Three-Cornered Halo (26 page)

The group about the altar, also knelt, the Archbishop at the prie-Dieu before his throne. The Patriarch moved slowly down the four shallow steps from the altar, turned and, kneeling, prayed aloud. “Blessed Juanita, Pearl of San Juan, hear and answer the prayers of your people, hear the prayer of your daughter here below.…”

There was a long, long, long silence. Nothing will happen, thought Cousin Hat rather desperately, and
then
what will they do? She looked with compassion at the slender figure, kneeling with bowed head, lit only by the gleams from the altar candles falling on the shining gold hair beneath the black veil, on the jewels that shimmered on the tight-clasped hands. The Grand Duchess lifted her head at last and her voice shook; and yet, in the hush of the great domed shadowy building, though small, was sweet and clear. “Santa Juanita,” prayed La Bellissima in carefully rehearsed Juanese, “here before our people, we pray that you will intercede for us before the Throne of God for the gift of a son—an heir to the dukedom of our belovéd island; and that in token of hearing this, our prayer, you will vouchsafe the miracle of a sign.” Her voice died away. The Grand Duke said, loudly and strongly: “Amen!” A hush fell, so profound that it seemed to Miss Cockrill, kneeling rigid with apprehension in her corner by the sanctuary rails, that if a candle-flame had but flickered, she must have heard.

In the shadows to the east of the altar, and above it, something flickered that was not a candle-flame—that was not so bright as a flame and yet as faintly, faintly luminous, something that stirred in the shadows above the High Altar. La Bellissima's voice took on a new note, a note of doubt, which was yet a note of something like dawning awe. “Juanita … Juanita, hear our prayer …” And in the shadows, slowly, indefinitely, something began to take shape.…

Slowly, slowly—slowly taking shape. The shape of a woman in the long cloak of Juanese church-going, the black lace veil pulled half across the lower part of the face.… From the great crowds came a great gasp, the sighing intake of a thousand breaths; and only here and there a woman cried out with a little sharp, yelping scream. Until suddenly, in the surrounding darkness, there was a brightness all about her; and clear and vivid for all to see, she stood there—stood there on the nothingness in the shadows above the High Altar: a little stocky woman in a long cloak and a black veil, worn like a mantilla over her dark head.

Juanita.

There was a rustling and surging of sound as with one accord the packed mass of the people forced itself, tumbling forward, down on to its knees: the clicking of innumerable beads as hands holding rosaries crossed from forehead to breast, from shoulder to shoulder; the sighing moan of a woman here or there, fainting, unobserved, unattended, remaining pinned upright on her knees by the press of her neighbours. On their splendid prie-Dieu, the Grand Duke and Duchess were motionless, staring up into the circle of light, all about the altar the priests and acolytes knelt stricken into awe; and the old Archbishop remained, unmoving, the terrible, wounded old face raised up, lit to radiance, the face of a happy child. Mr Cecil was open-mouthed with astonishment and doubt, Winsome Foley gave a great sob and buried her face in her hands; and even the arid heart of Cousin Hat was pierced with a thrill that seemed to cut her through to the very soul.

She stood for a long time, absolutely without movement, silent. Gradually all sound in the cathedral ceased, it was as though time stood still, so intense, so mass-concentrated was the effort of the people, willing her to remain with them. When the silence was absolute, the figure slowly moved: slowly the upraised hand was lowered. A deep voice said: “My children …”

A voice cried out sharply: “Her voice! Juanita! Juanita's own voice.” From aisle and nave, from chapel and clerestory came a thousand echoes, whispering out, almost in terror: ‘Juanita's voice!'

The vision raised its hand. There was silence again. She said again: “My children …” Now no one spoke. “My children—I, Juanita, speak to you in answer to your prayer. You pray well, daughter of France, belovéd of the island of San Juan: they do ill that speak against you. To you shall be granted the gift that you pray for, the gift of a child, so that all may know that your prayers find favour in the sight of God. My children, pray: pray with me in thanksgiving to God for these His mercies.…” The figure raised two hands, palms together, fingers upward-pointing. “Say after me … Te Deum.… Te Deum, laudemus, te Deum confitemur.…”

Under the bursting hum of the many voices stumbling after her through the great hymn of praise, Mr Cecil, very grey about the gills, nevertheless leaned over towards Miss Cockrill. “
All
done by mirrors?”

