It is not the fashion in London to believe in God just now.

Dr. Levillier had always, since he was a youth, walking hospitals and searching the terror of life for all its secrets, felt a deep care, a deep solicitude, for each duet, body and soul, that walked the world. He had never set them apart, never lost sight of one in turning his gaze upon the other. This fact, no doubt, accounted partially for the fact that many looked upon him as the greatest nerve-doctor in London. For the nervous system is surely a network lacing the body to the soul, and vice versa. Every liaison has its connecting links, the links that have brought it into being. One lust stretches forth a hook and finds an eye in another, and there is union. So with faiths, with longings, with fine aspirations, with sordid grovellings. There is ever the hook seeking the appropriate eye. The body has a hook, the soul an eye. They meet at birth and part only at death.

Dr. Levillier was constantly, and ignorantly, entreated to adjust the one comfortably in the other. It is a delicate business, this adjustment, sometimes an impossible business. Half of the Harley Street patients came saying, "Make me well." What they really meant was, "Make me happy." Yet the most of them would have resented a valuable mixed prescription, advice for the hook, and advice for the eye. Such prescriptions had to be very deftly, sometimes very furtively, made up. Often the doctor felt an intense exhaustion steal over him towards the close of day. This tremendous and eternal procession passing onwards through his life, filing before him like a march-past of sick soldiers, saluting him with cries, and with questions, and with entreaties; this never-ceasing progress fatigued him. There were moments when he longed to hide his face, to turn away, to shut his ears to the murmuring voices, and his eyes to the pale, expressive faces, to put his great profession from him, as one puts a beggar into the night. But these were only moments, and they passed quickly. And the little doctor was always bitterly ashamed of them, as a brave man is ashamed of a secret tug of cowardice at his heart. For it seemed to him the greatest thing in all the world to help to make the unhappy rightly happier.

And this was, and had always been, his tireless endeavour. Upon this day one of these hated moments of mental and physical exhaustion had come upon him, and he struggled hard against his enemy. The procession of patients had been long, and more than once in the tiny interval between the exit of one and the entry of another, Dr. Levillier had peeped at his watch. His last appointment was at a quarter to five, then he would be free, and he said to himself that he would take a cab and drive down to Victoria Street. Valentine was often at home about six. The doctor put aside the little devil of pride that whispered, "You have been badly treated," and resolved to make the advance to this friend, who seemed to have forgotten him. In times of fatigue and depression he had often sought Valentine in order to be solaced by his music. But this solace was at an end, unless, indeed, the strange burden of musical impotence had been lifted from Valentine, and his talent had been restored to him.

The last patient came to the doctor's door punctually and was punctually dismissed as the clock chimed the quarter of an hour after five. The last prescription was written. The doctor drew in a deep breath of relief. He touched the bell and his servant appeared.

"There is no one waiting?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"I have made no other appointment for to-day, and I am going out almost immediately. If any patients should call casually tell them I cannot possibly see them to-day. Ask them to make an appointment. But I cannot see any one to-day under any circumstances."

"Yes, sir."

Dr. Levillier took his way upstairs, made a careful toilet, selected from his absurd array of boots a pair perfectly polished, put them on, took his hat and gloves, sighed once again heavily, almost as a dog sighs preparatory to its sleep, and turned to go downstairs. He forgot for the moment that he was prepared to watch Valentine. Perhaps, indeed, his long period of absence had dulled in his memory the recollection of any apparent change in his friend. For at this moment of fatigue he only recalled Valentine's expression of purity and high-souled health, and the atmosphere of lofty serenity in which he seemed habitually to dwell. The doctor wanted relief. How Valentine's presence would refresh him after this dreary array of patients, after the continuous murmurs of their plaintive voices! As he opened his bedroom door he perceived his man-servant mounting the stairs.

"Lawler, I can't see any one," he said, more hastily than usual. "I told you so distinctly. I am going out immediately."

The man paused. He had been with the doctor for many years, and both adored and understood him. The doctor looked at him.

"It is a patient, I suppose?" he asked.

"Well, sir, I can't exactly say."

"A lady?"

"Yes, sir. At least, sir—well, no, sir."

"What do you mean?"

"A female, sir."

"What does she want?"

"To see you, sir. I can't get her to go. I asked her to, sir; then I told her to."

"Well?"

"She only gave me this and said she'd come to see you, and if you were in she'd wait."

He handed a card to his master. The doctor took it and read:

"Cuckoo Bright, 400 Marylebone Road."

The words conveyed nothing to his mind, for neither Julian nor Valentine had ever talked to him of the lady of the feathers.

"Cuckoo Bright," he said. "An odd name! And an odd person, I suppose, Lawler?"

Lawler pursed his lips rather primly.

"Very odd, sir. Not at all a usual sort of patient, sir."

"H'm. Go and ask her if she comes as a patient or on private business."

The man retreated and returned.

"The—lady says she's ill and must see you, sir, if only for a moment."

This was Cuckoo's ruse to get into the house, and was based upon Julian's long-ago remark that the doctor could never resist helping any one who was in trouble. Standing on the doorstep, she had histrionically simulated faintness for the special benefit of Lawler, who regarded her with deep suspicion.

"I suppose I must see her," the doctor said with a sigh. "Show her in, Lawler."

Lawler departed, disapprovingly, to do so, and after a moment the doctor followed him. He walked into his consulting-room, where he found the lady of the feathers standing by the writing table. The autumn day was growing dark, and the street was full of deepening mist. Cuckoo was but a fantastic shadow in the room. Her dress rustled with an uneasy sound as the doctor came in. His first act was to turn on the electric light. In a flash the rustling shadow was converted into substance. Cuckoo and the doctor stood face to face, and Cuckoo's tired eyes fastened with a hungry, almost a wolfish, scrutiny upon this stranger. She wanted so much of him. The look was so full of intense meaning that, coming in a flash with the electric flash, it startled the doctor. Yet he had seen something like it before in the eyes of those who suspected that they carried death within them, and came to ask him if it were true. He was surprised, too, by her appearance. The women of the streets did not come to him, although if they had been able to read the writing in his heart many of them would surely have come. He shook hands with Cuckoo, told her to sit down, and sat down himself opposite to her.

"What is the matter? Please tell me your symptoms," he said gently.

"Eh?" was the reply, spoken in a thin and high voice.

"What has been troubling you?"

Cuckoo, who was wholly unaccustomed to answer a doctor's questions, started violently. She fancied from his words that he had divined the lie she had told when she said that she was ill, and knew that she came for a mental reason. Instinctively she connected the word "trouble" with the heart, in a way that was oddly and pathetically girlish. Acting upon this impulse she exclaimed:

"Then you know as I ain't ill?"

