"Right," she answered, and for the first time there was an accent of

pleasure in her voice.

"But I'll walk a little way with you first," he added.

Together they crossed the Circus and mingled with the humming mob at the

corner of Regent Street. They pushed their way towards Piccadilly with

difficulty, for numbers of people at this hour do not attempt to walk,

but stand stock still, despite the cry of the policeman, staring at the

passers-by, or talking and laughing with the women who throng the

pavement. Having elbowed their way along as far as the St. James

restaurant, they began to move with a little more ease, and could have

talked as they went, but apparently neither of them felt conversational.

Julian was comparing the vision of the moon with the vision of the

street, a comparison no doubt often made even by young men in London on

still nights of summer, suggestive to most people, perhaps, of much

the same thoughts--yet a comparison to thrill, as all the wild and

eternal contrasts of life thrill. And Julian was thinking, too, rather

sombrely of himself. Cuckoo walked on beside him, looking straight before

her. Quite unconsciously, with the unconsciousness of a mechanical toy,

expressive at the turning of a key in its interior, she had assumed her

thin, invariable, professional smile. It came to her face in a flash when

the pavement of Piccadilly came to her feet. She did not know it was

there.

The moon looked down on it, yet, if Julian had been able to see, perhaps

the little flame still flickered in those eyes which had been full of

tears. But a little beyond St. James's Hall their silent progress was

arrested, for they both saw Valentine pass them swiftly in the crowd.

He saw them, too, but did not attempt to speak to them. With a smile at

Julian he walked on. Julian gazed after him, then turned to Cuckoo.

"And you saw him here to-night before I met you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"How long ago?"

"Two hours, I dare say."

After that Julian ceased to think of the vision of the moon. But

presently he noticed that Cuckoo was walking more slowly.

"You're tired?" he said.

She nodded.

"Have you been out all the evening?"

She nodded again.

"Take a cab and go home. I'll pay the man."

"No; I can't go yet."

"Why not?"

"I can't," she repeated, and a mulish look of obstinacy came into her

face.

Julian guessed the miserable reason.

"Let me--" he began, and in a moment his hand would have been in his

pocket. She stopped him.

"I told you as I never would, not from you," she said. "And I wouldn't,

all the more since--since that night."

Then, after an instant, she added:

"But you'd better leave me to myself now."

And then Julian realized that his presence and company were ruining her

chance. That thought turned him sick and dull.

"I can't," he began almost desperately.

She gave with her hand a little twitch at his.

"I say," she whispered, and she spoke to him as if to Jessie in the tiny

flannel-lined basket, "Go bials! will you?"

"But you?" he said, and there was something that was half a sob in his

voice.

"I can't. But you--go bials."

And then, to please her, he held up his hand and hailed a hansom. Getting

in he gave the direction of his rooms, loud enough for her to hear. She

stood at the edge of the pavement and nodded at him as she heard it.

Then she turned away, and Julian saw the feathers in her big hat waving,

as she joined once more the flight of the bats.

CHAPTER IV

THE FLAME IN A WOMAN'S EYES

"That girl loves you," Valentine had said, when Julian told him of

Cuckoo's strange fragmentary sermon in the Monico, and of its effect upon

himself.

Valentine spoke without any emotion or sympathy, and the absence of

feeling from his voice seemed almost to bring a certain slight vexation

into his manner. The love of Cuckoo, perhaps naturally, was to his fine

nature a thing of no account, or even of ill account. At least, his look

and manner faintly said so to Julian.

"But if she loves me," Julian said, and a certain wonder came into his

heart at the thought, "surely she wouldn't behave to me as she does,

turning me from a lover into a friend, and keeping me almost angrily in

the latter relation."

"Perhaps not," Valentine said languidly.

No doubt he understood what Julian did not entirely understand, the

subtleties of such a nature as Cuckoo's, a nature hammered out thin by

cruel circumstance, drilled till it found the unspeakable ordinary and

the loathsome inevitable, worn as a stone by dropping water till the

water, ceasing to fall, must have left a loneliness of surprise. Julian

did not fully realize that Cuckoo's life might well lead her to display

real affection, if she possessed it, by ways the reverse of those

naturally sought and gloried in by pure and protected women. To give is

the act natural to the love of such women. It is at least their impulse,

although restrained within strict limits, perhaps, by exigencies of

conscience or of religion. But to give is the impulse, giving being the

unusual act, the strange new act in them. Cuckoo's profession being an

ordered routine of giving, how could she show her love better than by

withholding? To be to Julian as she was to all men could prove nothing,

either to him or to herself. To be to him as she was not to any other man

whom she knew must mean something, argue something. So, at least, dimly

and without mental self-consciousness, her mind reasoned rather

instinctively, for the lady of the feathers was, above all things,

instinctive. Instead of logic, ethics, morals, the equipment of sage,

philosopher, good women, she had instinct only. Instinct told her the

secret meaning of reticence in her relations with Julian. When she said

good-bye to him, the hand-shake that passed between them had become

something more to her than a kiss. She kissed so many whom she hated, so

many who were dolls of vice to her, who were walking sins, incarnate lust

shadows, scarcely men. To be to Julian what another woman might have been

would be to seem to make him as all those dolls of horrible London. So

Cuckoo set him apart by her relations towards him, as she had previously

set him apart in her heart. She pushed the chair of her beloved from the

heart where the dolls sat night after night warming their expressive

hands at the cheap and ever-burning fire. She pushed it out into a circle

of cold that was the only sacred thing she could supply. The world and

her situation in it had bereft her of the power of even proving the

simplicity of love by simplicity of natural action. She had to find a new

way to show an old worship. She found it in refusal, where others find it

in assent.

But, after all, she was a woman, and perhaps she wished Julian to be an

anchorite. That was what Valentine meant when, after Julian's account of

Cuckoo's anger on finding him in Piccadilly, he simply said:

"That girl loves you."

The sentence stirred Julian to a surprise warmer than seemed reasonable,

for he had really known that Cuckoo had some feeling for him. But he had

always at the back of his mind the idea, common to so many, that such a

girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic,

not the love Bacchanalian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many

can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his

knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along

which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely

disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some

vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we

know a thing to be, we often cannot feel it to be. Knowledge in the mind

does not inevitably bring to the birth sensation in the heart, or even

the mental apprehension, half reasonable and half emotional, on the base

and foundation of which it is comparatively easy to ground acts that

indicate an understanding.

From Valentine's remark Julian understood him to mean that Cuckoo's

anger was entirely caused by jealousy, not at all by a fine desire of

protecting some one stronger than herself from that which she knew so

well through her own original weakness. Yet that was what Julian had

been led to believe, not by any hint of Cuckoo's, but by something

within himself.

"I don't see why she should love me," he said, presently.

"You're well off, Julian," Valentine rejoined.

Almost for the first time in his life Julian felt angry with Valentine.

"You don't know her at all," he said, hotly.

"I know her class."

Julian looked at him, and his anger died, as his mind sailed off on a new

tack.

"Her class! Then you must have been studying it lately, Val. Not long ago

you could not have studied it. Your nature would not have let you."

"That is true enough."

"Were you studying it when we met you the other night?"

"Yes."

"With what result?" Julian asked with eager curiosity.

"That I understand something I never understood before--the charm of

sin."

Julian was greatly surprised at this deliverance of his friend, who

uttered it in his coldly pure voice, looking serenely high-minded and

even loftily intellectual.

"You find the charm of sin in Piccadilly?"

"I begin to find it everywhere, in every place in which human beings

gather together."

"You no longer feel yourself aloof from the average man, then?"

Valentine pressed his right hand slowly upon Julian's shoulder.

"No longer," he answered quietly. "Julian, you and I are emerging

together from the hermitage in which we have dwelt retired for so long.

I always thought you would emerge some day. I never thought I should. But

so it is. Don't think that I am standing still while you are travelling.

It is not so."

The strength of his hand's grip upon Julian's shoulder seemed to indicate

a violence of feeling which the tones of his voice did not imply. Julian

listened, and then said, in a hesitating, irresolute manner:

"Yes, I see, Val; but I say, where are we travelling? or, at least,

where shall we travel if we don't pull up, if we keep on? That's the

thing, I suppose."

As he spoke he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the

disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which

prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind. Yet so

it was. And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against

her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil. For he said lightly:

"After all, do human souls travel? I often think they are like eyes

looking at a whirling zoetrope. It is the zoetrope that travels."

"You think souls don't go up or down?"

"I think that none of us knows really much about souls, and that, after

all, it is best not to bother ourselves too much about them."

"Marr thought a great deal about them. I used to fancy that as some

maniacs have been known to murder people in order to tear out their

hearts, he could have murdered them to tear out their souls."

Valentine took his hand from Julian's shoulder.

"Marr is dead and forgotten," he said almost sternly.

"I can't quite forget him, Val; and I still feel as if he had had

some influence over both of us. We have changed since those days of

the sittings, since that night of your trance and his death."

Julian was looking at Valentine in a puzzled way while he spoke.

Valentine met his eyes calmly.

"If I have changed," he said slowly, "it cannot be in essentials. Look at

me. Is my face altered? Is my expression different?"

"No, Valentine."

Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater

happiness. To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at

rest. No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was

really and radically evil. Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a

boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just

to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick

motion, its powers of varied movement. Where could be the harm of that?

And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely

too. He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.

"You mean you are beginning to play with life?" he said.

"That is it exactly. I am putting life through its paces. After all, no

man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in

the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps--but only after he has

seen and known it--to reject. To do that is like living in the midst of

a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and

declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all

be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm."

"Yes, yes, I see. Then you think that Cuckoo is jealous of me?--that that

was all she meant?"

Julian again returned to the old question. Valentine replied:

"I feel sure of it. Women are always governed by their hearts. So much so

that my last sentence is a truism, scarcely worthy the saying. Besides,

my dear Julian, what would it matter if she were not? What could the

attitude of such a woman on any subject under the sun matter to you?"

The words were not spoken without intentional sarcasm. They stung Julian

a little, but did not lead him, from any sense of false shame, to a

feeble concealment of his real feeling.

"It does seem absurd, I dare say," he said. "But she's--well, she's not

an ordinary woman, Val."

"Let us hope not."

"No; you don't understand. There's something strong about her. What she

says might really matter, I think, to a cleverer man than I. She knows

men, and then, Valentine, there's something else."

