The health of this precious, mysterious boy must be improving – if her hearty colour is anything to go by...
The surgical intervention must definitely have saved him... and I have hopes of seeing him walking around Norbert’s little garden once more, on the arm of his beautiful nurse...
This is unheard of: it now seems to me that I am going to hate Christine... and do you know why? O, mysteries of the human heart, as someone once said... because she could betray someone like Jacques Cotentin for the sake of this popinjay.
Now that I have fathomed a little of that brain, then yes... yes... Christine is no more to me than a loathsome, odious, hateful doll!... If she didn’t love him, she shouldn’t have promised herself to him! If she doesn’t love him any more, she should tell him! But to be unfaithful to such a man...
Wait, here she comes!... What youthful innocence!... How could Gabriel not be cured by such a smile at his bedside? That beautiful hand could entice a dead man out of his tomb!
A propos the dead and the tomb: I have not seen the Marchioness for a while now... and, as a consequence, I have not had to preoccupy myself with inventing plausible pretexts for not having returned all her little old stories of brucolacs, which I continued to leaf through, and which ended up offending my intelligence with their stupidity.
Christine must have seen her. Where, when, or how – I simply don’t know.
She had told me that the Marchioness had once again become very languid, and that Saib Khan was seeing her nearly every day.
“Why are you so late?” I asked Christine, looking straight into her eyes.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she rejoined in a tone that accentuated her smile, “one might think that you always have to find something to reproach me for.”
“Eh? I have nothing to reproach you for except for your late arrival. Nothing else…”
“Oh, monsieur is so gallant,” she teased, looking at me over her shoulder with a slightly mocking expression, as she headed into the library.
I blushed all the way down to the roots of my hair. You can see how far gone I am... such awkwardness! What good do you think it’ll do you, Adonis?
When we reached the library, and I had given her the key to the garden, she said to me:
“Now we are quite at home in here. We can come in through the garden, and leave whenever we want to! We won’t have to deal with the old nightporter in the Swiss costume; we won’t have to walk through the whole mansion under the prying eyes of Sangor, or have to tolerate that little marmoset Sing-Sing jumping out at us.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, “I haven’t got a key now.”
“I’ll have one cut for you tomorrow. The Marquis understands this! He wants us to feel at home here, and that we won’t be disturbed by anyone.”
“Really?”
“He wants it to be like that,” she said, turning towards the door of the library, which led into the little vestibule, “this door has been sealed shut... and no-one but the Marquis can come in here...”
“Is that so?” I asked, a little surprised to hear her say it... “then what are all these precautions for?”
“He doesn’t want the Marchioness coming in here and annoying us!”
“Oh, now I understand!”
I ought to be delighted at the prospect of being left alone with Christine from now on, but the obscure circumstances that have led to this occurrence... and the thought of the other isolated one, who was in her death throes, drained by a deranged imagination, causes me a kind of malaise that I am not easily able to define – which is like the general feeling of dread one experiences on the eve of something terrible happening... In fact, a singular and even tragic incident occurred a few minutes later that disturbed me (and Christine) so profoundly that I scarcely know how to describe it.
We had just started work, next to an open window overlooking the garden; when, all of a sudden, we were startled by an immense scream of pain that echoed throughout the house...
Christine and I leapt to our feet, one as pale-faced as the other... we had both recognized the voice of the Marchioness...
The screaming was followed by groans, by pleas, by the guttural bellowing of Sangor, the miaowing chatter of Sing-Sing, and, above all, the curt orders that were repeated in the furious voice of the Marquis:
“Run! Why don’t you run?”
Finally, in the vestibule, on the staircase, throughout the house, there came a tumultuous noise of heavy footsteps, and furniture being overturned...
I hurled myself against the door, but it would not open.
Christine called to me:
“Through the garden... through the garden!” And we propelled ourselves into the garden and through a little alley that connected it to the courtyard that we entered, out of breath...
On the threshold of the sinister vault, to which the door was closed, stood the old nightporter – his feet were planted there, as if he was incapable of movement.
As soon as he saw us, he shouted:
“Don’t interfere... don’t interfere with this... it’s just milady the Marchioness having another one of her attacks!”...
But we were already past him and, climbing four steps at a time, we entered the main house. All the noise was now on the first floor.
Guided by the tumult, and by the loud noise of a door being smashed in...we soon found ourselves in the corridor that led to the Marchioness’ apartments... A broken door hung there as if burst open by a missile from a catapult. Behind it lay the bedchamber of the Marchioness...
