Only Jessie knew that at present, unless indeed Valentine had divined it, as seemed possible from his words to Julian.

And these twin passions were fed full by the peculiar circumstances of Cuckoo's relation to Julian, and by the depth of her knowledge concerning a certain side of life.

She went home, that night of their meeting, very late, and in the weariness of the morning succeeding it, and of many following mornings, she began to brood over the change in Julian that she had intuitively divined. Her street-woman's instinct could not be at fault with a boy. For Julian was little more than a boy. She knew that when she first met him, when they made toast together on the foggy afternoon that she could never forget, Julian was unshadowed by the darkness that envelopes the steps of so much human nature. Lively, bright, full of youth, strength, energy, as he was, Cuckoo knew that then he had been free from the bondage of sense which demands and obtains the sacrifice of so many lives like hers. And she knew that now he was not free from that bondage, and that she, by an irony of fate, had, with her own hands, fastened the first fetter upon him.

Valentine had plotted that.

Cuckoo's belief said so; but surely her curious instinct against Valentine must have tricked her here!

It was this knowledge of her unwilling action against Julian's peace that first woke in her the strong protective feeling towards him, a feeling almost akin to the maternal instinct. It was her strange love for him that prompted the fiery antagonism against his relations with others that could only be called jealousy. And though one of her passions was noble, the other pitiable, they could but work together for the same end, aim at a similar salvation.

Yet how could any salvation for a man come out of that dreary house in the Marylebone Road, from that piteous rouged agent of the devil?

Cuckoo never stopped to ask such a question as that. She was a girl, and she began to understand love. She had no time to stop. And each passing day soon began to give fresh vitality to the vision of Julian's need.

Between him and her there had sprung up on the ruins of one night's folly a tower of comradeship. Its foundations were not of sand. Even Cuckoo, despite her ceaseless jealously, felt that. But, after all, she had only come into his life as a desolate waif drifts into a settled community. She was neither of his class, his understanding, or his education. She was in the gutter; in the gutter to an extent that no man, as women feel at present, can ever be. And though through her inspiration he had not to come into the gutter to find her and to be with her, yet she sometimes writhed with the thought that he was so far above her. Nevertheless, her position never once tempted her, in the struggle that the future quickly brought with it, to shrink from effort, to fail in fight, to despair in endeavour for him.

There are flames that burn the dross from humanity and reveal the gold. There are flames in the eyes and in the hearts of women.

* * * * *

Julian's visits to Cuckoo were irregular but fairly frequent. He always came in the afternoon, an hour or two before the psychological moment of her start out for the evening's duty. Sometimes he would take her out to tea at a small Italian restaurant near Baker Street Station. More often they would make tea together in the little sitting-room, with the ecstatic assistance of Jessie. And Rip, Valentine's dog, generally made one of the party. He and Jessie got on excellently together, and devoutly shared the scraps that fell from the Marylebone Road table. The first time that Julian brought Rip to number 400, Cuckoo fell in love with him.

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

"Rip's not mine," Julian answered.

"Isn't he? Whose is he?"

"Valentine's."

"Then why d'you have him with you?" asked Cuckoo, suddenly and rather roughly pushing away Rip, who was swirling in her lap like a whirlpool.

"Oh, he's taken a stupid dislike to Valentine," Julian answered thoughtlessly. "He won't stay with him."

In a moment Cuckoo had caught the little dog back.

"That's funny," she said.

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

Then, seeing her thoughtful gaze, and the odd way in which she suddenly caressed the dog, he was angry with himself for having told her anything about the matter.

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

"Not she, never!" said Cuckoo, with conviction. And, after that, she could never spoil Rip enough.

These visits and teas ought to have been pleasant functions, bright oases in the desert of Cuckoo's life, but a cloud fell over them at the beginning and deepened as the days went by. For Cuckoo, with her sharpness of the gamin and her quick instinct of the London streets, was perpetually watching for and noting the signs in Julian's face, manner, or language, that fed those two passions of jealousy and of protection within her. And, at first, she allowed Julian to see what she was doing.

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

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

"Like what?"

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

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

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

He got up from the table and shut the afternoon sun out. The tea-tray, the photographs, the little dogs, they two, were plunged in a greenish twilight manufactured by the sun with the assistance of the Venetian blind.

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

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

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

"Rot!"

"Oh! you were pleased, then?"

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

"You're rather like the Sphinx."

"What's that?"

"Enigmatic."

She didn't understand, and looked rather cross.

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

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

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

Julian began to see that there was something lurking in the background behind her show of temper. He wondered what on earth it was.

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

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

"I suppose so."

She seemed vexed at his assent, and went on:

"Now, aren't you, though?"

"I say, yes."

"Well, you usen't to be," she exclaimed, with actual bitterness of accent and of look. "That's just why I was lookin' at you,—for I was lookin',—makin' out the difference."

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

"No, you ain't."

Having uttered this very direct contradiction, Cuckoo proceeded with great energy:

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

Julian was completely puzzled.

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

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

Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second, Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during the interval.

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

But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned from the subject or silenced.

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

"I was in Paris."

Cuckoo's brow clouded still more. Her knowledge of Paris was not intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of geographical or artistic. Julian's mention of the French capital drove a sword into her.

"With him?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, with Valentine."

"Oh, what did you do there?"

She spoke with angry insistence, and Julian could not help thinking of Valentine's remark, "That girl loves you." It seemed indeed that Cuckoo must have some deep and wholly personal reason prompting her to this strange demonstration of vexation.

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

"Oh, you can't kid me over that. I know well enough what men go to Paris for!" she rejoined, with almost hysterical bitterness.

Julian was silent. It was curious, but this girl stirred his conscience from its sleep, as once Valentine alone could stir it. But by how different a method! The stillness and calm of one who was sinless were replaced by the vehemence and the passion of one who was steeped in sin. And yet the two opposites had, to some extent, the same effect. Julian did not yet realize this thoroughly, and did not analyze it at all. Had any one hinted to him that the waning influence of Valentine for good could ever be balanced by the waxing influence of the lady of the feathers, he would have laughed at the crazy notion. And in the first place he would have denied that Valentine's spell upon him had changed in nature; for Valentine was still as a god to him. And Cuckoo could never be a goddess, either to him or to any one else. But, though he would scarcely acknowledge it even to himself, he did not care for Cuckoo to know fully the changing way of his life. Perhaps it was the curiously strong line she had from the first taken with regard to his actions that made him careful with her. Perhaps it was the incident of the vision of the flame—but no; remembrance of that had been well-nigh lulled to sleep by the lullabies of Valentine, by his disregard of it, his certainty that it was an hallucination, a mirage. Whatever the cause might be, Julian felt somewhat like a naughty boy in the angry presence of Cuckoo. As he looked at her the greenish twilight painted a chill and menacing gleam in her eyes, and made her twisting lips venomous and acrid to his glance. Her rouge vanished in the twilight, or seemed only as a dull, darkish cloud upon her thin and worn cheeks. She sat at the table almost like a scarecrow, giving the tables of some strange law to a trembling and an unwilling votary.

"I know!" she reiterated.

Julian said nothing. He did not choose to deny what was in fact the truth, that his stay in Paris had not been free from fault, and yet he did not feel inclined to do what most men in his situation must by all means have done, challenge Cuckoo's right to sit in judgment, or even for a moment to criticise any action of his. There was something about her, a frankness perhaps, which made it impossible to put her out of court by any allusion to her own life. And indeed that must have been cowardice and an impossibility. Besides, she put herself and her own deeds calmly away as unworthy and impossible of discussion, as things sunk down beneath the wave of notice or comment, remote from criticism or condemnation, because the life of their hopelessness had been so long and sunless.

Cuckoo, with her eyes on Julian, was silent, too, now. She understood that what her suspicion had affirmed, without actually knowing, was true, and her stormy heart was swept by a whirlwind of jealousy, and of womanish pity for the man she was jealous of. In that moment she felt a sickness of life more sharp than she had ever felt before, and a dull longing to be a different woman, a woman of Julian's class, and clever, that she might be able to do something to keep him from sinking to the level of the men she hated.

How could she, in her nakedness of permanent degradation, give a helping hand to anybody? That was a clear rendering of the vague thought, vague as this twilight in which they sat, that ran through her mind. Suddenly she turned to the tray and poured herself out a cup of tea. The tea had been standing while they talked, and was black and strong. She drank it eagerly, and a wave of nervous energy rushed over her, surging up to her brain like light and electricity. It gave to her a sort of reckless valour to say just the thing she felt. She turned towards Julian with a manner that was half shrew, half wildcat—street girls cannot always compass the impressive, though they may feel the great eternities nestling round their hearts—and cried out:

"I just hate you!"