Doctor Levillier was still more surprised. Not understanding what was in her mind, he entirely failed to keep pace with its agility.

"Why do you come to me, then?" he asked.

"Oh," she returned, with a quickly gathering hesitation, "I thought as perhaps you knew."

"I! But we have never met before."

The doctor bent his eyes on her searchingly. For a moment he began to wonder whether his visitor was quite right in her head. Cuckoo shuffled under his gaze. The very kindliness of his face and gentleness of his voice made her feel hot and abashed. A prickly sensation ran over her body as she cleared her throat and said, monosyllabically:

"No."

The doctor waited.

"What is it?" he said at length. "Tell me why you have called. If you are not ill, what is it you want of me?"

"You'll laugh, p'r'aps."

"Laugh? Is it something funny, then?"

"Funny! Not it!"

The sound of her voice seemed to give her some courage, for she went on with more hardy resolution:

"Look here, you can see what I am—oh yes, you can—and you wonder what I'm doin' here. Well, if I tell you, will you promise as you won't laugh at me?"

This was Cuckoo's way of delicately sounding the doctor's depths. She thought it decidedly subtle.

"Yes, I'll promise that," the doctor said.

He looked at her faded young face and felt no inclination to laugh.

"Well, then," Cuckoo said, more excitedly, "you know Ju—Mr. Addison, don't you?"

The doctor began to see a ray of light.

"Certainly I do," he said.

"And Mr. Cresswell?"

"He is one of my most intimate friends."

The words were spoken with an unconscious warmth that chilled Cuckoo. For surely the man who spoke thus of the man she hated, must be her enemy. She faltered visibly, and a despairing expression crept into her eyes.

"I don't know as it's any use my sayin' it," she began as if half to herself.

The doctor saw that she was much troubled and the kindness of his nature was roused.

"Don't be afraid of me," he said. "You have come here to tell me something, tell it frankly. I am a friend of both the people you mention."

"You can't be that," she suddenly cried. "Nobody can't be that!"

"Why not?"

"You ought to know."

She said it fiercely. All her self-consciousness was suddenly gone, swept away by the flood of thought and of remembrance that was surging through her mind.

"Why can't you see what he is," she exclaimed, "any more than he can, than Julian—Mr. Addison, I mean? Any one'd think you was all mad, they would."

Doctor Levillier was glad he had admitted the lady of the feathers to his presence. Interest sprang up in him, alive and searching.

"Tell me what you mean," he said. "Are you talking about Mr. Cresswell?"

"Yes, I am; and I say of all the beasts in London he's the greatest."

Cuckoo did not choose her words carefully. She was highly excited and she wanted to be impressive. It seemed to her that to use strong language was the only way to be impressive. So she used it. The doctor's face grew graver.

"Surely you hardly know what you're saying," he said very quietly.

But his thoughts flew to that summer night when his mastiffs howled against Valentine, and he felt as if a mystery were deepening round him as the autumn mist of evening deepened in the street outside.

"I do," she reiterated. "I do. But nobody won't see it. And it's no use what I see. How can it be?"

The words were almost a wail.

"Tell me what you see."

Cuckoo looked into the doctor's sincere eyes, and a sudden rush of hope came to her.

"That's what I want to. But if you like him you'll only be angry."

"No, I shall not."

"Well, then. I see as he's ruinin' his friend."

"Ruining Mr. Addison?"

"Yes."

It struck the doctor as very strange that such a girl as Cuckoo obviously was should cry out in such a passionate way against the ruin of any young man. Was it not her fate to ruin others as she herself had been ruined? He wondered what her connection with the two youths was, and perhaps his face showed something of his wonder, for Cuckoo added, after a long glance at him:

"It's true; yes, it is," as if she read his doubts.

"How do you come to know it?" the doctor said, not at all unkindly, but as if anxious to elucidate matters.

"Why, I tell you I can see it plain. Besides," and here she dropped her voice, "Valentine, as he calls himself—though he ain't—as good as told me. He did tell me, only I couldn't understand. He knew I couldn't—d'you see? That's why he told me. Oh, if he'd only tell you!"

Fragments of Valentine's exposition of his deeds and of his strange gospel were floating through Cuckoo's mind as fragments of broken wood float by on a stream, fragments of broken wood that were part of a puzzle, that should be rescued by some strong hand from the stream, and fitted together into a perfect whole.

"Valentine! You say he told you that he was ruining Julian?"

Unconsciously the doctor used the Christian names. His doing so set Cuckoo more at her ease.

"Yes. Not like that. But he told me. He ain't what you think, nor what Julian thinks. He's somebody else, and you can't tell it. He's laughing at you all."

Thus the gospel came forth from the painted lips of Cuckoo, crude and garbled, yet true gospel. The doctor was completely puzzled. All he gathered from this announcement was that Valentine seemed in some way to have been confiding in this girl of the streets. Such a fact was sufficiently astounding. That they should ever have been associated together in any way was almost incredible to any one who knew Valentine. Yet it was quite obvious that they did know each other, and in no ordinary manner.

"Do you know Mr. Cresswell well?" the doctor said.

He saw that he could only make the tangle clear by being to some extent judicial. Humanity merely excited Cuckoo to something that was violently involved, passionate, and almost hysterical.

"Well enough."

"And Mr. Addison?"

Cuckoo flushed slowly.

"Yes, I know him—quite well."

An almost similar answer, but given with such a change of manner as would be possible only in a woman. It told the doctor much of the truth and gave him the first page of a true reading of Cuckoo's character. But he went on with apparently unconscious quietude:

"And you came here to tell me, who know and like them both, that the one is ruining the other. What made you come to me?"

"Why, somethin' Julian said once. He thinks a lot of you. I was afraid to come, but I—I thought I would. It's seein' them—at least Julian—since they got back made me come."

"I haven't seen them yet," the doctor said, and there was an interrogation in the accent with which he spoke. Something in Cuckoo's intense manner roused both wonder and alarm in him. She evidently spoke driven by tremendous impulse. What vision had given that impulse life?

"Ah!" she said, and fell suddenly into a dense silence, touching her left cheek mechanically with her hand, which was covered by a long, black silk glove. She alternately pressed the fingers of it against the cheek bone and withdrew them, as one who marks the progress of a tune, hummed or played on some instrument. Her eyes were staring downwards upon the carpet. The doctor watched her, and the wonder and fear grew in him.

"Have you nothing more to tell me?" he said at last.

"Eh?"

She put down her hand slowly and turned her eyes on him.

