Saint-Clair said, simply:
“My dear friend, do not forget that, as a Nyctalope, darkness does not exist for me.”
“Ah! That’s right!” exclaimed d’Hermont. “Excuse me.”
The darkness was, in any case, only relative, for the afternoon light of the long hallway penetrated into the room through an open door. Walking side by side with his friend, Saint-Clair heard him whisper in his ear:
“Pardon me, I am prone to lapses. What makes this even more ridiculous is that it is precisely because you are the Nyctalope that I called you to my aid! But everything in its time, I say, everything in its time...”
And in his normal voice, he added:
“This way, my dear friend. Come.”
The Red Room was a vast square space, with two windows that also opened onto the front of the castle, the lawn, the entrance road, the valley and the rounded hill on which the houses and the church of Saint-Christophe stood. Everything was furnished in the purest Empire style, with beautiful carpets spread over the waxed floor. There was also a long, deep alcove with the bed, flanked by two tables. A chandelier garnished with electric lights hung in the middle, just over a very beautiful round table. In the fireplace, wood was heaped up on great andirons, ready to be set aflame. The walls were covered with garnet fabric and adorned with portrait paintings in the imperial neoclassical genre. There was also a library, full of books well arranged behind a glass.
“The bathroom is this way, my dear friend.”
Moving into the alcove to the left of the entrance door, Jacques d’Hermont pushed open a door on hinges that must have been well-maintained, as it opened without the slightest noise. Saint-Clair saw a room full of light, pierced by a window that also faced the front of the house. It was furnished with a bathtub, a shower, a washbasin, and a marble table of the kind referred to by the expression “modern comfort.”
“I admire the way you have modernized your house without damaging what was old and uniquely original about it,” said Saint-Clair with sincerity.
“It pleases me that you like it,” said the chatelain, satisfied.
Back in his room, he pointed out an open door between the alcove and the entrance, which led to a third room lit by an electric ceiling light. Soca and Vitto had already set down the two bags and hung up Saint-Clair’s rifle case.
“Here are the wardrobe and storage closet,” said d’Hermont. “Is Soca going to help you settle in, or would you like me to leave you my servant, Firmin, while I take Soca and Vitto to their rooms?”
“Leave me Firmin,” said Saint-Clair.
“It is just after noon. The lunch bell will ring when you please.”
“Didn’t you say that at Beech Grove you have lunch at 12:30 a.m.?”
“Yes, but…”
“My dear host, I won’t have Madame your sister and your daughters change the habits of the house because of me. A half-hour will be quite enough for Firmin to empty my bags and for me to freshen up.”
“Then I shall leave you, my dear friend.”
Followed by Soca and Vitto, the Comte went out. Knowing that his master did not like any doors near him to remain uselessly open, the Corsican took care to close those of the Red Room and dark backroom.
Something struck the Nyctalope right away when d’Hermont introduced him to his two daughters and his sister, Laure Dauzet, a little later in the dining-room. It was the rare quality of the eyes of the youngest of the two d’Hermont girls, who bore the uncommon name of Basilie. Her eyes, a very pale periwinkle blue, appeared immense under her long eyelids with painted eyelashes. At first sight, and even afterward, unless one had the penetrating gaze of the Nyctalope, these eyes gave an impression of angelic candor, an infantile and joyful wonder at all things. They seemed in perfect accord with her round face, haloed by warm blonde curls highlighted in copper and gold, as well as her clear and delicate, yet very healthy, complexion. The girl’s lips were bright red, owing nothing to artifice, and her body was at once slender and full, supple and lively. Everything in the young girl was the image of physical and moral health, naïveté and perfect happiness with life. Basilie must have been between eighteen and twenty years-old. But Saint-Clair had the strange thought—was it an intuition?—that those beautiful and splendidly candid eyes were a screen, an impenetrable screen stretched over a secret soul, with an enigmatic life in retreat from the apparent life on the surface. But this was no more than a quick thought, of which he was conscious for only a second or two.
