The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories

by Ambrose Bierce

  I searched Paris for several days. I dined at the principal hotels; I went to the theaters; I rode in the Bois de Boulogne in the morning, and picked up an acquaintance, whom I forced to drive with me in the afternoon. I went to mass at the Madeleine, and I attended the services at the English Church. I hung about the Louvre and Notre Dame. I went to Versailles. I spent hours in parading the Rue de Rivoli, in the neighborhood of Meurice’s corner, where foreigners pass and repass from morning till night. At last I received an invitation to a reception at the English Embassy. I went, and I found what I had sought so long.

  There she was, sitting by an old lady in gray satin and diamonds, who had a wrinkled but kindly face and keen gray eyes that seemed to take in everything they saw, with very little inclination to give much in return. But I did not notice the chaperon. I saw only the face that had haunted me for months, and in the excitement of the moment I walked quickly toward the pair, forgetting such a trifle as the necessity for an introduction.

  She was far more beautiful than I had thought, but I never doubted that it was she herself and no other. Vision or no vision before, this was the reality, and I knew it. Twice her hair had been covered, now at last I saw it, and the added beauty of its magnificence glorified the whole woman. It was rich hair, fine and abundant, golden, with deep ruddy tints in it like red bronze spun fine. There was no ornament in it, not a rose, not a thread of gold, and I felt that it needed nothing to enhance its splendor; nothing but her pale face, her dark strange eyes, and her heavy eyebrows. I could see that she was slender too, but strong withal, as she sat there quietly gazing at the moving scene in the midst of the brilliant lights and the hum of perpetual conversation.

  I recollected the detail of introduction in time, and turned aside to look for my host. I found him at last. I begged him to present me to the two ladies, pointing them out to him at the same time.

  “Yes—uh—by all means—uh,” replied his Excellency with a pleasant smile. He evidently had no idea of my name, which was not to be wondered at.

  “I am Lord Cairngorm,” I observed.

  “Oh—by all means,” answered the Ambassador with the same hospitable smile. “Yes—uh—the fact is, I must try and find out who they are; such lots of people, you know.”

  “Oh, if you will present me, I will try and find out for you,” said I, laughing.

  “Ah, yes—so kind of you—come along,” said my host. We threaded the crowd, and in a few minutes we stood before the two ladies.

  “‘Lowmintrduce L’d Cairngorm,” he said; then, adding quickly to me, “Come and dine tomorrow, won’t you?” he glided away with his pleasant smile and disappeared in the crowd.

  I sat down beside the beautiful girl, conscious that the eyes of the duenna were upon me.

  “I think we have been very near meeting before,” I remarked, by way of opening the conversation.

  My companion turned her eyes full upon me with an air of inquiry. She evidently did not recall my face, if she had ever seen me.

  “Really—I cannot remember,” she observed, in a low and musical voice. “When?”

  “In the first place, you came down from Berlin by the express ten days ago. I was going the other way, and our carriages stopped opposite each other. I saw you at the window.”

  “Yes—we came that way, but I do not remember—” She hesitated.

  “Secondly,” I continued, “I was sitting alone in my garden last summer—near the end of July—do you remember? You must have wandered in there through the park; you came up to the house and looked at me—”

  “Was that you?” she asked, in evident surprise. Then she broke into a laugh. “I told everybody I had seen a ghost; there had never been any Cairngorms in the place since the memory of man. We left the next day, and never heard that you had come there; indeed, I did not know the castle belonged to you.”

  “Where were you staying?” I asked.

  “Where? Why, with my aunt, where I always stay. She is your neighbor, since it IS you.”

  “I—beg your pardon—but then—is your aunt Lady Bluebell? I did not quite catch—”

  “Don’t be afraid. She is amazingly deaf. Yes. She is the relict of my beloved uncle, the sixteenth or seventeenth Baron Bluebell—I forget exactly how many of them there have been. And I—do you know who I am?” She laughed, well knowing that I did not.

  “No,” I answered frankly. “I have not the least idea. I asked to be introduced because I recognized you. Perhaps—perhaps you are a Miss Bluebell?”

