The Arm and the Darkness Page 9

  Unaccustomed to thought as he was, unfamiliar with anything but the most superficial of emotions, and living only by his exuberant instincts and passion for laughter and adventure, he found his new sensations overwhelming, chaotic, and a little frightful. His whole mind, his whole being, were convulsed, blown upon by strange hot winds, dazzled by supernatural lights, thrown into disorientation. The skepticism of which he had always been more than a trifle proud was swept away like a leaf upon a whirlpool. Passionate and vehement, and possessed of a naïveté which could be dangerous in its strength, he was not given to questioning, to analysis, to judicious contemplation. Portals had burst open before his eyes. Emotional instinct made him stand before them, gasping at what was revealed. Later would come the disillusionment of the ardent man. In that was the danger.

  His thoughts, his emotions, exhausted him by their very fire, though they were still formless, like nebulæ bearing in them the potentialities of new worlds. He closed his eyes for what seemed a moment or two. He opened them, and found himself alone. The old men were gone, with their sibyl words, which were old and forever new. The stub of candle wallowed, hissing, in its socket, blinked, wavered, prepared to go out.

  There was a faint rustle near him, a soft breath, a movement. Cecile was approaching the bed. Thinking the sick man profoundly asleep, she approached him in her short shift, her long fair hair streaming over her shoulders and bosom. He instinctively half shut his eyes. But he could see the beam of last candlelight in her hair, the tendrils of spun gold at her white temples. He saw, as she bent over him, the blue veins in her young bosom, revealed by the gaping shift, the tender warm softness of her flesh between and below her breasts. She exhaled the humid sweetness of youth, which was like the spring air, and it was a perfume in nostrils which were accustomed only to artificial scents. Peering through his lashes, feeling the sudden hot pounding of his body, he could see only her parted pale lips, drooping with weariness, and the soft yet firm curve of her chin.

  She hesitated, bending over him. He felt the touch of her hand, lightly, on his forehead, feeling for fever. Then, sighing, she blew out the candle. The cool dank air was permeated with the acrid odor of tallow and wick. There was complete darkness in the room, and it was filled by her breathing and the living emanations from her flesh.

  She did not go at once. He heard her sigh again. Her bodily presence was more urgent, more exigent, in the darkness, than in the light. It was like some strong force, magnetic, innocent, compelling, full of passion and intoxication.

  Then, he felt her lips on his forehead. It was like the touch of summer grasses, fragrant and warm from the sun.

  She had gone. In the singing darkness he lay with dilated eyes, hearing only the roar of blood in his ears and an unknown surging in his heart.

  It were as though for the first time in his life he had become aware of something ineffably sweet, ineffably lovely, too poignant even for the frailest thought, too exquisite for a touch, but so irresistible in its force, so powerful and tremendous, that man and God could not defy nor oppose it.

  CHAPTER IX

  “Certes!” exclaimed Armand, Marquis du Vaubon, irritably, to his son, Louis, “you have a low opinion of your brother!”

  “It is not I who have been responsible for this opinion,” replied Louis, with his accustomed icy hauteur, which was yet so humble. “Men create the opinions of others.”

  He sat in his father’s lofty bed-chamber on a gilt chair, which his attitude reproved for its frivolity and insubstantiality. Arsène had often declared that Louis could display more disapproval, more cold displeasure, by the set of his broad thin shoulders, and the turn of his head, than other men could display by gestures or glances or words.

  Louis de Richepin, Monseigneur du Vaubon, was still young, and extremely handsome in the manner in which a sexless statue is handsome. That is, his sexlessness was that of the great marble angels in the Cathedral, whose masculinity is revealed in an absence of female breasts and softnesses, and in a possession of stern large faces and soaring strength of contour. In truth, there was about Louis de Richepin the majesty of marble, the inexorability of stone, the largeness of a sculptor’s heroic concept of an archangel. Tall, slender, spare, yet slow-moving, he had a hard and aristocratic grace of body, and a quality of quietness that was impressive and intimidating. Even the Cardinal had declared, with amused annoyance, that Louis frequently awed even him with his uncompromising silences, his noble reticence and severity, the cold impersonal rebuke of his pale and frosty eye. Louis was fair, almost colorless, resembling, at times, a statue of snow and ice, heroically clad in ecclesiastical black and white. His robes fell in beautiful folds about his graceful but somewhat stiff frame. His hands were white, slender, but exceedingly strong. He walked with august dignity. The unhuman grandeur of an iceberg was his posture.

