“She’s so headstrong,” Fitzstephan said lightly, not having listened to half I had said, busy with his own thoughts. He turned his head on the pillow so that his eye looked at the ceiling, narrow and brooding.
I said: “And so ends the Great Dain Curse.”
He laughed then, as well as he could with one eye and a fraction of a mouth, and said:
“Suppose, my boy, I were to tell you I’m a Dain?”
I said: “Huh?”
He said: “My mother and Gabrielle’s maternal grandfather were brother and sister.”
I said: “I’ll be damned.”
“You’ll have to go away and let me think,” he said. “I don’t know yet what I shall do. Understand, at present I admit nothing. But the chances are I shall insist on the curse, shall use it to save my dear neck. In that event, my son, you’re going to see a most remarkable defense, a circus that will send the nation’s newspapers into happy convulsions. I shall be a Dain, with the cursed Dain blood in me, and the crimes of Cousin Alice and Cousin Lily and Second-cousin Gabrielle and the Lord knows how many other criminal Dains shall be evidence in my behalf. The number of my own crimes will be to my advantage, on the theory that nobody but a lunatic could have committed so many. And won’t they be many? I’ll produce crimes and crimes, dating from the cradle.
“Even literature shall help me. Didn’t most reviewers agree that _The Pale Egyptian_ was the work of a sub-Mongolian? And, as I remember, the consensus was that my _Eighteen Inches_ bore all the better known indications of authorial degeneracy. Evidence, son, to save my sweet neck. And I shall wave my mangled body at them–an arm gone, a leg gone, parts of my torso and face–a ruin whose crimes and high Heaven have surely brought sufficient punishment upon him. And perhaps the bomb shocked me into sanity again, or, at least, out of criminal insanity. Perhaps I’ll even have become religious. It’ll be a splendid circus. It tempts me. But I must think before I commit myself.”
He panted through the uncovered half of his mouth, exhausted by his speech, looking at me with a gray eye that held triumphant mirth.
“You’ll probably make a go of it,” I said as I prepared to leave. “And I’m satisfied if you do. You’ve taken enough of a licking. And, legally, you’re entitled to beat the jump if ever anybody was.”
“Legally entitled?” he repeated, the mirth going out of his eye. He looked away, and then at me again, uneasily. “Tell me the truth. Am I?”
I nodded.
“But, damn it, that spoils it,” he complained, fighting to keep the uneasiness out of his eye, fighting to retain his usual lazily amused manner, and not making such a poor job of it. “It’s no fun if I’m really cracked.”
When I got back to the house in the cove, Mickey and MacMan were sitting on the front steps. MacMan said, “Hello,” and Mickey said: “Get any fresh woman-scars while you were away? Your little playmate’s been asking for you.” I supposed from this–from my being readmitted to the white race–that Gabrielle had had a good afternoon.
She was sitting up in bed with pillows behind her back, her face still–or again–powdered, her eyes shining happily.
“I didn’t mean for you to go away forever,” she scolded. “It was nasty of you. I’ve got a surprise for you and I’ve nearly burst waiting.”
“Well, here I am. What is it?”
“Shut your eyes.”
I shut them.
“Open your eyes.”
I opened them. She was holding out to me the eight bindles that Mary Nunez had picked my pocket for.
“I’ve had them since noon,” she said proudly; “and they’ve got finger-marks and tear-marks on them, but not one of them has been opened. It–honestly–it wasn’t so hard not to.”
“I knew it wouldn’t be, for you,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t take them away from Mary.”
“You knew? You trusted me that much–to go away and leave me with them?”
Nobody but an idiot would have confessed that for two days the folded papers had held powdered sugar instead of the original morphine.