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 Series Volumes of
Haunted Library of Horror Classics:
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (2020)
The Beetle by Richard Marsh (2020)
Vathek by William Beckford (2020)
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (2020)
Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins (2021)
The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror by Arthur Conan Doyle (2021)
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (2021)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James (2021)
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (2022)
The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (2022)
The Mummy! by Jane Webb (2022)
Fantasmagoriana translated into English by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson
(2022)
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (2022)
…and more forthcoming
First published in 1895 by F. Tennyson Neely, New York
Introduction © 2021 by Nic Pizzolatto
Additional supplemental material © 2021 by Eric J. Guignard and
Leslie S. Klinger
Copyright © 2021 by Horror Writers Association
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design and illustration by Jeffrey Nguyen
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information
storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing
from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are
used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Originally published as The King in Yellow in 1895 in New York City,
New York, United States of America, by F. Tennyson Neely.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William), author. |
Pizzolatto, Nic, writer of introduction.
Title: The king in yellow / Robert W Chambers ; with an introduction
by Nic
Pizzolatto.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series:
Haunted library of horror classics | “Originally published as The King
in Yellow in 1895 in New York City, New York, United States of
America,
by F. Tennyson Neely.” | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048797 | (trade paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal fiction, American. | GSAFD: Horror
fiction. |
Occult fiction.
Classification: LCC PS1284 .K56 2021 | DDC 813/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048797
This edition of The King in Yellow is presented by the Horror Writers
Association, a nonprofit organization of writers and publishing
professionals around the world, dedicated to promoting dark
literature and the interests of those who write it.

For more information on HWA, visit: horror.org.

 Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

The Repairer of Reputations

The Mask

In the Court of the Dragon

The Yellow Sign

The Demoiselle D’ys

The Prophets’ Paradise

The Street of the Four Winds

The Street of the First Shell

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields

Rue Barrée
About the Author, Robert W. Chambers

Suggested Discussion Questions for Classroom Use

Suggested Further Reading of Fiction

About the Series Editors

Back Cover
 Introduction

AS the reader will shortly discern, I am no scholar of The King in

Yellow. I read only two or three of its stories when I ran across the
book as a teenager and never revisited, though a certain few
sentences stayed with me, like a tune that won’t leave your head.
Around two decades later I linked the notional King in Yellow to a
killer and the savage cult that bred him in a Gothic police procedural
I created, at a time when the idea of a story that caused insanity
seemed like a proper metaphor both to a detective’s obsessive
theory and the everyday world I was seeing all around.
The conceit of Chambers’s fictional play appears still more relevant
today, among this landscape of cultural memes, narratives whose
spread can be traced like pathogens, language going viral, fiction
disguised as facts, and a news-entertainment complex whose
defining purpose appears to be waging relentless psychological
warfare on its own audience, almost entirely through stories. The
America seen in “The Repairer of Reputations” looks nearly
prescient, a society falling to chaos in the story’s background while
most of the city is under the power of a grotesque extortionist
whose physical appearance distorts the human as fully as his
enterprise. Like the elusive play, the dwarf’s tools are words—lists,
letters, genealogies, records of transgression.
Stories. Words.
 The idea of “magic words” has always felt misunderstood to me.
The magic is not the words themselves, or any particular word,
because they are, after all, empty vessels. The magic is only ever
using the right words in the exact right way. The secret knowledge
lies in arranging, say, the twenty-six symbols of our English alphabet
into a configuration which reliably produces an intended effect upon
the audience, perhaps and even especially against that audience’s
wishes—configurations most commonly categorized as a story,
poem, lyric, or play. Then there’s no end to the capabilities of
language and its power over human beings, its ability to engender
the most overwhelming emotional states. Put words to music and
the entire world can move.
As we’re all too aware since the world started living on our phones,
stories can without much effort induce apoplectic rage or shattering
fear. More difficult to accomplish, the same vehicle can also make us
feel emptied and purged by a heartbreaking beauty that perhaps
widens the scope of our perceptions, making the experience of
consciousness fundamentally different afterward. Language can also
absolutely drive a person insane. I intend no euphemism; I’m talking
stark raving mad. A configuration of language can demonstrably
trigger mental illness for individuals whose psychologies were stable
prior, but unknowingly receptive to that sort of stimuli. Books of
supposedly secret knowledge and magic have this sort of reputation,
and in my experience it is earned.
Readers may be interested to know there are very real currents of
the occult practiced by lodges in the Typhonian and Voudon
traditions which view Hastur and the King in Yellow as actual
entities, as they do Lovecraft’s Old Ones: nightmares that were
channeled through artists and sensitives who were unaware their
fictions represented the influence of actual para-terrestrial
intelligences. Such occultists have spent the better part of the last
century using ritual and ceremonial magic to ostensibly communicate
with such entities and “hold open the gateways” for same.
Transcriptions of communication from these entities constitute
illuminated manuscripts to members of these lodges, many of whom
believe that the Sign of Protection will shield them as the chthonic
forces from a broken universe exert influence in our dimension.
Speaking of mental illness.
Then again, the above has been taking place throughout the most
brutally transformative, chaotic, and devastating century of our
species. World Wars, mass killings, the advent of serial murderers
and active shooters, to say nothing of technology as fantastical and
horrifying as the atomic bomb or the internet…
I should get back to the topic at hand, which I think had
something to do with stories as viral delivery devices that produce
specific symptoms in an audience…
This book’s original effect on me had been entirely centered
around the peculiar, haunted quality exuded by its omissions, the
idea of the play. The lines Chambers provides from the imaginary
work and the vague wisps of events therein resonate with the
existential gravity of a particular horror—a very personal, human
horror of the mind, where something essential is confirmed, that the
world cannot in any way be apprehended, enlightenment is
indistinguishable from derangement, and the joke is very much on
you.
Reading now, I found these stories also offer a prose style whose
techniques seem significantly ahead of their time, in their meta-
textual conceits, their vision of the world and the dissonance that
vision generates. The legacy of The King in Yellow in the horror
genre is well-known, but Chambers’s careful prose, his willingness to
disorient, and the strangeness of his imagination have surely had an
influence among literary writers outside horror or fantasy. One might
hear his echoes in the compelling dream-logic and almost oppressive
dread in John Hawkes, Fleur Jaeggy, and others.
I’m aware that I’ve been speaking around the work in question,
only grazing it edges, circling, looking to digression.
That feels appropriate, as much in the book suggests it isn’t meant
to be viewed directly, rationally, but rather approached sideways,
seen from the corner of the eye, because that is where its greatest
effects lie, in suggestion and glimpse, in the nuanced madness that
rises to its surfaces like a bubble in the blood.
Probably for those reasons, I’ve never found even the most
imaginative and technically masterful visualizations of the King to
possess any of the dread and dark power the figure attains through
Chambers’s avoidance and implication (and invocation). Likewise,
the few times I’ve sampled the fiction of other writers, which have
grown around the present book, none could reproduce the original’s
stir of almost vertiginous sensation, the fluttering edge of a
transformative perception, always just outside the page’s periphery.
That this book has proven so inspirational while resistant to
emulation might be the strongest evidence of its enduring power.
A very human yearning exists in these stories, too, a longing that
animates its characters and their experience of the world. The desire
at work feels almost too nebulous and primal to be contained by
definition, something like an instinct toward deliverance, however
hazy its conception…
The same longing powers these few, obtuse lines, which may be
among the most uncanny and evocative we have in our literature, an
almost spiritual mystery in the weight they carry:
 “…for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the
heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the
afternoon…”
And, oh, what thoughts. And still, what shadows?
Nic Pizzolatto
June 3, 2020
Los Angeles, California
 Author’s Dedication

THE KING IN YELLOW

DEDICATED
TO
MY BROTHER 1

“Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.”

—Cassilda’s Song in “The King in Yellow.”

Act 1. Scene 2. 2

1 The successful New York City architect Walter Boughton Chambers

(1866–1945).
2 The play is fictional. The name “Carcosa” came from Ambrose
Bierce’s story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886).
 The Repairer of Reputations

“Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la
nôtre… Voila toute la différence.” 3

