The Arm and the Darkness

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  “Your Eminence can speak so of Madame—!” he cried, and stopped, choking.

  But the Cardinal was beside himself at the impudence of so frail a creature, who tortured all his senses waking or sleeping.

  “So,” he muttered, “she plots behind my back, this Spaniard, this enemy of France, this sly drab! It is the end. She must be destroyed.”

  “What are you saying!” exclaimed Père Joseph.

  The Cardinal regarded him with eyes of fire.

  “I have been patient,” he said, through his clenched teeth. “I have been long-suffering. I have been merciful and understanding of this crafty enemy. I shall be so no longer. She is intriguing against France; she is in the employ of her brother, that black and dangerous Spaniard, who longs for nothing but the ruin of France! So, these rascals would have me revoke the Edict of Nantes, would they! Knowing only too well that such a revocation would result in the resumption of civil war within France. Thus, then, they would find her weakened and helpless, and could despoil and conquer her at their leisure.”

  He panted, glaring before him, seeing nothing but his hatred.

  “The Edict of Nantes is the Edict of Satan,” said Père Joseph, sternly. “It is an insult to Almighty God, this edict which accords to heretics equal rights with Catholic Frenchmen.”

  “Reflect!” said the Cardinal, with a menacing and flaming look. “This Edict was promulgated by the father of his Majesty, Henry of Navarre, for the protection of his Huguenot friends.” He paused. “Henry declared that Paris was worth a mass, and so returned to the Church.” His voice became lower, but more intense. “And I find Paris, I find France, worth the Edict of Nantes.”

  “His Holiness demands—” said Père Joseph, outraged.

  “His Holiness,” said the Cardinal again, “is not a Frenchman.”

  He lifted a finger and stared formidably at his friend.

  “The wheel, the ax, the gallows, however beloved of his Holiness, shall defame France no more. I have said it.”

  Père Joseph turned away his eyes, helplessly, sickeped, and encountered the eyes of Louis. Then Père Joseph was startled, for he saw the fanatical madness on the face of the young priest. His brows drew together, thoughtfully. He spoke to the Cardinal, but looked only at Louis.

  “God is greater than France,” he said. “Meditate upon that, Monseigneur. God can crush France by the lifting of an eyelash.”

  The Cardinal smiled somberly.

  Then he said: “Can his Holiness find his sole concern in the Edict of Nantes? What of this war which is raging beyond France, which threatens the very heart of the Church? Does this not cause his Holiness the most acute anxiety?”

  For the time being, Père Joseph forgot the Edict of Nantes, and immediately plunged into a discussion of the war, then mounting with slow fury toward the prolonged crisis. Then, remembering something with disquiet, Père Joseph fixed his fierce blue eyes upon the Cardinal.

  “It is said that your Eminence is secretly supporting the Protestants which his Catholic Majesty, the Emperor of the Habsburgs, is seeking to overthrow. But this is not possible!”

  “I have my defamers,” said the Cardinal, tranquilly, with a gentle look.

  Only partly reassured, Père Joseph resumed with excitation:

  “The Germanies! Let the Emperor, from his throne in Vienna, crush them with ease! Let him destroy them utterly, those Protestant wolves! They are filled with greed, wishing to retain their nefarious grip upon the Church lands which they have blasphemously seized, and the Church revenues they have looted. Pray God and all His saints that the Emperor will annihilate them, join the Germanies once more in a Catholic brotherhood! Only then will Christendom be reestablished, Catholic culture revived, and France saved.”

  “Only then,” said the Cardinal with soft inexorableness, “will France be ruined.”

  But Père Joseph was too transported to hear these words. However, Louis heard them, and the blue glacial eyes were filmed over with ice.

  Père Joseph continued in his vehement denunciations of the Protestants, and his ecstatic adoration of the Habsburg Emperor, that most Catholic monarch. The Cardinal became wearied.

  He said at last, ironically: “Philip of Spain, of a surety, is deeply interested in this holy crusade. He will, of course, drive out the infidel Moors from his Empire, upon completion of the war against the Protestants?”

