"Did you see him?" she whispered to Valentine.
"Whom?"
"Him—Marr! He's not dead; he's here; he's here, I tell you. I see him in the glass!"
She shivered. The room seemed spinning round with her, and the two faces danced and sprang in the mirror, as if a hand shook it up and down, from side to side.
"If he is here," Valentine said, "it is not in the way you fancy. Your imagination has played you a trick."
"Didn't you—didn't you see him? Don't you see him now?"
"I see only you and myself."
As if for a joke he bent his head and peered closely at the mirror, like a man endeavouring to discern some very pale and dim reflection there.
"No, he's—he's not there!" he murmured, "but—"
With a harsh exclamation he dashed his fist against the mirrored face of the lady of the feathers. The glass cracked and broke from top to bottom. Cuckoo cried out. Valentine's hand had blood upon it. He did not seem to know this, and swung round upon her with an almost savage fury.
"Don't—don't, for God's sake," she cried, fearing an attack.
But he made no movement against her. On the contrary, an expression of relief chased the anger from his lips and eyes.
"Ah!" he said, "that's a lying mirror! It lied to you and to me. I smashed it. Well, I'll give you another that is more truthful, and more ornamental too."
"What was it you saw?" she murmured.
"A silly vision, power where there is only weakness; a will, a soul, where there could not be one!"
"Eh? was it that you struck at?"
"Why do you ask?" he said with sudden suspicion.
"You struck where my face was," she said doggedly. "You did, you did!"
"Nonsense!"
"It ain't! Why did you do it, then?"
A gleam of hope had shot into her eyes, lit by his weird attack upon her mirrored image. After all, despite his sneers at her faded body, his gibes at her faded and decaying soul, he struck at her as a man strikes at the thing he fears. In that faded soul a wild hope and courage leaped up, banishing all the sick despair which had preceded it. The lady of the feathers faced Valentine with a deathless resolution of glance and of attitude.
"You've been telling lies," she said "you've been telling me damned lies!"
"What do you mean?"
"You said as I was—was done with."
A forced smile came like a hissing snake on Valentine's lips.
"So you are!"
"I ain't! I ain't! What's more, you know it!"
"You have broken yourself to pieces as I have broken that mirror!"
He spoke with an effort after scathing contempt, but she detected a quiver of agitation in his voice.
"If I have, I'll break you yet!" she cried.
"Me? What are you talking about?"
"You know well enough."
"But do you know—do you know that I—I am Marr?"
He almost whispered the last words! A chill of awe fell over the lady of the feathers. She did not understand what he meant, and yet she felt as if he spoke the truth, as if this inexplicable mystery were yet indeed no fiction, no phantasy, but stern fact, and as if, strangely, she had at the back of her mind divined it, known it when she first knew Valentine, yet only realized it now that he himself told her. She did not speak. She only looked at him, turning white slowly as she looked.
"I am Marr," he repeated. "Now do you understand my gospel? Understand it if you can, for you are bereft of the power that belongs of right only to the woman who is pure. Long ago, perhaps, you might have fought me. Who knows, you might even have conquered me? But you have thrown yourself to the wolves, and they have torn you till you are only a skeleton. And how can a soul dwell in a skeleton? Your soul, your will, is as useless as that vagrant soul of Valentine, which I expelled into the air and into the night. It can do nothing; you can do nothing either. If I have ever feared you, and hated you because I feared you, I have fooled myself. I have divined your thoughts. I have known your enmity against me, and your love—yours!—for Julian. But if the soul and the will of Valentine could not save Julian from my possession, how can yours? You are an outcast of the streets! Go back to the streets. Live in them! Die in them! They are your past, your present, your future. They are your hell, your heaven. They are everything to you. I tell you that you are as much of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as you tread night after night. And what soul can a street thing have? What can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons, and who follows every voice that calls? I feared you. I might as well have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an autumn leaf. I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men raise up for themselves as a bogey. Will is God! Will is the Devil! Will is everything! And you—you, having tossed your will away—are nothing."
He had spoken gravely, even sombrely. On the last word he was gone.
The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight. Her face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered canary-coloured hair. Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror, and with awe. Yet she looked undaunted. Staring at the door through which the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered:
"It ain't true! It ain't! Nothin' does for a woman; not when she loves a man! Nothin'. Nothin'."
She fell down against the hard horsehair sofa, and stretched her arms upon it, and laid her head against them, as if she prayed.
BOOK IV—DOCTOR LEVILLIER
CHAPTER I
THE LADY VISITS DOCTOR LEVILLIER
The Russian Grand Duke, whose malady was mainly composed of two ingredients, unlimited wealth and almost unlimited power, was slow in recovering, and slower still in making up his mind to part with the little nerve-doctor whom he had summoned from England. And so London was beginning to fall into its misty autumn mood before Doctor Levillier was once more established in Harley Street. He had heard occasionally from both Valentine and Julian during his long absence, but their letters had not communicated much, and once or twice when he, in replying to them, had put one or two friendly questions as to their doings, those questions had remained unanswered. The doctor had been particularly reluctant to leave England at the time when the Grand Duke's summons reached him, as his interest and curiosity about Valentine had just been keenly and thoroughly roused. But fate fought for the moment against his curiosity. It remained entirely ungratified. He had not once seen Valentine since the afternoon in Victoria Street, when the lamentation of that thoroughfare's saint had struck consternation into the hearts of musical sinners. Nor had the doctor met any one who could give him news of the two youths over whose welfare his soul had learned to watch. Now, when he returned to London, he found that both Valentine and Julian were abroad. Only Rip, left in charge of Julian's servant, greeted him with joy; Rip, whose conduct had given the first strong impulse to his wonder and doubt about Valentine.
Doctor Levillier took up the threads of his long-forsaken practice, and gave himself to his work while autumn closed round London. One day he heard casually from a patient that Valentine and Julian had returned to town. He wondered that they had not let him know: the omission seemed curious and unfriendly.
