The Arm and the Darkness

by Taylor Caldwell

  Arsène listened to this incredulously, with a stupefied expression upon his face. But Paul smiled grimly, and still grasping the hilt of his sword, replied: “I disdain to answer Monseigneur’s foolish accusations, but if Monseigneur prefers to discuss this some morning, at dawn, in a more peremptory fashion, I am at his service.”

  Finding his voice at last, Arsène shouted at his brother: “Morbleu, you incredible fool! Why have you come here with your babblings and your folly? How dare you intrude upon us? I ask you again, withdraw, lest I force you to do so with my own hands!”

  Louis gazed at him with long and malignant bitterness. “Appeals to you have entered deaf ears. You persist in your criminal stupidity. You are proceeding to the ultimate consequences of your acts, which can bring nothing but death and ruin to yourself, and anguish of mind to our father, and suffering to your wife. You have associated yourself with traitors like this, not from any ardent, conviction of mind, which might be understood, but from pure adventurousness and a love of confusion and violence.” He pointed directly at Paul, and continued to address his brother: “This man has seduced what poor intelligence you possess, and would lead you to only one end: the gallows or the ax. He is imbued with the evil of Satan, and would guide foolish victims like yourself to one foreordained end. I protest his presence in this house, and I have means to make more peremptory my protest. I ask you now to send him from under this roof, and do not mistake my feebleness of intention.”

  His voice, as he spoke to his brother, was full of the scorn and hatred he felt for him, the jealousy and burning poison of his own nature. In Louis’ worst moments, Arsène had never seen such a look upon his face, nor had heard such a voice. For an instant he was daunted, as all sane men must be daunted at the aspect of madness. Then his rage gathered itself together again, and he advanced menacingly upon his brother; for he was stung unbearably at the comments upon his intelligence:

  “Unless you apologize to my friend, and withdraw immediately, I shall take it upon myself to rectify your insults at whatever cost!” He forgot his former compassion for Louis, and his new understanding, and obscene words burst from his lips:

  “You are filled with poison because you do not possess a woman, because you have fixed your perverted love upon one who rightfully despises you, and has despised you from your birth! You do not like these remarks, Monseigneur? I perceive that you pale, that you start. You did not think I knew your secret? You will now reflect that I do, you venomous priest! Return to your cloister, your master, and your itching, and leave honest men to their thoughts and their affairs. Intrude again, and by the wounds of God, I shall do you a mischief!”

  Filled with a sudden sickness and aversion for these savage remarks, Paul caught Arsène’s arm, but Arsène, in his transports of rage, shook him off violently. He stretched out his hands toward his brother’s throat, but Louis did not flinch nor recoil. He seemed to grow in stature, in menace and ominousness, for all the blue lines about his lips and his sunken eyes.

  “No sword shall soil itself with your polluted blood!” screamed Arsène, beside himself because of the fear for his friend in his heart. “I shall do what is to be done with these hands, as I have longed to do for many years!”

  He was truly enraged, but he was also afraid. He well knew that Louis had been one of the most gifted swordsmen at Pluvenal’s Academy, and understood instinctively that it is not the vehement or violent man who is the most deadly, but the man of cold and austere temperament, who can proceed and calculate every thrust without passion. Louis had defeated him on more than one occasion during fencing lessons, and in moments of sport, and Arsène did not deceive himself that Louis, for all his calling, had lost his skill. Paul, for all his cleverness with the rapier, had not the brutal heart and callousness necessary for deadly duelling, and, again, Arsène knew that Louis comprehended this, in his icy and vitriolic mind. To fight successfully, Paul would have to be imbued with burning ardor and indignation. He would not have these in any contest with the brother of his friend. For one distressed instant, Arsène contemplated the impotence of the civilized man. Therefore, he sought to turn Louis’ adamant intention upon himself.

  But Louis smiled at him with deadly scorn, and brushed aside those hands so near to his throat. Now he was truly dangerous, because of his brother’s violently indiscreet remarks.

  “You fool!” he said, in low and crushing tones. “Do you think for a moment that I would engage you? Do you think for an instant that you would dare lay a finger upon me?”

