Our Lady of Darkness

by Bernard Capes

The lodestone to all this dark force of electricity that came up swiftly over the verge of the world, rising from the caldron of the East, where inhuman things are brewed! Was it an iron cross standing high in the roadway of a populous bridge; a cross that seemed to crane its gaunt neck looking ever over a wandering concourse of heads to the horizon, gazing, like St Geneviève, for the cloudy coming of an Attila; a cross held up, as it were, before the towers of Paris—a Retro Satanas to the menacing shapes that, emerging from chaos, threatened the ancient order, the ancient dynasty, the ancient religion;—the cross, indeed, on the bridge of Charenton? For in Charenton that day was pregnant conference, was a famous banquet to Marseillais and Jacobin, was sinister tolling of the death-knell of royal France. And what if the bell swung without a clapper! The very air it displaced, reeling from its onset like foam from a prow, caught the whisper of death in its passing, and carried it on to the cross.

The death of royalty and of religion; the desecration of the tabernacles; the spilling of the kingly chrism and trampling of the Host! As night at last shut upon the boiling day, concentrating the heat, the cross on the now lonely bridge stiffened its back and stood awaiting the storm. That must fly far before it could reach the pole of its attraction. But it was approaching. The cross could feel the very ribs of the world vibrating under the terrific trample of its march. At present inaudible; but there came by-and-by little vancouriers of sound, moaning doves of dismay that fled on the wind, as before a forest fire. These flew faster and more furious, fugitives in a moment before the distant explosion of artillery. The rain began to fall in heavy drops, like life-blood from the lungs of the heavens. The earth sighed once in its sleep ... in an instant a great glare licked the town....

Hither and thither, swayed, bent, but stubborn; now shoulder to shoulder with the hurricane; now clawing at the stones to save itself from being wrenched from its socket; now stooping a little to let a flying charge overleap it—through half the night the cross stood its ground, barring the road to Paris. Then at length a bolt struck and shivered it where it stood.

“It is gone!” shrieked the storm; “the way to Paris lies open. The last of the symbols of an ancient reverence is broken and thrown aside!”

* * * * * * * *

To Ned in the woods of Méricourt was vouchsafed a foretaste of this tempest that rose and travelled so swiftly; that, having for its siderite the pole-star of all revolution, rushed across a continent in fire so rabid as that it expended nine-tenths of its force before it might reach and charge with its remaining strength the electric city—the nerve-drawn city that had shrilled into the night that encompassed it, crying for reserves of dynamism lest at the last it should sink and succumb. But if the storm brought small grist to the actual mill, the morning, when it broke, voiceless and dripping, revealed sufficient evidence of how deadly had been its threshing throughout the fields of its advance. Over the north-eastern noon, and flying, a dull high monster, up the valley of the Meuse—from Charleroi to Maubeuge and across the border; down with a swoop upon St Quentin, and on with a shriek and crash into and through the woods of Soissons; opening out at last, from Pantin to Vitry, as if to invest the city and slash at it with a reaping-hook of fire—so the force had come and passed, like a tidal wave of flame, leaving a broad wake of ruin and desolation. On all the league-long roads converging to the central city were fragments of broken and twisted railings, of riven trees, of thatch and rick and chimney; on many was the sterner wreckage of human beings—poor Jacques and Jacqueline struck down and torn by branch or flame as they drove their slow provision carts towards the capital through the furious darkness. Not a dying Christ at a cross-track but the storm demon had found and shattered on his blazing anvil. The pitiful symbols of the old love, of the old belief—one by one he had splintered and flung them as he swept on his road. Nor only the symbols of the old faith, but of the new order. For entering in the end the very gates of the city, he had driven with a desperate rally of ferocity at certain sentinels ensconced dismally in their boxes against the railings of public buildings, and, consuming them, had committed their ashes to the consideration of the anarchy to which he had rushed to subscribe.

Such revelations were all for the morrow; and in the meantime Ned was become a little fateful waif of the first processes of the force.

The storm came upon him when alighted in the deep woods behind the chateau. Passing under cover through Méricourt a few minutes earlier, he had peeped through his tilt, scanning the familiar scenes with a strange little emotion of memory. Feeling this, he had almost regretted his venture. Perhaps the emotion was accountable, he thought, to the heat—to the re-enacting of an atmosphere that was charged with suggestion. He could—and did—recall a vision by the village fountain—the vision of a girl, all bold outline and colouring, standing with her arms crooked backwards under her lifted hair. He could recall another figure coming up the field-path hard by—a face of pearly shadows and wondering blue eyes under a great fragrant load of grasses. These blue eyes haunted him in the retrospect, even while he shut his own angrily upon the little ghostly impression. Why could he not dismiss the thought of them from his mind? Why had he submitted himself to the influence of the place at all?

It was too late now to retreat. His carter—a sleepy Liégeois, attired appropriately in a hoqueton, or smock, like a night-gown—led his team stolidly by fountain and “Landlust,” past church and smithy, and so through the village into the forest road beyond. Ned, in the darkness, felt in his breast for his talisman, his tiny packet of geranium flower; and bringing out his hand scented, kissed it. Then, restored thereby to reason, in the thick of the woods he hailed his jehu to a stop, descended, and, paying liberally for his journey, plunged amongst the trees.

At once the shadow of an impending fear took him in grip. The earth, he could have thought, lay rigid in a dry fever of terror. The shade he had so much coveted fell around him like a living shroud. He had always an unreasonable dread of what lay behind the curtain of trunks before him. He moved on purposeless and prickling with apprehension. Had it not been for very shame he would have turned and fled for the open, daring any meeting in the village rather than this nameless dead solitude. But he forced himself to proceed, mentally assigning himself for goal that old withered leviathan in the clearing that was the centre of some strange associations. He had been curious long ago, he admitted, to look upon this monster since the legend of divinity had attached to it. He would go so far now and satisfy his eyes, then turn and make for air and light.