"What do you wish me to do?" he said, "I do not know yet what may—" he checked himself and substituted, "I must go and see my friends."

"Yes, go."

She nodded her head slowly, and then she shivered as she sat in the chair.

"Go, and do somethin'," she said. "I would—I want to—but I can't. It's true, I suppose, what he said. I'm nearly done with, I'm spoilt. I say, you're a doctor, aren't you? You know things? Tell me then, do, what's the good of goin' on being able to feel—I mean to feel just like anybody, anybody as hasn't gone down, you know—if you can't do anythin' the same as they can, get round anybody to make 'em go right? I could send him right, I could, as well as any girl, if feelin' 'd only do it. But feelin' ain't a bit of good. It's looks, I suppose. Everythin' 's looks."

"No, not everything," the doctor said.

Cuckoo's speech both interested and touched him. Its confused wistfulness came straight from the heart. And then it recalled to the doctor a conversation he had had with Valentine, when they talked over the extraordinary influence that the mere appearance—will working through features—of one man or woman can have over another. The doctor could only at present rather dimly apprehend the feeling entertained for Julian by Cuckoo. But as he glanced at her, he understood very well the pathos of the contest raging at present between her heart and the painted shell which held it.

"Nobody who feels goodness is utterly bereft of the power of bringing good to another," he said. "For we can seldom really feel what we can never really be."

Light shone through the shadows of the tired face at the words.

"He said different from that," she exclaimed.

"He—who?"

"Him as you call Valentine. That's why he told me all about it, because he knew as I shouldn't understand, and because he thinks I can't do nothin' for any one. But I say, you do somethin' for Julian, will you, will you?"

There was a passion of pleading in her voice. She had lost her fear of him, and, stretching out her hand, touched the sleeve of his coat.

"I don't understand it all," the doctor said. "I don't like to accept what you say about Mr. Cresswell, even in thought. But I will go and see him, and Julian. The dogs," he added in a low and secret voice to himself. "There is something terribly strange in all this."

He fell into a silence of consideration that lasted longer than he knew. The lady of the feathers began to fidget in it uneasily. She felt that her mission was perhaps accomplished and that she ought to go. She looked across at the doctor, pulled her silk gloves up on her thin arms, and kicked one foot against the other. He did not seem to notice. She glanced towards the window. The fog was pressing its face against the glass like a dreary and terrible person looking upon them with haggard eyes. It was time, she supposed, for her to drift out into the arms that belonged to that dreary and terrible face. She got up.

"I'll go now," she said.

The doctor did not hear.

"I'll go now, please," she repeated.

This time he heard and got up. He looked at her and said, "I have your address. I will see you again."

If misery chanced to stand once in his path, he seldom lost sight of it till he had at least tried to bring a smile to its lips, a ray of hope to its eyes. But in the instance of Cuckoo he had other reasons, or might have other reasons, for seeing her in the future.

"You are sure you have nothing more to say to me?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"No, I don't think," she murmured.

"Then good-bye."

He held out his hand. She put hers in it, with an action that was oddly ladylike for Cuckoo. Then she went out, rather awkwardly, in a reaction, to the hall, the doctor following. He opened the door for her, and the mist crawled instantly in.

"It's a gloomy night," he said. "Very autumnal."

"Yes, ain't it? I do hate the nights."

She spoke the words with an accent that was venemous.

"C-r-r!" she said.

And with that ejaculation, half an uttered shiver, half a muttered curse, she gave herself to the fog, and was gone.

Doctor Levillier stood for a moment looking into the vague and dreamy darkness. Then he put on his coat and hat, caught up a cab whistle, and with a breath, sent a shrill and piercing note into the night. Long and mournfully it sounded. And only the moist silence answered like that paradox—a voice that is dumb. Again and again the cry went forth, and at last there was an answering rattle. Two bright eyes advanced in the fog very slowly, looking for the sound, it seemed, as for a thing visible. The doctor got into the cab, and set forth in the fog to visit Valentine.



CHAPTER II

THE VOICE IN THE EMPTY ROOM

When the doctor arrived at the Victoria Street flat Valentine's man answered his ring. Wade had been with Valentine for many years and was always famous for his great devotion to, and admiration of, his master. Wade was also especially partial—as he would have expressed himself—to Doctor Levillier, and when he saw who the visitor was, his face relaxed into contentment that strongly suggested a smile.

"Back at last Wade, you see," the doctor said, cheerfully. "Is Mr. Cresswell in?"

"No, sir. But I expect him every minute to dress for dinner. He's dining out, and it's near seven now. Will you come in and wait?"

"Yes."

The doctor entered and walked into the drawing-room, preceded by Wade, who turned on the light.

"Why! what have you been doing to the room?" the doctor said, looking round in some surprise. "Dear me. It's very much altered."

In truth, the change in it was marked. The grand piano had vanished, and in its place stood an enormous cabinet made of wood, stained black, and covered with grotesque gold figures, whose unnatural faces were twisted into the expressions of all the vices. Some of these faces smiled, others scowled, others protruded forked tongues like snakes and seemed to hiss along the blackness of the background. The shapes of the figures were voluptuous and yet suggested, rather than fully revealed, deformity, as if the minds of these monsters sought to reveal their distortion by the very lines of their curved and wanton limbs. Upon the top of this cabinet stood a gigantic rose-coloured jar filled with orchids, the Messalinas of the hothouse, whose mauve corruption and spotted faces leered down to greet the gold goblins beneath. It was easy to imagine them whispering to each other soft histories of unknown sins, and jeering at the corrupt respectabilities of London, as they clustered together and leaned above the ruddy ramparts of the china, wild flowers as no hedgerow violet, or pale smirking primrose, is ever wild in the farthest wood.

