The Final Hour

by Taylor Caldwell

  When Peter became restless, demanded paper and certain books, seemed about to engage Henri in serious discussion, all this was dexterously evaded by the courteous host. Later, the physician would call upon the irritable invalid, with urgings that he ‘rest’ a little longer, that he relax, be calm, that his health was improving and it would be folly to destroy the gains already made. Peter, for Celeste’s sake, would subside. But his sleeplessness increased.

  He felt surrounded by enemies, though everyone was extremely solicitous. Sometimes, in vague but feverish words, he suggested this to Celeste. But Celeste, who had been in consultation with the physician, would plead with him to be patient. Peter would become silent. But he would regard his wife with passionate eyes in which the confused light of a prisoner would glimmer.

  He was experiencing the sluggish impotence of one in chains. He was encompassed with care and friendliness, and the affection of Annette, who was very fond of him. He heard nothing of significance in the kind voices of his relatives. He remembered the deviousness, craft and greed of his brothers, their murderous exigency. But now he saw only bland smooth faces, heard only expressions of solicitude, and easy laughter. Where were the undercurrents he remembered, the hatred, the plottings, the sensation of terrible things occurring in silence and in secrecy? They were not present in the least. Utter amiability and calm prevailed. Everyone appeared on the best of terms, engrossed with nothing but smilingly contemptuous opinions of the President, golf, summer plans, and family affections. They joked, laughed, brought small gifts for the invalid, and many invitations. The Depression did not appear to affect them. ‘We’re marking time,’ said Francis, Peter’s brother, he of the frigid blondness, now greying.

  ‘Marking time?’ Peter would say, sombrely. ‘For what?’

  But no one would answer him except with light laughter, a pressure on the shoulder, a change of subject.

  However, very slowly, as the days passed, he began to feel undercurrents again, more powerful, more frightful, more significant and sinister, than he had ever remembered. They threw him into a frenzy. He was a blind man groping through awful caverns filled with muffled echoes, with the brushing-by of appalling enemies, with the breath of unseen terrors. He could not speak of them even to Celeste, who was engrossed only with his health now. He never saw Adelaide more than once a week, she who had been his confidante even more than had been his wife. When he did see her, she was always with others.

  He was alone. He was paralyzed with the inertia of those who are alone. He stretched out his hands in the dark, to the suspected shapes, the whispering voices, and encountered nothing. But his dread and fear grew as the days glided like a silver dream into June, into July. He heard the urgent call from a distance, and could not rise. He prayed. In his prayers was the terror of the threatened, the terror of one who knew but had no power, no words, to express his knowledge.

  We must leave here, he thought. I’ve done no good coming here. He suggested to Celeste leaving Robin’s Nest, but frightened by the private words af the physicians, she resisted, with murmured soothing words and loving touches.

  It came to him slowly, with overpowering and almost superstitious fear, that he was being watched. That even while his many relatives talked to him idly and comfortably of the most unimportant things, he was watched by them. He told himself that he was acquiring the suspiciousness and querulous introspection of an invalid. But it was no use. He saw the sudden gleam of an eye here and there, immediately averted. Why were they watching him; if they were? It was absurd. He was a fool. He was no power among the Bouchards. It is true his anti-war, anti-munitions, book The Terrible Swift Sword, had been enormously popular, in America. He had thought it had much influence. (His relative, Georges Bouchard the publisher, had amicably assured him, however, that a writer’s influence was romantically and grossly overestimated, especially in America, where so few were mentally literate.) But the book was no longer mentioned, even casually, in the papers, or in literary magazines. He thought this inevitable. The book had been published so long ago. He did not know that his family had had much to do with this suppression in periodicals and newspapers of any mention of the book. Nor did he know that his family had prevented its sale to the moving picture industry, and that a large sum had exchanged discreet hands.

  Why, then, should he have the sensation of being unremittingly watched? And all this while no one would discuss anything of importance with him. He was asked, affectionately, about the celebrities he had met in France, Germany, Italy and England. But the instant he spoke, with rising passion, of what he had seen there, and understood, the subject was languidly changed, faces became disinterested, and bored. He thought at first that it was because his relatives discerned that he was becoming upset, and this annoyed him, for only when he spoke of these things did he come alive. But later, he began to wonder.