During the day on which the news reached him he was, as usual, busily engaged from morning till evening in the reception of patients. His reputation was very great, and men and women thronged his consulting-rooms. Although his rule was that nobody could ever gain admission to him without an appointment, it was a rule made to be broken. He never had the heart to turn any one from his door in distress, and so it frequently happened that his working-day was prolonged by the admission of people who unexpectedly intruded themselves upon him. Great ladies, more especially, often came to him on the spur of the moment, prompted to seek his solace by sudden attacks of the nerves. A lover had used them ill, perhaps, or a husband had turned upon them and had rent a long dressmaker's bill into fragments, without paying it first. Or the ennui of an exquisite life of unbridled pleasure had suddenly sprung upon them like a grisly spectre, torn their hearts, shaken them into tears. Or—and this happened often—a fantastic recognition of the obvious fact that even butterflies must die, had abruptly started into their minds, obtruding a skeleton head above the billowing chiffons, rattling its bones until the dismal sound outvied the frou-frou of silk, the burr of great waving fans, the click of high heels from Paris. Then, in terror, they drove to Doctor Levillier's door and begged to see him, if only for a moment.
There was no doctor in London so universally sought by the sane lunatics of society as Dr. Levillier. He was no mad-doctor. He had no private asylum. He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand, scandal still fluttering upon their ashy lip; the lunatics who live for themselves, until their eyes are hollow as tombs and their mouths fall in from selfishness, and their cheeks are a greenish white from satiety, and lust's gratified flame beacons on their drawn cheeks and along their crawling wrinkles; the lunatics who seek to be what they can never be, the beauties of this world, the great Queens of the Sun, whose gaze shall glorify, whose smile shall crown and bless, whose touch shall call hearts to agony and to worship, whose word shall take a man from his plough and send him out to win renown, or snatch a leader from his ambition and set him creeping in the dust, like a white mouse prisoned by a scarlet silken thread; the lunatics who dandle religions like dolls, and play with faiths as a boy plays with marbles, until the moment comes when the game is over, and the player is faced by the terror of a great lesson; the lunatics who stare away their days behind prancing horses in the Park, who worship in the sacred groves of bonnets, who burn incense to rouged and powdered fashions, who turn literature into a "movement," and art into a cult, and humanity into a bogey, and love into an adulterous sensation; the lunatics who think that to "live" is only another word for to sin, that innocence is a prison and vice liberty; the lunatics who fill their boudoirs with false gods, and cry everlastingly, "Baal, hear us!" till the fire comes down from heaven, which is no painted ceiling presided over by a plaster god. These came to Doctor Levillier day by day, overtaken by sad moments, by sudden, dreary crises of the soul, that set them impotently wailing, like Job among the potsherds. Many of them did not "curse God," only because they did not believe in Him.
It is not the fashion in London to believe in God just now.
Dr. Levillier had always, since he was a youth, walking hospitals and searching the terror of life for all its secrets, felt a deep care, a deep solicitude, for each duet, body and soul, that walked the world. He had never set them apart, never lost sight of one in turning his gaze upon the other. This fact, no doubt, accounted partially for the fact that many looked upon him as the greatest nerve-doctor in London. For the nervous system is surely a network lacing the body to the soul, and vice versa. Every liaison has its connecting links, the links that have brought it into being. One lust stretches forth a hook and finds an eye in another, and there is union. So with faiths, with longings, with fine aspirations, with sordid grovellings. There is ever the hook seeking the appropriate eye. The body has a hook, the soul an eye. They meet at birth and part only at death.
Dr. Levillier was constantly, and ignorantly, entreated to adjust the one comfortably in the other. It is a delicate business, this adjustment, sometimes an impossible business. Half of the Harley Street patients came saying, "Make me well." What they really meant was, "Make me happy." Yet the most of them would have resented a valuable mixed prescription, advice for the hook, and advice for the eye. Such prescriptions had to be very deftly, sometimes very furtively, made up. Often the doctor felt an intense exhaustion steal over him towards the close of day. This tremendous and eternal procession passing onwards through his life, filing before him like a march-past of sick soldiers, saluting him with cries, and with questions, and with entreaties; this never-ceasing progress fatigued him. There were moments when he longed to hide his face, to turn away, to shut his ears to the murmuring voices, and his eyes to the pale, expressive faces, to put his great profession from him, as one puts a beggar into the night. But these were only moments, and they passed quickly. And the little doctor was always bitterly ashamed of them, as a brave man is ashamed of a secret tug of cowardice at his heart. For it seemed to him the greatest thing in all the world to help to make the unhappy rightly happier.
And this was, and had always been, his tireless endeavour. Upon this day one of these hated moments of mental and physical exhaustion had come upon him, and he struggled hard against his enemy. The procession of patients had been long, and more than once in the tiny interval between the exit of one and the entry of another, Dr. Levillier had peeped at his watch. His last appointment was at a quarter to five, then he would be free, and he said to himself that he would take a cab and drive down to Victoria Street. Valentine was often at home about six. The doctor put aside the little devil of pride that whispered, "You have been badly treated," and resolved to make the advance to this friend, who seemed to have forgotten him. In times of fatigue and depression he had often sought Valentine in order to be solaced by his music. But this solace was at an end, unless, indeed, the strange burden of musical impotence had been lifted from Valentine, and his talent had been restored to him.
The last patient came to the doctor's door punctually and was punctually dismissed as the clock chimed the quarter of an hour after five. The last prescription was written. The doctor drew in a deep breath of relief. He touched the bell and his servant appeared.
"There is no one waiting?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"I have made no other appointment for to-day, and I am going out almost immediately. If any patients should call casually tell them I cannot possibly see them to-day. Ask them to make an appointment. But I cannot see any one to-day under any circumstances."
"Yes, sir."
Dr. Levillier took his way upstairs, made a careful toilet, selected from his absurd array of boots a pair perfectly polished, put them on, took his hat and gloves, sighed once again heavily, almost as a dog sighs preparatory to its sleep, and turned to go downstairs. He forgot for the moment that he was prepared to watch Valentine. Perhaps, indeed, his long period of absence had dulled in his memory the recollection of any apparent change in his friend. For at this moment of fatigue he only recalled Valentine's expression of purity and high-souled health, and the atmosphere of lofty serenity in which he seemed habitually to dwell. The doctor wanted relief. How Valentine's presence would refresh him after this dreary array of patients, after the continuous murmurs of their plaintive voices! As he opened his bedroom door he perceived his man-servant mounting the stairs.
