Bluebeard's Chamber/Part 1
(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.
“Even supposing you were the man—that wouldn't change me. I am what I have become. I might face hardship well enough—the kind of hardship that my sort do face—the hardship of sport or adventure, but not squalor and meanness. My life will always have to be splendid somehow.”
“Very well” he said. “I will make it splendid.”
“How?”
“I will make money.”
“At what cost?” And now it was she who held his hand, regardless of everything but her own pitiless vision. “You'd have to give up the real adventure of your life—the opening of secret doors. And even then—it might not be enough.”
He threw up his head. “Margaret—I said I was ambitious. But I have never been ambitious for myself. I was ambitious for our whole race. But if I could have made other men a little wiser, a little nearer the ultimate truth, I wouldn't have cared if my name had never been heard. I've never wanted anything for myself—until now. And now I do, Other men can do what I might have done. I can go free.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked.
After a moment he answered quietly: “No, perhaps I don't. It's my work. At the bottom of my heart I mean to do it—and, if I am the man, to have you, too. It comes back to that, doesn't it? Am I the man?”
She stood up. “Yes,” she said. “Heaven help us both—but I believe you are!”
“Then it's all right,” he said. “Wait for me.
3
HE WALKED the streets that night like a man who saw them for the first time. He looked curiously into the faces of the people who passed him, feeling an immense tenderness a it was possible that they, too, loved and were loved. He had always thought of people in the larger term of humanity, and now humanity meant people to him—separate individuals who suffered or were happy—or were both together, as he was.
He wondered at their tranquil, inexpressive faces. For life was rather difficult to live for every one, and there must have been so many among them aching for an unobtainable happiness—people bound hand and foot by honor or poverty.
Money—he had never been under any illusion about that. It was nothing, and it was everything. The man who valued it for itself was as big a fool as the man who despised it. It was a key. If you had it, it was only decent to lend it to those who hadn't. For it opened doors to the finest things in life—knowledge and love and freedom. So much he had always known—but not as he knew it now.
He had to have money. He understood in that passionate hour why men committed crimes for it. Sometimes it was the very best in them, frustrated and dammed back, that drove them. His own starved youth, the unwanted, ungiven tenderness of his heart, clamored in him. “Margaret, Margaret!” he repeated under his breath, as though the very sound of her name were a revelation. He forgot his pure, impersonal ambition. It seemed negligible and ridiculous in the light of this blazing need of personal happiness. He would grow rich somehow. He would build her a home such as she would love—spacious and beautifully simple. They would live there for ever. He could not even conceive of death separating them. Margaret, his wife, Margaret.
People glanced curiously at the man who blundered among them as though he could not see them. For he was thirty-seven and full-grown for the first time.
HE WENT back, guided by a deep-seated instinct. He had to work. Harder than ever.
He and Sewell had planned to stop early and in the end they hung on till morning. Something had happened; the dawn, showing a gray, sickly face over the roofs, caught them like belated ghosts. Even Sewell, who had been tigerish in his remorseless energy, was now nothing but an exhausted shadow of himself. He stood by the table, idly turning over the charred and broken fragments of that last experiment. The light seemed to gather round his fair, bent head, lending it a sort of beauty. But his mouth gaped. There was something pitiful and distressing about that mouth. It was like a betrayal, bringing down the splendid head in ruins.
Robert Napier stood by the window, He looked down into the streets and saw nothing. He was shivering slightly and did not know it. He felt like a traveler, almost at the end of his resources, whom the merest chance had led down an insignificant side-path on to a sudden and giddy height, with the word lying at his feet. For a time he had not beep able to see or think clearly. Now he was beginning to understand.
A tremendous thing had happened—not to himself only. In this cold, unspectacular laboratory men had come to a definite turning point in their history. They did not know it. Possibly they never knew. It was queer to look down upon them and their colossal ignorance. They were beginning to stir now, like ants in a disturbed ant-hill. A few workers scudded dismally along the gray pavements, every man intent on his own job, on his own scrap of life. They did not dream that perched high above them was the representative of their composite will, holding, at least for a little while, absolute power. For after all, as they were, he was. Their thoughts their values, their standards, their beliefs seemed to his feverish fancy to have poured themselves into the narrow channel of his own personality. He was Every-man who, fumbling down a dark passage, had touched a secret door. And the door had flown open.
