Lord of the Hollow Dark (17 page)

“Apollinax talked of
us,
I fancy,” Madame Sesostris ventured.

“Of course he would, sooner or later.” The Archvicar lit one of his cheroots. “Marina, you told me of what you dreamed night before last. Now let me tell you of what I dreamed that same night; it has some bearing on your situation and on ours.”

“I’d like to hear it,” said Marina, insincerely. She was atremble. What a charade all this was! This beautiful old house falling to ruin, these half-wild doomed policies, this burlesque of a country-house weekend of yesteryear, these depraved or murderous human grotesques dining formally and miserably: all like a world turned upside down, awaiting the Last Trump!

“My dream,” the Archvicar commenced, “is even more difficult to put into words than was yours, Marina. But like the original Sweeney, ‘I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.’”

Marina compelled herself to look directly at Gerontion, hoping that she appeared unconcerned.

“When I went to bed night before last, after a talk with the Master and dear Apeneck,” the Archvicar said, “I was tired and apprehensive. I must have fallen asleep immediately; but Fresca knows more about that than I do.”

Why Fresca? Marina wondered. Why not Grizel Sesostris, his wife?

“What I can tell you in words,” he was saying, “is only a faint shadow of what I experienced in my sleep.” The Archvicar sat up straight and took off those peculiar goggles of his; Marina was astounded to find the old man’s eyes clear, sparkling, full of mischief. Old? Erect and without those smoked lenses, the Archvicar seemed twenty years younger. He spoke crisply, with no trace of that chi-chi accent.

“First, as I slept-though of course I did not know that I slept-came blinding light, conceivably Pascal’s ‘fire, fire, fire’—but not light from Pascal’s source, I’m sure. There were whirligigs of excruciating color, purples, greens, reds. And I was swept away, and for a time was conscious of nothing, as if exiled to infinite space. When consciousness returned, I was transformed, and did not know whence I had come. The interval between one consciousness and another, incidentally, was somewhat like the blackness I had known, or rather not known, that time when I lay shot in the back by the Fords of Krokul—but I must tell you of that African episode some other day, Marina.”

Here Fresca touched his arm and said something in an Italian dialect, very low. The Archvicar nodded. “The girl wonders whether we are quite safe from observation or intrusion just here; she suspects that I am about to become indiscreet of speech. We’ll remedy that, if you please. Behold our privy chamber!”

He pointed to an enormous ancient yew tree a little higher up the den, overlooking the pond and commanding a good view of the house. The yew’s branches, dense, swept the ground. “Shall we hide there?”

Up to the yew they went; the Archvicar, now undisguisedly erect, almost sprang up the slope, swinging his stick. He parted some branches, and the little party entered a broad space beneath the yew, very like a vaulted room; they must be invisible, and perhaps inaudible, from without. Phlebas was set with his back against the trunk to guard their rear. “The Third Laird is said to have plotted with Maitland of Lethington under this tree,” the Archvicar instructed them.

They sat down again. Marina had to exert all her will to keep herself from shaking visibly. Had they taken her to this dim retreat meaning to interrogate her, or worse? But Gerontion, that bland criminal in many lands, went on with his narration.

“Well, then! All memory of recent things blotted out of my awareness, in this vision I found myself sitting in a certain room of the Lodging. None of you has been there yet. On the door-it is high up in the house-a brass plate bears the inscription ‘Lord Balgrummo.’ It was his study, cozier and more private than the vast library on the second story.

“I was perched on a stool, and my feet did not reach the floor. I wanted something to do, but I didn’t dare to say so. I wore a little velvet jacket and knickerbockers. One of the silver buttons was missing from my jacket. There was music in the study, and I was not alone.

“A clavichord stood in the room; it is there still. A tall strong man, his back to me, was playing skillfully some delicate eighteenth-century fugue that I have not heard these many years-something from the collection of scores in the Lodging’s library, I suppose. I tried not to sneeze, but failed. The man at the clavichord turned. It was Lord Balgrummo.”

“The last one?” Madame breathed.

“None other. He was frowning at the interruption, but forced himself into a better temper on seeing me.

“‘Manfred!’ he said, and again, ‘Manfred!’ He seemed to collect himself. ‘I did not know you were in the house.’ His voice was unexpectedly gentle.”

Madame and Fresca, Marina noticed, were even more intent upon this story than she was; the Archvicar must have had no time until now to tell them of his dream, or else had thought it better to keep silent, for some reason. She would have thought he was inventing it out of whole cloth, had it not been for her own dream on the same night. The Archvicar clearly was moved by his own narration.