I.
TOWARD the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United
States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the
last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was
apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour
questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that
country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars
upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the
invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval
victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von
Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and
Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the
territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The
country was in a superb state of defence. Every coast city had been
well supplied with land fortifications; the army under the parental
eye of the General Staff, organized according to the Prussian system,
had been increased to 300,000 men, with a territorial reserve of a
million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships
patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam
reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from
the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college
for the training of diplomats was as necessary as law schools are for
the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer
represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was
prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great
fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful
than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. 4
Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New
York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion
of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved
and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated
structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them.
The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of
architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely
surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a
god-send to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and
state opera brought its own reward. The United States National
Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same
kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet
position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forestry and Game
Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of
National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties
with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a
measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent
negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws
concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in
the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When
the Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian
cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable
organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a
former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When,
after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were
laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring
sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in
the new world which after all is a world by itself. 5
But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to
look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium
writhed in the throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the
Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.
In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the
dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live
in the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge
Statue was removed in that year. 6 In the following winter began that
agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its
final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government
Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.
I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer’s house on Madison
Avenue, where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall
from my horse, four years before, I had been troubled at times with
pains in the back of my head and neck, but now for months they
had been absent, and the doctor sent me away that day saying
there was nothing more to be cured in me. It was hardly worth his
fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did not grudge him the
money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at first.
When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay
unconscious, and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my
horse’s head, I was carried to Dr. Archer, and he, pronouncing my
brain affected, placed me in his private asylum where I was obliged
to endure treatment for insanity. At last he decided that I was well,
and I, knowing that my mind had always been as sound as his, if not
sounder, “paid my tuition” as he jokingly called it, and left. I told
him, smiling, that I would get even with him for his mistake, and he
laughed heartily, and asked me to call once in a while. I did so,
hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but he gave me none, and
I told him I would wait.
The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the
contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a
lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic,
temperate, and above all—oh, above all else—ambitious. There was
only one thing which troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness,
and yet it troubled me.
During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time,
The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it
occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the
book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell
open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of
the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it,
but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open
page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant
that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals
and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and
wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails
me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget
Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows
of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns
sink into the lake of Hali; 7 and my mind will bear for ever the
memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the
writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation,
terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now
trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government
seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London,
of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book
spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to
continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press
and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary
anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked
pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could
not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was
acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The
King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain,
nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.
The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the
blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.
It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first
Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of
Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth
Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby
old buildings, used as cafés and restaurants for foreigners, had been
acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and
Italian cafés and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was
enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden
with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood
a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and
surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the
roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of
the Fates 8 stood before the door, the work of a young American
sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three
years old.
 The inauguration ceremonies were in progress as I crossed
University Place and entered the square. I threaded my way through
the silent throng of spectators, but was stopped at Fourth Street by
a cordon of police. A regiment of United States lancers were drawn
up in a hollow square round the Lethal Chamber. On a raised tribune
facing Washington Park stood the Governor of New York, and behind
him were grouped the Mayor of New York and Brooklyn, the
Inspector-General of Police, the Commandant of the state troops,
Colonel Livingston, military aid to the President of the United States,
General Blount, commanding at Governor’s Island, Major-General
Hamilton, commanding the garrison of New York and Brooklyn,
Admiral Buffby of the fleet in the North River, Surgeon-General
Lanceford, the staff of the National Free Hospital, Senators Wyse
and Franklin of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Works.
The tribune was surrounded by a squadron of hussars of the
National Guard.
The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the
Surgeon-General. I heard him say: “The laws prohibiting suicide and
providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been
repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of
man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him,
through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the
community will be benefited by the removal of such people from
their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in
the United States has not increased. Now the Government has
determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town and
village in the country, it remains to be seen whether or not that class
of human creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of
self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided.” He
paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the
street was absolute. “There a painless death awaits him who can no
longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek
it there.” Then quickly turning to the military aid of the President’s
household, he said, “I declare the Lethal Chamber open,” and again
facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: “Citizens of New York
and of the United States of America, through me the Government
declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.”
The solemn hush was broken by a sharp cry of command, the
squadron of hussars filed after the Governor’s carriage, the lancers
wheeled and formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant
of the garrison, and the mounted police followed them. I left the
crowd to gape and stare at the white marble Death Chamber, and,
crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked along the western side of that
thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I turned to the right and
stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign,

HAWBERK, ARMOURER.

I glanced in at the doorway and saw Hawberk busy in his little

shop at the end of the hall. He looked up, and catching sight of me
cried in his deep, hearty voice, “Come in, Mr. Castaigne!” Constance,
his daughter, rose to meet me as I crossed the threshold, and held
out her pretty hand, but I saw the blush of disappointment on her
cheeks, and knew that it was another Castaigne she had expected,
my cousin Louis. I smiled at her confusion and complimented her on
the banner she was embroidering from a coloured plate. Old
Hawberk sat riveting the worn greaves of some ancient suit of
armour, and the ting! ting! ting! of his little hammer sounded
pleasantly in the quaint shop. Presently he dropped his hammer, and
fussed about for a moment with a tiny wrench. The soft clash of the
mail sent a thrill of pleasure through me. I loved to hear the music
of steel brushing against steel, the mellow shock of the mallet on
thigh pieces, and the jingle of chain armour. That was the only
reason I went to see Hawberk. He had never interested me
personally, nor did Constance, except for the fact of her being in love
with Louis. This did occupy my attention, and sometimes even kept
me awake at night. But I knew in my heart that all would come
right, and that I should arrange their future as I expected to arrange
that of my kind doctor, John Archer. However, I should never have
troubled myself about visiting them just then, had it not been, as I
say, that the music of the tinkling hammer had for me this strong
fascination. I would sit for hours, listening and listening, and when a
stray sunbeam struck the inlaid steel, the sensation it gave me was
almost too keen to endure. My eyes would become fixed, dilating
with a pleasure that stretched every nerve almost to breaking, until
some movement of the old armourer cut off the ray of sunlight,
then, still thrilling secretly, I leaned back and listened again to the
sound of the polishing rag, swish! swish! rubbing rust from the
rivets.
Constance worked with the embroidery over her knees, now and
then pausing to examine more closely the pattern in the coloured
plate from the Metropolitan Museum.
“Who is this for?” I asked.
Hawberk explained, that in addition to the treasures of armour in
the Metropolitan Museum of which he had been appointed armourer,
he also had charge of several collections belonging to rich amateurs.
This was the missing greave of a famous suit which a client of his
had traced to a little shop in Paris on the Quai d’Orsay. He, Hawberk,
had negotiated for and secured the greave, and now the suit was
complete. He laid down his hammer and read me the history of the
suit, traced since 1450 from owner to owner until it was acquired by
Thomas Stainbridge. When his superb collection was sold, this client
of Hawberk’s bought the suit, and since then the search for the
missing greave had been pushed until it was, almost by accident,
located in Paris.
“Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty
of the greave being still in existence?” I demanded.
“Of course,” he replied coolly.
Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.
“It was worth something to you,” I ventured.
“No,” he replied, laughing, “my pleasure in finding it was my
reward.”
“Have you no ambition to be rich?” I asked, smiling.
“My one ambition is to be the best armourer in the world,” he
answered gravely.
Constance asked me if I had seen the ceremonies at the Lethal
Chamber. She herself had noticed cavalry passing up Broadway that
morning, and had wished to see the inauguration, but her father
wanted the banner finished, and she had stayed at his request.
“Did you see your cousin, Mr. Castaigne, there?” she asked, with
the slightest tremor of her soft eyelashes.
“No,” I replied carelessly. “Louis’ regiment is manoeuvring out in
Westchester County.” I rose and picked up my hat and cane.
“Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?” laughed old
Hawberk. If Hawberk knew how I loathe that word “lunatic,” he
would never use it in my presence. It rouses certain feelings within
me which I do not care to explain. However, I answered him quietly:
“I think I shall drop in and see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two.”
“Poor fellow,” said Constance, with a shake of the head, “it must be
hard to live alone year after year poor, crippled and almost
demented. It is very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often
as you do.”
“I think he is vicious,” observed Hawberk, beginning again with his
hammer. I listened to the golden tinkle on the greave plates; when
he had finished I replied:
“No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is
a wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and
I would give years of our life to acquire.”
Hawberk laughed.
I continued a little impatiently: “He knows history as no one else
could know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his
memory is so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in
New York that such a man existed, the people could not honour him
enough.”
“Nonsense,” muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen
rivet.
“Is it nonsense,” I asked, managing to suppress what I felt, “is it
nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissards 9 of the
enamelled suit of armour commonly known as the ‘Prince’s
Emblazoned’ can be found among a mass of rusty theatrical
properties, broken stoves and ragpicker’s refuse in a garret in Pell
Street?”
Hawberk’s hammer fell to the ground, but he picked it up and
asked, with a great deal of calm, how I knew that the tassets and
left cuissard were missing from the “Prince’s Emblazoned.”
“I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day.
He said they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.”
“Nonsense,” he cried, but I noticed his hand trembling under his
leathern apron.
 “Is this nonsense too?” I asked pleasantly. “Is it nonsense when
Mr. Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire and
of Miss Constance—”
I did not finish, for Constance had started to her feet with terror
written on every feature. Hawberk looked at me and slowly
smoothed his leathern apron.
“That is impossible,” he observed. “Mr. Wilde may know a great
many things—”
“About armour, for instance, and the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned,’” I
interposed, smiling.
“Yes,” he continued, slowly, “about armour also—may be—but he is
wrong in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know,
killed his wife’s traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he
did not long survive his wife.”
“Mr. Wilde is wrong,” murmured Constance. Her lips were
blanched, but her voice was sweet and calm.
“Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde
is wrong,” I said.