Well, John Elroy was silenced now. His power looked ridiculous enough.
“We've got to make sure,” Sewell said. He shook himself like a man throwing off a stupor. “And then—when we're sure—we”ve got to be cautious. It's one thing to have the cards—one's got to play them. We've almost too many. It makes one mad—”
He lurched over to Napier's side, and suddenly, as though the limitless vista of the great city, its awakening murmur, conveyed some new thought to him, he lifted his clenched fists above his head in a gesture that was either of salutation or of menace.
“Why—we're like gods,” he stammered; “like gods—”
And after that they were both silent, staring at their own visions.
4
SHE had seen the placards as she drove westward from Whitehall, and the men she danced with joked with her about it. As the Prime Minister's daughter, what was she going to do? They implored her to declare war so that they could have a go at the impudent beggars. And anyhow, how were wretched subalterns going to get a rise if none of their superiors were ever to be killed off? It was high time something lively happened.
She laughed back at them. She felt how much she loved their kind and how closely she belonged to them. When she was among them, she felt as though any moment Peter might come round the corner and slip his arm through hers. They were as alike as brothers might be—not in feature, but in type. Their freshness, their slight, athletic figures, their perfect, yet unostentatious grooming, were dear and familiar to her. It was queer she had never found one among them whom she could have loved—queer and rather sad. Peter would have wished it. And perhaps, if he had lived, it would have happened. He would have linked her so closely to these dear, delightful young men that nothing else would have seemed possible. “Their sort” didn't go about marrying “outsiders.” At the very suggestion his blue eyes would have opened with that quizzical incredulity which had withered more than one girlish enthusiasm. For his judgment had been her law.
Tonight it seemed harder than ever to believe that Peter was really dead—or that there was any other life for her but this. She loved dancing. She loved the music and the atmosphere of well-bred opulence. She loved her own youth and beauty with an almost impersonal tenderness. She felt protective toward it, as though somewhere out in the dark an enemy awaited it. Tonight, when she thought of Robert Napier, it was with a kind of resentment. And then the next instant her heart tightened: the great room and the boy she danced with became fantastically unreal beside the stark reality of that figure. She could have cried with the agony of it. It was as though her personality were being torn asunder—her tastes, her traditions, warring against this outlaw love.
She stopped short, her hand pressed to her eyes. “Do you know, I think I'll go home,” she said. “I've got an awful head.”
He was delightfully solicitous. Though it meant cutting his dances, he went with her, and in the car he caught her hand and stammered out his confession. It was couched in the language of his caste—an almost barbaric language in its crude poverty of expression, but sincere enough. He must have been Peter's contemporary, not less than thirty, and yet he looked such a boy, so pink and smooth. She had a sudden conviction that when he was fifty he would be just the same. He might grow a little fatter or a little leaner. There would be lines about his pleasant eyes, and the fair hair would have receded from the honest forehead. But he would never, never grow up.
She drew her hand gently away from him. “It's no good, Roy dear.”
“You mean—there's some one else?”
“Yes,” she said.
She felt that with that “yes” she had done something irrevocable. She had chosen, and she had to stick to her choice. But she mustn't run risks. She must never give herself the chance to feel as she had felt tonight.
Her companion helped her out. He stood mournfully, but respectfully, hat in hand, until the door closed against him.
ANOTHER man watched her from the shadow. She saw him clearly. He made no sign, but she knew that he had stood for hours in that fine rain just to see her pass and give her the silent greeting of his presence. None of Peter's friends would have done that. They would have thought it foolish, and not even in good taste. Perhaps it wasn't. It half frightened her—like a strong gesture of reality in a pretty world of make-believe. Both Roy and he had said, “I love you.” And Roy had been like a child using big words he didn't understand.
The butler bent toward her.
“Sir John is in the library, miss. He arrived half an hour ago. He asked for you.”
She should have felt relief. All day long the house had buzzed with the strangeness of his absence. Cabinet Ministers had driven up, impatient and imperative, and finally in consternation. The fact that at this moment he should have locked himself in the fastnesses of the moors, out of their immediate reach, was as bewildering to them as it was to her. But had gone—as he had gone once before, silent and inflexible. Even Margaret had not questioned him. He was not a man to be questioned. His pale, impassive face made questions and fears equally impertinent. Once she had thought that he loved Knaresholm because it had been Peter's home—strangely as such sentimentality would have sat upon him—but now she knew that he hated it—that he went there dragged by some inexorable power outside himself. Knaresholm lay upon him, as it did upon her, like the shadow of some invisible disaster.
