"Well, Miss Bright, I want you to assume something."

"What's that?"

"To pretend to yourself that you think something, whether you do really

think it or not."

"Make believe!" cried Cuckoo, childishly.

"Exactly."

"What about?"

"I want you to 'make believe' that Mr. Cresswell is not himself--is not

sane."

"O-oh-h!" said Cuckoo, with a long intonation of surprise.

"I do honestly believe it; you are to pretend to believe it. Now,

remember that."

"All right."

"You are not to contradict any more, you see."

"Oh," began Cuckoo, in sudden distress. "Pardon. I didn't--"

"Hush! That's all right. Act with me on the make-believe or assumption

that Mr. Cresswell is not himself at present."

"Ah, but that ain't no make-believe. He told me as he wasn't himself when

he says, 'I am Marr.'"

"Yes--yes," said the doctor. Secretly, almost angrily, he said to himself

that Valentine, in some access of insanity, had actually confessed to the

lady of the feathers that he knew himself to be mad.

"He says he ain't himself," she repeated again, with an eager feeling

that perhaps, at last, she had got at the right interpretation of the

gospel of Valentine.

"That is practically the same thing as his saying to you that he was mad.

Now you have told me what you feel for Julian."

Cuckoo flushed, and muttered something unintelligible, twining her hands

in the sables till she nearly pulled them from Doctor Levillier's knees.

"And you have seen the terrible change that has come over him, and that

is fast, fast deepening to something that must end in utter ruin. You

have not seen him these last few days, I think."

"No", said Cuckoo, her eyes fixed hungrily on the doctor's face. She

began to tug at her veil. "What's it? Is he--is he?"

She collapsed into a nervous silence, still tugging with a futile hand at

the veil, which remained implacably stretched across her face. The doctor

looked at her, and said steadily:

"He has gone a little further--down. You understand me?"

"I ought to," she said, bitterly.

"As you are mounting upward," the doctor rejoined, with a kind and firm

gravity that seemed indeed to lift Cuckoo, as a sweet wind lifts a

feather and sends it on high.

The bitterness went out of her face, but she said nothing, only sat

listening attentively while the doctor went on:

"My belief is this, and if you hold it you can perhaps act in this matter

with more boldness, more fearlessness, than if you do not hold it. I

believe that Mr. Cresswell, who played very foolish tricks with his

nerves some time ago, just before he got to know you, has become mad to

this extent, that he believes himself to have a power of will unlike that

possessed by any other man,--an inhuman power, in fact. He fancies that

he has the will of a sort of god, and he wishes to prove this to himself

more especially. Everything is for self in a madman. Now he looks about

for a means of proving that his will can do everything. He wants to make

it do something extraordinary, uncommon. What does he find for it to do?

This, the ruin of Julian. And now I'll tell you why this ruin of Julian

would be a peculiar triumph for his will. Originally, when Cresswell was

sane and splendid, his splendour of sanity guarded Julian from all that

was dangerous. Julian was naturally inclined to be wild. He has an ardent

nature, and five years ago, when he was a mere boy, might have fallen

into a thousand follies. Cresswell's influence first kept him from these

follies, and at last taught him to loathe and despise them. And Julian,

remember this, told Cresswell at last that he had been to him a sort of

saviour. You can follow me?"

"'M," Cuckoo ejaculated with shut mouth and a nod of her head.

"So that Cresswell knew what his will had been able to do in the

direction of lifting Julian high up, almost above his nature. Well, then

followed certain foolish practices which I need not describe. Cresswell

and Julian joined in a certain trickery, often practised by people who

call themselves spiritualists and occultists. It certainly had an effect

upon them at the time, and I advised them earnestly to drop it. They

disregarded my advice, and the result was that Mr. Cresswell fell into

an extraordinary condition of body. He fell into a trance, became as if

he were dead, and remained so for some hours on a certain night. I was

called in to him, and actually thought that he was dead. But he revived.

Now, I believe that though he seemed to recover, and did recover in

body, he never recovered from that insensibility in mind. I believe he

went into that sleep sane and came out of it mad, and that he remains

mad to this moment. Certainly, ever since then he has been an altered

man, the man you know, not at all the man he used to be. Since that

night he, who used to be almost unconscious of the wonder of his own

will, has become intensely self-conscious, and engrossed with it, and

has wished to make it obey him and perform miracles. And what is the

special miracle to which he is devoting himself at this moment, as you

have observed? Just this: the ruin of the thing he originally saved. It

is like this," he said, noting that Cuckoo was becoming puzzled and

confused, "Cresswell, by his influence, made Julian loathe sin. Coming

out of this trance, as I believe, a madman, he seeks to make his will

do something extraordinary. What shall he make it do? His eyes fall on

Julian, who is always with him, as you know. And he resolves to make

Julian love what he has taught him to loathe--sin, vice, degradation of

every kind. So he sets to work with all the cunning of a diseased mind,

and hour by hour, day by day, he works for this horrible end. At first he

is quiet and careful. But at last he becomes almost intoxicated as he

sees his own success. And he allows himself to be led into outbreaks of

triumph. One of those outbreaks you yourself seem to have witnessed. I

have witnessed another--on the night I dined alone with Cresswell, when

he killed the dog, Rip, and threw him out into the snow. Cresswell is

intoxicated with the mental intoxication of mania, at the degradation

into which his will has forced Julian, who had learnt to love him, to

think that everything he did must be right. And this intoxication is

leading him to excesses. It is my firm belief that he intends to drag

Julian down into intolerable abysses of sin, to plunge him into utter

ruin, to bring him perhaps to prison, and to death."

Cuckoo was listening now with a white face--even her lips looked almost

grey. The sunshine still lay over the winter world. The horses trotted.

The sables were warm about her. They had nearly left the city behind

them and were gaining the heights, on which the air was keener and more

life-giving, and from which the outlook was larger and more inspiring.

But the girl's gaiety and almost wild sense of vivacity and protectedness

had vanished. For the doctor's face and voice had become grave, and his

words were weighty with a conviction, which, added to her own knowledge

of Julian and Valentine, made her fears unutterable. As the doctor paused

she opened her lips as if to speak, but she said nothing. He could not

but perceive the cloud that had settled on her, and his manner quickly

changed. A brightness, a hopefulness, illumined his face, and he said

quickly:

"This tragedy is what you and I, but you especially, must prevent."

Then Cuckoo spoke at last:

"How ever?" she said.

"Remember this," he answered. "If Cresswell is mad we must pity him,

not condemn him. But we must, above all, fight him. Could I prove his

madness the danger would be averted? Possibly time will give me the

means of proving it. I have watched him. I shall continue to watch him.

But as yet, although I see enough to convince me of his insanity, I

don't see enough to convince the world, or, above all, to convince

Julian. Therefore never give Julian the slightest hint of what I have

told you of to-day. His adoration of Valentine is such that even a hint

might easily lead him to regard both you and me as his enemies. Keep your

own counsel and mine, but act with me on the silent assumption that

Cresswell being a madman, we are justified in fighting him to the bitter

end, you and I, with all our forces."

"I see," Cuckoo said, a burning excitement beginning to wake in her.

"Justified in fighting him, but not in hating him."

"Oh," she said, with a much more doubtful accent.

"Scarcely any human being, if indeed any, is completely hateful. How then

can a human being, whose mind is ill and out of control, be hateful?"

said the doctor, gently.

She felt herself rebuked, and a quick thought of herself, of what she

was, rebuked her too.

"I'll try not," she murmured, but with no inward conviction of success.

They were on the heath now, and the smoke of London hung in the wintry

air beyond and below them. The sun was already beginning to wear the

aspect of a traveller on the point of departure for a journey. His once

golden face was sinister with that blood-red hue which it so often

assumes on winter afternoons, and which seems to set it in a place more

than usually remote, more than usually distant from our world, and in a

clime that is sad and strange. Winds danced over the heath like young

witches. The horses, whipped by the more intense cold, pulled hard

against the bit, and made the coachman's arms ache. The doctor looked

away for a moment at the vapours that began to clothe the afternoon in

the hollows and depressions of the landscape, and at the sun, whose

gathering change of aspect smote on his imagination as something akin to

the change that falls over the faces of men towards that hour when the

sun of their glory makes ready for its setting. Still keeping his glance

on that sad red sun in its nest of radiating vapours, he said, in a

withdrawn voice:

"We must hate nothing except the hatefulness of sin in ourselves and in

others."

Cuckoo listened as to the voice of some one on a throne, and tears that

she could not fully understand rose in her eyes.

But now the doctor turned from the sun to the lady of the feathers, and

there was a bright light in his quiet eyes.

"You and I must fight with all our forces," he said. "Have you ever

thought about this thing will which Cresswell worships insanely? Have you

ever felt it in you, Miss Bright?"

"I don't know as I have," Cuckoo said, secretly wondering if it were

that strange and fleeting power which had come to her of late, which

had made her for a moment fearless of Valentine as she defied him in the

loneliness of her room, which had stirred her even to a faith in herself

when she spoke with the doctor under the stars upon her doorstep.

"I think you have. I think you will. It must be there, for Julian feels

it in you. He--he calls it a flame."

"Eh? A flame?"

"Yes. He sees it in your eyes, and it holds him near you."

So the doctor spoke, partly out of his conviction, partly because he

had definitely resolved to put away from him all the things that fought

against his reason and that his imagination perhaps loved too much.

Such things, he thought, floated like clouds across the clearness of

his vision, and drowned the light of his power to do good. So his

fancies that had fastened on the mystery of the dead Marr and the living

Valentine, connecting them together, and weaving a veil of magic about

their strange connection, were banished. He would not hold more commerce

with them, nor would he accept the fancies of others as realities. Thus,

in his mind, Julian's legend of the flame in this girl's eyes, despite

the doctor's own vision of flames, became merely a story of the truth

of human will and an acknowledgment of its power.

"Is that why he looks at me so?" Cuckoo asked, in a manner unusually

meditative. "But then he, Valentine, did the same! Why, could that be

what scared him that night--what he struck at?"