He stopped. There was a queer look of mystery in his face.

"Something else! What is it? What can there be?"

"I saw the flame as if it was burning in her eyes."

Valentine made an abrupt movement. It might have been caused by surprise,

annoyance, anger, or simply by the desire to fidget which overcomes every

one, not paralyzed, at some time or another. His action knocked over a

chair, and he stooped to pick it up and set it in its place before he

spoke. Then he said:

"The flame, you say! What on earth is your theory about this

extraordinary flame? You seem to attach a strange importance to it. Yet

it can only be the fire of a fancy, a jet from the imagination. Tell me,

have you any theory about it, honestly? and if so, what is it?"

Julian was rather taken aback by this very sledgehammer invitation.

Hitherto the flame, and his thought of it, had seemed to have the pale

vagueness and the mystery of a dream. When the flame appeared, it is

true, he was oppressed by a sense of awe; but the awe was indefinite,

blurred, resisting analysis, and quite inexplicable to another.

"I did not say I had any theory about it," he answered.

"But then, why do you consider it at all? And why seem to think that

its supposed presence in the eyes of a woman makes that woman in any

way different from others?"

"But I did not say I thought so," Julian said, rather hastily. "How you

jump to conclusions to-day!"

"You implied it, and you meant it. Now, didn't you?"

"Perhaps I may have."

"This is all too much for me," Valentine said, showing now a very unusual

irritation. He even began to pace up and down the room with a slow, soft

footstep, monotonous and mechanical in its regularity. As he was walking

he went on:

"I do really think, Julian, that it is a mistake to allow any fancy to

get upon your nerves. You know what the doctor thought about this flame."

"Yes."

"And you know what I think."

"Do I?"

"Yes, that it is a mere chimera. But my opinion on such a subject has no

particular value. The doctor is different. He is a great specialist. The

nerves have been his constant study for years. If this vision continues

to haunt you, you really ought to put yourself definitely into his

hands."

"Perhaps I will," said Julian.

He spoke rather seriously and meditatively. Valentine, possibly because

he was in the sort of peculiarly irritable frame of mind that will

sometimes cause a man to dislike having his tendered advice taken, seemed

additionally vexed by this reply, or at any rate struck by it. He paused

in his walk, and seemed for an instant as if he were going to say

something sharply sarcastic. Then suddenly he laughed.

"After all," he exclaimed in a calmer voice, "we are taking an absurdity

mighty seriously."

But Julian would not agree to this view of the matter.

"I don't know that we are," he said.

"You don't know!"

"That is an absurdity. No, Valentine, I don't; I can't think that it is.

I saw it in Cuckoo's eyes only once, and that was--just--"

"Tell me just when you saw it."

The words came from Valentine's lips with a pressure, a hurry almost of

anxiety. He seemed curiously eager about the history of this chimera. But

Julian, eager too, and engrossed in thoughts that moved as yet in a maze

full of vapors and of mists, did not find time to notice it.

"I noticed it just after, or when, she was begging me to go home."

"Like a good boy," Valentine hastily interposed. "Because her jealousy

prompted her to hate the thought of your having any pleasure in which she

did not share. Oh, you noticed the flame then. Did it, too, tell you to

go home?"

He spoke rather harshly and flippantly, and apparently put the question

without desire of an answer, and rather with the intention of ridicule

than for any other reason. But Julian took it seriously and replied to

it.

"Somehow I felt as if, perhaps, it did wish to speak some message to me,

and that the message came, or might come, through her."

He spoke slowly, for indeed it was this action of words that was

beginning to make clear to himself his own impression, so vague and so

unpresentable before. As he thus traced it out, like a man following the

blurred letters of an old inscription with the point of his stick, and

gradually coming at their meaning, his excitement grew. He said, speaking

with a rising emphasis of conviction:

"I'm not a mere fool. There is--there is something in all this; I feel

it; I cannot be simply imagining. There is something. But I'm like a man

in the dark. I can't see what it is; I can't tell. But you, Valentine,

you, with your nature, so much better than I am, with so much deeper

an insight, how is it you don't see this flame? Unless,"--and here

Julian struck his hand violently on the table,--"unless it comes, as

it seemed to come that night in the darkness, from you. If it's part

of yourself--but then"--and his manner clouded again--"how can that be?"

"How indeed?" said Valentine, who had been watching him all through this

outburst with a scrutiny that seemed almost uneasy, so narrow and so

determined was it.

"Julian, listen to me; you trust me, don't you, and think my opinion

worth something?"

"Worth everything."

"Well, I believe you're getting into an unnatural, if you weren't a man

I should say a hysterical--habit of mind. If you can't throw it off by

yourself, I must help you to do so."

"Perhaps you're right. But how will you help me?"

Valentine seemed to think and consider for a moment. Then he exclaimed:

"I'll tell you. By making you join with me in putting this life, this

old life--new enough to both of us--through its paces. Why should each

of us do it alone? We are friends. We can trust one another. You know me

through and through. You know the--chilliness I'll call it--of my nature,

my natural bookishness--my bias towards contemning people too readily,

and avoiding what all men ought to know. And I know you. Without you I

believe I should never go any distance. Without me you might go too far.

Together we will strike the happy medium. For us life shall go through

all his paces, but he shall never lame us with a kick, like a vicious

horse, or give us a furtive bite when we're not looking. Men carry such

bites and kicks, the wounds from them, to their graves. We'll be more

careful. But we'll see the great play in all--all its acts. And, when

we've seen it, we'll be as we were, only we'll be no longer blind. And

we'll never forget our grand power of rejecting and refusing."

"Ah!" said Julian. "Perhaps I haven't that power."

"But I have."

"Yes, you have."

"And I'll share my power with you. We are friends and comrades. We ought

to share everything."

"Yes," exclaimed Julian, carried away. "Yes, by Jove, yes!"

"And as to this flame--"

"Ah!"

"We'll soon know if it's a vision or a reality. But it's a vision. You

saw it in a woman's eyes."

"I'll swear I did."

"Then that proves it's a fraud. The flame in a woman's eyes never burnt

true yet--never, Julian, since the days of Delilah."

CHAPTER V

JULIAN FEARS THE FLAME

Although Cuckoo knew well that Julian carried out his intention of going

home after he left her in Piccadilly, the fact of his being there, of his

making one of that crowd, that slowly-moving crowd, troubled her.

Valentine and Julian had argued the question of her real feeling about

the matter. Cuckoo did not argue it. She never deliberately thought to

herself, "I feel this or that. Why do I feel it?" She knew as much about

astronomy as introspection, and that was simply nothing at all. Instead

of diving into the depths of her mind and laboriously tracing every

labelled and tabulated subtlety to its source, she sat in the squalid

Marylebone Road sitting-room, with the folding doors open into the

bedroom to temper the heat of summer with draughts from the frigid zone

of the back area, and babbled her sensations to Jessie, who riggled in

response to every passing shadow that stole across the heart of her

mistress.

Jessie had learned much about Julian in these latter days. Into her

pricked and pointed ear, leaf-shaped and the hue of India-rubber, had

been whispered a strange tale of the dawning of love in a battered heart,

of the blossoming of respect in a warped mind. She had heard of the

meeting in Piccadilly, of the meal at the Monico, of the farewell on the

kerbstone. And she alone knew--or ought to have known--the mingling of

intense jealousy and of a grander feeling that burned in Cuckoo's breast

whenever she thought of Julian's life, the greater part of it that lay

beyond her knowledge, her sight, or keeping.

For the lady of the feathers, in most things a strange mixture, had never

driven two more contrasted passions in double harness than those which

she drove around the circle of which Julian was the core, the centre. One

was a passion of jealousy; the other a curious passion of protection.

Each backed up the other, urged it to its work. It would have been a hard

task, indeed, to tell at first which was the greater of the two. Cuckoo

neither knew nor cared. She did not even differentiate the two passions

or say to herself that there were two. That was not her way. She felt

quickly and strongly, and she acted on her feelings with the peculiar and

almost wild promptitude that such a life as hers seems to breed in

woman's nature. It is the French lady of the feathers who scatters

vitriol in the streets of Paris, the Italian or Spanish lady of the

feathers who snatches the dagger from her hair to stab an enemy. The wind

of Cuckoo's feelings blew her about like a dancing mote, and the feelings

awakened by Julian were the strongest her nature was capable of.

Only Jessie knew that at present, unless indeed Valentine had divined it,

as seemed possible from his words to Julian.

And these twin passions were fed full by the peculiar circumstances of

Cuckoo's relation to Julian, and by the depth of her knowledge concerning

a certain side of life.

She went home, that night of their meeting, very late, and in the

weariness of the morning succeeding it, and of many following mornings,

she began to brood over the change in Julian that she had intuitively

divined. Her street-woman's instinct could not be at fault with a boy.

For Julian was little more than a boy. She knew that when she first met

him, when they made toast together on the foggy afternoon that she could

never forget, Julian was unshadowed by the darkness that envelopes the

steps of so much human nature. Lively, bright, full of youth, strength,

energy, as he was, Cuckoo knew that then he had been free from the

bondage of sense which demands and obtains the sacrifice of so many lives

like hers. And she knew that now he was not free from that bondage, and

that she, by an irony of fate, had, with her own hands, fastened the

first fetter upon him.

Valentine had plotted that.

Cuckoo's belief said so; but surely her curious instinct against

Valentine must have tricked her here!

It was this knowledge of her unwilling action against Julian's peace that

first woke in her the strong protective feeling towards him, a feeling

almost akin to the maternal instinct. It was her strange love for him

that prompted the fiery antagonism against his relations with others that

could only be called jealousy. And though one of her passions was noble,

the other pitiable, they could but work together for the same end, aim at

a similar salvation.

Yet how could any salvation for a man come out of that dreary house in

the Marylebone Road, from that piteous rouged agent of the devil?

Cuckoo never stopped to ask such a question as that. She was a girl, and

she began to understand love. She had no time to stop. And each passing

day soon began to give fresh vitality to the vision of Julian's need.

Between him and her there had sprung up on the ruins of one night's folly

a tower of comradeship. Its foundations were not of sand. Even Cuckoo,

despite her ceaseless jealously, felt that. But, after all, she had only

come into his life as a desolate waif drifts into a settled community.

