Part 9 (2/2)

Vlemk nodded grimly and smiled to himself. He had forgotten their talent for self-delusion. He put on a doltish look, turned back to them, and opened his hands as if to ask, ”What do you think?”

”Beautiful! Just beautiful!” said a lady with silver hair. ”How much?”

Vlemk ignored her, watching the Princess. Her lips faintly trembled and she shot a quick look at him, something between confusion and anger. Then she looked down again. The picture on the box she was holding in her hand was one he called, privately, ”The Princess Considers Revenge.” If anyone had cared to look, it was her mirror image now, the face distorted, short of breath, the lips slightly puffy, the eyes sharp and stupid as an animal's. Eager to press the scene to its conclusion, Vlemk shrugged so broadly, with a look so unspeakably foolish, that the Princess could not help but look up at him. ”What do you think?” he asked again with his hands and arms.

She stared straight at him, guessing, he suspected, that he was putting on some act.

”I don't like it,” the Princess said. ”I don't think I look like that.”

A stillness went through them all. She had given them permission to despise him.

”It's true,” said the lady with the silver hair, looking at the box she'd just admired, ”it's not a good likeness, really.”

They looked at each other. Vlemk went on grinning like a fool and waiting. Only the Prince in the moustache seemed not to have noticed what had happened. He was staring with interest at a small, meticulously painted little pill box on which the Princess was shown waking from a dream of terrible debauchery. He turned it slightly-it was no larger around than a coin-making the glaze of the lips catch the light. ”I like this one,” he said, and held it toward the Princess, then saw her face.

”You should buy it,” she said, cold as ice.

The poor boy had no notion of what it was he'd done wrong. His hand lowered as if all strength had suddenly drained out of his arm, and he looked again, critically and sadly, at the picture. The fact, Vlemk saw, was that he did like it, that his innocent heart saw no evil in it, and rightly enough, because for him there was no evil there. ”I don't know,” he said, and his innocence was, that instant, just a little corrupted. He compressed his lips, as if he dimly understood himself what it was that was happening to him; but he was weak, without defenses, and after another quick look at the others, put the box back down on the table where he'd found it. ”No,” he said, ”I guess not. I don't know.”

The Princess had turned toward the door. She stood thinking, her features completely expressionless, the look of a woman taking pains to hide her thoughts. Her small fingers picked irritably at her clothes. Vlemk the box-painter, who knew every muscle and bone in that lovely young face, was not thrown for a moment. She would turn-she turned-and would reach almost at random for a painted box, almost certainly a landscape-she reached for a landscape-and would hold it up to ask ”How much?”

The Princess looked up, seemed to hesitate an instant, as if reading something in Vlemk's eyes. ”How much?” she asked.

Vlemk put on a sad, apologetic look and told her in gestures that unfortunately that one was not for sale. She moved instantly, like a chess player who knows her opponent, putting the box down and picking up another one, not even looking at it. ”This one?” she asked sharply.

He must have shown surprise. He covered as quickly as possible; it was better to take her charity than to continue this dangerous game. He raised six fingers, then with one finger and his thumb made a circle the size of the coin with the King on it-an exorbitant price.

Her eyes widened in astonishment, then suddenly she laughed, and then, just as suddenly, she shot him a hard, inquiring look. That too she quickly veiled, lowering her lashes. ”Very well, six crowns,” she said, and gestured to her servant, who reached with clumsy haste into his purse.

The lady with silver hair was at once struck by another of his landscapes; a gentleman in a wig found himself drawn to a picture of two dogs. The Prince in the moustache let his eyes wander over in the direction of the picture he'd been taken by, then thought better of it and began to look with studious interest at pictures of flowers. Vlemk waited until everyone was occupied, bending over landscapes, flowers, and animals, then slipped ”The Dream of Debauchery” from its place, waited for his moment, slapped the Prince on the arm in the age-old pickpocket's way, and dropped the little pill box into his pocket.

”How much?” they asked, one after another. ”How much?”

Each price he quoted, holding up his fingers, was more outrageous than the last. The Princess eyed him coolly, then went over to stand at the window, lost in thought. When it was time for them to leave, the Princess smiled and said, ”Good luck, Vlemk. G.o.d be with you, you poor man.”

”A touch!” said Vlemk inside his mind, taking her hand and kissing it. ”A touch! I felt it right here, just under my heart!”

8.

However, the Princess was not yet rid of those evil-hearted pictures her friend the box-painter had made. Studying the picture that could talk, in her room, she was more and more convinced that her father had been right. It was indeed her true likeness, much as she hoped it might not be. Might not the others, still less pleasing, be equally true to what she was? She tried to summon them up in her mind, but her memory was fuzzy, or if not, some mechanism distorted the image as soon as it came to her, burned it as an image is burned out of clarity when one looks at it in too much light.