"He too may feel that you have a power for good, to fight against his

power for evil. Yes, he does feel it. Make him feel it more. Rely on

yourself. Trust that there's something great within you, something placed

there for you to use. Never mind what your life has been. Never mind your

own weakness. You are the home, the temple, of this power of will. Julian

feels it, and it draws him to you, but it is as nothing yet compared

with the power of Cresswell. You have to make it more powerful, so that

you may win Julian back from this danger."

"Eh? How?"

"Rest on it; trust in it; teach it to act. Show Julian more and more that

you have it. Can't you think of a way of showing that you have this

power?"

"Not I. No," Cuckoo murmured.

The doctor lowered his voice still more. Quite at a venture he drew a

bow, and with his first arrow smote the lady of the feathers to the

heart.

"Has Julian ever asked you to do anything?" he said.

Suddenly Cuckoo's face was scarlet.

"Why? How d' you know?" she stammered.

"Anything for him that was not evil?" the doctor pursued, following out

an abstract theory, not as Cuckoo fancied, dealing with known facts. "I

know nothing. I only ask you to try and remember, to search your mind."

There was no need for the lady of the feathers to do that.

"Yes, he did once," she said, looking still confused and furtive.

"Was it difficult?"

She hesitated.

"I s'pose so," she answered at last.

"Did you do it?"

"No."

The doctor had noticed that his questions gave pain.

"I don't want to know what it was and I don't ask," he said. "I have

neither the right to, nor the desire to. But can't you do it, and show

Julian that you have done it? If you do I think he will see that flame,

which he fears and which fascinates him, burn more clearly, more

steadily, in your eyes."

"I'll see," Cuckoo said with a kind of gulp.

"Do more than this. This is only a part, one weapon in the fight.

Cresswell is always near Julian; you must be near him. Cresswell

pursues Julian; you must pursue him, use your woman's wit, use all your

experience of men; use your heart. Wake up and throw yourself into this

battle, and make yourself worthy of fighting. Only you can tell how. But

this is a fact. Our wills, our powers of doing things, are made strong,

or made weak by our own lives. Each time we do a degradingly low, beastly

thing"--he chose the words most easily comprehended by such a woman as

she was--"we weaken our will, and make it less able to do anything good

for another. If you commit loveless actions from to-day--though Julian

has nothing to do with them--with each loveless action you will lose a

point in the battle against the madness of Cresswell. And you must lose

no points. Remember you are fighting a madman, as I believe, for the

safety of the man you love. If I could tell you what--"

The doctor pulled himself up short.

"No," he said, "no need to tell you more than that, within these last

few days I have found that all you said about Cresswell's present

_diablerie_"--he shook his head impatiently at the language he was using

to the lady of the feathers--"Cresswell's present impulse for evil is

less horribly true than the truth. I shall watch him, day by day, from

now. And if I can act, I shall do so. If his insanity is too sharp for

me, as it may well be, I shall be checkmated in any effort to forcibly

keep him from doing harm. In that case I can only trust to you, and

hope that some chance circumstance may lead to the opening of Julian's

eyes. But they are closed--closed fast. In any case you will help me and

I will help you. You shall have opportunities of meeting Julian often. I

will arrange that. And Cresswell--"

He paused as if in deep thought.

"How to do it," he murmured, almost to himself. "How to bring this battle

to the issue!"

Then he turned his eyes on Cuckoo.

She was sitting bolt upright in the carriage. Her cheeks were flushed.

Her hollow eyes were sparkling. She had drawn her hands out from under

the rug and clasped them together in her lap.

"Oh, I'll do anything I can," she said, "anything. And--and I can do that

one thing!"

"Yes," said the doctor. "Which?"

"The thing that he asked me once, and what I said no to," she answered,

but in such a low murmur that the doctor scarcely caught the words.

He leaned forward in the carriage.

"Home now, Grant," he said to the coachman. "Or--no--drive first to 400

Marylebone Road."

The doctor turned again towards Cuckoo. She was looking away from him, so

much that he was obliged to believe that she wished to conceal her face,

which was towards the sunset.

The sky over London glowed with a dull red like a furnace. It deepened,

while they looked, passing rapidly through the biting cold of the late

winter afternoon.

The red cloud near the fainting sun broke and parted.

Spears of gold were thrust forth.

"Flames," the doctor whispered to himself. "Flames! The will, the soul of

God in nature."

PART V--FLAMES

CHAPTER I

VALENTINE INVITES HIS GUESTS

Valentine and Julian sat together in the tentroom at night, as they sat

together many months ago, when Julian confessed his secret and Valentine

expressed his strange desire to have a different soul. Now it was deep

winter. The year was old. In three days it must die. It lay in the snow,

like some abandoned beggar waiting for the inevitable end. Some, who were

happy, would fain have succoured it and kept it with them. Others,

who were sad, said: "Let it go--this beggar. Already it has taken too

many alms from us." But neither the happy nor the sad could affect its

fate. So it lay in the snow and in the wind, upon its deathbed.

The tentroom had not been altered. Still the green draperies, veiled

walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling. The fire

danced and shone. The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness.

Only Rip was gone from the broad and cushioned divan upon which he had

loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and

Julian listened or replied. The room was the same, and this very fact

emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it. They leaned

in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to

time in cigarette-smoke. No sound of London reached them in this small

room. Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain.

Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their

attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul. The

face of Julian was drawn and heavy. His eyes were downcast. His arms hung

over the cushioned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the

shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued. From time to time he

opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if

he ground them together. The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with

little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth.

The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the

steps of evening on an autumn day--grey, as if it clothed processes of

decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon

a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the

creaking threshold of premature age.

The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye. There was

still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in

his features. The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were

the lips of Julian. The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his

lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease. Yet

he, too, was changed. Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked

furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, asserted itself.

It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pass in a fleeting

gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed

immobility of a mask. Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon

it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness. Valentine's was a hard and

shameless face, although his features, if coarser than of old, were still

noble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.

He was looking across at Julian, who held idly between his lax fingers

a letter written with violet ink upon pink paper, which had a little bird

stamped in the left-hand corner.

"When did you get it?" he said.

"Two or three days ago, I think. I can't remember. I can't remember

anything now," Julian answered heavily.

"And you have had two since?"

"Yes. And to-day she called."

"You were out?"

"Yes."

"She shows herself very exigent all of a sudden. She is afraid of losing

you. I told you long ago she cherished absurd ambitions with regard to

you. Do you intend to answer her notes?"

"Oh yes," Julian said. "Cuckoo has always been very fond of me; very

fond."

He glanced at the absurdly vulgar little bird in the corner of the

letter. "And that's something," he added slowly.

"You are weighed down with gratitude? No wonder. Are you grateful to

others who have always cared for you in a different way--unselfishly,

that is?"

"I don't seem to feel very much about anybody now," Julian said. "I do

such a lot. The more you do, the less you feel. Damnable life! All

cruelty. I can't feel satisfied. But there must be something; something

I haven't tried. I must find it," he said, almost fiercely, and, stirring

in a sudden energy, "I must find it--or--curse you, Val, why don't you

find it for me?"

Valentine laughed.

"The last novelty has failed? You are a very discontented sinner, Julian.

And yet London begins to think you too enterprising. I hear that Lady

Crichton is the last person to shut her doors against you. What did she

hear of?"

"How should I know?"

He laughed bitterly.

"She oughtn't to be particular. She used to receive Marr. I met him first

in her yellow drawing-room."

"London had not discussed him, perhaps. You are rapidly becoming a legend

and a warning. That is fame. To be the accepted warning for others."

"Or infamy; which is much the same thing."

"But you are only at the first posting-station of your journey,"

Valentine continued, looking at him with a smile. "If you are

dissatisfied, it is because you have not tasted yet half that strength

of the spring we once talked of. You have not completely thrown off

the foolish yoke of public opinion. The chains still jangle about you.

Cast them away and you will yet be happy."

"Shall I? Shall I, Valentine?"

The exhausted, worn, and weary figure leaned abruptly forward in its

chair. Julian's tired eyes glittered greedily.

"To be happy, I'd commit any crime," he said.

"Crime is merely opinion," Valentine answered. "Everything is opinion.

You will commit crimes probably. Most brave men do."

"But shall I be happy?"

"You are greedy, Julian, greedy of everything, knowledge of life, lust,

joy. You are never satisfied. That's because you and I fasted for so

long; and the greedy man is never quite happy while he is eating, for

he is always anticipating the next course. And, let philosophers say what

they will, happiness does not lie in anticipation. Go on eating. Pass on

from course to course. At last there will come a time, a beautiful time,

when your appetite will be satisfied and you will rest contented. But,

remember, not till you have journeyed through the whole _menu_, played

with your dessert and even drunk your black coffee. Go on, only go on.

Men and women are unhappy. They think it is because they have done too

much. They reproach themselves for a thousand things that they have done.

Fools! They are unhappy because they have not done enough. The text

which will haunt me on my deathbed will be: 'I have left undone those

things which I ought to have done.' Yes, during my long cursed years of

inaction, when I was called the Saint of Victoria Street. Ah! Julian, you

and I slept; we are awake now. You and I were dead; we are now alive. But

we are only at the beginning of our lives. We have those years, those

white and empty years, to drown in the waters of Lethe. They are like

monstrous children that should have been strangled almost ere they were

born, white, vacant children. And now, day by day, we are pressing them

down in the waters with our hands. At last they will sink. The waves will

flow over their haggard faces. The waves will sweep them away. Then we

shall be happy. We shall redeem those years on which the locust fed, and

we shall be happy."

"Yes, by God, we shall be happy, we will--we will be happy. Only teach me

to be happy, Valentine, anywhere, anyhow."

"Not with the lady of the feathers. She will not make you happy."

"Cuckoo? No! For she's terribly unhappy herself. Poor old Cuckoo. I

wonder what she's doing now."

"Searching in the snow for her fate," Valentine said, with a sneer.

* * * * *

It was not so. Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the

Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of

hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible. And

the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre

must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows

and night-fellows.

