The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [203]
“There is no barrier of Master and Fledgling between you, and you can learn the secrets of their hearts as they learn the secrets of yours.”
I wanted to believe it.
I wanted to believe it so badly that I got up and left him, and making the gentlest smile at my Benjamin and kissing her silkily in passing, I withdrew to the garden and stood alone beneath and between a pair of massive oaks.
Their thunderous roots rose up out of the ground, forming hillocks of hard dark blistering wood. I rested my feet in this rocky place and my head against the nearer of the two trees.
The branches came down and made a veil for me, as I had wanted the hair of my own head to do. I felt shielded and safe in the shadows. I was quiet in my heart, but my heart was broken and my mind was shattered, and I had only to look through the open doorway into the brilliant glory of the light at my two white vampire angels for me to start crying again.
Marius stood for a long time in a distant door. He didn’t look at me. And when I looked to Pandora, I saw her coiled up as if to defend herself from some terrible pain—possibly only our quarrel—in another large old velvet chair.
Finally Marius drew himself up and came towards me, and I think it took a force of will for him to do it. He seemed suddenly just a little angry and even proud.
I didn’t give a damn.
He stood before me but he said nothing, and it seemed he was there to face whatever I had yet to say.
“Why didn’t you let them have their lives!” I said. “You, of all people, whatever you felt for me and my follies, why didn’t you let them have what nature gave them? Why did you interfere?”
He didn’t answer, but I didn’t allow for it. Softening my tone so as not to alarm them, I went on.
“In my darkest times,” I said, “it was always your words that upheld me. Oh, I don’t mean during those centuries when I was in bondage to a warped creed and morbid delusion. I mean long afterwards, after I had come out of the cellar, at Lestat’s challenge, and I read what Lestat wrote of you, and then heard you for myself. It was you, Master, who let me see what little I could of the marvelous bright world unfolding around me in ways I couldn’t have imagined in the land or time in which I was born.”
I couldn’t contain myself. I stopped for breath and to listen to her music, and realizing how lovely it was, how plaintive and expressive and newly mysterious, I almost cried again. But I couldn’t allow such to happen. I had a great deal more to say, or so I thought.
“Master, it was you who said we were moving in a world where the old religions of superstition and violence were dying away. It was you who said we lived in a time when evil no longer aspired to any necessary place. Remember it, Master, you told Lestat that there was no creed or code that could justify our existence, for men knew now what was real evil, and real evil was hunger, and want, and ignorance and war, and cold. You said those things, Master, far more elegantly and fully than I could ever say them, but it was on this great rational basis that you argued, you, with the worst of us, for the sanctity and the precious glory of this natural and human world. It was you who championed the human soul, saying it had grown in depth and feeling, that men no longer lived for the glamour of war but knew the finer things which had once been the forte only of the richest, and could now be had by all. It was you who said that a new illumination, one of reason and ethics and genuine compassion, had come again, after dark centuries of bloody religion, to give forth not only its light but its warmth.”
“Stop, Armand, don’t say any more,” he said. He was gentle but very stern. “I remember those words. I remember all of them. But I don’t believe those things anymore.”
I was stunned. I was stunned by the awesome simplicity of this disavowal. It was