glad to do it.”

“You mean—a great discovery—something valuable—that will change everything?”

“Change scientific thought. As to valuable—I don't suppose anybody will be a penny richer. But that doesn't matter.”

His mind was running hither and thither like a baffled thing. He couldn't lose her. There had to be some way out. “We shall be poor—you said so, Robert. “I didn't know what poverty meant—I didn't know it was like this and dust and torn carpets—” he said bitterly, “—and half-cold sausages”

They had reached the crest of the last hill. Beneath them lay the valley tucked in its protecting folds, and beyond that Knaresholm. The long, featureless building, set high in a walled and barren park, had the grim look of a rock growing up out of the soil and beaten by centuries of storm. Its windows were dead. But from one lonely clump of trees a lesser house peered out into the stormy dusk with one bright, shining eye of light.

Miss Elroy was looking at the lesser house. She always saw it first. It had some odd, painful fascination for her, even now, when she wasn't thinking about it at all.

She was thinking of the man beside her. She was feeling intensely sorry and faintly ashamed. She felt she ought to say, “Go back.” But she hadn't the heart. Besides—she didn't want him to go back.

“It looks a long way,” she said. “But it's only a few minutes now. You'll be almost in time.”

“Is it the big house or the little house? he asked smiling.

“Oh, the big house. The little house—that's just the old shooting box. No one lives there now.”

“It looks very much alive,” Napier said.

For the light had moved. It ran backward and forward—down and up again. “An occupant carrying a lamp in the devil of a hurry,” Napier thought. But the effect was uncanny, as though something in torment were flitting desperately hither and thither, seeking release.

“I meant, nobody but caretakers,” Miss Elroy said. Her voice was low, and the wind nearly swept it away from him. “My brother used to live there. He brought his friends, and they could be as noisy and happy as they liked. He loved the place. It was his very own. After he was killed, my father gave it to his two servants who had served with him. We—I never go near it.” And then she added, to her own astonishment: “You see, my brother and I were everything to each other. I've never cared for any one else.”

“I'm glad of that,” Napier said.

He said it, as he said everything, with such absolute simplicity that it was only later, on the threshold of the house, that the stopped to wonder what he meant. And her wondering made her suddenly curt and a little angry—not with him, oddly enough, but with herself.

“And now you must fight your own battle,” she said.

He held her hand. She knew instinctively that the cheap emotional commerce of the men and women of her set was simply unknown to him. He held her hand because it was difficult to let it go. And ridiculous as his feeling might be, it did not seem ridiculous. Presently she might laugh at this absurd young professor trying to sell her father his unmarketable wares, but not out here in the storm.

“Shan't I see you again? Aren't you going to give me a cup of tea?”

She shook her head. “My father won't. Don't expect it.” Then suddenly, because she was half-ashamed and half-unhappy, she let her irritation run away with her. “You don't understand. He doesn't see any one here. You've just forced yourself on him. He comes here to be alone, to get away from things.”

“But you—” he said, “couldn't you give me a cup of tea?”

“My father is your host—not I,” she answered.

“But I shall see you again?”

“I don't see why or how.”

“My profession requires patience and pertinacity,” he remarked apparently apropos of nothing. “And I am very ambitious.”

He let go her hand at last and lifted the shapeless Homburg gravely. Miss Elroy left him standing there. It was uncivil, but she felt uncivil. It was as though this extraordinary man had made her a long speech in which he had told her that he had fallen in love for the first time in his life and that if the heavens fell he meant to marry her.

Nothing like that had ever happened to Margaret Elroy before.

SIR JOHN ELROY sat under the lamplight. He had been reading, but he looked up at her as she came in, and she thought how curiously he must have struck on his visitor's expectations with his pale air of gentle invalidism. His face was small and white and quite expressionless. And he was alone.

The tea things waited for her. There were the two cups as usual. So there were times when even pertinacity and ambition failed. She felt faintly triumphant, but the wind howling against the house made her heart sore.