And now he had come back as suddenly as he had gone.
She found him with two harassed secretaries, turning over the papers which they had laid before him. The greatcoat that he still wore made the face which he lifted to her seem unnaturally small and wizened. She could have believed that he had shriveled in these few hours. Yet the look of power remained, and for a moment the greater issues were forgotten. She foresaw their personal conflict, It could not be postponed. Just because of her own weakness she had to show her colors. The patient figure in the shadow challenged her to this final honesty.
Elroy kissed her. “Dancing while Rome is burning, eh?”
The secretaries smiled wanly, gathered up the despatches, and were gone. Margaret lingered beside him.
“Is it burning?”
He did not answer.
“I THINK there are no more men left,” he said at last with a chill detachment; “no men like your brother, Margaret. If there were, I should not be bluffing and twisting like a hunted hare. People talk about power; this country has none. It was drained dry of enthusiasm and faith twelve years ago. Now it would not fight—not for its existence.”
Margaret thought of the men she had danced with. “There are some,” she said.
“Some. Your set. Peter's set. A mere handful. They have deceived governments over and over again. I am not deceived. I know that there is nothing behind me but the one desire—'Peace at any price.' I may threaten and bluster, but I know.” He sighed, pushing his papers on one side. “In ten years another generation that knows nothing of war will be ready to fight again. But that will be too late. If only there were some power that could hold us where we are till then!”
He had never spoken to her like that. His voice died away. She realized that he had been hardly aware of her—that he had spoken his thoughts aloud, driven by a queer, unfathomable distress. Her question sounded strange in her own ears:
“Do you think the other men—the dead men—would fight again if they could?”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded, as though at some one she could not see. “Yes—”
Her thoughts wandered back to what was for her the real issue. They were both silent. In the glass opposite she saw the reflection of a fair-haired girl in a shining golden frock. She saw how lovely she was. In the dark, massively furnished room she had a fragile, fairy quality, a look of gracious aloofness from all the roughness and turmoil of life. She looked at the slender feet in their brocaded slippers—feet that were meant to dance lightly down smooth and sheltered paths. And she was frightened. She saw herself and then the dark, rain-swept street. For one moment she wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and then that pitiless force within her swept her forward. She loved the man against wisdom and reason—helplessly.
John Elroy roused himself to smile palely at her. “And what has happened in your world, my dear?”
She smiled back at him. She felt as though she were pronouncing sentence of death against herself.
“Not much. I'm engaged, that's all.”
“Indeed? Well, that was to be expected. Do I know the man?”
“You've met him; it's Robert Napier.”
He shook his head. “One of the dancing partners? There are so many of them.”
He was trying to take a facetious interest. She knew that in reality he didn't care much. He was thinking about the country and perhaps about Peter. He had never loved anything else.
“No, He came down to Knaresholm. He wanted you to help him with some experiment.”
She did not expect any outburst from him. He lifted his pale eyebrows with a faint surprise.
“I remember now. He was trying to discover the component parts of the atmosphere round Mars, or something equally useful, but I didn't realize you had ever met him.”
“I did, that day on the moors—and then at a reception. We've been meeting each other—”
“An astute fellow, after all,” Elroy commented. “Having failed to get my help directly, he tries indirect methods—not unsuccessfully, it seems.”
“I knew you would say that.”
“It's rather inevitable, my dear, isn't it?'
She made no attempt to defend Napier or herself, It was useless. And her mind wouldn't let her. Her mind told her that she was mad, and her heart didn't care.
“Of course, your life is your own, Margaret,” Elroy went on at last. “You—must weigh your values yourself and make your own choice. But you can't expect me to help you to make a fool of us both. This is your home always—until you make your choice, and after you have chosen and have found out your mistake. But I shan't do more. I'm not playing the heavy father. I'm simply doing my best as I see it.”
“I know,” she said.
“If you explain the situation clearly to Mr. Napier, it may help you both to see things in another light. I do not mean that he is not in love with you, or necessarily that he is consciously thinking of his particular advantage. But human beings are queer cattle. They have a way of blinding themselves as to their own motives which is quite remarkable. You must give each other a chance to be honest.” He looked up at her, narrowing his tired eyes. “One thing I can tell you. Love doesn't last, but tastes and ambitions do. Think it over.” He patted her hand. “I expect Winchester in a minute. He's been worrying for me all day. You'd better run along.”