Cousin Hat, also rather pale, contrived a broad wink. She jerked her head meaningfully to where the Grand Duke knelt with clasped hands, his chin buried in the folds of the great black cloak. When Juan Lorenzo sued to heaven for miracles, he evidently took no chances of being refused.

And yet … Mr Cecil thought of the evil thing hidden in the golden censer, of which only he and three others in the world had knowledge. He thought of what by now might have happened, had not this most aptly timed ‘vision' appeared to them. “Well, I wouldn't know; there are miracles and miracles,” he said.

And so thought also Tomaso di Goya, standing with his back against a pillar, propped up above the heads of the kneeling people, one foot in a crevice of the carving of the marble font. A lot of childish poppy-cock, a parcel of priests preying on the minds of these poor, credulous, simple fools, like a pack of wolves: salving their consciences, no doubt, with the old excuse that it was ‘for their own good'; wrecking his own plans, throwing them into confusion—for the Gerente and his men would have deserted their places, who knew but what Francisco also might be displaced in the shifting of the crowd?—and not standing there, meek as a tethered bullock, to be butchered when the time came.… He climbed up higher on the font, ruthlessly clambering over the lovely marble, braced himself against the pillar, out of the way of anyone reaching up to try to silence him; and when the canticle ended, cried out into the silence that followed: “A fake! A plot of the priests! This is no vision, this is not Juanita at all!”

A groan of horror came up from the darkness below him like the shrieks of the damned rising up out of hell. The Patriarca, kneeling at the altar, leapt to his feet, sweeping aside the heavy red, white and gold vestments. There was a scrimmage in the darkness about the font, men clawed up at his ankles trying to find and drag him down. But the light about the vision never wavered and her voice rang out, cutting as a lash, above all their heads. “Silence! Who dares to speak thus to the messenger of God?”

Tomaso braced himself back against his pillar. “If you are a messenger of God, you know who speaks.”

For a moment, the light about the figure seemed to waver, there was a sort of shifting, a sort of changing; and when she spoke again, she spoke with the same voice and yet with a new voice: the voice of a woman, of an ordinary woman, but a woman accustomed to command, accustomed to be obeyed. The voice said sharply: “Tomaso di Goya—you are insolent before God.”

That voice! That voice! He shrank back against the pillar, his heart grown cold within him. How often as a child had he been dragged, one of a reverent procession, to file past the table where the saint lay in her self-imposed imprisonment, to make his clumsy, schoolboy reverence; how often had that sharp voice snapped out at him, at those about him—this same voice that now addressed him by his name, the bright eyes above the black veil piercing the shield of darkness into which he cringed. And all about him, fools cried out in awe and exaltation, ‘Juanita's voice!' “A trick!” he called back resolutely. “Don't believe it! Don't be taken in! It's a trick.”

The vision spoke again. “Does heaven play tricks, Tomaso? Do you not know my voice?”

“I and everyone else in San Juan,” he called back boldly. “Every grown man and woman on the island remembers Juanita's voice. And this is some woman, imitating the voice, some woman from Barrequitas or Toscanita: hired by the priests, taught by them what to say.”

She gave a laugh, a sort of cackling laugh: just such a laugh, whispered his heart with a sickening stab, as Juanita would laugh in those old days when he stumbled over the catechism which it had been her delight to force visiting children to repeat to her, jeering at their mistakes. But she did not reply directly. She said instead: “Bellissima!”

“Juanita?” whispered La Bellissima.

“Speak to me in your own language.…”

“A plant!” cried Tomaso, over the unintelligible interchange.

She laughed again. “There are English ladies in the congregation. You will not suspect them, also, of duplicity?” She said in English: “Will an English lady kindly speak a few words to me?”

No English lady present could, for the moment, find her tongue. Just as Cousin Hat, anxious only to oblige her friend the Grand Duke, was groping for words not too idiotically incongruous, however, another voice came to the rescue. The voice would just like to say, it declared in measured tones, that it was very, very happy and honoured to address a few words to the vision of Saint Jew-ann, and certainly would be most gratified if there was some message which it, the voice, could take to the ladies of the Women's Club, back home in the United States of America.…

Juanita inclined graciously. “A blessing upon the ladies of your confraternity. I thank you for speaking.” She added sharply: “Tomaso di Goya—did you understand what was said?”

“No,” said Tomaso sullenly.