Glancing from this cabinet, and those that stood upon it, the doctor was aware of a deep and dusty note of red in the room, sounding from carpet and walls, tingling drowsily in the window curtains and in the cushions that lay upon the couches. This was not the crude and cheerful sealing-wax red with which the festive Philistine loves to dye the whiteness of his dining-room walls, cooling its chubby absurdity with panels of that old oak, which is forever new. It was a dim and deep colour, such as a dust-filmed ruby might emit if illuminated by a soft light. And Valentine had shrouded it so adroitly that though it pervaded the entire room, it always seemed distant and remote, a background, vast perhaps, but clouded and shadowed by nearer things. These nearer things were many, for Valentine's original asceticism, which had displayed itself essentially in the slight bareness of his principal sitting-room had apparently been swept away by a tumultuous greed for ornaments. The room was crowded with furniture, chairs, and sofas of the most peculiar shapes, divans and tables, bookstands and settees. One couch was made of wood, carved and painted into the semblance of a woman, between whose outstretched arms was placed the pillow to receive the head of one resting there. Another lay on the bent backs of two grinning Indian boys, whose crouching limbs seemed twined into a knot. Upon the tables and cabinets stood a thousand ornaments, many of them silver toys, sweetmeat-boxes, tiny ivory figures and wriggling atrocities from the East. But what struck the doctor most in the transformation of the room was the panorama presented upon its walls. The pictures that he remembered so well were all gone. The classical figures, the landscapes full of atmosphere and of delicacy had vanished. And from their places leered down jockeys and street-women painted by Jan Van Beers and Dgas, Chaplin and Gustav Courbet, while above the mantelpiece, where once had hung "The Merciful Knight," a Cocotte by Leibl smoked a pipe into the room. It seemed incredible that Valentine could be at rest in such a livid chamber, and not even the vague communications of Cuckoo woke in the doctor such a definite and alive sensation of discomfort as this vision of outward change that must surely betoken an inward transformation of the most vivid and unusual kind. And everywhere, as a deep and monotonous bell ringing relentlessly through a symphony of discordant and crying passions, there sounded that sinister note of deep and dusty red. Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears a monotonous song of dull and weary change. No silence had ever before spoken to him so powerfully. He was greatly affected, and did not scruple to show his discomfort to Wade, who waited respectfully by the door.

"What an alteration!" he said again, but in a lower and more withdrawn voice. "I cannot recognize the room I once knew—and loved!"

"Mr. Valentine has been doing it up, sir."

"But why, Wade; why?"

"I don't know, sir; a fancy, I suppose, sir."

"An evil one," the doctor murmured to himself.

He glanced at Wade. It struck him that the man's mind might possibly march with Cuckoo's in detection of his master's transformation, if transformation there were. Wade returned the doctor's glance with calm, good breeding.

"Mr. Valentine is well, I hope, Wade?" he said.

"Very well, sir, I believe."

"And Mr. Addison?"

"I couldn't quite say, sir, as to that."

"Do you mean that he looks ill?"

"I couldn't say, sir. Mr. Julian don't look quite what he was, to my view, sir."

"Oh."

The butler's level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and again a prophetic chord of change was struck.

"Thank you, Wade" said the doctor.

The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room.

* * * * *

Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose nerves played him tricks. He was, above all things, sane, both in mind and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation. Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was, perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by the action of the imagination. Half, at least, of his great success in life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity. No man, in fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he. Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there. The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded chamber.

The hour was quiet. No fire danced in the grate. Doctor Levillier leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting Valentine's return. But the composure which had already been slightly shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the empty room.

Sitting thus in it alone the doctor examined it with more detail, and with a more definite remembrance of Valentine's habit of mind than before. And he found himself increasingly amazed and confounded. For not only was the change great, but it was not governed and directed by good taste, or even by any definite taste, either good or bad. A number of people might have devised the arrangement and selection of the mass of furniture and ornaments, and have thrown things down here and there in sheer defiance of each other's predilections. Only in the setting, the red setting of the picture, was there evidence of the presence of a presiding genius. In that red setting the doctor supposed that he was to read Valentine. He could read nobody in the rest of the room, or perhaps everybody whose taste refused purity and calm as foolish Dead Sea growths. Some of the silver ornaments might have assembled in the garish boudoir of a Parisian fille de joie, as the carved woman might have been the couch to which Thais tempted Paphnuce, and the Indian boys the lifeless slaves of Aphrodite. The jockeys on the wall would have been at home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the jeunesse dore of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds." The golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the masculine and feminine, the corrupt "modern" and the flagrant Philistine, the vaguely suggestive Nineteenth Century Athenian and the larky and unbridled schoolboy. A neurotic woman seemed to have been at work here, a sordid youth there. On a sidetable the hysterical man of our civilization fought a duel in taste with some Amazon whose kept vow had evidently wrought a cancer in her mind. In every corner there was the clash of civil war. Yet there was always the cloudy red, visible through the lattice-work of decoration, as the blue sky is visible through the lattice-work of a Tadema interior. In that clouded red the doctor felt himself reading a new yet powerful Valentine, and in the grotesque orchids leaning their misshapen chins upon the rosy rim of their vase. Those flowers had evil faces, and they seemed strangely at home in the silent room where no clock ticked and no caged bird twittered. Only the red cloud spoke like a dull voice, and Doctor Levillier sat and listened to it, until he felt as if he began to know a new Valentine. There is an influence that emanates from lifeless things, strong, subtle, and penetrating; an influence in form, in colour, in scent, even in juxtaposition. And such influence is like a voice speaking to the soul. There was a voice in that empty room; and the words it uttered stirred the doctor to a greater surprise, a greater dread than the words of Cuckoo. Her painted lips related that which might well be a legend of her fancy or of her hate. This voice related a reality and no legend.

As the doctor sat there he conversed of many strange and evil matters, of many discomforting affairs. He was the interrogator, the perpetual anxious questioner, and the voice in the empty room gave vague and sinister answers. That was a terrible catechism, a catechism of the devil, not of God. Question and answer flowed on, and in the doctor's soul the anxiety and the distress ever deepened. Nor could he control their development, although at moments his common sense broke into the catechism like a cool voice from without, and sought to interrupt it finally. But the twig could not stay the torrent. And the darkness deepened, darkness in which there was a vision of fire, the vision of a man, fantastic and menacing. He was the genius of this room. This room sang of him. Yes, even now the twisted silver goblins, the curved monstrosities on the cabinet, the crouched Indian boys, the leering pictures, and always the dull red cloud on wall and carpet, cushion and hanging. And then a strange deception overtook the doctor and shook his usually steady nerves. The red cloud seemed to his observing eyes to tremble, like a flame shaken in a breath of wind, and to glow all around him. He looked again, endeavouring to laugh at his delusion. But the glow deepened and there was surely distinct movement. Everywhere on walls, floor, hangings, couches, faint, thin shadows took shape, grew more definite. He watched them and saw that they were tiny flames, glowing red relieved against the red. It was as if he sat in the midst of a ghostly furnace; for these flames had no pleasant crackling voices. Silently they burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly. He saw them move this way and that. Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly, as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided. The doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing to tremble and to murmur from their lips. Yet they sang no chorus, but always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him. He knew himself to be the victim of a delusion. He knew what he would have said to a patient seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses. In his common sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the actual. These flames were real. They had forms. They moved. They enclosed him in a circle. They embraced him. As he watched them he fancied that they longed to be near to him, and—and—yes—so ran his thoughts—to communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his. They trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire. They tried to escape from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a leash. The doctor was impelled ardently to believe that they yearned to find voices and to utter some word. And then, on a sudden, he recalled Julian's declaration on the night of Valentine's trance, that he had seen a flame shine from his friend's lips, and fade away in the darkness. He recalled, too, Julian's question about death-beds. Was the soul of a man a flame? And, if so, were these flames many souls, or one soul reproduced on all sides by his excitement, and by the intensity of his gaze after them?