She was neither of his class, his understanding, or his education. She

was in the gutter; in the gutter to an extent that no man, as women feel

at present, can ever be. And though through her inspiration he had not to

come into the gutter to find her and to be with her, yet she sometimes

writhed with the thought that he was so far above her. Nevertheless, her

position never once tempted her, in the struggle that the future quickly

brought with it, to shrink from effort, to fail in fight, to despair in

endeavour for him.

There are flames that burn the dross from humanity and reveal the gold.

There are flames in the eyes and in the hearts of women.

* * * * *

Julian's visits to Cuckoo were irregular but fairly frequent. He always

came in the afternoon, an hour or two before the psychological moment of

her start out for the evening's duty. Sometimes he would take her out to

tea at a small Italian restaurant near Baker Street Station. More often

they would make tea together in the little sitting-room, with the

ecstatic assistance of Jessie. And Rip, Valentine's dog, generally made

one of the party. He and Jessie got on excellently together, and devoutly

shared the scraps that fell from the Marylebone Road table. The first

time that Julian brought Rip to number 400, Cuckoo fell in love with him.

"Why, you never said you had a dog," she exclaimed.

"Rip's not mine," Julian answered.

"Isn't he? Whose is he?"

"Valentine's."

"Then why d'you have him with you?" asked Cuckoo, suddenly and rather

roughly pushing away Rip, who was swirling in her lap like a whirlpool.

"Oh, he's taken a stupid dislike to Valentine," Julian answered

thoughtlessly. "He won't stay with him."

In a moment Cuckoo had caught the little dog back.

"That's funny," she said.

"Yes, isn't it?" said Julian.

Then, seeing her thoughtful gaze, and the odd way in which she suddenly

caressed the dog, he was angry with himself for having told her anything

about the matter.

"Rip's a little fool," he said. "Perhaps Jessie will take a dislike to

you some day, Cuckoo."

"Not she, never!" said Cuckoo, with conviction. And, after that, she

could never spoil Rip enough.

These visits and teas ought to have been pleasant functions, bright

oases in the desert of Cuckoo's life, but a cloud fell over them at

the beginning and deepened as the days went by. For Cuckoo, with her

sharpness of the _gamin_ and her quick instinct of the London streets,

was perpetually watching for and noting the signs in Julian's face,

manner, or language, that fed those two passions of jealousy and of

protection within her. And, at first, she allowed Julian to see what

she was doing.

One day, as they sat at the table in the middle of the room, Julian said

to her:

"I say, Cuckoo, why d'you look at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Why d'you stare at me? Anything wrong?"

"I wasn't staring at you," she asserted. "The sun gets in my eyes if I

look the other way."

"I'll draw the blind down," he said.

He got up from the table and shut the afternoon sun out. The tea-tray,

the photographs, the little dogs, they two, were plunged in a greenish

twilight manufactured by the sun with the assistance of the Venetian

blind.

"There," Julian said, sitting down again, "now we shall all look

ghostly."

"But if I do take a fancy to look at you, why shouldn't I, then?" Cuckoo

asked.

"I don't mind," he laughed. "But you didn't seem pleased with me, I

thought."

"Rot!"

"Oh! you were pleased, then?"

"I don't say as I was, or wasn't."

"You're rather like the Sphinx."

"What's that?"

"Enigmatic."

She didn't understand, and looked rather cross.

"I told you I wasn't looking at you," she exclaimed pettishly.

"Then you told a lie," Julian said, with supreme gravity. "Think of that,

Cuckoo."

"And what would you ever tell me but lies if I was to ask you things?"

she rejoined quickly.

Julian began to see that there was something lurking in the background

behind her show of temper. He wondered what on earth it was.

"Why should I tell you lies?" he said.

"Oh! to kid me. Men like that. You're just like the rest, I suppose."

"I suppose so."

She seemed vexed at his assent, and went on:

"Now, aren't you, though?"

"I say, yes."

"Well, you usen't to be," she exclaimed, with actual bitterness of

accent and of look. "That's just why I was lookin' at you,--for I was

lookin',--makin' out the difference."

"I'm just the same as I was," Julian said, and he spoke with quite

sincere conviction.

"No, you ain't."

Having uttered this very direct contradiction, Cuckoo proceeded with

great energy:

"You've been lettin' him do it. I know you have."

Julian was completely puzzled.

"What do you mean?" he asked, with a real desire for information.

"You know well enough. He's leadin' you wrong."

Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in

his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been

doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second,

Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to

Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would

get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once

told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had

been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him

peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during

the interval.

"Cuckoo, you're talking great nonsense," he said, forcing himself to

speak quietly.

But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned

from the subject or silenced.

"No, I ain't," she said. "Where was you last week? You didn't come in

once."

"I was in Paris."

Cuckoo's brow clouded still more. Her knowledge of Paris was not

intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of

men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of

geographical or artistic. Julian's mention of the French capital drove a

sword into her.

"With him?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, with Valentine."

"Oh, what did you do there?"

She spoke with angry insistence, and Julian could not help thinking of

Valentine's remark, "That girl loves you." It seemed indeed that Cuckoo

must have some deep and wholly personal reason prompting her to this

strange demonstration of vexation.

"I can't tell you everything," Julian answered.

"Oh, you can't kid me over that. I know well enough what men go to Paris

for!" she rejoined, with almost hysterical bitterness.

Julian was silent. It was curious, but this girl stirred his conscience

from its sleep, as once Valentine alone could stir it. But by how

different a method! The stillness and calm of one who was sinless were

replaced by the vehemence and the passion of one who was steeped in sin.

And yet the two opposites had, to some extent, the same effect. Julian

did not yet realize this thoroughly, and did not analyze it at all. Had

any one hinted to him that the waning influence of Valentine for good

could ever be balanced by the waxing influence of the lady of the

feathers, he would have laughed at the crazy notion. And in the first

place he would have denied that Valentine's spell upon him had changed in

nature; for Valentine was still as a god to him. And Cuckoo could never

be a goddess, either to him or to any one else. But, though he would

scarcely acknowledge it even to himself, he did not care for Cuckoo to

know fully the changing way of his life. Perhaps it was the curiously

strong line she had from the first taken with regard to his actions that

made him careful with her. Perhaps it was the incident of the vision of

the flame--but no; remembrance of that had been well-nigh lulled to sleep

by the lullabies of Valentine, by his disregard of it, his certainty that

it was an hallucination, a mirage. Whatever the cause might be, Julian

felt somewhat like a naughty boy in the angry presence of Cuckoo. As he

looked at her the greenish twilight painted a chill and menacing gleam in

her eyes, and made her twisting lips venomous and acrid to his glance.

Her rouge vanished in the twilight, or seemed only as a dull, darkish

cloud upon her thin and worn cheeks. She sat at the table almost like a

scarecrow, giving the tables of some strange law to a trembling and an

unwilling votary.

"I know!" she reiterated.

Julian said nothing. He did not choose to deny what was in fact the

truth, that his stay in Paris had not been free from fault, and yet he

did not feel inclined to do what most men in his situation must by all

means have done, challenge Cuckoo's right to sit in judgment, or even for

a moment to criticise any action of his. There was something about her, a

frankness perhaps, which made it impossible to put her out of court by

any allusion to her own life. And indeed that must have been cowardice

and an impossibility. Besides, she put herself and her own deeds calmly

away as unworthy and impossible of discussion, as things sunk down

beneath the wave of notice or comment, remote from criticism or

condemnation, because the life of their hopelessness had been so long

and sunless.

Cuckoo, with her eyes on Julian, was silent, too, now. She understood

that what her suspicion had affirmed, without actually knowing, was true,

and her stormy heart was swept by a whirlwind of jealousy, and of

womanish pity for the man she was jealous of. In that moment she felt

a sickness of life more sharp than she had ever felt before, and a dull

longing to be a different woman, a woman of Julian's class, and clever,

that she might be able to do something to keep him from sinking to the

level of the men she hated.

How could she, in her nakedness of permanent degradation, give a helping

hand to anybody? That was a clear rendering of the vague thought, vague

as this twilight in which they sat, that ran through her mind. Suddenly

she turned to the tray and poured herself out a cup of tea. The tea had

been standing while they talked, and was black and strong. She drank it

eagerly, and a wave of nervous energy rushed over her, surging up to her

brain like light and electricity. It gave to her a sort of reckless

valour to say just the thing she felt. She turned towards Julian with a

manner that was half shrew, half wildcat--street girls cannot always

compass the impressive, though they may feel the great eternities

nestling round their hearts--and cried out:

"I just hate you!"

All her jealousy rang in that cry, smothering the whisper of the maternal

passion that went ever with it. Julian could no longer doubt the truth of

Valentine's words.

"Cuckoo, don't be silly," he said hastily, and awkwardly enough.

"Silly!" she burst out. "What do I care for that? I ain't silly, either,

and I ain't blind like you are. I can see where you're goin'."

"I shall go away from here," Julian said, trying to laugh, "if you talk

in this ridiculous way."

She sprang up and ran passionately in front of the door, as if she

thought he was really going to escape.

"No, you don't," she said, and her accent seemed to draw near to that of

Whitechapel as her voice rose higher. "Not till I've said what I mean."

"Hush, Cuckoo! We shall have Mrs. Brigg up, thinking I'm murdering you."

"Let her come! And you are, that's what you are, murderin' me, and worse,

seein' you go where you're goin'. He's takin' you. It's all him. Yes, it

is! He'll make you as he is."

"Cuckoo, I won't have it."

Julian spoke sternly and got up. The little dogs, alarmed by the tumult,

had begun to whine uneasily, and at his movement Jessie barked in a thin

voice. Julian went to Cuckoo, took her wrists in his two hands, and drew

her away from the door; but she tore herself from his grasp with fury,

for the touch of his hands gave a clearer vision to her jealousy of his

secret deeds, and made her understand better the depth of her present

feeling.

"You shall have it," she cried. "You shall. I know men. I know what

you'll be. I know what women'll make of you."

"A man makes himself," Julian interrupted.

"Rot! That's all you know about it. I've seen them begin so nice and go

right down, like a stone in a well. And they never come up again. Not

they. No more'll you. D'you hear that?"

"I shall hear you better if you speak lower."

Cuckoo suddenly changed from a sort of frenzy to a violent calm.

"You're different already," she said. "Can't I see it?"

