Day of the Arrow

by Philip Loraine

  Yet the words which the Marquis de Bellac spoke were so mundane, so anticlimactic, that Lindsay nearly laughed out loud—nearly missed the whole point of all that he had seen.

  ‘Welcome, all of you, to Bellac and to Les Treize Jours.’

  Then Philippe inclined his head, looked down at his son—and kissed him lightly.

  The vast, communal gasp of the crowd came at exactly the same moment as the woman’s scream; in Lindsay’s mind they were indivisible.

  He caught the shrill words: ‘No. Ah dear God, no . . .’ And he glimpsed the white distraught face of Tante Estelle as she crumpled, fluttering, into the dust.

  The banging on the door echoed down the long passage that led to Tante Estelle’s preposterously overcrowded sitting room; it reverberated among the chimes of the grandfather clock and caused the lusters of the dusty chandelier to tinkle delicately.

  The old woman lay on a chaise longue, her face pale, almost transparent against the red cushions; her eyes, however, were very bright, possibly even vindictive. Lindsay, Françoise and the sturdy red-faced maid, Marianne, were all looking towards the door, as if expecting it to give way at any minute before that thunderous knocking.

  After a moment the knocking stopped, and Philippe de Montfaucon’s voice shouted, ‘Marianne, open the door. Open this door at once.’

  Tante Estelle turned her head among the cushions; her voice was faint, shadowy: ‘Speak to him, Marianne. Don’t let him in.’

  Marianne gestured curtly to Lindsay to stand out of the line of the passage; she then squared her formidable shoulders and advanced to the fray. Before unbolting the door, however, she slipped a heavy chain into its socket.

  In the room they heard the bolts clatter back, heard the big lock snap open. At once Philippe must have thrust his weight at the door, but the chain outwitted him, leaving only a gap of some two inches.

  They heard him say, ‘Let me in, woman; I’ve got to talk to your mistress.’

  Marianne said, ‘Mademoiselle has taken a tisane and a sleeping draught. She is already asleep.’

  ‘Then wake her at once.’

  ‘That, Monsieur le Marquis, I cannot do . . .’

  ‘You’ll do as I say.’

  ‘Forgive me, Monsieur le Marquis, but I am a working woman, and I am no longer young. I would remind monsieur that it is Mademoiselle who pays my wages; it is more than my job is worth to disobey her orders.’

  They heard the rustle of banknotes, and Marianne’s voice very genuinely aggrieved: ‘Monsieur, there is also loyalty.’

  ‘Very well.’ Not even Philippe could disguise the boiling rage behind the reasonable tone. ‘Very well. It will not trans­gress your code of loyalty, I feel sure, to tell me whether Madame la Marquise is with my aunt.’

  ‘Mademoiselle is alone.’

  ‘Neither she nor M. Lindsay?’

  ‘Mademoiselle is alone; she is asleep.’

  After a moment there was the sound of the bolts being shot home, of the ancient lock clacking into place again. Marianne returned, nodded grimly to her mistress, ignoring Françoise and Lindsay, and left the room.

  For a long time there was silence. A bee was bumbling about among the layers of frilled lace curtains that covered the windows. The old woman’s eyes were closed; she might have been asleep—or dead—in this dusty sepulcher of a forgotten past.

  After a time she gave a sigh—a deep, weary sigh that seemed to come up out of her very soul. They did not know it then, but this was a sigh of capitulation; there was remorse in it, and there was release in it.

  ‘Philippe is afraid,’ she said. ‘Afraid of what I am going to tell you.’ She had not opened her eyes. ‘It has been a secret between us for so long—just between the two of us.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It is amusing that now he should be afraid of me—when for so many years I have been afraid of him—afraid that he might tell it.’

  Neither Lindsay nor Françoise spoke; it was as if they both held their breath. Tante Estelle, still without opening her eyes, said, ‘I knew, you see, as soon as you—’ she gestured vaguely towards Lindsay—‘spoke to me of death—of Philippe being afraid of death.’

  Again she was silent; then she turned her head on the cushions—turned it restlessly to and fro. ‘Or did I know before that? One lies to oneself. It is a sin. When I saw the boy, I knew.’

