The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  The old man had come running in response to the clamor of the horn, as quickly as his age permitted. Properly dressed in his Sunday clothes, he raised his gnarled hands in an almost adoring gesture, coarse and touching. “Oh, Monsieur Charles!”

  Joy and anxiety were combined in his face: a joy that was entirely new superimposed on an anterior anxiety, which it had not yet succeeded in effacing. He had his hat in his hand. He was bald. His fine grey moustache accentuated the astonishingly deep suntan of his complexion. The muscles of his neck disappeared into the collar of a shirt of coarse white linen, a vestige of olden times. “I can’t tell you, Monsieur Charles, how glad I am that you’ve come!”

  “Because of the sarvant?” said Charles, laughing.

  “How do you know about that?” asked the astonished guardian of Silaz. “I didn’t put anything in my letter.”

  Péronne had come out in her turn, wearing her white frilly bonnet, wiping her hands on her blue apron. She had a simple, open face, molded by honesty and devotion—and also common sense—and two eyes that expressed a rarely-seen fidelity and respectful submission toward Charles.

  An odd household! A bizarre couple, who were not a married couple, but more like a pair of hounds.10 Claude and Péronne had been living there since their youth, in the service of the Christiani family. No other bond united them, but they had a marvelous mutual understanding as comrades, and nothing had ever disturbed their amity. An old man and an old woman, each having “property” in a native village, they remained at Silaz, content to serve the same masters with the same probity.

  “Is Monsieur Charles up to date?” said Péronne, looking up at the traveler plaintively. “Have you explained it to him, Claude?”

  “No, but Monsieur knows already that it’s the sarvant.”

  They were on the threshold of the garage, sheltered by an arch. The little road continued between the commons and the grounds. Charles, flanked by the two old people, headed for the château. They went in by the kitchen door.

  “Come with me,” said Charles. “Tell me about it.”

  The windows of the drawing-room were open, as was the glazed door overlooking the English park. The weather was mild and the light gilded. The great silence of the countryside reigned like a fascination. After a day in a roaring automobile, Charles felt the spaciousness weighing upon him.

  “Well?” the young man queried.

  “It’s in the little top room,” said Claude. “Every night, there’s a light that appears—and someone can be seen.”

  Charles smiled.

  “Monsieur Charles will see for himself,” said Péronne, respectfully. “It’s in the evening, when dusk has fallen, that the sarvant goes into the little top room. The people in the village have seen it, as we have.”

  “All right! I believe you. Since when?”

  “We first saw it a fortnight ago,” Claude said. “That night, we were about to go to bed after supper. I’d just released the dog Milord—which is, as you know, a very good guard-dog—when, all of a sudden, I heard him barking in the grounds, near the château. I went out and made a tour of the buildings…”

  “You should know,” Péronne added, “that the dog was barking very loudly, more loudly than he does from time to time when animals are on the prowl or people are passing by on the road.”

  “Yes,” Claude confirmed. “So, in consequence, I muffled my footsteps on the gravel. Look, Monsieur Charles, Milord was there.” He pointed through the open window at a place outside. “If you wouldn’t mind stepping out in front of the château, I’ll show you…”

  They went out.

  The floor of the drawing-room was on a level with the gravel-covered esplanade that preceded the lawns. There was a porch outside the door with a glass canopy. As they passed through it, Charles looked at it critically. That addition dated from 1860; Napoléon Christiani had had it built at the time of the annexation of the Savoy, on which occasion he had splashed out on celebratory parties, moved by patriotism and ambition. The porch, in the Napoléon III style, contrasted strongly with the aspect of the thoroughly Savoyard façade, with its ancient coarse stonework, its little windows and its heavy, steeply-sloped roofs, which overhung it like a firmly pushed-down hat.

  Apart from the porch, in fact, the slightly-dilapidated Château de Silaz presented a remarkable example of the regional architecture of the 17th century, unpolished but charming. Charles noticed that once again as he raised his eyes toward the “little top room”—which it seems indispensable to us to situate more precisely for the reader’s benefit.