As if to emphasize her remark she approached her face quite close to his

in the twilight. While they had been arguing a cloud had passed over the

sun, and dimness increased in the little room. Both of them were still

standing up, and now Cuckoo peered into Julian's eyes with almost hungry

scrutiny. Her lips were still trembling with excitement and her mouth was

contorted into a sideways grin, expressive of contemptuous knowledge

of the descent of Julian's nature. She was a mere mask of passion, no

doubt a ridiculous object enough, touzled, dishevelled and shaken with

temper, as she leaned forward to get a better view of him. And Julian

was both vexed and disgusted by her outbreak, and sick of a scene which,

like all men, he ardently hated and would have given much to avoid. He

faced her coldly, endeavouring to calm her by banishing every trace of

excitement from his expression.

And then, in the twilight of the dingy room, and in the twilight of her

eyes, he saw the flame once more. A thin glint of sunshine found its way

in from the street, and threw a shadow near them. Cuckoo's eyes emitted

a greenish ray like a cat's, and in this ray the flame swam and

flickered, cold and pale, and, Julian fancied, menacing.

Perhaps, because he was already irritated and slightly strung up by

Cuckoo's attack, he felt a sudden anger against the flame, almost as he

might have felt a rage against a person. As he stared upon it, he could

almost believe that it, too, had eyes, scrutinizing, upbraiding,

condemning him, and that in the thin riband and shade of its fire there

dwelt a heart to hate him for the dear sin to which, at last, he began to

give himself. For the moment Cuckoo and the flame were as one, and for

the moment he feared and hated them both.

Abruptly he held up his hand to stop the further words that were

fluttering on her thin and painted lips.

"Hush!" he said, in a little hiss of protest against sound.

For again, fighting with the anger, there was awe in his heart.

There was something unusual in his expression which held her silent, a

furtive horror and expectation which she did not understand. And while

she waited, Julian turned suddenly, and left the room and the house.

CHAPTER VI

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS LEARNS WISDOM

Julian did not come again to the house in the Marylebone Road for at

least a fortnight, and during that time the lady of the feathers was left

alone with her life and with her sad thoughts. The summer days went

heavily by, and the sultry summer nights. No rain fell, and London was

veiled in dust. The pavements were so hot that they burned the feet that

trod them. Sometimes they seemed to burn Cuckoo's very soul, and to sear

her heart as she stood upon them for hours in the night, while the crowds

of Piccadilly flitted by like shadows in an evil dream. She stared

mechanically at the faces of those passing as she strolled with a lagging

footstep along the line of houses. She turned to meet the eyes of the

pale-faced loungers in the lighted entrance of the St. James's

restaurant, "Jimmy's," as she called it. But her mind was preoccupied. A

problem had fastened upon it with the tenacity of some vampire or strange

clinging creature of night. Cuckoo was wrestling with an angel; or was it

a devil? And often, when she stopped on the pavement and exchanged a word

or two with some casual stranger, she scarcely knew what she said, or to

what kind of man she was speaking. She was possessed by one thought, the

thought of Julian and of his danger. Valentine, in her thoughts, was

strangely a pale shadow, incredibly evil, incredibly persistent, luring

Julian downwards, beckoning him with the thin hand of a saint to depths

unpierced by the gaze of even the most sinful. And that hand of the saint

was only part of the appalling deception of his beautiful and tragically

lying body, a crystal temple in which a demon dwelt secretly, peering

from its concealment through the shadowy blue windows, in which Julian

saw truth and honour, but in which Cuckoo read things to terrify and to

dismay.

For she was not wholly unaware of the mystery of Valentine, of the sharp

contrast between his appearance and the vision of his nature as it came

to her. She understood that there was something in the fine beauty of

his face and figure to account for Julian's blindness and refusal to be

warned against him. Cuckoo's intuition, the intuition of an unlearned and

instinctive creature trained by the hardest circumstances to rely on what

she called her wits, laid the crystal temple in ruins, and drove the

demon from its lurking-place naked and shrieking into the open. But,

after all, was not she rather deceived than Julian? Julian, from the

first moment of meeting Valentine, looked upon him as saint. Cuckoo,

from the first moment of meeting, looked upon him as devil. Each put

him aside from the general run of humanity, the one in a heaven of the

imagination, the other in a hell. Neither would allow him to be midway

between the two, containing possibilities of both,--ordinary, natural

man. Julian angrily scouted the notion of Valentine's being like other

men. Cuckoo felt instinctively that he was not. And so they glorified

and cursed him.

Cuckoo had at first cursed him plainly in the market-place and upon the

house-top. But that was before she had learned wisdom. Slowly she learnt

it on these hot days and nights, when the London dust filtered over the

paint upon her cheeks and lips, clung round the shadows in the hollows

beneath her eyes, and slept in the artificial primrose of her elaborate

cloud of hair. Slowly she learnt it in many vague and struggling mental

arguments, in which logic was a dwarf and passion a giant, in which

instinct strangled reason, and love wandered as a shamefaced fairy with

tear-dimmed eyes.

Julian's prolonged absence and silence first taught the lady of the

feathers the slow necessity of wisdom, otherwise, perhaps, her vehement

ignorance could never have absorbed the precious thing. Women of her

training and vile experience, nerve-ridden, and clothed in hysteria as

in a garment, often think to gain what they want by the mere shrillness

of outcry, the mere grabbing of ostentatious, eager hands and frenzy of

body. Their lives lead them through a wonder of knowledge and of danger

to the demeanour of babyhood, and they cry for every rattle, much more

for every moon. So Cuckoo had thrown her feelings down before Julian.

She had dashed her hatred of Valentine in his face; she had cried her

fears of his downfall to that which she consorted with eternally and

loathed--when she had still the energy to loathe it, which was not

always--in his ears with the ardent shrillness of a boatswain's whistle.

She had, in fact, done all that her instinct prompted her to do, and the

result was the exit of Julian from her life. This set her, always in her

sharp and yet childish way, sometimes oddly clear sighted, often muddled

and distressed, to turn upon instinct with a contempt not known before,

to discard it with the fury still of a child. And instinct thus forsaken

by an essentially instinctive creature opened the gates of distress and

of confusion.

By day Cuckoo sat in her stuffy little parlour brooding wearily. She

waited in day after day, always hoping that Julian would return, full of

resolutions, prompted by fear, to be gentle, even lively, to him when he

did come, full of excited intention which could not be fulfilled; for he

did not come. And by night, while she tramped the streets, still Cuckoo's

anxious mind revolved the question of her behaviour in the future. For

she would not, passionately would not, allow herself to contemplate the

possibility that Julian's anger against her would keep him forever

beyond reach either of her fury or of her tenderness. She insisted on

contemplating his ultimate reappearance, and her wits were at work to

devise means to win him from Valentine's influence without stirring his

horror at any thought of disloyalty to his friend. Cuckoo, in fact,

wanted to be subtle, intended to be subtle, and sought intensely the

right way of subtlety. She sought it as she walked, as she hovered at

street corners in the night, while the hours ran by, sometimes till the

streets were nearly deserted, sometimes even till the dawn sang in the

sky to the wail of the hungry woman beneath it. She sought it even in the

company of those strangers who stepped for a night into her life as into

a public room, and stepped from it on the morrow with a careless and

everlasting adieu, half-drowned in the chink of money.

And sometimes she thought, with a sick dreariness, that she would never

find it, and sometimes courage failed her, and, despite her passionate

resolution, she did for a moment say to herself, "If he should never come

again." There were moments, too, when every other feeling was drowned by

sheer jealousy of Julian, when the tiger-cat woke in this street-girl who

had always had to fight, when her thin frame shivered with the shaking

violence of the soul it held. Then she clenched her hands, and longed to

plant her nails in the faces of those other women, divined, though never

seen,--those French women who had sung him, like sirens, to Paris, away

from the sea of her greedy love. Her similes were commonplace. In her

heart she called such sirens hussies. Had she met them the battle of

words would have been strong and singularly unclean. That she herself was

a hussy to other men, not to Julian, did not trouble her. She did not

realize it. Human nature has always one blind eye, even when the other

does not squint. This passion of jealousy, circling round an absent man,

seized her at the strangest, the most inopportune moments. Sometimes it

came upon her in the street, and the meditation of it was so vital and

complete that Cuckoo could not go on walking, lest she should, by

movement, miss the keenest edge of the agony. Then she would stop

wherever she was, lean against the down-drawn shutter of a shop, or the

corner of a public house, among the gaping loungers, let her powdered

chin drop upon her breast, and sink into a fit of desperate detective

duty, during which she followed Julian like a shadow through imagined

wanderings, and watched him committing all those imagined actions that

could cause her to feel the wildest and most inhuman despair.

One night, when she was thus sunk and swallowed up in the maw of

miserable inward contemplation, a young man, who was walking by, observed

her. He was very young and eager, fresh from Cambridge, ardent after the

mysteries and the subtleties of life, as is the fashion of clever modern

youth. The sight of this painted girl leaning, motionless as some doll or

puppet, against the iron shutters of the vacant house, her head drooped,

and her hands, as if the strings to manipulate her had fallen loose from

the grasp that guided them, caught and eventually fascinated him. It was

a late hour of night. He passed on and returned, shooting each time a

devouring, analytical glance upon Cuckoo. Again he came back, walking a

little nearer to the houses. His heart beat quicker as he approached the

puppet. Its complete immobility was almost appalling, and each time he

came within view of it he examined it violently to see if a limb was

displaced. No; one might almost suppose that it was the body of some one

struck dead so suddenly against the shop that she had not had time to

fall, and so remained leaning thus. With shorter and shorter revolutions,

like a dog working itself up to approach some motionless but strange

object, the youth went by Cuckoo, hesitating more and more each time he

came in front of her with strange feelings of one being vaguely criminal.

He longed to touch the puppet, to see if any quiver would convulse its

limbs, any light flicker into its eyes. And he was so fascinated and

interested that at last he did furtively stop precisely in front of it.

For a second both of them were motionless, he from contemplation of the

outward, she of the inward. Then Cuckoo's thoughtful jealousy came to a

ghastly crisis. Her imagination had shown her frightful things and

herself an utterly helpless and compelled spectator. The puppet opened

its red lips to utter a sob, lifted up its white and heavy eyelids to let

loose tears upon its unnaturally bright cheeks, stirred its hanging hands

to clasp them in a crude gesture of dull fury. The youth started as at a

corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like

a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding

her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of

coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration

rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away

in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome

of all the horrors of cruel London.