  He seemed to increase even more enormously in stature, to fill the dim and lambent air with lightning and storm. His eyes blazed upon Arsène balefully. Then he turned to Paul de Vitry.

  “You perceive what division, what danger, you have brought to this household. I am prepared to engage you whenever you desire, Monsieur le Comte. But I am also prepared to destroy you by more impersonal means. Do not deceive yourself that your activities and treason have been undetected. The trap is drawing closer about you. Your days are numbered.”

  Paul was silent. He looked at his friend, and there was a great sadness and weariness in his expression.

  Truly beside himself now, Arsène seized the hilt of his sword. The weapon was half withdrawn, when Louis caught his wrist easily. His fingers of cold steel crushed Arsène’s flesh. He smiled down into his brother’s eyes with savage bitterness. Then he flung aside that wrist in a gesture of complete contempt. He lifted his hand and struck Arsène fully in the face, with slow and calculated brutality, as a master strikes an impudent servant or a loutish child.

  “You would play Cain with me, you imbecile?” he asked, with that strange and glittering smile.

  A darkness, filled with swirling sparks, fell over Arsène’s eyes. He heard an immense thunder in his ears. He felt a supporting hand on his arm, which he tried to throw off. It tightened. When the mist cleared, he discovered that he was alone with Paul, who was speaking to him urgently.

  But he could not listen. He was overwhelmed with shame.

  An almost voluptuous paralysis held him. He writhed physically and spiritually. He felt that he was dying. He had hated before, lusted before, but never with this complete and flaming madness. He began to sob, with nauseated dryness and agony.

  “Some day, I shall kill him!” he cried aloud. He raised his clenched fist, and regarded Paul with madness. “I swear by all that is holy to me, that I shall kill him!”

  Paul was too wise a man to find bravado in these cries. He was horrified. He caught that upraised hand, held it tightly in his own, tried to control Arsène by the quiet fire in his own eyes.

  “Arsène, I implore you to control yourself. You have been unbearably insulted, as I have. This man seeks a quarrel with us, to destroy us. Would you play into his hands? Control yourself, I beseech you. We have work to do. Am I to be disappointed again, in my last friend? From no other man but this would I endure the infamy which has been put upon me. But there are matters beyond our mere satisfaction. I beg of you to remember them.” His voice broke, sternly, and after a moment he resumed: “Do not betray me. Do not desert me. You have promised me this, and I hold you to your promise.”

  The madness retreated like a fiery wave from Arsène, but a cold deadliness replaced it. When Paul released his hand, he let it fall heavily to his side.

  “Until I kill him, I shall know no peace,” he said, and his voice was as quiet as Paul’s. “I swear this. I cannot endure with this shame poisoning me. I have endured a lifetime of insults and provocation from that foul and inhuman priest. Now is the time for retribution. But I shall withhold my hand until I have served you, Paul. That is my word to you.”

  Paul sighed. He said nothing. He seemed overwhelmed with sudden and tragic thoughts, sick and disintegrating. When Arsène, frightened at the aspect of his friend, put his arm about him, Paul replied to that gesture with a heart-broken smile.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  The Cardinal sat in his chair near the window of his
chamber. His black garments enhanced the yellowness and mortal texture of his delicate and narrow face. He was an unbreathing effigy of wax, his aristocratic head thrown back against the crimson cushions, which were fringed with gold, his frail eyelids, full and large, purple as if bruised, his pale and fragile lips parted in his beard. The golden shadow of the muted sun chased itself vagrantly over his rigid still features, increasing his deathly aspect. His hands lay motionless on the arms of the chair, relaxed, drooping, exquisite in their slender colorless beauty. Never had he appeared so close to the edge of dissolution, so exhausted, so undone, and yet, strangely, never had he appeared so unearthly, so inexorable, so full of power. It was as if the approach of death, closer than ever, only enhanced the terrible potentialities of this man, threw them into more implacable relief against its black shadow. He might be prostrated in the flesh, but his spirit gained in potency by the dwindling of its body. That body, toxic and overwhelmed by its own poisons, might sicken by the weight of its own soul, and the weariness and agony of that soul, but through its disintegrating sheath the mind that had terrorized all of Europe glittered like an immortal sword.

