BEHIND THE BRONZE DOOR
BEHIND THE BRONZE DOOR
BEHIND THE BRONZE DOOR
“Isn’t this terrible, Henry? Where is it going to end?”
“Isn’t what terrible?—and where is what going end?”
“Why! Haven’t you read to-night’s paper?”
“No.”
“Here it is; read that!” and handing her husband theEvening HeraldMrs. Hartsilver indicated with her finger a paragraph in the “stoppress” headed: “Another Society Tragedy,” and stated that a well-known baronet had been found shot in his bedroom in circumstances of great mystery.
Certainly the series of tragedies which had taken place during the past eight months in what is called “Society,” had been most puzzling.
First, Lord Hope-Cooper, the fifth peer, held in high esteem by all his friends and acquaintances, owner of Cowrie Park in Perthshire, Leveden Hall in Warwickshire, and one of the finest houses in Grosvenor Square, had drowned himself in the beautiful lake at Cowrie, apparently for no reasonand without leaving even a note of farewell for Lady Hope-Cooper, with whom he was known to be on the best of terms—they had been married eight years.
Then Viscount Molesley, a rich bachelor of three-and-twenty, an owner of thoroughbreds and well-known about town and in sporting circles, had been found shot in his bedroom one morning, an automatic pistol on the floor beside him, and in the grate the ashes of some burnt papers; apparently he had shot himself after receiving his morning letters.
Following close upon these tragedies had come the sudden death of the Honorable Vera Froissart, Lord Froissart’s younger daughter, in mysterious circumstances. She had been found dead in the drawing-room in her father’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate, and at the inquest the jury had returned a verdict of “death due apparently to shock.” Then the death of a rather notorious ex-Society woman, Madame Leonora Vandervelt, who had been divorced by three husbands—she had thrown herself out of a fourth-floor window at a fashionable West End hotel. Then the death by poisoning of an extremely prosperous stockbroker of middle-age, owner of two financial journals. And after that four or five more tragedies of the same nature, the victim in nearly every case being a man or woman of high social standing and large income.
“Exactly the way Molesley made away with himself,” Henry Hartsilver observed dryly as he laiddown the paper after reading the report of the discovery of Sir Stephen Lethbridge’s body in his bedroom at Abbey Hall in Cumberland.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“You may think me hard and unsympathetic, my dear,” he went on, addressing his wife, “but these people who make away with themselves leave me cold. Such tragedies don’t excite my pity—they arouse in me only a feeling of contempt.”
He paused, then continued:
“Now, look at me.Youknow how I began life, though I sometimes try to forget it, as I hope others do. My parents were poor, and I received only a moderate education; but I had grit and determination and I won through. And look at me to-day. All who know me look up to and respect me. I’m a self-made man and not ashamed to own it, though I don’t crow about it on the housetops as some of these plebeians do. Though I come of the people, I pride myself on being one of Nature’s gentlemen, and what can you want more than that—eh? We can’t choose our parents, or I might have chosen parents like yours, my dear—blue blood through and through. And that was one reason why I married you. I think I have told you this before. I made up my mind when I was still a lad that the woman I made my wife should be a lady in the true acceptation of that often misapplied word, and the first time I met you—you remember that day, eh, my dear?—I recognized the type, and then and there I decided that you were the lady for me!”
He lay back in the big arm-chair, slipped his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, and looked at his young wife with an expression of extreme self-satisfaction.
“But, Henry,” she said, wincing, “what has all that to do with this calamity? You forget that I knew poor Stephen Lethbridge. Abbey Hall is close to my old home, and Stephen and I were children together. I can’t help feeling upset.”
“I understand that quite well, but the feeling is one you ought to fight against, my dear Cora. A man who deliberately commits suicide, no matter what his social status may be, and no matter what the reason or reasons may be which prompt him to commit the rash act, is guilty of a grave wrong, not to himself alone, but to the whole of the community. Heaven knows I have had difficulties, almost unsurmountable difficulties, to contend with in my time, yet the bare thought of self-destruction never entered my imagination.”
Henry Hartsilver had been married three years. A common, self-centered person, endowed with exceptional shrewdness and with considerable commercial acumen, he had begun life as a jerry-builder in a small country town. Then war with Germany had been declared, and realizing at once what so many failed to realize, namely that such a war must last for years at least, Hartsilver had seized the opportunity he saw spread out before him of amassing money quickly and in large lump sums by securing by divers means building contracts for our Government.