They burned more clearly. Their forms were more defined. Then suddenly they grew vague, blurred, faint all around him. They faded. They died into the red of the room. And once more the doctor sat alone.

He listened and heard the click of a key in the front door. And then suddenly the horror that he had felt long ago, on the night when he was followed in Regent Street, once more possessed him. He got on his feet to face it, and, as the drawing-room door was pushed slowly open, faced Valentine.



CHAPTER III

THE DOCTOR MEETS TWO STRANGERS

Upon seeing the doctor, Valentine paused on the threshold of the door, and, as he paused, the doctor's horror fled.

"Valentine," he said, holding out his hand.

"Doctor."

Their hands met and their eyes. And then Levillier had an instant sensation that he shook hands with a stranger. He looked upon the face of Valentine certainly, but he was aware of a subtle, yet large, change in it. All the features were surely coarser, heavier. There was a line or two near the eyes, a loose fullness about the mouth. Yet, as he looked again, he could not be certain if it were so, or if his memory were at fault, groping after a transformation that was not there. The words he now said truthfully expressed his real feeling in the matter.

"You are quite a stranger to me," he said.

Valentine accepted the remark in the conventional sense.

"Yes, quite a stranger. We have not met for an age."

The voice was cool and careless.

"I have been waiting for you," the doctor went on, still unable to feel at his ease. "By the way, how you have changed your room."

"Yes. Do you like it?"

"Well, frankly, no."

"I am sorry for that," Valentine replied, drawing off his gloves. "Julian chose a great many of the things in it."

"Julian! Did he devise the colour scheme?"

"That curious red? No, that was my idea. But he had a great deal to do with the new furniture and the ornaments."

"I should have supposed many minds had been at work here."

Valentine smiled, and the doctor was convinced that both his mouth and eyes had altered in expression.

"That's true in a way," he answered. "Julian has had various advisers—of the feminine gender. The love of the moment is visible all over this room. That is why it amuses me. Those silver ornaments were chosen by a pretty Circassian. A Parisian picked out that black cabinet in a warehouse of Boulogne. A little Italian insisted upon that vulgar-painted sofa—and so on."

"Why do you allow such people to have any intercourse with a room of yours?"

"Oh, it amused Julian, and I was tired of my room as it was. After 'The Merciful Knight' went to be cleaned, I resolved on a change."

"For the worse."

"Is it for the worse?"

"Surely."

The eyes of the two men challenged each other. Valentine's glance was carelessly impudent and hardy. The deference which he had always given to the doctor was gone. If it had been genuine it was dead. If it had only been a mask it had apparently served its purpose and was now contemptuously thrown aside. Doctor Levillier was deeply moved by the transformation. His friend had become a stranger during the interval of his absence. The man he admired was less admirable than of old. He recognized that, although he was not yet fully aware of the transformation of Valentine. Before he left England he vaguely suspected a change. Now the change hit him full in the heart. So acute was it that, in an age of miracles, he could well have believed Cuckoo Bright's disjointed statement. Valentine was, to his mind, even in some strange way to his eye, at this moment no longer Valentine. He was talking with a man whose features he knew certainly, but whose mind he did not know, had never known. And his former resolution to watch Valentine closely was consolidated. It became a passion. The doctor woke in the man. Nor was the old friend and lover of humanity lulled to sleep.

"How is Julian?" the doctor asked, dropping his eyes.

"Very well, I think. He will be here directly. He's coming to fetch me. We are dining at the Prince's in Piccadilly in the same party. That reminds me, I must dress. But do stay, and have some coffee."

"No coffee, thank you."

"But you will stay and see Julian. I dare say he will be here early."

"Yes, I will stay. I should like to meet him."

After a word or two more Valentine vanished to dress, and the doctor was once more alone. He was much perplexed and saddened, but keenly interested too, and, getting up from the chair in which he had been sitting, he moved about the grotesque and vulgar room, threading his way through the graceless furniture with a silent and gentle caution. And as he walked meditatively he remembered a conversation he had held with Valentine long ago, when the latter had spoken complainingly of the tyranny of an instinctive purity. The very words he had used came back to him now:

"The minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly poised, and a little push can send them one way or the other. Remember if you lose heaven, the space once filled by heaven will not be left empty."

Had not the little push been given? Had not heaven been lost? That was the problem. But Doctor Levillier, if he saw a little way into effect, was quite at a loss as to cause. And already he had a suspicion that the change in Valentine was not quite on the lines of one of those strange and dreadful human changes familiar to any observant man. This suspicion, already latent, and roused, perhaps, in the first instance long ago by the mystery of Rip's avoidance of his master, and by the shattering of Valentine's musical powers, was confirmed in the strongest way when Julian appeared a few minutes later. Yet the change in Julian would have seemed to most people far more remarkable.

He came into the drawing-room rather hastily, in evening dress with a coat over it. Wade had forewarned him of the doctor's presence, and he entered, speaking loud words of welcome, and holding out a greeting hand. The too-ready voice and almost premature hand betokened his latent uneasiness. Vice makes some people unconscious, some self-conscious. Julian belonged at present to the latter tribe. Whether he was thoroughly aware of self-alteration or not, he evidently stirred uneasily under an expectation of the doctor's surprise. This drove his voice to loud notes and his manner to a boisterous heartiness, belied by the shifting glance of his brown eyes.

