“True. But before visiting madame he had paid a visit to mademoiselle, who was still resting in her room. And he, too, saw that crucifix. She had not changed its position. She probably never thought of it.”
“He came back to change it!” cried Mr. Ricardo. “He meant to change it secretly, to avoid the scandal. That was why he crept so furtively along the terrace. That was why you said the readjustment had been made!”
“Yes. The second time we entered that room I slipped the crucifix off its nail and set it to stand upon the table and against the wall, as a crucifix should stand, whilst you, my friend, were probing the mysteries of the Grand Canal.”
At another time Mr. Ricardo might well have taken offence at Hanaud’s irony and repelled it with stinging words such as “Oh, indeed!” and “To be sure.” But he was by now wrought to a pitch of amazement and perplexity which made everything trivial except the satisfaction of his curiosity. The amateur of sensations sat forward in the window-seat, his mind a-tiptoe on the most satisfying expectations. Even the question he was now to utter had its thrill; and he attuned his voice to the proper note of awe.
“So in this — chapel — on that night, the Black Mass was celebrated?”
“Yes.”
“By Robin Webster?”
“By Robin Webster, the priest.”
As he spoke, Hanaud took his blue packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Mr. Ricardo, on the other hand, was so startled that he almost put out a hand to restrain his companion from a sacrilege. And even when the smoke of the cigarette rose blue, turned brown and shredded away, spreading its pungent odour about this recess of the window, he had a feeling that an indiscretion was being committed. The next minute, however, Hanaud began to talk.
“A pretty affair! The old Sabbaths — one can understand them better. Poor serfs, hungry, without pleasures, in revolt against the great injustice which gave all the colour of the world to a handful of nobles and all the misery of the world to the rest. One can see them fermenting to ecstasies of blasphemy and abomination in some forest glade or old burial — ground. But the Black Mass. That’s sheer decadence. The people of disappointed ambitions, those who have exhausted the normal joys and crave the forbidden ones, those who would sell their immortal souls for a new thrill, those who look to Satan for the gifts which Christ refuses, the whole body of degenerates with the blackmailers who live on them — criminals seeking accomplices, poisoners seeking protection — you heard the mother Chicholle. There were great ones whom she would betray. That’s the spirit and that’s the congregation too. Great ones rubbing shoulders with the witches of the slums, and all of them looking for their profit to Adonis there” — and once again his arm shot out with a big outspread hand denouncing the idolatry— “Adonis the Sterile.”
“Really! Really!” said Mr. Ricardo, himself aware of the inadequacy of his comment.
“It was the Vicomte de Mirandol who began the cult here. An odd, exotic creature, half crazy with long vigils, a shallow erudition and a lack of recognition, he found importance and no doubt, too, a response to a thread of mysticism in his nature. Satan’s agent in the Gironde! A position, you understand, full of flattery. It needed a daring man. He stood aloof, awe- inspiring, wrapped in wickedness like a black cloak. And he believed it all. And not he alone. From the days of Madame de Montespan and the Abbe Guibourg, the Black Mass has had its congregation. Ennui, yielding to excitement, that to the conviction that the unpardonable sin of The Revelations has been committed, that again to a savage glorying in it — like a child in a rage at being punished who mutters obstinately, ‘Rakah, Rakah,’ because he who says the word can never be forgiven. Tidon joins the brotherhood — Paris may be the nearer. Diana Tasborough becomes a candidate. Here a person of standing, there a woman of the town. Jeanne Corisot would hear of it. The very thing for her! And the mother Chicholle! There will be pickings for her out of it. For the people who use the Black Mass are people who want evil things safely done.”
Gradually the pieces of the puzzle were fitting themselves together in Mr. Ricardo’s sight. He could imagine whispers of the celebration spreading very quietly, very gradually, but also very certainly. The dark secret could not be smothered. And whoever had it would also have all the worshippers in the hollow of his hand. He or she could insist upon admittance; and the cult with its associates would become almost automatically an organization for malevolence and crime. Diana Tasborough’s obsession, her insensibility to her companion’s petulant assumption of authority, at once became easy to understand. What would even the most persistent stream of querulous reprimands matter to a girl possessed by the unholy excitement of a dreadful and forbidden creed?