“His face—why, it wasn’t so ravaged as you might suppose. Perhaps Farinata, Dante’s Farinata, had such a face, with a high scorn of his circumstances stamped upon it. But the face was almost vacant. I think he had difficulty in drawing himself out of reverie, infernal reverie, to speak to me. Surely he was bemused at my presence. Yet he pulled himself together after a fashion: even at his worst, he retained grace of manner. I dreaded him and was fascinated by him.

“His words rose to his lips only slowly, as if he had been silent for a thousand years. ‘It was good of them-yes, good of them to let you come to see me, Manfred.’ What a longing in those eyes that had seen everything! I feared he might reach out and pat my small shoulder.

“‘Sir,’ I asked, ‘please, sir, may I go out into the Den and play?’ After saying it, I could have bitten my tongue through, ten-year-old boy though I was. The terror of sadness that came into his oxlike eyes when he saw the aversion in mine!

“‘If you wish, Manfred.’ He groped for something more, perhaps a phrase of entreaty, but abandoned the venture. ‘Have a care, then, of the old shafts there; some are beneath shrubs, and the ground can give way under one’s feet.’ He turned back toward the clavichord.

“I slipped down from the stool. He faced me again.

“‘I don’t suppose you will stay long, Manfred. When you leave, give my compliments to your mother. She understands why I cannot bring myself to write. The servants treat you well here? No complaints? I find it hard to keep them. Are the meals at all decent? I don’t notice. You’re the only guest who ever sleeps in the Lodging, you know-and it was hard enough to get permission for you to visit occasionally. You manage tolerably at that school? They’ll make a soldier of you? Had you borne my name, I don’t suppose they would have admitted you. So let us be thankful, Manfred, for small blessings like morganatic marriage.’

“He seemed to sink back within himself, but rallied after a long moment during which I stared anxiously at him. ‘Sometimes,’ he went on, faintly, ‘I suffer from the delusion that this old house is full of people, unpleasant folk. It was good to find you instead, my boy. Watch out for those rascals. Ah, yes, I have been meaning to show you something that might be useful to you one day. Let it be our secret, Manfred, a dead secret between father and son.’

“I shivered, though perhaps with a frightful joy at such trust from a Penny-Dreadful Monster. Every word he said will be with me forever-verbatim. I wonder if he remembers, too.

“Then he took a long pin from his desk drawer, went to a certain panel in the wainscoting, thrust that pin under molding at a certain point—making me come up close to observe. He was able to raise the panel some inches, reach in, press some lever, and crook his long arm so that he could grasp objects within the thickness of the wall, below the level of the floor. He drew them out.

“One was a roll of papers, sewn up in oilskin. ‘These are the plans of what’s down beneath this house, Manfred.’

“The other object, which made me gasp, was a heavy African weapon with jewels in the hilt, a kind of elegant chopper, double-bitted, seemingly coated with grease all down the sharp blade to keep it from rust. I knew at once when he must have used it.

“‘They never could discover it,’ he told me, with the wan ghost of a smile. ‘This, too, conceivably, you may find worth retrieving one day. They’ve taken all the other weapons in the house. These things are between you and me, Manfred.’

“I would have run for it then, but my feet might have been nailed to the Turkey carpet. As I looked at him, and he looked at me, astonishment came over his face—
he
seemed frightened by
me!
And then I went-but as if whirled up, pummeled, uprooted. The blackness followed, and then the whirligigs of abhorrent color.

“And next, Fresca my Pomegranate, you found me clutching you and moaning most unmanfully.

“What am I to believe? This nocturnal experience: was it hallucination, or translation, or memory conjured up from the subconscious, or a Timeless Moment? I recollect well certain uncomfortable half-hours with that fallen man in that very room; even hastily gulped cups of tea or chocolate with him in his dark-walled study. But I have no conscious memory whatsoever of precisely such a conversation with him, in my boyhood, as I have described just now. Were he and I beyond time?

“I was given opportunity to say some word of comfort, and I failed him. But what words could have availed? Perhaps ‘I love you, Father.’ That sentence would have been a lie, and he would have known it for a lie.”

Marina spoke without forethought, the words coming from her in a gasp. “Then Lord Balgrummo really was-actually
was
—your father?”

