Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/124

112 wise, that she had not been murdered. She was stamping up and down the passage, banging at the closed door with her clenched fist, peering into the kitchen, making as much disturbance as was in her power.

“The only thing alive, barring rats, seems to be blackbeetles. We must have slaughtered thousands when we came in. The kitchen’s black with them. Come and look.” I declined. “But they can hardly have opened that door and shut it with a bang. There’s no evidence to show which door it was, but I believe it was one which leads into Bluebeard’s chamber.”

“Pollie! How can you tell?”

“I can’t tell, but I can believe. Can’t I believe, my dear? I shall, anyhow. It is my belief”—she spoke with an emphasis which was meant for me—“that the mystery it conceals peeped out, then, fearing discovery, popped back again. It was its hurry to pop back which caused the bang. I wonder, by the way, if it was anyone who made a bolt into the street.”

She tried to open the front door, against my wish, and failed. We had opened it from within easily enough before, when we had gone out to interview her Tom; but now it appeared to be as hermetically sealed as the door leading into what she called “Bluebeard’s Chamber.” It was no use reasoning with her. So soon as she found that it would not open she made up her mind that it should. For a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes she tried everything she could to force it. In vain. By the time we returned to the bedroom she was not in the best of tempers. And I had resolved that nothing should induce me to stay any longer alone with her beneath that roof than I could possibly help.

We had something like a quarrel. She said some very cruel things to me, and, when I told her she was