"Lawler, I can't see any one," he said, more hastily than usual. "I told you so distinctly. I am going out immediately."
The man paused. He had been with the doctor for many years, and both adored and understood him. The doctor looked at him.
"It is a patient, I suppose?" he asked.
"Well, sir, I can't exactly say."
"A lady?"
"Yes, sir. At least, sir—well, no, sir."
"What do you mean?"
"A female, sir."
"What does she want?"
"To see you, sir. I can't get her to go. I asked her to, sir; then I told her to."
"Well?"
"She only gave me this and said she'd come to see you, and if you were in she'd wait."
He handed a card to his master. The doctor took it and read:
"Cuckoo Bright, 400 Marylebone Road."
The words conveyed nothing to his mind, for neither Julian nor Valentine had ever talked to him of the lady of the feathers.
"Cuckoo Bright," he said. "An odd name! And an odd person, I suppose,
Lawler?"
Lawler pursed his lips rather primly.
"Very odd, sir. Not at all a usual sort of patient, sir."
"H'm. Go and ask her if she comes as a patient or on private business."
The man retreated and returned.
"The—lady says she's ill and must see you, sir, if only for a moment."
This was Cuckoo's ruse to get into the house, and was based upon Julian's long-ago remark that the doctor could never resist helping any one who was in trouble. Standing on the doorstep, she had histrionically simulated faintness for the special benefit of Lawler, who regarded her with deep suspicion.
"I suppose I must see her," the doctor said with a sigh. "Show her in,
Lawler."
Lawler departed, disapprovingly, to do so, and after a moment the doctor followed him. He walked into his consulting-room, where he found the lady of the feathers standing by the writing table. The autumn day was growing dark, and the street was full of deepening mist. Cuckoo was but a fantastic shadow in the room. Her dress rustled with an uneasy sound as the doctor came in. His first act was to turn on the electric light. In a flash the rustling shadow was converted into substance. Cuckoo and the doctor stood face to face, and Cuckoo's tired eyes fastened with a hungry, almost a wolfish, scrutiny upon this stranger. She wanted so much of him. The look was so full of intense meaning that, coming in a flash with the electric flash, it startled the doctor. Yet he had seen something like it before in the eyes of those who suspected that they carried death within them, and came to ask him if it were true. He was surprised, too, by her appearance. The women of the streets did not come to him, although if they had been able to read the writing in his heart many of them would surely have come. He shook hands with Cuckoo, told her to sit down, and sat down himself opposite to her.
"What is the matter? Please tell me your symptoms," he said gently.
"Eh?" was the reply, spoken in a thin and high voice.
"What has been troubling you?"
Cuckoo, who was wholly unaccustomed to answer a doctor's questions, started violently. She fancied from his words that he had divined the lie she had told when she said that she was ill, and knew that she came for a mental reason. Instinctively she connected the word "trouble" with the heart, in a way that was oddly and pathetically girlish. Acting upon this impulse she exclaimed:
"Then you know as I ain't ill?"
Doctor Levillier was still more surprised. Not understanding what was in her mind, he entirely failed to keep pace with its agility.
"Why do you come to me, then?" he asked.
"Oh," she returned, with a quickly gathering hesitation, "I thought as perhaps you knew."
"I! But we have never met before."
The doctor bent his eyes on her searchingly. For a moment he began to wonder whether his visitor was quite right in her head. Cuckoo shuffled under his gaze. The very kindliness of his face and gentleness of his voice made her feel hot and abashed. A prickly sensation ran over her body as she cleared her throat and said, monosyllabically:
"No."
The doctor waited.
"What is it?" he said at length. "Tell me why you have called. If you are not ill, what is it you want of me?"
"You'll laugh, p'r'aps."
"Laugh? Is it something funny, then?"
"Funny! Not it!"
The sound of her voice seemed to give her some courage, for she went on with more hardy resolution:
"Look here, you can see what I am—oh yes, you can—and you wonder what I'm doin' here. Well, if I tell you, will you promise as you won't laugh at me?"
This was Cuckoo's way of delicately sounding the doctor's depths. She thought it decidedly subtle.
"Yes, I'll promise that," the doctor said.
He looked at her faded young face and felt no inclination to laugh.
"Well, then," Cuckoo said, more excitedly, "you know Ju—Mr. Addison, don't you?"
The doctor began to see a ray of light.
"Certainly I do," he said.
"And Mr. Cresswell?"
"He is one of my most intimate friends."
The words were spoken with an unconscious warmth that chilled Cuckoo. For surely the man who spoke thus of the man she hated, must be her enemy. She faltered visibly, and a despairing expression crept into her eyes.
"I don't know as it's any use my sayin' it," she began as if half to herself.
The doctor saw that she was much troubled and the kindness of his nature was roused.
"Don't be afraid of me," he said. "You have come here to tell me something, tell it frankly. I am a friend of both the people you mention."
"You can't be that," she suddenly cried. "Nobody can't be that!"
"Why not?"
"You ought to know."
She said it fiercely. All her self-consciousness was suddenly gone, swept away by the flood of thought and of remembrance that was surging through her mind.
"Why can't you see what he is," she exclaimed, "any more than he can, than Julian—Mr. Addison, I mean? Any one'd think you was all mad, they would."
Doctor Levillier was glad he had admitted the lady of the feathers to his presence. Interest sprang up in him, alive and searching.
"Tell me what you mean," he said. "Are you talking about Mr. Cresswell?"
"Yes, I am; and I say of all the beasts in London he's the greatest."
Cuckoo did not choose her words carefully. She was highly excited and she wanted to be impressive. It seemed to her that to use strong language was the only way to be impressive. So she used it. The doctor's face grew graver.
"Surely you hardly know what you're saying," he said very quietly.
But his thoughts flew to that summer night when his mastiffs howled against Valentine, and he felt as if a mystery were deepening round him as the autumn mist of evening deepened in the street outside.
"I do," she reiterated. "I do. But nobody won't see it. And it's no use what I see. How can it be?"
The words were almost a wail.
"Tell me what you see."
Cuckoo looked into the doctor's sincere eyes, and a sudden rush of hope came to her.
"That's what I want to. But if you like him you'll only be angry."