  The Cardinal, who secretly despised and feared true celibacy, had taken subtle pains to introduce Louis to irresistible women, had forced opportunities for luxurious dallying upon him. But all without success. There was another thing that also infuriated the Cardinal: Louis had none of the gusty appetite of the Frenchman, none of the exquisite love for the table. This inspired annoyance in the Cardinal. He often said: “I would never send a lover of food upon any mission involving ruthlessness. But neither would I trust the man who looks on wine and dainties with an unlusting eye.” Nevertheless, he trusted his secretary, Louis de Richepin, as he did not trust even the Captain of his Musketeers or his familiar, Father Joseph, the Grey Eminence. In that unhuman passionlessness, in that stern majesty, was the quality that even so subtle and diabolical a man as Richelieu trusted as he never trusted his God. He was also vaguely ashamed before that quality, a shame that lurked deep in his labyrinthine and devious soul. He often accused himself of some naïveté in his trust of Louis, but never had he felt justified in his accusation.

  But Louis’ devotion to the Church, and to himself, could never be questioned. He was capable of the most extraordinary martyrdom and selflessness. He never considered himself at all. He lived only to serve Mother Church, and her servants. Sometimes the Cardinal, watching him slyly out of the corner of his cunning and subtle eye, wondered if Louis had heard any of the remarkable but only too true stories about him. But if Louis had heard, it was evident that he had not believed. Had he believed, the Cardinal was certain, the younger man would have stopped at nothing to expose his superior, or even to have destroyed him openly. So, with considerable impatience and irritation, the Cardinal concealed much of his irascible and voluptuous nature in Louis’ presence, but yet, at times, could not resist in displaying some of his traits of character in an irresistible desire to prod, dismay or confuse him. He finally came to the conclusion that Louis was incapable of suspecting anyone so illustrious, so highly placed as the Cardinal, so brilliant, could possibly be venal, treacherous or wicked.

  Many hated Louis, feared him for his enormous influence with the Cardinal, who was known to trust him above all other men. Many attempted to use that influence, without the slightest result, without, even, Louis suspecting that an attempt had been made. Once, the King himself had attempted to probe Louis for betraying details about the Cardinal, but Louis had gazed so emptily, so icily, so un-comprehendingly, at His Majesty, that the King had felt both fury and shame and bewilderment.

  “At the door of the Cardinal’s house is a man of unmelting and transparent ice,” the King had said, angrily, but with some secret admiration for his own metaphor.

  Never, even in the wildest and most fanciful of moments, did Armand suspect that Louis had for him the only human love he ever gave to any living creature. He would have listened, astounded, gaping, blinking, if any one had ever told him, believing he was listening to the words of an idiot. Only Arséne knew this, and sometimes he wondered if he, himself, was mad, in his suspicions. What was there in this dark, restless, womanish man, this creature of facile emotions, querulous feminine voice, unpredictable but narrow passions, unreaso
ning caprices, and malicious vagaries, to inspire such horrifying and glacial devotion? For, indeed, there was something horrifying in it. It was as if an ice-covered mountain had conceived a terrible and voiceless and enormous love for a sparrow, a love that had in it nothing human, nothing of blood and warmth, but contained in it the wind of endless stark chasms under the earth, and the power of sunless rivers running through tortuous caverns, and the barren lightning that flashes over stony peaks unconquered by man. It was affrighting; it was frightful. And the poor little creature who was the victim, rather than the recipient of it, would have been crushed, annihilated, driven to screaming idiocy, had he understood even a part of it. So Arsène, knowing all this with an intensity strange in so unimaginative a young and lusty man, took care only to say humorously to his father, when pleading Louis’ case: “But Louis has quite a little fondness for you, my father. Be, therefore, more compassionate, more gentle, with him.”