“There are so many mad people in this world,” John Elroy said, smoothing the page of his book with his fragile hand. “I have just met one of them.”

“I know,” Margaret answered. “I met him, too.”

She smiled to herself, but the regret remained. She ought to have warned him. There was something tragic about it all.

“In fact, I turned him out,” Elroy went on. “I was angry. I thought from his letter he was in possession of some secret of national importance. And it was just nothing—vague stuff. No good to any one. A case of swollen head.”

Not swollen-headed, she thought. Only sure of himself and very daring. Ambitious in a sense her father wouldn't understand. She didn't understand herself. He was different from any one else—disturbing and challenging. His values weren't their values. They might be nothing to her, but she felt they were real enough—uncomfortably real. She said casually,

“I suppose Johnson has taken him to the station.”

“I don't know. I didn't inquire. The fool could do as he liked.”

She rather loved her father's ruthlessness. Indirectly it had made England more feared than it had ever been in history. And beneath it was a queer, selfless love. She knew that. He had loved his son with passion, his country with a purity of motive that was unassailable. But tonight she would have been glad if for once he had yielded to a foolish kindliness.

She went over to the window. The rain beat against the panes like an assailing army. It was almost night, and she could see nothing but the blurred lights of the Old House among the trees. He had walked, of course. Five miles in the dark across the moor—the cold and wet and the wretched little station. She thought of the men she knew—with whom she would dance and laugh again when this strange yearly exile was over. Soldierly, immaculate men, brave and reasonable. One day she would marry one of them.

The tears came into her eyes. There was something moving, but not pitiful, in that solitary, battling figure.

John Elroy stood at her side. He was looking over her shoulder. And she was aware of a sudden intentness.

“Fletcher and Gordon seem to be giving a party,” she said with a little gust of anger. “The Old House must have every light burning. I wish they wouldn't. I wish the Old House could be shut up altogether.”

John Elroy did not answer at once. It was as though he heard her only after a long interval.

“It will be—” he said; “it will be.”

He turned and went out of the room. She heard a bell ring faintly through the storm, and presently the clash of a heavy door. Familiar, ordinary sounds. But she was tired, and the wind had got on her nerves. This place, with its melancholy and its memories, was like a hand pressing her heart. She thought of the London house and the brilliant life of which she was a part—a safe, splendid life.

And then for no reason she saw Gordon and Fletcher, those two grim-faced North Countrymen as they had passed her on the road, touching their caps with that queer, furtive look. Did they never speak to any one? Her brother's servants. They had tried to save him at the risk of their own lives. But she could: not like them. They frightened her—as all this place frightened her when night came.

She turned back, shivering, to the fire.

2

NOR had anything like that ever happened to Robert Napier before. It wasn't that women were alien to him. He felt neither superior nor diffident with them. He just supposed they were like himself. Relationship with them would be more or less like any other human relationship. But then he had never had any human relationship. He hadn't had time. He had fought his way up from the gutter through privation and the bitter, hindering war, and there had never been time or strength left for life itself. Even Jimmy Sewell wasn't his friend—Jimmy Sewell with the leonine, splendid head and the face that fell away just below the eyes into a kind of meaninglessness. Sewell's brain was his fellow-worker—but Sewell himself, in the rare moments when Napier had caught a glimpse of him, was a puzzling, confusing stranger.

Not so much as a day's pause—but a fierce, steady thrusting forward, the effort to make up for those hideous days of waste and destruction, to give back to the world all that he had taken from it. That battle across the moor had been his first freedom. And then and there it had happened to him. He knew. There was no possible mistake. His mind wasn't littered up with a lot of tawdry, half-baked episodes. He saw with a perfect clarity, and what he saw made sitting soaked to the skin on a drafty station platform a thing of glory.

Afterward, his failure, as he regarded it, didn't matter. Even if he had seen Sewell's face—as he didn't, for Sewell was busy unpacking some apparatus—he wouldn't have realized his own preposterousness. As he had said, he was ambitious and very patient.