All her jealousy rang in that cry, smothering the whisper of the maternal passion that went ever with it. Julian could no longer doubt the truth of Valentine's words.

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

"Silly!" she burst out. "What do I care for that? I ain't silly, either, and I ain't blind like you are. I can see where you're goin'."

"I shall go away from here," Julian said, trying to laugh, "if you talk in this ridiculous way."

She sprang up and ran passionately in front of the door, as if she thought he was really going to escape.

"No, you don't," she said, and her accent seemed to draw near to that of Whitechapel as her voice rose higher. "Not till I've said what I mean."

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

"Let her come! And you are, that's what you are, murderin' me, and worse, seein' you go where you're goin'. He's takin' you. It's all him. Yes, it is! He'll make you as he is."

"Cuckoo, I won't have it."

Julian spoke sternly and got up. The little dogs, alarmed by the tumult, had begun to whine uneasily, and at his movement Jessie barked in a thin voice. Julian went to Cuckoo, took her wrists in his two hands, and drew her away from the door; but she tore herself from his grasp with fury, for the touch of his hands gave a clearer vision to her jealousy of his secret deeds, and made her understand better the depth of her present feeling.

"You shall have it," she cried. "You shall. I know men. I know what you'll be. I know what women'll make of you."

"A man makes himself," Julian interrupted.

"Rot! That's all you know about it. I've seen them begin so nice and go right down, like a stone in a well. And they never come up again. Not they. No more'll you. D'you hear that?"

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

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

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

As if to emphasize her remark she approached her face quite close to his in the twilight. While they had been arguing a cloud had passed over the sun, and dimness increased in the little room. Both of them were still standing up, and now Cuckoo peered into Julian's eyes with almost hungry scrutiny. Her lips were still trembling with excitement and her mouth was contorted into a sideways grin, expressive of contemptuous knowledge of the descent of Julian's nature. She was a mere mask of passion, no doubt a ridiculous object enough, touzled, dishevelled and shaken with temper, as she leaned forward to get a better view of him. And Julian was both vexed and disgusted by her outbreak, and sick of a scene which, like all men, he ardently hated and would have given much to avoid. He faced her coldly, endeavouring to calm her by banishing every trace of excitement from his expression.

And then, in the twilight of the dingy room, and in the twilight of her eyes, he saw the flame once more. A thin glint of sunshine found its way in from the street, and threw a shadow near them. Cuckoo's eyes emitted a greenish ray like a cat's, and in this ray the flame swam and flickered, cold and pale, and, Julian fancied, menacing.

Perhaps, because he was already irritated and slightly strung up by Cuckoo's attack, he felt a sudden anger against the flame, almost as he might have felt a rage against a person. As he stared upon it, he could almost believe that it, too, had eyes, scrutinizing, upbraiding, condemning him, and that in the thin riband and shade of its fire there dwelt a heart to hate him for the dear sin to which, at last, he began to give himself. For the moment Cuckoo and the flame were as one, and for the moment he feared and hated them both.

Abruptly he held up his hand to stop the further words that were fluttering on her thin and painted lips.

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

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

There was something unusual in his expression which held her silent, a furtive horror and expectation which she did not understand. And while she waited, Julian turned suddenly, and left the room and the house.



CHAPTER VI

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS LEARNS WISDOM

Julian did not come again to the house in the Marylebone Road for at least a fortnight, and during that time the lady of the feathers was left alone with her life and with her sad thoughts. The summer days went heavily by, and the sultry summer nights. No rain fell, and London was veiled in dust. The pavements were so hot that they burned the feet that trod them. Sometimes they seemed to burn Cuckoo's very soul, and to sear her heart as she stood upon them for hours in the night, while the crowds of Piccadilly flitted by like shadows in an evil dream. She stared mechanically at the faces of those passing as she strolled with a lagging footstep along the line of houses. She turned to meet the eyes of the pale-faced loungers in the lighted entrance of the St. James's restaurant, "Jimmy's," as she called it. But her mind was preoccupied. A problem had fastened upon it with the tenacity of some vampire or strange clinging creature of night. Cuckoo was wrestling with an angel; or was it a devil? And often, when she stopped on the pavement and exchanged a word or two with some casual stranger, she scarcely knew what she said, or to what kind of man she was speaking. She was possessed by one thought, the thought of Julian and of his danger. Valentine, in her thoughts, was strangely a pale shadow, incredibly evil, incredibly persistent, luring Julian downwards, beckoning him with the thin hand of a saint to depths unpierced by the gaze of even the most sinful. And that hand of the saint was only part of the appalling deception of his beautiful and tragically lying body, a crystal temple in which a demon dwelt secretly, peering from its concealment through the shadowy blue windows, in which Julian saw truth and honour, but in which Cuckoo read things to terrify and to dismay.

For she was not wholly unaware of the mystery of Valentine, of the sharp contrast between his appearance and the vision of his nature as it came to her. She understood that there was something in the fine beauty of his face and figure to account for Julian's blindness and refusal to be warned against him. Cuckoo's intuition, the intuition of an unlearned and instinctive creature trained by the hardest circumstances to rely on what she called her wits, laid the crystal temple in ruins, and drove the demon from its lurking-place naked and shrieking into the open. But, after all, was not she rather deceived than Julian? Julian, from the first moment of meeting Valentine, looked upon him as saint. Cuckoo, from the first moment of meeting, looked upon him as devil. Each put him aside from the general run of humanity, the one in a heaven of the imagination, the other in a hell. Neither would allow him to be midway between the two, containing possibilities of both,—ordinary, natural man. Julian angrily scouted the notion of Valentine's being like other men. Cuckoo felt instinctively that he was not. And so they glorified and cursed him.

Cuckoo had at first cursed him plainly in the market-place and upon the house-top. But that was before she had learned wisdom. Slowly she learnt it on these hot days and nights, when the London dust filtered over the paint upon her cheeks and lips, clung round the shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes, and slept in the artificial primrose of her elaborate cloud of hair. Slowly she learnt it in many vague and struggling mental arguments, in which logic was a dwarf and passion a giant, in which instinct strangled reason, and love wandered as a shamefaced fairy with tear-dimmed eyes.

Julian's prolonged absence and silence first taught the lady of the feathers the slow necessity of wisdom, otherwise, perhaps, her vehement ignorance could never have absorbed the precious thing. Women of her training and vile experience, nerve-ridden, and clothed in hysteria as in a garment, often think to gain what they want by the mere shrillness of outcry, the mere grabbing of ostentatious, eager hands and frenzy of body. Their lives lead them through a wonder of knowledge and of danger to the demeanour of babyhood, and they cry for every rattle, much more for every moon. So Cuckoo had thrown her feelings down before Julian. She had dashed her hatred of Valentine in his face; she had cried her fears of his downfall to that which she consorted with eternally and loathed—when she had still the energy to loathe it, which was not always—in his ears with the ardent shrillness of a boatswain's whistle. She had, in fact, done all that her instinct prompted her to do, and the result was the exit of Julian from her life. This set her, always in her sharp and yet childish way, sometimes oddly clear sighted, often muddled and distressed, to turn upon instinct with a contempt not known before, to discard it with the fury still of a child. And instinct thus forsaken by an essentially instinctive creature opened the gates of distress and of confusion.

By day Cuckoo sat in her stuffy little parlour brooding wearily. She waited in day after day, always hoping that Julian would return, full of resolutions, prompted by fear, to be gentle, even lively, to him when he did come, full of excited intention which could not be fulfilled; for he did not come. And by night, while she tramped the streets, still Cuckoo's anxious mind revolved the question of her behaviour in the future. For she would not, passionately would not, allow herself to contemplate the possibility that Julian's anger against her would keep him forever beyond reach either of her fury or of her tenderness. She insisted on contemplating his ultimate reappearance, and her wits were at work to devise means to win him from Valentine's influence without stirring his horror at any thought of disloyalty to his friend. Cuckoo, in fact, wanted to be subtle, intended to be subtle, and sought intensely the right way of subtlety. She sought it as she walked, as she hovered at street corners in the night, while the hours ran by, sometimes till the streets were nearly deserted, sometimes even till the dawn sang in the sky to the wail of the hungry woman beneath it. She sought it even in the company of those strangers who stepped for a night into her life as into a public room, and stepped from it on the morrow with a careless and everlasting adieu, half-drowned in the chink of money.