  He read the Windsor News, the newspaper owned by his people. Everything in it was restrained and conservative. It deprecated the imminence of war. It laughed tolerantly at any Governmental suggestions of dire future events. He found it intolerable. He subscribed to various liberal periodicals, but they came to him desultorily, and had a habit of disappearing.

  By the end of July, he was in a ferment. His terror was a living thing. Sometimes he would almost forcibly seize on Henri, the power of the Bouchards, and demand to be told what was taking place in the company, in its subsidiaries. Henri would raise his eyebrows over those pale and implacable eyes, and say, humorously: ‘We’re just getting by. Marking time. What can interest you in our affairs? Frankly, I don’t know what we’ll do, if we don’t get rid of that man in the White House next year. Business is at a standstill.’

  It is not true, Peter would think, in dread and despair. I know. I know what you are doing. But he could do nothing but look at Henri with impotent fear, with gathering hatred, and overwhelming confusion.

  He tried to engage his relatives in discussions of politics. But beyond the fact that they were enthusiastically vitriolic at the mention of Mr Roosevelt’s name, they said nothing of significance, except to hint at a Republican victory in the coming Presidential election next year. ‘We have our man picked,’ Jean was indiscreet enough to acknowledge, but when Peter asked to be enlightened, Jean drifted away followed by the dark glances of other relatives.

  So, he discovered nothing. He ought not to have come to Robin’s Nest, to be smothered in this sinister solicitude. He was imprisoned. He was kept incommunicado.

  In the meantime, the shining air of peace was constantly agitated by winds full of portent and horror. It might have been his imagination, so far as the Bouchards were concerned. Moreover, instead of improving, he grew worse. He was being subtly poisoned by an inertia inflicted upon him by others. He would lie awake at night, thinking of this, thinking that he was going mad. His reason repudiated his terror. But his instinct warned him ominously.

  Engrossed with himself, smothering at Robin’s Nest, he did not see the fever gathering in Celeste’s pale face, which was losing its luminous quality. He did not see her desperate eyes, the increasing worn repression about her mouth.

  There was another thing: for all the discussions of summer plans, Peter saw that none of the Bouchards was absent from Windsor for more than a few days. They, too, waited, as he waited. He felt their eyes, fixed and dangerous, turned eastward, across the sea. The world waited.

  CHAPTER VIII

  On July 26, 1939, Christopher Bouchard (‘the Chromium Robot’) and his wife Edith, sister to Henri, came to Robin’s Nest from Florida. Christopher ostensibly to see his beloved only sister Celeste. He had been her guardian, substituting for Jules, the father he had hated so monstrously. He had almost destroyed the girl. She had never known this. At the end, before the final implacability, he had been weak. He could not complete the destruction. Celeste’s faith in him had saved herself, and strangely, also her brother.

  Christopher was within sight of fifty now, but he had the agelessness of thos
e of his temperament and his colouring. He was much like his father, except for that colouring, which was fair, pallid, steel-tinted, with that glimmering hint of polished chromium which had given him his nickname. Bloodless, with a small sleek skull with thin grey-brown hair, earlobes so delicate and small that they were almost transparent, slight and slender rather than excessively tall, toneless and unemphatic of voice, he at first gave no hint of the deadliness of his personality, his sadistic cruelty, his inner selfish terror, his murderous exigency. His hands were delicate also, with blue veins and pale nails. He moved softly, like the ‘silver snake’ his brother, Armand, had declared he resembled. His features were refined and attenuated, expressing nothing, and there was a silvery paleness on his ‘Egyptian’ eyes. When he smiled, it was an immobile smile. He trusted no one. He hated everyone. There was a quality of hatred even in his love for his wife and sister. And only his wife and his mother and his sister loved him. For his mother, Adelaide, he had only the most indifferent malice and contempt. Usually, he forgot her existence, and once, when reminded that she was still alive, he exclaimed, to Edith: ‘What! Isn’t she dead yet? Good God, she’s almost eighty, then!’