  The façade of the château facing the grounds—which still exists, of course, at the time of writing—is not established on a single vertical plane but composed of two parts, one of which extends further forward than the other. For an observer placed in the grounds, it is the section on the right that is set back from the section on the left, to a depth of one room, and it is from that section in retreat that Charles, Claude and Péronne had just emerged beneath the porch.

  The other section, on the left, which protrudes by comparison with the one on the right, is similarly provided with a ground floor and a first floor, but it is surmounted, though only on its right-hand part, by a second floor, the side of which forms a right-angle with the façade in retreat. That second story, consisting of only one room, forms a square tower, similarly topped by a tiled roof, whose base is integrated into the advanced construction. This tower is pierced by two windows on each floor, one facing southwards—the orientation of the whole façade—the other facing eastwards and having a view, at right-angles, of the retreating façade.

  The ground-floor of the tower is a study.

  The first floor is a bathroom connected to the next room.

  The second and final floor is the “little top room,” a library and work-room.

  “It’s up there!” said Claude. “I didn’t suspect anything when I arrived close to Milord, of course. The night was already dark, with no moon. Immediately, my attention was drawn to that window.” He pointed to the eastward-facing window, the one in the sheltered corner formed above the gravel esplanade by the two sections of the building. “The dog had his head raised, barking and turning round and round, growling. And up there, Monsieur, there was a light, as in a room that someone was using. My first impulse was to go fetch my revolver and go up to the little top room, because my first thought was that we were dealing with burglars. But—I don’t know why—it suddenly occurred to me that it must be the sarvant…”

  Charles chided him in a mocking tone. “Come on, Claude! Seriously, do you still believe in ghosts?”

  As the two old people lowered their heads, Charles recalled all the ghost stories they had told him when he was young. He knew that both of them were convinced that they had glimpsed the sarvant in various forms, indecisive but alarming, at dusk, in moonlight, in darkness, in the gloomy depths of wine-cellars, going along a corridor in a deserted house or disappearing around the corner of a shadowed staircase.

  What exactly is a sarvant, or servant? A shade, a specter, a spirit, a demon, a soul in torment—anything you like. Savoyard and Bugist legends are haunted by them. Simple minds, influenced by the wild solitudes and somber gorges, have not yet abjured the ancient superstition, and they create these nocturnal scarecrows for themselves, before which they shiver all the more because they are imaginatively tailored to their fears, in such a way that nothing could be more frightening.

  “So you didn’t go up to see what the light was?” Claude went on. “To see what produced it?”

  “I wouldn’t have gone up there for all the gold in the world!”

  “He came to look for me,” said Péronne. “He brought the dog back…”

  “Yes, I wanted there to be two of us, at first. Afterwards, I tried to shut Milord up, so as to be able to listen without his growling and barking.”

  “Didn’t the racket the dog was making disturb the person with the light?” Charles asked. “You mentioned someo
ne just now—someone who had gone into the little top room, and continues to go into it every night. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Monsieur Charles, that’s right. But the din that Milord was making hadn’t drawn anyone to the window, or caused any sort of movement inside. Perhaps it was that, fundamentally, that seemed bizarre to me, you see! When I came back with Péronne, a few minutes later, without the dog, the light was still there…”

  “What sort of light? White? Yellow? Bright?”

  “Lamplight,” said Péronne, “and not very strong. Yellowish—like a small lamp. We had gone out without making any noise, me in my slippers, Claude in his socks. There was still nothing to be heard. Nothing was moving in the room. We stayed there for three-quarters of an hour, looking up, and looking behind us at the darkness from time to time. We weren’t reassured, you know, Monsieur Charles.”

  “But in the end, you saw someone?”

  Claude took up the story. “The shadow of someone, at first. On the wall and the ceiling, then on the bookcase. And suddenly—oh, goodnight! I remember it!—a man, or the false semblance of a man, came from the left to stand in front of the window.”