“But, of course, the keystone of the whole black business was the fact that Robin Webster was an ordained priest. The Black Mass postulates the supremacy of God. God has to be lured and tricked into the wafer and the wine, before He can be made subject to Satan. Only a priest can do that. The celebrant of the Devil’s Mass must be the celebrant of the Mass of God. The Abbe Guibourg, Gille Lefrance, Davot, Mariette — they were all true priests, even as Robin Webster.”
“Yes, who was he?” Mr. Ricardo asked.
“A curious history. He belonged to the Gironde. His family goes back to those days when Bordeaux was English. The Websters grew vines and made wine in the Gironde as far back as the old times when Gaufridi was burnt for witchcraft at Aix-en-Provence. They fell upon evil days. From proprietors they dwindled to managers and not very successful merchants in Bordeaux. Robin Webster’s father was the last of them. Robin the son was mistaken enough to believe that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Odd? But people are odd. There isn’t anyone, if you could lay out on a plate the inside of his mind as a surgeon lays out the inside of your body, whom you could call commonplace. There’s some queer imp at the heart of each one of us. He was sent to Beaumont College, officiated for a time at a church in London — he was there when his father died — wearied of it and went off.”
“With Evelyn Devenish,” Mr. Ricardo declared confidently, but Hanaud shook his head.
“She had predecessors. Ho, ho, that fellow! I tell you. With his white hair and his fine looks, and his air of a man set apart, and a suggestion of passion which his eyes would let you see for a moment, he was fatal. The women tumbled for him—”
“Fell for or tumbled to,” said Mr. Ricardo amiably, “and it is the first you mean. It would have been preferable if you had meant the second.”
For once in a way Hanaud was baffled. He stared at his friend suspiciously, fearing that his leg was being distinctly drawn, but he did not dispute; he swept on with his story. “So much information we owe to routine. But we should still have been in very great difficulty but for one thing.”
“That bundle of letters in Robin Webster’s room which you photographed,” said the irrepressible Mr. Ricardo.
“This time, my friend, you are right,” Hanaud replied as he lit another cigarette. “That bundle of letters told the whole of the curious little story of passion and intrigue which led to the sale of the Blackett necklace to the mother Chicholle and reached its abominable climax in this room.”
“And he kept those letters!” cried Mr. Ricardo astonishment. But a moment afterwards he remembered a case in his own country in which letters just as fatal had been preserved. “Isn’t it strange that passion should so mislead a man?”
“No! No!” Hanaud interrupted. “In Webster’s room, I told you, there was another reason besides passion which made a man keep letters to his undoing. And I preferred even then that second reason of the two. It was cunning, it was a horrible kind of prudence which persuaded Robin Webster to keep those letters. All the passion was on the other side. He — with the letters he kept the mastery over a woman mad with jealousy. For they were fatal letters scribbled by Evelyn Devenish, some in that very house down there, the Chateau Suvlac.”
At what precise date Evelyn Devenish and Robin Webster had met, Hanaud was unaware. It was
certainly before Webster had introduced Evelyn Devenish to Diana Tasborough at Biarritz. But there had been a compact between the two of them that all letters should be destroyed on the day they were received. Evelyn Devenish, to whose foresight the compact was due, had kept to the bargain faithfully. Not a shred of a letter had been discovered amongst her possessions. And up to a certain date, when they were all together at Biarritz, Robin Webster had kept his word too. But there had come a time when Evelyn Devenish’s passion grew exacting and even dangerous. The letters gave to her lover a hold over her. He could answer threat with threat.
“One side of the correspondence — his,” Hanaud continued, “had been destroyed. He was sure of Evelyn’s loyalty. No written page of his could be brought out of the ashes to convict him. He was in a position to say, ‘I didn’t answer that,’ or ‘I was careful to make no suggestion,’ or ‘All my letters were intended to bring Evelyn into a reasonable frame of mind.’ On the other hand, he was in a position to say to her at any moment — and the moment was coming— ‘I have done with you, and you will kindly keep as quiet as a mouse, or I cause you aggravations and inconveniences.’”
“But after Evelyn Devenish was dead,” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed, “the letters had lost their value. Also, it seems, they were dangerous to him. He would have destroyed them on that night when Evelyn Devenish died.”
