Fact after fact, incident after incident, slid into place in his mind as the miles slid into the speedometer.
A gray, lowering dawn had given way to somber morning by the time he reached Arles. Every minute the roads were growing busier, and his progress slower. Again and again in his mind he heard that click which had severed him so utterly, so finally from Françoise. He did not think that she would be in any actual, physical danger—not, that is to say, so long as she kept her head; and she would keep her head so long as her small boy was no further involved in whatever might, at this very minute, be happening at Bellac. Yet however savagely and however often he might repeat to himself that she was in no danger, he could not banish from his memory the soft, threatening voice singing in the wood, and the snap of the Alsatian’s teeth missing his throat by inches. Just at this moment there were men at Bellac who did not need very much excuse to kill; three years of disaster had made them like this, and two thousand years of tradition.
He could understand now that what gripped the people of the valley was as immediate and as real as any other form of blood lust. It was the mood of the crowd before a bullfight; it was as savagely irresistible as an outbreak of racial hatred. Intelligent men, caught up in these cataclysms of the soul, might repudiate them afterwards; at the time they were ineluctable.
But at Bellac the madness had deeper, more dangerous roots, for it was involved with a religion—a religion so old, so fundamental, so much a part of the heritage of mankind that Christianity seemed modern by comparison.
It was this, this madness of the soul, that had caught and bound him as he had stood in the little square in front of the church watching the twelve dancers and the golden man round whom they danced. The tense expectancy of that crowd of peasants had communicated itself to his inmost being; perhaps that was why, now, he knew, without a shadow of doubt, that the only cure for the madness was the same as it had been since the beginning of man—the spilling of blood.
With this clarity in his mind came a sense of reality. He was quite sure suddenly of what he had to do. Alone he would be helpless in the face of what waited for him at Bellac. The proper antidote, he felt sure, was the most mundane one—the appearance, in force, of the police.
After Nîmes the road began to climb; there was a mountain feeling in the air, even though the mountains themselves were hidden in lowering clouds the color of ripe figs.
Lindsay lost all count of time and distance. He only knew that, however fast he drove, however many idiotic risks he took on the twisting corners that multiplied ahead of him, he could not reach the chateau soon enough. His whole being became fixed in a point of concentration, and that point was the neat sign in the street behind the Grand Place in Dennat which read, Gendarmerie.
He reached the little town just after nine o’clock. In the square, under the plane trees, the market was in full swing. He had to waste precious minutes while an ancient cart laden with produce was pulled out of the gutter where one wheel had got stuck in a drain.
He jerked the car to a standstill outside the police station and leapt out. By now he had reached that point of exhaustion where the system seems to revitalize itself out of itself like some kind of nuclear reactor. It was twenty-seven hours since he had slept (if that drugged coma could be called sleep) and almost as long since he had eaten anything more substantial than a sandwich. He felt utterly uncoordinated in both speech and movement, and the wound on his forehead was throbbing crazily; and yet he was not, in any accepted meaning of the word, tired. Out of his mind, perhaps, but not tired.
Certainly he must have looked extraordinary, if the stare given him by the gendarme on duty at the door was anything to go by.
He lurched into the stuffy office where a sergeant was sitting behind a desk, banged his fist down on it and said, ‘Listen—I need your help badly. At once.’
Since policemen all over the world seem to be like highly strung spinsters waiting to be insulted by every man they meet, the sergeant gave this dirty, wild-eyed, unshaven apparition what could be called a distinctly old-fashioned look.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let us begin at the beginning. What is your name, monsieur?’
‘Oh for God’s sake! James Lindsay. That’s got nothing to do with . . .’
‘On the contrary, monsieur, it has everything to do with it.’ His eyes flicked away from Lindsay’s face and focused on something beyond him.
Lindsay, a sudden awareness of danger tingling all over him, swung round—and found himself looking straight into the brown, amorphous eyes of Prince Rinaldo Cottanero. The smooth voice said, ‘Thank you, officer. You have been most kind.’
He moved forward and gripped Lindsay’s arm with fingers that surprisingly belied his physical softness.
‘Philippe wants to talk to you. Please come at once.’
‘No,’ said Lindsay savagely, struggling. He turned back to the policeman. ‘You’ve got to help me. There’s going to be an accident—a fatal accident . . .’
The sergeant said, ‘Monsieur, you should drink less or you may find yourself in serious trouble. At least be glad that you have good friends.’
To his fury Lindsay caught the two men exchanging an understanding and pitying look.
‘But . . .’ he began.
‘And you can count yourself lucky that Monsieur le Marquis is willing to overlook the theft.’
‘Theft!’
While Lindsay’s brain was still reeling, Cottanero pulled him towards the door. A man whom he dimly recognized appeared from the passage outside and took his other arm.
He turned, shouting, ‘You don’t understand. This is all a trick. I . . .’
Cottanero said, ‘Use your intelligence. Don’t you see that no one believes anything you say?’
He found himself hurried out of a side door and thrust into a large, black limousine which was waiting there, engine running. A second later he was sitting in the back seat between two sturdy, brown-faced men, and the car was moving. Cottanero had got into the front next to the driver. He now turned and slid open the glass window which separated them.
