The King in Yellow
as they were before Geneviève fell ill. Boris and I would look into
each other’s eyes, and there would be neither rancour nor cowardice
nor mistrust in that glance. I would be with them again for a little
while in the dear intimacy of their home, and then, without pretext or
explanation, I would disappear from their lives for ever. Boris would
know; Geneviève—the only comfort was that she would never know. It
seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found the meaning of that
sense of obligation which had persisted all through my delirium, and
the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite ready, I beckoned
Jack to me one day, and said—
“Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to
Geneviève....”
When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell
into a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to
atoms. I raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled
forth some weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his
youth was gone for ever. I seemed to be past the capability of further
suffering, and one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to
Boris’ house, I took them without a tremor and asked him to tell me
all. It was cruel of me to ask him, but there was no help for it, and
he leaned wearily on his thin hands, to reopen the wound which could
never entirely heal. He began very quietly—
“Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not
be able to explain any more than I what has happened. I suspect that
you would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else
I would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the
telling. I shall use few words.
“That day when I left you in the doctor’s care and came back to Boris,
I found him working on the ‘Fates.’ Geneviève, he said, was sleeping
under the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he
said. He kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him.
Before long, I saw that the third figure of the group—the one looking
straight ahead, out over the world—bore his face; not as you ever saw
it, but as it looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I
should like to find an explanation, but I never shall.
“Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way
until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply,
and a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway
and I followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the
pool, her hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the
heart.” Jack stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and
his thin cheeks twitched. “I carried Boris to his room. Then I went
back and let that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the
water, washed the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared
descend the steps, I found her lying there as white as snow. At last,
when I had decided what was best to do, I went into the laboratory,
and first emptied the solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then
I poured the contents of every jar and bottle after it. There was
wood in the fireplace, so I built a fire, and breaking the locks of
Boris’ cabinet I burnt every paper, notebook and letter that I found
there. With a mallet from the studio I smashed to pieces all the empty
bottles, then loading them into a coal-scuttle, I carried them to the
cellar and threw them over the red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times
I made the journey, and at last, not a vestige remained of anything
which might again aid in seeking for the formula which Boris had found.
Then at last I dared call the doctor. He is a good man, and together we
struggled to keep it from the public. Without him I never could have
succeeded. At last we got the servants paid and sent away into the
country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet with stories of Boris’ and
Geneviève’s travels in distant lands, from whence they will not return
for years. We buried Boris in the little cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor
is a good creature, and knows when to pity a man who can bear no more.
He gave his certificate of heart disease and asked no questions of me.”
Then, lifting his head from his hands, he said, “Open the letter, Alec;
it is for us both.”
I tore it open. It was Boris’ will dated a year before. He left
everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to
take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott the
management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother’s
family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed
by himself. These he left to me.
The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the
window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear
what he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and
gentleness.
“Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna
bends tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face
that never would have been except for her.”
His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, “Courage, Alec.” Next
morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.
IV
The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known
so well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though
I went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself
to enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and
sat down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys,
and I turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked
every door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and
went away. Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in
charge of my apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople.
During the two years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our
letters, we never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their
names crept in. I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack’s
letters replying to one of mine—
“What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill,
and feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice, of course
troubles me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight
after he died. I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part
of your delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it
you.”
Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in
India so unlike anything that I had ever known of him that I decided
to return at once to Paris. He wrote: “I am well, and sell all my
pictures as artists do who have no need of money. I have not a care of
my own, but I am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off
a strange anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a
breathless expectancy—of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing
me out. Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall
anything afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating,
and all day the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night
to recall the same experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have
determined to break up this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I
go to Bombay, or will you come to Paris?”
I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.
When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted,
looked in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as
we sat and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it
was pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.
We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept
with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where
Boris lay.
“Shall we place the ‘Fates’ in the little grove above him?” Jack asked,
and I answered—
“I think only the ‘Madonna’ should watch over Boris’ grave.” But Jack
was none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could
not retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that
at times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.
“You see I do you harm and not good,” I said. “Try a change without
me.” So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands, and I
went back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris’ house, now mine, since
my return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by
Jack; there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went
there to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself
able to paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms—all but one.
I could not bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay,
and yet I felt the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to
kneel beside her.
One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as
I had lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the
tawny Eastern rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the
pointed ears and flat cruel head, and I thought of my dream where
I saw Geneviève lying beside it. The helmets still hung against
the threadbare tapestry, among them the old Spanish morion which I
remembered Geneviève had once put on when we were amusing ourselves
with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes to the spinet; every
yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand, and I rose, drawn
by the strength of my life’s passion to the sealed door of the marble
room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling hands. Sunlight
poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of Cupid, and
lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her tender face
bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure that I knelt
and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the Madonna, and
yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and beneath her
softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with rose, as
if from some faint warm light within her breast.
Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.
A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing
the girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.
She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in
the house, and asked what should be done with it. I told her to let it
loose in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It
was from Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his
reason. It was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the
house until he could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the
dreams, he said—he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must
not leave the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.
As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish
were swimming: “Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean
by interrupting me,” I said.
With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her
and sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the
studio; there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except
the marble of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room.