* * * * *

"I am going to write to Cuckoo," Julian said a day later. "What shall I

say?"

Valentine hesitated.

"What have you thought of saying?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. First one thing, then another. Good-bye among the

number. That's what you wish me to say, Val, isn't it?"

He spoke in a listless voice, monotonous in inflection and lifeless

in timbre. The dominion of Valentine over him since the supper at the

Savoy had increased, consolidating itself into an undoubted tyranny,

which Julian accepted, carelessly, thoughtlessly, a prey to the internal

degradation of his mind. Once he had only been nobly susceptible, a fine

power. Now he was drearily weak, an ungracious disability. But with his

weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled

despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the

indifference peculiar to the autocrat. Valentine recognized in the voice

the badge of serfdom, even more than in the question, and he smiled with

a cold triumph. He had intended telling Julian now, once for all, to

break with the lady of the feathers, of whom even yet he stood in vague

fear. But the question, the voice of Julian, gave him pause, slid into

his soul a new and bizarre desire, child of the strange intoxication of

power which was beginning to grip him, and which the doctor had remarked.

If Julian broke with Cuckoo, repulsed her forever into the long street

that was her pent and degraded world, would not the sharp salt of

Valentine's triumph be taken from him? Would not the wheels of his

Juggernaut car fail to do their office in his sight--there was the

point!--upon a precious victim? The lady of the feathers thus

deliberately abandoned by Julian would suffer perhaps almost to the

limit of her capability of pain, but Valentine would have lost sight

of her in the dark, and though he would have conquered that spectral

opposition which she had whimsically offered to him--he laughed to

himself now, thinking of his fear of it--he would not see that greatest

vision, the flight of his enemy. These thoughts flashed through his mind,

moving him to an answer that astonished Julian.

"Good-bye!" he said. "Why should I wish that?"

"You said the other day at the Savoy that she hated you; that you and she

must have a battle unless I chose between you."

"I was laughing."

The lifelessness left Julian's voice as he exclaimed:

"Valentine! But you were--"

"Sober, and you were not. Can you deny it?"

Julian was silent.

"I so little meant that nonsense," Valentine continued, "that I have

conceived a plan. To-morrow is the last night of the old year. The doctor

asked us to spend it with him. We refused. Providence directed that

refusal, for now we are at liberty to celebrate the proper occasion

for burying hatchets by burying our particular hatchet. The lady of the

feathers, your friend, my enemy, shall see the new year in here, in this

tentroom, where long ago we--you and I--with how ill success, sought to

exchange our souls."

Julian looked utterly astonished at this proposition.

"Cuckoo wouldn't come here," he began.

"So you said once before. But she came then, and she will come now."

"And then the doctor! If he gets to hear of it! We said we were dining

out."

Valentine's hard smile grew yet harder, and his eyes sparkled eagerly.

"I'll arrange that," he said. "The doctor shall come here too."

It seemed indeed as if he meant that his triumph should culminate on this

final night of the year, his year. He laughed Julian's astonishment at

this vagary aside, sat down and wrote the two notes of invitation, and

then went out with Julian, saying:

"Julian, come out with me. You remember what I said about the greedy man?

Come; Fate shall present you with another course, one more step towards

your _café noir_ and--happiness. _Voilà!_"

Valentine was right in his supposition that both the lady of the feathers

and the doctor would accept his invitation, but he did not understand

the precise motive which prompted their acceptance. Nor did he much care

to understand it. Cuckoo, Doctor Levillier! After all, what were they

to him now? Spectators of his triumph. Interesting, therefore, to a

certain extent, as an unpaying audience may be interesting to an actor.

Interesting, inasmuch as they could contribute to swell the bladder of

his vanity, and follow in procession behind his chariot wheels. But he no

longer cared to divine the shades of their emotions, or to busy himself

in fathoming their exact mental attitudes in relation to himself. So he

thought, touched perhaps with a certain delirium, though not with the

delirium of insanity attributed to him by Doctor Levillier.

The doctor had intended celebrating the last night of the year in Harley

Street with Cuckoo and the two young men. The refusal of the latter put

an end to the opening of his plan of campaign in this strange battle,

and he was greatly astonished when he received Valentine's invitation.

Still, he had no hesitation in accepting it.

"So," he said to himself, as he read the note, "we join issue within the

very wall of the enemy. Poor, deluded, twisted Valentine! that I should

have to call him, to think of him as an enemy! We begin the fight within

the shadow of our opponent's tent."

Literally that was the fact.

Cuckoo's thoughts were less definite, more tinged with passion, less

shaped by the hands of intellect. They were as clouds, looming large,

yet misty, hanging loose in torn fragments now, and now merging into

indistinguishable fog that yet seemed pregnant with possibilities.

Poor thoughts, vague thoughts; yet they pressed upon her brain until

her tired head ached. And they stole down to her heart, and that ached

too, and hoped and then despaired--then hoped again.

CHAPTER II

CAFÉ NOIR

Snow fell, melodramatically, on the year's death-night. During the day

Valentine occupied himself oddly in decorating his flat for the evening.

But although he thus seemed to fall in with the consecrated humours of

the season his decorations would scarcely have commanded the approval of

those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is

prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the

inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the

heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped

from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers,

brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and

spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring upon the

hurly-burly of furniture and ornaments. In the corners of the room were

immense red flowers, such as hang among the crawling green jungles of

the West Indies. They gleamed, like flames, amid a shower of cunningly

arranged green leaves, and palms sheltered them from the electric rays

of the ceiling. The tentroom was a maze of tulips, in vases, in pots,

in china bowls that hung by thin chains from the sloping green roof.

Few of these tulips were whole coloured. They were slashed, and striped,

and spotted with violent hues. Some were of the most vivid scarlet

streaked with black. Others were orange-coloured with livid pink spots,

circus-pink, such as you see round the eyes of horses bred specially for

the ring. There were white tulips, stained as if with blood, pale pink

tulips tipped with deepest brown, rose-coloured tulips barred with wounds

whose edges were saffron-hued, tulips of a warm wallflower tint dashed

with the stormy yellow of an evening sky. And hidden among those

scentless flowers, in secret places cunningly contrived, were great

groups of hyacinths, which poured forth their thick and decadent scent,

breathing heavily their hearts into the small atmosphere of the room,

and giving a strange and unnatural soul to the tulips who had spent

all their efforts in the attainment of form and daring combinations of

colour. As if relapsing into sweet simplicity, after the vagaries of a

wayward nature had run their course, Valentine had filled his hall and

dining-room with violets, purple and white, and a bell of violets hung

from the ceiling over the chair which the lady of the feathers was to

occupy at dinner. These were white only, white and virginal, flowers for

some sweet woman dedicated to the service of God, or to the service of

some eternal altar-flame burning, as the zeal of nature burns, through

all the dawning and fading changes of the world.

Thus Valentine passed his day among flowers, and only when the last

twilight of the year fell had he fixed the last blossom in its place.

Then he rested, as after six days of creation, and from the midst of

his flowers saw the snow falling delicately upon London. Lights began

to gleam in the tall houses opposite his drawing-room windows. He glanced

at them, and they brought him thoughts at which he smiled. Behind those

squares of light he imagined peace and good will in enormous white

waistcoats and expansive shirt-fronts, red-faced, perhaps even whiskered,

getting ready for good temper and turkey, journalistic geniality and plum

pudding. And holly everywhere, with its prickly leaves and shining,

phlegmatic surfaces.

Peace and good will!

He glanced at his orchids and at the red West Indian flowers, and he

thought of those crawling green jungles from which they should have come,

and smiled gently.

Peace and good will!

He went to dress.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in the Marylebone Road the lady of the feathers achieved

her toilet, assisted by Jessie. The only evening dress that Cuckoo

possessed had been given to her long ago by a young man in the millinery

department of a large London shop. For a week he had adored Cuckoo.

During that week he had presented her with this tremendous gift. She

went into her bedroom now, took it out and looked at it. The gown rustled

a great deal whenever it was moved; this had been the young man's idea.

He considered that the more a gift rustled, the more aristocratic it

was, and, being well acquainted with all the different noises made by

different fabrics, he had selected one with a voice as of many waters.

Cuckoo heard it now as in a dream. She laid it down upon the bed and

regarded it by candle-light. The young man's taste in sound found its

equivalent in his taste in colour. The hue of the gown was also very

loud, the brightest possible green, trimmed with thick yellow imitation

lace. Once it had enchanted Cuckoo, she had put it on with a thrill to go

to music-halls with the young man. But now she gazed upon it with a lack

lustre and a doubtful eye. The flickering flame of the candle lit it up

in patches, and those patches had a lurid aspect. Remembering that Julian

had liked her best in black, she shrank from appearing before him in

anything so determined. Yet it was her only dress for the evening,

and at first she supposed the wearing of it to be inevitable. She put

it on and went in front of the glass. In these days she had become even

thinner than of old, and more haggard. The gown increased her tenuity

and pallor to the eye, and, after a long moment of painful consideration,

Cuckoo resolved to abandon these green glories. Once her mind was

made up, she was out of the dress in an instant; time was short. She

hurriedly extracted her black gown from the wardrobe, caught hold of

a pair of scissors, and in a few minutes had ripped the imitation lace

from its foundations and was transferring it with trembling fingers

to Julian's gift. Never before had she worked at any task with such

grim determination, or with such deftness; inspired by exceptional

circumstances, she might for twenty minutes have been a practised

dressmaker. Certainly, pins were called in as weapons to the attack;

but what of that? Compromises are often only stuck together with pins.

In any case Cuckoo was not entirely in despair with the new aspect of

an old friend, and when she was ready was able at least to hope that

things might have been worse.

Putting on over the dress a black jacket, she went out into the passage

and called down to Mrs. Brigg, who, as usual, was wandering to and fro in

her kitchen, like an uneasy shade in nethermost Hades.

"Mrs. Brigg! Mrs. Brigg, I say!"

"Well?"

"Where's the whistle?"

Mrs. Brigg came to the bottom of the kitchen stairs.

