Thunder On The Right (12 page)

"... A most interesting church," Jennifer was saying with every appearance of delight.

"And so unusual. All these statues . . . I've never seen another quite like it before, even in France. And at home we're as a rule quite content to deal with one saint at a time."

"Except for St. Simon------"

"And St. Jude," nodded Jennifer. They smiled happily at one another. Then Jennifer said, perhaps a shade too casually, "That's a remarkable statue of the Madonna that they've got at the convent, isn't it? I don't know when I've seen a lovelier."

The little priest looked puzzled. "Statue? Oh, you mean in the corridor? That's of St.

Anne, my child."

"No, not that. The one in the Lady chapel on the little altar. I thought it was wonderful. And so is that big picture in the chancel."

"As to that," said Father Anselm frankly, "that's a modern thing, isn't it? I can't say I've looked at it very hard. I'm a bit shortsighted, you know, besides being old-fashioned in my tastes." He chuckled.

And indeed the general standard of taste reflected in the crowded little church did not indicate any very noticing and critical eye on the part of the convent's priest. To Father Anselm it was quite probable that El Greco's stretched and skyward saints looked "modern" and no more. But surely, statue-minded as he was, he would have noticed the jeweled Madonna? Jennifer looked up to see the same query in Stephen's eye even as Father Anselm answered it by adding, "And the statue you mention ... I don't remember noticing that, either. In the Lady chapel? Surely they have a picture on the altar there, a pretty little thing, blue and gold? The children put flowers in front of it when I visit them."

So the treasures went into hiding, did they, on visiting days? Jennifer, not daring to look at Stephen, stifled the urge to ask if the gold candlesticks had similar vanishing habits, and said instead, with a gesture toward a particularly crowded pillar, "But you have plenty here, haven't you? All these ... so strange . . . one feels so ignorant. . . ."

This attempt to turn the conversation had an immediate success. Father Anselm gave a curious little skip. "That's it! That's just the point! I have determined, in my church, that nobody—
nobody
, (however obscure)—shall be forgotten. A few years ago"—he began absently to polish the already gleaming candlesticks of St.

Augustine of Hippo—"a few years ago, I wrote a book on the saints of the Church.

You can imagine, mademoiselle, that their stories led me into many strange and unexpected places. I speak metaphorically, of course."

"Of course."

"It took a good many years . . . but I think I may say that, in the finished work—compendium would be the better word—I have omitted no name, however obscure."

"Really?"

"And when I became cur6 here, I made it my earnest endeavor to commemorate all those (however obscure), who had made their contribution to faith."

"I think it's a wonderful idea," said Jennifer warmly. "And you've got a wonderful church."

"Dedicated," said Father Anselm, with a sudden chuckle, "to All Saints. So you see, how could I help it?" He gave a final valedictory rub to St. Augustine's candlesticks, and looked up at Stephen, out of eyes that were all at once disconcertingly shrewd and wise.

"And now," said Father Anselm, with a flap of his duster, "you want to ask me a few questions about the woman who died on Tuesday the twenty-first of June, up at the convent in the Valley of the Storms? I am listening, my son. . . ."

But there was, after all, little new to add.

"They thought at first that she would get better," said Father Anselm, "but then, on the Tuesday night, she suddenly took a turn for the worse, and seemed to weaken very rapidly. I was sent for, and I was with her when she died. It was at about eleven at night." He looked up at Jennifer. "You say she was your cousin, mademoiselle?"

She nodded.

"I am sorry," said Father Anselm simply.

Stephen's eyes met Jennifer's, and, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

"Father," she began.

"Ma fille."

"I hope you won't think it very strange my asking you these questions. It's a very confidential matter, you see, and------"

"I shall tell no one."

"If I might just ask you certain things about this—about my cousin.. .."

Father Anselm turned his disconcertingly bright gaze away from her, and spoke to St. Onesimus. "You may ask me anything you like, my child, and I will answer anything I can. What do you want to know?"

Stephen spoke. "We should like to know, mon pire, what the woman looked like."