And sometimes she thought, with a sick dreariness, that she would never find it, and sometimes courage failed her, and, despite her passionate resolution, she did for a moment say to herself, "If he should never come again." There were moments, too, when every other feeling was drowned by sheer jealousy of Julian, when the tiger-cat woke in this street-girl who had always had to fight, when her thin frame shivered with the shaking violence of the soul it held. Then she clenched her hands, and longed to plant her nails in the faces of those other women, divined, though never seen,—those French women who had sung him, like sirens, to Paris, away from the sea of her greedy love. Her similes were commonplace. In her heart she called such sirens hussies. Had she met them the battle of words would have been strong and singularly unclean. That she herself was a hussy to other men, not to Julian, did not trouble her. She did not realize it. Human nature has always one blind eye, even when the other does not squint. This passion of jealousy, circling round an absent man, seized her at the strangest, the most inopportune moments. Sometimes it came upon her in the street, and the meditation of it was so vital and complete that Cuckoo could not go on walking, lest she should, by movement, miss the keenest edge of the agony. Then she would stop wherever she was, lean against the down-drawn shutter of a shop, or the corner of a public house, among the gaping loungers, let her powdered chin drop upon her breast, and sink into a fit of desperate detective duty, during which she followed Julian like a shadow through imagined wanderings, and watched him committing all those imagined actions that could cause her to feel the wildest and most inhuman despair.

One night, when she was thus sunk and swallowed up in the maw of miserable inward contemplation, a young man, who was walking by, observed her. He was very young and eager, fresh from Cambridge, ardent after the mysteries and the subtleties of life, as is the fashion of clever modern youth. The sight of this painted girl leaning, motionless as some doll or puppet, against the iron shutters of the vacant house, her head drooped, and her hands, as if the strings to manipulate her had fallen loose from the grasp that guided them, caught and eventually fascinated him. It was a late hour of night. He passed on and returned, shooting each time a devouring, analytical glance upon Cuckoo. Again he came back, walking a little nearer to the houses. His heart beat quicker as he approached the puppet. Its complete immobility was almost appalling, and each time he came within view of it he examined it violently to see if a limb was displaced. No; one might almost suppose that it was the body of some one struck dead so suddenly against the shop that she had not had time to fall, and so remained leaning thus. With shorter and shorter revolutions, like a dog working itself up to approach some motionless but strange object, the youth went by Cuckoo, hesitating more and more each time he came in front of her with strange feelings of one being vaguely criminal. He longed to touch the puppet, to see if any quiver would convulse its limbs, any light flicker into its eyes. And he was so fascinated and interested that at last he did furtively stop precisely in front of it. For a second both of them were motionless, he from contemplation of the outward, she of the inward. Then Cuckoo's thoughtful jealousy came to a ghastly crisis. Her imagination had shown her frightful things and herself an utterly helpless and compelled spectator. The puppet opened its red lips to utter a sob, lifted up its white and heavy eyelids to let loose tears upon its unnaturally bright cheeks, stirred its hanging hands to clasp them in a crude gesture of dull fury. The youth started as at a corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome of all the horrors of cruel London.

And Cuckoo, thus roused and deserted, put aside for the moment her nightmare, and started once more upon her promenade of the night.

At last she began to fear that Julian would never come back, and by a sudden impulse she wrote to him a short, very ill-spelt letter, hoping he would come to tea with her on a certain afternoon. On the day mentioned she waited in an agony of expectation. She had put on his black dress, removed all traces of paint and powder from her face, remembering his former request and her experiment, tricked Jessie out in a bright yellow satin riband twisted into a bow almost larger than herself, and bought flowers—large ones, sunflowers—to give to her dingy room an air of refinement and of gaiety. Amid all this brilliancy of yellow satin and yellow flowers she waited uneasily in her simple black gown. The day was dull, not wet, but brooding and severe, iron-grey, like a hard-featured Puritan, and still with the angry peace of coming thunder. The window was open to let in air, but no air seemed to enter, only the weariful and incessant street noises. Jessie wriggled about, biting sideways with animation to get at her yellow adornment, and pattering around the furniture seeking stray crumbs, which sometimes eluded her for a while and, lying in hidden nooks and corners, unexpectedly rewarded her desultory and impromptu search. Cuckoo leaned her arms across the table, glanced at the tea things for two, and listened. A cab stopped presently. She twisted in her chair to face the window. It had drawn up next door, and she subsided again into her fever of attention. Jessie found a crumb and swallowed it with as much action and large air of tasting it as if it had been a city dinner. The hands of the clock drew to the hour named in Cuckoo's note, touched it, passed it. A sickness of despair began to creep upon her like a thousand little biting insects. She shuffled in her seat, glanced this way and that, pressed her lips together, and, taking her arms from the table, clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Then she sat straight up and counted the tickings of the clock, the spots on the tablecloth, the gold stars upon the wallpaper of the room. She counted and counted until her head began to swim. And all the time she waited, the lady of the feathers was learning wisdom. The lesson was harsh, as the lessons of time usually are; the lesson was bitter as Marah waters. And she thought the lesson was going to be a cross too heavy for her narrow shoulders to bear when the iron gate of the garden sang its invariable little note of protest on being opened. Cuckoo's head turned slowly to one side. Her haggard eyes swept the view of the path. Julian was walking up it.

She met him very quietly, almost seriously, and he shook hands with her as if they had been together quite recently and parted the best of friends. Only, as he held her hand, she noticed that he cast a hasty, and as she fancied a fearful, glance into her eyes. Then he seemed reassured and they sat down to tea. Cuckoo supposed that he had for the moment dreaded what she called another row, and was satisfied by her expression of good temper. They drank their tea, and after a short interval of constraint began chattering together very much as usual. At first Cuckoo had hardly dared to look much at Julian, lest he should see the joy she felt at his coming, but when she was pouring out his second cup she let her eyes rest fully on his face, and only then did she realize that a shadow lay upon it, a shadow from which it had been free before.

With a trembling hand she filled the cup and stared upon the shadow. She knew its brethren so well. In dead days she herself had helped to manufacture such shadows upon the faces of men. She had seen them come, thin, faint, delicate, impalpable as a veil of mist before morning. Only morning light never followed them. And she had seen them stay and grow and deepen and darken. Shadow over the eyes of the man, shadow round his lips, shadow like a cloud upon the forehead, shadow over the picture painted by the soul, working through the features, that we call expression. Many times had she seen the journey taken by a man's face to that haunted bourne, arrived at which it is scarcely any more a man's face, but only a mask expressive of one, or of many, sins. Had Julian then definitely set foot upon that journey? As yet the shadow that lay over him was no more than the lightest film, suggestive of a slightly unnatural and forbidding fatigue. Yet Cuckoo shrank from it as from a ghost.

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

"Oh, I was out late last night," she answered, putting the teapot hastily down. And they talked on, pretending there were only two of them and no shadowy third.

Julian, having returned at last to the Marylebone Road, fell into his old habit of coming there often. And each time that he came the lady of the feathers counted a fresh step on his hideous journey towards the haunted bourne. Yet she never spoke of the dreary addition sum she was doing. She never reproached Julian, or wept, or let him see that her heart was growing cold as a pilgrim who kneels, bare, in long prayers upon the steps of a shrine. For she had learnt wisdom, and hugged it in her arms. Valentine was scarcely ever mentioned between them; but once, and evidently by accident, Julian allowed an expression to escape him which implied that Valentine now objected to the intimacy with Cuckoo. Immediately the words were uttered, Julian looked confused, and obviously would have wished to recall them, had it been possible.

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

Julian answered nothing.

"Why d'you come, then?" she continued, with a certain desperation. "There ain't nothin' here to bring you. I know that well enough."

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

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

While she spoke Julian began to wonder, too, why he came, why he liked to come there. As Cuckoo said, there was nothing at all to bring him so often. He liked her, he was sorry for her, he had even a deep-running sympathy for her, but he did not love her. Yet he was fascinated to come to her, and there were sometimes moments when he seemed taken possession of, led by the hand, to that squalid room and that squalid presence in it. Why was that? What led him? He could not tell.

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

Cuckoo glanced up hastily at the words. A little serpent enmity surely hissed in them. Julian spoke as if he were a man with some rebel feeling at his heart. But the serpent glided and was gone as he added:

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

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

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

"No, dearie."

"Oh, he's a nerve-doctor, and a sort of little saint, lives for his work, and is a deuced religious chap, never does anything, you know."

Julian looked at her.

"Oh," she said.