Thus, long before the war ended, he found himself a rich man. Then, anxious to gratify his second ambition, he set to work to look about for a woman of good social standing to become his wife; the thought that any woman to whom he might propose might decline the honor of marrying him did not occur to him.
Consequently he was not surprised, nor did he appreciate the honor conferred upon him, when the only surviving daughter of a well-connected country gentleman accepted his offer of marriage. True, the war had reduced her already impoverished father almost to penury, and in addition both her brothers had been killed in action early in the war, so that when she accepted him she felt that she did not now much care what became of her. Her mother had been dead many years, and her father she literally worshipped. What she never admitted, even to herself, though in her heart she knew it to be the truth, was that by marrying Henry Hartsilver she would be able to provide her father with a comfortable income in his declining years. And since his sons’ death he had aged very rapidly.
Hartsilver was now in his forty-sixth year, his wife just seven-and-twenty. They had no children, but that did not prevent Hartsilver’s everlasting complaint to his wife that he considered himself deeply aggrieved at the Government’s neglect in failing to confer a title upon him.
“Just think, my dear,” he had said to her more than once, “what you would feel like if I made you ‘my lady!’ Shouldn’t we be able to crow itover our friends, eh? And to think of the sums I gave to war charities! Well, we must live in hope!”
Fortunately his wife’s tact, possibly also the sense of humor which she possessed, prevented her from becoming annoyed with him when he spoke like that, and making the sarcastic rejoinder which she sometimes longed to utter. Though she could not accuse herself of having married him for his money, that being the last thing she cared about, she yet felt that she had in a way married him under false pretenses, for certainly she knew that, but for her anxiety to add to her father’s happiness and comfort, this common, self-satisfied, and self-righteous person was one of the last men she would have linked herself to for life.
Presently he spoke again.
“You know, my dear Cora,” he said, linking his fingers across his ample chest, “although of course, it distresses me that you should grieve for this man Lethbridge, yet I don’t quite appreciate your feeling what I can only suppose is a sort of affection for the fellow—you, a married woman. Somehow it seems—it seems not quite the right thing. A woman, when she marries, should have no thought for other men, at least of all thoughts of a—er—friendly nature. Now, consider for a moment, and tell me if your better nature does not tell you so itself.”
Cora Hartsilver winced, but her husband did not notice it. He did notice, however, when a moment later she smiled.
“You seem amused, my dear,” he said dryly. “May I ask what amuses you?”
“Oh nothing, Henry, nothing at all,” she answered quickly, then bit her lip. “It was only something I happened to think of just then.”
“Ah, then it was something. Then why say it was ‘nothing?’ You should always be truthful, Cora, always absolutely truthful, in even the smallest matters. And what did you ‘happen to think of just then?’”
“I can’t remember now. It’s gone. Anyway it was nothing of consequence. May I have that paper again, Henry?”
“Certainly,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders. Then, as he handed it to her, he said:
“Tell me what you know about Sir Stephen Lethbridge. I know him only by name.”
“Well, I have not seen him for a year or two,” she replied carelessly. “Indeed, I think not since our marriage. He came to the wedding, if you remember.”
“I don’t remember. But go on.”
“He was in the Gunners. He went out to France in 1914, and was home on sick leave when we were married. He used to be rather fond of me, I believe.”
Henry’s mouth opened. He stared at his wife in astonishment.
“Really, Cora——” he began, but she went on without heeding him.
“I heard not so long ago that he had got intorather a bad set. Somebody told me that the things he had seen out in France seemed to have unsettled his brain—I know that happened in other cases too. But he was a man who would never, I am quite sure, have done anything dishonorable. Oh, I wish I knew,” she exclaimed, carried away by a sudden emotion. “I do wish I knew what made him kill himself!”
“I wouldn’t worry about him, my dear Cora, if I were you,” her husband remarked coldly. “Probably he was mentally unsound, mad—‘potty’ as the boys say, Those scenes in the trenches must have been extremely trying. And yet—had I been younger and able to join the colors——”
He stopped and stared. Cora, lying back on the settee, was laughing hysterically.