And Cuckoo, thus roused and deserted, put aside for the moment her

nightmare, and started once more upon her promenade of the night.

At last she began to fear that Julian would never come back, and by a

sudden impulse she wrote to him a short, very ill-spelt letter, hoping he

would come to tea with her on a certain afternoon. On the day mentioned

she waited in an agony of expectation. She had put on his black dress,

removed all traces of paint and powder from her face, remembering his

former request and her experiment, tricked Jessie out in a bright yellow

satin riband twisted into a bow almost larger than herself, and bought

flowers--large ones, sunflowers--to give to her dingy room an air of

refinement and of gaiety. Amid all this brilliancy of yellow satin and

yellow flowers she waited uneasily in her simple black gown. The day was

dull, not wet, but brooding and severe, iron-grey, like a hard-featured

Puritan, and still with the angry peace of coming thunder. The window was

open to let in air, but no air seemed to enter, only the weariful and

incessant street noises. Jessie wriggled about, biting sideways with

animation to get at her yellow adornment, and pattering around the

furniture seeking stray crumbs, which sometimes eluded her for a while

and, lying in hidden nooks and corners, unexpectedly rewarded her

desultory and impromptu search. Cuckoo leaned her arms across the table,

glanced at the tea things for two, and listened. A cab stopped presently.

She twisted in her chair to face the window. It had drawn up next door,

and she subsided again into her fever of attention. Jessie found a crumb

and swallowed it with as much action and large air of tasting it as if it

had been a city dinner. The hands of the clock drew to the hour named in

Cuckoo's note, touched it, passed it. A sickness of despair began to

creep upon her like a thousand little biting insects. She shuffled in her

seat, glanced this way and that, pressed her lips together, and, taking

her arms from the table, clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Then she

sat straight up and counted the tickings of the clock, the spots on the

tablecloth, the gold stars upon the wallpaper of the room. She counted

and counted until her head began to swim. And all the time she waited,

the lady of the feathers was learning wisdom. The lesson was harsh, as

the lessons of time usually are; the lesson was bitter as Marah waters.

And she thought the lesson was going to be a cross too heavy for her

narrow shoulders to bear when the iron gate of the garden sang its

invariable little note of protest on being opened. Cuckoo's head turned

slowly to one side. Her haggard eyes swept the view of the path. Julian

was walking up it.

She met him very quietly, almost seriously, and he shook hands with

her as if they had been together quite recently and parted the best of

friends. Only, as he held her hand, she noticed that he cast a hasty, and

as she fancied a fearful, glance into her eyes. Then he seemed reassured

and they sat down to tea. Cuckoo supposed that he had for the moment

dreaded what she called another row, and was satisfied by her expression

of good temper. They drank their tea, and after a short interval of

constraint began chattering together very much as usual. At first Cuckoo

had hardly dared to look much at Julian, lest he should see the joy she

felt at his coming, but when she was pouring out his second cup she let

her eyes rest fully on his face, and only then did she realize that a

shadow lay upon it, a shadow from which it had been free before.

With a trembling hand she filled the cup and stared upon the shadow.

She knew its brethren so well. In dead days she herself had helped to

manufacture such shadows upon the faces of men. She had seen them come,

thin, faint, delicate, impalpable as a veil of mist before morning. Only

morning light never followed them. And she had seen them stay and grow

and deepen and darken. Shadow over the eyes of the man, shadow round his

lips, shadow like a cloud upon the forehead, shadow over the picture

painted by the soul, working through the features, that we call

expression. Many times had she seen the journey taken by a man's face

to that haunted bourne, arrived at which it is scarcely any more a man's

face, but only a mask expressive of one, or of many, sins. Had Julian

then definitely set foot upon that journey? As yet the shadow that lay

over him was no more than the lightest film, suggestive of a slightly

unnatural and forbidding fatigue. Yet Cuckoo shrank from it as from a

ghost.

"Why, Cuckoo, your hand is trembling!" Julian said.

"Oh, I was out late last night," she answered, putting the teapot hastily

down. And they talked on, pretending there were only two of them and no

shadowy third.

Julian, having returned at last to the Marylebone Road, fell into his

old habit of coming there often. And each time that he came the lady of

the feathers counted a fresh step on his hideous journey towards the

haunted bourne. Yet she never spoke of the dreary addition sum she was

doing. She never reproached Julian, or wept, or let him see that her

heart was growing cold as a pilgrim who kneels, bare, in long prayers

upon the steps of a shrine. For she had learnt wisdom, and hugged it in

her arms. Valentine was scarcely ever mentioned between them; but once,

and evidently by accident, Julian allowed an expression to escape him

which implied that Valentine now objected to the intimacy with Cuckoo.

Immediately the words were uttered, Julian looked confused, and obviously

would have wished to recall them, had it been possible.

"Oh, I know as he don't like me," Cuckoo said.

Julian answered nothing.

"Why d'you come, then?" she continued, with a certain desperation. "There

ain't nothin' here to bring you. I know that well enough."

She cast a comprehensive glance round over the badly furnished room.

"Nothin' at all," she added with a sigh.

While she spoke Julian began to wonder, too, why he came, why he liked

to come there. As Cuckoo said, there was nothing at all to bring him so

often. He liked her, he was sorry for her, he had even a deep-running

sympathy for her, but he did not love her. Yet he was fascinated to come

to her, and there were sometimes moments when he seemed taken possession

of, led by the hand, to that squalid room and that squalid presence in

it. Why was that? What led him? He could not tell.

"I like coming here," he said; "and of course it's nothing to Valentine

where I go."

Cuckoo glanced up hastily at the words. A little serpent enmity surely

hissed in them. Julian spoke as if he were a man with some rebel feeling

at his heart. But the serpent glided and was gone as he added:

"I'm always with him when I'm not with you, for I haven't seen the doctor

for ages."

"The doctor! Who's that, then," asked Cuckoo.

"Doctor Levillier. Surely you've heard me talk about him."

"No, dearie."

"Oh, he's a nerve-doctor, and a sort of little saint, lives for his work,

and is a deuced religious chap, never does anything, you know."

Julian looked at her.

"Oh," she said.

"And believes in everything. He's a dear little chap, the kindest heart

in the world, good to every one, no matter who it is. He's devoted to

Valentine."

"Eh?" said Cuckoo, with a long-drawn intonation of astonishment.

"I say he's devoted to Valentine," Julian repeated rather irritably. His

temper was much less certain and sunny lately than of old. "But I believe

he's devoted to every one he can do any good to. We used to see him

continually, but he's been abroad for weeks, looking after a bad case, a

Russian Grand Duke in Italy, who would have him, and pays him all the

fees he'd be getting in London. He'll be coming back directly, I think."

"Where does he live?" said Cuckoo, ever so carelessly.

Julian gave the number in Harley Street rather abstractedly. Their

conversation had led him to think of the little doctor. Would he be glad

to see him again? And would Valentine? He tried to realize, and presently

understood, and had a moment of shame at his own feeling. Soon afterwards

he went away. That night, before she went to Piccadilly, Cuckoo walked

round to Harley Street. She wandered slowly down the long thoroughfare

and presently came to the doctor's house. There was a brass plate upon

the door. The light from a gas lamp, just lit, flickered upon it, and

Cuckoo, stopping, bent downwards and slowly read the printed name,

"Doctor Levillier." Did it look a nice name, a kind name? She considered

that question childishly, standing there alone. Then, without making up

her mind on the subject, she turned to go. As she did so she saw the tall

figure of a man motionless under the gas-lamp on the other side of the

street. He was evidently regarding her, and Cuckoo felt a sudden thrill

of terror as she recognized Valentine. They stood still on the two

pavements for a minute, looking across at one another. Cuckoo could only

see Valentine's face faintly, but she fancied it was angry and distorted,

and her terror grew. She hesitated what to do, when he made what seemed

to her a threatening gesture, and walked quickly away down the street.

CHAPTER VII

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS BUCKLES ON HER ARMOUR

That evening Cuckoo remained in a condition of mingled terror and

resolution. There was something about Valentine that filled her, not

merely with alarm, but with a nameless horror, indescribable and

inveterate. She felt that he was her deadly enemy and the enemy of

Julian. But he had cast such a spell over Julian that the latter was

blinded and ready to follow him anywhere, and not merely to follow him,

but to defend every step he took. Cuckoo had a sense of entering upon a

combat with Valentine. As she stood upon the doorstep in Harley Street

and faced him under the gas-lamp, were they not as antagonists definitely

crossing swords for the first time? It seemed so to her. And the

impression upon her was so strong and so exciting, that for once she

broke through her invariable routine. Instead of going to Piccadilly she

went home to her lodgings. It was about half-past nine when she arrived

and opened the door with her latchkey. Mrs. Brigg happened to be in the

passage _en route_ to the kitchen from some business in the upper

regions. She stared upon Cuckoo with amazement.

"What ever," she began, her voice croaky with interrogation. "Are you

ill? What are you back for?"

"I'm all right," said Cuckoo crossly. "Leave me alone, do."

She turned into her sitting-room. Mrs. Brigg followed, open-mouthed.

"Ain't you a-goin' out ag'in?"

"No; oh do leave off starin'. What's the matter with you?"

Mrs. Brigg heaved a thick sigh and shuffled round upon her heels, which

made a noise upon the oilcloth like the boots of the comic man at a

music-hall.

"Well," she said with a sudden grimness, "I hope it'll be all right about

the rent, that's all."

She vanished, shaking her head, on which a stray curl-paper, bereft of

its comrades of the morning, sat unique in a thin forest of iron-grey

wisps.

Cuckoo shut her door and sat down to think. But at first she had to

receive the attentions of Jessie, who was even more surprised than Mrs.

Brigg at her unexpected return, and who began to bark with shrill joy

and run violently round the room with the speed of a rat emancipated from

a cage. As she would not consent to repose herself again, Cuckoo at last

put her into the next room, on the bed, and shut the door on her. Then

she returned, lit all the three gas-burners and turned them full on,

before she removed her hat, and definitely settled herself in for the

evening. She was fearful, and dreaded darkness, or even twilight. The

pulse of London beat round her while she stretched herself on the hard

sofa, let down her touzled yellow hair, and frowned slowly as the

unlearned do when they know that they want to meditate.