"And believes in everything. He's a dear little chap, the kindest heart in the world, good to every one, no matter who it is. He's devoted to Valentine."

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

"I say he's devoted to Valentine," Julian repeated rather irritably. His temper was much less certain and sunny lately than of old. "But I believe he's devoted to every one he can do any good to. We used to see him continually, but he's been abroad for weeks, looking after a bad case, a Russian Grand Duke in Italy, who would have him, and pays him all the fees he'd be getting in London. He'll be coming back directly, I think."

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

Julian gave the number in Harley Street rather abstractedly. Their conversation had led him to think of the little doctor. Would he be glad to see him again? And would Valentine? He tried to realize, and presently understood, and had a moment of shame at his own feeling. Soon afterwards he went away. That night, before she went to Piccadilly, Cuckoo walked round to Harley Street. She wandered slowly down the long thoroughfare and presently came to the doctor's house. There was a brass plate upon the door. The light from a gas lamp, just lit, flickered upon it, and Cuckoo, stopping, bent downwards and slowly read the printed name, "Doctor Levillier." Did it look a nice name, a kind name? She considered that question childishly, standing there alone. Then, without making up her mind on the subject, she turned to go. As she did so she saw the tall figure of a man motionless under the gas-lamp on the other side of the street. He was evidently regarding her, and Cuckoo felt a sudden thrill of terror as she recognized Valentine. They stood still on the two pavements for a minute, looking across at one another. Cuckoo could only see Valentine's face faintly, but she fancied it was angry and distorted, and her terror grew. She hesitated what to do, when he made what seemed to her a threatening gesture, and walked quickly away down the street.



CHAPTER VII

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS BUCKLES ON HER ARMOUR

That evening Cuckoo remained in a condition of mingled terror and resolution. There was something about Valentine that filled her, not merely with alarm, but with a nameless horror, indescribable and inveterate. She felt that he was her deadly enemy and the enemy of Julian. But he had cast such a spell over Julian that the latter was blinded and ready to follow him anywhere, and not merely to follow him, but to defend every step he took. Cuckoo had a sense of entering upon a combat with Valentine. As she stood upon the doorstep in Harley Street and faced him under the gas-lamp, were they not as antagonists definitely crossing swords for the first time? It seemed so to her. And the impression upon her was so strong and so exciting, that for once she broke through her invariable routine. Instead of going to Piccadilly she went home to her lodgings. It was about half-past nine when she arrived and opened the door with her latchkey. Mrs. Brigg happened to be in the passage en route to the kitchen from some business in the upper regions. She stared upon Cuckoo with amazement.

"What ever," she began, her voice croaky with interrogation. "Are you ill? What are you back for?"

"I'm all right," said Cuckoo crossly. "Leave me alone, do."

She turned into her sitting-room. Mrs. Brigg followed, open-mouthed.

"Ain't you a-goin' out ag'in?"

"No; oh do leave off starin'. What's the matter with you?"

Mrs. Brigg heaved a thick sigh and shuffled round upon her heels, which made a noise upon the oilcloth like the boots of the comic man at a music-hall.

"Well," she said with a sudden grimness, "I hope it'll be all right about the rent, that's all."

She vanished, shaking her head, on which a stray curl-paper, bereft of its comrades of the morning, sat unique in a thin forest of iron-grey wisps.

Cuckoo shut her door and sat down to think. But at first she had to receive the attentions of Jessie, who was even more surprised than Mrs. Brigg at her unexpected return, and who began to bark with shrill joy and run violently round the room with the speed of a rat emancipated from a cage. As she would not consent to repose herself again, Cuckoo at last put her into the next room, on the bed, and shut the door on her. Then she returned, lit all the three gas-burners and turned them full on, before she removed her hat, and definitely settled herself in for the evening. She was fearful, and dreaded darkness, or even twilight. The pulse of London beat round her while she stretched herself on the hard sofa, let down her touzled yellow hair, and frowned slowly as the unlearned do when they know that they want to meditate.

Now and then she rose suddenly on her elbow, half turned her head towards the window and listened. She had thought she heard a step on the pavement pause, and the cry of the little iron gate. Then, reassured, she leaned back once more. She had taken off her boots, and her feet, in black stockings gone a little white at the toes, were tilted up on the shoulder of the sofa. She fixed her eyes mechanically upon them while she began, all-confusedly, and with the blurred vagueness of the illiterate, to plan out a campaign. Not that she said that word to herself; she did not know its meaning. All that she knew was, that she wanted to put her back against the wall, or get into an angle, like a cornered animal, and use her teeth and claws against Valentine, that menacing figure with an angel's face. And what disgusted and drove Cuckoo almost mad as she lay there in the crude gaslight was the abominable fact that she was desperately afraid of Valentine. There was something about him which filled her not only with intense horror, but with something worse than horror,—intense fear. Why, she had all three gas-burners alight because, having met him that night and seen him watching her, she trembled at the faintest shadow and must see things plainly, lest their dim outlines should appal her fancy by taking his form.

Only once had the lady of the feathers known such enfeebling terror as this, on the night when she fled from the hotel in the Euston Road and left Marr dying on the bed between the tall windows. More than once, in her thoughts, had she loosely linked Marr with Valentine, puzzled, scarcely knowing why she did so. And, she repeated the mental operation now more definitely. They had at least one thing in common, this extraordinary power of striking fear into her soul. And Cuckoo was not accustomed to sit with fear. Her life had bred in her a strong, tough-fibred restlessness. She was essentially a careless creature, ready to argue, quarrel, hold her own with anybody, proud, as a rule, of being a match for any man and well able to take care of herself. She had knocked about, and was utterly familiar with many horrors of the streets, and of nameless houses. She had heard many rows at night; had been in brawls; had been waked, in the dense hours, by sudden sharp cries for help; was accustomed to be alone with strangers, men of unknown history, of unknown deeds. And all these circumstances she met with absolute carelessness, with a devil-may-care laugh, or the sigh of one weary, but not afraid. She was no more timid than the average English street-boy. Only these two men, one dead, one alive, knew how to dress her in terror from head to foot, brain, heart, and body. And so she joined them in a ghastly brotherhood.

But to-night she was making a conscious effort against the domination of Valentine, for the awakening of fear in her was counterbalanced by other feelings prompting her to fight. And once Cuckoo began to fight she felt that she would not lack courage. For she clung to action, and hated thought, walking clearly in the one, but through a maze in the other.

Despite her fear of him, something drove her to fight Valentine; only she did not know how to fight him. It was in a mood of doubt that she had wandered into Harley Street and bent to read the name on the door of Dr. Levillier. Julian's description of the doctor had appealed to her. The mention of his goodness, of his pure life, of his care for others, had impressed her, she scarcely knew why, and brought into her mind a desire to see this little man. Yet he was devoted to Valentine. And then Cuckoo, lying back on the sofa, felt heart-sick, wondering at the power of this man whom she hated and feared, wondering how she could ever fight against his influence over Julian; wondering, too, a little, why it was that she knew she must and certainly would fight it. For beyond the motive power of her love and jealousy, beyond the ordinary woman's desire to keep the man she admired from sinking to the level of the men she despised, there was another fiery and strong and urging insistent influence working upon her, working within her, crying to her, like a voice, to buckle on her armour and to do battle with the enemy. This influence came silently from without, and spoke to the lady of the feathers when she was alone, and never more clearly and powerfully than to-night. It wrestled with her terror of Valentine, and told her to put it away, to come into closer relations with him fearlessly, not to flee from him, but rather to watch him, dog him, learn what he was and what he was doing or trying to do. Yet fear fought this growing, stirring, strange warm influence that burned like a fire at Cuckoo's heart. She flushed and she paled as she lay there, with down-drawn brows and enlaced hands, her yellow hair falling over the hard, shiny horsehair of the sofa. She longed for some one to come to her who would give her counsel, help, courage, that she might fight for Julian, who was too spell-bound to fight for himself, and who was falling so fast, so terribly fast, into the abyss where men crawl like insects and women are as poisonous weeds in the slime of the pit.

Oh, for some one!

Involuntarily she sat up and extended her thin arms almost as if in a beckoning gesture.

As she did so the front door bell rang.

Cuckoo was startled and felt as if it rang for her. But that was unlikely; and there were other lodgers of her kind in the house. No doubt it was a visitor for one of them.

Mrs. Brigg went in weary procession along the passage and opened the door. A few words were indistinctly spoken in a man's voice. Then the street door shut, and almost simultaneously the door of Cuckoo's sitting-room opened very quietly and Valentine entered.