She kissed him. She couldn't feel any resentment. He sat there like the personification of her own reason.
5
THEY were sure now.
Sewell had said it was like holding too many good cards, and the phrase hadn't seemed to mean much except that the thing had a sort of overwhelming, terrific quality. It came near to tumbling unexpectedly over the secret of the Universe. Napier hadn't yet been able to look at it in its relation to life, and until this moment they had never spoken of it. For them it was a process to be completed. It was Sewell, lingering at the door of Napier's shabby sitting-room, who threw out the first indication of his real thoughts.
“Well, you can marry her now,” he said. “For that matter you can marry any one you please. Dozens, if that amuses you.” He laughed queerly. “It's not for any one to say 'No' to us.”
He went out, not waiting for an answer. But a moment later he opened the door again, putting his head through with a grinning mischief that sat oddly on his middle years. The soft hat pulled low down kept the upper part of his face in shadow, so that there was nothing visible but the mouth and chin. To Napier it was as though he saw him for the first time.
“I fancy one of them is coming now,” Sewell said. And he was gone again.
His information sounded like a stupid joke, and Napier, seated at the littered table, made a movement of impatience. The wave of exasperated dislike which had broken over him was a new thing. For he had never disliked Sewell—nor cared for him. He simply hadn't thought of him in that way. Sewell had been a splendid brain with which he had worked in complete accord. But of late something had happened. It was as though the brain were receding, and in its place had come a personality, unfamiliar, disconcerting. Outwardly nothing had changed. They had worked unceasingly, and Sewell hadn't failed. And yet Napier knew dimly that his companion's mind was occupied with its own secret considerations—and that in some inexplicable way the man who had endured hardship and austerity without complaint had suddenly become gross.
It wasn't James Sewell, the best student of his day, who had grinned back through the open door: it had been a common, vulgar fellow—even dangerous.
THE realization held Napier where he was. He did not hear the faint, questioning knock and only when the door opened did he look up. Then he saw that it was Margaret Elroy standing on the threshold. She was outside the range of lamplight, vague and exquisite as his fancies, and her smile, that had been at first gay and teasing, became suddenly uncertain, as though she herself were frightened, He could not have reassured her, for above his bewilderment was the realization of two things—two trivial and vital things—that were like hammer-blows on his consciousness—the horrible loveliness of the furs she wore, and the mean squalor of the room. Until now they had always met on neutral ground, and there, somehow, they had been lovers and equals. Here, in some cruel, grotesque way, they themselves seemed to have no significance. It was the furs pitted against the threadbare carpet, the dirty tablecloth, the dusty ornaments of a second-rate lodging-house—irreconcilable opponents.
And he had never known till now what it would mean to him to lose her.
“Margaret—!”
“I met some one on the stairs; he told me these were your rooms. May I come in?”
He set the one decent chair for her. Involuntarily he tried to turn it from the table so that she should not see the wretchedness of his half finished meal. Then he threw aside his pitiful defences. It was better and inevitable that she, too, should have to face things out.
He did not touch her. Once, in the park at dusk, he had kissed her at parting, shyly, as a boy in love might have done—and he had dreamed of holding her in his arms and kissing her with all the starved tenderness and passion of his life. Now that she was here, all that fell away into insignificance. She knew it, too. Perhaps she had been hungry for him But it was the Things of Life overwhelming them both.
She looked about her with a sort of puzzlement; her breeding hid any other emotion “Poor Robert! You were having your dinner I was out shopping. I thought— It was selfish of me—”
“Oh, my dear—”
“You must go on; it will be getting cold—stone-cold. Let's see what it is. I'd better know your tastes. Sausages—! Does one eat sausages for dinner?” She laughed tremulously.
He said, “You see, they're cheap and satisfying,” and her laugh broke off. It was as though she felt herself guilty of an indelicacy.
He took the gimcrack table and carried it to the other end of the room. She had seen it. He wasn't hiding anything. He was merely sparing her a spectacle which he felt with a twist of wry pain, must have been almost horrible.
She talked hurriedly. “Robert, who was it I met?”
