The burning logs exploded sharply. De Medici sprang to his feet.
“Damn!” he muttered. “It’s the door.”
Walking swiftly across the shadowed room he shut the thing he fancied had frightened him. Yes, opened doors in a dark room, even a lighted room, always chilled him. They reminded him vaguely of something—of winding corridors, of hidden things waiting beyond them. He would sit, slowly terrified, watching an opened doorway, as if awaiting something, as if straining to catch a sound of clanking and wailing....
His earliest memories were those of fears. Windows, silences, doorways, darknesses, lights far away, candle-light in a mirror, winds howling, hidden noises—these were things of which he had been in terror as a boy.
It had been that way with his father, the Prince Julien of the Paris ateliers—an indifferent artist, a violent-tempered, black-haired man who had died at forty, his name a byword even to the decadent aristocracy that postured futilely among the memories of France.
Years after his death De Medici understood the tragedy of the man who had been his father. Rake and scoundrel, he had died raving in drink. A memory of debauches and black deeds had survived him. But as he grew older the De Medici son understood. These nightmares that bloomed in the recesses of his own thought, these terrors that animated the depths of his nature, had been his father’s legacy as well as his own. And, despairing of the ghosts whose whisperings darkened his life, the elder Prince Julien had fled. Drink, women, excesses—scenes of glaring lights and crazed laughter—these had been hiding-places. The notorious De Medici of the Paris ’90’s had been no more than a frightened refugee fleeing an inheritance.
Left alone in the care of a senile uncle, the boy Julien had stumbled upon a different direction for flight—literature. He had come into his estate at fifteen. At eighteen he had chosen America. France was too familiar. Its ancient roads, the dark corners of Paris, the very air he breathed haunted and frightened him.
Now, after twelve years, he had matured into a nervously brilliant man, engagingly cynical, egoistic as a child and subtle-minded as a Jesuit. Among his friends he was regarded with deference. His name, his manner, his genius combined with his wealth attired him in an unassailable superiority. They found him, however, neither arrogant nor perverse, despite the startling and often horrible plots and ideas which came from his pen. None, not even his few intimates, had ever intruded upon his secret, had ever glimpsed behind the charming and stenciled smile of Prince Julien, the “Borgian” ghosts that pantomimed in his soul.
The offending door closed, De Medici returned to his chair. He yearned to turn on the lights of the room. With the cheerful glare of the electric bulbs the dim terrors assailing him would vanish. But, as always, he treated himself to this discipline—a refusal to humor the senseless fears of his nerves. He folded his hands and smiled, regretting his action in closing the door.
A step in the corridor leading to the room lifted the tension under which he sat. Victor Ballau at last. Yet he waited, apprehensive, as the step approached, as the door slowly opened. With the familiar figure of his friend standing in the far glow of the fire, however, De Medici’s nervousness vanished.