  “Considering that you are a neighbor, I will tell you who I am,” she answered. “No; I am of the tribe of Bluebells, but my name is Lammas, and I have been given to understand that I was christened Margaret. Being a floral family, they call me Daisy. A dreadful American man once told me that my aunt was a Bluebell and that I was a Harebell—with two l’s and an e—because my hair is so thick. I warn you, so that you may avoid making such a bad pun.”

  “Do I look like a man who makes puns?” I asked, being very conscious of my melancholy face and sad looks.

  Miss Lammas eyed me critically.

  “No; you have a mournful temperament. I think I can trust you,” she answered. “Do you think you could communicate to my aunt the fact that you are a Cairngorm and a neighbor? I am sure she would like to know.”

  I leaned toward the old lady, inflating my lungs for a yell. But Miss Lammas stopped me.

  “That is not of the slightest use,” she remarked. “You can write it on a bit of paper. She is utterly deaf.”

  “I have a pencil,” I answered; “but I have no paper. Would my cuff do, do you think?”

  “Oh, yes!” replied Miss Lammas, with alacrity; “men often do that.”

  I wrote on my cuff: “Miss Lammas wishes me to explain that I am your neighbor, Cairngorm.” Then I held out my arm before the old lady’s nose. She seemed perfectly accustomed to the proceeding, put up her glasses, read the words, smiled, nodded, and addressed me in the unearthly voice peculiar to people who hear nothing.

  “I knew your grandfather very well,” she said. Then she smiled and nodded to me again, and to her niece, and relapsed into silence.

  “It is all right,” remarked Miss Lammas. “Aunt Bluebell knows she is deaf, and does not say much, like the parrot. You see, she knew your grandfather. How odd that we should be neighbors! Why have we never met before?”

  “If you had told me you knew my grandfather when you appeared in the garden, I should not have been in the least surprised,” I answered rather irrelevantly. “I really thought you were the ghost of the old fountain. How in the world did you come there at that hour?”

  “We were a large party and we went out for a walk. Then we thought we should like to see what your park was like in the moonlight, and so we trespassed. I got separated from the rest, and came upon you by accident, just as I was admiring the extremely ghostly look of your house, and wondering whether anybody would ever come and live there again. It looks like the castle of Macbeth, or a scene from the opera. Do you know anybody here?”

  “Hardly a soul! Do you?”

  “No. Aunt Bluebell said it was our duty to come. It is easy for her to go out; she does not bear the burden of the conversation.”

  “I am sorry you find it a burden,” said I. “Shall I go away?”

  Miss Lammas looked at me with a sudden gravity in her beautiful eyes, and there was a sort of hesitation about the lines of her full, soft mouth.

  “No,” she said at last, quite simply, “don’t go away. We may like each other, if you stay a little longer—and we ought to, because we are neighbors in the country.”

  I suppose I ought to have thought Miss Lammas a very odd girl. There is, indeed, a sort of freemasonry between people who discover that they live near each other and that they ought to have known each other before. But there was a sort of unexpected frankness and simplicity in the girl’s amusing manner which would have struck anyone else as being singular, to say the least of it. To me,
however, it all seemed natural enough. I had dreamed of her face too long not to be utterly happy when I met her at last and could talk to her as much as I pleased. To me, the man of ill luck in everything, the whole meeting seemed too good to be true. I felt again that strange sensation of lightness which I had experienced after I had seen her face in the garden. The great rooms seemed brighter, life seemed worth living; my sluggish, melancholy blood ran faster, and filled me with a new sense of strength. I said to myself that without this woman I was but an imperfect being, but that with her I could accomplish everything to which I should set my hand. Like the great Doctor, when he thought he had cheated Mephistopheles at last, I could have cried aloud to the fleeting moment, Verweile doch, du bist so schon!

  “Are you always gay?” I asked, suddenly. “How happy you must be!”

  “The days would sometimes seem very long if I were gloomy,” she answered, thoughtfully. “Yes, I think I find life very pleasant, and I tell it so.”

  “How can you ‘tell life’ anything?” I inquired. “If I could catch my life and talk to it, I would abuse it prodigiously, I assure you.”