"What d' yer want it for?"

"A cab, of course," cried Cuckoo, in the narrow voice of one in a hurry.

"A cab!" rejoined Mrs. Brigg, ascending the dark stairs all the time she

was speaking. "And what do you want with cabs, I should like to know? Who

pays for 'em, that's what I say; who's to do it?"

Her grey head hove in sight.

"Where are you going? Piccadilly?"

"No; get the whistle."

"What--and no hat!"

She was evidently impressed.

"A toff is it?" she ejaculated, obviously appeased. "Well! so long as I

get the rent I--"

With a white glare Cuckoo seized the whistle from her claw, and in a

moment was driving away through the snow.

Mrs. Brigg trotted back to the kitchen decidedly relieved. Cuckoo's

suddenly altered mode of life had tried her greatly. The girl had taken

to going out in the day and staying at home at night. Simultaneously

with this changed _régime_ her funds had evidently become low. She had

begun to live less well, to watch more keenly than of old the condition

in which her commons went down to the kitchen and returned from it on

the advent of the next meal. By various little symptoms the landlady

knew that her lodger was getting hard up. Yet no amount of badgering

and argument would induce Cuckoo to say why she sat indoors at night.

She acknowledged that she was not ill. Mrs. Brigg had been seriously

exercised. But now her old heart was glad. Cuckoo was, perhaps, mounting

into higher circles, circles in which hats were not worn during the

evening. And as Mrs. Brigg entered her nethermost hell she broke into

a thin, quavering song:

"In 'er 'air she wore a white cam-eeiyer,

Dark blue was the colour of 'er heye."

It was her song of praise. She always sang it on great occasions.

When the lady of the feathers reached Victoria Street she found the

little party already assembled. Valentine met her ceremoniously in the

violet-scented hall and helped her to slide out of her jacket. His glance

upon the imitation lace was quick and gay, but Cuckoo did not see it. She

was gazing at the flowers, and when she entered the drawing-room and

found herself in the midst of the orchids, the West Indian flowers and

the palms, her astonishment knew no bounds.

"I never!" she murmured under her breath.

Then she forgot the flowers, having only time to remember to be shy.

Dinner was immediately announced by Wade, whose years of trained

discretion could not banish a faint accent of surprise from his voice.

He was, in fact, _bouleversé_ by this celebration of the death of the

old year. Valentine offered Cuckoo his arm. She took it awkwardly, with

a shooting glance of question at the doctor, who seemed her only spar in

this deep social sea. Valentine placed her beneath the bell of violets,

and took his seat beside her. Julian was on her other hand, the doctor

exactly opposite. Wade presented her with _hors-d'oeuvres._ Cuckoo

selected a sardine. She understood sardines, having met them at the

Monico. Valentine and the doctor began to talk. Julian ate slowly, and

Cuckoo stole a glance at him. His aspect startled her so much that she

with difficulty repressed a murmur of astonishment. He had the appearance

of one so completely exhausted as to be scarcely alive. Most people,

however stupid, however bored, have some air, when in society, of

listening even when they do not speak, of giving some sort of attention

to those about them, or to the place in which they find themselves. They

glance this way and that, however phlegmatically. They bend in attention

or lean back in observation. It is seen that they are conscious of their

environment. But Julian was engrossed with fatigue. The lids drooped over

his eyes. His face wore a leaden hue. Even his lips were colourless. He

ate slowly and mechanically till his plate was empty. Then he laid down

his fork and remained motionless, his eyes still cast down towards the

tablecloth, his two hands laid against the table edge, while the fingers

were extended upon the cloth on either side of his plate. Cuckoo looked

at him with terror, wondering if he were ill. Then, glancing up, she met

the eyes of the doctor. They seemed to bid her take no heed of Julian's

condition, and she did not look at him again just then. Trying to control

her fears, she listened to Valentine's conversation with the doctor.

"Doctors are sceptics by profession," she heard him say.

"I believe in individualism too firmly to allow that any beliefs or

unbeliefs can be professional, Cresswell."

"Possibly you are right," Valentine answered lightly. "What a pity it is

that there is no profession of which all the members at least believe in

themselves."

"Ah; would you enter it?"

"I scarcely think it would be necessary."

He glanced first at the doctor, then at Cuckoo as he spoke.

"I am thankful to say," he added in his clear, cool voice, "that I have

no longer either the perpetual timidity of the self-doubter or even the

occasional anxiety of the egoist."

"You have passed into a region which even egoism cannot enter."

"Possibly--the average egoism."

"The average egoism of the end of the century moves in a very rarefied

air."

"Its feet touch ground nevertheless."

"And yours?"

Valentine only laughed, as if he considered the question merely

rhetorical or jocose.

"But we are getting away from the question, which was not personal,"

he said. "I contend that doctors, as a body, are bound to combat these

modern Athenians, who are inclined to attribute everything to some

obscure action of the mind. For, if their beliefs are founded on rock,

and if they can themselves sufficiently, by asceticism, or by following

any other fixed course of life which they may select as the right one,

train their minds to do that which they believe can be done, the

profession of doctors may in time be abolished. Mind will be the

universal medicine; will, not simply the cure, but the preventive,

of disease."

"And of death?" the doctor asked quietly. "Will man be able to think

himself into an eternity on earth?"

Valentine looked at him very strangely.

"You ask that question seriously?" he said.

"I ask seriously whether you think so."

It was evident that the doctor meant to make the question above all

things a personal one. This time Valentine accepted that condition.

He sat for a moment twisting his champagne-glass about in his long

fingers, and glancing rapidly from the doctor to Cuckoo, who heard this

conversation without very well understanding it. Indeed, she sat beneath

her bell of violets in much confusion, _distraite_ in her desire to

command intellectual faculties which she did not possess. Valentine

watched her narrowly, though he seemed unattentive to her. Perhaps

he thought of his delivery of his gospel to her, and wondered if she

recalled it at this moment; or perhaps once more he began to rejoice

in her mental distress and alienation.

"Wade," he said "the champagne to Mr. Addison. Well, doctor, suppose I

acknowledged that I did so--mind, I don't acknowledge it!--you might, on

your side, think something too--that I am mad, for instance. Ah! Miss

Bright has knocked over her glass!"

Cuckoo murmured a stumbling apology, gazing with nervous intentness at

Valentine. It seemed to her that he had a gift of divination. Doctor

Levillier laughed gently.

"I am not inclined to suppose all my opponents in thought mad," he said.

"Still, such a belief would certainly indicate in the holder of it the

possession of a mind so uncommon, so unique, I may say, that it would

naturally rouse one to very close attention and observation of it."

"Exactly," Valentine rejoined.

A certain audacity was slowly creeping into his demeanour and growing

while he talked. It manifested itself in slight gesticulations, conceited

movements of the hand and head, in the colour of the voice and the blunt

directness of his glances.

"Exactly. Attention and observation directed towards the object of

satisfying yourself that the man--myself, let us say--was mad? You

don't reply. Let me ask you a question. Why should a profound belief

in human power of will indicate madness?"

"A belief that is not based on any foundation or proof--that is my point.

An extraordinary belief, personal to one person, rejected by mankind in

the mass, and founded upon nothing, no fact, no inference even, in the

history of mankind, is decidedly a strong indication of dementia."

"But suppose it is a belief founded upon a fact?"

"Of course that would entirely alter the matter."

The two men looked across at one another with a long and direct glance

full in the eyes. Cuckoo watched them anxiously. Julian sat with his

eyes cast down. He seemed unaware that there was any one near him, any

conversation going on around him. Wade moved softly about, ministering

to the wants of his master's guests. Course succeeded course.

"Do you propose to give me a fact proving the reasonableness of

entertaining a belief that a man, by his own deliberate action of the

will, can compass immortality on earth, or even prolong his life in such

a way as this, for instance; by the successful domination, or banishment,

of any disease recognized as mortal?--For I acknowledge that the will to

live may prolong for a certain time a life threatened merely by the

sapping action of old age.--Do you propose to give me a fact to prove

that?"

"I do not say that I intend to give it to you," Valentine answered, with

scarcely veiled insolence.

"But you know of such a fact?" said the doctor, ignoring his host's tone.

"Possibly."

The voice of Valentine thrilled with triumph as he spoke the word. Again

he glanced at the lady of the feathers.

"Cannot you convert the doctor?" he asked her, in tones full of sarcastic

meaning. "You know something of my theories, something of their putting

into practice."

"I don't know--I don't understand," she murmured helplessly.

She looked down at her plate, flushing scarlet with a sense of shame at

her own complete mental impotence.

"What's the matter, Cuckoo?"

The words came slowly from the lips of Julian, whose heavy eyes were now

raised and fixed with a stare of lethargic wonder upon Cuckoo.

"What are they saying to you?"

His look travelled on, still slow and unwieldy, to the doctor and to

Valentine.

"I won't have Cuckoo worried," he said. And then he relapsed with a

mechanical abruptness upon the consideration of his food. Valentine

seemed about to make some laughing rejoinder, but, after a glance at

Julian, he apparently resigned the idea as absurd, and, turning again

to the doctor, remarked:

"It is sometimes injudicious to state all that one knows."

"Still more so all that one does not know. But I have no desire to press

you," the doctor said, lightly. "This is wonderful wine. Where did you

get it?"

"At the _Cercle Blanc_ sale," Valentine answered quickly.

It seemed that he was slightly irritated. He frowned and cast a glance

that was almost threatening upon the doctor.

"Would you assume weakness in every strong man who refuses to take off

his coat, roll up his shirt sleeve and display the muscle of his arm?"

he said, harshly.

"The case is not analogous. That muscle exists in the world is a proved

fact. When I was at Eton, I was knocked down by a boy stronger than I

was. Since then I acknowledge the power of muscle."

"And have you never been knocked down mentally?"

"Not in the way you suggest."

Valentine shifted in his seat. It did not escape the doctor that he

had the air of a man longing to either say or do something startling,

but apparently held back by tugging considerations of prudence or of

expediency.

