The Arm and the Darkness

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I do not know how long he will remain this time, Monseigneur. I have told you this!”

  “But it is necessary, Madame, most urgently necessary, that he leave at once. I cannot impress this upon you too profoundly. Is it possible he will remain over a week?”

  “It is possible that he will remain for yearsl” Her voice rose on a vicious and hating pitch.

  “Then, you must urge him, on some excuse, to return with you to Paris, Madame.” The man’s tone was cold and virulent, full of authority.

  Arsène sat up, now, the better to listen. But they did not speak again. Hearing the rustle of footsteps, he flattened himself to the ground. Two forms emerged from the gloom. By turning his head cautiously, Arsène saw that these forms were those of Madame duPres and the mysterious priest, Père de Pacilli. They floated away together, their voices low. Now they were lost to sight.

  Arsène rose. What he had heard was insignificant, but he was certain that something ominous and dangerous had been in those words. Engrossed now, in his conjectures, he pursued his journey to Paris, feeling his own personal sufferings diminished in the awakening of his apprehensions for his friend.

  A few days later a messenger brought a letter from Arsène to Paul. Paul was in his fields and vineyards. Madame duPres received the message. Some prescience warned that cunning woman that in this message was a threat to herself. How she knew this, she could not explain. Perhaps the heightened intuitiveness of those engaged in nefarious and treacherous undertakings impelled her to her suspicions.

  The missive was sealed with Arsène’s signet, but Madame duPres was dexterous. After prolonged and delicate effort, the letter was opened. It was brief and appeared to have been written in haste, and as if the writer was in the grip of some restraining emotion.

  “When you receive this, my dear friend, I shall have gone on my wedding journey. I thank you excessively for the gifts which you had conveyed to Madame and myself, and I trust, upon our return, that you will not wait an instant to visit us.

  “I am compelled to write you this letter because of a disturbing event to which I was an unsuspected witness. But first of all, I must recall to your mind my first suspicions of that saturnine priest, de Pacilli, which embarrassed you upon my open expression of them. I could not believe he is innocuous. Now I am certain that he is even worse than I suspected, and more unfathomable.

  “Upon leaving you after my visit to Chantilly, I paused to rest at the edge of the forest, in the twilight. I heard voices, which I later recognized as those of Madame duPres and that ominous priest. He was urging her to plead with you to return with her to Paris. He appeared most insistent and commanding, and no longer spoke in that mawkish voice of feigned meekness which he directed at you and me. They spoke no more that I could hear, but all my sensibilities were aroused to an appreciation of some danger to you. I cannot urge you too strongly to insist that his bishop replace him immediately. Even in this event, be warned: there is some evil afoot against you.

  “I conclude this hasty missive with the hope that we shall meet again within a brief period. Because of the disturbed conditions now prevailing throughout Europe, our wedding journey is not to be extensive. I intend to spend some time on the estates of my mother in Gascony. Please accept my expressions of love and devotion, eternally.”

  Cold terror seized the woman upon reading this message. She hastened at once to Monseigneur Antoine de Pacilli, who was now all alone in the humble house of the old priest. He read the letter in chill black silence. Then he fixed his glittering almond eyes upon her with malignant resolution.

  “We must work with all speed,” he said.

  And then he tore the letter to shreds with precise and vicious and delicate movements, as though it were a living thing with nerves and muscles to endure agony.

  CHAPTER XXX

  Madame de Richepin wrote to her mother, Madame de Tremblant from Gascony:

  “Dearest Mama, it is with deep anxiety that I beseech you to inform me if there has been news of my dear uncle, who disappeared so alarmingly before my wedding. You know how I love him, not only because he is my godfather, but for the excessive kindness he has always bestowed upon you, dear Mama, and me and my sisters. Arsène joins me in this message, as he appears sorely apprehensive about Uncle Raoul, though he persists in his refusal to divulge to me wherein lies his anxiety.

  “I received your missive upon our arrival in Gascony, in which you affectionately inquire as to my health and my state of happiness. My health is excellent, as always. But I cannot speak so about my happiness.

