“So in this—chapel—on that night, the Black Mass was celebrated?”
“Yes.”
“By Robin Webster?”
“By Robin Webster, the priest.”
As he spoke, Hanaud took his blue packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Mr. Ricardo, on the other hand, was so startled that he almost put out a hand to restrain his companion from a sacrilege. And even when the smoke of the cigarette rose blue, turned brown and shredded away, spreading its pungent odour about this recess of the window, he had a feeling that an indiscretion was being committed. The next minute, however, Hanaud began to began to talk, and as he had done before when his thoughts were tumbling out of him he used his native tongue.
“A pretty affair! The old Sabbaths—one can understand them better. Poor serfs, hungry, without pleasures, in revolt against the great injustice which gave all the colour of the world to a handful of nobles and all the misery of the world to the rest. One can see them fermenting to ecstasies of blasphemy and abomination in some forest glade or old burial ground. But the Black Mass. That’s sheer decadence. The people of disappointed ambitions, those who have exhausted the normal joys and crave the forbidden ones, those who would sell their immortal souls for a new thrill, those who look to Satan for the gifts which Christ refuses, the whole body of degenerates with the blackmailers who live on them—criminals seeking accomplices, poisoners seeking protection—you heard the mother Chicholle. There were great ones whom she would betray. That’s the spirit and that’s the congregation too. Great ones rubbing shoulders with the witches of the slums, and all of them looking for their profit to Adonis there”—and once again his arm shot out with a big outspread hand denouncing the idolatry—“Adonis the Sterile.”
“Really! Really!” said Mr. Ricardo, himself aware of the inadequacy of his comment.
“It was the Vicomte de Mirandol who began the cult here. An odd, exotic creature, half crazy with long vigils, a shallow erudition and a lack of recognition, he found importance and no doubt, too, a response to a thread of mysticism in his nature. Satan’s agent in the Gironde! A position, you understand, full of flattery. It needed a daring man. He stood aloof, awe-inspiring, wrapped in wickedness like a black cloak. And he believed it all. And not he alone. From the days of Madame de Montespan and the Abbé Guibourg, the Black Mass has had its congregation. Ennui, yielding to excitement, that to the conviction that the unpardonable sin of The Revelations has been committed, that again to a savage glorying in it—like a child in a rage at being punished who mutters obstinately ‘Rakah, Rakah,’ because he who says the word can never be forgiven. Tidon joins the brotherhood—Paris may be the nearer. Diana Tasborough becomes a candidate. Here a person of standing, there a woman of the town. Jeanne Corisot would hear of it. The very thing for her! And the mother Chicholle! There will be pickings for her out of it. For the people who use the Black Mass are people who want evil things safely done.”
Gradually the pieces of the puzzle were fitting themselves together in Mr. Ricardo’s sight. He could imagine whispers of the celebration spreading very quietly, very gradually, but also very certainly. The dark secret could not be smothered. And whoever had it would also have all the worshippers in the hollow of his hand. He or she could insist upon admittance; and the cult with its associates would become almost automatically an organisation for malevolence and crime. Diana Tasborough’s obsession, her insensibility to her companion’s petulant assumption of authority, at once became easy to understand. What would even the most persistent stream of querulous reprimands matter to a girl possessed by the unholy excitement of a dreadful and forbidden creed?
“But, of course, the keystone of the whole black business was the fact that Robin Webster was an ordained priest. The Black Mass postulates the supremacy of God. God has to be lured and tricked into the wafer and the wine, before He can be made subject to Satan. Only a priest can do that. The celebrant of the Devil’s Mass must be the celebrant of the Mass of God. The Abbé Guibourg, Gille Lefrance, Davot, Mariette—they were all true priests, even as Robin Webster.”
“Yes, who was he?” Mr. Ricardo asked.
“A curious history. He belonged to the Gironde. His family goes back to those days when Bordeaux was English. The Websters grew vines and made wine in the Gironde as far back as the old times when Gaufridi was burnt for witchcraft at Aix-en-Provence. They fell upon evil days. From proprietors they dwindled to managers and not very successful merchants in Bordeaux. Robin Webster’s father was the last of them. Robin the son was mistaken enough to believe that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Odd? But people are odd. There isn’t anyone, if you could lay out on a plate the inside of his mind as a surgeon lays out the inside of your body, whom you could call commonplace. There’s some queer imp at the heart of each one of us. He was sent to Beaumont College, officiated for a time at a church in London—he was there when his father died—wearied of it and went off.”
“With Evelyn Devenish,” Mr. Ricardo declared confidently, but Hanaud shook his head.
“She had predecessors. Ho ho, that fellow! I tell you. With his white hair and his fine looks, and his air of a man set apart, and a suggestion of passion which his eyes would let you see for a moment, he was fatal. The women tumbled for him—”
“Fell for or tumbled