Lindsay shouted, ‘You’re crazy, the whole lot of you.’
‘The crazy man,’ replied Cottanero evenly, ‘is the one whom the majority of men think to be crazy. That’s you.’
‘By God,’ said Lindsay, ‘you can’t stop me talking forever. I’ll let the whole world know what happened here.’
Cottanero sighed. ‘Have you finished shouting? If you have, listen to me. I chose to sit in front because I don’t intend to hold any idiotic discussions with you. You can no more prevent what is happening at Bellac than you can prevent tomorrow being the second of August. As for the future, you may say whatever you like—nobody will believe you. You are a very small man, Mr. Lindsay, and you face something that not a thousand . . . not a million like you can change or destroy, or even so much as dent. This has been proved for as many centuries as mankind has been on earth.’
He closed the glass window and turned away.
The man on Lindsay’s left said to the man on his right, ‘It would have saved a lot of trouble if we’d killed him that evening on La Bosse.’
Lindsay glanced at the two, weather-worn faces—self-contained, peasant faces with something mysterious and secret about them. His tired brain could not for a moment be sure whether they were outsiders in his world or he in theirs; suddenly the barrier between reality and unreality, perilously insecure at the best of times, seemed to have vanished altogether.
The big car swooped down the last steep incline of that winding road along the gorge, and rounded the last corner. Immediately ahead of them, blocking the way completely was a hay wain.
It took Lindsay a few seconds to realize that this was no accident. Whether it was placed there purely to stop him, if he had decided to drive straight to the chateau, or as a measure of security against the whole outside world, he was never to know. As soon as the men in charge of it saw the limousine they ran to their horses,
dragging the huge cart clear. Lindsay glimpsed impassive faces as they passed, dark eyes staring, revealing nothing.
The car plunged into the dark pine wood, and a moment later Bellac swung into view—a dark, lowering fortress against dark hills under a sky of storm. On this somber day there was not a vestige of warmth in the yellowish-gray stone, and the lake, which had been a shimmering miracle the day before, glinted with the cruel lights of burnished steel. In spite of himself Lindsay’s heart sank.
And now, as the road straightened out, passing between fields and vineyards, he became aware of the people of Bellac: at first a small group of them, standing together by the roadside, turning sunburned country faces to watch the car as it passed. A little further on two men stood by a gate; then six or more outside a small house.
Suddenly Lindsay realized what was strange about them; they were all looking in the same direction—towards the castle—and in the pose of each body was an unmistakable, a terrible expectancy.
He leaned forward, staring, aware of the two men watching him without sympathy. Just before they came to the village he saw an old woman in one of the vineyards; she was kneeling among the diseased vines, bent double, her face in her hands. He was seized suddenly by a terrible urgency; it rose up in him like vomit until every nerve in his body was tingling. Sweat trickled cold in the small of his back.
He was out of the car almost before it had pulled to a standstill in the tree-lined Cour d’Honneur.
He ran, stumbling a little, up the wide steps and in at the huge doorway.
The great hall, on this thunderous day, was dark and shadowy. It was a moment before he became aware of the group of men who stood at the far end of it, their bodies lost in the gloom, only their faces, turned to look at him, palely shining, other-worldly. He recognized the abbé’s German secretary, the horseman who had stopped on the road to speak to Philippe about the vines, one or two others he had seen on the morning of Les Treize Jours or at work about the estate. None of them moved or said a word.
Lindsay turned, hearing Cottanero enter the room behind him. ‘Françoise . . .’ he began.
‘She is perfectly all right.’ From the prince’s voice he sensed that he had been primed on this subject; the idea infuriated him. He said, ‘I must see her—now.’
Cottanero shook his head. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
He moved towards the great staircase. Lindsay stayed where he was. Cottanero turned and looked at him with something almost like compassion. ‘Mr. Lindsay, you know that I shall have you carried after me if you don’t do as I ask.’
As he moved, something else caught his attention—something which, because of his impatience or because of the gloom, he had failed to notice before. All the men who faced him were dressed for shooting; they all carried sporting guns.
Cottanero paused at the foot of the staircase. ‘It’s a tradition,’ he said. ‘I thought you knew that. The hunt on the day after Les Treize Jours.’
‘Yes,’ said Lindsay bitterly. ‘I knew.’
He understood now that the men standing before him in the sepia shadows of the great hall were the Twelve—or would be the Twelve when they were joined by the Abbé Luchard and Christian, the only ones who were missing.
Before the cold, almost pitying stare of those ten pairs of eyes, he felt his resolution weakening again, and he knew, with a terrible sense of his own inadequacy, that this was because he had no faith to set against the passionate faith that ruled them.
He turned and followed Cottanero up the stairs. He felt feeble, helpless. In panic he realized that he had no idea what words he could try to use when at last he stood in front of his old friend.
Cottanero led him across the wide landing at the top of the stairs, up another flight, and into the corridor which ended in the massive door of the tower. It was the Abbé Luchard who opened it. Lindsay moved forward into the spacious circular room. He heard the door being locked behind him.