  “Most certainly!” cried Père Joseph. “And the Jews, also. They are conspiring, as of old, against Spain.”

  “I thought the torture chambers of the Inquisition, and the gallows, and the wheel, and the stake, were piously employed to good advantage against the Jews, and that they were now safe in the arms of Mother Church.”

  Père Joseph was suddenly silent.

  The Cardinal delicately examined his pale oval finger nails.

  “That was unfortunate, that converting by ‘pious’ means, of the Jews. That eliminated an eternal victim, an eternal means of preventing internal revolt and dissatisfaction with the government. A wise monarch allows the existence of a victim among his people, or even cultivates or invents one if one does not exist. Thus he protects himself from the indignation of his people.”

  “His Spanish Majesty still has the Moors,” said Père Joseph, unguardedly.

  At this, the Cardinal burst into loud and ribald laughter.

  Père Joseph exclaimed: “The Protestant pretender to the throne of Hungary allied himself without shame with the Turks. The Moors are their brothers. They must be driven out of Spain.”

  But the Cardinal’s acrid laughter became only the more ribald.

  While Père Joseph continued his transported discussion of the bloody war between the Catholics and the Protestant Germans for the fate of Europe, the Cardinal lost himself in virulent and delicious contemplation of mankind. What a foul monster was man, filled with viciousness, stupidity and evil, distracted by every slight wind, blood-thirsty and voracious as only a mad beast could be, but without a beast’s innocent ferocity, a creature justifiably hated by all more simple and honest animals, hating all things in return, even himself! A thousand thousand generations of enlightenment, a hundred Christs, would not serve to elevate this perverted demon to even the elemental decencies which lower animals understood instinctively. Where else in the universe was such craft, such wickedness, such cruelty, such obtuseness and dirtiness? The evil of men was of such a degradation that it could never aspire even to a kind of black grandeur. Who could encompass the vileness of men, which was the vileness of inconceivable filth, by comparison with which the ordure of animals was sweet-scented?

  The Cardinal was imbued again, with that implacable hatred for his species which never failed to inspire and revivify him. As some men are transported to superhuman strength by love and religious ecstasy, he was so transported by loathing. He felt the blood coursing through his veins like an awakened river, irresistible.

  I am what men have made me, he thought. And he understood then that the tyrants, the oppressors, the mass-murderers, the Genghis Khans and the Caesars, the engorged monsters, were created by mankind out of its own substance, its own desire, its own soul and infernal heart. The tyrant was not guilty; the murderer had clean hands. They were the helpless and fleshless emanations from the spirits of men. At the end, the genii invoked from the abysses of men’s souls destroyed them. That was ironical justice. The Cardinal lost himself in pleased contemplation of this justice.

  When he had been younger, and even now in flashes, he had endured awful anguishes of spiritual pain, so intense that it seemed his spirit became incandescent with tortured fires, when contemplating mankind. But now, after the first ectasy of his hatred passed, all suddenly became dark and formless before his eyes. All became tongueless as a silent bell, and all reality became to him an uttered sound without meaning.

  It is hard to endure life, he thought out of the chasm of his sinking, but it is harder no longer to discern what must be endured.

  The profound
and disintegrating exhaustion had him again. He closed his eyes. Somewhere in outer space he heard an interminable and vehement voice continuing a senseless diatribe. But it no longer disturbed him. He was lost to all sensation, even to despair. At these moments, which became much more frequent as his flesh failed, he no longer desired even that which could not be attained. Nor could he remember what it was that he once desired.

  He opened his eyes, opaque with weariness and dissolution. He saw the gray figure of Père Joseph, gesticulating, pacing. He saw the pale phantom of his secretary.

  He dragged his voice up from the depths of his pain and deathly exhaustion.

  “We shall discuss all this again,” he said, and his voice had lost its resonance. “My dear friend, sit with me. I have others to interview. It should amuse you.”

  He lifted his hand as a signal to Louis to admit another visitor.