“On the stair? Sewell—the man I work with.”
“Really? He didn't look—well, not clever.
“You didn't see his head. That's all there is of him, I fancy, but it's a lot.”
“He seemed—ordinary. Does he live here, too?”
“No, Sewell's a swell compared to me. He had all the money there was; he threw it into this job of ours. I sometimes wonder why. I expect his brain was stronger than the rest of him—made him quixotic.”
“But this isn't where you work?”
He laughed. “No; we've a laboratory. A wonderful place. I only live here.”
A curious expression, half-mocking, half-wistful, shadowed her face. He saw it and added quickly,
“I haven't lived at all—not till now.”
“My darling—my poor darling!”
She had never spoken to him like that. Her attitude with him had always been defensive—half resentful—as though he had been an enemy. Now she was reckless and generous. The wonder of it made him silent, the blood pounding in his ears. Since she loved him like that, the things became ridiculous in their impotence.
She looked up at him, standing quiet and rather grim beside her.
“What is it? Aren't you glad I've come? Oughtn't I to have come? I suppose not—not according to our grandmothers.”
“Our grandmothers are all safely buried,” he interrupted, suddenly happy—“and we've the law unto ourselves. It's just that I haven't grasped that you're really here. It's dazzling and rather stupefying—you in this dreadful lace.”
She caught his hand and pressed it. She might have been pleading with him. “It is dreadful, isn't it?”
“Unspeakable. Didn't you think I knew?”
“I—I thought perhaps you didn't care.”
“I haven't dared to care. Not if we were to go on with what I was doing. I had to choose.”
“Yes. You'll always have to choose.”
She looked down at her hands. Such slender hands. The price of their gloves would have kept him in food for a month. As suddenly as it had come, his joy had gone. He felt sick and faint at heart.
“Robert—”
“Dear—?”
“My father knows. I told him last night.”
“That was brave of you.”
“No—he's not terrifying. Just reasonable.”
“He thought I was after your money?”
“We had to be prepared for that. He didn't really blame either of us, but he said we couldn't expect him to help, and that we were to think it over. Robert, he said love changed—tastes and ambitions never.”
He saw her eyes fill, and the quiver of her fine mouth. There was something terribly pathetic about her then—like a lovely bird that he was trying to shut up in this dark, wretched cage. Stronger in that moment than his rising fear was his pity.
“Why did you tell him just then?”
“I couldn't bear it for you any more. It must have hurt you so—standing there in the rain—seeing me like that with other people—not being sure. I had to show my colors. It made me sale, too.”
“Safe—?”
SHE broke down utterly. Her face in her hands, she cried her heart out, and in a flash the queer restraint that had held him let go its hold. He flung himself on his knees beside her, and for the first time she was in his arms. A cloud enveloped him, blinding, intoxicating, fragrant, so that he knew he could never lose her. Through it he heard her broken voice:
“Robert—you must despise me—this me—the real me—”
“I love you—I love you,” he stammered back. “I love you as you are—whatever you are—”
She clung to him; their first long kiss was wet with her tears. But at least he was not now the besieging enemy. She threw open the gates, and for a moment her love was as passionate and splendid as his own. It did not last. He became aware that she was holding back from him—in some dim, inexplicable way struggling with them both.
“You don't know. You might think the other was the real me—the girl in the storm—not minding the rough road and the rain. I'm not like that. This is me—all these pretty clothes—scents and powders—things you must hate—”
HE LAUGHED unhappily. As though she had been a child, he kissed her gloves, her scented handkerchief.
“I love them—they're beautiful. I wouldn't have you without them.”
“But you'd have to. They'd have to go—all these foolish things that are me.”
She laid her hands on his shoulders, looking him deeply in the eyes.
“What would be left of me then, Robert?”
His mind was running hither and thither like a baffled thing. He couldn't lose her. There had to be some way out.
“Margaret—my sweetheart—it will be all right—somehow.”
“We shall be poor—you said so, Robert. I didn't know what poverty meant. When people said they were 'hard up,' they meant that they were going to Cannes instead of Monte Carlo. It was a sort of make-believe—not like this.”
“Dirt and dust and torn carpets,” he said bitterly—“and half-cold sausage.”
She thought he was laughing at her.