Philippe de Montfaucon sat in an armchair near the window. In the passionless light of that gray day Lindsay saw at once that the refining process was still at work on the handsome, bony features; yet, where there had been torment when last he saw it, there was now peace. It was this look of peace which, finally, made his hopes shrivel and die inside him.
Père Dominique stood beside the chair, one hand resting on the back of it.
On the other side of the room, leaning on the mantelpiece, but turning to look at the intruder, was Christian. Beyond him, chin in hand, gazing at the chessboard, sat the most surprising member of the company: Odile de Caray. She glanced up at Lindsay for a moment without interest.
Philippe said, ‘You made a long and, by the look of you, exhausting journey for nothing, James.’
Lindsay said, ‘Françoise . . .’
‘Françoise is perfectly safe. She is at the moment locked into her apartments in the same way that you, in a few minutes, will be locked in here.’
His voice was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that Lindsay felt a wild desire to grab hold of him and shake him. Instead he suddenly heard himself shouting, ‘You can’t do this, Philippe; it’s crazy, it’s meaningless . . .’
He saw the fire blaze into Père Dominique’s eyes, but Philippe raised a hand and silenced the priest before he could speak.
‘You don’t for one moment believe that it’s meaningless, James, I can tell that by your face.’ He stood up and came nearer. ‘I’m in no mood for arguments, I daresay you can understand that; let me just say one thing. I don’t know what you were told in Hyères; I assure you that your informant knows very little; I also assure you that in a few hours’ time he will no longer be a resident of the Villa Oriflamme—he will be moving to another country, and he will be using another name. I have arranged that, but even if I hadn’t, his own fear would have compelled him to run away . . . again.
‘It was stupid of you to go to the police; I should have thought that even you, knowing the very little that you do, would have realized that there is nothing here which they will begin to understand. I advise you, however, to get away from Bellac as soon as you can, after you are released from this room; your . . . foreknowledge of events will be the only sort of evidence they will have, and it may make life extremely awkward for you.’
The calm impersonality of that known, once loved voice, as much as the devastating logic of what it said, was for Lindsay the coup-de-grâce. He realized that Bellac had seized him again, within a few minutes of his crossing its threshold—seized him and conquered him. He could only whimper, ‘But don’t you see—you’re dying for nothing.’
‘I shall die for my faith, and for my people—is that nothing? Did the millions who died in the last war, will the millions who are going to die in the next, die for more?’ He shook his head. ‘When your turn comes, James, ask yourself, “Am I dying for what I passionately believe?” The answer will be “No.” ’
‘You believe!’ Lindsay cried out. ‘You believe all this . . . primitive hocus-pocus?’
Philippe and the priest crossed themselves.
After a moment, after he had controlled himself, Philippe de Montfaucon said, very gently, ‘Yes, my old friend, I believe. And it is our belief in a thing, mine or yours, which makes that thing—forever, or for a moment—divine.’
Lindsay was entirely unable to decide—would never, in all his life, be able to decide—whether what he saw in the face of the man confronting him was the twisted conviction of insanity or the radiant conviction of saintliness. Who can say, in any case, where the dividing line between them lies? It is as equivocal as the line between stupidity and selfless bravery, between love and hatred.
All he did know was that Philippe de Montfaucon had long ago moved out of his own world of evasions and practical considerations—that it no longer mattered whether he was right or wrong. What mattered was that he had made a choice, and that he believed, with everything that was in him, in the rightness of that choice. The belief, the strength of the belief, cr
eated its own truth.
Presumably, at this last moment, as their eyes met for the last time, Philippe was satisfied with the glimmering of understanding which he saw, because he nodded to himself.
Then, swiftly, he turned away and went to the far corner of the room where, Lindsay now noticed, there was a prie-dieu; he knelt down for a moment in prayer. Then he stood up and turned to the door; he went out without so much as a glance at Lindsay. The Abbé Luchard followed him.
Père Dominique looked at Christian, and it was now, as the boy turned from the mantelpiece, that the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place in Lindsay’s mind. Something about the smooth, young face made his breath catch in his throat—an extraordinary look of . . . yes, of what could only be called witless peace.
Père Dominique said to Odile de Caray, ‘Is he all right?’
She nodded, turning those extraordinary amber eyes towards the young man.
Lindsay remembered that strange scene in the forecourt of the palace on the day that he had ridden with Philippe to look at the vineyards: how the groom had moved to take his master’s horse, and how he had seemed almost ashamed of this natural action when Christian had intervened. He remembered, too, that little outbreak of jeering—and yet it had been only a token jeering—which the young man’s presence in front of the church had called forth from the crowd. He remembered, finally, how in drawing that face he had been surprised to find evidence of the primitive characteristics underlying the surface sophistication.
He saw, quite clearly now, that the boy was under deep hypnosis, and he understood, as perhaps he had always understood with some instinctive part of his own mind—and as the people of Bellac had certainly known from the beginning—that it was this boy in this state who would kill Philippe de Montfaucon under the oak tree in the forest on the day of Lammas. The beloved would kill the god, just as William Rufus had been killed by his familiar, Tyrrell.
Day of the Arrow Page 17