"Some day you may be," he said at last, obviously conquered by this

prompting prudence.

"When I am, the 'Christian scientist' who once declared to me that she

cured a sprained ankle by walking on it many miles a day, and thinking

it was well while she walked, shall receive my respectful apologies,"

the doctor answered, laughing.

Valentine handed the lady of the feathers some strawberries. On her

nervous refusal of them he exclaimed:

"I see you have finished your wine, doctor. No more? Really? Nor you,

Julian?"

Julian made no reply. He simply pushed his glass a little away from him.

"Then shall we accompany Miss Bright into the tentroom? I thought we

would have coffee there. You have never seen the tentroom," he added to

Cuckoo, getting up from his seat as he spoke.

"I usually sit in it when I am alone or with Julian. You will not mind

our cigarettes, I know."

He led the way down the scented corridor, scented with the thin, gently

bright scent of violets.

"The tentroom has a history," he continued to Cuckoo, opening a door

on the left. "It was once the scene of an--an absurd experiment. Eh,

doctor?"

They entered the room. As they did so the hot, sticky scent of the hidden

hyacinths poured out to meet them. For a moment it seemed overwhelming,

and Cuckoo hung back with an almost unconquerable sensation of aversion

and even of fear. The aspect of this small room astonished her; she had

never seen any chamber so arranged. Certainly, it looked very unusual

to-night. The small fire was hidden by a large screen of white wood, with

panels of dull green brocade. Only one of the electric lamps was turned

on, and that was shaded, so that the diffused light was faint, a mere

unflickering twilight. The masses of tulips hung like quantities of

monotonously similar shadows from the tented ceiling, and the flood of

scent caused the room to seem even smaller than it really was, a tiny

temple dedicated to the uncommon, perhaps to the sinister.

"We will see the old year out and drink our _café noir_ here," said

Valentine. "Where will you sit, Miss Bright?"

"I don't mind. It's all one to me," murmured Cuckoo. "What a funny room,

though!" she could not help adding. "It ain't like a room at all."

"Imagine it an Arab tent, the home of a Bedouin Sheik in a desert of

Nubia," said Valentine. "This divan is very comfortable. Let me arrange

the cushions for you."

As he bent over her to do so, he murmured in her ear:

"And you, having tossed your will away, are nothing!"

They had been the last words of his gospel, proclaimed to her that night

on which she prayed!

The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the

knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet;

the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action,

she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the

doctor's trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the

knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair

sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer,

incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that

encompasses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human

lives with mystery. She looked up at him with this world of mingling

knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling

sensation of frigid awe.

"What--what?" he began. Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly

away.

"Sit down, doctor. Do you like my flowers? Julian, are you still tired?

The coffee will wake you up. A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar? Here are

the matches."

Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo. His

unnatural lethargy was gradually passing away into a more explicable

fatigue, no longer speechless. Leaning on his elbow, he looked into

her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim

pathos. It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during

the evening was still Cuckoo's confusion over her own misunderstanding

at dinner, for he now again referred to it.

"Have they been chaffing you, Cuckoo?" he said, striking a match on the

heel of his shoe and lighting a cigarette. "Have they been worrying you?

Never mind. It's only Val's fun. He doesn't mean anything by it. I say,

how awfully pale you look to-night, and thin."

He paused, considering her with a glance that was almost severe.

"I'm all right," said Cuckoo, trying to repress the agitation she always

felt now when speaking to Julian. "I ain't ill. Why don't you come to see

me now?" she added. "You don't never come."

Julian glanced over to Valentine, who was standing by the hearth talking

to the doctor, who sat in an armchair.

"I've been busy," he said. "I've had a lot of things to do. Do you miss

me, Cuckoo, when I don't come?"

"Yes," she replied, but without softness. Then she added, lowering her

voice almost to a whisper:

"Don't he want you to come?"

Julian did not reply, but puffed rather moodily at his cigarette,

glancing towards Valentine. He was thinking of the conversation at

the Savoy and of the antagonism between Valentine and Cuckoo. Suddenly

there came into his mind a dull wish to reconcile these two on the last

night of the year, to--in Valentine's own words--bury the hatchet. He

sat meditating over his plan and trying to revolve different and dramatic

methods of accomplishing it. Presently he said:

"Cuckoo, you and Val have got to be friends from to-night."

She started, stirring uneasily on the great cushions that were heaped at

her back.

"We are," she said.

He shook his head.

"Not real friends."

"Oh, we are all right."

"D'you hate him still?"

"He don't like me," she answered, evasively.

"Yet he invites you here," Julian said. "Why does he do that?"

"I dunno," Cuckoo said.

She wondered why. Not so the doctor, to whom it had become evident

that Valentine had asked his guests out of vanity, and with a view to

some peculiar and monstrous display of his power over Julian. While

Cuckoo and Julian talked together on the divan Valentine came over to

the doctor. His eyes still held an expression of awe created in him by

the strange new glance of the lady of the feathers. He sought to conquer

this sensation of awe, which fought fiercely against his intended blatant

triumph of to-night.

"Your cigarette all right, doctor?" he said, in a quick voice.

"A delicious one, thanks."

Valentine began touching the ornaments on the mantelpiece with nervous

fingers.

"We didn't quite finish our conversation at dinner," he said.

"No?"

"I did not give you a reason for my belief."

A deep interest woke in the doctor, but he did not show it. He thought:

"So, he must insanely return to this one subject, round which his brain

makes an eternal tour."

"No," he said aloud; "you have a reason then?"

"Yes."

Valentine's voice vibrated with arrogance. His hand still darted to

and fro on the mantelpiece while he stood looking down at the doctor.

There was something in his manner that suggested a mixture of triumph

and fighting anxiety in his mind. But, as he continued to speak, the

former got the upper hand.

"A reason that might convince even you if you knew it."

"Convince me, of exactly what?" the doctor asked, indifferently.

His indifference seemed to pique Valentine, who replied with energy:

"That human will can be cultivated, has been developed, until it has

moved the mountain, achieved the thing men call a miracle."

"By whom has it been so developed?"

Valentine hesitated almost like one who fears to be led into a trap. The

doctor could see "By me!" trembling upon his lips. He didn't actually

utter it, but instead exclaimed with a laugh:

"Some day you will discover."

And as he spoke he looked at Julian and the lady of the feathers.

The doctor was anxious to lead him on, and leaning easily back in his

comfortable chair, occupied himself with his cigarette for a minute, as a

man calmly at ease. Between his whiffs he presently threw out carelessly:

"This man has compassed eternity by his own will?"

"Oh, I did not say that."

"He has contented himself with curing a sprained ankle by walking upon

it, like my Christian scientist?"

"Now you fly to the other extreme--from the very great to the very

little. Take a middle course."

"Where would that lead me?"

Valentine threw a glance round the dim, hot, scented little room, then

once more his eyes rested on Julian and Cuckoo.

"What if I said--To this little room, to Julian and that girl, to

myself?" he answered in a low voice.

"And the miracle?" said the doctor.

The door opened. Wade appeared with coffee.

CHAPTER III

THE HEALTH OF THE NEW YEAR

Valentine turned quickly, with an air of mingled irritation and relief at

the interruption.

"We must all take coffee," he cried. "It will give us impetus, vitality,

so that as the old year dies we may live more swiftly, more strongly. I

like to feel that my life is increasing while that of another--the old

year for instance--is decreasing."

But the doctor noticed that his eyes had rested with a curiously

significant expression upon Julian as he spoke the last sentence.

"Leave the coffee-pot on that little table," he added to Wade, when the

man had filled all four cups. "We may want it."

Wade obeyed him and disappeared.

"Your man makes wonderful coffee," the doctor said, sipping.

"Yes. Julian, have you reached that _café noir_ I spoke of the other

day?" Valentine asked laughingly, returning to his simile of the greedy

man and happiness.

"I don't know. Not yet, Val, I think," Julian answered. This coffee

seemed to give him life at last. The heavy weariness disappeared from

his face. His eyes gleamed with something of their old youthfulness and

ardour.

"If so, I must be close on happiness," he added.

As he spoke he looked into the hollow eyes of Cuckoo, seeming, strangely,

to seek in them the will-o'-the-wisp of which he spoke.

"Never look for it in unfurnished rooms," Valentine exclaimed with sudden

violence.

This glance of Julian, so the doctor judged, precipitated his curious and

subtle insanity towards an outburst.

"You will find it in the thing that is most definite, not in the thing

that is most indefinite. Isn't it so, doctor? Happiness lies in the

positive, not in the negative."

"Happiness lies in many places. Each finds it in a different house."

"Perhaps you can't tell where I should find it, Val," Julian interposed,

with a certain sturdiness of manner.

"No," said Cuckoo, eagerly.

The coffee, it appeared, had an effect upon her too. There was a life,

a keen intentness in her thin, white face, not visible there before.

Valentine turned round upon her. He was holding his coffee cup in his

right hand. With the other he put his cigarette to his lips.

"Can you tell us where Mr. Addison is likely to find happiness?" he said.

"Can you tell us, lady of the feathers?"

"No. He can tell himself. That's all," she said. "Let him find it

himself."

"Each for himself and God for us all, eh?"

"I don't know about God," she said, looking towards the doctor as if for

assistance.

"Each for another and God for us all is perhaps a better motto," the

doctor interposed.

"Ah, Charity!"

Valentine took out his watch and looked at it.

"Charity! Midnight is approaching, and, of course, this is Charity's

benefit-night by common consent. Thank you, doctor, for the hint. Did

the dying old year prompt you with its husky voice full of the wind and

of the snow?"

"Possibly."

"Let us have some more coffee. Julian, give me Miss Bright's cup. You

shall have your absinthe presently. Wade has not forgotten it."

"Absinthe?" said the doctor.

"Julian drinks it every night. He has got tired of whiskey. Doctor, your

cup too."

"We shall not sleep a wink to-night."

"All the better. Why should not we see the dawn in, as we did once

before? You recollect."

"Ah, Val! on the night of your trance."

"Yes. You were not here then, lady of the feathers."