The doctor was astounded as he looked at him. Yet the change here was far less inexplicable than that other change in Valentine. Its mystery was the familiar mystery of humanity. Its horror was the horror that we all accept as one of the elements of life. Deterioration, however rapid, however complete, does not come upon us like a ghost in the night to puzzle us absolutely. It is not altogether out of the range of our experience. Most men have seen a man crumble gradually, through the action of some vice, as a wall crumbles through the action of time, falls into dust and decay, filters away into the weed-choked ditches of utter ruin and degradation. Most women have watched some woman slip from the purity and hope and innocence of girlhood into the faded hunger and painted and wrinkled energies of animalism. Such tragedies are no more unfamiliar to us than are the tragedies of Shakespeare. And such a tragedy—not complete yet, but at a third-act point, perhaps—now faced Doctor Levillier in Julian. The wall that had been so straight and trim, so finely built and carefully preserved, was crumbling fast to decay. A ragged youth slunk in the face, beggared of virtue, of true cheerfulness, of all lofty aspiration and high intent. It was youth still, for nothing can entirely massacre that gift of the gods, except inevitable Time. But it was youth sadder than age, because it had run forward to meet the wearinesses that dog the steps of age but that should never be at home with age's enemy. Julian had been the leaping child of healthy energy. He was now quite obviously the servant of lassitude. His foot left the ground as if with a tired reluctance, and his hands were fidgetty, yet nerveless. The eyes, that looked at the doctor and looked away by swift turns, burned with a haggard eagerness unutterably different from their former bright vivacity. Beneath them wrinkles crept on the puffy white face as worms about a corpse. Busy and tell-tale, they did not try to conceal the story of the body into which they had prematurely cut themselves. Nor did Julian's features choose to back up any reserve his mind might possibly feel about acknowledging the consummate alteration of his life. They proclaimed, as from a watch-tower, the arrival of enemies. The cheeks were no longer firm, but heavy and flaccid. The mouth was deformed by the down-drawn looseness of the sensualist, and the complexion beaconed with an unnatural scarlet that was a story to be read by every street-boy.

Yet, even so, the doctor, as he looked pitifully and with a gnawing grief upon Julian, felt not the mysterious thrill communicated to him by Valentine. These two men, these old time friends of his, were both in a sense strangers. But it was as if he had at least heard much of Julian, knew much of him, understood him, comprehended exactly why he was a stranger. Valentine was the total stranger, the unknown, the undivined. Long ago the doctor had foreseen the possibility of the Julian who now stood before him. He had never foreseen the possibility of the new Valentine. The one change was summed up in an instant. The other walked in utter mystery. The doctor had been swift to notice Julian's furtive glance, and was equally swift in banishing all trace of surprise from his own manner. So they met with a fair show of cordiality, and Julian developed a little of his old cheerfulness.

"Val's dressing," he said. "Well, there's plenty of time. By the way, how's your Russian, doctor?"

"Better."

"You've cured him! Bravo!"

"I hope I have persuaded him to cure himself."

Julian looked up hastily.

"Oh, that sort of complaint, was it?"

He laughed, not without a tinge of bitterness.

"Perhaps he doesn't want to be cured."

"I have persuaded him to want to be, I think."

"Isn't that rather a priest's office?" Julian asked.

The doctor noticed that a very faint hostility had crept into his manner.

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. Such an illness is a matter of temperament, I dare say, and the clergy tinker at our temperaments, don't they? while you doctors tinker at our bodies."

"A nerve-doctor has as much to do with mind as body, and no doctor can possibly do much good if he entirely ignores the mind. But you know my theories."

"Yes. They make you clergyman and doctor in one, a dangerous man."

And he laughed again, jarringly, and shifted in his seat, looking around him with quick eyes.

"What do you think of the room?" he said abruptly.

"I think it entirely spoilt and ruined," the doctor answered gravely.

"It's altered, certainly."

"Yes, for the worse. It was a beautiful room, one of the most beautiful in London."

A momentary change came over Julian. He dropped his hard manner, which seemed an assumption to cover inward discomfort or shame.

"Yes," he said almost regretfully. "I suppose it was. But it's gayer now, got more things in it. Full of memories this room is."

The last remark was evidently put forth as a feeler, to find out what Valentine had been talking about. Dr. Levillier was habitually truthful, although he could be very reserved if occasion seemed to require it. At present he preferred to be frank.

"Memories of women," he remarked.

"Oh, you've heard?"

"That several tastes helped to make his room the pandemonium which it is. Yes."

"You're severe, doctor."

"Perhaps you like the room for its memories, Addison."

Julian looked doubtful.

"I don't know. I suppose so," he hesitated.

"By the way, is there among these vagrant memories of Circassians, Greeks, and Italians anything chosen by Cuckoo Bright?"

Julian started violently.

"Cuckoo Bright," he exclaimed, "what do you know of her?"

As he spoke Valentine strolled into the room dressed for dinner. He was drawing on a pair of lavender gloves, and looked down sideways at his coat to see if his buttonhole of three very pale and very perfectly matched pink roses was quite straight.

"Cuckoo Bright?" he echoed. "Does everybody know her, then? How came she into your strict life, doctor?"

Doctor Levillier noticed that Valentine, like Julian, carefully set him aside as a being in some different sphere, much as a great many people insist on setting clergymen. This fact alone showed that he was talking with two strangers, and seemed to give the lie to long years of the most friendly and almost brotherly intercourse.

"Is my life so strict, then?" he asked gently.

"I think little Cuckoo would call it so, eh, Julian?"

He glanced at Julian and laughed softly, still drawing on his gloves. In evening dress he looked curiously young and handsome, and facially less altered than the doctor had at first supposed him to be. Still there was a difference even in the face; but it was so slight that only a keen observer would have noticed it. The almost frigid and glacial purity had floated away from it like a lovely cloud. Now it was unveiled, and there was something hard and staring about it. The features were still beautiful, but their ivory lustre was gone. A line was penciled, too, here and there. Yet the doctor could understand that even Valentine's own man might not appreciate the difference. The manner, however, was more violently altered. It was that which made the doctor think again and intensely of Cuckoo's vague yet startling statement.

"Where did you meet Cuckoo, doctor?"

It was Julian who spoke, and the words were uttered with some excitement.

"I have met her," Levillier replied.

It was sufficiently evident that he did not intend to say where.

But Valentine broke in:

"She has called on you again, then, and this time found you at home. I scarcely thought she would take the trouble."

"Again!" the doctor said.

"Yes. One evening when you were away I saw her at your door and ventured to give her a piece of advice."

"And that was?"

"Not to trouble you. I told her your patients were of a different class."

"In that case I fear you misrepresented me, Cresswell. I do not choose my patients. But Cuckoo Bright is no patient of mine."

"If she's not ill," Julian said, "why should she go to you?"

"That is her affair, and mine," the doctor answered, in his quietest and most finishing tone.

Julian accepted the delicate little snub quietly, but Valentine sneered.

"Perhaps she went to seek you in your capacity of a doctor of the mind rather than of the body. Perhaps, after all, she sought your aid."

As he spoke the doctor could not help having driven into him the conviction that the words were spoken with meaning, that Valentine knew the nature of Cuckoo's mission to Harley Street. There rose in him suddenly a violent sensation of enmity against Valentine. He strove to beat it down, but he could not. Never had he felt such enmity against any man. It was like the fury so obviously felt by Cuckoo. The doctor was ashamed to be so unreasonable, and believed for a moment that the poor street-girl had absolutely swayed him, and predisposed him to this animus that surged up over his normal charity and good, clear impulses of tenderness for all that lived.