“Please—please don't. It seems funny to you now. It's because you don't understand, I came here to tell you I'd marry you, if you still wanted me—when you liked—tomorrow, I didn't care. I've never loved any one before. It's too strong for me. But I'm frightened: I don't trust myself. I'm warning you.”
He stood up and lifted her to her feet beside him. His mind was quiet now, standing on the threshold of release. There was a way out, spectacular, unmistakable. That was what Sewell had meant. They held all the cards. They had something to sell which no one was rich enough to buy. But it would do.
“It's all right, Margaret.”
“If you really loved me, you ought to send me away—never see me again. It's not fair to either of us.”
“It's all right,” he repeated steadily. “I do really love you. And I wouldn't see you again if life with me meant all this. You're right; it would break us both. I wouldn't risk it. You've got to trust me.”
She put her hand to his face, caressing him with a piteous tenderness.
“Why should you be what you are? Why couldn't you have been ordinary? You're so clever—you could have been rich, and we could have been happy.”
“Scientists can be rich, Margaret.”
She laughed brokenly. “Oh, my poor darling, what have you to sell? Moonshine?—the secrets of Mars? Who'll buy?”
His hold tightened on her. “If I had a little instrument in this room and, by touching a wire, I could wipe out Berlin or Paris as though they had never been, don't you think people would want to buy that—at any price—even your father?”
She lifted her face to his, smiling with sad mockery. “Oh, if you had anything like that—”
“Well, wait then, trust me.” It was he who laughed now, and the sound was loud and rough in his own ears. “What is it the Americans say? I've 'got the goods' this time. Sewell and I aren't just wool-gatherers. We're merchants, too, like every one else. We'll sell to the highest market, and you shall have pretty things, sweetheart, all the days of your life.”
He bent over her. “Kiss me, Margaret—kiss me—”
PRESENTLY he came back alone. He stood with his back against the door, looking at the room, which seemed familiar and yet strange, like a place that had been lived in years ago. He remembered having been very happy here. The room had had a sort of secret loveliness. He could see now that it had been like the poor cave of some old-time hermit, seeking after God in humility and poverty, with a pure heart. Now it was just a place of dirt and squalor.
He felt physically sick.
How pleased she had been at the mere thought! A man who could blow other men out of existence—that was the man for her heart—and she was the woman for his money. He had bought her. She had required to be bought. Buying and selling. That was life—that was the soul of civilization, The terrific thing before which his mind had knelt in passionate wonder was, after all, little more than a patent medicine—a patent gadget for an aeroplane or car—something to be sold for as ma as you could get, so that you could marry the woman you loved and give her the toys she loved. As to the uses to which the thing was put, that was not his concern. His concern was for himself. So long as Robert Napier and Margaret Elroy were happy in their midget playtime among the centuries, what else mattered?
No one could blame him. He was a product of his time. He accepted the standards of his generation. Sell and be damned. Men made the loveliness of the universe hellish. Apes, comic, horrible apes running amuck in a treasure house—smashing, despoiling, cursing their self-inflicted misery.
He put his hands to his head. For that moment he hated Margaret Elroy and himself. He hated this room with its reproach. If only he could change places with some downtrodden worker, blank-minded, with seeing, sightless eyes, living his little life in innocency! He wasn't fit—no one living man was fit.
Suddenly he couldn't bear the room any more. He turned and fled from it.
6
“NAPIER is a genius,” Sewell said. “I know that, but I also suspect him of being a visionary. That is why I am here—not to go behind his back in any way, but in both our interests. Fundamentally this is a business matter.”
“And you are the business partner,” Elroy suggested.
Sewell flushed faintly. “I may say that the discovery is as much mine as his—indeed, more so. Without my financial support Napier could have done nothing.”
“Quite so.”
They were both silent. Throughout they had been very wary with each other, and now they had reached a vital and dangerous place in their negotiations. Elroy measured the man opposite him. He was a good judge of men, and he knew that he had to deal with both brains and greed. Well, greed was a good weapon in the hands of an opponent. He shifted his reading lamp a little to one side, placing his own face in shadow.
“Naturally you will have to substantiate your claims before experts.”
“Naturally.” Sewell's gesture was ironic. “Equally naturally, the experiment could only be on the smallest scale.”
“Quite. Unless—well, we can leave that point. How soon could the experiment take place?”
“At once; we are absolutely ready. We should require a very considerable space of open country and something on which the experiment could be directed—a house—a moving herd of sheep—anything you choose—”
“What is your present range?”