"No, I shall not."
"Well, then. I see as he's ruinin' his friend."
"Ruining Mr. Addison?"
"Yes."
It struck the doctor as very strange that such a girl as Cuckoo obviously was should cry out in such a passionate way against the ruin of any young man. Was it not her fate to ruin others as she herself had been ruined? He wondered what her connection with the two youths was, and perhaps his face showed something of his wonder, for Cuckoo added, after a long glance at him:
"It's true; yes, it is," as if she read his doubts.
"How do you come to know it?" the doctor said, not at all unkindly, but as if anxious to elucidate matters.
"Why, I tell you I can see it plain. Besides," and here she dropped her voice, "Valentine, as he calls himself—though he ain't—as good as told me. He did tell me, only I couldn't understand. He knew I couldn't—d'you see? That's why he told me. Oh, if he'd only tell you!"
Fragments of Valentine's exposition of his deeds and of his strange gospel were floating through Cuckoo's mind as fragments of broken wood float by on a stream, fragments of broken wood that were part of a puzzle, that should be rescued by some strong hand from the stream, and fitted together into a perfect whole.
"Valentine! You say he told you that he was ruining Julian?"
Unconsciously the doctor used the Christian names. His doing so set
Cuckoo more at her ease.
"Yes. Not like that. But he told me. He ain't what you think, nor what Julian thinks. He's somebody else, and you can't tell it. He's laughing at you all."
Thus the gospel came forth from the painted lips of Cuckoo, crude and garbled, yet true gospel. The doctor was completely puzzled. All he gathered from this announcement was that Valentine seemed in some way to have been confiding in this girl of the streets. Such a fact was sufficiently astounding. That they should ever have been associated together in any way was almost incredible to any one who knew Valentine. Yet it was quite obvious that they did know each other, and in no ordinary manner.
"Do you know Mr. Cresswell well?" the doctor said.
He saw that he could only make the tangle clear by being to some extent judicial. Humanity merely excited Cuckoo to something that was violently involved, passionate, and almost hysterical.
"Well enough."
"And Mr. Addison?"
Cuckoo flushed slowly.
"Yes, I know him—quite well."
An almost similar answer, but given with such a change of manner as would be possible only in a woman. It told the doctor much of the truth and gave him the first page of a true reading of Cuckoo's character. But he went on with apparently unconscious quietude:
"And you came here to tell me, who know and like them both, that the one is ruining the other. What made you come to me?"
"Why, somethin' Julian said once. He thinks a lot of you. I was afraid to come, but I—I thought I would. It's seein' them—at least Julian—since they got back made me come."
"I haven't seen them yet," the doctor said, and there was an interrogation in the accent with which he spoke. Something in Cuckoo's intense manner roused both wonder and alarm in him. She evidently spoke driven by tremendous impulse. What vision had given that impulse life?
"Ah!" she said, and fell suddenly into a dense silence, touching her left cheek mechanically with her hand, which was covered by a long, black silk glove. She alternately pressed the fingers of it against the cheek bone and withdrew them, as one who marks the progress of a tune, hummed or played on some instrument. Her eyes were staring downwards upon the carpet. The doctor watched her, and the wonder and fear grew in him.
"Have you nothing more to tell me?" he said at last.
"Eh?"
She put down her hand slowly and turned her eyes on him.
"What do you wish me to do?" he said, "I do not know yet what may—" he checked himself and substituted, "I must go and see my friends."
"Yes, go."
She nodded her head slowly, and then she shivered as she sat in the chair.
"Go, and do somethin'," she said. "I would—I want to—but I can't. It's true, I suppose, what he said. I'm nearly done with, I'm spoilt. I say, you're a doctor, aren't you? You know things? Tell me then, do, what's the good of goin' on being able to feel—I mean to feel just like anybody, anybody as hasn't gone down, you know—if you can't do anythin' the same as they can, get round anybody to make 'em go right? I could send him right, I could, as well as any girl, if feelin' 'd only do it. But feelin' ain't a bit of good. It's looks, I suppose. Everythin' 's looks."
"No, not everything," the doctor said.
Cuckoo's speech both interested and touched him. Its confused wistfulness came straight from the heart. And then it recalled to the doctor a conversation he had had with Valentine, when they talked over the extraordinary influence that the mere appearance—will working through features—of one man or woman can have over another. The doctor could only at present rather dimly apprehend the feeling entertained for Julian by Cuckoo. But as he glanced at her, he understood very well the pathos of the contest raging at present between her heart and the painted shell which held it.
"Nobody who feels goodness is utterly bereft of the power of bringing good to another," he said. "For we can seldom really feel what we can never really be."
Light shone through the shadows of the tired face at the words.
"He said different from that," she exclaimed.
"He—who?"
"Him as you call Valentine. That's why he told me all about it, because he knew as I shouldn't understand, and because he thinks I can't do nothin' for any one. But I say, you do somethin' for Julian, will you, will you?"
There was a passion of pleading in her voice. She had lost her fear of him, and, stretching out her hand, touched the sleeve of his coat.
"I don't understand it all," the doctor said. "I don't like to accept what you say about Mr. Cresswell, even in thought. But I will go and see him, and Julian. The dogs," he added in a low and secret voice to himself. "There is something terribly strange in all this."
He fell into a silence of consideration that lasted longer than he knew. The lady of the feathers began to fidget in it uneasily. She felt that her mission was perhaps accomplished and that she ought to go. She looked across at the doctor, pulled her silk gloves up on her thin arms, and kicked one foot against the other. He did not seem to notice. She glanced towards the window. The fog was pressing its face against the glass like a dreary and terrible person looking upon them with haggard eyes. It was time, she supposed, for her to drift out into the arms that belonged to that dreary and terrible face. She got up.
"I'll go now," she said.
The doctor did not hear.
"I'll go now, please," she repeated.
This time he heard and got up. He looked at her and said, "I have your address. I will see you again."
If misery chanced to stand once in his path, he seldom lost sight of it till he had at least tried to bring a smile to its lips, a ray of hope to its eyes. But in the instance of Cuckoo he had other reasons, or might have other reasons, for seeing her in the future.
"You are sure you have nothing more to say to me?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No, I don't think," she murmured.