"My aid," he said—and the turmoil within him caused him to speak with unusual sternness. "And if she did, what then?"

"Poor Cuckoo!" Julian said, and there was a touch of real tenderness in his voice.

"Oh, I have nothing to say against it," Valentine replied, buttoning slowly and carefully the last button of the second glove. "Only, Cuckoo Bright is beyond aid. She can neither help herself nor any one else."

"How do you know, Cresswell?"

"Because I have observed, doctor. Once I, too, thought that even Cuckoo might—might—well, have some fight in her. I know now that she has not. Her corruption of body has led to worse than corruption of mind, to corruption of will. Cuckoo Bright is as helpless as is a seabird with a shot through its wings, upon the sea. She can only drift in the present—die in the future."

The doctor listened silently. But Julian said again:

"Poor, poor Cuckoo!"

The exclamation seemed to irritate Valentine, for he caught up his cloak and cried:

"Bah! Let's forget her. Doctor, we must say good-night. We are due at the Prince's. It has been good to meet you again."

The last words sounded like the bitterest sarcasm.



CHAPTER IV

THE DEATH OF RIP

Although Dr. Levillier's visit to Victoria Street had been such a painful one, he had no intention whatever of letting the two young men drift away out of his acquaintance. He wanted especially to be with them in public places, and to see for himself, if possible, whether Cuckoo's accusation against Valentine were true. That a frightful change had taken place in Julian's life, and that he was rapidly sinking in a slough of wholly inordinate dissipation was clear enough. But did Valentine, this new, strange Valentine, lead him, or merely go with him, or stand aloof smiling at him and letting him take his own way like a foolish boy? That question the doctor must decide for himself. He could only decide it satisfactorily by ignoring Valentine's impertinence to himself, and endeavouring to resume his former relations of intimacy with these old friends who were strangers. He began by asking them both to dinner. Rather to his surprise they accepted and came. The mastiffs were shut close in their den below, lest they should repeat their performance of the summer. The dinner passed off with some apparent cheerfulness, but it served to show the doctor the gulf that was now fixed between him and his former dear associates. He was on one shore, they on another. Their faces were altered as if by the desolate influence of distance. Even their voices sounded strange and far away. Great spaces had widened between their minds and his. He endeavoured at first to cover those spaces, to bridge that gulf; but he soon came to learn the vanity of such an attempt. He could not go to them, nor would they return to him. He could only pretend to bridge the gulf by the exercise of a suave diplomacy, and by carefully banishing from his manner every trace of that dispraising elderliness which seems to the young the essence of prudery arising, like an appalling Phoenix, from the ashes of past imprudence. In this way he drew a little nearer to Julian, who obviously feared at first to suffer condemnation at his hands, but, finding only geniality, lost his uneasiness and suffered himself to become more natural.

But this thawing of Julian, the quick response of humanity to the adroit treatment of it, only threw into harsher relief the immobility of Valentine, and to him the doctor drew no nearer, but seemed, with each moment, more distant, more absolutely divided from him. And the gulf between them was full of icebergs, which filled the atmosphere with the breath of a deadly frost. This was what the doctor felt. What Valentine, the new Valentine, felt could not be ascertained. He wore a brilliant mask, on whose gay mouth the society smile was singularly well painted. He wore a manner edged with tinkling bells of brilliancy. Happiness and ease beamed in his eyes. Yet his look, his voice, his smile, his gaiety chilled the doctor and set him mentally shivering. And with each bright saying and merry laugh he struck a blow upon the former friendship. The doctor fancied he could actually hear the sound of the hammer at its work.

The simile of the hammer was peculiarly consonant with his present view of the new Valentine, for, despite the latter's gaiety, ease, and self-possession, his smiling sociability and expansiveness, the doctor was perpetually conscious of a lurking violence, an incessant and forcible exigence in him. It might be a fancy, but the doctor was not, as a rule, the prey of fancies. Yet Valentine gave no outward hint of inward turmoil. Rather did the doctor divine it as by a curious intuition that guided him to that which lay in hiding. And it was this apprehension of a deep violence and peculiar, excessive animation in Valentine that woke the doctor's deepest wonder, and set the gulf between them so widely. For all violence had once been so specially abhorred by Valentine. He had so loved and sought all calm. The calm, he had often said, were the true aristocrats of life. Fury and any wild movements of the passions were of the gutter.

That dinner was returned. The doctor dined with Valentine and Julian more than once, and accompanied them to the theatre. But he was unable to make certain of Valentine's precise attitude towards Julian, although he saw easily that the influence of the one over the other had rather waxed than waned. This being so, it followed that Julian, having completely changed, the influence that guided him must have completely changed also. The pendulum had swung back. That often happened in the record of men's lives. But not in such a way as this. The doctor, like Cuckoo, recognized the existence of a mystery. But he was by no means prepared to accept her fantastic and ignorantly vague explanation of it. That was a wild fable, a fairy tale for a child, not a reasonable elucidation for a man and a doctor. The most curious thing of all was that she declared that Valentine had actually told her the truth about the matter, knowing that she could not understand it. The doctor resolved to see her later, and to question her more minutely on this point. Meanwhile he began to watch Valentine carefully, and with the most sedulous attention to every detail and nuance of manner, look, and word. He understood Julian. His sad case was to an extent due to his long happiness and freedom from the bondage in which so many men move wearily. It was as if his passions had been dammed up by the original influence of Valentine. Through the years, behind the height of the dam, the waters had been rising, accumulating, pressing. Suddenly the dam was removed, and a devastating flood swept forth, uncontrollable, headlong, and furious. Julian needed rescue, but the only way to rescue seemed to lie through Valentine, within whose circle of influence he was so closely bound. The mystery of Valentine must be laid bare.

And so the doctor watched and wondered, bringing all his knowledge of the world and of the minds and bodies of men to help him.

And meanwhile the lady of the feathers was seen nightly in Piccadilly.

And Julian went his way steadily downwards.

* * * * *

One night there was a flicker of snow over London, and the air was chill with the breath of coming winter. The dreary light of snow illumined the faces of all who walked in the streets, painting the brightest cheeks with a murky grey pigment, and making the sweetest eyes hollow and expressive of depression. Heavily the afternoon went by and the evening came sharply, like a blow.