Sewell shrugged his shoulders. “We are not dealing with a clumsy gun, sir John. There is no limit.”
“You mean literally that this force in the air which you have discovered and, as it were, isolated and harnessed, could destroy a city five hundred miles away?”
“Exactly. Only it would be difficult, until further experiment had been made, to limit the range of action exactly.”
“I gather that this—this thing is not necessarily destructive?”
“Far from it. It is simply a new form of power. But it is as an engine of national defence that I conceive its chief utility, Sir John.”
“Defence, or a defensive offensive?”
Sewell made a movement of indifference. “That is a matter of policy. It does not concern me. I am merely a man of science.”
Elroy allowed himself a shadowy smile. “Quite.”
He got up and began to walk slowly backward and forward in and out of the lamplight. His footstep made no sound on the thick carpet. With his small, bowed figure he might have been some pathetic, sorrow-driven ghost. Yet as he came at last to a standstill in front of his visitor, his face was placid as a mask.
“How soon could this machine be set in action?”
“At once.”
“What are your terms?”
“A million for Napier and for myself.”
“My dear sir!”
“I ask only a million because I can not conceive that I should want more. Otherwise you can see for yourself that there is no real limit to the value of what I am offering you,”
“And if I—if we—refuse?”
“Other people will not. I have given you, as representing this country, the first chance. I can not be expected to do more.”
“But two million—! How do you suppose—”
“It is so very obvious.” Sewell flashed into a sudden animation. It was as though something he loved were being disparaged and underestimated. “Haven't you understood? You can scrap your Navy and your Amy tomorrow. Such things are as useless and obsolete as bows and arrows. The power which holds our secret is absolute dictator, and without an effort—almost without cost.”
“How can you be sure that it is a secret? Some one may have forestalled you?”
Sewell gave his companion an amused glance.
“Politics are not my concern. I am woefully ignorant. But I should imagine you would have felt the pressure.”
“Quite.”
THE two men looked each other in the eyes for the first time and smiled unwillingly. Elroy made a little old-fashioned inclination.
“You underestimate your political capacity, my dear Sewell. As you say, there would be no haggling with such a power. But there is one other point. You may not be forestalled. You may be followed. You say yourself that you and Mr. Napier stumbled upon this discovery. Others may stumble—and what then?”
Sewell considered a moment, frowning. “It is a risk. Not a very great one—not for this generation, at any rate. Sooner or later, perhaps—but not yet. And the first discoverer has an incalculable advantage. Farther than that no one can see.”
Elroy nodded to himself. “Once such a discovery has been made, there is no turning back,” he reflected. “And now—” he went on in a clearer tone, “we must act quickly. I shall call together men whom I can trust—experts. At once. Tomorrow. Early. At your own place. You will be willing to meet them?”
“Obviously.”
“And Napier—?”
“Napier is bound to be amenable,” Sewell said. “He can have no reasonable objection to offer.”
“Yet you foresaw some difficulty?”
“I hardly know why. It may be the merest fancy on my part. He seemed curiously unaware of, or indifferent to, the ultimate significance of what we had accomplished. At least, we never spoke of it—” He gave a short laugh. “It is curious how great issues may hang on little ones, Sir John. After all, Napier's attitude will probably be governed by a third and purely human influence.”
“You mean—? Ah, quite. I had thought of that myself. It looks like the hand of Providence, doesn't it?—working for the ultimate good of all.”
Sewell stood up, and they shook hands. Elroy stood close to his visitor, holding him in a long, intent regard. A nameless emotion quivered for a moment in the small, white face and was gone again like a ripple on the surface of still water.
“You are both young to have attained so much,” he said. “Other men have done their best and been less fortunate. As to us old people—a million more or less means nothing; there is nothing for us to buy. All that is left for us is our duty.”
Sewell smiled a vague understanding. He thought coolly: “Old men are like that. He is growing senile. Thank God, I am still young enough!”
“Tomorrow, then. At ten. I shall bring Edstein and Jameson, if possible.”
“We shall be ready,” Sewell answered, bowing.
He followed a discreet, soft-footed servant to the door. It was raining. The man bent toward him.
“A taxi, sir?”
Sewell shook his head. “I prefer to walk.”
He laughed to himself. He hadn't the money for a taxi, But tomorrow— How funny it all was!