“On that night, as you will see,” Hanaud replied, “the good Robin Webster was very busy. The morning found him still at his labours. Had it not been very necessary that he should hold a little committee meeting at the Chateau Mirandol with our dear Vicomte and that ambitious young judge, those letters would have been little grey flakes before we ever cast our eyes on them.”
Hanaud opened the leather portfolio which he had laid upon the table, and took out a copy of the photographed letters.
“Look at this passage,” he said, and he pointed to the beginning of one of them. It had been written at Biarritz when Robin Webster had returned to his duties at Suvlac. “Ah, the poor woman! One who loves and one who is loved. The eternal story.” Mr. Ricardo read; — Dearest,
I shut my eyes. I won’t see — yet how can I not see? Whenever I have finished a letter to you, I begin another. I notice all the little things that happen, and sift them out into things which may amuse you, and things which won’t. And every little thing which will, I write down at once, whether it is a book I am reading or some queer-looking stranger who comes into the restaurant, or some funny story, so that in two days I have a great long letter written to you. And all yours begin “Darling, since the post is going out in half an hour I am writing a line to you in haste” —
Hanaud turned over a page or two and came to the last of them, a dozen in all. Passages in them were heavily underlined with a blue pencil.
“Read them in their order,” said Hanaud; and Mr. Ricardo took the letters upon his knee.
CHAPTER 25
EVELYN DEVENISH’S LETTERS
IN THE FIRST of the marked passages, Evelyn Devenish, writing from Biarritz to Suvlac, reluctantly agreed to a marriage between Diana Tasborough and Robin Webster. “Of course she’s in love with you. She has already sent Bryce Carter about his business. She can’t talk for five minutes without bringing you in — I sometimes wish that you were disfigured and rather horribly, so that no one in the world except myself would willingly look at you — Oh, I’d make up for them! But we are as poor as rats, and nothing’s any good without money.”
Once he was married to Diana, there would be money to burn — for both of them. There was to be but the most momentary of suspensions in their own relationship. A whole code of conduct was laid down for him, and very authoritatively. Diana was to become a negligible apanage, a sack of money. If she suffered — well, all the better.
Already there were allusions to the ceremonies of the conference room. She herself had embraced the faith with the fervour of a Madame de Montespan. She would keep her lover by the Devil’s rites, and at the same time reduce Diana to the abject position of a Mormon’s wife. Diana was to be initiated into those mysteries. She was to be provoked by subtle appeals to her curiosity, her love of excitement. She was to be persuaded that she had committed the unforgivable sin. Remorse and the fear of scandal would turn her into a puppet.
Other letters, some written whilst Evelyn Devenish was away in Bordeaux, some even when she and Robin Webster were under the same roof and Marianne was used to carry them, described the gradual progress of the plot. Diana hesitated, was afire now, terrified at another time. She stood at the edge of a sea, venturing a foot in and withdrawing it to the warmth of the solid sand, thrilled and tormented. Of Evelyn she had no suspicion. “He loves me, I know,” she said to her. “Whatever he has done in the past, or whomever he has been friendly with, doesn’t matter at all. And what he wishes — even that! — yes, yes.”
Hanaud laid a broad hand upon the typed copies. “So you see the position of affairs. Both of these young women in love with Robin Webster, and both of them fooled by him. Evelyn Devenish will let him marry Diana Tasborough, so long as she keeps him for herself. Meanwhile he keeps her letters. Diana is certain that he loves her, and if he worships the Devil — well, so will she. And he? Robin Webster? He cares not a snap of the fingers for either of them. No, he is ‘L’homme a femmes,’ and to be “L’homme a femmes,’ my friend, means that you mustn’t be touched by one of them. You must be without pity; they must be so many sleepers over which the rails of your destiny will run.” He looked with a curious smile at Mr. Ricardo. “Did you know that one of the Devil’s names was Robin? Yes. That, too, I learnt at the Archiepiscopal Palace in diving into some old books. Robin Abiron, Robin this and Robin that — Satan himself, eh?” and with another glance he nodded his head gravely. “Yes, I, too, wonder”; and then with a burst of violence: “If you and I, who after all have lived in the world, and outlived our youth and all its romance — if you and I draw in our breath with a shiver and say, ‘I wonder,’ is it strange that these girls, their emotions stirred, their nerves frayed, should say instead, I believe’? Look at this!”