CHAPTER VIII

VALENTINE EXPOUNDS THE GOSPEL OF INFLUENCE TO THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Valentine closed the door behind him and stood by it, looking at Cuckoo gravely. She had pushed herself up on the sofa, using her elbows as a lever, and in an awkward attitude, half sitting, half lying down, stared at him with startled eyes. Her unshod feet were drawn in towards her body, and her dyed hair hung in a thick tangle round her face and on her shoulders. She said nothing.

Valentine put his hat down on the table and began to take off his gloves.

"I am glad to find you at home," he said politely.

Cuckoo shifted a little farther back on the sofa. Now that she was actually shut up alone with Valentine, fear returned upon her and banished every other feeling, every desire except the desire to be away from him. She ran her tongue over her lips, which had suddenly become dry.

"What are you come for?" she asked, never taking her eyes from his.

"To see you. I have never yet returned your kind call upon me."

"Eh?"

Cuckoo spoke in the tone of one who had become deaf, and she felt as if the agitation of her mind actually clamoured within her like a crowd of human voices, deadening sounds from without. Valentine repeated his remark, adding:

"Won't you ask me to sit down?"

He put his hand on the back of a chair.

"May I?"

Cuckoo gave her body a jerk which brought her feet down to the floor, so that she was sitting upright. She pushed out one of her hands as if in protest.

"You can't sit here," she murmured.

"I? Why not?"

"I can't have you here, nor I won't either."

Her voice was growing louder and fiercer as the first paralysis of surprise died gradually away from her. After all, she had not buckled on her armour only to run away from the enemy in it. The street Arab impudence was not quite killed in her by the strange influence of this man. The mere fact of having her feet firmly planted upon the floor gave Cuckoo a certain fillip of courage, and she tossed her head with that old vulgar gesture of hers which suggested the harridan. She pointed to the door.

"Out you go!" she cried.

For her intrepidity had not risen to calm contemplation of an interview. She was only bracing herself up to the necessary momentary endurance of his presence, which followed upon Mrs. Brigg's admittance of him within the door.

Valentine heard the gentle hint unmoved, and replied to it by drawing a chair out from the table and sitting down upon it. A sort of rage, stirred by terror, ran over Cuckoo. She seized the back of his chair with both hands and shook it violently.

"No, you don't stay," she ejaculated; "I won't have it!"

It was characteristic of her to lose all sense of dignity at an instant, when dignity might have served her purpose. Her outburst might have been directed against a statue. Valentine neither moved nor looked in any way affected. Glancing at Cuckoo with a whimsical amusement, he said:

"What a child you are! When will you learn wisdom!"

Cuckoo took away her hands. A conviction pierced her that the weapons a woman may use with effect against an ordinary man could be of no service now, and with this man. She faded abruptly from anger and violence into fatigue, always closely accompanied by fear.

"I'm awfully tired to-night," she said. "Please do go! I'm home because I'm tired."

"The walk from Harley Street was too much for you. You shouldn't make such exertions."

For the first time a sinister note rang in his voice.

"I shall go where I like," Cuckoo answered, and this time with some real sturdiness of manner. "It ain't nothin' to you where I go, nor what I do."

"How can you tell that?"

She laid her chin in the upturned palms of her two hands, planting her elbows on her knees.

"How can it be?" she said. "I'm nothin' to you, nor I ain't going to be either."

"That's what you say."

"And it's God's truth too!" she cried again with violence, as the sense of Valentine's inflexible power grew in her.

"I'm going to smoke if you will allow me," Valentine said.

Slowly he drew out and lit a cigarette, Cuckoo neither refusing nor permitting it. With protruding lips he threw the light smoke round him. Then speaking through it he said:

"Tell me why you go to Harley Street."

"I ain't goin' to talk to you."

"Tell me why. It lies out of your beat; it's a respectable thoroughfare."

The words were said to sting. Cuckoo let them go by. She had been stung too often, and repetition of cruelty sometimes kills what it repeats. She set her lips to silence, with a look of obstinacy not impressive, but merely mulish and childish.

"Well?" Valentine said.

She made no answer. He did not seem angry, but continued:

"You find few fish for your net there, I imagine. But perhaps you don't go for fish. What was the name you read upon the door while I watched you?"

This time Cuckoo, changing her mind, as she often did, with all the swiftness of a crude nature, answered him:

"You know well enough!"

"It was Dr. Levillier, wasn't it?"

She nodded her head silently.

"Why do you go to his door? What do you want with him?"

Cuckoo's quick woman's instinct detected a suspicion of something that was like anxiety in his voice as he said the words. In an instant the warm impulse that, in her silent meditation, had led her to buckle on her armour and to think, with a certain courage, that she was to fight one day, stirred and glowed and leaped up, an impulse greater than herself. The fear that had fallen upon her was lessened, for she felt that this man, too, might, nay did, know fear.

"What's that to you?"

She turned upon him boldly with the question, and he knew her for the first time as an antagonist, who might actively attack as well as passively hate. He leaned forward, and looked into her eyes searchingly, with a sort of rapture, of anxiety, too. It recalled something to Cuckoo. She tried to remember what, but for a moment could not. Then, as if reassured, he resigned his eager and nervous posture of inquiry. That second movement brought the light that Cuckoo's puzzled mind sought. It was Julian who had looked first into her eyes with that strange watchfulness. These men echoed one another in that glance which she could not understand. What they sought in her eyes she could not tell. If it were the same thing it could not be love. And it seemed to be a thing that they feared to find.

"Doctor Levillier is a great friend of mine," Valentine said. "He is a famous nerve-doctor. Seeing you hovering about his door led me to suppose you might be ill, and were going to consult him. I hope you are not ill."

"Not I!"

"Because he is away from home at present."

"Oh!"

"Do you want to see him?"

"I suppose I can see him, like any one else, if I've a mind to."

"Well! He's—he doesn't see quite every one. His practice is only among the richest and smartest people in town. Some one else might answer your purpose better."

He spoke suavely, but the words he said cemented Cuckoo's previously vague thought of trying, perhaps, to see Doctor Levillier into a sudden, strong determination. She divined that, for some reason, Valentine was anxious that she should not see him. That was enough. She would, at whatever cost, make his acquaintance.

"I'll see him if I like," she said hastily, lost to any appreciation of wisdom, through the desire of aiming an instant blow at Valentine.

"Of course! Why not?" was his reply.

"You don't want me to. I can see that," she went on, still more unadvisedly. "You needn't think as you can get over me so easily."

Valentine's smile showed a certain contempt that angered her.

"I know you," she cried.

"Do you?" he said. "I wonder if you would like to know me? Do you remember Marr?"

The lady of the feathers turned cold.

"Marr!" she faltered; "what of him?"

"You have not forgotten him."

"He's dead!"

A pause.

"He's dead, I say."

"Exactly! As dead as a strong man who has lived long in the world ever can be."

"What d'you mean? I say he's dead and buried and done with." Her voice was rather noisy and shrill.

"That's just where you make a mistake," Valentine said quite gravely, rather like a philosopher about to embark upon an argument. "He is not done with. Suppose you fear a man, you hate him, you kill him, you put him under the ground, you have not done with him."

"I didn't kill him! I didn't, I didn't!" Cuckoo cried out, shrilly, half rising from the sofa. A wild suspicion suddenly came over her that Valentine was pursuing her as an avenger of blood, under the mistaken idea that she had done Marr to death in the night.

"Hush! I know that. He died naturally, as a doctor would say, and he has been buried; and by now probably he is a shell that can only contain the darkness of his grave. Yet, for all that, he's not done with, Miss Bright."

"He is! he is!" she persisted.

The mention of Marr always woke terror in her. She sat, her eyes fixed on Valentine, her memory fixed on Marr. Perhaps for this reason what her memory saw and what her eyes saw seemed gradually to float together, and fuse and mingle, till eyes and memory mingled, too, into one sense, observant of one being only, neither wholly Marr nor wholly Valentine, but both in one. She had linked them together vaguely before, but never as now. Yet even now the clouds were floating round her and the vapours. She might think she saw, but she could not understand, and what she saw was rather a phantom standing in a land of mirage than a man standing in the world of men.

"Some day, perhaps, I will prove to you that he is not," Valentine said.

"Eh, how?"

She had lost all self-consciousness now, and in her eagerness of fear, wonder, and curiosity seemed tormented by the veil of yellow hair that was flopping in frizzy strands round her face and over her eyes. She seized it in her two hands, and with a few shooting gestures, in and out, wound it into a dishevelled lump, which she stuck to the back of her head with two or three pins. All the time she was looking at Valentine for an answer to her question.

