The Sea Peoples(55)
“They may turn on you,” Hildred suggested.
Wilde rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax substitutes.
“I think not,” he murmured thoughtfully. “I seldom have to apply, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.”
“How do you apply the whip?” Hildred demanded.
Wilde’s eyes dwindled to a pair of green sparks. John felt his mind recoil, and even Hildred Castaigne blanched a little inwardly.
“I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,” Wilde said in a soft voice.
A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable expression.
“Who is it?” he inquired.
“Mr. Steylette,” was the answer.
“Come tomorrow,” replied Mr. Wilde.
“Impossible,” began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark from Mr. Wilde.
“Come tomorrow,” he repeated.
“Very . . . very well.”
He heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the stairway.
“Who is that?” Hildred asked.
“Arnold Steylette, owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York Herald.”
He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: “I pay him very badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.”
“Arnold Steylette!” Hildred repeated, amazed.
Odd, John thought; and he could feel the second man linked to him, the Boisean, agree. He thinks of a scrivener as if he were a great man, someone of power, not just a hired servant.
“Yes,” said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.
The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at Wilde and snarled, a deep rumble in its chest. He climbed down from the chair and squatting on the floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased snarling and presently began a loud purring which seemed to increase in timbre as he stroked her.
“Where are the notes?” Hildred asked.
His voice was calm, but longing and desire surged through him. The Boisean echoed it, but with an undertone of revulsion.
Wilde pointed to the table, and Hildred picked up a manuscript, blazoned with a title that he whispered aloud with exultation and longing:
The Imperial Dynasty of America.
When Hildred had finished, Wilde nodded and coughed.
“Speaking of your legitimate ambition,” he said, “how do Constance and Louis get along?”
“She loves him,” he replied simply.
The cat on Wilde’s knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung her off and climbed on to the chair opposite Hildred.
“And Dr. Archer! But that’s a matter you can settle any time you wish,” he added.
“Yes,” Castaigne replied.
A sudden image flooded Hildred’s mind; John could feel the straight-jacket cramping his arms, strong hands holding him as he convulsed in rage, and the blood and spittle spraying from his mouth as someone—Dr. Archer—approached with a pad of ether-soaked fabric. Then something that was Hildred imagining: Imagining the stout middle-aged doctor burning, his skin bubbling and turning black and red cracks of flame bursting through it as his eyeballs ran molted down his cheeks and he screamed and screamed and did not die . . .
“Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin Louis,” Hildred said calmly.
“It is time,” Wilde agreed.
Then he took another ledger from the table and flipped through it.
“We are now in communication with ten thousand men,” he said in an abstract tone. “We can count on one hundred thousand within the first twenty-four hours, and in forty-eight hours the state will rise en masse. The country follows the state, and the portion that will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.”
A shrill laugh stayed locked behind Hildred Castaigne’s lips, though when he spoke it was abstractly:
“A new broom sweeps clean,” he said.
“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts,” said Mr. Wilde.
“You are speaking of the King in Yellow,” Hildred said, with a pleasure mingled with terror.
A shadow moved through his mind; a figure in tattered yellow robes. John’s own memories suddenly grew clearer; the yellow figure on the ramparts of the fantastic coral castle in Baru Denpasar’s harbor.
“He is a king whom emperors have served,” Wilde said.
“I am content to serve him,” Hildred replied.
Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his fingerless hand. “Perhaps Constance does not love your cousin,” he suggested.
Hildred started to reply with a cold surge of venom, but a sudden burst of military music from the street below drowned his voice.
The twentieth dragoon regiment, formerly in garrison at Mount St. Vincent, is returning from the man?uvers in Westchester County, to its new barracks on East Washington Square, he thought, as he moved to look down from the window. Louis’ regiment.
John’s mind looked down as well, and whoever-it-was-from-Boise. They both saw a good-looking set of horse soldiers in pale blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbies and tight white riding breeches with a double yellow stripe. Every other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which fluttered yellow and white pennons. The band passed, playing the regimental march; then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons fluttered from their lance points.