"Then good-bye."
He held out his hand. She put hers in it, with an action that was oddly ladylike for Cuckoo. Then she went out, rather awkwardly, in a reaction, to the hall, the doctor following. He opened the door for her, and the mist crawled instantly in.
"It's a gloomy night," he said. "Very autumnal."
"Yes, ain't it? I do hate the nights."
She spoke the words with an accent that was venemous.
"C-r-r!" she said.
And with that ejaculation, half an uttered shiver, half a muttered curse, she gave herself to the fog, and was gone.
Doctor Levillier stood for a moment looking into the vague and dreamy darkness. Then he put on his coat and hat, caught up a cab whistle, and with a breath, sent a shrill and piercing note into the night. Long and mournfully it sounded. And only the moist silence answered like that paradox—a voice that is dumb. Again and again the cry went forth, and at last there was an answering rattle. Two bright eyes advanced in the fog very slowly, looking for the sound, it seemed, as for a thing visible. The doctor got into the cab, and set forth in the fog to visit Valentine.
CHAPTER II
THE VOICE IN THE EMPTY ROOM
When the doctor arrived at the Victoria Street flat Valentine's man answered his ring. Wade had been with Valentine for many years and was always famous for his great devotion to, and admiration of, his master. Wade was also especially partial—as he would have expressed himself—to Doctor Levillier, and when he saw who the visitor was, his face relaxed into contentment that strongly suggested a smile.
"Back at last Wade, you see," the doctor said, cheerfully. "Is Mr.
Cresswell in?"
"No, sir. But I expect him every minute to dress for dinner. He's dining out, and it's near seven now. Will you come in and wait?"
"Yes."
The doctor entered and walked into the drawing-room, preceded by Wade, who turned on the light.
"Why! what have you been doing to the room?" the doctor said, looking round in some surprise. "Dear me. It's very much altered."
In truth, the change in it was marked. The grand piano had vanished, and in its place stood an enormous cabinet made of wood, stained black, and covered with grotesque gold figures, whose unnatural faces were twisted into the expressions of all the vices. Some of these faces smiled, others scowled, others protruded forked tongues like snakes and seemed to hiss along the blackness of the background. The shapes of the figures were voluptuous and yet suggested, rather than fully revealed, deformity, as if the minds of these monsters sought to reveal their distortion by the very lines of their curved and wanton limbs. Upon the top of this cabinet stood a gigantic rose-coloured jar filled with orchids, the Messalinas of the hothouse, whose mauve corruption and spotted faces leered down to greet the gold goblins beneath. It was easy to imagine them whispering to each other soft histories of unknown sins, and jeering at the corrupt respectabilities of London, as they clustered together and leaned above the ruddy ramparts of the china, wild flowers as no hedgerow violet, or pale smirking primrose, is ever wild in the farthest wood.
Glancing from this cabinet, and those that stood upon it, the doctor was aware of a deep and dusty note of red in the room, sounding from carpet and walls, tingling drowsily in the window curtains and in the cushions that lay upon the couches. This was not the crude and cheerful sealing-wax red with which the festive Philistine loves to dye the whiteness of his dining-room walls, cooling its chubby absurdity with panels of that old oak, which is forever new. It was a dim and deep colour, such as a dust-filmed ruby might emit if illuminated by a soft light. And Valentine had shrouded it so adroitly that though it pervaded the entire room, it always seemed distant and remote, a background, vast perhaps, but clouded and shadowed by nearer things. These nearer things were many, for Valentine's original asceticism, which had displayed itself essentially in the slight bareness of his principal sitting-room had apparently been swept away by a tumultuous greed for ornaments. The room was crowded with furniture, chairs, and sofas of the most peculiar shapes, divans and tables, bookstands and settees. One couch was made of wood, carved and painted into the semblance of a woman, between whose outstretched arms was placed the pillow to receive the head of one resting there. Another lay on the bent backs of two grinning Indian boys, whose crouching limbs seemed twined into a knot. Upon the tables and cabinets stood a thousand ornaments, many of them silver toys, sweetmeat-boxes, tiny ivory figures and wriggling atrocities from the East. But what struck the doctor most in the transformation of the room was the panorama presented upon its walls. The pictures that he remembered so well were all gone. The classical figures, the landscapes full of atmosphere and of delicacy had vanished. And from their places leered down jockeys and street-women painted by Jan Van Beers and Dégas, Chaplin and Gustav Courbet, while above the mantelpiece, where once had hung "The Merciful Knight," a Cocotte by Leibl smoked a pipe into the room. It seemed incredible that Valentine could be at rest in such a livid chamber, and not even the vague communications of Cuckoo woke in the doctor such a definite and alive sensation of discomfort as this vision of outward change that must surely betoken an inward transformation of the most vivid and unusual kind. And everywhere, as a deep and monotonous bell ringing relentlessly through a symphony of discordant and crying passions, there sounded that sinister note of deep and dusty red. Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears a monotonous song of dull and weary change. No silence had ever before spoken to him so powerfully. He was greatly affected, and did not scruple to show his discomfort to Wade, who waited respectfully by the door.
"What an alteration!" he said again, but in a lower and more withdrawn voice. "I cannot recognize the room I once knew—and loved!"
"Mr. Valentine has been doing it up, sir."
"But why, Wade; why?"
"I don't know, sir; a fancy, I suppose, sir."
"An evil one," the doctor murmured to himself.
He glanced at Wade. It struck him that the man's mind might possibly march with Cuckoo's in detection of his master's transformation, if transformation there were. Wade returned the doctor's glance with calm, good breeding.
"Mr. Valentine is well, I hope, Wade?" he said.
"Very well, sir, I believe."
"And Mr. Addison?"
"I couldn't quite say, sir, as to that."
"Do you mean that he looks ill?"
"I couldn't say, sir. Mr. Julian don't look quite what he was, to my view, sir."
"Oh."
The butler's level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and again a prophetic chord of change was struck.
"Thank you, Wade" said the doctor.
The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room.
* * * * *
Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose nerves played him tricks. He was, above all things, sane, both in mind and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation. Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was, perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by the action of the imagination. Half, at least, of his great success in life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity. No man, in fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he. Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there. The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded chamber.