II.
I CLIMBED the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which I had so
often climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the
corridor. Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.
When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest
against it, he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my
face with his little light-coloured eyes. Half a dozen new scratches
covered his nose and cheeks, and the silver wires which supported
his artificial ears had become displaced. I thought I had never seen
him so hideously fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones,
which now stood out at an angle from the fine wire, were his one
weakness. They were made of wax and painted a shell pink, but the
rest of his face was yellow. He might better have revelled in the
luxury of some artificial fingers for his left hand, which was
absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no inconvenience,
and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small, scarcely
higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently
developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete’s. Still, the most
remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvellous
intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and
pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people
imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane,
but I knew him to be as sane as I was.
I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping
that cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was
certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the
creature, nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his
room with this surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up
from the manuscript I was studying by the light of some tallow dips,
and seeing Mr. Wilde squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes
fairly blazing with excitement, while the cat, which had risen from
her place before the stove, came creeping across the floor right at
him. Before I could move she flattened her belly to the ground,
crouched, trembled, and sprang into his face. Howling and foaming
they rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and clawing, until
the cat screamed and fled under the cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned
over on his back, his limbs contracting and curling up like the legs of
a dying spider. He was eccentric.
Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my
face, picked up a dog’s-eared ledger and opened it.
 “Henry B. Matthews,” he read, “book-keeper with Whysot Whysot
and Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd.
Reputation damaged on the race-track. Known as a welcher. 10
Reputation to be repaired by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars.” He
turned the page and ran his fingerless knuckles down the closely-
written columns.
“P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New
Jersey. Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon
as possible. Retainer $100.”
He coughed and added, “Called, April 6th.”
“Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,” I inquired.
“Listen,” he coughed again.
“Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City. Called
April 7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by
October 1st Retainer $500.
“Note.—C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. Avalanche, ordered
home from South Sea Squadron October 1st.”
“Well,” I said, “the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is
lucrative.”
His colourless eyes sought mine. “I only wanted to demonstrate
that I was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a
Repairer of Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it
would cost me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five
hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue
the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear.
These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are
pillars of the most exclusive social temples; others are the prop and
pride of the financial world; still others, hold undisputed sway among
the ‘Fancy and the Talent.’ I choose them at my leisure from those
who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough, they are all
cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So
you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of their
fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.”
“They may turn on you,” I suggested.
He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax
substitutes. “I think not,” he murmured thoughtfully. “I seldom have
to apply the whip, and then only once. Besides they like their
wages.”
“How do you apply the whip?” I demanded.
His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled
to a pair of green sparks.
“I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,” he 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 to-morrow,” replied Mr. Wilde.
“Impossible,” began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark
from Mr. Wilde.
“Come to-morrow,” he repeated.
We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner
by the stairway.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Arnold Steylette, Owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York
daily.”
He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: “I pay
him very badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.”
“Arnold Steylette!” I repeated amazed.
“Yes,” said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.
 The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated,
looked up at him and snarled. 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?” I asked. He pointed to the table, and for the hundredth
time I picked up the bundle of manuscript entitled

“THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY OF AMERICA.”

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own

handling, and although I knew all by heart, from the beginning,
“When from Carcosa, the Hyades, Hastur, 11 and Aldebaran,” to
“Castaigne, Louis de Calvados, born December 19th, 1877,” I read it
with an eager, rapt attention, pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and
dwelling especially on “Hildred de Calvados, only son of Hildred
Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne, first in succession,” etc.,
etc.
When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed.
“Speaking of your legitimate ambition,” he said, “how do Constance
and Louis get along?”
“She loves him,” I replied simply.
The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he
flung her off and climbed on to the chair opposite me.
“And Dr. Archer! But that’s a matter you can settle any time you
wish,” he added.
“Yes,” I replied, “Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin
Louis.”
“It is time,” he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the
table and ran over the leaves rapidly. “We are now in communication
with ten thousand men,” he muttered. “We can count on one
hundred thousand within the first twenty-eight 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.”
The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, “A new broom
sweeps clean.”
“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,” I groaned, with a
shudder.
“He is a king whom emperors have served.”
“I am content to serve him,” I replied.
Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. “Perhaps
Constance does not love him,” he suggested.
I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the
street below drowned my voice. The twentieth dragoon regiment,
formerly in garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the
manoeuvres in Westchester County, to its new barracks on East
Washington Square. It was my cousin’s regiment. They were a fine
lot of fellows, in their pale blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbys 12
and white riding breeches with the double yellow stripe, into which
their limbs seemed moulded. 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. The troopers, who rode with the beautiful English seat,
looked brown as berries from their bloodless campaign among the
farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres against the
stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful to me. I
saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an officer
as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the
window, saw him too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked
straight at Hawberk’s shop as he passed, and I could see the flush
on his brown cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the
window. When the last troopers had clattered by, and the last
pennons vanished into South Fifth Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out
of his chair and dragged the chest away from the door.
“Yes,” he said, “it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.”
He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and
stepped into the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set
my foot on something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a
murderous blow at the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against
the balustrade, and the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde’s room.
Passing Hawberk’s door again I saw him still at work on the
armour, but I did not stop, and stepping out into Bleecker Street, I
followed it to Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber,
and crossing Washington Park went straight to my rooms in the
Benedick. Here I lunched comfortably, read the Herald and the
Meteor, and finally went to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the
time combination. The three and three-quarter minutes which it is
necessary to wait, while the time lock is opening, are to me golden
moments. From the instant I set the combination to the moment
when I grasp the knobs and swing back the solid steel doors, I live
in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments must be like moments
passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at the end of the time
limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for me, for me
alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced when
the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest
gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of
waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to
increase as the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings,
an Emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but
it shall be worn by his royal servant.
I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and
then tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I
walked slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square,
and leaned on the window sill. The afternoon sun poured into my
windows, and a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the elms and
maples in the park, now covered with buds and tender foliage. A
flock of pigeons circled about the tower of the Memorial Church;
sometimes alighting on the purple tiled roof, sometimes wheeling
downward to the lotos fountain in front of the marble arch. The
gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the fountain, and
the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn mower,
drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and
watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives.
Around the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced
the monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in
the spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby
carriages with a reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants,
which could probably be explained by the presence of half a dozen
trim dragoon troopers languidly lolling on the benches. Through the
trees, the Washington Memorial Arch glistened like silver in the
sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern extremity of the square the
grey stone barracks of the dragoons, and the white granite artillery
stables were alive with colour and motion.
 I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square
opposite. A few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron
railing, but inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched
the fountains ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this
new bathing nook, and the basins were covered with the dusty-
feathered little things. Two or three white peacocks picked their way
across the lawns, and a drab coloured pigeon sat so motionless on
the arm of one of the Fates, that it seemed to be a part of the
sculptured stone.
As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group
of curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young
man had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the
gravel path which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber.
He paused a moment before the Fates, and as he raised his head to
those three mysterious faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured
perch, circled about for a moment and wheeled to the east. The
young man pressed his hand to his face, and then with an
undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps, the bronze doors
closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers slouched
away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the arms of
Fate.
I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before
dinner. As I crossed the central driveway a group of officers passed,
and one of them called out, “Hello, Hildred,” and came back to shake
hands with me. It was my cousin Louis, who stood smiling and
tapping his spurred heels with his riding-whip.
“Just back from Westchester,” he said; “been doing the bucolic;
milk and curds, you know, dairy-maids in sunbonnets, who say
‘haeow’ and ‘I don’t think’ when you tell them they are pretty. I’m
nearly dead for a square meal at Delmonico’s. What’s the news?”
 “There is none,” I replied pleasantly. “I saw your regiment coming
in this morning.”
“Did you? I didn’t see you. Where were you?”
“In Mr. Wilde’s window.”
“Oh, hell!” he began impatiently, “that man is stark mad! I don’t
understand why you—”
He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my
pardon.
“Really, old chap,” he said, “I don’t mean to run down a man you
like, but for the life of me I can’t see what the deuce you find in
common with Mr. Wilde. He’s not well bred, to put it generously; he
is hideously deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane
person. You know yourself he’s been in an asylum—”
“So have I,” I interrupted calmly.
Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered
and slapped me heartily on the shoulder. “You were completely
cured,” he began; but I stopped him again.
“I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to
have been insane.”
“Of course that—that’s what I meant,” he laughed.
I disliked his laugh because I knew it was forced, but I nodded
gaily and asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his
brother officers who had now almost reached Broadway.
“We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you
the truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk
instead. Come along, I’ll make you my excuse.”
We found old Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit,
standing at the door of his shop and sniffing the air.
“I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before
dinner,” he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis.
“We thought of walking on the park terrace along the North River.”
At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by
turns as Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. I tried to excuse
myself, alleging an engagement uptown, but Louis and Constance
would not listen, and I saw I was expected to remain and engage
old Hawberk’s attention. After all it would be just as well if I kept my
eye on Louis, I thought, and when they hailed a Spring Street horse-
car, I got in after them and took my seat beside the armourer.
The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the
wharves along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished
in the autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular
promenades in the metropolis. They extended from the battery to
190th Street, overlooking the noble river and affording a fine view of
the Jersey shore and the Highlands opposite. Cafés and restaurants
were scattered here and there among the trees, and twice a week
military bands from the garrison played in the kiosques on the
parapets.
We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the
equestrian statue of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her
sunshade to shield her eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring
conversation which was impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning
on his ivory headed cane, lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to
which I politely refused, and smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low
above the Staten Island woods, and the bay was dyed with golden
hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of the shipping in the
harbour.
Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming
with people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and
white freight cars, stately sound steamers, déclassé tramp steamers,
coasters, dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay
impudent little tugs puffing and whistling officiously;—these were
the craft which churned the sunlight waters as far as the eye could
reach. In calm contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer a
silent fleet of white warships lay motionless in midstream.
Constance’s merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.
“What are you staring at?” she inquired.
“Nothing—the fleet,” I smiled.
Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its
relative position to the old Red Fort on Governor’s Island.
“That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat,” he explained;
“there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the
Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. The gun-boats just above are
the Princeton, the Champlain, the Still Water and the Erie. Next to
them lie the cruisers Faragut and Los Angeles, and above them the
battle ships California, and Dakota, and the Washington which is the
flag ship. Those two squatty looking chunks of metal which are
anchored there off Castle William are the double turreted monitors
Terrible and Magnificent; behind them lies the ram, Osceola.”
Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes.
“What loads of things you know for a soldier,” she said, and we all
joined in the laugh which followed.
Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to
Constance, and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk
watched them for a moment and then turned to me.
“Mr. Wilde was right,” he said. “I have found the missing tassets
and left cuissard of the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned,’ in a vile old junk
garret in Pell Street.”
“998?” I inquired, with a smile.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,” I observed.
 “I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,”
continued Hawberk. “And I intend it shall be known that he is
entitled to the fame of it.”
“He won’t thank you for that,” I answered sharply; “please say
nothing about it.”
“Do you know what it is worth?” said Hawberk.
“No, fifty dollars, perhaps.”
“It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the ‘Prince’s
Emblazoned’ will give two thousand dollars to the person who
completes his suit; that reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.”
“He doesn’t want it! He refuses it!” I answered angrily. “What do
you know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn’t need the money. He is rich—
or will be—richer than any living man except myself. What will we
care for money then—what will we care, he and I, when—when—”
“When what?” demanded Hawberk, astonished.
“You will see,” I replied, on my guard again.
He looked at me narrowly, much as Doctor Archer used to, and I
knew he thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate
for him that he did not use the word lunatic just then.
“No,” I replied to his unspoken thought, “I am not mentally weak;
my mind is as healthy as Mr. Wilde’s. I do not care to explain just yet
what I have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more
than mere gold, silver and precious stones. It will secure the
happiness and prosperity of a continent—yes, a hemisphere!”
“Oh,” said Hawberk.
“And eventually,” I continued more quietly, “it will secure the
happiness of the whole world.”
“And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr.
Wilde’s?”
 “Exactly,” I smiled. But I could have throttled him for taking that
tone.
He looked at me in silence for a while and then said very gently,
“Why don’t you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and
take a tramp among the mountains somewhere or other? You used
to be fond of fishing. Take a cast or two at the trout in the
Rangelys.”
“I don’t care for fishing any more,” I answered, without a shade of
annoyance in my voice.
“You used to be fond of everything,” he continued; “athletics,
yachting, shooting, riding—”
“I have never cared to ride since my fall,” I said quietly.
“Ah, yes, your fall,” he repeated, looking away from me.
I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I brought the
conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again
in a manner highly offensive to me.
“Mr. Wilde,” he repeated, “do you know what he did this afternoon?
He came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to
mine; it read:

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
3D BELL.

“Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?”

“I do,” I replied, suppressing the rage within.
“Oh,” he said again.
Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we
would join them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment
a puff of smoke shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the
boom of the sunset gun rolled across the water and was re-echoed
from the Highlands opposite. The flag came running down from the
flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the white decks of the warships,
and the first electric light sparkled out from the Jersey shore.
As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur
something to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered
“My darling,” in reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk
through the square I heard a murmur of “sweetheart,” and “my own
Constance,” and I knew the time had nearly arrived when I should
speak of important matters with my cousin Louis.

III.
ONE morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my
bedroom, trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds
flashed fire as I turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold
burned like a halo about my head. I remembered Camilla’s agonized
scream and the awful words echoing through the dim streets of
Carcosa. They were the last lines in the first act, and I dared not
think of what followed—dared not, even in the spring sunshine,
there in my own room, surrounded with familiar objects, reassured
by the bustle from the street and the voices of the servants in the
hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped slowly into
my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is absorbed.
Trembling, I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead,
but I thought of Hastur and of my own rightful ambition, and I
remembered Mr. Wilde as I had last left him, his face all torn and
bloody from the claws of that devil’s creature, and what he said—ah,
what he said. The alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and
I knew my time was up; but I would not heed it, and replacing the
flashing circlet upon my head I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood
for a long time absorbed in the changing expression of my own
eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was like my own, but whiter,
and so thin that I hardly recognized it. And all the time I kept
repeating between my clenched teeth, “The day has come! the day
has come!” while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamoured, and
the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. I heard a door
open but did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the
mirror:—it was only when another face rose over my shoulder, and
two other eyes met mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long
knife from my dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale,
crying: “Hildred! for God’s sake!” then as my hand fell, he said: “It is
I, Louis, don’t you know me?” I stood silent. I could not have spoken
for my life. He walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.
“What is all this?” he inquired, in a gentle voice. “Are you ill?”
“No,” I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.
“Come, come, old fellow,” he cried, “take off that brass crown and
toddle into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What’s all this
theatrical tinsel anyway?”
I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet
I didn’t like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from
my hand, knowing it was best to humour him. He tossed the
splendid diadem in the air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.
“It’s dear at fifty cents,” he said. “What’s it for?”
I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it
in the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal
din at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the
sudden ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a
biscuit box. Fearing lest he might examine the combination I led the
way into my study. Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at
flies with his eternal riding-whip. He wore his fatigue uniform with
the braided jacket and jaunty cap, and I noticed that his riding-boots
were all splashed with red mud.
“Where have you been?” I inquired.
“Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,” he 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.”
I gave him some brandy from my medicinal store, which he drank
with a grimace.
“Damned bad stuff,” he observed. “I’ll give you an address where
they sell brandy that is brandy.”
“It’s good enough for my needs,” I said indifferently. “I use it to
rub my chest with.” He stared and flicked at another fly.
“See here, old fellow,” he began, “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,” I said. “But wait, yes, there is
another book, The King in Yellow.” I looked him steadily in the eye.
“Have you never read it?” I asked.
“I? No, thank God! I don’t want to be driven crazy.”
I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There
is only one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word
is crazy. But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought The
King in Yellow dangerous.
 “Oh, I don’t know,” he 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,” I answered.
“That’s probably true,” he muttered; “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend
like that.”
“It is a book of great truths,” I 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?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I came to tell you that I am going to be married.”
I believe for a moment my heart ceased to beat, but I kept my
eyes on his face.
“Yes,” he continued, smiling happily, “married to the sweetest girl
on earth.”
“Constance Hawberk,” I said mechanically.
“How did you know?” he cried, astonished. “I didn’t know it myself
until that evening last April, when we strolled down to the
embankment before dinner.”
“When is it to be?” I asked.
“It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a despatch
came ordering our regiment to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave
at noon to-morrow. To-morrow,” he repeated. “Just think, Hildred,
to-morrow I shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in
this jolly world, for Constance will go with me.”
I offered him my hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook
it like the good-natured fool he was—or pretended to be.
 “I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,” he rattled
on. “Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne, eh, Hildred?”
Then he told me where it was to be and who were to be there, and
made me promise to come and be best man. I set my teeth and
listened to his boyish chatter without showing what I felt, but—
I was getting to the limit of my endurance, and when he jumped
up, and, switching his spurs till they jingled, said he must go, I did
not detain him.
“There’s one thing I want to ask of you,” I said quietly.
“Out with it, it’s promised,” he laughed.
“I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour’s talk to-night.”
“Of course, if you wish,” he said, somewhat puzzled. “Where?”
“Anywhere, in the park there.”
“What time, Hildred?”
“Midnight.”
“What in the name of—” he began, but checked himself and
laughingly assented. I watched him go down the stairs and hurry
away, his sabre banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker
Street, and I knew he was going to see Constance. I gave him ten
minutes to disappear and then followed in his footsteps, taking with
me the jewelled crown and the silken robe embroidered with the
Yellow Sign. When I turned into Bleecker Street, and entered the
doorway which bore the sign,

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
3D BELL.