  Charles examined the window, quite calmly. From below he could indeed see, through the panes, a corner of the ceiling and the edge of the bookcase, which he recognized. He was familiar with the “little top room.” He had worked there in the past. The glass-fronted bookcase, in varnished mahogany, contained the great majority of the documents that he had taken the trouble to organize. His memory recalled the other items of furniture: a ridge-backed desk in fruit-tree wood; a nice simply-designed Directory-style chest of drawers. All of that gave an impression of the “good old days,” to which no modification had probably been made since the beginning of the 19th century.

  The window at which he was looking was not equipped with shutters. He went around the corner to look at the little top room’s other window; that one was hermetically sealed by solid shutters. (There is no need to be surprised by such disparities, which are quite common in the older buildings of the region.) Now, anticipating Charles’ arrival, Claude had opened the shutters—solid or slatted—of all the other windows in the château. On seeing those closed shutters, Charles knew that the brave man was decidedly not brave enough to have dared to go into the little top room, even in broad daylight.

  Claude confessed that he had only opened the door, cast a glance around, and assured himself that everything was in its usual place. “One might have thought that no one had been in there since the last inspection—but a sarvant isn’t someone!” The old fellow, surprised and annoyed to see his master so incredulous and indifferent, added: “Monsieur Charles hasn’t even asked me for the end of my story!”

  “Well, go on, my brave Claude. What happened next?”

  “What happened, Monsieur, is that the man turned round—and then he started walking around, quickly, like someone deep in thought. And imagine this, Monsieur Charles: his footsteps didn’t make the slightest sound, and the silence was so profound that we would have heard him walking in the room, even if he were wearing carpet-slippers. There’s no carpet up there, on the floor, and we have sharp ears, Péronne and me, thank God!

  “Finally, about midnight, we saw him go out of the room. Because of the height, we could only see his head. He took the light away, but we couldn’t see whether he was holding a lamp or a lantern, or anything else. Anyway, we saw perfectly clearly that he opened the door—didn’t we, Péronne?—and that the door closed behind him, silently, like a phantom door! And everything went dark again in the top room…except that he must have put the light out as soon as he went out, because we didn’t see the slightest glimmer in the windows of the loft.”

  “That’s true,” said Charles. “The door to the little top room lets out into the loft, via the stairway. He remembered the picturesque disposition that had delighted him when, as a small boy, he had played beneath the roofs of Silaz—too rarely for his liking. The little top room did not entirely occupy the contents of the square tower on the top floor; its door opened on to a light fir-wood stairway which led down to the loft of the section in retreat, by means of a door-less opening. There was no other exit from the little top room.

  “What does Monsieur Charles think of all that?” Péronne asked, anxiously. “No noise! Not a whisper! And every night, the sarvant comes back at the same time, and goes away at the same time! I don’t know if Monsieur can imagine what it’s like to lodge under the same roof as such a frightful thing! Not to mention that we don’t know where the accursed thing goes when it leaves that room up there!”

  “In sum,” said Charles, “What have you done? What measures have you taken?”

  Claude made a gesture of helplessness. “I’ve written to Madame. I’ve moved our beds to the ground floor, because our bedrooms in the attic…you understand! Besides, I’ve continued to keep a lookout, even with men from the village. They’ve kept me company and will repeat what I’ve just told you.”

  “A lookout? Where? How?”

  “But…from here, where we’re standing…from nightfall until the disappearance of…the thing.”

  “What does he look like, your sarvant?”

  “It’s difficult to be sure, Monsieur Charles. The light’s weak. You can only make out a dark shape, and you can only see the upper part of the body, of course.”

  “None of the men from the village thought of going up there while your visitor was there?”

  “Oh!” cried Claude, while Péronne expressed the same sentiment. “Not one of them wanted to get mixed up in it!”