At the same time, Saint-Clair was strongly attracted and intrigued by the entirely different figures of the widowed sister, Madame Dauzet, and the Comte’s older daughter, whose first name was Madeleine. Their poor health showed them to be in the same disturbing state as their brother and father, Jacques d’Hermont.
Like him, whom they resembled, their eyes were dark brown and their slim bodies were stiffened by a nervous tension that seemed to need relaxation. Madame Dauzet was in her forties and Madeleine was in her twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. They had yellowing, emaciated faces, with feverish circles under their eyelids and folds of bitterness at the corners of their mouths. The expression in their faces was at the same time anxious and yet full of hope and courage.
The identical look of Jacques, Laure and Madeleine, thought the Nyctalope, explains the call for help in the letter… But then, why doesn’t Basilie look like her father, aunt and sister?
Naturally, he looked again into the eyes of pale periwinkle. But after the introduction was made, the young girl grew distracted, and busied herself with the best arrangement of the beautiful red carnations in a vase on a nearby table. She must have felt the Saint-Clair’s look fixed on her face. Without turning and lifting her eyes, she said:
“These carnations are beautiful, aren’t they? I received them yesterday from a friend in Nice.”
Saint-Clair felt an indefinable awkwardness. Jacques d’Hermont put an end to it by saying in a falsely deliberate tone:
“Shall we go to the table now, my dear friend?”
“With pleasure,” said Saint-Clair, smiling. And he offered his arm to Madame Dauzet.
Ample, well-ordered and savory as it was, the meal was nevertheless relatively brief. The master of the house made an effort to animate it with accompanying conversation; Saint-Clair attempted to help. The two war comrades told anecdotes from their fraternity in arms; then, they spoke of the hunt for wild boars, the pretext for Saint-Clair’s visit. D’Hermont expanded on the particulars of the hunt in that wild part of the southern region.
“Here, my dear friend,” he concluded, “there is nothing to shoot but pheasant, rabbit, and, on rare occasions, hare or partridge...”
The woman and the two girls took part in the conversation, since each of them was a bit of a huntress. For all of the guests, however, it was a relief once the meal was over. Only Basilie had remained at ease and natural, even laughing occasionally, without having to force the brilliance of her gaiety. Nonetheless, in her big blue eyes, the Nyctalope did not see the childishness that she superficially showed.
Is there anything hidden behind her face? he wondered. Is this young girl anything more than an adolescent happy to live in magnificent health? Does she see that she is the only one well here, in this place touched by the anxiety of mystery? And what is this mystery?
Saint-Clair declared that he never drank anything after a meal, not liquor or even coffee, without a glass of pure water, and he did not return to the living-room. Madame Dauzet did not insist. Just then, her brother said:
“Ah well! But my dear friend, certainly you will do me the pleasure of taking a walk with me on such a beautiful afternoon, with such bright skies and dry air. Would you like to go right away?”
“Yes, and we can stop by the post office at Saint-Christophe. I must send a postal money order I didn’t have the time to send in Paris yesterday. This morning, I left before the offices opened.”
Five minutes later, the two friends were outside. T
hey left the castle by the entrance road and continued along the path that descended through the valley toward the village. After they had crossed the bridge over railway tracks and turned a corner, so that they were completely out of sight of the castle, Saint-Clair put his hand on d’Hermont’s arm. With the affectionate familiarity that had united the two men so tightly during wartime, he said:
“Jacques, the money order was nothing but a false pretext. Let’s stop here and sit on this tree trunk. Talk to me.”
To one side of the path, at the edge of the ditch, lay the trunk of an old beech tree knocked down by some storm. Sitting there, elbow to elbow, the two friends looked out over the valley. In the depths below, the narrow and calm Nais wound, blue and silvery between low banks irregularly interspersed with elms and pink-branched poplars. On these natural shores grazed cows, speckled white and red. On the hill opposite, the houses of Saint-Christophe stretched out amidst the gardens until the church bell tower, which pointed into a pale sky where the sun gently shone. All nature was motionless and silent, charmed by the sun’s calm serenity. The air was warm, and it almost felt like spring.