“Marrying Elroy's daughter would be an excellent move, certainly,” Sewell said in slow irony. “It's a pity Elroy has figuratively kicked you downstairs. And what do you propose to do now?”

He turned, and his face came into the light. It was deceptively fair and young-looking. The brow was that of a genius and the chin and mouth were that of a boy—an eager, hungry boy. “We're through with our own resources. The scientific societies have nothing left for us. They can't go on financing people who want to out-Einstein Einstein and muddle the daily press worse than it is muddled already. We can't starve. A professorship and respectable harness seems all that's left to us.”

“I'll starve first,” Napier said. He looked round the bare room with its austere show of delicate instruments and repeated his oath solemnly. “We can hold out for three months more,” he added. “By that time anything may happen.”

“Anything,” Sewell admitted. He had gone over to the window and was watching the glittering stream of night life flow westward. His voice shook with a sudden anger. “God!” he said—“I'd like to go out and eat and drink as though it didn't matter what I ate or drank. Sometimes the universe and all its infernal secrets could go to hell for all I care. I want to be free while it's worth while. In twenty years it will be too late.”

“Well, wait three months,” Napier said.

Within these three months a he met Margaret Elroy twice. The first time was at a scientific reception at which John Elroy presided. Napier came in his day clothes because they were all he had, but his credentials were unimpeachable, and there were other men shabby as himself. But, at least, they did not speak to John Elroy's daughter. They kept away from her. Her youth and expensive beauty would have put their gray, laborious lives hopelessly in the wrong. But though Napier saw that she was lovelier even than he had remembered, it did not occur to him that he was therefore an impossible figure. He stood in front of her, so that she could not have avoided him. And because she did not attempt to smile, but looked flushed and troubled, he became suddenly quite sure. After a perceptible effort she gave him her hand and withdrew it quickly.

“I didn't know you came to frivolous affairs like this,” she said.

“I don't,” he answered; “you can see I don't. But one of the advantages of my job is that you can look like anything and go anywhere. It doesn't matter.”

“Still, I don't see why you should want to come here,” she retorted. “To me it's intensely dull, and to you, I should have thought, great waste of time.”

She was gazing idly about her, giving him the benefit of her lightest manner, but he held his ground. The hubbub of voices should have made it difficult for them to hear each other, and yet to both of them it was as though they were quite alone.

“I came here because I hoped I should see you,” he said.

“Why should you want to see me?”

“I had something I had to say to you.”

“Is it so urgent?”

“It's something that in an ordinary way would have had to wait. But I may not have another chance, and it's important that you should know.”

She had to look at him. He had a singleness of purpose that was disarming and consequently frightening. In her world men were moved by so many subtle and interwoven interests; you could play them off, keep them at bay with a light touch. The absolute truth was unknown to them. This man knew too much—he couldn't be diverted by any flimsy side issues. He gave and demanded a stark sincerity. And looking at him, her eyes hard and defiant, she saw how thin he was. He would have been a scarecrow but for that air of self-mastery and nervous strength. She thought of a fine sword that had almost worn through its scabbard.

“Well?” she said mockingly.

“You know,” he answered, “I love you, and I want to marry you.”

“I ought to think you mad,” she said with a breathless laugh. “I don't know why I don't.”

“Because I'm not,” he returned simply. “You might think perhaps that I couldn't be sure. We have only met each other once. But things can happen that way. It's like that in my work. You may toil for years—and then suddenly a door will open at the first touch.”

“How many people have you said that to?” she asked,

“To no one. I haven't cared for any one before—in any sort of way. That's how I know.”

PEOPLE came up to speak to her and drifted away again. She was his prisoner: because of the foolish, empty flirtations that had crowded her life she was helpless. They made her seem a poor thing fluttering in any chance wind. She struck out as cruelly and venomously as she knew.