The hour was quiet. No fire danced in the grate. Doctor Levillier leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting Valentine's return. But the composure which had already been slightly shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the empty room.
Sitting thus in it alone the doctor examined it with more detail, and with a more definite remembrance of Valentine's habit of mind than before. And he found himself increasingly amazed and confounded. For not only was the change great, but it was not governed and directed by good taste, or even by any definite taste, either good or bad. A number of people might have devised the arrangement and selection of the mass of furniture and ornaments, and have thrown things down here and there in sheer defiance of each other's predilections. Only in the setting, the red setting of the picture, was there evidence of the presence of a presiding genius. In that red setting the doctor supposed that he was to read Valentine. He could read nobody in the rest of the room, or perhaps everybody whose taste refused purity and calm as foolish Dead Sea growths. Some of the silver ornaments might have assembled in the garish boudoir of a Parisian fille de joie, as the carved woman might have been the couch to which Thais tempted Paphnuce, and the Indian boys the lifeless slaves of Aphrodite. The jockeys on the wall would have been at home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the jeunesse dorée of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds." The golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the masculine and feminine, the corrupt "modern" and the flagrant Philistine, the vaguely suggestive Nineteenth Century Athenian and the larky and unbridled schoolboy. A neurotic woman seemed to have been at work here, a sordid youth there. On a sidetable the hysterical man of our civilization fought a duel in taste with some Amazon whose kept vow had evidently wrought a cancer in her mind. In every corner there was the clash of civil war. Yet there was always the cloudy red, visible through the lattice-work of decoration, as the blue sky is visible through the lattice-work of a Tadema interior. In that clouded red the doctor felt himself reading a new yet powerful Valentine, and in the grotesque orchids leaning their misshapen chins upon the rosy rim of their vase. Those flowers had evil faces, and they seemed strangely at home in the silent room where no clock ticked and no caged bird twittered. Only the red cloud spoke like a dull voice, and Doctor Levillier sat and listened to it, until he felt as if he began to know a new Valentine. There is an influence that emanates from lifeless things, strong, subtle, and penetrating; an influence in form, in colour, in scent, even in juxtaposition. And such influence is like a voice speaking to the soul. There was a voice in that empty room; and the words it uttered stirred the doctor to a greater surprise, a greater dread than the words of Cuckoo. Her painted lips related that which might well be a legend of her fancy or of her hate. This voice related a reality and no legend.
As the doctor sat there he conversed of many strange and evil matters, of many discomforting affairs. He was the interrogator, the perpetual anxious questioner, and the voice in the empty room gave vague and sinister answers. That was a terrible catechism, a catechism of the devil, not of God. Question and answer flowed on, and in the doctor's soul the anxiety and the distress ever deepened. Nor could he control their development, although at moments his common sense broke into the catechism like a cool voice from without, and sought to interrupt it finally. But the twig could not stay the torrent. And the darkness deepened, darkness in which there was a vision of fire, the vision of a man, fantastic and menacing. He was the genius of this room. This room sang of him. Yes, even now the twisted silver goblins, the curved monstrosities on the cabinet, the crouched Indian boys, the leering pictures, and always the dull red cloud on wall and carpet, cushion and hanging. And then a strange deception overtook the doctor and shook his usually steady nerves. The red cloud seemed to his observing eyes to tremble, like a flame shaken in a breath of wind, and to glow all around him. He looked again, endeavouring to laugh at his delusion. But the glow deepened and there was surely distinct movement. Everywhere on walls, floor, hangings, couches, faint, thin shadows took shape, grew more definite. He watched them and saw that they were tiny flames, glowing red relieved against the red. It was as if he sat in the midst of a ghostly furnace; for these flames had no pleasant crackling voices. Silently they burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly. He saw them move this way and that. Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly, as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided. The doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing to tremble and to murmur from their lips. Yet they sang no chorus, but always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him. He knew himself to be the victim of a delusion. He knew what he would have said to a patient seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses. In his common sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the actual. These flames were real. They had forms. They moved. They enclosed him in a circle. They embraced him. As he watched them he fancied that they longed to be near to him, and—and—yes—so ran his thoughts—to communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his. They trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire. They tried to escape from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a leash. The doctor was impelled ardently to believe that they yearned to find voices and to utter some word. And then, on a sudden, he recalled Julian's declaration on the night of Valentine's trance, that he had seen a flame shine from his friend's lips, and fade away in the darkness. He recalled, too, Julian's question about death-beds. Was the soul of a man a flame? And, if so, were these flames many souls, or one soul reproduced on all sides by his excitement, and by the intensity of his gaze after them?
They burned more clearly. Their forms were more defined. Then suddenly they grew vague, blurred, faint all around him. They faded. They died into the red of the room. And once more the doctor sat alone.
He listened and heard the click of a key in the front door. And then suddenly the horror that he had felt long ago, on the night when he was followed in Regent Street, once more possessed him. He got on his feet to face it, and, as the drawing-room door was pushed slowly open, faced Valentine.
CHAPTER III
THE DOCTOR MEETS TWO STRANGERS
Upon seeing the doctor, Valentine paused on the threshold of the door, and, as he paused, the doctor's horror fled.
"Valentine," he said, holding out his hand.
"Doctor."
Their hands met and their eyes. And then Levillier had an instant sensation that he shook hands with a stranger. He looked upon the face of Valentine certainly, but he was aware of a subtle, yet large, change in it. All the features were surely coarser, heavier. There was a line or two near the eyes, a loose fullness about the mouth. Yet, as he looked again, he could not be certain if it were so, or if his memory were at fault, groping after a transformation that was not there. The words he now said truthfully expressed his real feeling in the matter.
"You are quite a stranger to me," he said.
Valentine accepted the remark in the conventional sense.
"Yes, quite a stranger. We have not met for an age."
The voice was cool and careless.
"I have been waiting for you," the doctor went on, still unable to feel at his ease. "By the way, how you have changed your room."
"Yes. Do you like it?"
"Well, frankly, no."
"I am sorry for that," Valentine replied, drawing off his gloves. "Julian chose a great many of the things in it."
"Julian! Did he devise the colour scheme?"
"That curious red? No, that was my idea. But he had a great deal to do with the new furniture and the ornaments."