The little priest deserted St. Onesimus for a moment to send Stephen a look of surprise. "My son, she was dying, and those who are dying------"

"I didn't mean in that sense," said Stephen hurriedly. "I meant the color of her hair and eyes, and so on."

"But mademoiselle here------" Father Anselm broke off, and addressed himself once more to St. Onesimus. "She was fair," he said briefly, "and she had gray eyes or blue—I cannot tell you which. As to her height, I do not know. When I saw her she was very thin, and she had suffered much from the fever. A dying woman does not look as she has looked in life, my children, and I saw her only at the end. And by candlelight," he added.

"She spoke French to you?"

"But yes. All the time. Until you told me you were her cousin, I had never supposed she was not wholly French. Her name, too, you see . . ." He began to chip a gout of candle grease from St. Onesimus' pedestal with his fingernail.

"She was sensible—I mean, she wasn't delirious when you saw her?"

"No. She was quite lucid. She knew she was dying."

"She knew she was dying?"
said Jennifer softly.

"That is so."

"And she left no message with you, mentioned nobody by name?"

He shook his head.

"I know," she said awkwardly, "that you can't speak of anything said in confession, but you could tell me if she had left a message or mentioned a name, couldn't you, even if you couldn't tell me what it was?"

Father Anselm twinkled at her. "Yes, I could. But no, nothing of the sort was said. I am sorry, mademoiselle." His voice was grave again. "She did not, in fact, confess.

The end came more quickly than we had expected. Too quickly. . . ."

There was a little pause. Then he looked up at her once more, his bright black eyes shrewd. He said suddenly, "Have you seen her papers? Everybody carries papers in France, you know."

"Yes, I saw them."

"Then," said Father Anselm, staring straight at St. On-esimus, "I'm afraid I can't tell you anything else that would identify her beyond doubt. . . ."

When they left him, he was unconcernedly engaged in cleaning a pillar positively swarming with Holy Innocents.

Stephen said good night at the convent gate, and Jennifer, hoping a shade nervously that she would not meet Doña Francisca again that night, rang for admittance. She need not have been afraid. She was let in by a young nun she had not seen before, a pleasant-faced girl in the white headdress of the novice, and crossed the yard with her to the sound of singing from the chapel. The novice led her quickly into the tunnel, then through the refectory, and up the stairs at the far end of the big room.

These gave on to a long narrow corridor, lined with doors. At one of these the novice stopped, tapped, and on receiving no reply, opened the door and showed Jennifer in.

The room was as small and bare as might have been expected; there were two beds, two chairs, two chests of drawers, and a hassock placed beneath a small picture of the Virgin and Child. The window gave south on to the garden, and, far beyond, soaring miraculously above the darkness, the moonlit snows of Spain.

The novice pointed to the bed near the window.

"That will be yours, mademoiselle, and that chest of drawers has been emptied. I've written out for you a little list of meal and chapel times, but"—she smiled—"you mustn't feel bound to attend the latter. The Reverend Mother was most insistent that you must feel free to come and go as you pleased."

Jennifer thanked her, and the girl withdrew, leaving her alone.

She crossed to the window and stood looking out over the garden. Across the wall to her left, through a tangle of night-dim apple boughs, she could see the graveyard, and the wall that hung its arras of roses and blue convolvulus over the grave. Well, here she was, ensconced in the heart of her mystery, and something, she told herself, must happen soon. For a beginning, anyway, there was Celeste.

She turned back from the window, wondering anew at the barren look of a room without personal possessions. There was nothing here to give a clue to the character of the owner. The dark cloak hanging behind the door, the string-soled slippers side by side under the chair—this was all. There were not even curtains on the window.

No flowers, no pictures except the one devotional one, no books except a small scarlet missal lying on one of the chests of drawers. She picked this up, and then, her interest quickening, looked at it more closely. It was bound in scarlet leather, beautifully tooled with gilt, and the pages were illuminated exquisitely with medieval arabesques of gold and green and purple. She turned them reverently, marveling at the work, until something familiar in her sensation of surprise brought her up short.