Now and then she rose suddenly on her elbow, half turned her head towards

the window and listened. She had thought she heard a step on the pavement

pause, and the cry of the little iron gate. Then, reassured, she leaned

back once more. She had taken off her boots, and her feet, in black

stockings gone a little white at the toes, were tilted up on the shoulder

of the sofa. She fixed her eyes mechanically upon them while she began,

all-confusedly, and with the blurred vagueness of the illiterate, to plan

out a campaign. Not that she said that word to herself; she did not know

its meaning. All that she knew was, that she wanted to put her back

against the wall, or get into an angle, like a cornered animal, and use

her teeth and claws against Valentine, that menacing figure with an

angel's face. And what disgusted and drove Cuckoo almost mad as she

lay there in the crude gaslight was the abominable fact that she was

desperately afraid of Valentine. There was something about him which

filled her not only with intense horror, but with something worse than

horror,--intense fear. Why, she had all three gas-burners alight because,

having met him that night and seen him watching her, she trembled at the

faintest shadow and must see things plainly, lest their dim outlines

should appal her fancy by taking his form.

Only once had the lady of the feathers known such enfeebling terror as

this, on the night when she fled from the hotel in the Euston Road and

left Marr dying on the bed between the tall windows. More than once,

in her thoughts, had she loosely linked Marr with Valentine, puzzled,

scarcely knowing why she did so. And, she repeated the mental operation

now more definitely. They had at least one thing in common, this

extraordinary power of striking fear into her soul. And Cuckoo was

not accustomed to sit with fear. Her life had bred in her a strong,

tough-fibred restlessness. She was essentially a careless creature, ready

to argue, quarrel, hold her own with anybody, proud, as a rule, of being

a match for any man and well able to take care of herself. She had

knocked about, and was utterly familiar with many horrors of the streets,

and of nameless houses. She had heard many rows at night; had been in

brawls; had been waked, in the dense hours, by sudden sharp cries for

help; was accustomed to be alone with strangers, men of unknown history,

of unknown deeds. And all these circumstances she met with absolute

carelessness, with a devil-may-care laugh, or the sigh of one weary, but

not afraid. She was no more timid than the average English street-boy.

Only these two men, one dead, one alive, knew how to dress her in terror

from head to foot, brain, heart, and body. And so she joined them in a

ghastly brotherhood.

But to-night she was making a conscious effort against the domination of

Valentine, for the awakening of fear in her was counterbalanced by other

feelings prompting her to fight. And once Cuckoo began to fight she felt

that she would not lack courage. For she clung to action, and hated

thought, walking clearly in the one, but through a maze in the other.

Despite her fear of him, something drove her to fight Valentine; only she

did not know how to fight him. It was in a mood of doubt that she had

wandered into Harley Street and bent to read the name on the door of

Dr. Levillier. Julian's description of the doctor had appealed to her.

The mention of his goodness, of his pure life, of his care for others,

had impressed her, she scarcely knew why, and brought into her mind a

desire to see this little man. Yet he was devoted to Valentine. And then

Cuckoo, lying back on the sofa, felt heart-sick, wondering at the power

of this man whom she hated and feared, wondering how she could ever fight

against his influence over Julian; wondering, too, a little, why it was

that she knew she must and certainly would fight it. For beyond the

motive power of her love and jealousy, beyond the ordinary woman's desire

to keep the man she admired from sinking to the level of the men she

despised, there was another fiery and strong and urging insistent

influence working upon her, working within her, crying to her, like a

voice, to buckle on her armour and to do battle with the enemy. This

influence came silently from without, and spoke to the lady of the

feathers when she was alone, and never more clearly and powerfully than

to-night. It wrestled with her terror of Valentine, and told her to put

it away, to come into closer relations with him fearlessly, not to flee

from him, but rather to watch him, dog him, learn what he was and what

he was doing or trying to do. Yet fear fought this growing, stirring,

strange warm influence that burned like a fire at Cuckoo's heart. She

flushed and she paled as she lay there, with down-drawn brows and enlaced

hands, her yellow hair falling over the hard, shiny horsehair of the

sofa. She longed for some one to come to her who would give her counsel,

help, courage, that she might fight for Julian, who was too spell-bound

to fight for himself, and who was falling so fast, so terribly fast,

into the abyss where men crawl like insects and women are as poisonous

weeds in the slime of the pit.

Oh, for some one!

Involuntarily she sat up and extended her thin arms almost as if in a

beckoning gesture.

As she did so the front door bell rang.

Cuckoo was startled and felt as if it rang for her. But that was

unlikely; and there were other lodgers of her kind in the house. No

doubt it was a visitor for one of them.

Mrs. Brigg went in weary procession along the passage and opened the

door. A few words were indistinctly spoken in a man's voice. Then the

street door shut, and almost simultaneously the door of Cuckoo's

sitting-room opened very quietly and Valentine entered.

CHAPTER VIII

VALENTINE EXPOUNDS THE GOSPEL OF INFLUENCE TO THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Valentine closed the door behind him and stood by it, looking at Cuckoo

gravely. She had pushed herself up on the sofa, using her elbows as a

lever, and in an awkward attitude, half sitting, half lying down, stared

at him with startled eyes. Her unshod feet were drawn in towards her

body, and her dyed hair hung in a thick tangle round her face and on her

shoulders. She said nothing.

Valentine put his hat down on the table and began to take off his gloves.

"I am glad to find you at home," he said politely.

Cuckoo shifted a little farther back on the sofa. Now that she was

actually shut up alone with Valentine, fear returned upon her and

banished every other feeling, every desire except the desire to be

away from him. She ran her tongue over her lips, which had suddenly

become dry.

"What are you come for?" she asked, never taking her eyes from his.

"To see you. I have never yet returned your kind call upon me."

"Eh?"

Cuckoo spoke in the tone of one who had become deaf, and she felt as if

the agitation of her mind actually clamoured within her like a crowd of

human voices, deadening sounds from without. Valentine repeated his

remark, adding:

"Won't you ask me to sit down?"

He put his hand on the back of a chair.

"May I?"

Cuckoo gave her body a jerk which brought her feet down to the floor, so

that she was sitting upright. She pushed out one of her hands as if in

protest.

"You can't sit here," she murmured.

"I? Why not?"

"I can't have you here, nor I won't either."

Her voice was growing louder and fiercer as the first paralysis of

surprise died gradually away from her. After all, she had not buckled

on her armour only to run away from the enemy in it. The street Arab

impudence was not quite killed in her by the strange influence of this

man. The mere fact of having her feet firmly planted upon the floor gave

Cuckoo a certain fillip of courage, and she tossed her head with that old

vulgar gesture of hers which suggested the harridan. She pointed to the

door.

"Out you go!" she cried.

For her intrepidity had not risen to calm contemplation of an interview.

She was only bracing herself up to the necessary momentary endurance of

his presence, which followed upon Mrs. Brigg's admittance of him within

the door.

Valentine heard the gentle hint unmoved, and replied to it by drawing

a chair out from the table and sitting down upon it. A sort of rage,

stirred by terror, ran over Cuckoo. She seized the back of his chair

with both hands and shook it violently.

"No, you don't stay," she ejaculated; "I won't have it!"

It was characteristic of her to lose all sense of dignity at an instant,

when dignity might have served her purpose. Her outburst might have been

directed against a statue. Valentine neither moved nor looked in any way

affected. Glancing at Cuckoo with a whimsical amusement, he said:

"What a child you are! When will you learn wisdom!"

Cuckoo took away her hands. A conviction pierced her that the weapons a

woman may use with effect against an ordinary man could be of no service

now, and with this man. She faded abruptly from anger and violence into

fatigue, always closely accompanied by fear.

"I'm awfully tired to-night," she said. "Please do go! I'm home because

I'm tired."

"The walk from Harley Street was too much for you. You shouldn't make

such exertions."

For the first time a sinister note rang in his voice.

"I shall go where I like," Cuckoo answered, and this time with some real

sturdiness of manner. "It ain't nothin' to you where I go, nor what I

do."

"How can you tell that?"

She laid her chin in the upturned palms of her two hands, planting her

elbows on her knees.

"How can it be?" she said. "I'm nothin' to you, nor I ain't going to be

either."

"That's what you say."

"And it's God's truth too!" she cried again with violence, as the sense

of Valentine's inflexible power grew in her.

"I'm going to smoke if you will allow me," Valentine said.

Slowly he drew out and lit a cigarette, Cuckoo neither refusing nor

permitting it. With protruding lips he threw the light smoke round him.

Then speaking through it he said:

"Tell me why you go to Harley Street."

"I ain't goin' to talk to you."

"Tell me why. It lies out of your beat; it's a respectable thoroughfare."

The words were said to sting. Cuckoo let them go by. She had been stung

too often, and repetition of cruelty sometimes kills what it repeats. She

set her lips to silence, with a look of obstinacy not impressive, but

merely mulish and childish.

"Well?" Valentine said.

She made no answer. He did not seem angry, but continued:

"You find few fish for your net there, I imagine. But perhaps you don't

go for fish. What was the name you read upon the door while I watched

you?"

This time Cuckoo, changing her mind, as she often did, with all the

swiftness of a crude nature, answered him:

"You know well enough!"

"It was Dr. Levillier, wasn't it?"

She nodded her head silently.

"Why do you go to his door? What do you want with him?"

Cuckoo's quick woman's instinct detected a suspicion of something that

was like anxiety in his voice as he said the words. In an instant the

warm impulse that, in her silent meditation, had led her to buckle on her

armour and to think, with a certain courage, that she was to fight one

day, stirred and glowed and leaped up, an impulse greater than herself.

The fear that had fallen upon her was lessened, for she felt that this

man, too, might, nay did, know fear.

"What's that to you?"

She turned upon him boldly with the question, and he knew her for

the first time as an antagonist, who might actively attack as well as

passively hate. He leaned forward, and looked into her eyes searchingly,

with a sort of rapture, of anxiety, too. It recalled something to Cuckoo.

She tried to remember what, but for a moment could not. Then, as if

reassured, he resigned his eager and nervous posture of inquiry. That

second movement brought the light that Cuckoo's puzzled mind sought.

It was Julian who had looked first into her eyes with that strange

watchfulness. These men echoed one another in that glance which she

could not understand. What they sought in her eyes she could not tell.

If it were the same thing it could not be love. And it seemed to be a

thing that they feared to find.

"Doctor Levillier is a great friend of mine," Valentine said. "He is a

famous nerve-doctor. Seeing you hovering about his door led me to suppose

you might be ill, and were going to consult him. I hope you are not ill."