Choosing a cigar from a stiff leather case and lighting it with care, Saint-Clair expected Jacques d’Hermont to talk. But, after a few minutes had gone by, he saw that his friend was so tense that he would need to speak first and question him. Gently, he said:
“Jacques, you called me. Your call was pressing. Let’s not waste an hour. There is a start to everything. The simplest way is to start, together, at the beginning. So, I’m asking you: how and from what do you suffer, and when did it begin?”
Jacques d’Hermont suddenly seemed freed from a heavy burden. He raised his arms, waved them, lowered them, and, after setting his hands on his knees, spoke with feverish animation:
“That’s it, Léo, that’s it! The beginning... or rather the first brutal fact, significant in spite of its mystery, was the death of my wife... But wait! This death, sudden because it was unforeseen by us both, and which constitutes what I call the ‘brutal fact’ because of the terrifying shock it gave my sister, my eldest daughter and myself, this death was preceded for many months by things that no doubt produced this ‘beginning’ you asked me about. There were symptoms…”
“What symptoms?”
“It started towards the end of August,” continued d’Hermont.
Now his voice was firm and his tone energetic, such that his body, with its straight bust and supple gestures, once again took on the bearing of an officer of the Alpine Hunters. The powerfully charismatic influence of Saint-Clair finally had its usual effect: mental lucidity, physical force.
“Yes, it was towards the end of autumn... You know the constant health I am gifted with, from the time we spent together in the war. My wife, Lucile, came from a race of folks similar to mine, and was as solid as I am. I showed you her photograph, do you remember?”
“Yes,” said Saint-Clair. “A young Diana, a fine woman, with good features, a calm look, and a grave smile.”
“My eldest daughter Madeleine is like her. As for Basilie...”
He hesitated and made an animated gesture as if clearing the air, then said with calm resolution:
“Let’s leave Basilie for the moment. I will come back to her, since, by all evidence, she’s found and still finds herself outside the infernal and mysterious cycle of illness in which Lucile, Laure, Madeleine and I have been trapped for a month... I continue: it was one of the last days of the season. Summer had been brutal, without a single day of relief from the torrid, heavy weather and thunderstorms that stopped short of bringing rain to the region, always bursting far beyond the Loire valley, on Le Mans and Nogent-le-Rotrou. Here, the whole region suffered from drought, except for Beech Grove and the narrow valley that stretches before us, which, as you can see, is closed off to the north just before the village of Dissay-sous-Courcillon, by the old windmill with its feudal towers, half-hidden behind the oldest and most beautiful poplars in the region.”
D’Hermont became quiet, and did not speak for a few moments. Saint-Clair contented himself with nodding as he looked into the distance at the line of tall poplars.
“That was a very unhealthy summer,” d’Hermont went on. “Everyone in my house blamed it for the poor state of health we found ourselves in during the first days of September. My wife, my sister, my eldest daughter and myself were all in the same state, sickly without a defined illness, in a state of general weariness that increased from day to day, a lack of sleep and appetite, and a bizarre kind of fever that rose from night to morning, fell abruptly at sunrise to leave us exhausted, and began to rise again at nightfall… The doctor of Saint-Christophe, Doctor Luvier, is my friend. He visited us often. He examined us, observed us, tried to cure us, but in vain. The four of us were not affected to the same degree. More than me, more than my sister Laure, more than my daughter Madeleine, Lucile grew progressively weaker. By the end of September, she was no more than a skeleton. She could be fed only with liquids, which she mostly rejected. By the middle of October, her legs were incapable of carrying her. She was confined to bed definitively...”
Jacques d’Hermont stopped, and, with infinite distress in his feverish eyes, his whole yellowish and emaciated face, he looked at Saint-Clair, who observed him.
“Pernicious anemia?” speculated the Nyctalope.