  “I was innocently under the impression that Arsène and I were to have a gay visit to his father’s estates, where our neighbors would be amiable and agreeable people. It is true we visited these estates, where for a brief time, we were regaled with banquets and balls and hunting and riding. The toilettes of the ladies, however, left much to be desired, and it was evident that few of them had been to Paris recently. My gowns were greatly admired and envied, and there is quite a flurry among the local dressmakers to copy them for the ladies. All this was very agreeable. The gentlemen, though tinged with the manners of the country, were excessively gallant, and Arsène pretended to be green with jealousy. But this was only pretense, for, to my distress, he appeared preoccupied, and had the alarming habit of disappearing for long intervals to inspect the estates. Alas, this was not all. He engaged’ our hosts in long arguments about which I still remain in ignorance, though I believe they referred to what he called the ‘condition’ of the peasants about the estates. The gentlemen, though always polite, appeared astounded and bewildered, and, in some cases, very angry. I feared at every instant that he would be challenged. In truth, some of the replies of the gentlemen would hardly have been borne by a man of spirit. And Arsène was always ready with a challenge and a sword, and formerly appeared to take umbrage at the mildest remark. However, he appeared to be unaware of hardly veiled insults, and only sank deeper in his preoccupation.

  “This, too, might have been endurable. I am a bride, chosen by him, and always he appeared to regard me with the deepest interest and affection. Yet, while we remained on his father’s estates, he would disappear unaccountably for hours at a time, and even overnight. My natural pique and tears passed unnoticed by him. He developed a permanent frown, and an irascible tongue. I might have been an old and wearisome wife of many years.

  “He scarcely danced with me at balls, though he was once most expert at ballets and minuets. I frequently discovered him hidden in distant corners engaging hosts and other gentlemen in long obscure arguments, during which much heat was displayed, and voices were not amiable.

  “I do not know what has happened to my husband, though I perceived a change in him since the dolorous time when he disappeared for a long interval in Paris, and I was made ill in consequence. He has become progressively paler and thinner, and I hardly recognize his expressions, so grim are they, so concentrated and alarming. He was always quarrelsome, but it was a light-hearted quarrelsomeness. Now, it is actually gloomy and somber, and quite menacing.

  “Very abruptly, and without allowing me the opportunity to take polite leave of our former gracious hosts and hostesses, he bore me away to Gascony. Dearest Mama, do you know Gascony? I assure you it is the vilest and most desolate spot.

  “The heat is intolerable. The country is a glare of white light. The faces of the people are strange to me, and their dialect grates upon my sensitive ear. Nevertheless, I was prepared to be amiable to them. But from the first they were suspicious of me. The ladies covertly sneered at my toilettes. They dress coarsely and simply, and appeared amused at my manners and my gowns. There is much hunting, but of a gross sort. Moreover, the château here is most uncomfortable, and the servants boorish. The few dinners to which we were invited were conspicuous for their disgusting dishes and strong bad wine. It is very dull and tedious. I believed that Arsène, who had always adored gaiety and dancing and the light life of Paris, would soon become weary o
f this abominable and ugly place. But, alas, here his peculiar new preoccupations only manifested themselves more threateningly.

  “Dearest Mama, I am conscious that this is a most astonishing and mournful letter for one who is only lately a bride to pen to her mother. But I am so distraught that the words pour from my heart. Is it not possible for you to write an urgent missive to me implying that it is most necessary for us to return to Paris at once? I close with the most passionate expressions of devotion for you and my dearest sisters. Clarisse.”

  After completing this affecting letter, Madame de Richepin wiped her great blue eyes daintily with her lace kerchief, and folded the paper with angry and exaggerated gestures which testified to her distrait condition of mind. She glanced about her austerely furnished boudoir with a shudder, recalling, with grief, the luxurious chamber of her maidenhood. The open swinging window framed the bronzed bare fields simmering under a sun that was almost as brazen in a sky white and molten with summer heat. Young Madame de Richepin regarded all this, flinging out her soft and delicate hands in a gesture of complete and bewildered despair. It was only the wildest dream! She had married the gayest and most dashing gallant in Paris, a gentleman famous for his quickness and dexterity with the sword, a dancer par excellence, a wit that could convulse a marble statue, a graceful maker of legs far surpassing any other courtier. And by some sinister legerdemain, he had become a somber and irascible man, preoccupied with strange and incomprehensible thoughts, a scowler and a curser, given to mysterious humors and to comings and goings without preamble or excuse. This was surely not her Arsène! The tears flowed again, and she wiped them away carefully, so as not to deface or blotch the soft rose of her cheek. She shook out the shimmering white silk of her morning robe, and patted the profuse flaxen curls that fell over her brow and ears and long white neck. She caught a glimpse of her beauty in an opposite mirror, and the vision both saddened and soothed her.