  “But Louis dislikes you with unnatural strength,” Armand would return, petulantly. “How then, you miserable scoundrel, can I feel anything but annoyance with him? Besides, he oppresses me. He gives me the shivers. He always did. I should have strangled him when he was born.” And he would laugh gleefully and childishly, and with malice, when he said this, as if he found some revenge in his words upon his younger son. “He is not human. He was born without the parts of a man.”

  Armand, as he lay in his invalid’s posture by the sunny casement, this warm spring day, thought of this, looking at Louis sitting opposite him, so rigid, so tall, so straight, in his black robes. Louis seemed to have an unconscious aversion to sunlight; he sat in shadow. But reflected beams glimmered over his handsome face like lances of ice-struck radiance. He was a statue. Armand did not see how pathetic he was, how horribly alone. He never knew of the bitter cold despair, black and monstrous, which crouched in the nameless and subterranean caves of Louis’ lonely soul. He never knew that the only other emotion, besides the love for his father, of which Louis was capable, was hatred. And even this hatred lacked the human quality of lesser men, though containing the potentialities of all cruelty, all ruthlessness, all inexorability, all monstrousness. Armand only knew that Louis alternately annoyed him, frightened him, made him uneasy and curiously breathless, as if the young priest brought with him that rarefied and smothering airlessness of great heights.

  Armand was not really an invalid, but he was recovering at this time from the distress and apprehensions that had afflicted him upon Arsène’s mysterious and complete disappearance. However, he was nervous enough to be the victim of frequent attacks of lassitude, vague pain, exhaustion, and shallow melancholy. These induced a laziness paradoxical in one so spare, swift-moving and erratic. His body, his face, his nature, belonged to a man of restlessness and capriciousness, which he was indeed, in more sanguine moods. Hating all responsibility, vain, suspicious, sly, expedient and childishly treacherous, he had frequently to retire to his bed-chamber and refresh himself from the constant turmoil of his superficial but thronging emotions, which were like a swarm of gnats. During these periods, he gave himself up to luxurious pampering, calling upon his hairdresser and his valets to attend him constantly. He was as conceited as a silly woman. His long black hair, dank and straight and betraying a persistent tendency to grayness, was dyed, pomaded, polished and brushed, and loaded with fragrant pomades. It lay daintily on his narrow jerking shoulders with a false and oily lustre and in geometrical curls. His long lean nose, constantly twitching, was powdered whitely. The eyelashes on his small, too closely-spaced black eyes, were thick with oily dye, as were his sharp black brows, so like Arsène’s. So sharp, so restless, so glittering were his eyes, so leaping about with suspicion, rolling, jerking, that they instantly inspired distrust and wariness in the beholder. There was more than a trace of rouge on his high and narrow cheekbones, and on his weak spasmodic mouth, with its protruding and petulant lower lip. His face was dry, the skin coarse and flaking under its scented unguents, and furrowed with deep lines from nostril to mouth, and across the high but narrow forehead. His whole expression conveyed his chronic anxiety, his malice, his suspicion of all things, his slyness and his treachery. Even when he was alone, or not speaking, his hands jerked involuntarily, gestured without meaning, the thin dark fingers heavy with sparkling rings.

  He thought himself irresistible to women, and if their attendance upon him was any proof, he was. He was too vain to consider that his position at Court, the affection the King had for him, and his wealth, might have something to do with this devotion. He loved rich garments, was a leader of fashion, designing many of his own coats and doublets and hats, and even sketching patterns for lace he had especially made for his collars and his cuffs. There was no doubt that he had considerable elegance and taste, and a natural eye for fashion, style and symmetry, for he was widely and enviously copied, and his word on the latest frippery was solemnly and slavishly accepted. He wore garments in dark intense colors, plum, deep fiery blue, crimson, and velvety black. He was inordinately proud of a really beautiful and feminine ankle, and slender legs and a tiny graceful foot. He was also a connoisseur of perfumes, having his own private chemists concocting them in a locked chamber in the Hôtel de Vaubon. Some of his latest, called Fleur d’Amour, stood in a beautiful gilt and crystal bottle on the baroque table at his chair-side, and this he sniffed in the uneasy intervals of his conversation with his son, Louis. His person was permeated with it, as was the lace and silken kerchief he flaunted delicately in his hand. Louis’ nostrils distended painfully, as gusts of the musky odor assaulted his senses, and he would move his head backwards as if to escape asphyxiation. Armand noted this, and maliciously poured fresh scent on his kerchief, and gestured with it with even more elaborateness than usual.