The unfortunate woman lay moaning and struggling in the arms of the Marquis... her elaborate evening dress had been torn to shreds... her ever-present furs lay on the floor at her feet, like a carpet of snow... and she was even paler than her furs, even whiter than snow...
Sing-Sing, his jade-green eyes burning with an unbearable brightness, was helping the Marquis to hold her down.
As soon as she saw us the poor woman let out a piercing cry, in which she had invested all her last hopes: “This time it was in the arm!” she screamed... “See?” As she lifted her arm we could see a small wound, not far from her shoulder, that poured copiously with vermilion blood...
“What? You’re here, too?” roared the Marquis (in a tone of voice that, it struck me, meant that he did not realize that we were still in the house)... “So much the better! You can help me to calm her down... It’s nothing... nothing at all to worry about!... It’s just a little scratch... I’ll wager she cut herself on the rose bush... but look at the state she’s in!”
While he was speaking, the Marchioness kept repeating, in a sort of hiccup:
“Don’t leave me... whatever you do, don’t leave me with them!”
At the same moment, Sangor came running into the room... he appeared to be as surprised as his master had been to find us in there... In his hand was a bottle: on the label I could make out the words sodium citrate.
As soon as he saw the bottle, the Marquis shouted at Sangor:
“Imbecile, that’s not the bottle I asked for... I wanted the calcium chloride!”
Sangor bowed and left the room, returning almost immediately with the bottle of calcium chloride the Marquis had requested.
The flow of blood from the little wound was staunched by the action of the calcium chloride... The Marquis nursed his wife with great care and words of encouragement, but she fell in a faint...
I studied the wound: it was no bigger than a puncture from a large hypodermic needle.
That was when the Indian doctor arrived.
The Marquis spoke to him:
“She has hurt her arm... followed, as usual, by another attack!”
At that, Saib Khan asked us to leave him alone with his patient.
She opened her eyes again and I felt heartsick as she looked at us with such a pleading expression. However, now she was held in the gaze of Saib Khan, as well as that of the Marquis, she could not muster the strength to pronounce a sing
le word. Her trembling lips let out a low moan. We were had no choice but to leave her.
The Marquis had already made a gesture to us. We left the room with him. Sangor and Sing-Sing marched behind us.
The Marquis showed us the shattered door:
“You see,” he explained, “I had to force the door open! We can’t leave her on her own when she suffers one of her attacks. She might kill herself… she might throw herself out of the window, or start bashing her head against the wall.”
“How did it all start?” asked Christine.
As for me, I asked nothing. I felt strangely troubled and hardly dared look at the Marquis, because I was afraid that he could read my thoughts – my hesitant, dreadful, tormenting thoughts.
He conducted us into a small salon on the ground floor, the Marchioness’ private room, in which the window overlooking the garden was still open. A climbing rose coiled outside.
“She was taking a breath of fresh evening air at the window,” he explained... “I did not see her there, but Sing-Sing, as he came out of the garage, noticed her at the precise moment when she let out her cry of despair! And then, in a desperate clamour, the like of which I have not heard from her for a long time, she ran upstairs to her bedroom and locked herself inside... I was sitting in my study when all of this commotion broke out... I did not need to be told what was going on... I knew what was going on without question... We ran up there after her... we had to force the door... and now you know as much as I do,” he added, turning to face me, “now no-one can claim to be ignorant of my troubles!”
Christine and I went back to the library, she was sad; I was becoming more and more agitated...
“What did you make of all that?” she asked me.
I said to her:
“Christine, when we went into the bedroom, did you happen to notice the expression on the Marquis’ face?”
“No, I was only looking at the Marchioness!...”
“Well, I was looking at the Marquis...he was not a pretty sight to behold, let me tell you!... His red eyes seemed about to burst out of their sockets like two bloodshot ruby beads; his mouth was open, baring his savage teeth, and the ferocious snarl on his face looked like one of those masks that Japanese warriors use to terrorize their enemies! I have never seen anything that compares, except for the vision of joyous savagery that you can see on the face of the bust of the Duke of Gonzaga [11] that is carefully hidden on the ground floor of the Museo Patrio in Mantua, in a little storage room, that is only lit by a window that opens onto Dante’s Square...
Maybe Gonzaga had the same look on his face on the day, on the eve of the Battle of Fornovo, that he promised to pay ten ducats for the first French head cut off by his stradiots, and, indeed, kissed the man who brought it to him on the lips... He may not have been a vampire, but he still drank the blood of many after his own fashion!”