  Père Joseph had done speaking, and sat near his friend and beloved master. His russet brows were knitted as he contemplated this stricken and frightful man, and he felt a pang of grief and fear, and that great reverence for the Cardinal which pervaded him in moments of such contemplation.

  Now the dim shadow of a voice proceeded from the Cardinal’s lips, though he made no movement, and did not open his eyes:

  “So, de Buckingham has been done to death so that the conspiracy against France can proceed in all its enormous implications.” He mused on this thought, then the strangest and most sinister smile touched his mouth, and Père Joseph knew that he was thinking of the young queen, and her agony at the death of her lover.

  For a terrible instant, Père Joseph suspected that the Cardinal had, himself, ordered the death of de Buckingham. It is not possible! whispered the Capuchin to himself, in swimming horror. Yet, how much did he truly know of this basilisk of a man? Was it possible that he had even jeopardized the very existence of France in order to remove a man beloved by a foolish and inane woman whom he, himself, coveted? Could such as the Cardinal forget himself for such a woman?

  The Cardinal was speaking again, and the waxen aspect of his countenance deepened:

  “But more appalling to me is this news you bring me of the murder of the Duc de Tremblant by—highwaymen. He was my friend. I cannot endure this news.”

  The Capuchin’s unearthly blue eyes bent themselves piercingly on that shut and austere face before him. Were these words hypocrisy? Never had the Cardinal played the hypocrite with him before. Was there irony in these words, a deadly satisfaction and amusement? The expression of the Cardinal had not changed except to become more deathly and prostrated, and now there was a sunken look about him as if he had already died. Not a breath stirred the gray hairs of his thin and pointed beard. The full hooded lids lifted and the Cardinal’s eyes were revealed, and they were clouded and moist as though a hemorrhage had occurred behind them, and he was blind to all except the horror of some secret anguish.

  “It was unfortunate, but the man was an enemy of France,” said the Capuchin, in quiet and steadfast tones. “We must comprehend the hand of God in this. He was dangerous. If, by the muskets and the swords of robbers he has died, then we must see that God uses strange and mysterious instruments.”

  Now the Cardinal fixed his eyes upon some distant spot and smiled. It was a most dreadful smile. The limp hands on the arms of the chair flexed like frail but cogent claws. He was like a corpse animated by some sudden and evil life.

  “I have been thinking,” said the Cardinal, in his mist of a voice. “I have been wondering if the death of one such as de Tremblant is not too much to pay for France.”

  Appalled, the Capuchin listened with turmoil in his heart. He clenched his teeth on his lips. The dreadfulness of the Cardinal’s smile deepened; he seemed to be staring at some frightful and leering vision from out of the ghastly limbo of the universe.

  “I am tired,” said the Cardinal. “I am weary of living. I would that I were dead.”

  The Capuchin rose abruptly. He began to pace up and down the chamber with disordered steps, running his hands through his thatch of russet hair and through his great russet beard. There was an element of fierce flight and fury in his manner. The Cardinal did not appear to see him.

  The Capuchin spoke in a loud but muffled voice: “God has disposed of one of the most formidable enemies of the Church. We must not shrink from that solemn fact. We must remember that the Huguenots hold fortressed cities and embattled towns, that France is in the most awful danger. We must remember that the dangerous hour approaches, and must forget everything else. France is to be split asunder again, to be inundated by a river of civil blood. Everything else must be forgotten, while we gird up our loins.”

  He paused before the Cardinal, whose fixed smile had something spectral and dead in it, like the grimace of a corpse.

  “Can nothing avert the shedding of the blood of Frenchmen?” cried the Capuchin, in real anguish, stretching forth his hands as if he would literally seize the Cardinal’s attention. “Is there nothing we can do to weld Frenchmen together, Huguenot and Catholic, and avert this bloody dream which is settling over France? Can we find no external enemy, no scapegoat, real or imagined, to wed together these opposing forces, and bring peace to France?”

