The Final Hour

by Taylor Caldwell

  This time, he thought, in his bottomless terror, I shall sleep, and I shall not awaken. I will close my eyes, and she will not know I am awake.

  And then, the strangest of thoughts came to him, like a quiet voice: But, I have done nothing to deserve peace. I shall surely come back again, and again, and again, until I am no longer frightened and sick and covered with dirtiness.

  He looked at his doom, and now a strange resolution and calm and resignation came to him. He felt humbled and full of sorrow. He sighed from the very pit of his heart.

  When he opened his eyes again, the room was still dark, the lamp still burning. But Miss Concord stood beside him, her hand on his pulse, her eyes staring at him anxiously. He moved his stiff cold lips, and whispered:

  ‘I want my son. Please call my son.’

  She was a blur of white as she drifted from the room. He watched her go. He was sure that he never took his eyes from the door, yet, oddly, he was next conscious of his physician at his side, and Antoine. ‘Very strange,’ he murmured, and smiled. His facial muscles were stiff and cold, also, and this puzzled him. He felt the slow congealed moving of them.

  And then, the doctor completely vanished, or, at least, Armand saw him no longer. Antoine was sitting by his bedside, his dark inscrutable face glimmering in the lamplight. Armand saw nothing else in the room. He and his son were in one dim circle of half-light, and nothing else existed. The April rain murmured at the windows. There was a sudden breath of sweet, fresh air, damp and humid, sweeping through the dusky quietness.

  Armand could only stare at his son. His last urge of life stood in his failing eyes. In his turn, Antoine saw the dying face of his father. Very few things ever disturbed him, or discomfited him, but for some reason Armand’s expression, the long and steadfast regard, made him faintly uneasy. He had never seen Armand with such a look, sombre, thoughtful, completely aware, and very sad. It was a mature look, cleansed of all shrinking, all fear, all diffused alarm.

  Then Armand spoke, his voice laboured and whistling, and very meditative. He said: ‘It was a long time ago. My father sent for me. This was his bed. He was very proud of it. They said it was Robespierre’s bed, once. Robespierre. He died in this bed.’ He moved his hand feebly over the mattress beside him.

  Antoine inclined his, head gently. Armand could see the black and thoughtful glitter of his tilted eyes. The young man waited.

  ‘Now, I’m going to die in it,’ Armand went on, his voice so low that Antoine had to lean forward to hear it. ‘Robespierre’s bed. I never thought how appropriate, my father dying in it. He was guillotined, too, like Robespierre. He knew that, at the last.’

  And now his regard was grave and mournful. What is he trying to tell me? thought Antoine. Had his father been maudlin or frightened in this supreme hour of his dying, Antoine would have felt far more at ease, and very cynical. He knew that venal men frequently experienced pangs of cowardly terror in the face of death. He had believed that his father would reveal these, and that it would be very interesting to observe him, and would have a macabre and amusing quality. But the face that lay on the pillows, though formless and slack with approaching dissolution, possessed eyes that were more alive, more potent, more poignant and urgent, than they had ever been in the height of life. Moreover, there was no fear in them, only a profound understanding and heavy sorrow. There was no sign in them of that craven repentance, that shrinking remorse, which so often assailed the dying. Too, in this hour, Armand possessed a strange dignity, a coherence of personality, which he had never revealed before.

  Now a pale gleam passed over his features. He moved his head a little. He had not taken his steadfast regard from Antoine, and now it quickened.

  ‘My father sent for me, just before he died. It was like this. He lay in his bed, and I sat beside him, as you are sitting, Antoine. He said some things to me. I don’t think he meant to say them. They were unimportant. What he didn’t say was the important thing.’ He paused. ‘He was a very strange man, my father. He was a bad man. But he was very amusing. And superior. None of his sons could come up to him. He was the most grown-up man I ever knew.’ And now Armand’s voice took on a stronger and firmer quality, and there was a look about him of renewed vitality.