This had happened before, and recently. In the chapel . . . the little dim, plain building, with its flat white walls, its common windows—and the treasures of Italy and Spain glowing under its rich lamplight....

And this repeated the effect, this beautiful little thing which lay so carelessly upon the ugly chest of drawers. She looked up at the picture of the Madonna and Child, and saw without surprise that the pictured lips were smiling down over the baby with the smile that Murillo had used to light greater canvases than this.

The missal had fallen open in her hands, and the pages had turned of themselves, to leave the book lying open at the first page, the flyleaf.

On it was written: "Marie Celeste, from Maria Francisca,
un don en Dios
."

The Madonna smiled.

Then the door opened quietly, and Celeste slipped into the room.

Jennifer, with the book lying open in her hands, felt confused and guilty, as if caught in some questionable act. She smiled at the girl and said, "I hope you don't mind, Celeste. It was such a lovely little book."

The girl had flushed scarlet, as if with annoyance, but she muttered, "De rien, mamselle," and, sitting down with her back turned, began to unfasten her slippers.

Jennifer, eying her back dubiously, decided that confidences were more easily extracted in the dark, and said no more. But by the time she had undressed, and had come back from the washroom, Celeste was curled up in bed, with her face to the wall. If she was not asleep, it was at any rate obvious that sleep was the impression she wished to convey.

Jennifer gave a little sigh to herself, blew out the candle, and got into bed.

She woke to thick darkness, and lay for a moment, vaguely wondering where she was, then, more coherently, what it was that had woken her. The wind? This must have risen all at once, because, though the evening had been still, she could hear now the soughing of the pines, and the intermittent flung rattle of rain against the window.

But it was some slighter sound than this, she knew, that had awakened her; some telling little sound that should not have been....

The door. It had been the quiet closing of the door.

She sat up in bed and strained her eyes in the dark room, then, as things took shape, she saw that Celeste's bed was empty, and her slippers gone from under the chair.

She groped for her handbag and, after one or two fumbling attempts, lit a match and surveyed the room by its small uncertain light. Yes, the slippers had gone, and the black cloak behind the door. . . . Well, thought Jennifer, the corridors are chilly, and she may, after all, be on a perfectly normal errand. She must not, she told herself, run too eagerly on the trail of her mystery.

The match went out, but as it did so, something that she saw in its last flicker made her sit up straighter and grope again for the matchbox. What she thought she had seen— yes, she had been right. Celeste's white cotton nightdress was flung down across the bed, Jennifer slid out of her own bed and went, cautiously because of the flickering match, across to the chest of drawers where, earlier that evening, she had seen Celeste tidily fold away her day clothes. She opened the drawer. It was empty.

As she reached for the candlestick, the second match died, and she stood there in the quiet darkness, her mind racing. If Celeste had only gone somewhere else in the convent—say, to Doña Francisca's room, or, which seemed possible, to the chapel, would she have dressed to do it? Her cloak would surely have provided warmth enough? But if she had gone outside . . . Jennifer padded across to the window and looked out. In the windy moonlight the dim outline of mountain and forest bulked huge and uncertain; rain was spattering the panes, and low clouds flung their moving and fitful shadows. Then all at once she saw another shadow, a slight black shadow, moving more purposefully across the garden below than the ghost of any cloud. It drifted below the apple trees, through the gate, and vanished into the deeper darkness of the graveyard wall. Jennifer, leaning out, all at once excited, heard, in a sudden lull of the wind, the click of a latch. The door in the outer wall.

She did not consciously decide what to do; indeed, she could never afterwards say how she came, hastily but adequately dressed, to be letting herself out of that same door a very few minutes later. As she shut it softly behind her, and paused in the shelter of the wall with the wind plucking at her coat, she was telling herself that she was a fool. In this darkness, and with that start, Celeste would be already well out of sight and sound. Whatever she had hoped to discover —and on this point she was far from clear—it could not be discovered on a night like this.

Then, unbelievably, as a fragment of torn cloud, racing high, laid bare a patch of wet starlight, she saw it; it was barely seventy yards ahead of her, a hurrying black figure, bent against the wind, its cloak bellying like a sail.