  As he waited in silence, he wondered again, as he always wondered, if Père Joseph knew his thoughts, comprehended him. He wondered if he deceived him. He could not know. He only knew that Père Joseph was watching him gravely with that inhuman detachment. But he did not know that there was compassion and sadness in that regard, also.

  CHAPTER XVI

  A lackey, in somber black, entered with a silver cup of hot milk mixed with spiced wine. The Cardinal drank slowly and gratefully. There was silence in the chamber. The golden shadows of the sun lengthened, struck the pale and subtle countenance on its silken pillows. Now it was imbued with an attenuated grandeur and delicacy, and it could now be seen that the Cardinal had in himself the quality of nobility and patrician melancholy. The soldier, the diplomat, the schemer, the liar and the hypocrite, the courtier and the politician and the murderer, were obscured by a frail envelope of transparent and luminous flesh. The face of the Jesuit, the priest, the dreamer and the poet arrested itself.

  As the sunlight slowly mounted to his eyes, he recalled that visitors still waited in the antechamber. The light quenched itself from his features, and the old expression of intolerant malice returned.

  Three gentlemen were then admitted, together, and at their appearance, the Cardinal’s face narrowed, became closed and more subtle. But he smiled at them sweetly, and greeted them in the most affectionate terms.

  The first gentleman was Raoul, the Duc de Tremblant, brother-in-law of Madame de Tremblant, who was the mother of Mademoiselle Clarisse, the betrothed of Arsène de Richepin. Monsieur le Duc was a Huguenot. Upon perceiving him, Louis turned paler than ever, and the most vindictive look appeared on his marble features. He hated almost all men; for de Tremblant he had a particularly virulent detestation.

  De Tremblant did not appear to be a gentleman to inspire any one’s animosity. It is true that he had little of the traditional Frenchman’s elegance and urbanity and cynicism, and light grace of body and manner. He was a man of about fifty, tall, angular and somewhat ungainly of locomotion, his sober but rich garments hanging awkwardly on a lean but upright figure. His doublet, breeches and hose were of dark purple wool, his collar and cuffs of plain white linen, his shoes plain and simple with a silver buckle. The sword he wore had an unornamented silver hilt, and clanked against his hip and knee as if he were unaccustomed to wear it. However, he had the reputation of being a formidable swordsman, a reputation received incredulously by those who judged by superficial appearances. He might have been an obscure squire, a country gentlemen, a bourgeois of undistinguished ancestry, rather than a nobleman of an old and illustrious name beside which the family of the King himself was plebeian and coarse.

  His face was long, gaunt, and much wrinkled, for it was a stranger to the perfumed unguents so sedulously affected by other gentlemen. Moreover, the skin was dark and parched by wind and sun. He spent much time on his country estates, sometimes, to the horror of his peers, working with his peasants in the fields and actually guiding a plow. As a result, his hands were calloused, the nails broken, his face so lined that when he smiled his gentle but disillusioned smile a whole deep web of wrinkles broke out about his large thin mouth, long bony nose and small contemplative brown eyes. He had shaggy grizzled eyebrows, and this gave him a quizzical expression, heightened by the one-sided twist of his mobile lips. Like many Huguenots who were Protestant in their souls as well as their politics, he affected no personal adornments, and his graying hair was closely cut about his long and narrow head. Some of his friends affectionately declared that he had the appearance of an elderly but patrician thoroughbred horse.

  Even his enemies could find nothing venal or scandalous in any part of his life, for he had austerity and great simplicity and enormous kindness and understanding. When he smiled, his look was so sweet, so direct, so honest, that viciousness subsided in itself, growling. He was no innocent; he was never deceived. But he had acquired no bitterness in his association with men, though much sadness. As a consequence, he preferred the company of his ignorant peasants and the air of the unsullied country. “It is not possible to love men, nor to feel compassion for them, if one lives among them,” he would often say.

  He was one of the most powerful magnates in France, and his personal wealth was tremendous. Yet he never abused his power, never asserted it except in righting some injustice, and lived in the utmost simplicity. He needed no luxury about him, as did the Cardinal, to assure himself that he was adequately protected against others. He had too many inner fortitudes to be harassed by a constant fear of his fellows. Reticent, humorous, watchful and kind, hating no man and despising only the fearful and the ambitious, he was deeply loved by his few friends and appallingly hated by his enemies.