  “I dare say. You have a melancholy temper. You ought to live out-of-doors, dig potatoes, make hay, shoot, hunt, tumble into ditches, and come home muddy and hungry for dinner. It would be much better for you than moping in your rook tower and hating everything.”

  “It is rather lonely down there,” I murmured, apologetically, feeling that Miss Lammas was quite right.

  “Then marry, and quarrel with your wife,” she laughed. “Anything is better than being alone.”

  “I am a very peaceable person. I never quarrel with anybody. You can try it. You will find it quite impossible.”

  “Will you let me try?” she asked, still smiling.

  “By all means—especially if it is to be only a preliminary canter,” I answered, rashly.

  “What do you mean?” she inquired, turning quickly upon me.

  “Oh—nothing. You might try my paces with a view to quarreling in the future. I cannot imagine how you are going to do it. You will have to resort to immediate and direct abuse.”

  “No. I will only say that if you do not like your life, it is your own fault. How can a man of your age talk of being melancholy, or of the hollowness of existence? Are you consumptive? Are you subject to hereditary insanity? Are you deaf, like Aunt Bluebell? Are you poor, like—lots of people? Have you been crossed in love? Have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for the sake of the world? Are you feeble-minded, a cripple, an outcast? Are you—repulsively ugly?” She laughed again. “Is there any reason in the world why you should not enjoy all you have got in life?”

  “No. There is no reason whatever, except that I am dreadfully unlucky, especially in small things.”

  “Then try big things, just for a change,” suggested Miss Lammas. “Try and get married, for instance, and see how it turns out.”

  “If it turned out badly it would be rather serious.”

  “Not half so serious as it is to abuse everything unreasonably. If abuse is your particular talent, abuse something that ought to be abused. Abuse the Conservatives—or the Liberals—it does not matter which, since they are always abusing each other. Make yourself felt by other people. You will like it, if they don’t. It will make a man of you. Fill your mouth with pebbles, and howl at the sea, if you cannot do anything else. It did Demosthenes no end of good, you know. You will have the satisfaction of imitating a great man.”

  “Really, Miss Lammas, I think the list of innocent exercises you propose—”

  “Very well—if you don’t care for that sort of thing, care for some other sort of thing. Care for something, or hate something. Don’t be idle. Life is short, and though art may be long, plenty of noise answers nearly as well.”

  “I do care for something—I mean, somebody,” I said.

  “A woman? Then marry her. Don’t hesitate.”

  “I do not know whether she would marry me,” I replied. “I have never asked her.”

  “Then ask her at once,” answered Miss Lammas. “I shall die happy if I feel I have persuaded a melancholy fellow creature to rouse himself to action. Ask her, by all means, and see what she says. If she does not accept you at once, she may take you the next time. Meanwhile, you will have entered for the race. If you lose, there are the ‘All-aged Trial Stakes,’ and the ‘Consolation Race.’”

  “And plenty of selling races into the bargain. Shall I take you at your word, Miss Lammas?”

  “I hope you will,” she answered.

  “Since you yourself advise me, I will. Miss Lammas, will you do me the honor to marry me?”

  For the first time in my life the blood rushed to my head and my sight swam. I cannot tell why I said it. It would be useless to try to explain the extraordinary fascination the girl exercised over me, or the still more extraordinary feeling of intimacy with her which had grown in me during that half hour. Lonely, sad, unlucky as I had been all my life, I was certainly not timid, nor even shy. But to propose to marry a woman after half an hour’s acquaintance was a piece of madness of which I never believed myself capable, and of which I should never be capable again, could I be placed in the same situation. It was as though my whole being had been changed in a moment by magic—by the white magic of her nature brought into contact with mine. The blood sank back to my heart, and a moment later I found myself staring at her with anxious eyes. To my amazement she was as calm as ever, but her beautiful mouth smiled, and there was a mischievous light in her dark-brown eyes.

  “Fairly caught,” she answered. “For an individual who pretends to be listless and sad you are not lacking in humor. I had really not the least idea what you were going to say. Wouldn’t it be singularly awkward for you if I had said ‘Yes’? I never saw anybody begin to practice so sharply what was preached to him—with so very little loss of time!”