I saw old Hawberk moving about in his shop, and imagined I heard
Constance’s voice in the parlour; but I avoided them both and
hurried up the trembling stairways to Mr. Wilde’s apartment. I
knocked and entered without ceremony. Mr. Wilde lay groaning on
the floor, his face covered with blood, his clothes torn to shreds.
Drops of blood were scattered about over the carpet, which had also
been ripped and frayed in the evidently recent struggle.
“It’s that cursed cat,” he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his
colourless eyes to me; “she attacked me while I was asleep. I
believe she will kill me yet.”
This was too much, so I went into the kitchen, and, seizing a
hatchet from the pantry, started to find the infernal beast and settle
her then and there. My search was fruitless, and after a while I gave
it up and came back to find Mr. Wilde squatting on his high chair by
the table. He had washed his face and changed his clothes. The
great furrows which the cat’s claws had ploughed up in his face he
had filled with collodion, 13 and a rag hid the wound in his throat. I
told him I should kill the cat when I came across her, but he only
shook his head and turned to the open ledger before him. He read
name after name of the people who had come to him in regard to
their reputation, and the sums he had amassed were startling.
“I put on the screws now and then,” he explained.
“One day or other some of these people will assassinate you,” I
insisted.
“Do you think so?” he said, rubbing his mutilated ears.
It was useless to argue with him, so I took down the manuscript
entitled “Imperial Dynasty of America,” for the last time I should
ever take it down in Mr. Wilde’s study. I read it through, thrilling and
trembling with pleasure. When I had finished Mr. Wilde took the
manuscript and, turning to the dark passage which leads from his
study to his bed-chamber, called out in a loud voice, “Vance.” Then
for the first time, I noticed a man crouching there in the shadow.
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“Harmless!” Ford grinned and scratched his head. “Well, Crane, I
wasn’t takin’ any chances. A little Epsom salts and brook water,
tinctured up with port wine never hurt ’em any, I guess. Then, of
course, they had a dollar’s worth of excitement in waitin’ to get
young. Used to throw in a mirror and a pocket-comb with every
three-bottle sale.”
“A hundred and fifty dollars a week! Ah, you don’t tell me!” exclaimed
Enoch slowly, squaring about in the rocker and scrutinizing Ford
sternly.
“That’s what it amounted to, my friend—clean velvet profit—from
Monday to Saturday night. Not so bad for a youngster of sixteen,
was it? I used to do a lot of talkin’ then. I had to.”
“Naturally you needed a good rest Sundays,” intervened Enoch
coldly.
“Oh! Sundays, of course I had to close down the show. But I was
pretty light-fingered on the cornet in those days, and when I struck a
fresh town Sundays I used to lead the church choir. Nothing like a
cornet to fill a meetin’-house. That always netted me a five-dollar
note. I tell daughter she must have somehow inherited her musical
talent from me.”
“Inherited?” remarked Enoch dryly.
“Well, of course, not exactly—inherited—I being her stepfather; but
anyway,” he laughed, “music runs in the family. Take Mrs. Ford, for
instance, never took a lesson in her life, but she certainly can play
the piano.”
“Now, Ebner,” protested a voice behind Enoch’s chair.
Mrs. Ford, red from dressing, heralded by the faint rustle of a new
lavender-silk dress, and a strong odor of violet perfume, swept
effusively into the room.
“Well, Mr. Crane!” exclaimed that round little woman. (Mrs. Ford was
really round all over. There were no angles.) “You don’t know how
overjoyed we are to see you; how simply delighted!”
“My wife, Crane,” Ford endeavored to explain. She put forth a plump
hand to Enoch as he rose from the rocker. “Ebner has so often
spoken of you,” she burst out.
“Delighted to meet you, madam,” said Enoch. “I regret not having the
double pleasure of seeing your daughter. Your husband tells me
Miss Preston is out singing at a musicale.”
“At a tea, Mr. Crane,” declared Mrs. Ford, her small mouth pinched in
a set smile. “At the Van Cortlandt’s. I tell Sue she’s getting on
famously; of course you know the Van Cortlandts—as if there was
any one in New York who didn’t. Of course you saw about their
niece’s superb wedding in the papers the other day. Magnificent
affair, wasn’t it?”
“Evidently it escaped me,” confessed Enoch.
“Why, Mr. Crane, the papers were full of it! As I tell Sue, when you do
go into society, go into the best.”
“You are right, madam,” returned Enoch. “There is nothing rarer than
good society; the best is none too good. It is more often shockingly
bad.”
“But of course the Van Cortlandts, Mr. Crane. Their wealth and
position——”
Enoch did not reply.
“Sue says their house on Fifth Avenue is a palace of luxury!”
exclaimed her mother.
“Window-curtains alone cost forty thousand dollars, they claim,” put
in Ford over Enoch’s shoulder.
“Well,” sighed the little woman, “when you have millions—do be
seated, won’t you? I’ve disturbed you, I fear. Don’t fib—I have,
haven’t I?—just as you were having a good old chat with Ebner. Ah,
you men, when you get together! Of course you can tell I’m a
Southerner, can’t you, Mr. Crane? They say we old families from
North Carolina never quite lose our accent. Sue was speaking about
it at the Van Cortlandts only the other day.”
“Worth about three millions, ain’t he?” interrupted Ford.
“Who—Sam Van Cortlandt?” inquired Enoch, turning sharply to him
as Mrs. Ford subsided on the sofa, and began to smooth out the
wrinkles in her new lavender-silk dress with an air of a duchess
trying to decide whether or not she should give it to the poor.
“Wasn’t it him that made that big corner in cotton about ten years
ago?” asked the promoter.
“Yes,” said Enoch. “That was Sam Van Cortlandt.”
“Biggest thing ever done, wa’n’t it?”
“Yes, Mr. Ford, in the way of unprincipled scoundrelism it was,”
declared Enoch with some heat. “Piracy on the high seas of finance.
Piracy, pure and simple,” he declared, his stern voice rising savagely.
“Why, Mr. Crane, you surprise me!” exclaimed Mrs. Ford.
“Piracy, madam; there’s no other word for it.”
“Um!” exclaimed Ford. “You call a man a pirate and a scoundrel,
because he’s successful—because he’s got grit, and nerve, and
brains enough to carry a deal through that made him, if I recollect it
right, over a million dollars in a single day?”
“I do,” snapped Enoch, “when that million means the financial ruin of
hundreds of honest families. Sam Van Cortlandt ruined them by the
wholesale. He ruined them from New Orleans to San Francisco,” he
cried hotly. “Many of them have never recovered.”
Mrs. Ford raised her thin eyebrows to the speaker in silent
astonishment.
“Six months later,” continued Enoch brusquely, squaring himself
before the fireless grate, his hands clenched behind him, “Van
Cortlandt again held his grip on the cotton market. Those who had
managed to escape the first crash, went down under the second. A
few came out limping, but he got most of them in the end—more
than one he drove to suicide. Then they thought of running him for
governor. Instead, the Supreme Court ran him uncomfortably close
to the penitentiary for complicity in bribery relative to his mining
territory in Montana. You have asked me about Sam Van Cortlandt.
Very well; I have told you.”
He shut his square jaws hard, and gazed for some seconds at the
pattern in the faded carpet.
Mrs. Ford did not utter a syllable; she sat immovable on the sofa,
redder under the shock of Enoch’s tirade, though none too willing to
believe it. The Van Cortlandt’s millions and social position, their
niceness to her daughter, and the glamour of her being welcomed to
their exclusive society serving only too readily as a balm to heal the
gaping wound left by Enoch’s words.
Enoch had slashed deep; he had bared the truth about Sam Van
Cortlandt down to the bone.
The promoter looked up and cleared his throat.
“Ain’t you exaggerating a little, friend?” he ventured blandly.
“Exaggerating!” Enoch jerked up his square jaws, and protruded his
under lip, a gesture peculiar to him when he was roused. He
focussed a kindling eye on his questioner: “Do you suppose, sir, I do
not know what I am talking about? I am not given to making
statements which have no foundation.”
“But all that which you speak of, Mr. Crane, is—is happily in the
past,” remarked Mrs. Ford sweetly, endeavoring to soften the
awkward pause that followed. “As I tell Ebner, we should always be
ready to forgive others their—their little mistakes. Oh! I believe
strongly in forgiveness, Mr. Crane—’deed I do. I’m just that way, Mr.
Crane, and always have been, since I was a girl—my old North
Carolinian blood, I suppose—” Her monotonous, high-keyed voice
softened as she spoke, and Enoch caught plainly now her Southern
accent, touched slightly with the lazy cadence of the negro, as she
continued to dilate upon the beauty and virtues of Mrs. Van Cortlandt
and the lavish generosity of her husband.
“What’s past is past,” was Ford’s profound remark, when she had
finished. “He got his money, anyway. If he’d laid down and give up,
somebody else ’ed trampled over him—done the trick, and got it—
wouldn’t they? I’ll bet you a thousand dollars even they would have.”
(Ford’s bets were never lower than a thousand.) “I guess when you
sift the whole thing down, friend, you’ll find Sam Van Cortlandt was
up against a pretty big proposition. It was win out or die.”
Enoch lifted a face that quivered with sudden rage, but he did not
open his lips.
“Hark!” said Mrs. Ford excitedly, as she caught the sound of a quick,
familiar step on the stairs. “That’s Sue now,” and she rushed to open
the door. She confided to Sue in an excited whisper as she tripped
up to the landing that Mr. Crane was there; saw for herself that her
daughter was trim and unruffled, smoothed a wisp of her fair hair in
place, and ushered her into the sitting-room, beaming with motherly
pride.
There was a refreshing cheerfulness about the young girl as she
entered that sent the hard lines out of Enoch’s face before her
mother had presented her. As he looked up critically at the girl before
him, her charm and refinement were evident to him before she had