He spoke with a light mockery.

"I fainted, or died--the doctor was deceived into thinking so--and was

born again in the dawn of the very day on which Julian first met you."

Cuckoo shivered with the recollection of Marr and her horror of that

night.

"Why do you shiver?" Valentine continued. "Do you find the room cold?"

"No, no."

Indeed, the heat and the overpowering scent of the hyacinths had

previously weighed upon her physique, and increased the _malaise_

into which her curious new dutifulness, and the faint spectre which

drew near to her, had brought her.

"Perhaps you shiver in the influence of this little room," he continued,

persistently. "Julian and I once did so. Eh, Julian?"

"Yes, in those sittings."

"I didn't shiver," Cuckoo said, bluntly and very obviously lying.

She quickly drank some more coffee.

"If you had, it might not have been astonishing," said Valentine. "For

this little room has seen marvels, and strange things that happen perhaps

stamp their strange impression upon the places in which they happen.

We ought to discuss the occult, doctor, on the last night of the year."

"By all means."

"How long ago it seems!" Julian said suddenly, with a sigh.

"Yes," Valentine answered. "Because so much has happened in the interval.

The greedy man has eaten so many courses, Julian."

He seemed to take a delight in throwing out allusions to one and the

other of his guests, allusions which nobody but the person addressed

could understand rightly. For he now went on, addressing himself to

Cuckoo:

"In this little room was committed the great act of brigandage of which

I once spoke to you. Do you remember?"

She shook her head.

"Never mind. But, though you cannot remember, that might make you

shiver."

"What act of brigandage, Valentine?" Julian asked.

"Oh, the attempt--my attempt to seize upon a different soul."

"But you failed."

"Did I? Do you think so, doctor?"

His apparent audacity seemed to increase. In the twilight of the scented

room he drew himself up as he stood by the brocaded screen that hid the

fire. He closed and unclosed rapidly his left hand which hung at his

side. His foot tapped the thick carpet gently.

"Did you not?" the doctor answered quietly.

But Julian was roused to vivacity.

"What do you mean, Valentine?" he said. "Of course you may have changed,

or developed, or whatever you like to call it, since then. But to say you

have got a different soul!"

"Is absurd? Yes, you are right. Because if I had got a different soul

the original 'I,' that was dissatisfied with itself, must have ceased

to be. Since the soul of a man--his will to do things, his will to feel

things--is the man himself, if I had a different soul I should be another

man. The former man would have ceased to be."

"Or would be elsewhere."

It was the doctor who spoke, and he spoke without special interest,

simply expressing his thought of what might happen in so whimsical an

event as that harped upon by Valentine. But Valentine seemed painfully

struck by the almost idle words.

"Elsewhere!" he exclaimed, with a lowering expression. "What do you mean,

doctor? What do you imply?"

The doctor looked at him surprised.

"Merely that a thing expelled is not necessarily a thing slain. If you

turn me out of this room I am not certain to expire on the doormat."

Valentine broke into a nervous and uneasy laugh, and cast a quick glance

all around him, and especially on Cuckoo, who sat listening silently with

her eyebrows drawn together in a pent frown of puzzled attention.

"I see, I see," he said hastily. And here Julian broke in.

"But the whole thing's impossible," he said with a laugh.

"You would say so, doctor?"

Valentine addressed this question to Doctor Levillier in a very marked

and urgent manner.

"You would say so, since the will of man cannot perform miracles?"

"Certainly, I should say so, despite the triumphs of hypnotism. A man

may change greatly through outside influence, or perform occasional acts

foreign to his nature under the influence of 'suggestion' or hypnotism.

But I do not believe he can change radically and permanently, except from

one cause."

The last words were spoken after a moment of hesitation. Valentine

rejoined quickly:

"What? What? One cause, you say! You allow that--wait, though! What is

the cause?"

Doctor Levillier was silent. He was asking himself should he play this

forcing card, make this sharp, cutting experiment. He resolved that he

would make it.

"A man may change radically," he said, "if he becomes insane."

A short breath, like a sigh, came from Cuckoo. Valentine stood quite

still, regarding the doctor closely for a moment. Then he said

contemptuously:

"Mad! Oh, madmen don't interest me."

The doctor had gained nothing from his experiment. It was impossible

to gather from Valentine's manner that he was in any way struck by this

suggestion, and indeed he abandoned all allusion to it with careless

haste, and returned to that other suggestion of which the doctor

himself had thought nothing.

"Supposing the soul of a man to be expelled," he said, abruptly,

"where--where do you suppose it would go, would be?"

It was obvious that he endeavoured to speak lightly, but there was a most

peculiar anxiety visible in his manner. The doctor wondered from what

cause it sprang.

"I have never formed a supposition on that matter," he said.

"Well--well--try to form one now. Yes, and you, Julian, too."

He did not address himself to the lady of the feathers, but he looked

at her long and narrowly. The doctor lit another cigarette. He seemed

to be seriously considering this odd question. Julian, whose lethargy

was changing into an almost equally pronounced excitement, was not so

hesitating. As if struck by a sudden flashing idea, he exclaimed:

"How if it was in the air? How if it was wandering about from place to

place. By God, Val!" he cried, with emphasis, "do you know what I read in

a book I took up from your shelves the other day--something about souls

being like flames? It was in Rossetti: Flames!"

He turned to Cuckoo and stared into her eyes.

"I was half asleep when I read it," he said. "Why should I remember

it now? That flame--I saw that flame months ago." He seemed like a man

puzzling something out, trying to trace a way through a tangled maze of

thought that yet might be clear. "It came from you, Val, that night, with

a cry like a lost thing. A soul expelled, did you say?"

Suddenly his face was set in an awestruck gravity.

"Why--but then, if so, that flame would be _you_. Valentine, the flame

that seemed to haunt me, that I have seen in--"

He looked at Cuckoo again and was silent.

"Yes, Julian?" Valentine said in a hard, thin voice. "Go on, I am

listening."

Julian stared at him with strong excitement.

"And what are you, then, Valentine? Where do you come from?" he said

slowly.

"From Marr."

The words came from the divan, from the dry lips of Cuckoo. Doctor

Levillier knew not why, but he was thrilled to the very soul by them,

as by a revelation throwing strong light upon the depths of things.

Whether it was the influence of this strange scented room, in which

strange things had happened, or the influence of the hour and the

climax and death of the year, or a voice in his heart speaking to him

with authority, he could not tell. Only he knew that on a sudden all

his guiding reason, all his knowledge, all his cool contemplation of

the physician and common sense of the man, were swept entirely away.

His theory of insanity seemed in a moment the theory of a dwarf

intellect trying to stick wretched, absurd pins through angels--white

or black--that it thought butterflies. His conversation with Cuckoo on

the Hampstead Heights seemed the vain babble of a tricked and impotent

observer. His mind fell on its knees before the mind of the lady of the

feathers. Reason was stricken by instinct. The confused feeling of the

woman had conquered the logical inferences of the man. From that moment

the doctor secretly abandoned the old landmarks which had guided him all

his life, and entered into a new world--a world in which he would not

have dreamed of permitting any of his patients to walk if he could help

it. A strange magic floated round him like a mist blotting out the crude

familiarities of the normal world. The tentroom, with its shadowy tulips,

its scented warmth, its pale twilight, its quick silences when voices

ceased, was a temple of wonder and a home of the miraculous. And those

gathered in it, what were they? Men and a woman? Bodies? Earthly

creatures? No. To his mind they were stripped bare of the clothes in

which man--governed by decrees of some hidden power--must make his life

pilgrimage. They were stripped bare and naked of their bodies. They were

warm, stirring, disembodied things--they were flames leaping, waving,

contending, aspiring. And he remembered the night when he sat alone in

the drawing-room of Valentine, and saw the red walls glow, and the light

deepen, and saw the stillness grow to movement, and the shadows come away

from their background, and take forms--the forms of flames. Was that

night a night of prophesy? Were those flames silent voices speaking

to the ear of his mind? He looked around him like a man in a strange

country, who takes a long breath and liberates his soul in wonder. He

looked around, and the shadowy, thin girl leaning forward on the divan,

with one arm outstretched as if she gave a message, was among the other

flames as a flame upon an altar. At least his instinct had not played

him false with regard to her. He knew it now. In the wild and sad

streets, where feet of men tread ever, where tears of women flow ever,

grow flowers of Paradise, strange flowers, leap flames from the eternal

fires of heaven. And the voice of Cuckoo thrilled him as the voice of

revelation.

Valentine turned upon the lady of the feathers, hearing her cry.

"Marr!" he said, "your lover who died! Ah!"

The brutality of the remark was so unexpected, so savage, that it struck

all those who heard it like a whip. Cuckoo shrank back among her cushions

trembling. Julian made a slight forward movement as if to stop Valentine.

The doctor laid his hands on the arms of his chair and pressed them hard.

He felt a need of physical energy. In the sudden silence Valentine

touched the electric bell. Before any one spoke it was answered by Wade,

who carried a tray on which stood various bottles and glasses.

"We must counteract the exciting effects of our _café noir_," Valentine

said, addressing his guests in a group. "Otherwise we shall be strung

up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church

bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or

of spectres. Julian, here is your absinthe. What will you drink, Miss

Bright? Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?"

"Lemonade, please," Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper.

The tears were crowding in her eyes. She dared not look Julian in the

face. Never before had her past risen up before her painted in such grim

and undying colours. The reprise of Valentine had been as the reprise of

a Maxim gun to a volley fired by a child from an air-tube. So Cuckoo

felt. But how greatly was she deceived! Perhaps physical conditions

played a subtle part in the terrible desolation that seized her now,

after her outburst of daring and of excitement. The warmth and smallness

of the room, the penetrating scent that filled it, even the movements

of her companions, the sound of their voices, suddenly became almost

insupportable to Cuckoo. She was the victim of a reaction that was so

swift and so intense as to be unnatural. And in it both her mind and body

were bound in chains. Then she was petrified. Her very heart felt cold

and cramped, and then hard, icy, inhuman. Her tears did not fall, but

were dried up in her eyes, like dew by a scorching sun. She looked at

Julian, and felt as indifferent towards him as if he had been a shadow on

the grass in the evening time. Then he became remote, with a removedness

attained by no shadow even. For a shadow is in the world, and Julian

seemed beyond the world to Cuckoo. She thought, even repeated, with

tiny lip-movements, the cruel words of Valentine, and they seemed to her

no longer cruel, or of any meaning, bad or good. For they came from too

far away. They were as a cry of shrill music from a cave leagues onward

beyond the caves of any winds.