  Ah! if she had followed her heart and married her real love! But he was a Huguenot, and though dear Uncle Raoul was one, also, Mama had not countenanced such a match, which would jeopardize her position at court. How tedious were these men with their passionate adherence to one religion or another! All that was important was love, balls, dazzling toilettes, gaiety, laughter, and flirtatious intrigues. In such a delightful world, why did gentlemen conspire to destroy all delight for some vague doctrine or another? Was it not wiser, and simpler, merely to be gay and happy?

  She felt a consuming anger and indignation at all this folly, which had left her, a young and blooming bride, quite alone in a bare chamber in an inexecrable country château, while her bridegroom tramped about his burned and barren acres with lowering brow, quarreling fiercely with that honest Monsieur Dariot, and raising his voice in abominable language every hour of the day. Who would have believed that Arsène would have been transformed into a fanatic, especially into that brand of fanaticism that was totally incomprehensible to the female mind?

  She was overcome with her longing for her beloved Paris, for her coarse mother and pretty sisters, for the Bois and the balls, the laughter and the candlelight shining on rouged faces and jeweled toilettes, for polished floors and beautiful restrained gardens and fountains sparkling under the moon. She listened to the bitter burning silence of the Gascon countryside, broken only by the strident shrieking of hot insects. The blinding light quickened when the fiery wind blew, a parching wind like the dazzle of sun on brass, increasing that light.

  The she heard Arsène’s footsteps on the stone corridor, and a moment later he flung open the door and entered the chamber. His boots, once so polished and elegant, were crusted with red clay. His britches and his doublet had been donned hastily, and they, too, were gritty with dust. His dark hair was disordered; there were smudges on his cheeks and chin. His sharp black brows were drawn together over his glittering dark eyes, and his mouth was gloomy and heavy. Worse than all this, to young Clarisse, was the startled and sullen glance he gave her, as though her presence was unexpected and none too welcome.

  She rose automatically at his entry, and her knee bent politely. He was not wearing his sword, but he was carrying a whip, which he stared at for a moment before hurling it pettishly into a distant corner. She did not love him, but he had the power to render her faint and palpitating. She hoped that he perceived how bewitching she was this morning. But there was no lightening of his countenance. He looked at the small commode upon which she had been writing, and asked quickly:

  “You have written the letter, then?”

  “But certainly, Monsieur,” she answered, tossing her head so that the silken curls flowed backward upon her shoulders in a delicious flurry.

  He stared at her blindly for a long moment or two. Then he said: “I cannot rest until I know he has returned safely.”

  He flung himself, sprawling, on the wooden settle near the bare window and gazed over his simmering land.

  “That Dariot!” he muttered. “A piggish imbecile! What would Paul do with such a creature? He has a skin as thick as leather, and a mind closed to all argument! How is one to endure him?”

  “I have always considered that gentleman to be completely incomprehensible and impossible!” exclaimed Clarisse, eagerly.

  Arsène stared at her blankly. “When have you entered into conversation with him, Madame?”

  She was perplexed. “But many times, Arsène. However, he was not a frequent visitor at the Hôtel de Tremblant. But it is well known that he is tiresome and dull, a poor wit and a worse dancer.”

  Arsène stared again, then laughed abruptly. “Ah, we talk, at cross purposes. I was speaking of Dariot, not the Comte de Vitry.” Now he was both annoyed and impatient. “The Comte is my friend, and worth all the rest of Paris, Madame. It is your loss that you do not realize this.”

