The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [3]
There was something altogether more Nordic and icy about him than there was about Lestat, whose hair tended more to golden, for all its luminous highlights, and whose eyes were forever prismatic, drinking up the colors around him, becoming even a gorgeous violet with the slightest provocation from the worshipful outside world.
In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern wilderness, eyes of steady radiance which rejected any outside color, perfect portals to his own most constant soul.
“Armand,” he said. “I want you to come with me.”
“Where is that, Master, come where?” I asked. I too wanted to be civil. He had always, even after a struggle of wits, brought such finer instincts out of me.
“To my house, Armand, where they are now, Sybelle and Benji. Oh, don’t fear for them for a second. Pandora’s with them. They are rather astonishing mortals, brilliant, remarkably different, yet alike. They love you, and they know so much and have come with you rather a long way.”
I flushed with blood and color; the warmth was stinging and unpleasant, and then as the blood danced back away from the surface of my face, I felt cooler and strangely enervated that I felt any sensations at all.
It was a shock being here and I wanted it to be over.
“Master, I don’t know who I am in this new life,” I said gratefully. “Reborn? Confused?” I hesitated, but there was no use stopping it. “Don’t ask me to stay here just now. Maybe some time when Lestat is himself again, maybe when enough time has passed—. I don’t know for certain, only that I can’t accept your kind invitation now.”
He gave me a brief accepting nod. With his hand he made a little acquiescent gesture. His old gray cloak had slipped off one shoulder. He seemed not to care about it. His thin black wool clothes were neglected, lapels and pockets trimmed in a careless gray dust. That was not right for him.
He had a big shock of white silk at his throat that made his pale face seem more colored and human than it otherwise would. But the silk was torn as if by brambles. In sum, he haunted the world in these clothes, rather than was dressed in them. They were for a stumbler, not my old Master.
I think he knew I was at a loss. I was looking up at the gloom above me. I wanted to reach the attic of this place, the half-concealed clothing of the dead child. I wondered at this story of the dead child. I had the impertinence to let my mind drift, though he was waiting.
He brought me back with his gentle words:
“Sybelle and Benji will be with me when you want them,” he said. “You can find us. We aren’t far. You’ll hear the Appassionata when you want to hear it.” He smiled.
“You’ve given her a piano,” I said. I spoke of golden Sybelle. I had shut out the world from my preternatural hearing, and I didn’t want just yet to unstop my ears even for the lovely sound of her playing, which I already missed overly much.
As soon as we’d entered the convent, Sybelle had seen a piano and asked in a whisper at my ear if she could play it. It was not in the chapel where Lestat lay, but off in another long empty room. I had told her it wasn’t quite proper, that it might disturb Lestat as he lay there, and we couldn’t know what he thought, or what he felt, or if he was anguished and trapped in his own dreams.
“Perhaps when you come, you’ll stay for a while,” Marius said. “You’ll like the sound of her playing my piano, and maybe then we’ll talk together, and you can rest with us, and we can share the house for as long as you like.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s palatial in a New World sort of way,” he said with a little mockery in his smile. “It’s not far at all. I have the most spacious gardens and old oaks, oaks far older than those even out there on the Avenue, and all the windows are doors. You know how I like it that way. It’s the Roman style. The house is open to the spring