  Françoise said, ‘Christian?’

  Tante Estelle nodded. ‘Christian. The other was called . . . How one’s memory betrays one! Was it Armand? Yes, I think it was Armand.’

  Lindsay and Françoise exchanged a look. Françoise said, ‘The other one?’

  ‘Long ago. Why did I stay here? To see it happen again? Bah, I must be mad.’

  Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked at them—first at Lindsay, then at her niece by marriage. ‘I suppose he’s your lover,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t blame you; there’s a lot to be said for lovers, even I know it. Besides that happened before, too.’

  Françoise knelt beside the chaise longue. ‘My dear, what happened before? Who was Armand?’

  Tante Estelle touched the younger woman’s smooth face with a gentle old finger. ‘Your children are like we were: just like Alain and me. You never met Alain, did you? My darling brother, Philippe’s father.’

  ‘He was drowned long before I was married, you know that.’

  ‘I don’t know what I know; that’s the truth. Alain and I were so close—just like your Gilles, your Antoinette. Gilles is the image of Alain; perhaps that’s why I love him so much—why I am going to tell you what I swore . . . Yes, I swore it on the Holy Bible. I swore never to speak of it to a living soul.’

  Suddenly she put her hands up to her face, pressing her white cheeks so hard that the imprint of the fingers stayed there long after the hands had dropped to her lap again.

  ‘I swore on the Bible, so I am damned; but then perhaps I am damned in any case. But when I saw Philippe lift up his son and kiss him . . . Did I cry out? I can’t remember. When I saw it, I was a child again; I was looking up at my father as he lifted my darling brother—down there in the square, on this same day, all those years ago . . .’ She shook her head as if to dispel that confusion in time which haunted her.

  Lindsay could contain himself no longer. ‘You know the meaning of it then? Of the dancers, and the tomb in the forest—your own father’s tomb—and Philippe’s fear of death?’

  Tante Estelle stared at him, her eyes wide yet curiously vacant. After a moment she shook her head. ‘I know nothing,’ she repeated, ‘except that I saw it all before. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. But my father . . . Yes, there was a young man, Armand. My father—’ she glanced at Françoise—‘turned from my mother. She was not as strong as you are—not as good as you are; she went away; she made a fool of herself with many men.’

  Lindsay could feel the excitement dying inside him. He had thought that here, locked in this muddled old brain, were the answers to all the questions that taunted him; but, as she herself had said, she knew nothing—well, perhaps a little more than he had suspected, that was all. Was it only a desire to prevent the old lady telling them this—these feeble memories of a dead past—that had brought Philippe de Montfaucon banging at her door like a madman? He could have spared himself the trouble.

  But Françoise, more reasonable, more patient, was saying, ‘Darling, tell us; you must tell us now—what was it that you swore to keep to yourself?’

  The old woman nodded. ‘Yes, I must tell you. For your little boy, you see, because I love him so much. Will God forgive me? For the love of a child, will He forgive me?’

  Gently Françoise said, ‘I think He will.’

  Tante Estelle looked at Lindsay. ‘I don’t know the answers to your questions—because I am a woman, and this is a man’s secret. You are a man; you can save Gilles—perhaps you can save Philippe as well, I don’t know about that; but you can save Gilles—he doesn’t have to go the same way as my own dear brother.’
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  Lindsay took a step nearer to her. Françoise was holding the thin dry hand; she said, ‘You mean . . . I always suspected it. Philippe’s father wasn’t drowned by accident; he committed suicide to escape from something?’

  Tante Estelle shook her head, never taking her eyes off Lindsay.

  Françoise said, ‘It really was an accident then?’

  Still looking at Lindsay, the old woman said, ‘Neither an accident, nor suicide; it was a plan. He is still alive.’

  12

  The Drowned Man

  The church clock in the Old Town of Hyères was striking midnight as Lindsay climbed out of the Renault. He had been driving for six hours. He was tired and stiff, and his wounded forehead was aching abominably; yet during that drive he had become aware of a feeling of desperate urgency. He could not say how it had started, or what combination of circumstances had given birth to it; all he knew was that he could not banish from his mind a picture of Françoise—of her face as she had watched him drive away, pale, drawn, her eyes smudged with violet shadows of anxiety and fatigue.