  “Right. And tell me, Claude: have you suspected anyone of playing a malicious joke on you? That must have occurred to you, mustn’t it? Have you any enemies? Have we? You’ve been deceived by a practical joker—I’m sure of it. Think hard. Who? Think of anyone who might have a reason for doing it, who thinks he has a score to settle with you, if not with my family…”

  “Honestly, I can’t think of anyone. Come on, Monsieur Charles, believe me—it’s no good looking for an explanation in that direction. What’s happening isn’t natural, and I’ll wager a hundred francs that you’ll soon share our opinion, when you’ve seen with your own eyes…”

  “Unless the presumed sarvant doesn’t do me the honor of putting in an appearance for me!”

  The setting sun had just slipped behind the blue chains of the west. The temperature was cooling rapidly. The grounds were full of shadows. Only one sheer slope, quite close by, still benefited from the rays of sunlight, but the shadow was moving up it like a tide and the golden mountain was gradually turning into a mountain of darkness. Soon the very peaks were submerged and extinguished. Bats began their rounds in the crepuscular twilight.

  Péronne and Claude followed Charles Christiani back into the drawing-room. The two servants waited expectantly for questions and instructions.

  “Where am I to sleep?” he asked.

  “I’ll prepare whichever room Monsieur wishes,” said Péronne.

  “The usual one, then.”

  “Very well, Monsieur,” said the servant, meekly. “Has Monsieur taken account…?”

  “Of what, my dear?” he said cordially. “Of the fact that the room I usually occupy is next to the tower? That its bathroom is immediately underneath the little top room? I assure you that it’s all the same to me.” He added: “Ah! I’ll have dinner right away, so as not to miss the arrival of the sarvant!”

  “I hope that Monsieur Charles will not be imprudent!” said Péronne, anxiously.

  “I suspect that the circumstances will not permit any recklessness,” he replied. “I’m convinced, my friends, that someone has been trying to frighten you; I shall try, in the next few days, to find out why and penetrate the secrets of this stage-setting. As for this evening, I’ll wager, myself, that all will be tranquil and that your trickster won’t come! I regret now having arrived without taking any precautions. I ought to have left the automobile somewhere nearby and slipped in here
on foot or by bicycle, without being seen.

  “In any case, don’t mention my arrival in the village. Try not to make any more movement here than usual. Don’t go into the room I’ll be staying in until I tell you. I’ll only go into it myself at bedtime—and, of course, I’ll be ready to go up to the little top room at a moment’s notice. In brief, let’s do our best not to tip off the joker.”

  “But what if he comes, Monsieur Charles?” said Claude.

  “If he comes, Monsieur Claude, Julien and I are big enough to deprive him of any desire to return!”

  “Oh, my God, my God!” groaned Péronne, heading for the kitchen.

  “I have my revolver,” Claude recalled.

  “You’d do better to get your shotgun and load it with coarse salt! Call Julien, then, if you please, and I’ll give him his instructions…”

  At 9:30 p.m., Charles, the chauffeur Julien and Claude were posted under a chestnut-tree. Through the foliage, they were easily able to observe the suspect window, a casement formed in four squares, two to the left and two to the right. The dog Milord, a rather handsome briard, was keeping Péronne company in the closed kitchen.

  The crescent Moon was descending in the south-west, in a clear sky. An autumn chill was emanating from the Rhône, with a rising mist. Odors of grass and moist earth were in the air. Leaves could be heard falling, along with chestnuts, which sometimes tumbled noisily through the branches. In the distance, trains were rumbling along, then leaving the silence of nature to re-establish itself like dormant water that had been momentarily disturbed.

  It was in one of these almost absolute silences that the window was softly illuminated. Up there, someone was opening the door and coming in. The light spread further. The door having been closed again, a man passed by and disappeared toward the left. The shadows immobilized; doubtless the lamp had now been placed on an item of furniture. Then the window remained illuminated within the dark wall, for the moon no longer struck that wall, although it bathed the façade around the corner to the right, and made the glass in the porch glisten. There had not been the slightest perceptible sound.