"Perhaps I don't know how yet."

"Yes, you do, though. I can see you do. What have you got to do with him, with Marr?"

"I never said I had anything to do with him."

"Ah! but you have. I always knew it!"

"Many men are linked together by thin, perhaps invisible threads, impalpable and impossible to define."

The lady of the feathers was out of her depth in this sentence, so she only tossed her head and murmured:

"Oh, I dessay!" with an effort after contempt.

But Valentine's mood seemed to change. An abstracted gaiety stole over him. If it was simulated, the simulation was very perfect and complete. Sitting back in his chair, the cigarette smoke curling lightly round him, his large blue eyes glancing gravely now at Cuckoo crumpled up on the horsehair sofa, now meditatively at some object in the little room, or at the ceiling, he spoke in a low, clear, level voice, as if uttering his thoughts aloud, careless or oblivious of any listener.

"Every man who lives, and who has a personality, has something to do with many men whom he has never seen, whom he will never see. Messengers go from him as carrier-pigeons go from a ship. He may live alone, as a ship is alone in mid-ocean, but the messengers are winged, and their wings are strong. They fly high and they fly far, and wherever they pause and rest, that man has left a mark, has stamped himself, has uttered himself, has planted a seed of his will. Have you a religion?"

Valentine stopped abruptly after uttering this question, and waited for an answer. It was characteristic enough.

"What?" said the lady of the feathers, staring wide-eyed.

"I say, have you a religion?"

"Not I. How can I when I don't go to no church?"

"That is, no doubt, a convincing proof of heathendom. And yet I have a religion that never leads me to a church door. My religion is will, my gospel is the gospel of influence, and my god is power. Will binds the world into a net, whose strands are like iron. Will dies if it is weak, but if it is strong enough it becomes practically immortal. But, though it lives itself, it has the power to kill others. It can murder a soul in a man or a woman, and throw it into the grave to decay and go to dust, and in the man it can create a soul diametrically opposite to the corpse, and the world will say the man is the same; but he is not the same. He is another man. Or if the will is not strong enough actually to kill a soul"—at this point Valentine spoke more slowly, and there was a certain note of uneasiness, even almost of agitation, in his voice—"it can yet expel it from the body in which it resides, and drive it, like a new Ishmael, into the desert, where it must hover, useless, hopeless, degraded, and naked, because it has no body to work in. Yes! yes! that must be so! The soul can have no power divorced from the body! none! none!"

He got up from his chair, and began to pace the little room. Cuckoo watched him as a child might watch a wild animal in its cage. His face was hard and thin with deep thought, and hers was contorted under her yellow hair—contorted in a frantic effort to grasp and to understand what he was saying; for, stupid, ignorant as the lady of the feathers was, she had a sharp demon in her that often told her the truth, and this demon whispered now in her ear:

"Listen, and you may learn things that you long to know!"

And she listened motionless, her eyes bright and eager, her lips shut together, her slim body a-quiver with intensity, mental and physical.

"How can it?" Valentine went on. "What is a soul without a body? You cannot see it. You cannot hear it, and if you think you can, that is a vile trick of the mind, an hallucination. For if one man can see it, why not another? Here, let me look into your eyes again."

As he said the last words, he stopped opposite to Cuckoo, suddenly caught her chin in his two hands, which felt hard and cold, and forcibly pushed up her face towards his. She was terrified, beginning now to think him mad, and to fear personal injury. Gazing hard and furtively into her eyes, he said:

"No; it's a lie! It is not there. It never was! It is dead and finished with, and I won't fear it."

As if struck by the fatigue of some sudden reaction, he sank down again into his chair, and went on with his apparently fantastic monologue:

"And if it was ever alive, what could it do? A soul can't work, except through a body; it must fasten on a body, and bend the body to its will—man is such a creature that he can only be influenced through flesh and blood, nerves, sinews, eyes, things he can see, things that he can hear. He is so grovelling that nothing more delicate than these really appeals to him."

Again, and this time with less abstraction, and with a sort of contemptuous humour, he turned to the lady of the feathers, and continued, as if once more aware of her presence:

"Are you imbibing my gospel, the gospel of will and of influence? I see you are by your pretty attitude and by the engaging face you are making at me. Well, don't get it wrong. A gospel gone wrong in a mind is dangerous, and worse than no gospel at all. If you get this gospel wrong you may become conceited, and fancy yourself possessed of a power which you haven't a notion of. To use will in any really affective way, you must train your body, and take care of it, not ruin it, and let it run to seed, or grow disfigured, or a ghastly tell-tale, a truth-teller, a town-crier with a big bell going about and calling aloud all the silly or criminal things you do. Now you have forgotten this, or perhaps you never knew it, and so will could not work in you; not even, I believe, a malign will to do mischief. You have thrown your body to the wolves, and whoever looks upon you must see the marks of their teeth."

It was evident that he gloated on this idea that the body of the lady of the feathers was forever useless for good, and even powerless to do much effective evil. He seemed to revel in the notion that she was simply a thing powerless, negative, and totally vain.

"I was mad ever to imagine the contrary," he said. Then, glancing away from personality, he exclaimed with more energy:

"But sometimes a will is so great, so trained, so watchful of opportunities, so acute and ready, that, instead of passing away practically on the passing away of the body in which it has been born and has lived, and merely living and working through the emanations of itself that have clung to men and women in many different places, instead—in fact—of being diffused—you understand me?" he broke out, with an obvious delight in the grossness of her ignorance and the denseness of her bewilderment and misunderstanding of him—"which is a sort of death, it seizes, whole, as a body, with all the members sound, upon another home. It commits, in effect, a great act of brigandage. It lives on complete, powerful—even more powerful than ever before, because to all its original powers it adds a glory of deception, and is a living lie. If only you could understand me!"

Suddenly he burst into a peal of laughter that was a full stop to his philosophy. His cigarette had gone out. He threw it into the grate and stretched out his arms, still laughing. And Cuckoo gazing at him, as if fascinated, said silently to herself, "If only I could!"

For she felt as if Valentine were telling her a great secret, secure in the hideous knowledge that, though she heard it, it must remain a secret from her on account of her ignorance and of her stupidity. There was something in that feeling peculiarly maddening, yet Cuckoo displayed no irritation. The sharp little demon at her elbow whispered to her to be silent, told her that she might learn, might yet understand, if she would play a part, and be no more the wildcat, the foolishly impulsive lady of the feathers. Valentine struck his hand upon the table, and repeated:

"Why—why can't you understand?"

The piquancy of the situation evidently delighted his mind and his sense of mischief. He enjoyed playing the philosopher to a fool; and the more the fool became a fool, the higher soared his philosophy and his appreciation of it. There is always something paradoxical in wisdom instructing folly, for, after all, folly can never really learn, can never really understand. Valentine hugged that thought.

"Go on," the lady of the feathers said, apparently in gaping wonderment.

"Why? do you mean to tell me you are interested?"

"I'm listenin'! It sounds wonderful!"

"It is wonderful!" Valentine cried. "Every living lie is wonderful. But you don't know yet much about will. My gospel is full of secrets and of subtleties, and only a few people are beginning to guess at its far-reaching power, and to aim at learning its truths and sounding its depths. And many unbelievers play with it, and never know that they are playing with fire. A man did this once. Shall I tell you about him?"

"Yes!" said Cuckoo.

And her soul cried to the darkness in which she imagined some vague power to dwell; cried aloud for understanding. This silent cry was so intense that she lay back upon the hard sofa, almost exhausted, and as she lay there, something hot, like fire, seemed to make its nest in her heart, and to flame there, and to be alive, as a flame is alive, and to speak to her, but not aloud, as a flame speaks in the coals to the imagination of the watcher by the hearth. In that moment the lady of the feathers felt as if she were conscious of a new companion, a companion full of some intensity towards her, some anxiety about her, anxious and brilliant as a flame is, vital, keen, blazing, intense. Although she could not define her sensation thus, that lack of analytical power could not deprive her of it. She knew that her vision became clearer, that her mind became brighter, that a light illumined her, that she was, for the moment, greater than herself. But Valentine did not know it. He looked towards the sofa and saw spread upon it a thin, painted, haggard young creature curled into a position at once passionate, languid, and merely awkward, with relentless, thickly tangled hair, staring eyes, and half-opened lips, glowering in rouged stupidity and a coarseness of the gutter. He was a philosopher, with a beauty of the stars and of snows, with a refinement, white in its brilliance. She was an image of Regent Street, a ghastly idol of the town; and he was telling her strange things that she could never comprehend, in a jargon that was to her as Greek or as Hebrew. It was too absurd. Yet he loved to tell her, and he could scarcely tell why he loved it.