  The last thing he felt like doing was broaching an unknown old man of uncertain temper, particularly when he knew that his very presence here meant that a closely guarded secret had been betrayed. And this, moreover, at midnight.

  He left the car in the ancient, paved square and went into a café. Clearly the tourists, whose cars had made the greater part of his journey a nightmare, never penetrated to the Old Town of Hyères—at any rate not in the evenings; the handful of local men who looked up as he entered did not seem unduly grateful for the pleasure of his company, though they did express some interest at the speed with which he dispatched four glasses of brandy and a cup of scalding-hot black coffee.

  Following their directions he found the Villa Oriflamme without difficulty; he stood for some time, looking at the heavy wooden door set in the high wall and rubbing his chin. The noise of the bell, when he did finally pull the iron ring which operated it, scared him out of his wits—also half the dogs in the neighborhood; and he was surprised by the speed with which this tintinnabulation was answered. The door opened, and he found himself staring into the eyes of one of the most murderous-looking Arabs he had ever seen. This individual, however, seemed to be impressed by the letter which Tante Estelle had given to Lindsay as a passport, and on the back of which she had written her name with a bold flourish. He bowed, opened the door a little wider and stood to one side.

  Lindsay found himself in a courtyard with a mimosa growing in the center of it. The Arab closed the gate, gave Lindsay a small secret smile which was far from reassuring and vanished into the house. Lindsay sat down on a stone seat, still, at this late hour, slightly warm from the day’s sun, and waited.

  He waited a long time. Presently the Arab reappeared and ushered him into the villa—or rather through it—to a vine-hung terrace. There was still no sign of the man who had once been called Alain de Montfaucon, Marquis de Bellac, but who now called himself M. Alain Gravier. Lindsay realized that the letter must have been a great shock to him; a secret which had for many years been in the possession of only two people, and those two people immediate blood relations, had now, for all that the old man knew, become the property of the whole wide world.

  The terrace was perched high up on a little cliff; it seemed to have been hewn out of the rock or out of the thick walls of the Old Town. Below it was a jumble of brown roofs, the tower of the church, the twinkling windows of Hyères, and, in the distance, the lights of the plage and a half-moon reflected in the Mediterranean. Gazing at this view Lindsay did not hear the step behind him; only when something white moved into his field of vision did he turn abruptly. He found himself looking at a massive nurse wearing a uniform and an aggrieved expression. Her voice was English and genteel. ‘You have upset M. Gravier, young man; it’s a great pity. Still it’s done now, and he insists on coming down.’

  Lindsay said, ‘I’m sorry; I . . . I didn’t realize that he was ill.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ replied the nurse, and added darkly, ‘at the moment. We have enough trouble when Mlle. de Montfau­con comes to stay here once a year, without . . . Oh well.’ She began to puff up the cushions on the terrace chairs. ‘As I say to M. Gravier, “You and your old flames—at your age!” He likes a little joke, you know.’

  There was something both grotesque and tragic in this—the old lady having to visit the brother she loved so much in the guise of an ‘old flame.’

  ‘Ah,’ the nurse said, ‘here he comes. Now you be careful, young man, won’t you?’ And she put one finger to her head with the ghastly callousness of her kind. ‘Not badly,’ she added. ‘But we just take care.’

  ‘Take care of what?’ inquired a querulous voice from the darkness of the room behind them, also speaking in English.

  ‘Of this terrace,’ she replied brightly, ‘and we don’t go sitting on the parapet like this young visitor of yours.’

  ‘Oh, go away, you stupid woman,’ said Philippe’s father as he came into view seated in a wheelchair which was being pushed by the Arab. ‘And shut these windows—all of them; there are times when I demand to be private.’

  He had a long, narrow head and the kind of distinguished features associated with diplomats of the old school or with prelates in port advertisements; Lindsay thought that in the elegant, high-stiff-collared and long-narrow-trousered days of his youth he would have been accounted a very handsome man. But he had clearly had a stroke, which probably explained the wheelchair; two spots of unhealthily high color burned on the fine cheekbones—Philippe’s cheekbones.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, speaking in French now, ‘that fearful woman has been telling you I’m off my head?’