”Why did he paint them, I wonder?” she asked aloud one day, standing at her window, talking to herself.

”I'm sure he meant no harm,” said the picture on the box, its voice no louder than the buzzing of a bee.

The Princess tipped her head, not quite turning to the box. After a moment she asked, ”Does he hate me, do you think? Is that it?”

”He never spoke of you unkindly, so far as I remember,” said the picture on the box.

”You're lying,” said the Princess, though in fact she was not sure. For some queer reason she found it harder and harder to know what the image on the box was thinking, even when the tone of voice was most distinctly her own.

”I'm not!” said the picture with a touch of indignation. ”The fact is, I never heard him mention you!”

”Well, he certainly must have given me some thought,” said the Princess. ”I mean, my face seems to be an obsession with him!”

”Ah!” said the picture. ”So you admit that there is indeed some slight resemblance!”

”I admit nothing!” snapped the Princess. ”Stop quizzing me!” Quickly, to avoid further argument, she left the room.

But her doubts would not leave her a moment's peace. Sitting at supper, with the Prince across from her, looking gloomy because he no longer understood her and the time of his visit was nearing its end, the matter between them still entirely unresolved, the Princess, taking a small bite of her roll, would suddenly see Vlemk the box-painter's image of her eating a piece of chicken with a look of insatiable gluttony, her eyes like a weasel's. Or walking in the woods, wringing her hands and tossing her hair back again and again, as if to drive away fierce thoughts or deny unfounded charges made by people she had trusted implicitly, she would suddenly see in her mind's eye, more real than the ferns and trees around her, Vlemk the box-painter's image of her tearing at her cheeks with her fingernails, gone mad.

One night her father the King came into her room, something he had never done before. When the door was closed behind him and his servants had stepped back in the way he required of them, seeming to disappear like September mist into the curtains and walls, the King, clutching at his clothes with a kind of unconscious desperation, as if anything that touched him, any slightest physicality, gave him a scalding pain, almost more than he could bear, raised his head with great difficulty and said: ”Daughter, what's the matter with you? I'm told on good authority you're like a woman that's out of her wits.”

The Princess went white with fear, for like everyone in the palace she had experience of her father's rages.

”Don't lie!” snapped her father.

”I wasn't going to!” she snapped back, indignant.

His eyebrows lifted, and he studied her, his tiny claws pulling more fiercely at his clothes. ”Good,” he said. His head snapped back suddenly, as if something invisible had struck him on the chin. And he shook all over, his hands flying out over the wheelchair arms, fluttering like wings, until the fit was over. The servants stood like monkeys, bent forward, prepared to rush to him. When he could raise his head again, sweat streaming down onto his nose and beard, he said, ”Tell me what's the matter, then. I haven't much time left-as any d.a.m.n fool can see.” When she said nothing, he said, ”Well?”

”I haven't been myself,” said the Princess, feebly. She noticed, in horror, that she was picking at the front of her dress, exactly as her father did, though not so wildly.

His head fell toward her, tilted sideways, the lips stretched wide with agony. ”Don't waste time!” he cried. ”Have mercy!” Again, more violently than before, the old King's head shot back and the trembling came over him. The servants moved toward him, and-with such strength of will that the Princess was thrown into awe of him-his fluttering hands waved them back. ”No time for niceties!” he gasped. His nose began to bleed and he tried to take an angry swipe at it.

It was the box that cried out in an agony of love and sorrow, ”Tell him! For the love of G.o.d tell him and be done with it!”

The King rolled his eyes toward the box, then let them fall upward again.

”Very well!” the Princess said, clutching at her dress, twisting and wrinkling it, then straightening it again. In a rush, she told him all. When she was finished, she sat staring at her knees, weeping and occasionally sniffing, jerking back her head.

The King let his head and shoulders fall forward, his eyelids sinking over his eyes as if by their weight. With what seemed his last breath, he said, ”Go to the box-painter. Beg him to remove the curse. Otherwise we're doomed.”

”Princess!” cried the picture on the box in a voice unlike any the Princess had ever heard from it, ”he's dying! Run to him!”

Without thinking, the Princess obeyed. ”Father!” she cried, ”Father, for the love of G.o.d!” Now the servants were all around her, and it seemed to the Princess in her madness that the walls of the room had caught fire.

”Don't die!” she whispered, but she knew now, flames all around her, that that was why he'd come to her. In the ravening heat, it was as if her mind had flown open and she knew everything everyone in the room was thinking. Then, the next instant, in the blinding whiteness, her mind went blank.

”Princess,” one of the servants said softly, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, ”we'll take care of him. Rest yourself.”

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