"Not I!"

"Because he is away from home at present."

"Oh!"

"Do you want to see him?"

"I suppose I can see him, like any one else, if I've a mind to."

"Well! He's--he doesn't see quite every one. His practice is only among

the richest and smartest people in town. Some one else might answer your

purpose better."

He spoke suavely, but the words he said cemented Cuckoo's previously

vague thought of trying, perhaps, to see Doctor Levillier into a sudden,

strong determination. She divined that, for some reason, Valentine was

anxious that she should not see him. That was enough. She would, at

whatever cost, make his acquaintance.

"I'll see him if I like," she said hastily, lost to any appreciation

of wisdom, through the desire of aiming an instant blow at Valentine.

"Of course! Why not?" was his reply.

"You don't want me to. I can see that," she went on, still more

unadvisedly. "You needn't think as you can get over me so easily."

Valentine's smile showed a certain contempt that angered her.

"I know you," she cried.

"Do you?" he said. "I wonder if you would like to know me? Do you

remember Marr?"

The lady of the feathers turned cold.

"Marr!" she faltered; "what of him?"

"You have not forgotten him."

"He's dead!"

A pause.

"He's dead, I say."

"Exactly! As dead as a strong man who has lived long in the world ever

can be."

"What d'you mean? I say he's dead and buried and done with." Her voice

was rather noisy and shrill.

"That's just where you make a mistake," Valentine said quite gravely,

rather like a philosopher about to embark upon an argument. "He is not

done with. Suppose you fear a man, you hate him, you kill him, you put

him under the ground, you have not done with him."

"I didn't kill him! I didn't, I didn't!" Cuckoo cried out, shrilly,

half rising from the sofa. A wild suspicion suddenly came over her that

Valentine was pursuing her as an avenger of blood, under the mistaken

idea that she had done Marr to death in the night.

"Hush! I know that. He died naturally, as a doctor would say, and he has

been buried; and by now probably he is a shell that can only contain the

darkness of his grave. Yet, for all that, he's not done with, Miss

Bright."

"He is! he is!" she persisted.

The mention of Marr always woke terror in her. She sat, her eyes fixed

on Valentine, her memory fixed on Marr. Perhaps for this reason what her

memory saw and what her eyes saw seemed gradually to float together,

and fuse and mingle, till eyes and memory mingled, too, into one sense,

observant of one being only, neither wholly Marr nor wholly Valentine,

but both in one. She had linked them together vaguely before, but never

as now. Yet even now the clouds were floating round her and the vapours.

She might think she saw, but she could not understand, and what she saw

was rather a phantom standing in a land of mirage than a man standing

in the world of men.

"Some day, perhaps, I will prove to you that he is not," Valentine said.

"Eh, how?"

She had lost all self-consciousness now, and in her eagerness of fear,

wonder, and curiosity seemed tormented by the veil of yellow hair that

was flopping in frizzy strands round her face and over her eyes. She

seized it in her two hands, and with a few shooting gestures, in and out,

wound it into a dishevelled lump, which she stuck to the back of her head

with two or three pins. All the time she was looking at Valentine for an

answer to her question.

"Perhaps I don't know how yet."

"Yes, you do, though. I can see you do. What have you got to do with him,

with Marr?"

"I never said I had anything to do with him."

"Ah! but you have. I always knew it!"

"Many men are linked together by thin, perhaps invisible threads,

impalpable and impossible to define."

The lady of the feathers was out of her depth in this sentence, so she

only tossed her head and murmured:

"Oh, I dessay!" with an effort after contempt.

But Valentine's mood seemed to change. An abstracted gaiety stole over

him. If it was simulated, the simulation was very perfect and complete.

Sitting back in his chair, the cigarette smoke curling lightly round

him, his large blue eyes glancing gravely now at Cuckoo crumpled up on

the horsehair sofa, now meditatively at some object in the little room,

or at the ceiling, he spoke in a low, clear, level voice, as if uttering

his thoughts aloud, careless or oblivious of any listener.

"Every man who lives, and who has a personality, has something to do with

many men whom he has never seen, whom he will never see. Messengers go

from him as carrier-pigeons go from a ship. He may live alone, as a ship

is alone in mid-ocean, but the messengers are winged, and their wings are

strong. They fly high and they fly far, and wherever they pause and rest,

that man has left a mark, has stamped himself, has uttered himself, has

planted a seed of his will. Have you a religion?"

Valentine stopped abruptly after uttering this question, and waited for

an answer. It was characteristic enough.

"What?" said the lady of the feathers, staring wide-eyed.

"I say, have you a religion?"

"Not I. How can I when I don't go to no church?"

"That is, no doubt, a convincing proof of heathendom. And yet I have a

religion that never leads me to a church door. My religion is will, my

gospel is the gospel of influence, and my god is power. Will binds the

world into a net, whose strands are like iron. Will dies if it is weak,

but if it is strong enough it becomes practically immortal. But, though

it lives itself, it has the power to kill others. It can murder a soul in

a man or a woman, and throw it into the grave to decay and go to dust,

and in the man it can create a soul diametrically opposite to the corpse,

and the world will say the man is the same; but he is not the same. He is

another man. Or if the will is not strong enough actually to kill a

soul"--at this point Valentine spoke more slowly, and there was a certain

note of uneasiness, even almost of agitation, in his voice--"it can yet

expel it from the body in which it resides, and drive it, like a new

Ishmael, into the desert, where it must hover, useless, hopeless,

degraded, and naked, because it has no body to work in. Yes! yes! that

must be so! The soul can have no power divorced from the body! none!

none!"

He got up from his chair, and began to pace the little room. Cuckoo

watched him as a child might watch a wild animal in its cage. His face

was hard and thin with deep thought, and hers was contorted under her

yellow hair--contorted in a frantic effort to grasp and to understand

what he was saying; for, stupid, ignorant as the lady of the feathers

was, she had a sharp demon in her that often told her the truth, and

this demon whispered now in her ear:

"Listen, and you may learn things that you long to know!"

And she listened motionless, her eyes bright and eager, her lips shut

together, her slim body a-quiver with intensity, mental and physical.

"How can it?" Valentine went on. "What is a soul without a body? You

cannot see it. You cannot hear it, and if you think you can, that is

a vile trick of the mind, an hallucination. For if one man can see it,

why not another? Here, let me look into your eyes again."

As he said the last words, he stopped opposite to Cuckoo, suddenly caught

her chin in his two hands, which felt hard and cold, and forcibly pushed

up her face towards his. She was terrified, beginning now to think him

mad, and to fear personal injury. Gazing hard and furtively into her

eyes, he said:

"No; it's a lie! It is not there. It never was! It is dead and finished

with, and I won't fear it."

As if struck by the fatigue of some sudden reaction, he sank down again

into his chair, and went on with his apparently fantastic monologue:

"And if it was ever alive, what could it do? A soul can't work, except

through a body; it must fasten on a body, and bend the body to its

will--man is such a creature that he can only be influenced through flesh

and blood, nerves, sinews, eyes, things he can see, things that he can

hear. He is so grovelling that nothing more delicate than these really

appeals to him."

Again, and this time with less abstraction, and with a sort of

contemptuous humour, he turned to the lady of the feathers, and

continued, as if once more aware of her presence:

"Are you imbibing my gospel, the gospel of will and of influence? I see

you are by your pretty attitude and by the engaging face you are making

at me. Well, don't get it wrong. A gospel gone wrong in a mind is

dangerous, and worse than no gospel at all. If you get this gospel wrong

you may become conceited, and fancy yourself possessed of a power which

you haven't a notion of. To use will in any really affective way, you

must train your body, and take care of it, not ruin it, and let it run

to seed, or grow disfigured, or a ghastly tell-tale, a truth-teller, a

town-crier with a big bell going about and calling aloud all the silly

or criminal things you do. Now you have forgotten this, or perhaps you

never knew it, and so will could not work in you; not even, I believe,

a malign will to do mischief. You have thrown your body to the wolves,

and whoever looks upon you must see the marks of their teeth."

It was evident that he gloated on this idea that the body of the lady of

the feathers was forever useless for good, and even powerless to do much

effective evil. He seemed to revel in the notion that she was simply a

thing powerless, negative, and totally vain.

"I was mad ever to imagine the contrary," he said. Then, glancing away

from personality, he exclaimed with more energy:

"But sometimes a will is so great, so trained, so watchful of

opportunities, so acute and ready, that, instead of passing away

practically on the passing away of the body in which it has been born

and has lived, and merely living and working through the emanations

of itself that have clung to men and women in many different places,

instead--in fact--of being diffused--you understand me?" he broke

out, with an obvious delight in the grossness of her ignorance and the

denseness of her bewilderment and misunderstanding of him--"which is a

sort of death, it seizes, whole, as a body, with all the members sound,

upon another home. It commits, in effect, a great act of brigandage.

It lives on complete, powerful--even more powerful than ever before,

because to all its original powers it adds a glory of deception, and

is a living lie. If only you could understand me!"

Suddenly he burst into a peal of laughter that was a full stop to his

philosophy. His cigarette had gone out. He threw it into the grate and

stretched out his arms, still laughing. And Cuckoo gazing at him, as if

fascinated, said silently to herself, "If only I could!"

For she felt as if Valentine were telling her a great secret, secure in

the hideous knowledge that, though she heard it, it must remain a secret

from her on account of her ignorance and of her stupidity. There was

something in that feeling peculiarly maddening, yet Cuckoo displayed no

irritation. The sharp little demon at her elbow whispered to her to be

silent, told her that she might learn, might yet understand, if she would

play a part, and be no more the wildcat, the foolishly impulsive lady of

the feathers. Valentine struck his hand upon the table, and repeated:

"Why--why can't you understand?"

The piquancy of the situation evidently delighted his mind and his

sense of mischief. He enjoyed playing the philosopher to a fool; and

the more the fool became a fool, the higher soared his philosophy and

his appreciation of it. There is always something paradoxical in wisdom

instructing folly, for, after all, folly can never really learn, can

never really understand. Valentine hugged that thought.

"Go on," the lady of the feathers said, apparently in gaping wonderment.

"Why? do you mean to tell me you are interested?"

"I'm listenin'! It sounds wonderful!"

"It is wonderful!" Valentine cried. "Every living lie is wonderful.