even opened her pretty lips or stretched forth her shapely gloved
hand, which she did with so much unassuming frankness that Enoch
held it gratefully. Her cheeks were rosier than usual to-day. Evidently
she had thoroughly enjoyed herself at the tea. There was a certain
radiance and sparkle in her blue eyes, as she tossed her roll of
music on the little Chippendale table and hastily drew off her gloves,
that captivated him. He had already banished Van Cortlandt’s failings
from his mind. It seemed incredible to him as he watched her, that
she was really part of the household in which, for the last quarter of
an hour, he had listened to the ill-disguised social aspirations of her
mother and the crude, mercenary view-point of her stepfather. The
sight of Sue warmed his heart; again his keen eyes kindled, this time
with satisfaction.
“Your mother tells me you have been singing at a tea,” said Enoch in
a kindly tone, as he released her hand. “I had no idea you were so
gifted, my dear,” he continued pleasantly. “And you made a success?
I’m sure of it.”
Sue flushed under the compliment.
“I did my best, Mr. Crane,” she confessed simply, with a forced little
laugh.
“The Van Cortlandts have asked her to sing again next week,”
declared her mother triumphantly.
“Well, say, girlie! that looks like success, don’t it?” broke in Ebner
Ford. “Made a hit, did you?”
He slammed down the top of the roll-top desk, and locked it. Sue
glanced at him with a pained expression.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Ford, it will be a good many years before I can really
make a success,” she said evenly. Then turning to Enoch seriously:
“I’m only a beginner, you know, Mr. Crane.”
“Of course you are,” he returned, “but there is a beginning to all art, a
hard beginning, and you are beginning bravely, my dear. There is no
short cut leading to art. It is a rough and stony road—mostly up-hill
and very little down-dale, and for the most of its length hedged with
thorns, masking so many pitfalls that many give up, faint and
disheartened by the wayside, long before they reach the broad
plateau of success at the top, and can stand there looking down over
the valley of shadows and trials they have struggled up through
safely.”
Sue caught her breath and looked at Enoch with her blue eyes wide
open with eager interest. “Oh, how wonderful!” she cried. “Do go on.”
“I am not saying this to discourage you, my dear,” he continued, “but
to encourage you. You are so young, so rich in years to come—
years that we old fellows no longer have. Do your best; sing on to
the best of your ability. In every fresh effort, in every new note lies
the real lesson. Think of how happy you will be when at last you are
sure of yourself, sure in making others feel what you feel. In painting,
in sculpture, and in literature it is the same, and in no art is this rare
ability of making others feel what you interpret so rare as in music.
Music without it is simply a display of pretty noises. Only the artist
can touch the heart.” The ugly little room was silent as he ceased
speaking. Sue’s eyes were shining.
“And you were not frightened?” asked Enoch.
“Yes, Mr. Crane,” declared Sue frankly, “I was. I was just scared to
death before all those people. New York is so critical, you know.
They have a way of looking at you when you begin as if they had
made up their minds to be bored. Think of it, mother, the ball-room
was packed—the conservatory, too. Mrs. Van Cortlandt, you
remember, said she had only asked a few intimate friends to drop in
for a cup of tea.”
“Gorgeous affair, of course,” declared the mother solemnly. “I
expected it would be, honey. The Van Cortlandts always entertain so
extravagantly. Well—” she sighed deeply—“when one has millions,
Mr. Crane! Tell me, did Miss Stimpson play your accompaniments? I
worried so, fearing she would disappoint you at the last moment; you
know, honey, how uncertain she is.”
At which Sue declared that that near-sighted and nervous girl, Mazie
Stimpson, had sent word at the last moment that it was impossible
for her to be there, owing to a distressing attack of sore throat.
“How outrageous of her!” exclaimed the mother. “No wonder, darling,
you were nervous.”
“Pity you didn’t go along with her, Emma,” ventured Ford meekly;
“been just the thing.”
“I certainly now wish I had,” declared Mrs. Ford firmly. “Sue is so
dependent on a good accompanist, Mr. Crane.”
“Ah, but I found one, mother,” announced Sue, with so much
satisfaction that Enoch pricked up his ears. “Who do you think came
to my rescue? A Mr. Lamont. He plays exquisitely. Wasn’t it kind of
him?”
“Mr. Lamont!” exclaimed the mother. “Not Mr. Jack Lamont?” she
asked, beaming with interest.
Sue nodded. “Yes, mother—Mr. Jack Lamont. He’s simply
marvellous. He gives one so much confidence when he’s at the
piano. He’s so wonderfully clever in his phrasing, and never rushes
you. I came home with him, mother. He insisted on taking me home
in his brougham.” This time Enoch caught his breath. “I begged him
to come up, but he had to go back for Mrs. Lamont. He told me such
a lot of interesting things—about his polo-ponies and his yacht, and
his cottage at Newport. The Van Cortlandts adore him.”
“How delightful!” exclaimed Mrs. Ford. “You, of course, have heard of
Mr. Lamont,” she said, turning to Enoch. “‘Handsome Jack Lamont,’
they call him. He’s such a lion in society. They say no cotillon can be
a success without him. You see his name everywhere.”
Enoch’s jaw closed with a grip; when it relaxed he confessed bluntly
that he had not only heard about Mr. Lamont, but had seen him. That
he was, in fact, a member of one of his clubs, where Mr. Lamont was
not only to be seen, but heard. He did not add “drunk or sober.”
Neither did he dilate upon the various escapades of that gentleman,
or the strained relations that had existed during several reckless
conspicuous years between Mrs. Lamont and her society-pampered
husband, or that his polo-ponies were fed and cared for, his steam-
yacht run, and the luxuries of his Newport cottage paid for out of
Mrs. Lamont’s check-book—Jack Lamont’s favorite volume, the
stubs of whose pages bore evidence of Mrs. Lamont’s resigned
generosity in matters that did not concern the public. Instead, Enoch
held his tongue and started to take his leave, having left in Sue
Preston’s heart a certain friendly reverence. In Enoch, in his charm
of manner, in his kindly outspoken sincerity, she saw those qualities
so sadly lacking in her stepfather. Enoch was real. She already felt a
strange confidence in him. From the little she had heard about him
as their neighbor—a reputation of being brusque and ill-natured—
she saw only too plainly now that it was a mask, back of which lay a
personality, full of so much charm and kindliness, of insight and
understanding, of that great gentleness which is part of every great
gentleman, that she felt she might come to him gladly for advice as a
daughter might come to a father. Had he not already encouraged
her? and so eloquently and graciously that she could have listened
to him for hours.
In the brief conversation that ensued as he neared the door to take
his leave, Ebner Ford referred again to the hospitality of the young
architects on the third floor, a tactless speech which Mrs. Ford
received frigidly, and which forced Sue to confess guardedly:
“Strange—wasn’t it, mother?—Mr. Grimsby was at the Van
Cortlandts’.”
“At the Van Cortlandts’! I trust it was by invitation,” returned her
mother stiffly, recovering from her astonishment. “Nothing would
surprise me in regard to that young man’s ability to force himself
anywhere. Imagine, Mr. Crane—we were hardly——”
“But, mother, I only saw him for an instant, just as Mr. Lamont and I
were leaving,” explained Sue. “He told me he had known the Van
Cortlandts for years.”
“A most excellent young fellow,” declared Enoch briskly. “A most
charming young fellow,” he insisted. “We are sadly in need of young
men of his good taste and ability, when you consider, Mrs. Ford, how
poverty-stricken in style our architecture has become. How many
horrors in brownstone we are obliged to look at and live in. Atrocious
jumbles, beastly attempts at Ionic and Corinthian—ugly, misshapen,
and badly conceived—nightmares, madam, in stone—scarcely a
detail that does not offend the eyes. Roman, French, Renaissance,
and Tudor stewed together, capped by mansard roofs, and
decorated with vagaries from the fret-saw, the lathe, and the cold
chisel in the hands of bumpkins—we are sadly in need of a
revolution in all this. New York is growing; it will be a beautiful city
some day, but it will take many years to make it so. Young men like
Mr. Grimsby and his colleague, Mr. Atwater, I tell you are worth their
weight in gold.” And with that he took his leave, not, however, without
the consciousness as he did so of a pair of blue eyes smiling into his
own.
“Jack Lamont!” he muttered to himself, as he climbed the stairs to his
rooms to dress for dinner at the club. “And he brought that child
home in his brougham? Merciful Heaven!”
 CHAPTER VII
The ever-watchful eye of the liveried servant in charge of the door of
the club, whose duty it was to recognize a member from a visitor and
receive him accordingly past that exclusive threshold, swung open
the door to Mr. Enoch Crane to-night with a bow and a respectful
smile of greeting.
“Good evening, James,” said Enoch pleasantly.
“Good evening, Mr. Crane,” returned the domestic; “a bad night, sir.”
A page ran up to relieve Enoch of his dripping umbrella, but it was
James himself who divested him of his overcoat and white muffler,
relieved him as well of his rain-bespattered silk hat, several seasons
out of date (Enoch had a horror of new fashions), and having handed
them to the page who hurried away with them to the coat-room, knelt
down on the marble floor, Enoch steadying himself with one hand on
the man’s broad shoulder, while he unbuckled and took off his
galoshes.
“I’ve got it for you here, sir,” said James, lowering his voice and
glancing furtively around him. Then as a trio of members crossed the
hall close to his heels, he added: “A note for you, Mr. Crane,” and he
rose and handed Enoch an unsealed white envelope, stamped with
the club’s name, and unaddressed.
“Thank you, James,” said Enoch, and left him to his vigil again at the
door.
Enoch never forgot to speak to James when he entered. He also bid