  He never forgot that it was Adelaide who had helped thwart his scheming to marry his sister to Henri, and so advance his own fortunes, his own plottings against his brother Armand, their father’s heir. He was now president of Duval-Bonnet, aeroplane manufacturers, in Florida.

  Edith Bouchard, sister of Henri, great-granddaughter of the terrible Ernest Barbour, wife of Christopher, was a plain but aristocratic woman now in her early forties. She had the dark colouring of the ‘Latin’ Bouchards, as opposed to the blondness of the ‘Saxon’ Bouchards. Small, and erect of head, she held herself with a kind of cold arrogance. Her body was somewhat hard, and very slender, with broad thin shoulders, and she was about as tall as her brother, appearing taller because of her straight, quickly moving figure. In some features, she resembled the chic Rosemarie, for her face was very narrow, hard and high of cheekbone, the nose too long and thin and prominent, the chin square and uncompromising. She used little artifice, and her naturally sallow tint of complexion was covered only by a film of dark face-powder, unrelieved by rouge or lipstick. Her eyes were nut-brown, but had no hint of the warmth of such a colour; they were direct and forthright, and completely honest, for all her native cleverness and disillusion. But, she had éclat, breeding, taste, and a certain elegance which the more flamboyant Rosemarie did not possess. Even her hair, black and straight and lustreless though it was, and dressed in a fashion similar to Rosemarie’s, added to her appearance of smartness.

  She had no children, had never desired them, for, while she had a deep and hidden kindness and integrity, she was without sentiment, and completely selfish. There was also another reason, which she hardly admitted even to herself. She was afraid of giving birth to another Bouchard.

  Completely undeluded about her husband, she nevertheless loved him with the only passion of her life. She and her brother, Henri, had been close and affectionate, but she had never felt for him this complete dedication of heart and soul. However, had it come to a real contest between her brother and her husband, as she knew it must some day, she would have surveyed the situation dispassionately, her opinion and support going unswervingly to the one she deemed less evil. Christopher knew this. He often chaffed her about her ‘Puritanism,’ but he respected her for it.

  For Celeste, she had a casual fondness, a wry amusement, a pity, and sometimes, a regret. She loathed poor little Annette, as she loathed all that was sickly and impotent. Peter was the one exception, and she felt for him only compassion and an indifferent sense of indignation for his sufferings.

  Often she reflected that fourteen years had passed since the marriage of Celeste to Peter, and each year was like another fort in the vulnerable area that surrounded Peter. But now Celeste and her husband were under the very roof of the inexorably patient Henri, and her first reaction to the news had been disgust and apprehension. She knew Henri very well indeed. Surely, even those innocents, Peter and Celeste, ought to know him a little by now. Surely, they might have remembered, with vagueness, that he never forgot, never forgave, and never gave up what he had desired. He had desired Celeste. The blue-eyed lamb had taken ‘shelter’ in the very ambush of the wolf.

  Christopher and Edith had arrived unexpectedly, on a Sunday morning, by aeroplane. It was still very early. Henri met them at the door, in the wake of the servants, who bustled about the cab, extracting baggage. Edith kissed him warmly, subjected his face to a furtive but very keen searching, even while she knew it was no use. Henri never revealed anything he desired to keep hidden. He shook hands heartily with Christopher. He stood there on the terrace, strong, somewhat stocky, in loose morning dress, for the day was very hot, and his sister felt again the impact of his formidable power. Even while he shook hands with Christopher, his left hand retained the cool brown fingers of his sister, and he pressed them with real affection.

  ‘They’re all in bed, except me,’ he said. He walked up towards Robin’s Nest between his sister and Christopher. ‘But they’ve been called. They’ll be down almost at once. How was the trip?’

  ‘Excellent. Duval-Bonnet plane, of course,’ replied Christopher, with his metallic grin, which warped his dry fine skin into a web of wrinkles. There was about him, reflected Henri, as he often had reflected, the quality of a parched and brittle death’s-head, sardonic and evil.