"Go on," said the lady of the feathers.

"This man," Valentine said, assuming a devout earnestness to trick her more, and watching for the puzzled expression to grow and to deepen in her eyes,—"this man had a holy nature, or I will say an unalterable will to do only things pure, reserved, refined—things that could not lead his body into difficulties, or his mind into quagmires. He was a saint without a religion. That is a possibility, I assure you; for a will can be amazingly independent. He had the peculiar grace that is said to belong to angels, a definite repugnance to sin. I know you understand me."

She nodded bluntly.

"I know—he couldn't go wrong, if it was ever so," she ejaculated.

"If it was ever so—as the housemaids say—you put the position of this man in a nutshell, and if this strange will of his had never relented, the transformation I am going to describe, or—" he paused for a moment as if in doubt, then continued—"or rather to hint at, would never have taken place. But he grew dissatisfied with his will. It bored him ever so little. He fancied he would like to change it, and to substitute for it the will of the world. And the will of the world, as you know well, my lady of the feathers, is to sin. For some time he longed, vaguely enough, to be different, to be, in fact, lower down in the scale than he was. But his longing to be able to desire sin did not lead him to desire it actually. One can force one's self to do a thing, you see, but one cannot force one's self to wish to do it, or to enjoy doing it. And this man, being a selfish saint—saints are very often very selfish—would not sin without desiring it. So it seemed that he must remain forever as he was, a human piece of flawless porcelain, wishing to be cracked and common delft."

"Whatever did he wish it for?" asked Cuckoo, with the surprise of a zany.

"Who can tell why one man wishes for one thing, another for another? That, too, is a mystery. The point is, that he did wish it, and that he did something more."

"What was that, eh?"

"He deliberately tried to weaken and to deface his will; to alter it. And he chose curious means, acting under suggestion from another will or influence that was more powerful than his own, because it was utterly self-satisfied and desired only to be what it was. I don't think I will tell you what the means were. But his original dissatisfaction with his own goodness was the weapon that brought about his own destruction. His will did not change, as he believed; but what do you think actually happened to it? I will tell you. It was expelled from his body. He lost it forever. He lost, in fact, his identity. For will is personality, soul, the ego, the man himself. And this soul, if you choose to call it so, was driven into the air. It went away in the darkness, like a bird. Do you see?"

He waved his hand upward, and lifted his eyes, as if following with them the flight that he described.

"It flew away!"

"Where did it go?" ejaculated Cuckoo.

Valentine seemed suddenly to become fully aware of the depth of her interest.

"Ah! even you are fascinated by my gospel, you who cannot understand it," he said. "But I cannot tell you where it went. I too have wondered."

He knit his brows rather moodily over this question of location. "I too have wondered. But I imagine that it died; that it ceased to be. Divorced from the body that was its home, degraded by dissatisfaction with itself, of what use could it be to any one? Even if it still continues to be, it is practically dead, for it can work neither harm nor good to any one, and the thing that cannot be good or evil, or turn others towards the one or the other, is dead. It is no more a will. It is no more an influence. It is a heart without a pulse in it; in fact, it is nothing."

A sort of joy had leapt into his face as he dwelt on this idea of nothingness, and he added:

"It is something like your soul, my lady of the feathers. Do you hear me?"

"Yes. I hear!"

"But the will that ousted it gained in power by that triumph. Totally self-satisfied, desirous of being only that which it is, having no enemy of yearning disappointment with itself in its camp, it can do what will never did before. It can lead captive the soul that was formerly the captive of the soul that it drove away to die. Like an enemy it has seized its opponent's camp, and the slave dwelling in that camp is now its slave forever."

As Valentine spoke he seemed to become almost intoxicated with the thoughts conjured up by his own words. His blue eyes blazed with a fury of shining excitement. His white cheeks were suffused with blood.

"I have made myself, my will, a god!" he exclaimed passionately.

At the words the lady of the feathers moved suddenly forward on the sofa.

"What—you!" she said.

The last word was uttered with an intensity that could surely only spring from something near akin to comprehension, if not from actual comprehension itself. It certainly startled Valentine, or seemed to startle him. His face showed an amazement like the amazement of a man raving to an image of wood, to whom, abruptly, the wood speaks with a tongue.

"What do you mean?" he said, and his voice faltered from its note of triumph and of exultation.

Cuckoo resumed her former position.

"Only was you the will, or the man, or whatever it all is?" she replied in the voice of one hopelessly muddled.

Valentine was reassured as to her stupidity.

"That has nothing to do with the story," he said.

"There was two of them, was there?" she persisted, but still with the accent of a hopeless dullard.

"Oh yes. One will must always work upon another, or else there could be no story worth the telling."

"Oh, I see; that's it."

Valentine again broke into laughter.

"You see, do you?" he said. "You see that, but do you see the truth of what I told you before about the connection of the will with the body? Do you see why you have no power now, can never have power again? Do you understand that the wreck of your body inevitably causes the wreck of your will, so that it really dies and ceases, because it can no more influence others? Do you understand that? I'll make you understand it now. Come here."

He got up from his chair and seized her two hands in his, dragging her almost violently up from the sofa. Her fear of him, always lurking near, came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back, moved by an irresistible repulsion. The slight and momentary struggle between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to come down. It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour. Valentine's hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was useless. She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the glass that stood over the mantelpiece. Pushing back the table behind them, he made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.

"Look there!" he cried; "look at yourself well! How can you have power over anybody?"

Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from the mirror, and Cuckoo—forced to obedience—examined them as if indeed they were a picture. She saw the man's face, fair, beautiful, refined, triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that filled the face with amazingly vivid expression. She saw the bright blue eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile. There was health in the face as well as thought. And there was power, which is greater than health, more beautiful even than beauty. And then she turned her eyes to the face's companion. Thin, sharp, faded, it met her eyes, half-shrouded in the thick, tumbled hair that shone in the mirror with the peculiar frigid glare that can only be imparted by a chemical dye, and can never be simulated by nature. One cheek was chalk-white. The other, which had been pressed against the horsehair of the sofa, showed a harsh, scarlet patch. All the varying haggard expressions of the world seemed crowding in the eyes of this scarecrow, and peering beneath the thickly blackened eyelashes that struck a violent discord against the yellow hair. The thin lips of the mouth were pressed together in an expression of pain, fear, and weariness. Shadows slept under the eyes where the face had fallen into hollows. To-night there seemed no vestige of prettiness in those peaked features. Nothing of health, youth, gaiety, or even girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed in its reflection.

How, indeed, could such a creature have power over fellow man or woman for good or for evil? If weakness can be written without words, it seemed written in that wasted countenance, which Cuckoo examined with a creeping horror that numbed her like frost. As she did so, Valentine was watching the ungraciousness of her face in the glass deepen and glide, moment by moment, into greater ugliness, greater degradation. And as the little light there had ever been behind those unquiet eyes, faded gradually away, in his reflected eyes the light leaped up into fuller glare, sparkling to unbridled triumph. And his reflected lips smiled more defiantly, until the smile was no longer touched merely with triumph, but with something more vehement and more malign! Cuckoo did not see the change. She saw only herself, and her heart cried and wailed, What good—what good to love Julian? What good to hate Valentine? What good to fight for the man she loved against the man she loathed? As well set a doll to move its tense joints against an army, or a scarecrow to defy a god! Never before had she realized thoroughly the complete tragedy of her life. Hitherto she had assisted at it in fragments, coming in for a scene here, a scene there. Now she sat through the whole of the five acts, and the only thing she missed was the fall of the curtain. That remained up. But why? There was—there could be—nothing more to come, unless a dreary recapitulation of such dreary events as had already been displayed. Such a cup could hold no wine that was not foul, thick, and poisonous. And she had known herself so little as to imagine that she could really love, and that her love might fulfil itself in protection instead of sensual gratification. Yes, vaguely she had believed that. She had even believed that she could put on armour and do battle against—and at this point in her desperate meditation the lady of the feathers shifted her eyes from her own face mirrored to the face beside it. As she did so, a sudden cry escaped from her lips. For a moment she thought she saw the face of the dead Marr, and the hallucination was so vivid that when it was gone and the mirror once more revealed the face of Valentine, Cuckoo had no thought but that she had really seen Marr. She turned sharply round and cast a glance behind her. Then:

"Did you see him?" she whispered to Valentine.

"Whom?"