him a pleasant good night when he left. In fact, it may be said that
out of all the members of that stately and time-honored
establishment, Enoch was the only one who invariably bid James
good evening and good night. Certainly it never occurred to that
faultlessly dressed member, Mr. Morton Beresford, to do so—
Beresford in his smart London clothes, who knew Europe and talked
it, a valuable man at dinner, and a great favorite with the newly
elected “money-having” men. Beresford considered those who
served him as objects of utility, like the great, soft rugs beneath his
feet, or the bell for a fresh cocktail under his big, ringed hand.
Neither was Jack Lamont given to these little touches of human
kindness, which often mean more to those who serve than tips. His
conduct to inferiors was generally overbearing. When he was obliged
to ring twice, Lamont swore. So did Seth Van Worden, grain-broker,
when the slightest thing disturbed him. Van Worden was proud of his
ancestry, having walked one day over a graveyard in Rotterdam and
found a de Worden buried there. From that moment Seth began to
search among the branches of his family tree for some distinguished
fruit. Finally, at the tip end of a forgotten limb, he discovered a
certain Van Worden—an admiral. His joy was intense. It left no doubt
in his mind that he himself was of straight descent from that famous
personage, and within twenty-four hours the Van Worden coat-of-
arms was conspicuous in gilt upon his note-paper, Mrs. Van Worden
adding a few flourishes to her taste which the blazon lacked, while
Seth became absorbed in making a collection of early Dutch prints
for his library—mostly sea-fights, in which the distinguished admiral
could be gloriously detected in the smoke. Seth, however, Enoch
knew, was pure New England, Van Worden meaning “from Worden,”
a Holland town. His ancestors being part of a shipload bound for
Salem, all of them were known when they landed as “Van Wordens,”
and most of them being suspicious characters, were glad to lose
their identity in Van Worden.
As for that ponderous and florid member, Mr. Samuel Barker, who
made his money in glue, and whose truffles, wines, and cigars, were
all especially selected for him, only the most capable of club
servants could attend to his wants speedily enough to save that
gentleman from growing purple with rage.
There were others, too, whose bald heads showed above the
window-sills of the big, luxurious room looking out upon Fifth
Avenue, and whose habit it was to fill its easy armchairs on fine
afternoons and themselves with idle opinions of the public who
strolled by them. Enoch knew them all.
Some of the younger members referred to Enoch as “old Crane,”
and gave him a wide berth, as being sour, opinioned, and crabbed.
They did not forget, however, that he was a member of the advisory
committee, and as such they feared more than respected his
authority, though they openly discussed the failings of the house
committee down to the question of soap and nail-files, and up to the
size of the cocktail-glasses, and the quality of the gin. Others
assumed that critical air of connoisseurs, who, having been weaned
on commonplace nourishment during their early struggles to make a
living, were more difficult to please in good fortune than Lucullus in
the matter of canvasback ducks, terrapin, and grilled mushrooms.
Many of them having reached manhood on cider and elderberry
wine, now considered themselves experts in dry champagne, sound
red burgundy, and their proper temperatures. Some became both
illustrious and conspicuous by inventing concoctions of their own,
like little Archie Reynolds, whose long drink known as a “Reynolds
pick-me-up,” survived two seasons of popularity, and finally fell flat,
to give place to an invention of the barman, whose full name nobody
cared about.
As for the elder men, there were many who were glad to meet
Enoch, men of distinction and brains, whom New York honored
among her citizens in commerce, in law, and in science, in surgery,
and in medicine—men whom it was a liberal education to meet, and
whose modesty was one of their many virtues.
There were half a dozen other clubs in which Enoch might have
chosen to dine to-night, but he chose this one—a club which he
rarely went to for dinner.
He glanced into the big front room where the shades were drawn
back of the heavy velveteen curtains, noted the identity of the men
there chatting in groups or screened behind the evening papers, and
having assured himself that the man he was looking for was not
among them, searched through the silent library and the card-rooms,
and without further investigation made his way to the dining-room,
where he chose a small table in the corner, commanding a view of
the door. A score of dinners were already in progress. Among these
he recognized several acquaintances, Morton Beresford and Sam
Barker being among them. These he nodded to in passing, and took
his seat at the table he had chosen, where he ordered a most
excellent little dinner, beginning with a dry Chablis and oysters, and
continuing with a bottle of Château de Bécheville, stuffed green
peppers, and a salad of cold, firm, sliced tomatoes, which he insisted
on dressing himself. He was dressing this salad when the tall, slim
figure of a middle-aged man silhouetted in the doorway made him
lay aside his spoon and salad-fork and watch the newcomer intently
as he scanned the dining-room with his black eyes, caught sight of
Seth Van Worden dining alone, and went over and joined him.
There was no mistaking that tall, slim figure, the iron-gray hair
shading to silver at the temples, the clean-cut, handsome profile, or
that easy manner of a man of the world with which he crossed the
dining-room.
Enoch saw Seth Van Worden rise briskly from his chair and stretch
out his hand to welcome him. Then the late comer took his seat at
Van Worden’s table and unfolded his napkin, with his back to Enoch,
who resumed his salad dressing with the grim satisfaction a
detective feels in having guessed where to find his man, and found
him.
It was Jack Lamont.
Enoch was in no hurry. He raised his eyes to a waiter and quietly
asked the man to bring him a copy of the Sun, which he refolded by
his plate and perused leisurely over his salad, while Lamont, with his
back to him, bent over his green-turtle soup, and a waiter poured for
him a stiff glass of Bourbon whiskey and soda. Now and then Enoch
caught fragments of their conversation, Seth Van Worden’s big voice
reaching clearly to his table. Lamont’s was pitched lower and
accompanied by a good deal of foreign gesture, which had become
a habit with him since his various sojourns abroad, more often in
Paris than elsewhere, though he knew that gay little Paris—Brussels
—as well as his pocket, and Italy—at least that side of it which
appealed to Jack; Florence in the height of the season, and Venice,
when a favorite little countess he knew was there to welcome him in
her palace so close to the Grand Canal, that you could have thrown
a kiss to it in passing. Seth’s eyes brightened as he drank his wine
and devoured a slice of cold duck cooked to his liking. Seth was
again on his favorite topic of conversation—the Dutch—and his
descent from that brave, stolid little nation. He dilated as usual upon
their centuries of prowess on the high seas, their honesty, their
ancient blood. Seth, being overblooded by high living, had his full
share of it. Presently he launched forth to Lamont, about the
Hollanders’ love of flowers, raking up from his shallow knowledge the
threadbare history of the black tulip. He informed Lamont that he had
picked up two rare volumes on tulip-growing, printed by hand in
Rotterdam in 1600, and paid “a sound price for them, by gad,” for
which he was not sorry, and had them now safe under a special
glass case in his library.
“I knew a Dutch girl once,” intervened Lamont, and he bent over to
confide her qualities to Seth out of hearing of the servants. “Titian
hair and a skin like ivory”—Enoch overhead him declare.
Thus the best part of an hour passed. Both were speaking freely
now, off their guard, the dining-room being nearly deserted.
“Weren’t—you—er—afraid he’d return?” asked Seth.
Lamont’s easy, well-modulated laugh filtered through the room.
“You don’t suppose I was fool enough not to have calculated that,”
he returned. “It was a good eight hours from Milan by train—and
besides there was old Cesare, my gondolier, and the little femme de
chambre Annina to give me warning.”
“Good-looking?” ventured Seth.
“Who—Annina? As pretty a little Venetian as ever paid you a smile
for a compliment. I was playing for high stakes, I’ll admit, old man.
But then I knew what I was about—the countess was no fool.”
Again Lamont lapsed into sotto voce.
“Besides,” he declared (again within ear-shot of Enoch), “they
manage these little affairs better in Italy than in America. To love is
an art there. Very well, they have brought it to a finesse. I’d give ten
years of my life to be back there again—Ah! but we were happy!
Once I wired her all the way from Verona.”
Again the conversation became inaudible to Enoch.
“And she came?” asked Seth, his voice rising, with a sneaking
thought in his mind that he would like to have known her.
“Of course she did; she even brought Annina. There are some
women who never can travel without a maid; the Countess Vezzitti
was one. She arrived in deep mourning without a jewel. Delicious,
wasn’t it? As she whispered to me: ‘You see, amico mio, I have only
brought one jewel—Annina.’ I believe that girl would have given her
life for her mistress.”
He lowered the candle under its crimson shade between them, and
kindled a Russian cigarette over its flame, lighting up his dark,
handsome, devil-may-care face and a cabochon emerald ring the
countess had given him. Lamont might easily have been mistaken
for an Italian. His slim, straight figure, over six feet in height, moved
with an easy Latin grace; a dark-skinned, handsome fellow, with the
eyes of a Neapolitan, fine hands, a soft persuasion in his voice, and
a smile that revealed his perfect teeth, white as milk. At thirty he was
all some women could have desired. He was now forty-three.
“Never run after a woman,” Lamont resumed quietly. “Take the
advice of an old hand, Van Worden, let them run after you; grande