  Armand’s taste extended to every room in his mansion. His bedchamber was baroque, but not oppressively so. There was grace in every gilt and marble and ebony table. Every surface sparkled with color. The walls were silk-hung in various shades of subtle gold, all melting into each other deliciously, so that the effect was of varying degrees of filtered sunlight. The Persian rug upon the polished floor was a subtle blend of poignant blues, gold, threads of scarlet, and tendrils of pure and delicate green. The canopied bed, with its soaring posts of scrolled gilt, had heavy curtains of the same material that draped the tall diamond-paned windows, and was covered, also, with this material. Upon the black and gilt chest of drawers near his bed stood a formidable array of scents, pomades, powders and golden brushes and combs, not to mention lotions for his feet and hands and cosmetics for his eyes and brows. An enormous crystal chandelier, like a series of icicles, hung from the plaster-scrolled and gilt ceiling. He had the best paintings upon his walls, all decadent, all warm and improper. As a concession, hasty perhaps, but necessary, a golden crucifix stood upon a small table, dressed like an altar with a snowy and lace-bordered cloth.

  Armand irritably considered, and rightly so, that the crucifix was incongruous in that feminine room, and did nothing to enhance its delicate debauchery. But as a convert, or as one who had only lately returned to Mother Church, he must at all times display evidences of devout piety. Sometimes, when he had no dangerous visitors, he had a glitttering Chinese screen placed about it. This was removed when Louis, or others like him, who could not be trusted, paid him a visit. But his restless eye came back to it at frequent intervals, with badly concealed impatience, for it annoyed him with its unfitness in the room. This increased his natural nervousness.

  It was Louis who had given his father the golden crucifix, believing that its exquisite ivory figure and elaborate scrollwork would please the erratic and tasteful man, and might, while he contemplated it with pleasure, subtly imbue him with its deeper meaning. He could not know, in his large and mountainlike simplicity, that the very sight of it hugely annoyed Armand, and even infuriated him, for he had not forgotten his father and La Rochelle. The crucifix did more to disturb and torment Armand that did any other inanimate objec
t, and sometimes he regarded it with a hatred singularly pure in so shallow a man. Once, in Arsène’s presence, he had hurled it upon the floor, in a furious tantrum of mingled hatred and disgust, declaring he was ready to forswear everything rather than keep it in his room.

  But Arsène had laughingly picked it up, and gently replaced it.

  “Beauty, no matter if in a maudlin form, is always holy,” he had said. Armand had become abruptly silent, in the midst of his hysterical tirade, and had stared unaffectedly at his son.

  “It is not the object; it is the giver,” he had mumbled, finally, rubbing his thin hands together, and shivering, and glancing uneasily at the door as if suspecting that some servant eavesdropped. But Arsène, with his rare flashes of insight, knew it was more than that.

  Now, as Armand talked querulously and languidly with his younger son, his eye kept straying toward the crucifix. He held his scent bottle to his twitching nostrils. His fine jeweled hand kept up a constant faint trembling. Under his rouge, he was a little pale, and his heart was beating with that intolerable tremor which was the prelude to hysteria. The presence of Louis always had this effect upon him, but he was not subtle enough to understand it. He could not read the sad passion deep in those large pale blue eyes set so beautifully in their sockets. He saw no tragedy in the stiff yet graceful body in its black robes. He saw no somber grandeur and mournfulness in the folded white hands. He only knew that Louis stared at him heavily and constantly, and his malaise increased.

  But he did know that Louis was anxious about him. Pardieu, if the wretch had not come today, he, Armand, would have been out in his carriage driving through the Bois and sniffing the fresh spring earth and reveling in the sunlight under the new trees! Louis’ unspoken but visible solicitude oppressed him. He pretended great weariness and pain, in order to torment his son. This was instinctive. He never comprehended Louis’ love for him.