Valentine poured out some lemonade and gave it to her. She accepted it

mechanically. She even put it to her lips and drank some of it. But her

palate was aware of no flavour, no coolness of liquid. And she continued

sipping without tasting anything.

Meanwhile Julian was saying to Valentine:

"I don't think I'll take any absinthe to-night. Give me some lemonade

too."

"Lemonade for you? Nonsense. I ordered the absinthe specially. You must

have some. Here it is."

As he spoke he poured some of the opalescent liquid into a tumbler and

handed it to Julian. While he did so his eyes were on the doctor and they

gleamed again with a sort of audacity or triumph. He seemed recovering

himself, returning to his former mood and veiled intentions. And Doctor

Levillier thought he saw the flame of Valentine's soul glow more deeply

and fiercely. The three men, as if with one accord, ignored the lady of

the feathers at this period of the evening. Valentine, having shot his

bolt, left his victim to shudder in the dust. Julian and the doctor, full

of pity or of wonder, were drawn instinctively to leave her for the

moment outside of the circle of intimacy, lest the conflict should be

renewed. They did not know how far outside of it she felt; how dim the

twilight was becoming to her eyes; how dim the voices to her ears. She

lay back on her pillows, in the shadow of the divan, and they supposed

her to be listening, as before, to what they said; to be drawing into her

nostrils the scent of the hyacinths, and into her soul--it might be--some

fragments of their uttered thoughts. But for the moment they seemed to

put her outside the door.

Julian did not protest against the absinthe. He took it and placed it

on a little table beside him, and as he talked he occasionally drank a

little of it, till his glass was empty. Valentine had again looked at his

watch.

"The flame of the year is flickering very low," he said.

This simile of the flame of the year, so ordinary, he had spoken

against his will. He asked himself angrily why he had said flame, and

again the doctor saw the flame of Valentine's soul trying to leap higher,

to aspire to some strange and further region than that in which it seemed

to dwell. Julian sat looking at Valentine with a gaze that was surely

new in his eyes, the dawning gaze of inquiry which a man directs upon

a stranger just come into his life. He had not alluded in any way to

Cuckoo's startling and vehement interposition. Valentine had killed that

conversation with one blow, it seemed. They buried it by deserting it.

Yet the thought of it was obviously with them, making quick interchange

of words on another subject difficult. Valentine had seized again on the

poor, prostrate year; yet he carried even to it the memory of that which

seemed to encompass them as with a ring of fire, and that despite

himself.

"We shall hear the bells directly," he added. "I hate bells at night.

They will sound odd in this room."

"Very odd," the doctor said.

"We ought to sit reviewing our past year," Valentine went on.

"Our past year and all it has done for us."

"Do you think it has done much for you, Addison?" the doctor asked. And,

despite his intention, there was a certain significance in his tone.

Julian looked rather grave and moody, yet excited too, like a man who

might burst into either gaiety or anger at a moment's notice.

"I suppose it has," he answered. "Yes, more than any year since I was

quite a boy."

"It has taught you how to live," Valentine said quickly.

"Or how to--die," the doctor could not resist saying.

"Why do you say that, doctor?" Valentine asked sharply. "Julian is

neither sick nor sad; are you, Julian?"

"Oh, I don't know. Don't bother about me."

But Valentine seemed suddenly determined that Julian should state in

precise terms his contentment with his present fate.

"You are making your grand tour towards happiness," he exclaimed.

"Dessert, _café noir_--then the cigarette and contentment."

"I have had the _café noir_," Julian said, indicating his empty cup,

which Wade had by accident omitted to clear away. "I have had the

cigarette."

"Well. What then? Are you unhappy?"

"I tell you I don't know. Give me some more absinthe."

The doctor watched his excitement growing as he drank. It seemed an

excitement adverse to Valentine.

"One may have too much black coffee," he suddenly said.

"And that exerts a very depressing effect upon the nerves," said the

doctor, taking him literally. "Neither you nor I are likely to sleep well

to-night, Addison."

"I never sleep well now, doctor," Julian said.

All this time he continued to regard Valentine in the peculiar,

observant manner of a stranger who is trying to make up his mind

about the unfamiliar man at whom he looks.

"Then you should not drink black coffee."

As he spoke a very faint sound of bells penetrated to the tentroom.

"The psychological moment!" said Valentine.

And then they were all silent, listening.

To the doctor, the prey of magic art since the soft cry of the lady of

the feathers, the bells seemed magical and strange to-night, thin and

dreamy and remote. They rang outside the circle of the flames, yet they,

too, had an eerie meaning. Nor did their music come, he thought, from any

church tower, from any belfry, summoned by the tugging hands of men. Very

softly they rang. Their sound was deadened by the thick draperies. They

ceased.

"My year is born," Valentine said.

"Your year?" the doctor repeated.

"Yes. I feel that in this year I shall culminate; I shall touch a point;

I shall put the corner-stone to the temple of my ambition. No one can

prevent me now, no one. Look, she has fainted!"

He had been watching Cuckoo, and had seen her posture of mere rest

change, almost imperceptibly, to the prostration of insensibility.

The doctor sprang up from his chair. Julian uttered an exclamation.

Valentine only smiled. The door was opened. A fan was used. Air was

let into the room. Presently Cuckoo stirred and sat up. The three men

were gathered round her, and suddenly Valentine said:

"My trance over again. The lady of the feathers imitates me."

Julian turned round to him with abrupt irritation.

"That's not so," he said. "Cuckoo is herself always." He turned again to

her.

"Are you better?" he asked, touching her hand gently.

"Yes, I'm all right. It was--them."

She glanced vaguely round at the tulips, as if searching for the cause of

the scent which filled the room.

"There are hyacinths somewhere," the doctor said.

"Yes, they are hidden!" said Valentine. "A hidden power is the greatest

power. But now you may see them."

And he drew from a nook, guarded by some large ferns, a pot of red

hyacinths.

Cuckoo sat up and drank a little brandy, which the doctor gave to her.

Some colour came into her pale and thin cheeks.

"I'm as right as ninepence now," she said, with an effort after

brightness.

The bells began again.

"What's that?" she asked. "Not New Year, is it?"

"Yes," answered Valentine. "A happy New Year to you, lady of the

feathers."

Julian was struck by a sudden thought.

"Val," he said, "Cuckoo, I want you to be real friends this year."

He caught hold of Valentine's hand and placed it in Cuckoo's. But then,

again, a bewilderment seemed to take hold of him, for even as he touched

Valentine's hand he looked at him askance, and the eagerness died away

from his face.

"I don't know," he muttered to himself, and getting up from the end of

the divan, where he had been sitting, he moved away towards the fire,

leaving Cuckoo's hand in the hand of Valentine.

Valentine smiled coldly on Cuckoo.

"Lady of the feathers," he said, "we are to be allies."

"What's that?" she asked, pulling her hand away, directly Julian had

turned his back upon them.

"When people fight together against a common enemy they are allies."

"Then we ain't," she whispered, "New Year or not."

"You defy me," he said, raising his voice so that the doctor might hear

the words.

"Yes," she said.

"Doctor, do you hear?"

He seemed suddenly bent on forcing a quarrel. Doctor Levillier felt again

that sense of dread and horror which had attacked him now more than once

of late in Valentine's presence. This time the sensation was so acute

that he could scarcely combat it sufficiently to reply.

"I hear," he murmured.

"Julian!" Valentine called. "Julian, come here. Miss Bright wishes to

tell you something."

Julian turned round.

"Now, lady of the feathers!"

But Cuckoo burst into a shrill little laugh. Her head was spinning again.

"I've nothing--nothing to say," she cried out. "Give me some more

brandy."

"Very well. Let us all drink to the health of the New Year."

Valentine filled the glasses--Julian's with absinthe--and gave the toast:

"The New Year!"

They all raised their glasses to their lips simultaneously. One fell with

a crash to the ground and was broken. It was Julian's.

"I won't drink it," he said, doggedly, looking at Valentine.

There was a silence. Then Valentine said, calmly:

"Have you an animus against the thing you don't yet know?"

It was sufficiently obvious that he alluded to the year just coming in

upon London. But the words were taken by the doctor, and apparently by

Julian, in a hidden and different sense.

"Perhaps because I don't yet know it thoroughly, and had thought I did,"

Julian answered, staring him full in the face still with that strange

glance of mingled interrogation and bewilderment.

Valentine watched him.

"You are treating the poor thing--and my carpet--scurvily, Julian," he

said. "And you have startled Miss Bright."

Cuckoo's eyes were shining.

"No," she ejaculated.

Valentine rang the bell and directed Wade to collect the fragments of

glass. While the man was doing so silence again reigned, and the little

room seemed full of uneasiness. Only Valentine either was or affected to

be nonchalant. As soon as Wade had gone he said to the doctor:

"This room is destined to be dedicated to strange uses, and to influence

those who come within it. Julian is not himself to-night."

"Are you?" Julian asked.

"Myself?"

"Yes."

"My dear Julian, we shall be forced to think the absinthe has been at

work too busily in your brain. What is the matter?"

"Nothing."

"One would think we had been having a sitting, you are so excited."

Julian suddenly drew his breath sharply, as if struck by a shot of an

idea.

"Let us have one," he cried.