  The Cardinal did not speak. He still stared into space. The Capuchin spoke with even more passion:

  “We cannot say to all Frenchmen: ‘England is our enemy. She upholds our French Huguenots in order to divide and destroy France.’ It is true, this plot of England’s, but the Huguenots will not listen. Above France, they adhere to their heresy. They do not hate their hereditary enemy, who has promised to assist them against other Frenchmen, and the Church. No, it must be a nearer enemy, a faction that is hated by both Huguenot and Catholic. It must be a more helpless enemy, that will cost little if any French blood, but will serve to divert the people from the civil war they contemplate.”

  “An enemy,” whispered the Cardinal, “who by exhausting the blood lust of both Catholic and Huguenot, will bring tranquillity to France, and the peaceful end of Protestantism. Yes, I can see that.”

  The Capuchin was silent. The Cardinal stirred in his great chair, and smiled again. Now he gazed directly at Père Joseph, and the latter could not read the expression in the Cardinal’s eyes.

  “But, we have no Moors,” said the Cardinal, with a delicate and exhausted gesture of his hand.

  The Capuchin approached nearer to his master, and waited.

  “It must be an innocent and defenseless enemy,” continued the Cardinal, and now he laughed, a faint and most frightful laugh, full of dreariness.

  The Capuchin bent over the Cardinal, and whispered: “But we have Jews.”

  The Cardinal laughed louder this time, throwing back his head as if seized by a convulsion of torment. “A mere handful of Jews! Thousands of Frenchmen exist who have never seen a Jew! Oh, I do not doubt the ingenuity of the Church to dress up a miserable Jew in the most sinister of garbs in order to render impotent a large and dangerous body of Huguenots; even those who have never seen a Jew! But, are there enough Jews to go around, my dear Joseph? Are there enough Jews in France to satisfy every Frenchman’s love for murder? Or, would you suggest importing some from the Germanies, from Spain, for this salubrious purpose?”

  The Capuchin’s face darkened, and the Cardinal’s laughter became thin and mad.

  After a moment, the Cardinal said in a changed and normal tone: “I have ordered a mole built across the harbor at La Rochelle. The aid of the English is delayed; by the time that bungling monolith of a nation moves to assist her fellow Protestants (and how strange it is that English aid is always reasonably delayed to her allies!) the mole will be completed and no English ship will be able to enter the harbor.
I, myself, intend to lead the campaign against the Rochellais, and we shall destroy that nest of pollution forever.”

  He seemed suddenly invigorated and sat up in his chair with his old aspect of vital power. The Capuchin, relieved, but not yet placated, said: “But what of de Bouillon, and his principality of Sedan? What if he remains intransigent, and decides to assist a Huguenot uprising all over France? There is a most formidable man! Would he, rather than de Tremblant, have been murdered!”

  “He awaits an audience at this moment,” said the Cardinal. Louis, entering at this moment with his cold and gloomy face, was requested to admit the Duc de Bouillon.

  The Duc entered, formal, alert and calm as ever. His eye met the eye of the Cardinal with full but calculating frankness as he bowed before the priest. The Cardinal extended a languid hand, which the Duc kissed with an air of deep respect. His chilly and handsome face was replete with confidence and virility.

  “De Buckingham is dead, as you know,” said the Cardinal.

  “An unfortunate calamity,” replied the Duc, assuming an air of regret.

  “He will not, then, either betray or assist your fellow Huguenots,” remarked the Cardinal. The Duc inclined his head with a thoughtful but noncommittal look.

  “I sometimes forget,” continued the Cardinal, with a sweet smile. “You were once a Catholic, Monsieur le Duc, were you not? Have you thought of returning to the bosom of the Church, or, do you prefer to hold to your power in Sedan?”

  The Duc was alarmed. He distrusted the smile and the piercing and sardonic glance of the Cardinal. He seated himself with grace and formality, and said nothing.

  “Your return might be worth considering, Monsieur le Duc,” said the Cardinal. “It is true that you would have to submit to the Throne and to the Church. Thus you would relinquish your autocratic hold upon Sedan, where you are king. On the other hand, returning to the Church as you might, and bringing your people with you, might make more secure the power of Sedan. You would have the authority of the Church to uphold you.”