"Him—Marr! He's not dead; he's here; he's here, I tell you. I see him in the glass!"

She shivered. The room seemed spinning round with her, and the two faces danced and sprang in the mirror, as if a hand shook it up and down, from side to side.

"If he is here," Valentine said, "it is not in the way you fancy. Your imagination has played you a trick."

"Didn't you—didn't you see him? Don't you see him now?"

"I see only you and myself."

As if for a joke he bent his head and peered closely at the mirror, like a man endeavouring to discern some very pale and dim reflection there.

"No, he's—he's not there!" he murmured, "but—"

With a harsh exclamation he dashed his fist against the mirrored face of the lady of the feathers. The glass cracked and broke from top to bottom. Cuckoo cried out. Valentine's hand had blood upon it. He did not seem to know this, and swung round upon her with an almost savage fury.

"Don't—don't, for God's sake," she cried, fearing an attack.

But he made no movement against her. On the contrary, an expression of relief chased the anger from his lips and eyes.

"Ah!" he said, "that's a lying mirror! It lied to you and to me. I smashed it. Well, I'll give you another that is more truthful, and more ornamental too."

"What was it you saw?" she murmured.

"A silly vision, power where there is only weakness; a will, a soul, where there could not be one!"

"Eh? was it that you struck at?"

"Why do you ask?" he said with sudden suspicion.

"You struck where my face was," she said doggedly. "You did, you did!"

"Nonsense!"

"It ain't! Why did you do it, then?"

A gleam of hope had shot into her eyes, lit by his weird attack upon her mirrored image. After all, despite his sneers at her faded body, his gibes at her faded and decaying soul, he struck at her as a man strikes at the thing he fears. In that faded soul a wild hope and courage leaped up, banishing all the sick despair which had preceded it. The lady of the feathers faced Valentine with a deathless resolution of glance and of attitude.

"You've been telling lies," she said "you've been telling me damned lies!"

"What do you mean?"

"You said as I was—was done with."

A forced smile came like a hissing snake on Valentine's lips.

"So you are!"

"I ain't! I ain't! What's more, you know it!"

"You have broken yourself to pieces as I have broken that mirror!"

He spoke with an effort after scathing contempt, but she detected a quiver of agitation in his voice.

"If I have, I'll break you yet!" she cried.

"Me? What are you talking about?"

"You know well enough."

"But do you know—do you know that I—I am Marr?"

He almost whispered the last words! A chill of awe fell over the lady of the feathers. She did not understand what he meant, and yet she felt as if he spoke the truth, as if this inexplicable mystery were yet indeed no fiction, no phantasy, but stern fact, and as if, strangely, she had at the back of her mind divined it, known it when she first knew Valentine, yet only realized it now that he himself told her. She did not speak. She only looked at him, turning white slowly as she looked.

"I am Marr," he repeated. "Now do you understand my gospel? Understand it if you can, for you are bereft of the power that belongs of right only to the woman who is pure. Long ago, perhaps, you might have fought me. Who knows, you might even have conquered me? But you have thrown yourself to the wolves, and they have torn you till you are only a skeleton. And how can a soul dwell in a skeleton? Your soul, your will, is as useless as that vagrant soul of Valentine, which I expelled into the air and into the night. It can do nothing; you can do nothing either. If I have ever feared you, and hated you because I feared you, I have fooled myself. I have divined your thoughts. I have known your enmity against me, and your love—yours!—for Julian. But if the soul and the will of Valentine could not save Julian from my possession, how can yours? You are an outcast of the streets! Go back to the streets. Live in them! Die in them! They are your past, your present, your future. They are your hell, your heaven. They are everything to you. I tell you that you are as much of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as you tread night after night. And what soul can a street thing have? What can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons, and who follows every voice that calls? I feared you. I might as well have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an autumn leaf. I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men raise up for themselves as a bogey. Will is God! Will is the Devil! Will is everything! And you—you, having tossed your will away—are nothing."

He had spoken gravely, even sombrely. On the last word he was gone.

The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight. Her face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered canary-coloured hair. Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror, and with awe. Yet she looked undaunted. Staring at the door through which the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered:

"It ain't true! It ain't! Nothin' does for a woman; not when she loves a man! Nothin'. Nothin'."

She fell down against the hard horsehair sofa, and stretched her arms upon it, and laid her head against them, as if she prayed.



BOOK IV—DOCTOR LEVILLIER



CHAPTER I

THE LADY VISITS DOCTOR LEVILLIER

The Russian Grand Duke, whose malady was mainly composed of two ingredients, unlimited wealth and almost unlimited power, was slow in recovering, and slower still in making up his mind to part with the little nerve-doctor whom he had summoned from England. And so London was beginning to fall into its misty autumn mood before Doctor Levillier was once more established in Harley Street. He had heard occasionally from both Valentine and Julian during his long absence, but their letters had not communicated much, and once or twice when he, in replying to them, had put one or two friendly questions as to their doings, those questions had remained unanswered. The doctor had been particularly reluctant to leave England at the time when the Grand Duke's summons reached him, as his interest and curiosity about Valentine had just been keenly and thoroughly roused. But fate fought for the moment against his curiosity. It remained entirely ungratified. He had not once seen Valentine since the afternoon in Victoria Street, when the lamentation of that thoroughfare's saint had struck consternation into the hearts of musical sinners. Nor had the doctor met any one who could give him news of the two youths over whose welfare his soul had learned to watch. Now, when he returned to London, he found that both Valentine and Julian were abroad. Only Rip, left in charge of Julian's servant, greeted him with joy; Rip, whose conduct had given the first strong impulse to his wonder and doubt about Valentine.

Doctor Levillier took up the threads of his long-forsaken practice, and gave himself to his work while autumn closed round London. One day he heard casually from a patient that Valentine and Julian had returned to town. He wondered that they had not let him know: the omission seemed curious and unfriendly.

During the day on which the news reached him he was, as usual, busily engaged from morning till evening in the reception of patients. His reputation was very great, and men and women thronged his consulting-rooms. Although his rule was that nobody could ever gain admission to him without an appointment, it was a rule made to be broken. He never had the heart to turn any one from his door in distress, and so it frequently happened that his working-day was prolonged by the admission of people who unexpectedly intruded themselves upon him. Great ladies, more especially, often came to him on the spur of the moment, prompted to seek his solace by sudden attacks of the nerves. A lover had used them ill, perhaps, or a husband had turned upon them and had rent a long dressmaker's bill into fragments, without paying it first. Or the ennui of an exquisite life of unbridled pleasure had suddenly sprung upon them like a grisly spectre, torn their hearts, shaken them into tears. Or—and this happened often—a fantastic recognition of the obvious fact that even butterflies must die, had abruptly started into their minds, obtruding a skeleton head above the billowing chiffons, rattling its bones until the dismal sound outvied the frou-frou of silk, the burr of great waving fans, the click of high heels from Paris. Then, in terror, they drove to Doctor Levillier's door and begged to see him, if only for a moment.

There was no doctor in London so universally sought by the sane lunatics of society as Dr. Levillier. He was no mad-doctor. He had no private asylum. He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand, scandal still fluttering upon their ashy lip; the lunatics who live for themselves, until their eyes are hollow as tombs and their mouths fall in from selfishness, and their cheeks are a greenish white from satiety, and lust's gratified flame beacons on their drawn cheeks and along their crawling wrinkles; the lunatics who seek to be what they can never be, the beauties of this world, the great Queens of the Sun, whose gaze shall glorify, whose smile shall crown and bless, whose touch shall call hearts to agony and to worship, whose word shall take a man from his plough and send him out to win renown, or snatch a leader from his ambition and set him creeping in the dust, like a white mouse prisoned by a scarlet silken thread; the lunatics who dandle religions like dolls, and play with faiths as a boy plays with marbles, until the moment comes when the game is over, and the player is faced by the terror of a great lesson; the lunatics who stare away their days behind prancing horses in the Park, who worship in the sacred groves of bonnets, who burn incense to rouged and powdered fashions, who turn literature into a "movement," and art into a cult, and humanity into a bogey, and love into an adulterous sensation; the lunatics who think that to "live" is only another word for to sin, that innocence is a prison and vice liberty; the lunatics who fill their boudoirs with false gods, and cry everlastingly, "Baal, hear us!" till the fire comes down from heaven, which is no painted ceiling presided over by a plaster god. These came to Doctor Levillier day by day, overtaken by sad moments, by sudden, dreary crises of the soul, that set them impotently wailing, like Job among the potsherds. Many of them did not "curse God," only because they did not believe in Him.