He turned back a couple of sheets and showed to Mr. Ricardo a passage which had not been underscored.
“Remember that Diana Tasborough, who had befriended Evelyn Devenish, was being played by her like a fish on a hook. To what sort of passion must Evelyn Devenish have been wrought, before she could write this of her friend,” and Mr. Ricardo read:
What do I want her to be? I haven’t the slightest difficulty. The dog that runs about after its master with its leash in its mouth. I have never discovered a better image of humiliation than that.
Mr. Ricardo gasped, as he read the contemptuous prophecy; and it was with a shock of relief that he realized that this could never be fulfilled.
“That’s the position, then,” said Hanaud, “when Joyce Whipple, disturbed by the letters she had received from Diana, puts off that urgent return of hers to America, and invites herself to the Chateau Suvlac. Inexplicable the queer visions which Diana’s commonplace letters set passing so vividly before Joyce Whipple’s eyes. Eh? Yes, inexplicable — unless you are inclined to believe that at times the other hidden things outside,” and with a great sweep of his arm he suggested the curve of a firmament which was a prison dome, “outside this world, break through to punish or to save.”
“Save?” cried Mr. Ricardo, who could not imagine how Diana Tasborough was to be saved from an explicit responsibility in the murder of Evelyn Devenish.
“Yes, saved,” continued Hanaud firmly. “That you will see. But first, see how the coming of Joyce Whipple upsets the carriage of the pears!”
“The apple-cart,” said Mr. Ricardo resignedly.
“If you like it that way, I make the concession,” Hanaud returned amiably. “Read!” and he placed a broad finger-end upon a sentence, so that Mr. Ricardo had to push it away before he could read at all.
You stare at her, like a schoolboy at a girl with a plait down her back. You are
troubled when she speaks to you. You jump when she comes near you. You look — silly — yes, silly, Robin!
And again, a little farther on:
She’s not even pretty really. And she’s certainly nothing else. She’s green, Robin, a little green thing for a little green boy. Oh, if I thought you were serious!
There it was. Robin Webster had met his fate, as people said at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the first sight of Joyce Whipple the fires which he was accustomed to inspire seized upon and held him. He must give now, he who had only taken. Her image was impressed upon the retinas of his eyes so that everywhere he must see her. He could not hide his passion and he did not want to. It was a glory to him of which he wished all the world to know.
“Your name upon my forehead and my brow.”
He shut his mind away from the whispers of prudence, and was blind to the spectacle of jealousy. Diana, indeed, moving with the bandage of her dreams across her eyes, remained undisturbed. She was no more aware of the new and enormous change in the disposition of the household than of her companion’s petulance. But Evelyn Devenish was of another mould. Accusations, reproaches, threats, alternated with violent appeals. Finally the threats became one threat, the appeals one demand. She wrote:
It’s intolerable. I don’t want to threaten but you have got to do what I want. My necklace has gone and you know where and why. You won’t find it difficult to arrange. I don’t believe for a moment that she’s going to America. She’s spying. I am sure of it. I have watched her listening. She means to use her journey to America as an excuse to get away when she has found out what she wants, and then she s going to make all the trouble she can to save Diana. I am sure of it. But you can use the journey to America as an excuse. She is going from Bordeaux to Cherbourg, she says. You can drive her into Bordeaux the night before she goes. She hasn’t any friends there to see her off. You must fix it up or I’ll do what she’s meaning to do. Yes, I will. The whole story — the Black Mass, our plan concerning Diana — yes, I’d rather pull the whole neighbourhood down with a crash and go down with it myself than allow things to go on as they are going. Do you know I went to the Cave of the Mummies today? You remember that boy? I dream of that — just that for her! It would serve her right for interfering — for throwing herself at you. You needn’t think she cares for you. You don’t mean the least little thing to her. We shall all be at Mirandol on Wednesday night. You can arrange the little that is left to be arranged there, and then on Thursday — she can go with you to Bordeaux.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 112