dame or bourgeoise, they are all alike.”
Then they fell into a talk about the theatres, in which Seth gave vent
to some heavy opinions about the revival of the “School for Scandal,”
at Wallack’s, expatiating upon the art and beauty of Miss Annie
Robe, and the consummate acting of John Gilbert as Sir Peter
Teazle, which he considered a capital performance.
In lighter vein, he talked over the good old theatre days of the past—
Harrigan and Hart in their old theatre, the little Comique, playing the
“Mulligan Guards Ball,” the drop-curtain with a picture of the Mary
Powell at full speed up the Hudson, and a strong smell of chloride of
lime permeating the house from gallery to pit. Thus he preambled
reminiscently up the Broadway of his younger days. Where was
Niblo’s Garden and the “Black Crook”? “Gone,” declared Seth.
“Evangeline” and “Babes in the Woods” at the old 14th Street
Theatre had vanished likewise, and the San Francisco Minstrels,
packed on Saturday afternoons with Wall Street brokers, roaring
over the personal jokes, those never-to-be-forgotten end-men, Billy
Birch and Charley Backus, had prepared for them overnight.
“All gone,” sighed Seth.
At which Lamont, who had been more familiar with the 23d Street
Koster & Bial’s, confided to Seth how many corks he himself had
added to the ceiling and walls of its famous cork-room back of the
scenes.
Enoch swallowed his salad slowly, his ears on the qui vive, his
countenance both grim and attentive, and his whole mind on the
man with his back to him, who, if he had seen him on entering, had
totally forgotten his existence during dinner. Thus another quarter of
an hour slipped by, during which Enoch ordered a long cigar and
some black coffee. It was not often he dined alone so lavishly, but
whatever it cost him to-night, he was determined to sit Lamont out. In
his search for him in the club before dinner he had made up his mind
to speak to him privately the instant he sighted him. He had ended in
listening. That which rankled deep in his heart did not concern Van
Worden. He intended to see Lamont alone. If Lamont had a grain of
decency in him, he felt he would understand.
“If he doesn’t understand,” he muttered to himself, as he sipped his
coffee, “I’ll make him. I’ll explain to him, that his method of winning
the confidence of a young girl scarcely out of her teens is nothing
short of damnable; that it’s got to stop.”
“Where?” asked Van Worden a moment later, rousing himself and
stretching his long, angular body back in his chair, as the two
reached their cigars and liqueurs.
“At the Van Cortlandts’,” confided Lamont.
“The devil you say!”
“Telling you the truth, Seth. At one of her deadly musicales. Dearest
little piece of flesh and blood you ever laid eyes on—intelligent, too,
frightened out of her wits, but I soon attended to that—got her
laughing, and played her accompaniments, Tosti’s ‘Good-by,’ and ‘I
Awake from Dreams of Thee,’ and all that sort of stuff. Chuck full of
sentimentality, with a pair of blue eyes that would keep you awake.”
“How’d she sing?” put in Van Worden.
The shoulders of Lamont’s well-fitting dress coat lifted in a careless
shrug.
“Er—not badly—rather surprised me, in fact, after all the squawkers
one hears during a winter; not so badly by any means; a damned
nice little voice, not badly pitched either, for her age—what we call in
Paris a ‘petite voix.’ She’s only a kid, you know, in the rosebud stage.
Lives with her mother and stepfather down in one of those gloomy
old houses in Waverly Place. Drove her home. She’s got the prettiest
little feet in the world, old man. I tell you as we fellows get older, we
begin to prick up our ears over something that is fresh and young;
bright and cheery, with a skin like a rose. They’re the best, after all.
Why shouldn’t they be? Our hearts never grow old, when we’re
young we’re timid and difficult, and by the time we do get some
worldly knowledge, the gray hairs begin to hit us, and we go tagging
around after a lot of passéd widows, and divorcées, who know as
much as we do.”
“And sometimes more,” grunted the grain-broker.
“And sometimes more,” reiterated Lamont, laughing outright.
Enoch clenched down his napkin, and rose quivering. He drew a
sharp breath, and strode over to the table where the two men were
seated. His eyes fastened savagely upon Lamont, his under lip shot
forward, the muscles of his jaw working convulsively, in an effort to
command his voice.
“Hello, Crane!” exclaimed Van Worden, who, facing him, was the first
to notice his approach. He might as well have addressed a bull about
to charge, for he got no reply, and for an instant stared blankly up at
him, wondering what was the matter.
Lamont wheeled round in his chair.
“Hello, Crane!” said he. “You here?” Then noticing the state he was
in, rose to his feet.
“You’re not ill?” he ventured, with a rapid apprehensive glance at Van
Worden, who had risen, his mouth open in astonishment.
“Mr. Lamont,” said Enoch evenly, despite the rage that shook him, “I
have something to say to you. Something of the utmost importance,
sir—that’s why I’m here.”
Lamont instinctively started back, like a man on his guard. Then he
covered the speaker with his attractive black eyes half closed, a
condescending smile playing about his lips.
“Well?” said he. “Out with it, Crane; what’s it all about?”
“You,” said Enoch grimly.
Lamont’s smile broadened under his trim, gray mustache.
“Must be devilish important for you to get into the state you’re in,” he
laughed, with a wink to Van Worden that suggested Enoch was
drunk.
Enoch’s eyes blazed.
“I’ll have you know, sir,” he declared tensely, “that it was important
enough to bring me here. I’ll have you know, sir, that I came here to-
night with the express purpose of seeing you”—he turned to Van
Worden—“over a matter which does not concern you, Mr. Van
Worden. I wish to express to you personally my apology for
disturbing you.”
“Oh! well—er—that’s all right,” stammered Van Worden. “Of course if
you want to see Lamont in private——”
“In private!” cried Lamont, his black eyes flashing. “What the devil
have you got to tell me in private, I’d like to know? I decline to be
bullied by you, sir, into anything like a conversation in private. No
conversations in private for me with a man in your state of mind,
thank you, without the presence of a witness. Your age, Crane,
prevents me from saying more. What right have you got to disturb
us, I’d like to know? Here we are, two gentlemen—dining alone, at
the club, and you have the arrogance, the impudence to disturb our
dinner!—to make a scene! You are extraordinary,” he cried with a
forced laugh. “Conversation in private—eh? I’ll be damned if I will.
What have you got to say, anyway?”
“This,” said Enoch, with slow determination, “that I warn you now,
Lamont, it will be to your advantage to grant me an interview, now, at
once, over there in the card-room, if you please.”
“Not without Seth,” retorted Lamont, reddening sullenly under
Enoch’s dogged insistence. “If that’s a go, say so. If not, you can go
to—” The oath did not escape him—something in the elder man’s
eyes arrested it.
“Will you grant me an interview, as I desire it, or not?” Enoch
demanded.
“Not without Seth,” repeated Lamont stubbornly. He wrenched back
his chair and sat down, followed by Seth Van Worden, who slipped
into his own.
Though he had scarcely put in a word in an affair which Enoch
Crane had assured him he was no part of, but which was rapidly
turning from bad to worse, it, nevertheless, made him frightened and
so ill at ease that he wished he was anywhere else but where he
was. Seth had a horror of scenes, and the scene before him was
verging dangerously near a club scandal. There was Mrs. Van
Worden to think of. If his name was mentioned with it he knew what
to expect from his wife, who was as proud of the name of Van
Worden as she was of her solitaire earrings, or her box at the opera,
in which she dozed twice weekly during the season.
“Without Mr. Van Worden,” Enoch continued to demand sternly.
“I’ll be damned if I will!” snapped Lamont, reaching out for the
decanter of Bourbon and shakily spilling out for himself a stiff drink.
“You are a member of this club, sir,” declared Enoch. “I, as you may
know, am a member of its advisory committee.” Lamont turned
sharply.
“Well,” said he, with a careless shrug, “what of it?”
“On December 14,” continued Enoch, “you were over a month in
arrears for house charges, amounting to one hundred and forty-two
dollars. On December 15 you paid the amount without being posted,
a delay having been granted you.”
Again Lamont turned. This time he faced him, silent and anxious.
“On the evening of December 14,” continued Enoch, “you were one
of four members—Mr. Blake, Mr. Archie Reynolds, Mr. Raymond
Crawford, and yourself—in a game of poker that lasted half the
night.” Enoch planted his strong hands on the table. “Late play in this
club is forbidden,” he declared. “Play of that kind especially. That
night you won close to four hundred dollars.”
“Well, I won it, didn’t I?” snarled Lamont. “And I paid my house
charges, too, didn’t I? What more do you want? See here, Crane
——”
“You will wait, Lamont, until I have finished,” returned Enoch firmly.
“The incident of the poker game might have been closed, had you
not left these in your trail.” Lamont started, a peculiar expression in
his eyes. “These,” repeated Enoch. He reached in his coat pocket
and drew out the white envelope James had given him. It contained
three cards—the ace of clubs, the ace of hearts, and the ace of
diamonds. “Look at them carefully, Lamont,” said he. “You no doubt
recognize the pin scratches in the corners.”
“You lie!” cried Lamont, springing to his feet, his fists clenched, Van
Worden staring at him in amazement.
“I might have expected that,” said Enoch, bending closer to him, and
lowering his voice. “If you attempt to strike me, Lamont, I warn you
you will find I am a stronger man than you imagine. What I say to
you is the truth, and you know it.” Lamont noticed the size of his
hands, the stocky breadth of his shoulders. “These cards are yours,
marked by you,” continued Enoch. “James, who put you into a cab at
daylight that morning, saw them slip out of your pocket—you were
drunk—as he propped you back in the seat; he picked them up from
the cab floor, discovered they were marked—came to me as a