“No. And neither would ‘some woman from Barrequitas or Toscanita.'”

“An actress, then, imported from abroad.…”

Juanita had had a mannerism, a jerking of the shoulders beneath the long cloak of her habit, when she was—as exceedingly often happened—annoyed. The vision thus jerked its shoulders now. She said sharply: “That is enough. You speak impiously and you speak like a fool. No ‘actress from abroad' could speak in fluent Juanese, no actress from abroad could recognise you, Tomaso di Goya, out there in the darkness.…”

“And no actress from abroad,” cried Tomaso, suddenly, “could look like Juanita.” And he shouted out at the top of his voice across the heads of the people, flinging down his gauntlet once and for all, flicking his glove across the face of God: “Juanita di Perli, Margherita di San Juan—drop down that veil and let us look upon your face!”

Absolute silence. Absolute stillness. The very stones of the building seemed to hold their breath, lest a draught should flicker a candle-flame in the crystal chandeliers. The radiance wavered about the vision, trembled and shifted: and suddenly pin-pointed her face in a blaze of light and she raised her hand and cried out, “Look, then!” and pulled aside the veil.

Mr Cecil had seen many pictures, many representations of Juanita. You could not avoid it if you spent so much as a day in San Juan. Her photograph (without, alas! the suicidal donkey) hung in every shop window on the island, there was one in each room in the Bellomare Hotel which is under her patronage; at least one, usually more, in every house. In the Duomo there was, of course, her mummified body with its death mask in white and pink wax; and in chapel and home and on the quays of Barrequitas, along the quiet country paths and at every busy street corner, one came across crude plaster statues each in its little niche, often with a night-light guttering before it under its miniature barley-sugar beehive, an inverted dome of coloured glass; always with bunches of flowers. A stocky figure, long in the body, short in the leg; a swarthy face, a piercingly bright brown eye: a pronounced black moustache.… Morning after morning, through two long winters at home, she had gazed up at him from his butter dish, evening after evening had beamed at him from his mantelpiece, her face stretched into a Cheshire cat smile by the curve of a moulded vase; day after day submitted to having cigarettes crushed out upon her pottery person, on a corner of his drawing-desk. He could not mistake her; and he did not mistake her now. It did not take the hiss of a thousand breaths to tell him that, long body, short legs, swarthy face, bright eye—this was Juanita who cried, “Look, then!” and dropped aside her veil.

Tomaso di Goya had been twelve years old when Juanita died. He had seen her many times, had filed past her body while she lay, still on her table, in state before the High Altar of the Duomo. He too knew that this was Juanita who confronted him now. No actress. No island woman with some chance resemblance—no relative who happened to have ‘taken after' her. Had there existed anyone in San Juan claiming any physical resemblance to their saint, all their tiny world would have known of it: such few as could claim kinship had long ago been sought out and were held in honour. For a moment he toyed with the possibility that some survivor of the family massacre at the hands of Pedro the Vile, might have slipped away and continued a branch of the family abroad; but he knew that it was false. In so small a community and so circumscribed an area, nothing could long be hidden; and every detail of her family history was as familiarly known to her people as the saint's table-life itself. No. Reconcile it how he might with his atheistical conscience, the fact remained that this could be no impostor who hung in her radiance in the cathedral shadows, the light now fading away from her face, suffused again in a general radiance: Juanita—voice, laugh, mannerisms, memory of things past, Juanita exactly as he himself had last seen her, just before she died.… Juanita: a saint of God, sent here to answer the prayers of the faithful, the good, the simple—who all this time had known better than clever Tomaso di Goya with his foreign travel and superior mind! Sent here by God.…

The thurible! With a clutch at his heart, he remembered the thurible. In a moment the vision would vanish: and then … The Mass would go forward, a Mass of thanksgiving as the old man had said. The Grand Duke would rise once more and stretch out his hand, and this time take the censer.… And this time, no one would stay his hand. The saint?—but she would be gone: and he, Tomaso, would be a murderer, doubly a murderer, for the destruction of the innocent Francisco no doubt would go forward and he be powerless to stop any of it. Nor would the bloodshed end there. And all—for what? Not for his future greatness: for the saint had said the Grand Duchess would have an heir—could only have meant, if the Grand Duke were within this hour to die, that she was already enceinte.… And with that promise, that message from God Himself before them, it was hardly likely that the people would accept Tomaso di Goya in the dead man's place.…