  The two men went into the mansion, but Edith lingered alone in the morning, looking about her with a strange dark wistfulness on her plain face, a softness that was unusual. She had always loved Robin’s Nest, the house built by her grandparents in the suburb of Roseville. She had not been here for years. Now her cold hard heart ached with nostalgia.

  This was the great Georgian house of grey stone, built for the tragic Gertrude Barbour by her husband, Paul. Through those grilled windows, Gertrude must often have glanced down the winding road that led through the park-like estate. For whom had she always been watching, until her early death? For Phillippe, the cousin whom she was to have married, and who had been sent away by her father? The parkway lay all about her granddaughter Edith, serene, golden in the summer sun, shadowed with the purple shade of the moving trees, so tall and majestic with the early rosy light on their upper branches. There was a stern and formal beauty about the grounds. But in the rear, Edith knew there were immense rose gardens, grottoes, little winding paths, fountains, and bending willows full of wind and mysterious whispers.

  By American standards, the house was ‘old,’ and impossibly archaic. The tremendous square rooms were without ‘style’ as the lady Bouchards often declared. But Edith remembered their cool and gracious quality, their quiet duskiness in the heart of the day, their immense fireplaces in every room, their dignity and classic grace, their lofty ceilings and darkly polished floors. She remembered the air of formality, even during the most intimate parties, the restraint of panelled wood and damask walls. From the heroic proportions of the reception hall, a graceful and strongly delicate spiral staircase curved upwards. Sometimes, on dim and lonely nights when she had lived there, Edith, lying in her bed, had imagined she had heard the rustling of taffeta on the stairs, the echo of a sad young sigh coming from a heart that was slowly breaking.

  She stood alone on the pathway to the house, listening to the flow of warm wind in the trees, breathing the scent of warm damp morning and the illusive fragrance of the rose gardens and the living earth. The sunlight shone on the dark severe face under the smart hat, and she felt its early heat on her gloved hands. The breeze stirred her thin black suit, fluttered the plain white collar. Birds, lulled by her immobility, ran over the plush of the green grass almost at her narrow feet. She heard their sweet twitterings in the trees, saw the flash of sunlight on their wings as they darted into shadows. The fresh and shining silence of the morning flowed over everything like water. Sometimes the ivy on the grey stones of the mansion turned wh
ite in the wind.

  The long sweep of the driveway, the greenness, the flowing trees, suddenly were a bright dazzle before her stern eyes. She and Henri had been born here. This was her home. She felt her flesh one with the house, the very living substance of her part of the earth. The house was almost a hundred years old, but only two people had been born here, herself and her brother. It was a house built for large families of happy children, who would play in those running mauve shadows under the trees, who would fill the lofty rooms with laughter and bright frocks and rosy faces. The music room should resound with small fingers at the immense grand piano. There was a harp there now, reflected Edith, Annette’s harp. No doubt the twilight would tinkle with silvery notes evoked by fragile fingers. She felt a sense of outrage.

  Perhaps, if Christopher and I had lived here, instead of Henri and Annette, I might have had children, she thought. The house would compel it. But, there might be a curse upon it, she reflected, with wry humour. Even her mother, Alice had not been born here, but in Ernest Barbour’s house. Birth fled from these majestic precincts.

  Her sense of outrage grew. How could Henri have been so obtuse as not to realize that the frail Annette would never bear him children? All at once, Edith, in spite of her fundamental hardness, felt the profundity of earth. It seemed, for the first time in her existence, that life was more important than power and wealth. She was startled. She was a true Bouchard, indifíerent, disingenuous, and even cunning, for all her honesty and forthrightness. Never had she thought these things before—that children, that home, that serenity and love might be more valuable than the things by which the Bouchards lived. They had had a sense of dynasty—yes. And so had produced children to carry on that dynasty. But children as flesh, as life, as health and sweetness and strength of heart and soul—this had never occurred to them. Power and revenge had moved Henri. He had not cared that they had also made his virility impotent in the sterile Annette. Did he never long for children, if even for the sake of dynasty? He was her brother; surely at times he must have felt this stirring that now created such sad havoc in her own flesh. She was filled with burning compassion for him.