“Or I might think of you as a pure adventurer.”

“You don't,” was his steady defence.

“Well,” she made a little gesture of ironical despair “Supposing you are, as you say sincere and honest, what do you expect? Do you think that I feel as you do?”

His eyes held hers, not boldly, but with a searching intensity.

“I don't know,” he said. “I am very ignorant about people. This is the most extraordinary adventure of my life. I haven't any landmarks. But it seems to me that such a wonderful thing couldn't have happened to me alone. The recognition couldn't have been on only one side. Could it?”

She felt strangely and absurdly on the point of tears. “What do you want—what do you expect?”

“I wanted you to know so that you shouldn't make any mistake.”

She smiled tremulously, but this time without irony—almost pitifully, as though she were grateful to him for asking so little. “Is that all?”

“And I want to meet you again—not in a place like this—somewhere where we can be alone.”

“There are no moors in London, Mr Napier.”

“There may be—if we look for them,” he answered,

“Will Hyde Park be big enough?”

“It will do,” he said.

IT WAS there, on a warm, spring morning, that he met her for the second time. It was a queer, tragic sort of meeting, something that Margaret Elroy's imagination could never have foreseen. All the preliminaries were swept away. She walked and talked with him as with some one already deeply interwoven in her life, and with whom her relations had reached a definite, heart-breaking crisis. She might tell herself that this was the third time they had spoken to each other, She knew in truth that he had haunted her, waking and sleeping.

She repeated helplessly, “What do you want?”

To which he replied with his steadfast, “That you should know—and that I should know.”

She held him off a moment longer.

“You're not fair,” she said. “You are doing something that other men—the men I know—would think dishonorable. I know you aren't an adventurer—I know you're honest. But you say yourself that you have nothing, and yet you are asking me to be bound to you.”

“I don't know about those other men,” he returned quietly. “Possibly they regard marriage as a contract and, being honest business people, they feel honor-bound to make their side of the bargain a sound one. But we're different. There aren't half a dozen people in the world who would do for us. There is only one man for you and only one woman for me. You couldn't conceive it otherwise. I may not be the man, but at least money and position have nothing to do with it. It would be better that you should never marry at all than that you should marry any one.”

SHE sat down wearily under one of the trees. He was like an army, besieging her, drawing tighter and tighter a cordon of inexorable truth. It wouldn't have mattered if it had not been the truth, but she knew that beneath all the idle love-making of her social life had been the secret conviction that it was all idle—that it was inconceivable that there could be more than one man in the mob of men that surrounded her who could be her husband, and that if she could at last be sure of him it would matter very little who he was. Only she had never foreseen this—this stranger this alien intruder, calling her out from safety into dangerous, barren seas.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees his hands clasped, not looking at her.

“Am I the man?”

She laughed. “I don't know. You are like a horrible futurist picture. One hates you but you make everything else look commonplace and stupid. You have spoiled everything—”

And then, to her own horror and anger, she began to cry.

He took her hand between his and kissed it. Even then she realized with a flash of warning tenderness that he was totally unashamed both of her tears and his own flagrant love making. The whole of her world might have been witness. He would neither have know nor cared.

“I know it seems awfully sad just now,” he said; “but if it is true it will be very wonderful.”

He waited quietly. She loved his quietness. He was not, like most men, impatient with her crying: he did not regard it as a tiresome feminine weakness. She was not only a woman to him, but first and last a fellow human being whose pain he understood and shared. She felt that he would have been glad to have cried with her, had it been physically possible. And suddenly he seemed stronger than any man she had ever known.

She gathered together all the reason and wisdom of her twenty-five years of life.

“If it is true—what will happen to us?”

“We shall marry.”

“When I marry I shall have nothing—not till my father's death, at any rate. Not then, if I have gone against his will. He is a loving man, but inflexible, too. He would despise a man who needed his help, and despise me for him.

“I shan't need his help,” Napier said.

She felt suddenly older than he was—infinitely wise.