‘He has a great deal of authority around here,’ she said. ‘And as you saw we dine together. It must be hard for him to remember he’s only an employee.’
‘How did he acquire his authority?’ I asked her.
She hesitated. ‘He — how shall I put it? — he made himself useful to Baron Aleku.’
‘Baron Aleku?’ I said in surprise. ‘But he’s been dead for…’ Half-bemused by amorousness as I was, I couldn’t work it out.
‘Robert has been here since 1890; thirty-five years ago. He’s a clever man, a good organizer. But for him my life here would be impossible.’
‘I think I understand.’
‘Can’t we forget him?’ she asked softly.
In an instant I had no breath. All I could do was nod my head.
‘Would you like to see some of the rooms?’
‘Very much.’
The room we saw (though I saw little enough of it, at any rate at first) was the countess’s sitting-room. I gazed at the pretty curtains and covers and cushions and agreed in lethargic tones that they were beyond doubt pretty. For whatever reason, my companion seemed equally distracted. She listlessly indicated another portrait of her great-uncle, less striking than the one I had noticed in the hall, then a larger picture which did catch my attention. This was an outdoor scene showing what I identified as a funeral procession moving across a stretch of parkland towards a one-storey building of somewhat grotesque design, no doubt a place of entombment. The light might have been that of a rainy day at the end of winter. I learned from the plate that the funeral was that of Baron Aleku Valvazor in the year 1891. For a few moments, without any clear reason, I experienced a feeling of the most profound depression. I spoke before I thought.
‘Where did this happen?’
‘Here,’ said the countess with an inquiring look. ‘In the grounds just outside this window.’
‘And what I see there is some kind of… sepulchre.’
‘There are Valvazors in it that go back to the sixteenth century.’
I made a non-committal noise. My interest had subsided again.
‘The ceiling in this room is supposed to be very unusual.’
And then… My dear Charles, we should both of us have to be altogether different from what we are if I could tell you, even in outline, what happened then; you must use your own experience and your imagination. But this I will say, even to the loyal friend of Connie’s that I know you to be: it wasn’t so much that what happened then was better than any comparable experience of mine, it was more that there simply was no comparison. Afterwards, we agreed that in the very first instant of our meeting — but now, like an oaf, I’m once more on the point of embarrassing you. So, in the most strictly practical fashion, I’ll do no more than state flatly that Countess Valvazor is called Lukretia (the Dacian aristocracy, like the Rumanian, are fond of stressing their links with Ancient Rome), that she’s twenty-nine years old and, as you must know to appreciate what followed, that the setting was her bedchamber, a rather sombre room which she had done her best to cheer up with her gay cushions and rugs and so on.
It was late when I fell asleep. At once, or so it appeared, I entered on a series of vivid yet incomprehensible dreams. There were animals quite unlike any real or even legendary beast, and manufactured objects, large and small, of unguessable purpose. And the people, so many of them, so active, so unremittingly interested in me — what were they all doing? What was happening? Where and what were these places? Was I dying? At last a horrified voice that called in a strange tongue banished this troubling phantasmagoria: ‘Aleku, you devil, you hound of hell!’ — yes, Charles, ‘tu kani d’infernu’, those very words; I was wide awake in a split second.
Lukretia took some calming down. She said she had very little idea of what had caused her to shriek out like that, it had been too dark in her dream, but she knew it was something awful, something loathsome. I said it was over whatever it was, and she said it wasn’t, and then — I must get this part down as near as possible verbatim, because although I don’t understand it I know it’s important.
She said, ‘Will you do something for me?’
I said, ‘Anything I can.’
‘Will you pray to God and tell Him I thank Him for sending you to me? Because I’ve no doubt that He did. I thought He had abandoned me for ever, but now I see He hadn’t after all. Tell Him that, too. You will, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will,’ I said, ‘but wouldn’t it be better if you told Him yourself?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘but in my state prayer is ineffective.’
‘In your state? What state?’
‘Of absolute sin.’
‘Can’t you confess it?’ I asked, I hope as gently as I intended.
‘The father won’t hear me. We… there was a quarrel.’
‘Then go to another father.’
She shook her head; she had a funny look I couldn’t make out. ‘Please do as I ask.’
‘Gladly.’
‘Promise me, Stephen.’
‘I promise.’
‘I’m going to hold you to it.’
When I slept again I didn’t dream at all. For the experience I did have I can find no word; perhaps you know one. I was awoken by the sound of an enormous bell from somewhere overhead, somewhere quite near, still dying away as I listened. Lukretia hadn’t stirred, I could readily see. But how could I see it so readily? Because the room had grown lighter. How? With light from outside, through the chinks between the heavy curtains, bright light. But that wasn’t possible. We all carry a reasonably efficient clock in our head, and mine told me that it should still be dark out there. With my thoughts wandering slowly from festive illuminations to forest fires I put on a thick wrap of blanket-cloth (which I was soon to be mightily glad of) and hurried to the window. As I reached it the bell tolled again with an abruptness that made me blink. I pulled a corner of curtain aside and looked out.
What I saw (and I saw it, I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t mad, and I certainly wasn’t dreaming, I knew that as a normal waking man always knows it) — what I saw was the funeral procession of Baron Aleku Valvazor in 1891. No one who had seen the picture in the room next door could have been in the slightest doubt. Everything and everybody was there, the old priest, the young priest, the coffin on an odd-looking waggon drawn by six men pulling ornamental ropes, the family and friends, the more prosperous farmers and yeomen in their characteristic brimless hats, the peasants, all on a rather blustery, chilly February or March afternoon nearly thirty-four years ago. I could also see several figures that I was nearly sure weren’t in the painting, like the one who must have been the artist himself furiously at work, an assistant at his side. And like Lukretia, clad in black, standing with bowed head near the entrance to the tomb and then suddenly glancing up and, as I recognized her, looking me straight in the eye.
I say I recognized her; she must have been nearly a hundred yards away, or quite that, but the light though not perfect was good enough and I had caught not so much any lineament as, more distinctively, a tilt of the neck that, after those few hours, I now knew well. But of course I thought of none of this at the time. Instinct made me turn away towards where I had left Lukretia and there was nothing, not only was she not there but the bed, the dressing-table, the pier-glass, the pictures, the sculptures, the brasses were all not there, nothing was there but stone walls and floor, the floor whose chill now struck through to my bare feet. I turned back to the window and there was nothing there either, just uncurtained panes and starlight and approaching dawn. Would you have lingered? Shivering and gasping with more than cold I was out of that grim spot pretty smartly, I can tell you, but finding my way back to the countess’s room or to my own was a different kind of task. I wandered up and down the great staircases and along the twisting corridors for anything up to half an hour. By then I was very cold indeed. In the end I rounded a corner and almost walked into Macneil, who was dressed for the outdoors, indeed for the saddle. He gave me a look of surprise and suspicion.