The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers [best short novels .TXT] 📗

in the dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a demon, and the tallow dip went out, but my long knife flew swifter than she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness, and then when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my head. Mr. Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair, seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life, lying prostrate there with the dead master, they came, seized me from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my voice failed with the paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis’ ghastly face, and farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

“Ah! I see it now!” I shrieked. “You have seized the throne and the empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”

(Editor’s Note⁠—Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal Insane.)

The Mask Camilla

You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger

Indeed?

Cassilda

Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger

I wear no mask.

Camilla

Terrified, aside to Cassilda. No mask? No mask!

The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2 I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame, and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam, which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting. At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the flower. “There is no danger,” he explained, “if you choose the right moment. That golden ray is the signal.”

He held the lily toward me, and I took it in my hand. It had turned to stone, to the purest marble.

“You see,” he said, “it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce it?”

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its heart.

“Don’t ask me the reason of that,” he smiled, noticing my wonder. “I have no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are. Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève’s goldfish⁠—there it is.”

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest crystal.

“If I should touch it now?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “but you had better not try.”

“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said, “and that is where the ray of sunlight came from.”

“It looked like a sunbeam true enough,” he said. “I don’t know, it always comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,” he continued, smiling, “perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from whence it came.”

I saw he was mocking, and threatened him with a mahlstick, but he only laughed and changed the subject.

“Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.”

“I saw her going to early mass,” I said, “and she looked as fresh and sweet as that lily⁠—before you destroyed it.”

“Do you think I destroyed it?” said Boris gravely.

“Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?”

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the Fates. He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor’s chisel and squinting at his work.

“By the way,” he said, “I have finished pointing up that old academic Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It’s all I have ready this year, but after the success the Madonna brought me I feel ashamed to send a thing like that.”

The Madonna, an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been the sensation of last year’s Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon that splendid terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The Fates would have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the strength of his having been born in America, although his father was French and his mother was a Russian. Everyone in the Beaux Arts called him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the same familiar way⁠—Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But after all was settled, and she