"I should have supposed many minds had been at work here."
Valentine smiled, and the doctor was convinced that both his mouth and eyes had altered in expression.
"That's true in a way," he answered. "Julian has had various advisers—of the feminine gender. The love of the moment is visible all over this room. That is why it amuses me. Those silver ornaments were chosen by a pretty Circassian. A Parisian picked out that black cabinet in a warehouse of Boulogne. A little Italian insisted upon that vulgar-painted sofa—and so on."
"Why do you allow such people to have any intercourse with a room of yours?"
"Oh, it amused Julian, and I was tired of my room as it was. After 'The
Merciful Knight' went to be cleaned, I resolved on a change."
"For the worse."
"Is it for the worse?"
"Surely."
The eyes of the two men challenged each other. Valentine's glance was carelessly impudent and hardy. The deference which he had always given to the doctor was gone. If it had been genuine it was dead. If it had only been a mask it had apparently served its purpose and was now contemptuously thrown aside. Doctor Levillier was deeply moved by the transformation. His friend had become a stranger during the interval of his absence. The man he admired was less admirable than of old. He recognized that, although he was not yet fully aware of the transformation of Valentine. Before he left England he vaguely suspected a change. Now the change hit him full in the heart. So acute was it that, in an age of miracles, he could well have believed Cuckoo Bright's disjointed statement. Valentine was, to his mind, even in some strange way to his eye, at this moment no longer Valentine. He was talking with a man whose features he knew certainly, but whose mind he did not know, had never known. And his former resolution to watch Valentine closely was consolidated. It became a passion. The doctor woke in the man. Nor was the old friend and lover of humanity lulled to sleep.
"How is Julian?" the doctor asked, dropping his eyes.
"Very well, I think. He will be here directly. He's coming to fetch me. We are dining at the Prince's in Piccadilly in the same party. That reminds me, I must dress. But do stay, and have some coffee."
"No coffee, thank you."
"But you will stay and see Julian. I dare say he will be here early."
"Yes, I will stay. I should like to meet him."
After a word or two more Valentine vanished to dress, and the doctor was once more alone. He was much perplexed and saddened, but keenly interested too, and, getting up from the chair in which he had been sitting, he moved about the grotesque and vulgar room, threading his way through the graceless furniture with a silent and gentle caution. And as he walked meditatively he remembered a conversation he had held with Valentine long ago, when the latter had spoken complainingly of the tyranny of an instinctive purity. The very words he had used came back to him now:
"The minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly poised, and a little push can send them one way or the other. Remember if you lose heaven, the space once filled by heaven will not be left empty."
Had not the little push been given? Had not heaven been lost? That was the problem. But Doctor Levillier, if he saw a little way into effect, was quite at a loss as to cause. And already he had a suspicion that the change in Valentine was not quite on the lines of one of those strange and dreadful human changes familiar to any observant man. This suspicion, already latent, and roused, perhaps, in the first instance long ago by the mystery of Rip's avoidance of his master, and by the shattering of Valentine's musical powers, was confirmed in the strongest way when Julian appeared a few minutes later. Yet the change in Julian would have seemed to most people far more remarkable.
He came into the drawing-room rather hastily, in evening dress with a coat over it. Wade had forewarned him of the doctor's presence, and he entered, speaking loud words of welcome, and holding out a greeting hand. The too-ready voice and almost premature hand betokened his latent uneasiness. Vice makes some people unconscious, some self-conscious. Julian belonged at present to the latter tribe. Whether he was thoroughly aware of self-alteration or not, he evidently stirred uneasily under an expectation of the doctor's surprise. This drove his voice to loud notes and his manner to a boisterous heartiness, belied by the shifting glance of his brown eyes.
The doctor was astounded as he looked at him. Yet the change here was far less inexplicable than that other change in Valentine. Its mystery was the familiar mystery of humanity. Its horror was the horror that we all accept as one of the elements of life. Deterioration, however rapid, however complete, does not come upon us like a ghost in the night to puzzle us absolutely. It is not altogether out of the range of our experience. Most men have seen a man crumble gradually, through the action of some vice, as a wall crumbles through the action of time, falls into dust and decay, filters away into the weed-choked ditches of utter ruin and degradation. Most women have watched some woman slip from the purity and hope and innocence of girlhood into the faded hunger and painted and wrinkled energies of animalism. Such tragedies are no more unfamiliar to us than are the tragedies of Shakespeare. And such a tragedy—not complete yet, but at a third-act point, perhaps—now faced Doctor Levillier in Julian. The wall that had been so straight and trim, so finely built and carefully preserved, was crumbling fast to decay. A ragged youth slunk in the face, beggared of virtue, of true cheerfulness, of all lofty aspiration and high intent. It was youth still, for nothing can entirely massacre that gift of the gods, except inevitable Time. But it was youth sadder than age, because it had run forward to meet the wearinesses that dog the steps of age but that should never be at home with age's enemy. Julian had been the leaping child of healthy energy. He was now quite obviously the servant of lassitude. His foot left the ground as if with a tired reluctance, and his hands were fidgetty, yet nerveless. The eyes, that looked at the doctor and looked away by swift turns, burned with a haggard eagerness unutterably different from their former bright vivacity. Beneath them wrinkles crept on the puffy white face as worms about a corpse. Busy and tell-tale, they did not try to conceal the story of the body into which they had prematurely cut themselves. Nor did Julian's features choose to back up any reserve his mind might possibly feel about acknowledging the consummate alteration of his life. They proclaimed, as from a watch-tower, the arrival of enemies. The cheeks were no longer firm, but heavy and flaccid. The mouth was deformed by the down-drawn looseness of the sensualist, and the complexion beaconed with an unnatural scarlet that was a story to be read by every street-boy.
Yet, even so, the doctor, as he looked pitifully and with a gnawing grief upon Julian, felt not the mysterious thrill communicated to him by Valentine. These two men, these old time friends of his, were both in a sense strangers. But it was as if he had at least heard much of Julian, knew much of him, understood him, comprehended exactly why he was a stranger. Valentine was the total stranger, the unknown, the undivined. Long ago the doctor had foreseen the possibility of the Julian who now stood before him. He had never foreseen the possibility of the new Valentine. The one change was summed up in an instant. The other walked in utter mystery. The doctor had been swift to notice Julian's furtive glance, and was equally swift in banishing all trace of surprise from his own manner. So they met with a fair show of cordiality, and Julian developed a little of his old cheerfulness.