  ‘He wasn’t afraid to die. He was never really afraid of anything. That is why he was so fascinating. He never trusted anyone, except, perhaps, my mother. He never trusted his sons. He had reason not to. I think he hated us. Yes, I am sure he did. Just before he died, he sent for me, and I sat near him. He told me about his will, and he enjoyed himself. That was because he knew we hated him. Or, he thought so. Perhaps he was right. I think he was thinking what we would do with what he had left us, and that amused him.’

  And now Armand lapsed into the French patois of his early youth, the language his father had used with so much elegance, so much grace, that the idioms had been pure music. On Armand’s lips, the peasant’s lips, however, they were rough and graceless, but, oddly, much more sincere.

  Antoine, whose French was fluent, rich and aristocratic, felt an obscure distaste for these uncouth accents, but acknowledged that they had a certain rough dignity, even grandeur, on those heavy peasant lips, and a native appropriateness. And there was even a subtle change on Armand’s face. It had never been delicate of outline, or refined of expression. But now it took on strength and earthiness, a coarse resolution and simple nobility.

  ‘And even as my father talked to me, amusing himself as he hinted at his will, there was the strangest emotion in me. I had always feared him, for he had the most penetrating wit, and a cruel inventiveness of epigram. I had always been a young and lumbering boar, and I must have amused him very frequently, though, doubtless, he despised me. Nevertheless, who but I remained to him? His other sons he distrusted. I, at least, did not have the wit—he believed—to be vicious or plotting.’

  And now Armand smiled mournfully. His short fat hands, overgrown with grey and auburn hair, lifted a trifle, then dropped back on the bed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, reflectively, ‘there was the strangest emotion in me as he told me of his will. I stared at him. I forgot what he was saying. Suddenly, it seemed very dreadful to me that he was dying. I did not know why. I had never loved him. I had always feared him, and avoided him. And yet, it was very dreadful that he was dying. I never understood. All at once I cried out to him: ‘‘But I do not want you to die!”’

  Antoine was silent. Again, Armand turned his head toward him, and fixed those queerly steadfast and quiet eyes upon him.

  ‘My father was very surprised. I shall never forget the look that flashed over his face, as if he was enormously perplexed and amazed. He even lifted himself on his pillows, quite high, to stare more closely at me. I think he died, still amazed. It had never occurred to him that anyone might want him to live. Love, he did not expect. Trust, he was too intelligent to believe might exist. And yet, he knew I was sincere. He knew I was very sorry. That was what so perplexed him.’

  Armand paused. His regard was more penetrating, and quite humble.’ I should like you, my son, to be sorry. I do not know why you should be, just as I am not sure why I was sorry when my father died. But, nevertheless, I should like it to be so.’

  Antoine smiled inwardly. He thought, with sharp cynicism: But you knew your father’s will! However, despite himself, his voice had a peculiar gentleness in it when he said: ‘I am sorry. Believe it, I am sorry.’

  Armand smiled. It was a dark and very sad smile. He said: ‘I do not know why, but I believe you. At this moment, you are sorry. You do not know why; I do not know why. Is it because you are sorry that I must go through death, or is it sorrow that I am not to live? It is very confusing. I think, perhaps, that you are sorry that I have suffered, and still suffer. I should like to believe that, in preference to believing you feel the same sorrow you would experience should a dog die, of whom you were indifferently fond. Yes, I should like to believe that. I think I do. For only if I have that belief can I tell
you what I must.’

  Suddenly, he was suffocating. He gasped: ‘Lift me up!’

  Invisible hands lifted him and put him higher on his pillows. He did not wonder at the hands, though Antoine had not moved in his chair. All Armand’s last energy, his desperate urgency, was concentrated on his son. Antoine, in his turn, was sincerely glad that his father was speaking in his French patois, for he wished no one to understand what the dying man was saying.

  Now Armand reached out, and his clammy hand, of a claylike texture and dampness, and as cold as clay, grasped Antoine’s hand. The young man felt its urgent strength. From his higher position, Armand was closer to his son, also.

  ‘What has there been between us?’ he asked. ‘Less, perhaps, than there was between my father and me. And, yet, perhaps, it was the same, in a fashion. Then, I was the son of a man similar to you; one such as you was my father. Nevertheless, though I often seen my father in your face, and hear his voice in yours, and watch his very gestures in your own, and his steps, there is something lacking in you, my son, that was in my father, Jules Bouchard. You have thought I was very dull and undiscerning. But I always knew what it was you lacked, though I had no words for it then. Perhaps I have no words now, though I am struggling for them.’