  She tossed her head once more. “Arsène, you are droll, and tedious. The Comte inspires nothing but ennui in the discerning. His conversation excites yawns. He is gauche and careless, and a discredit to his father. So says my mother—”

  “Your mother, Madame,” interrupted Arsène, with a rude and kindled violence, “is a fool. Like the rest of Paris. But what else is to be expected from a city of jackdaws and screeching peacocks?”

  Clarisse was so stricken at this, that she burst into tears so sincere, so bewildered and wretched, that she did nothing to halt them, and forgot entirely about her petal complexion. The crystal drops flowed over her cheeks and ran into the corners of her trembling mouth. There was something so touching in this pretty spectacle, something so helpless, that Arsène, with an impatient mutter, rose and took her in his arms. She sank against his breast and would not be comforted.

  “Ah, Monsieur, it were better that we had never married!” she lamented. “It is not hard to discern that I am nothing to you. Why, then, did you seek my hand?”

  For one brief instant, Arsène, the headlong and selfish and fiercely impulsive, had a glimmering of the incongruous situation into which he had forced his young bride, and an understanding of her bewilderment and his own heedless confusion. In that instant, he experienced an angry shame and embarrassment in the clarified light of his understanding, and a peculiar humiliation as though he had allowed himself to be trapped in some profound and ridiculous foolishness. He stood apart from himself, stupified. Less than a year ago, dazzled with this young girl’s beauty and charm, he had become betrothed to her. She was a part of his frivolous and light-hearted world, a world that might bore him occasionally, but was almost always exciting and delightful, and excessively amusing. More and more stupefied in retrospect, he recalled that until very recently he had never had a serious nor disturbing thought, that his mind had been occupied with adventure and intrigue, with quick flaming hatred and amorous episodes, alike evanescent and trivial. Had he ever had a serious thought? Not since his schooldays. And he remembered little of them, except in swift and disordered flashes. “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” Montaigne had said, and though he had quoted
that with an air on occasion, he had never understood it. Until now.

  It was not Arsène de Richepin who had married Mademoiselle de Tremblant. It was a changeling in his body which had considered that in honor he had been bound to a promise given by a stranger.

  Now as the girl wept, there was a terrible anguish in him. He had an impulse to exclaim to her, in pity and self-hatred: “I have wronged you! I am not he to whom you became betrothed!”

  But who he was, he did not know. Complete confusion fell over him like a black and swirling cloud. All things upon which he tried to fix his despairing vision lost outline and substance, became gyrating apparitions without meaning or coherence. He only knew that for some time he had been the victim of aching spiritual pain, formless, huge and distracting. He had listened to Paul de Vitry, to the Duc de Tremblant, to the Abbé Mourion, to François Grandjean, and these voices, once tedious and repetitious, like the oft repeated and tiresome phrases of a disliked and stuffy teacher, had suddenly impinged on his inner ear with the impact of impassioned significance and urgent summons roaring into the ear-drum of an only half-awakened man.

  He was still half-blind in a new, gigantic world, whose infinite dimensions filled him with vague terror and affright. He had only been able to follow the voices of his friends, relying, in the darkness, on the touch of their fevered hands.

  And into that terrible and enormous world of reality, he had brought this poor pretty child.

  Now, in his new capacity to see circumstance through the eye of another, he saw through her eye, beheld her perplexity and terror, her grief and suffering. He saw that she gazed at him, through her tears, as one gazes at a threatening stranger, fearfully trying to trace, in his lineaments, some reassuring familiarity.

  He sighed, profoundly, and with weariness. He owed her the debt, at the very least, of attempting to gain her understanding.

  He sat down, drawing her upon his knee gently, her arms still clinging about his neck in childish fear and despair. She laid her head upon his shoulder, the fair flaxen curls falling over his breast. And then, like a knife dividing his heart and exposing its inmost nerves and pulsing arteries, a pain convulsed him, a frightful longing and sorrow. He forgot the girl in his arms. He saw another face, another pair of stern blue eyes and a young and quiet mouth restrained in endurance and fortitude. This is she, my heart, my soul, he thought, with the devastating simplicity of appalling and inexorable truth.