The Archvicar nodded slowly. “I might not have come here for this adventurous foolery, if I hadn’t been told—fancy my astonishment—that the Timeless Moment was to occur at Balgrummo Lodging, of all possible places in this world. Apollinax had sent that news to Gerontion by way of Sweeney, and I coaxed or bullied it out of Gerontion before he died, along with much more information. What a twisted skein of circumstance! Is there any such thing as coincidence? I doubt it; we’re moved about like pins drawn by concealed magnets, I suspect. What concitation of the backward devils links together mad Apollinax, a horrid old pseudo-parson in Haggat, the last Lord Balgrummo, this haunted house, and you, Marina?”

“Then what are you?” Marina implored.

The protean man stood up, supple and straight, seeming little past the prime of life, raising Fresca along with him. “Why, young lady, your servant; and a brutal and licentious soldier.” He squeezed Fresca’s waist. “I was born on the wrong side of a blanket; Balgrummo’s ‘morganatic marriage,’ if really he said it, was a mere civil pretense to soothe the sensibilities of a lonely little boy. A bastard was I born.

“But I beg your pardon, Marina: I had forgotten our little friend here”—he nodded toward the blanket-swathed baby on the ground. “So much the better for him! Some fathers it is well not to have known.”

Marina, panting, could not grasp all this. “Then you aren’t Archvicar Gerontion at all?”

He shook his white head. “Most people call me Manfred Arcane, and Gerontion’s husk was burned at Haggat, in Africa, and I was in at the death.”

Fresca broke in impatiently-in
English!
“Manfredo, if the papers and the ax are in that room now...”

“For sufficient reasons, Pomegranate, I have not confided to you that at a certain hour yesterday, when not watched, I stole upstairs to Lord Balgrummo’s study. Somehow I was not afraid to enter-not very afraid, that is-but of course I found no one sitting at that clavichord. I did find the pin in the desk, and I did with it what Balgrummo had done in my vision, and I found those papers. Those drawings and calculations, a few hours later, enabled Sweeney and Coriolan to proceed so far as they have got, far down below. I haven’t yet given them, or Apollinax, every scrap of paper I found.”

“The ax, the chopper, Manfredo?” Fresca asked that with a sibilant eagerness, and Marina remembered the stiletto strapped to Fresca’s thigh.

“That I found too, and left it in its cranny: a damned thing, but good at need.”

There came a chill pause. At Arcane’s gesture, Phlebas pulled aside yew branches for them, and they filed out from under the ancient funereal tree.

With a quizzical grimace, the Archvicar-Marina somehow could not dissociate the man from his pretended dignity—resumed his goggles. “Once more into the breach, dear friends!” He flourished his heavy stick. “We contend against the Lord of This World.”

Unshaven and bone-weary, Sweeney was in the storeroom above the monks’ drain, sawing timbers into pit props, when someone poked him. Nervous as a stray cat, Sweeney swung round in alarm. It was only Sam, one of those devil-boys.

“The Master wants you in five minutes, in the library,” Sam told him. This was said with a sneer, as a command. Everybody knew he was a slave now, Sweeney thought. He wasn’t even permitted to go upstairs, except on command. Cots had been brought down for Coriolan and himself, and they were to sleep-precious little of that they got-in the storeroom at the entrance to the sewer. That slop from the kitchen was sent down to them, too; and they were kept toiling practically round the clock, helped incompetently by relays of devil-boys, trying to clear the rubble-choked tunnel or passage which led from the sewer in the direction of the Weem.

That unpleasant nut Apollinax, their Master, must be served. Sweeney dashed into a pantry, washed hands and face hurriedly, and then made his way upstairs. Gradually he was getting the layout of this crazy-built funhouse called Balgrummo Lodging; he had even managed to calculate just where Marina’s bedroom lay, for future reference. The library was on the second floor, taking up most of the front of the seventeenth-century block of the house on that story. He came to it, knocked. There was no response; he entered.

It was the valley of the shadow of books. The heavy interior shutters of the tall windows had been drawn back, and afternoon sunlight had penetrated, but the immense room remained gloomy. It was so high that a pillared narrow gallery ran round three sides, giving access to the upper tiers of books. Opposite the windows, a colossal marble mantelpiece with life-size allegorical figures, carved almost in the round, commemorated the part played by some heavy-handed Inchburn at the battle of Inverkeithing. Books, books, books, splendidly bound, from elephant folios to tiny pamphlets, tier upon tier, concerning every abstraction that ever had entered the fancy of man, loomed oppressive on every side, even between the great windows. Down the center of the room ran a row of glass cases, veiled in baize, probably containing rare manuscripts and the decorations and medals of long-dead Inchburns of Balgrummo. A fire smoldered insignificantly on the hearth beneath that overweening arrogant chimneypiece.