  “You probably never met a man who had dreamed of you for seven months before being introduced.”

  “No, I never did,” she answered gayly. “It smacks of the romantic. Perhaps you are a romantic character, after all. I should think you were if I believed you. Very well; you have taken my advice, entered for a Stranger’s Race and lost it. Try the All-aged Trial Stakes. You have another cuff, and a pencil. Propose to Aunt Bluebell; she would dance with astonishment, and she might recover her hearing.”

  III

  That was how I first asked Margaret Lammas to be my wife, and I will agree with anyone who says I behaved very foolishly. But I have not repented of it, and I never shall. I have long ago understood that I was out of my mind that evening, but I think my temporary insanity on that occasion has had the effect of making me a saner man ever since. Her manner turned my head, for it was so different from what I had expected. To hear this lovely creature, who, in my imagination, was a heroine of romance, if not of tragedy, talking familiarly and laughing readily was more than my equanimity could bear, and I lost my head as well as my heart. But when I went back to England in the spring, I went to make certain arrangements at the Castle—certain changes and improvements which would be absolutely necessary. I had won the race for which I had entered myself so rashly, and we were to be married in June.

  Whether the change was due to the orders I had left with the gardener and the rest of the servants, or to my own state of mind, I cannot tell. At all events, the old place did not look the same to me when I opened my window on the morning after my arrival. There were the gray walls below me and the gray turrets flanking the huge building; there were the fountains, the marble causeways, the smooth basins, the tall box hedges, the water lilies and the swans, just as of old. But there was something else there, too— something in the air, in the water, and in the greenness that I did not recognize—a light over everything by which everything was transfigured. The clock in the tower struck seven, and the strokes of the ancient bell sounded like a wedding chime. The air sang with the thrilling treble of the song-birds, with the si
lvery music of the plashing water and the softer harmony of the leaves stirred by the fresh morning wind. There was a smell of new-mown hay from the distant meadows, and of blooming roses from the beds below, wafted up together to my window. I stood in the pure sunshine and drank the air and all the sounds and the odors that were in it; and I looked down at my garden and said: “It is Paradise, after all.” I think the men of old were right when they called heaven a garden, and Eden a garden inhabited by one man and one woman, the Earthly Paradise.

  I turned away, wondering what had become of the gloomy memories I had always associated with my home. I tried to recall the impression of my nurse’s horrible prophecy before the death of my parents—an impression which hitherto had been vivid enough. I tried to remember my old self, my dejection, my listlessness, my bad luck, my petty disappointments. I endeavored to force myself to think as I used to think, if only to satisfy myself that I had not lost my individuality. But I succeeded in none of these efforts. I was a different man, a changed being, incapable of sorrow, of ill luck, or of sadness. My life had been a dream, not evil, but infinitely gloomy and hopeless. It was now a reality, full of hope, gladness, and all manner of good. My home had been like a tomb; to-day it was Paradise. My heart had been as though it had not existed; to-day it beat with strength and youth and the certainty of realized happiness. I reveled in the beauty of the world, and called loveliness out of the future to enjoy it before time should bring it to me, as a traveler in the plains looks up to the mountains, and already tastes the cool air through the dust of the road.

  Here, I thought, we will live and live for years. There we will sit by the fountain toward evening and in the deep moonlight. Down those paths we will wander together. On those benches we will rest and talk. Among those eastern hills we will ride through the soft twilight, and in the old house we will tell tales on winter nights, when the logs burn high, and the holly berries are red, and the old clock tolls out the dying year. On these old steps, in these dark passages and stately rooms, there will one day be the sound of little pattering feet, and laughing child voices will ring up to the vaults of the ancient hall. Those tiny footsteps shall not be slow and sad as mine were, nor shall the childish words be spoken in an awed whisper. No gloomy Welshwoman shall people the dusky corners with weird horrors, nor utter horrid prophecies of death and ghastly things. All shall be young, and fresh, and joyful, and happy, and we will turn the old luck again, and forget that there was ever any sadness.