  Antoine was startled. He frowned a little, delicately. Some obscure conceit in his was annoyed. However, he listened more attentively to his father when he resumed:

  ‘What I must say to you now could never have been said to my father, never, in all his life. For it would have been untrue to him. You have his wit and grace, his genius for intrigue, his inexhaustible plotting. But there the resemblance ends.’ He paused, then added in a stronger, surprised voice: ‘I knew this with my instinct, but not with my mind, until now!’ His face flashed with an oddly brilliant smile, as if he had been told some joyful news. ‘It gives me much happiness, my son, to know all this with my heart and my mind!

  What is the poor wretch trying to tell me? thought Antoine. But he made his expression attentive. Again, despite himself, there was the strangest weight in his chest. Armand’s amazing strength, too, his resolve to speak, his determination to resist death, filled Antoine with a faintly superstitious astonishment.

  ‘All my father’s attributes were bent towards one sole object: power,’ continued Armand, and now his voice was quite normal, no longer gasping, but filled with energy. ‘He must have power. He must take that power from Paul Barbour, the son-in-law of Ernest Barbour, who was my own great-uncle. It is very strange of me to remember that: that, indirectly, the blood of Ernest Barbour flows in me, and in you. It was bad blood, that, the blood of Ernest Barbour. It was strong in my father. I thought it was strong in me. I am glad to know, at last, that it was not. I am even happier to know that that blood is not strong in you, my son, though once I believed it was. There was the lust for power in that blood, a very evil lust.

  ‘My father had that lust. You do not possess it. You have acted as if you possessed it; you have pretended. It was, perhaps, a family tradition to desire power: that is what you have believed. It was intolerable of you, you thought, not to have the lust. You have always admired your grandfather; it flattered you that you resembled him, and I have seen you contemplating his portrait when you thought yourself unseen. It frightened me, the resemblance. But I was not so frightened when I realized that there was the final ultimate in him which you did not possess.’

  He turned his eyes to the portrait above the distant lamp, and instinctively Antoine looked also. All of the portrait was in diffused shadow except for the gay and satanic black eyes that stared so vitally from the frame. Armand nodded, and smiled. ‘It is lacking in you, what he possessed,’ he said. ‘That is why, now, I am so glad. That is why I am speaking to you like this.’

  Antoine frowned slightly. He regarded his father with a certain uneasy surprise.

  Armand continued to speak. His voice was much fainter now, but it had a disembodied clarity and penetration.

  ‘In spite of all my father’s attributes and graces and wit and intellect, he was a plebeian. He had the plebeian’s brutal lust for possessions. He seized and grasped. That was his nature. He must triumph, in the variety and richness of his possessions, over those he hated. And he hated all men. That is the mark of the plebeian: his avarice and his hatred. At the last, perhaps they are the same.

  ‘It gives me much joy, my son, to know that you were never avaricious. You have pretended you were. You have pretended, even to yourself, that the lust for power—the plebeian’s attribute—and the desire for possessions, lived in you. But these marks of the dull and the brutal man are not in you. You are an aristocrat. You might even be a great man, could you but rid yourself of your pretences, and the ugliness and death and weariness that must inevitably follow them. As they have followed me.’

  Antoine did not speak. He moved his chair backwards, only a trifle. But the gesture was significant. It was an instinctive desire to remove himself from the faint circle of light that enclosed his father and himself; it was an instinctive desire to recoil from his father’s most mysterious and subtle eyes, which, in this hour of his death, saw everything. The young man felt stripped, and an embarrassed anger filled him.

  ‘You have hated so many in the family!’ cried Armand, and he clasped his hands together very tightly, and shook them a little with a last vehemence. ‘You did not really know why you hated! But I have known. You hated them because they were parvenus and plebeians. You will deny this, even to yourself. But, some day you will acknowledge it. I want you to acknowledge it very soon, for otherwise, you might be destroyed. As I have been destroyed.’