But you don't know yet much about will. My gospel is full of secrets

and of subtleties, and only a few people are beginning to guess at its

far-reaching power, and to aim at learning its truths and sounding

its depths. And many unbelievers play with it, and never know that they

are playing with fire. A man did this once. Shall I tell you about him?"

"Yes!" said Cuckoo.

And her soul cried to the darkness in which she imagined some vague power

to dwell; cried aloud for understanding. This silent cry was so intense

that she lay back upon the hard sofa, almost exhausted, and as she lay

there, something hot, like fire, seemed to make its nest in her heart,

and to flame there, and to be alive, as a flame is alive, and to speak to

her, but not aloud, as a flame speaks in the coals to the imagination of

the watcher by the hearth. In that moment the lady of the feathers felt

as if she were conscious of a new companion, a companion full of some

intensity towards her, some anxiety about her, anxious and brilliant as a

flame is, vital, keen, blazing, intense. Although she could not define

her sensation thus, that lack of analytical power could not deprive her

of it. She knew that her vision became clearer, that her mind became

brighter, that a light illumined her, that she was, for the moment,

greater than herself. But Valentine did not know it. He looked towards

the sofa and saw spread upon it a thin, painted, haggard young creature

curled into a position at once passionate, languid, and merely awkward,

with relentless, thickly tangled hair, staring eyes, and half-opened

lips, glowering in rouged stupidity and a coarseness of the gutter. He

was a philosopher, with a beauty of the stars and of snows, with a

refinement, white in its brilliance. She was an image of Regent Street,

a ghastly idol of the town; and he was telling her strange things that

she could never comprehend, in a jargon that was to her as Greek or as

Hebrew. It was too absurd. Yet he loved to tell her, and he could

scarcely tell why he loved it.

"Go on," said the lady of the feathers.

"This man," Valentine said, assuming a devout earnestness to trick her

more, and watching for the puzzled expression to grow and to deepen in

her eyes,--"this man had a holy nature, or I will say an unalterable will

to do only things pure, reserved, refined--things that could not lead his

body into difficulties, or his mind into quagmires. He was a saint

without a religion. That is a possibility, I assure you; for a will

can be amazingly independent. He had the peculiar grace that is said to

belong to angels, a definite repugnance to sin. I know you understand

me."

She nodded bluntly.

"I know--he couldn't go wrong, if it was ever so," she ejaculated.

"If it was ever so--as the housemaids say--you put the position of this

man in a nutshell, and if this strange will of his had never relented,

the transformation I am going to describe, or--" he paused for a moment

as if in doubt, then continued--"or rather to hint at, would never have

taken place. But he grew dissatisfied with his will. It bored him ever so

little. He fancied he would like to change it, and to substitute for it

the will of the world. And the will of the world, as you know well, my

lady of the feathers, is to sin. For some time he longed, vaguely enough,

to be different, to be, in fact, lower down in the scale than he was.

But his longing to be able to desire sin did not lead him to desire it

actually. One can force one's self to do a thing, you see, but one cannot

force one's self to wish to do it, or to enjoy doing it. And this man,

being a selfish saint--saints are very often very selfish--would not sin

without desiring it. So it seemed that he must remain forever as he was,

a human piece of flawless porcelain, wishing to be cracked and common

delft."

"Whatever did he wish it for?" asked Cuckoo, with the surprise of a zany.

"Who can tell why one man wishes for one thing, another for another?

That, too, is a mystery. The point is, that he did wish it, and that he

did something more."

"What was that, eh?"

"He deliberately tried to weaken and to deface his will; to alter it.

And he chose curious means, acting under suggestion from another will

or influence that was more powerful than his own, because it was utterly

self-satisfied and desired only to be what it was. I don't think I will

tell you what the means were. But his original dissatisfaction with his

own goodness was the weapon that brought about his own destruction. His

will did not change, as he believed; but what do you think actually

happened to it? I will tell you. It was expelled from his body. He lost

it forever. He lost, in fact, his identity. For will is personality,

soul, the ego, the man himself. And this soul, if you choose to call it

so, was driven into the air. It went away in the darkness, like a bird.

Do you see?"

He waved his hand upward, and lifted his eyes, as if following with them

the flight that he described.

"It flew away!"

"Where did it go?" ejaculated Cuckoo.

Valentine seemed suddenly to become fully aware of the depth of her

interest.

"Ah! even you are fascinated by my gospel, you who cannot understand it,"

he said. "But I cannot tell you where it went. I too have wondered."

He knit his brows rather moodily over this question of location. "I too

have wondered. But I imagine that it died; that it ceased to be. Divorced

from the body that was its home, degraded by dissatisfaction with itself,

of what use could it be to any one? Even if it still continues to be, it

is practically dead, for it can work neither harm nor good to any one,

and the thing that cannot be good or evil, or turn others towards the

one or the other, is dead. It is no more a will. It is no more an

influence. It is a heart without a pulse in it; in fact, it is nothing."

A sort of joy had leapt into his face as he dwelt on this idea of

nothingness, and he added:

"It is something like your soul, my lady of the feathers. Do you hear

me?"

"Yes. I hear!"

"But the will that ousted it gained in power by that triumph. Totally

self-satisfied, desirous of being only that which it is, having no enemy

of yearning disappointment with itself in its camp, it can do what will

never did before. It can lead captive the soul that was formerly the

captive of the soul that it drove away to die. Like an enemy it has

seized its opponent's camp, and the slave dwelling in that camp is now

its slave forever."

As Valentine spoke he seemed to become almost intoxicated with the

thoughts conjured up by his own words. His blue eyes blazed with a fury

of shining excitement. His white cheeks were suffused with blood.

"I have made myself, my will, a god!" he exclaimed passionately.

At the words the lady of the feathers moved suddenly forward on the sofa.

"What--_you_!" she said.

The last word was uttered with an intensity that could surely only

spring from something near akin to comprehension, if not from actual

comprehension itself. It certainly startled Valentine, or seemed to

startle him. His face showed an amazement like the amazement of

a man raving to an image of wood, to whom, abruptly, the wood speaks

with a tongue.

"What do you mean?" he said, and his voice faltered from its note of

triumph and of exultation.

Cuckoo resumed her former position.

"Only was you the will, or the man, or whatever it all is?" she replied

in the voice of one hopelessly muddled.

Valentine was reassured as to her stupidity.

"That has nothing to do with the story," he said.

"There was two of them, was there?" she persisted, but still with the

accent of a hopeless dullard.

"Oh yes. One will must always work upon another, or else there could be

no story worth the telling."

"Oh, I see; that's it."

Valentine again broke into laughter.

"You see, do you?" he said. "You see that, but do you see the truth of

what I told you before about the connection of the will with the body?

Do you see why you have no power now, can never have power again? Do you

understand that the wreck of your body inevitably causes the wreck of

your will, so that it really dies and ceases, because it can no more

influence others? Do you understand that? I'll make you understand it

now. Come here."

He got up from his chair and seized her two hands in his, dragging her

almost violently up from the sofa. Her fear of him, always lurking near,

came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back,

moved by an irresistible repulsion. The slight and momentary struggle

between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to

come down. It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour.

Valentine's hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was

useless. She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the glass

that stood over the mantelpiece. Pushing back the table behind them, he

made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which

she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.

"Look there!" he cried; "look at yourself well! How can you have power

over anybody?"

Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from

the mirror, and Cuckoo--forced to obedience--examined them as if indeed

they were a picture. She saw the man's face, fair, beautiful, refined,

triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself

and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that

filled the face with amazingly vivid expression. She saw the bright blue

eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile. There

was health in the face as well as thought. And there was power, which is

greater than health, more beautiful even than beauty. And then she turned

her eyes to the face's companion. Thin, sharp, faded, it met her eyes,

half-shrouded in the thick, tumbled hair that shone in the mirror with

the peculiar frigid glare that can only be imparted by a chemical dye,

and can never be simulated by nature. One cheek was chalk-white. The

other, which had been pressed against the horsehair of the sofa, showed

a harsh, scarlet patch. All the varying haggard expressions of the world

seemed crowding in the eyes of this scarecrow, and peering beneath the

thickly blackened eyelashes that struck a violent discord against the

yellow hair. The thin lips of the mouth were pressed together in an

expression of pain, fear, and weariness. Shadows slept under the eyes

where the face had fallen into hollows. To-night there seemed no vestige

of prettiness in those peaked features. Nothing of health, youth, gaiety,

or even girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal

record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And

the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record

glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the

life whose story the mirror revealed in its reflection.

How, indeed, could such a creature have power over fellow man or woman

for good or for evil? If weakness can be written without words, it seemed

written in that wasted countenance, which Cuckoo examined with a creeping

horror that numbed her like frost. As she did so, Valentine was watching

the ungraciousness of her face in the glass deepen and glide, moment by

moment, into greater ugliness, greater degradation. And as the little

light there had ever been behind those unquiet eyes, faded gradually

away, in his reflected eyes the light leaped up into fuller glare,

sparkling to unbridled triumph. And his reflected lips smiled more

defiantly, until the smile was no longer touched merely with triumph,

but with something more vehement and more malign! Cuckoo did not see

the change. She saw only herself, and her heart cried and wailed, What

good--what good to love Julian? What good to hate Valentine? What good

to fight for the man she loved against the man she loathed? As well set

a doll to move its tense joints against an army, or a scarecrow to defy

a god! Never before had she realized thoroughly the complete tragedy of

her life. Hitherto she had assisted at it in fragments, coming in for

a scene here, a scene there. Now she sat through the whole of the five

acts, and the only thing she missed was the fall of the curtain. That

remained up. But why? There was--there could be--nothing more to come,

unless a dreary recapitulation of such dreary events as had already been

displayed. Such a cup could hold no wine that was not foul, thick, and

poisonous. And she had known herself so little as to imagine that she

could really love, and that her love might fulfil itself in protection

instead of sensual gratification. Yes, vaguely she had believed that.

She had even believed that she could put on armour and do battle

against--and at this point in her desperate meditation the lady of the

feathers shifted her eyes from her own face mirrored to the face beside

it. As she did so, a sudden cry escaped from her lips. For a moment she

thought she saw the face of the dead Marr, and the hallucination was so

vivid that when it was gone and the mirror once more revealed the face

of Valentine, Cuckoo had no thought but that she had really seen Marr.

She turned sharply round and cast a glance behind her. Then:

"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!"