The distant bells rang faintly. The doctor thrilled to the suggestion,

still bound by magic, surely. For now, since the inspiring exclamation of

Cuckoo, which had broken his theories on the wheel and swept his reason

like a dead flower along the wind, he no longer condemned, as a danger

only, that which had produced the trance from which, as from a strange

prison, had come the new Valentine. The former sitting had, it seemed,

beckoned that trance, and with the trance had beckoned an incredibly evil

and powerful thing. What if that which had the power to give had also the

power to take away? Often it is so in ordinary conditions of life. Why

not also in extraordinary conditions? So his thoughts ran, fantastically

enough, to the sound of the far-off bells.

"A good notion," he said on the spur of the moment and this quick

reflection.

"You think so?" said Valentine. "You who condemned us, even wrung a

promise from us against sitting."

His regard was suspicious.

"Perhaps I have changed my mind. Perhaps I take the matter less

seriously," said the doctor.

He had never been more near lying, nor was he ashamed of his

dissimulation. There are creatures against which we must, whatever

our principles, take up the nearest weapon that comes to hand. The

doctor looked at Julian and at Valentine, and could have perjured

himself a thousand times to wrest the one from the other.

"But Miss Bright is ill," said Valentine.

"No, I ain't. I'm all right now," Cuckoo said.

She did not understand what was being proposed, but she gathered that

the doctor desired it. That was enough for her. Valentine looked at

them all three with eyes that plainly betokened a busy mind, then a smile

flickered over his lips. It was the smile of one in power watching his

slaves creeping at their work--for him. He touched the point--of which he

had spoken earlier in the evening--in that smile, a point of delirium.

"Let them try to break me," his mind said within itself. "Their very

trial shall consolidate my empire."

And then his eyes left the others and rested only on Julian.

"Very well, we will sit," he said.

CHAPTER IV

THE SIXTH SITTING

Julian was painfully excited, but he strove to repress all evidences of

his inward turmoil as he began to pull out a table and arrange it in the

centre of the room. This act threw him with a jerk back into the days of

the past, recalling so vividly the former life of himself and Valentine

that he could not help saying:

"This is like last year."

"Like the year that the locust hath eaten," Valentine answered. "We must

push our empty white years down into the water, Julian."

Julian made no reply. The table was soon arranged, the screen was drawn

more closely round the fire, which had been allowed to burn low. Four

chairs were set. Valentine turned to Cuckoo, who sat hunched on the divan

staring with wide open eyes at these preparations.

"Will you come?" he said, with his hands on the back of one of the

chairs.

"Whatever are we going to do?" she asked nervously.

"Something very simple--and perhaps very foolish," said the doctor,

wondering, indeed, now the moment for beginning the phantasy was arrived,

whether he was not to blame for encouraging a thing that in his under

mind he so thoroughly disapproved of. "We are going to sit round that

table in the dark with our hands upon it, and wait."

"Whatever for?"

Her simple and blatant question caused the doctor actually to blush. His

confusion was quite obvious, but it was covered by Julian, who exclaimed,

rather roughly:

"Now, Cuckoo, don't chatter, but come here and sit quiet."

He drew her from the divan into a chair and sat down beside her.

Valentine glided swiftly into the chair on her other side and said:

"Oh, doctor, I forgot the light. Do you mind turning it out?"

The doctor obeyed, felt his way to the chair opposite Cuckoo and sat

down.

Almost at the moment he turned out the light the bells that rang,

"_Le roi est mort, vive le roi_," ceased. Cuckoo was directed to lay

her hands on the table, and to touch with her fingers the fingers of her

companions. She did so, trembling. This was a new experience to her, and

her entire lack of knowledge of what was expected to happen filled the

darkness with immoderate possibilities, and her soul with awe and with

confusion. Then, to sit between the man she loved and the man she

loathed, thus in the blackness, was a nerve-shaking experience which her

preceding fainting-fit did not deprive of its normal terrors. The hand of

Valentine and the hand of Julian were as ice and as fire to her. The

darkness seemed crowded with nameless things. She could fancy that she

heard it whisper incessantly in her ear.

But the real interest of this sitting, to any little demon gifted with

a miraculous power of pushing its detective way into the minds of the

sitters, would have lain, perhaps, chiefly in the mind of Doctor

Levillier. It has been said that, suddenly struck to the soul by the

conviction with which the instinctive Cuckoo pronounced those words,

"From Marr," Doctor Levillier entered into a new world, abandoning old

landmarks. He remained in this new world of the senses certainly, but

already he was becoming accustomed to it, clear-headed, keen-sighted,

even reasonable in it. Moved by some strange conviction that he was in

the presence of an inexplicable mystery, he no longer tried to explain

it in some ordinary fashion. He abandoned his theory of insanity, or it

abandoned him. In any case, it was dead, buried, whether he would or no.

He recognized a mystery at present beyond his capacity to understand or

to explain. Having got thus far, and having entered, at Julian's word,

into this present circumstance of sitting, table-turning, or rapping, or

whatever you may choose to call it, he cleared any ordinary furniture of

doctor's prejudices right out of his mind--made a clean sweep of them.

That done--and the doing of it required some strong effort--his mind

was receptive, ready for anything, odd or ordinary, that might come

along. There he sat with his empty room waiting to be filled--the only

reasonable way of waiting for that of which we have no knowledge. He did

not clamour "I won't," or "I will." He said nothing at all, only waited

with the strict desire and intention of recognizing things to be what

they truly were, neither dressing them up nor tearing their garments

off their backs. When he put out the light and sat down, what he

expected--so far as he expected anything--was this, that the addition

of darkness would add a cloud to his mind, and endeavour to give

various finishing-touches to any spurious excitement created in him,

however much against his will, by the enemy's doings. In this expectation

he was entirely deceived. The falling of darkness drew a veil from his

mind, leaving his mental sight singularly, even preternaturally,

clear. The falling of silence gave an amazing acuteness to his inner

sense of hearing. Certain people are so made that they can, under

certain conditions, and at certain moments, hear the workings of their

neighbours' minds, as you and I can hear the whirr of machinery, or the

cry of a child in the street. An ordinary man or woman can only hear a

mind when lips, teeth, and tongue utter it with living sounds that set

the air in vibration. These abnormal people hear, in these abnormal

moments, the silent murmurs of the mind making no effort at all to utter

itself through the usual speech apparatus. Till this moment the doctor

had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been

sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the

silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own

mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was

the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous

faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his

senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly distinct impression of

the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively

came to him as he sat there, although he could neither see nor hear them.

Each of them seemed to pour his or her thoughts into the doctor's mind.

Thus, at first, did his empty room become furnished with the thoughts of

his companions. He was sitting in the circle between Julian and Valentine

and held their hands. And it was Valentine who forged the first link in

this strange chain of unuttered communication. As the darkness cleared

the doctor's mind, and set him once more on his feet--although in a new

world--an aroma of triumph floated to him softly, like a scent in a damp

wood at night. He heard then the mind of Valentine murmuring in the

stillness the Litany of its glory, a long and an ornate Litany, deep and

full, and he knew that he had been right in supposing that Valentine had

invited him to witness that glory. But the doctor became aware, too, that

at moments the Litany faltered, hesitated, as if the mind of Valentine

grew uncertain or was assailed by vague fears. And these fears ran like

little pale furtive things to Valentine from the lady of the feathers. By

degrees the doctor could imagine that he actually saw them stealing back

and forth. Now one would come alone as if to listen to the Litany, and

then another would follow, and another, and, growing brave, they would

combine against it. Then Valentine would waver and become uneasy, as one

who hears little voices crying against him in the night, and knows not

whence they come or from whom. But the Litany would begin again, and

Valentine would triumph over the pale fears and they would shrink away.

And in the Litany one name recurred again and again--the name of Julian.

Over him was the triumph. In his ruin and fall and ultimate destruction

the glory lived. To witness the complete possibility of this ruin, the

complete sovereignty of this glory, the doctor and the lady of the

feathers were there. And the doctor grew to feel that only some outside

circumstance, alarming Valentine to anxiety and waking Julian to a new

observation, had hindered the intended triumph. What circumstance was

that? He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in

his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead. The rift

in the glory of the Litany came with that. Valentine was trying to close

it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his

companions in the darkness. The doctor felt his effort like a continually

repeated blow, stealthy and hard and merciless.

And now, in the darkness and in the silence, the doctor heard the mind of

Julian. Another scent floated through that imagined damp and breathing

wood from another--but how different--soul-flower. No Litany of triumph

murmured in the blackness where Julian sat, but a hoarse and broken solo,

part despair, part fear, part anger, and all perplexed and flooded with

bewilderment and with excitement. The doctor drew into him the murmur

of Julian's mind until it seemed to become, for the time, the murmur of

his own mind. He was conscious of a dreadful turmoil of doubt, and dread

and perplexity, so strong, so painful, that it lay upon him like a dense

and a suffocating burden. In that moment he knew utterly that the

greatest load in the world laid on any man is the load of his own,

perhaps beloved, sin. He was staggering wearily with Julian away from

the light. His eyes were dim--with the eyes of Julian. His ears, like

Julian's, were assailed with the dastard clamour of the calling sin.

"Listen! Listen! you want me. I am here. Take me! Take me!" And the

weltering seas of heavy flooding impotence rolled round him as they

rolled round Julian. He grew numb and vacant and inert, then--alive ever

to the murmur of Julian's mind--caught a glimpse, through the waters of

that whelming sea, of far-away light, and heard that the voices of the

importunate sins grew fainter. But whether the voices were loud or low,

whether the seas flowed above his head or sank and failed, he was always

conscious of the dominating mood of almost wild perplexity and a madness

of bewilderment. For Julian stirred under the yoke that Valentine had

laid upon him, as if at last conscious distinctly that it was indeed a

yoke, and that it galled him; as if at last conscious, too, that without

that yoke was freedom. And he shot against Valentine in the darkness

arrows of inquiry. But always he lived in doubt and almost in terror.

And then, detaching himself from the triumph, touched with anxiety, of

Valentine, and from the wild turmoil of Julian, Dr. Levillier opened the

door of his mind wide, and the lady of the feathers entered in.

He heard the thoughts of a woman.

That was strangest of all--the most fantastic, eerie, wayward, wonderful

music the doctor had dreamed of.