  He pressed his clenched hands, covered now with a cold dew, to his breast, and his burning eyes implored his son desperately. Antoine rested his elbow on his knee; he lifted his narrow dark hand and covered his mouth with it. Over that hand, his eyes, brooding, dark and hooded, regarded his father intently.

  Armand spoke again, and his voice was full of bitter pleading and humility: ‘I am praying that it is not too late. Had ï known earlier, when you were a child, and a youth, that you did not possess those attributes of my father, I might have done much. But your face, your voice, your gestures, deceived me that you were another one such as he. It was not very long ago that I began to guess. I did not believe. There was so much evidence to the contrary. Now I know that what I had guessed at was true.

  ‘I might have saved you so much had I been able to speak out of clear knowledge. I might have been able to tell you of my disgust for myself and others, my exhaustion, my weariness, my loathing of what I am and what I have done. You have all thought that I was a coward. It is true. But you did not know of the thing which made me afraid. You thought I was weak, but you did not know why I was weak. You have thought that it was perhaps some frail and uneasy stump of conscience in me that tormented me in the midst of all that I was doing. Perhaps, in a fashion, that is slightly true. But, my son, you see, it was because I knew what was right and what was wrong, and yet did not have the courage to resist the wrong. Because I, too, was a plebian, and had the lust for possessions, and avarice, and the desire for power. And when, as I grew old and sick, these lusts faded I discovered that I was impotent. Others had taken the power from me, the power to undo the evil I had done, and which they were now doing. It was this that really killed me,’ he added, with profound and moving simplicity.

  Antoine did not speak. The hooded eyes above the shelter of his quiet hand became a little more brilliant, a little more narrow. Armand stared at fliem with hopeful despair, searching, eager. He could not read them.

  ‘Do you want the things that will kill you, my son,’ he whispered, hoarsely. ‘They are nothing. They are stones, covered with dust. You have enough. Go away.’

  And now the two men regarded each other in a profound and most portentous silence. Antoine did not move, except that one finger of his hand rose a little as if to conceal his eyes. Armand could see his son so clearly in the lamplight, which sh
one like a bright pale outline over the shape of his sleek and narrow small head. He could see the set of his elegant thin shoulders, the lines of his compact and graceful body. He could see his fixed and unreadable eyes.

  And then the dying man cried out loudly, as if in frenzy: ‘You must tell me that what I have believed of you is true! You must tell me! I cannot die in peace unless you tell me it is true!’

  His slack mouth fell open as he gasped stridently. A grey shadow ran like water over his wet face. His eyes dilated, flamed and started. He lifted his hands in an abrupt gesture, the gesture of a man who is drowning and sinking beneath smothering waves.

  Antoine stirred. He looked aside. He said: ‘It is true.’

  He stood up. The nurse and the doctor, who had been there all this while, uncomprehending, bent over Armand. He did not feel their ministrations. He still stared at his son, all the last urge of his life in his eyes, imploring, desperate.

  ‘It is true,’ repeated Antoine. He turned away. He walked slowly from the bed. He stood beneath his grandfather’s portrait. The eyes gazed down at him, his own eyes, cynical, bright, full of dark laughter and bottomless gay contempt. For a long time Antoine stood there, looking at Jules, and it was as if he looked into a mirror.

  When he turned around again, the nurse, sighing heavily, was drawing the sheet over Armand’s closed eyes, his strange and aloof smile, which had in it an unreadable sorrow and resignation, a mournful and bitter wisdom.

  CHAPTER LVII

  No one wept at Armand’s funeral, except little Mary, Antoine’s wife, who, in her childish way, had been very fond of him. She was covered with grief and remorse. She cried in Antoine’s arms: ‘If only I had made him keep to his List!

  But I didn’t! I let him eat what he wanted, and now I really killed him!’

  ‘No, dear,’ said Antoine, with unusual gentleness. ‘He killed himself.’

  She stared at him with wet eyes, while the others in the family regarded them silently. ‘You mean,’ faltered little Mary, ‘that he killed himself because he wanted to eat the things he shouldn’t have wanted?’