  ‘She hinted as much.’

  The old man nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe I am; I sometimes think ninety-nine per cent of the world is.’

  Then he was silent, his dark eyes—Montfaucon eyes, as Lindsay knew from his study of the family portraits—fixed on the young man before him. Looking into them, Lindsay thought, Yes, he could well be deranged, and yet . . .

  The old voice broke in on his thoughts. ‘I am ashamed to think what your opinion of our family must be.’ He leaned forward. ‘I’m a proud man; it hurts me to say that. Do you understand—it hurts me?’

  The eyes were indeed remarkable. Lindsay noticed now that the stroke had twisted the face a little. ‘I understand,’ he said.

  A light gust of wind came off the sea and set the single overhead lantern that lit the terrace swinging a little; the shifting shadows on the old man’s face made it look as though he were under water. ‘Would it be surprising,’ he asked, ‘if I was mad? Dear God, aren’t they all mad? Haven’t the Montfaucons been mad since time immemorial?’ He laughed suddenly—a laugh made mirthless by his false teeth. ‘You could say that I’m the only sane one.’ He shook his head, as if this was something he didn’t believe himself. ‘You could say that they were the only sane ones, and the rest of the world mad. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.’

  There was a knock on the French windows behind them; the nurse appeared with a shawl which she put round her patient’s thin shoulders.

  ‘The only good thing about her,’ he said, ‘is that she can’t understand French, and never will.’

  Then, for a long time, he was silent. The little gusts of wind came and went; the lantern swung; the leaves of the vine whispered; the lights of Hyères twinkled far below.

  When the old voice spoke again it was entirely changed. Any assurance it had possessed, any élan, had vanished completely; it was a shadow of a voice, and Lindsay understood, suddenly, what life had been for this old man. The voice was shadowy because it was the voice of a shadow—of a man who had lost his identity, only to find that he could not assume another.

  ‘I’ve never even seen my grandson,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Nor my daughter-in-law, come to that. They say she’s a beauty.’ He looked up, and the old eyes were weary, almost puzzl
ed. ‘There are times when I almost feel that I really did drown that day at Antibes. “No,” I have to tell myself, “you swam round the headland, and the car was waiting . . .” ’ His voice trailed away; he shook his head and sighed.

  Lindsay said, ‘But why? Why did you have to do it?’

  The old man stared at him for a moment; then he chuckled but without very much amusement. ‘I pretended to die,’ he said, ‘because I was afraid of dying; and the result is that I’m dead. Or might as well be. Sounds like one of those Bellac riddles, doesn’t it? “Whoso danceth not, knoweth not what cometh to pass” and all the rest of it?’

  He noticed the way that Lindsay’s head jerked up at these words, and again he gave that dry rasp of mirth.

  When he next spoke his voice had changed yet again; it sounded almost impatient, bored.

  ‘My sister writes that you will save the child; she says you are a good man, brave . . . Everything I am not.’ He held up a bony, frail hand to stop Lindsay speaking. ‘You can only do this if you know what it is that you are saving him from. But what I can tell you is only a little; they never trusted me, I was never perfect, all that I know is only a little—and much of what I know I have forgotten.’

  He shook his head, the bowed, white-haired figure in the shawl, strangely lit by the swinging lantern. ‘No. Even that is not true. I have forgotten nothing, but I am . . . afraid to speak; there are things I dare not tell.’

  Again he was silent. Lindsay felt that impatience, that sense of precious time wasted, nagging at the edges of his mind.

  The old man said, ‘Is Cottanero there? Luchard?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was surprised; the impatience vanished. ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘No man knows them; no man knows any of them, but they know each other. What is the date?’

  Lindsay stared. The old voice was querulous again. ‘The date, boy, the date, the day of the month?’

  ‘It’s the thirty-first of July—or rather . . . No, because it’s after midnight: the first of August.’

  The old man sat up suddenly. ‘August,’ he said. ‘Already! Then my son . . .’ He broke off; he did, at this moment, look quite insane. Lindsay felt fear tingle in his spine.