“No. Luvier didn’t think so. Professor Render, visiting from Paris, confirmed his diagnosis, or rather his inability to diagnose. He advised a change of scenery, a change of air and habits, but my wife would not move. So we stayed and now she is dead. I asked for an autopsy to be performed. Her organs were all unharmed, without illness, only diminished in volume and shriveled. ‘I don’t understand,’ Professor Render confessed. And he understood even less, a few weeks later, when my sister, my eldest daughter and myself, after Lucile’s death, remained in a stable state—the one in which you see us now. There was one difference between September, October and November: our appetites returned. We began to eat normally again. But we still can’t sleep; during the nocturnal fevers that afflict us, we experience only brief periods of rest. We spend our nights plagued by nightmares that wake us with a start, drenched in sweat. Luvier refused to medicate us—what good would that do? All his pharmacopoeia has proved either useless, or had had typical harmful effects.”
“What about the change in scenery?” asked Saint-Clair.
“We tried. We all left for Menton. And here I have the strangest and most mysterious fact to report… the most anxiety-inducing, too, because it now seems to me as if the grip of death does not want to let us go, and plays with us as a ferocious tiger does with its powerless prey...”
He stopped again, breathing hard, with desperate panic in his eyes. Saint-Clair took one of his hands, clasped it, and said with irresistible authority:
“Jacques, courage! What is this fact?”
With a voice filled with anxiety, d’Hermont explained:
“The big car that was taking us to Menton had just come out of Tours, when my sister Laure, seated between my two daughters in the back, grabbed my arm. I was in one of the two seats in the front, next to Firmin, who was driving. Laure said to me with violence: ‘Jacques, let’s go back! Let’s return at once to Beech Grove!’ Now, my dear friend, after a few minutes, I, too, began to feel a growing repugnance for the journey, which had hardly begun since we were only about fifty kilometers from here. Yes! In my mind, growing minute by minute, was the notion of asking Firmin to take half the day off and bring us back home. This bizarre, unreasonable and crazy desire, motivated by nothing, took hold of me entirely. It produced an irresistible physical need to grab my driver’s arm, raise my voice with authority, and say exactly what Laure had just requested. When her cry had struck my brain, it was as if I had uttered it myself. And just as I was opening my mouth, about to give the order to turn back, Madeleine moaned: ‘Oh! Yes, father! Yes! Let’s go home!’ Only then did I look at the two of them. Laure was tense, shivering, l
ooking like a madwoman; Madeleine’s eyes were turned upward and her teeth chattered. I was feeling crazed myself and and confused, as if I was about to faint. So I grabbed Firmin’s arm and shouted: ‘Turn around! Turn around! Right away! Let’s go back quickly to Beech Grove!’ Firmin had the good sense and composure to immediately stop the car. His wife, Amélie, our cook, and her niece, Jeannette, our chambermaid, occupied the folding seats in the back. They were frightened, incapable of caring for Laure, who was in the midst of a nervous fit, and Madeleine, about to faint. Furiously, I ordered again: ‘Firmin, let’s go back, turn around, turn around!’”
Breaking off once more, Jacques d’Hermont gasped, wiped his sweating forehead with one hand, and, in a hoarse voice cut by nervous sobs, finished:
“Firmin obeyed. We returned to Tours, crossed the city, not stopping at any pharmacy or doctor’s office. Less than five minutes after the car had turned around, Laure had calmed down, and Madeleine had recovered from her fainting fit. I myself had regained all my lucidity, and felt calm, euphoric even, better than I had felt since the first days of summer! It didn’t last, however. At nightfall, fever took us again... Since then, our condition has not ceased to get worse from day to day. Every evening, as soon as the fever returns, it seems as if we’re about to die... to be extinguished suddenly, just as Lucile was extinguished at the exact hour of sunrise...”
The Comte had a convulsion, his whole body shook; he took his face in his hands and surrendered to tears and sobs. Formerly so strong mentally and physically, he was now at the end of his resistance. Alone with his friend, Jacques d’Hermont at last allowed himself to cry freely.
Certainly, Léo Saint-Clair was profoundly moved. But he showed it in just the right amount in his words and tone, so that d’Hermont understood that the friend he had called to his aid sympathized with all his heart with his plight, but also kept a cool head. This he was soon again in a state to listen, understand, reflect and speak according to facts and reason.
The Nyctalope and The Tower of Babel Page 2