“What exactly are you thinking...?” asked Christine in a low voice, “do you really believe that we have interrupted our Marquis on the eve of a kind of Fornovo?”
“My thoughts are so alarming that I dare not express them to you... Perhaps it was just something about his appearance,” I added, hastily.
“In any case,” she whispered, “even if Gonzaga believed that he was going to drink our blood on the eve of Fornovo, his hopes were thwarted the next day...”
“Indeed, someone showed up and spoiled the party...!”
“I got the same impression,” she concurred, “we seemed to have disturbed all those people, somehow...! But even if things were all as they ought to be, we shouldn’t be astonished that the Marquis was disagreeably surprised at our arrival at the scene!”
“But what if it was true...?” I challenged.
“What... what if what was true?” she repeated.
“You know what I’m talking about! Leave all the other stories to one side! He does not need to have lived for two hundred years to possess the instincts of a wild beast...”
“So, what do you think...? What exactly do you believe...?”
“Listen, Christine, do you remember the bottle that Sangor was carrying when he came into the bedroom for the first time?”
“Yes, it was a bottle of sodium citrate – wasn’t it?”
“That’s right!
“And then the marquis told him to take it away and come back with the calcium chloride...”
“Perfect! And what did he do with the calcium chloride, Christine, can you tell me?”
“Well...he stopped the bleeding!”
“Precisely... but do you know what one would do with sodium citrate, Christine?”
“No, I don’t!”
“Very well, using sodium citrate, one can make blood flow!” She looked at me as if I had gone mad this time.
“It makes... blood flow...?” she repeated.
“It does: it is an anti-coagulant that prevents the formation of a blood clot that would cause the wound to close... If you rub a wound, or a bite or sting, with sodium citrate the vein will continue to empty itself of blood like water bursting from a valve... But, that’s not all...! A mouth that wanted to suck the blood from this wound which has been rubbed with sodium citrate would not need to worry about coagulation, which is something it would otherwise have to monitor...”
“What you’re telling me now scares me! Where did you learn all that?”
“Why, in the most rudimentary medical books... don’t you have an illustrated anatomy textbook in your place...? My dear Christine, a bookbinder is not solely interested in bookbinding... in the end, he learns a great number of little things.”
She was still looking at me, and I could clearly see that she was as agitated as I was. She started to speak: “But that’s terrible! Science...in the service of vampirism!”
“These days,” I said by way of conclusion, “vampirism – if there is such a thing as vampirism – couldn’t be anything but scientific!”
We found ourselves staring up at the four portraits of the Coulterays on the wall, who smiled down at us in an enigmatic and highly disturbing manner – through the sinking sunlight that only revealed the contours of things in indecisive lines, in a sort of pastel-coloured effacement.
“It’s true, in a perfectly strange way, that they all look the same,” she said.
“And if they are one and the same person,” I added, trying to add a tone of irony and detachment to my voice, “he will have had ample time to perfect his method.”
But I stopped my joking there... more moaning sounds were coming from above..!
And as the moaning became more prolonged, we could not prevent ourselves from shivering.
“All the same,” I said, “it would be intriguing to know how she came by that wound... After all, the Marquis can tell us anything he likes!”
XIV
Evening
It was getting late now, it was long past our dinner hour... we could not decide if we ought to leave this place, where such a mysterious torment dwelled... They must have thought we had gone home... At that moment, we had no reason to dissimulate anything: it would be unworthy of us and, besides, there may have been circumstances in which they might need our help. In any case, that is what we would have said if anyone was surprised to discover that we were still there...
We lit the little portable electric lamp in our office. Its glow described a clear square of light over the nocturnal garden.
Suddenly, a great silence fell over the house, a silence that weighed upon us even more than the dismal, lugubrious, monotonous moaning which had just gripped us both in an acute sense of anguish...
A half hour passed like this; Christine and I were working vaguely on some books – I forget which ones – evidently prey to thoughts that we could not communicate with one another... In the end, I broke the silence:
“Does the Marquis leave you alone now, Christine?” She seemed surprised at the abrupt use of “you.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, in an agitated tone.
“Do you really think that there is any connection between... between all those flights of imagination upstairs... and what happens down here?”
“In a word, has he made another attempt?”
She appeared to hesitate for a second, and then she said:
“No, I have seen to all that!”...
“I have to admit that the Marquis always conducts himself around me with perfect manners... it’s just that he hardly dares look at you, except when he’s speaking to you!”
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