"Val's dressing," he said. "Well, there's plenty of time. By the way, how's your Russian, doctor?"
"Better."
"You've cured him! Bravo!"
"I hope I have persuaded him to cure himself."
Julian looked up hastily.
"Oh, that sort of complaint, was it?"
He laughed, not without a tinge of bitterness.
"Perhaps he doesn't want to be cured."
"I have persuaded him to want to be, I think."
"Isn't that rather a priest's office?" Julian asked.
The doctor noticed that a very faint hostility had crept into his manner.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Such an illness is a matter of temperament, I dare say, and the clergy tinker at our temperaments, don't they? while you doctors tinker at our bodies."
"A nerve-doctor has as much to do with mind as body, and no doctor can possibly do much good if he entirely ignores the mind. But you know my theories."
"Yes. They make you clergyman and doctor in one, a dangerous man."
And he laughed again, jarringly, and shifted in his seat, looking around him with quick eyes.
"What do you think of the room?" he said abruptly.
"I think it entirely spoilt and ruined," the doctor answered gravely.
"It's altered, certainly."
"Yes, for the worse. It was a beautiful room, one of the most beautiful in London."
A momentary change came over Julian. He dropped his hard manner, which seemed an assumption to cover inward discomfort or shame.
"Yes," he said almost regretfully. "I suppose it was. But it's gayer now, got more things in it. Full of memories this room is."
The last remark was evidently put forth as a feeler, to find out what Valentine had been talking about. Dr. Levillier was habitually truthful, although he could be very reserved if occasion seemed to require it. At present he preferred to be frank.
"Memories of women," he remarked.
"Oh, you've heard?"
"That several tastes helped to make his room the pandemonium which it is.
Yes."
"You're severe, doctor."
"Perhaps you like the room for its memories, Addison."
Julian looked doubtful.
"I don't know. I suppose so," he hesitated.
"By the way, is there among these vagrant memories of Circassians,
Greeks, and Italians anything chosen by Cuckoo Bright?"
Julian started violently.
"Cuckoo Bright," he exclaimed, "what do you know of her?"
As he spoke Valentine strolled into the room dressed for dinner. He was drawing on a pair of lavender gloves, and looked down sideways at his coat to see if his buttonhole of three very pale and very perfectly matched pink roses was quite straight.
"Cuckoo Bright?" he echoed. "Does everybody know her, then? How came she into your strict life, doctor?"
Doctor Levillier noticed that Valentine, like Julian, carefully set him aside as a being in some different sphere, much as a great many people insist on setting clergymen. This fact alone showed that he was talking with two strangers, and seemed to give the lie to long years of the most friendly and almost brotherly intercourse.
"Is my life so strict, then?" he asked gently.
"I think little Cuckoo would call it so, eh, Julian?"
He glanced at Julian and laughed softly, still drawing on his gloves. In evening dress he looked curiously young and handsome, and facially less altered than the doctor had at first supposed him to be. Still there was a difference even in the face; but it was so slight that only a keen observer would have noticed it. The almost frigid and glacial purity had floated away from it like a lovely cloud. Now it was unveiled, and there was something hard and staring about it. The features were still beautiful, but their ivory lustre was gone. A line was penciled, too, here and there. Yet the doctor could understand that even Valentine's own man might not appreciate the difference. The manner, however, was more violently altered. It was that which made the doctor think again and intensely of Cuckoo's vague yet startling statement.
"Where did you meet Cuckoo, doctor?"
It was Julian who spoke, and the words were uttered with some excitement.
"I have met her," Levillier replied.
It was sufficiently evident that he did not intend to say where.
But Valentine broke in:
"She has called on you again, then, and this time found you at home.
I scarcely thought she would take the trouble."
"Again!" the doctor said.
"Yes. One evening when you were away I saw her at your door and ventured to give her a piece of advice."
"And that was?"
"Not to trouble you. I told her your patients were of a different class."
"In that case I fear you misrepresented me, Cresswell. I do not choose my patients. But Cuckoo Bright is no patient of mine."
"If she's not ill," Julian said, "why should she go to you?"
"That is her affair, and mine," the doctor answered, in his quietest and most finishing tone.
Julian accepted the delicate little snub quietly, but Valentine sneered.
"Perhaps she went to seek you in your capacity of a doctor of the mind rather than of the body. Perhaps, after all, she sought your aid."
As he spoke the doctor could not help having driven into him the conviction that the words were spoken with meaning, that Valentine knew the nature of Cuckoo's mission to Harley Street. There rose in him suddenly a violent sensation of enmity against Valentine. He strove to beat it down, but he could not. Never had he felt such enmity against any man. It was like the fury so obviously felt by Cuckoo. The doctor was ashamed to be so unreasonable, and believed for a moment that the poor street-girl had absolutely swayed him, and predisposed him to this animus that surged up over his normal charity and good, clear impulses of tenderness for all that lived.
"My aid," he said—and the turmoil within him caused him to speak with unusual sternness. "And if she did, what then?"
"Poor Cuckoo!" Julian said, and there was a touch of real tenderness in his voice.
"Oh, I have nothing to say against it," Valentine replied, buttoning slowly and carefully the last button of the second glove. "Only, Cuckoo Bright is beyond aid. She can neither help herself nor any one else."
"How do you know, Cresswell?"
"Because I have observed, doctor. Once I, too, thought that even Cuckoo might—might—well, have some fight in her. I know now that she has not. Her corruption of body has led to worse than corruption of mind, to corruption of will. Cuckoo Bright is as helpless as is a seabird with a shot through its wings, upon the sea. She can only drift in the present—die in the future."
The doctor listened silently. But Julian said again:
"Poor, poor Cuckoo!"
The exclamation seemed to irritate Valentine, for he caught up his cloak and cried:
"Bah! Let's forget her. Doctor, we must say good-night. We are due at the
Prince's. It has been good to meet you again."
The last words sounded like the bitterest sarcasm.