  The Cardinal had a deep liking for him, wary though it was, and cynical. In de Tremblant’s presence, as in the presence of Père Joseph, he relaxed to a great extent, knowing that there was no hypocrite, no creature of duplicity and self-seeking. He would have liked to see more of de Tremblant, but the latter rarely appeared in the Louvre or the Palais-Cardinal, except on grave missions concerning his friends or his religion. This explained the wariness of the Cardinal, and the arching of his eyebrows. The Duc de Bouillon, the Duc de Rohan, and the Duc de Tremblant were the three most formidable Huguenots in France. When they appeared in concert, as they did today, the Cardinal felt in himself the gathering of sly and formidable forces and uneasiness.

  He greeted them with expressions of pleasure and friendship. If he liked de Tremblant, he hated the Duc de Rohan, and the Duc de Bouillon. He knew that de Tremblant would regard even his venalities and duplicities with humorous understanding. But the other nobles would have no such tolerance. He knew, too, that de Tremblant was a Protestant, not from desire to retain personal power and rich estates, but from deep conviction. The other two were Protestants less from conviction and devotion, than from hatred of the King and himself.

  The Duc de Rohan was somewhat older than de Tremblant, but because of his colossal animal vitality and robustness appeared younger. He was not the son of his mother for nothing. His mother had been of the House of Parthenay, of Poitou, like the Cardinal, himself. Indomitable, arrogant, courageous and intrepid, she had bequeathed these qualities to her sons, and notably to the Duc de Rohan, though she was not responsible for his sly good-humor and loud infectious laugh. Her family was a branch of the famous Lusignans, who had never abandoned their dream of a union of France and England under one government.

  Henri, Duc de Rohan, was tall but so broad that he appeared shorter than he was. His large strong body was full of power. Though dressing in soberer garments than those of his position affected, he yet loved elegance, and the darkness of his clothing was set off with rich lace collars, gold buttons and an elaborate sword. However, he was untidy, and not too clean. He had a broad coarse face, with the wide nostrils of those who loved life and lived gustily, and his hair and mustaches were bright red. This redness extended even to his skin, which was very florid, and even to his small quick and lively eyes, so that he seemed imbued with a vigorous hot fire. Though he laughed much, and always had
great humor and a fund of obscene jokes rising from the less refined brothels and the gutters, the Cardinal knew him as a dangerous and remorseless man, obstinate, shrewd, brave and ruthless. He had the quick and irascible temper of those of his coloring, and his hand was almost always on the hilt of his sword.

  The Duc was a powerful leader, the recipient of the complete devotion of his followers. The Protestants of the south and west of France adored him, trusted him as they did no other. They knew he would never betray them, even for reasons of overpowering self-gain. He was the best example of those who were Protestants by policy, and so was never bedeviled by those tolerant and thoughtful vacillations which afflicted de Tremblant, and made him too meditative, too hesitant, too reluctant to go to excess. Moreover, he was married to Sully’s daughter, that dedicated woman.

  Men like de Rohan find in their own hatred, and the hatred of others, their greatest stimulant. He knew that if the Catholics hated him, the powerful nobles of the Huguenot towns hated him also, fearing for their own power, and knowing that their own followers did not trust them overmuch. They knew that their followers adored de Rohan, especially the Presbyterian masses, who distrusted the Calvinists and the Lutherans. De Rohan had the ability to conciliate all these sects, weld them together in a strong Protestant bloc.

  It had been the Cardinal’s policy to conciliate the Huguenots for the sake of French unity against the enemies abroad. He had particularly conciliated de Rohan. But he knew that this conciliation was armed, that he was grasping a tiger by the tail, or holding a bull by the horns. No explanations could confuse de Rohan as they might confuse de Tremblant. De Rohan was uncomplex. He saw through all the Cardinal’s magician’s tricks.