The Sea Peoples(70)

Hildred let him take it from his hand, and he tossed the splendid diadem in the air, and catching it, turned to his cousin smiling in relief.

“It’s dear at fifty cents,” he said. “Why, it would put the Pope’s tiara to shame if it was real! What’s it for?”

Hildred silently took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its din at once. Louis watched him curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden silence.

“That’s some biscuit box for a piece of frippery!” he said, as Hildred hunched over the dial to make sure it was hidden as he spun it.

“Come, let’s go into the study,” Hildred said.

“That’s more like it!” Louis replied with a false heartiness.

Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his riding-whip; a flash of anger went through Hildred’s mind at it, and at the whole casual, brainless health of the man. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket and jaunty cap, and his cousin noticed that his riding boots were all splashed with red mud.

“Where have you been?” Hildred inquired, though he and John and the nameless Boisean all knew that was what happened when you rode hard through wet ground.

“Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,” Louis said. “I haven’t had time to change yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven’t you got a glass of something? I’m dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.”

Hildred poured brandy from a bottle, his nose wrinkling at the harsh scent. John’s soul flashed sympathy as Louis drank it and grimaced; that smelled like the worst sort of plonk, the sort of stuff you’d expect in a place in Portland or Hood River catering to riverboat crews and bargemen, an odd choice for a wealthy and wellborn man.

“Damned bad stuff,” Louis observed. “I’ll give you an address where they sell brandy that is brandy.”

“It’s good enough for my needs,” Hildred said indifferently. “I use it to rub my chest with.”

I’m surprised it doesn’t peel off the skin, or at least kill all the hairs there, John thought.

Louis stared and flicked at another fly with his riding crop, snapping it to a smear on the leg of a table.

He’s good, John thought, and . . . somewhere . . . the Boisean agreed. Very good hand-eye coordination. I’ll bet he’s a devil with a saber.

John felt a stab of grief; his father had been able to cut flies in half with a draw-and-strike, and had done it sometimes to entertain his children. The only other person he’d seen do it successfully was Heuradys d’Ath, though she claimed her adoptive mother had been able to do it as well, in her dreadful prime.

Which Da said was true; she was the only person he’d ever seen who was faster than him at his peak. There were more reasons than one that they call her Lady Death.

“See here, old fellow,” Louis began, his voice full of a rather forced heartiness. “I’ve got something to suggest to you. It’s four years now that you’ve shut yourself up here like an owl, never going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.”

He glanced along the row of shelves. “Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!” he read. “For heaven’s sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?”

“I wish they were bound in gold,” Hildred said. “But wait. Yes, there is another book. The King in Yellow.”

He looked his cousin straight in the eye. John could feel how unpleasant the expression was, and from his look Louis realized something of it too.

“Have you never read it?” Hildred asked, that sneer still curling his lip.

“I? No, thank God! I don’t want to be driven crazy.”

John saw Louis regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it, but he could hear Hildred’s teeth grinding as well as feel the sensation. There was only one word which Hildred loathed more than he did lunatic and his cousin had just uttered it. A white flash went through his skull, but iron will controlled it.

“Why do you think it dangerous? The King in Yellow is only a book, a play . . . and one that has never been performed, at that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Louis said, hastily. “I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”

“I understand he is still alive,” Hildred answered.

“That’s probably true,” he muttered. “Bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”

“It is a book of great truths,” Hildred said.

“Yes,” he replied. “Of truths which send men frantic and blast their lives. I don’t care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme essence of art. It’s a crime to have written it, and I for one shall never open its pages.”

“Is that what you have come to tell me?” Hildred asked.

“No,” he said, “I came to tell you that I am going to be married.”

For a moment John felt a flailing panic that he was going to die, drop down dead as Hildred’s metaphorically rotten and practically unhealthy heart simply stopped functioning and carried his unwilling psychic passengers along with him. Then the haze cleared from his eyes, and the man he was—or whose consciousness he rode—managed to draw another breath. It had looked possible to perish of sheer rage there for a moment, though. Would he have been back in the self that hung in the room of pain? Or on his way to Judgement?