Dr. Levillier was engaged to dine with Julian and Valentine at the former's rooms in Mayfair. Of late Valentine had seemed to seek him out, and especially to enjoy seeing him in the company of Julian. And the doctor fancied he detected something of a triumph that was almost blatant in Valentine's manner when they three were together, and when the doctor's eyes rested sorrowfully upon that crumbling wall, which had once been so fair and strong. Of late, too, the doctor, ever watching for the signs of change in Valentine, had grown more and more aware that he was an utterly, through and through, different man from the youth men had called the Saint of Victoria Street. He felt the transformation to be inhuman, and, by slow and reluctant degrees, he was beginning to form an opinion. It was only in embryo as yet, a shadow hesitating in the background of his mind. He shrank from holding it. He shuddered at its coming. Yet, if it were right, it might explain everything, might make what was otherwise incredible clear and comprehensible.

Was this vile change in his friend caused by a radical distortion of mind? Was Valentine a madman?

Lunacy turns temperaments upside down, transforms the lamb into the tiger, the saint into the murderer.

Was Valentine then mad? and was the monstrous distortion of his brain playing upon the life of Julian, who, like the rest of the world, believed him sane?

The thought came to the doctor, and once it had been born it was often near to him. Yet he would not encourage it unless he could rest it upon facts. That a man should change was not a proof of his madness, however unaccountable the change might seem. The doctor watched Valentine, and was compelled to admit to himself that in every way Valentine seemed perfectly sane. His cynicism, his love of ordinary life, his toleration of common and wretched people, might seem amazing to one who had known him well years ago, but there were many perfectly sane men of the same habits and opinions, of the same modes of speech and of action. If the doctor's strange thought were to become a definite belief, much more was needed, something at least of proof, something that would carry conviction not merely to the imagination, but to the cool and searching intellect.

On this night of the first snow the doctor's thought moved a step forward towards conviction.

When he arrived at Julian's rooms, he was greeted by Valentine alone.

"Our host has deserted us," he said, leading the doctor into the fire.

"What, is he ill?"

"He has not returned. He went away last night—on a quest of a certain pleasure. This afternoon he wired, asking me to entertain you. He was unavoidably detained, but hoped to arrive in time for dessert. His present love's arms are very strong. They keep him."

"Oh!" the doctor said, slipping out of his cloak; "we dine here then?"

"We do, alone. I don't think we've dined alone since Julian and I came back from abroad, and you deserted your Russian."

"No. I will consider myself your guest."

It struck the doctor that here was an excellent opportunity for confirming or abandoning his dreary suspicion. Alone with Valentine, he would be able to lead the conversation in any direction he chose. He was glad that Julian had not returned, and resolved to use this opportunity.

They went into the dining-room and sat down to dinner. Valentine was apparently rather amused at playing the host in another man's house. It was novel, and entertained him. He was obviously in splendid spirits, ate with good appetite and drank the champagne with an elation not unlike the elation of the dancing wine. More than once, too, he alluded to Julian's absence and probable occupation, as if both the one and the other were bouquets in his cap, or laurels in some crown which he alone could wear. Dr. Levillier noticed it and sought to draw him on in that direction, and to lead him to some open acknowledgment of his share in Julian's rapidly proceeding ruin. But Valentine changed the conversation into another channel without apparently observing his companion's intention, or deliberately frustrating it. He chattered of a thousand things, mostly of topics that are the common converse of London dinner-tables. The doctor joined in. To a listening stranger the two men would have seemed old friends, pleasantly at ease and secure with one another. Yet the doctor was doing detective duty all the time. And Valentine! was he not secretly revelling in that destruction of a human soul that was galloping apace?

Course succeeded course. At last dessert was placed upon the table. Valentine raised his glass with a smile:

"Let us drink the health of Julian's absence," he said. "For you and I get on so perfectly together."

"Rather a cruel toast in Julian's own rooms," said the doctor.

"Ah, but he's happy enough where he is."

"You know where that is?"

"No—I only suspect," Valentine cried gaily. "In the wilds of South Kensington, in a tiny house, all Morris tapestry and Burne-Jones stained glass, dwells the latest siren who has been calling to our Ulysses. He is there, I suspect. Wait a moment, though. His telegram might tell us. Where was it sent from?"

He sprang up, went to the writing-table near the window, and caught up the crumpled thin paper that he had flung down there. Smoothing it out, he read, holding the paper close to a wax candle:

"Handed in at the Marylebone Road office at 5:50."

His brow clouded.

"Marylebone Road," he repeated, looking at the doctor. "Why should he be there?"

His words immediately set the doctor on the track.

"Does not Cuckoo Bright live there?" he said.

"Yes, she does."

"May he not be with her?"

Valentine had dropped the telegram. He was standing at the table, and he pressed his two fists, clenched, upon the white cloth.

"I have told him he must give Cuckoo up," he said, almost in a snarl.

The doctor glanced at him quickly.

"You have told him?"

"Advised him, I mean."

"You dislike her?"

"I! No. How can one dislike a painted rag? How can one dislike a pink and white shell that holds nothing?"

"Every body holds a soul. Every human shell holds its murmur of the great sea."

"The body of Cuckoo then contains a soul that's cankered with disease, moth-eaten with corruption, worn away to an atom not bigger than a grain of dust. I would not call it a soul at all."

He spoke with more than a shade of excitement, and the gay expression of his face had changed to an uneasy anger. The doctor observed it, and rejoined quietly:

"How can you answer for another person's soul? We see the body, it is true. But are we to divine the soul from that—wholly and solely?"

"The soul! Let us call it the will."

"Why?"

"The will of man is the soul of man. It is possible to judge the will by the body. The will of such a woman as Cuckoo Bright is a negative quantity. Her body is the word 'weakness,' written in flesh and blood for all to read."

"Ah, you speak of her will for herself," the doctor said, thinking of Cuckoo's broken wail to him, as she sat on that autumn evening in his consulting-room. "But what of her will for another, her soul for another?"

He had spoken partly at random, partly led by the thought, the suspicion, that Cuckoo's abandoned body held a fine love for Julian. He was by no means prepared for the striking effect his remark had upon Valentine. No sooner were the words spoken than a strong expression of fear was visible in Valentine's face, of terror so keen that it killed the anger which had preceded it. He trembled as he stood, till the table shook; and apparently noticing this, and wishing to conceal so extreme an exhibition of emotion, he slid hastily into a seat.

"Her will for another," he repeated,—"for another. What do you mean by that? where's the other, then? who is it?"

The doctor looked upon him keenly.

"Anybody for whom she has any desire, any solicitude, or any love—you, myself, or—Julian."

"Julian!" Valentine repeated unsteadily. "Julian! you mean to say you—"

He pulled himself together abruptly.

"Doctor," he said, "forgive me for saying that you are scarcely talking sense when you assume that such a creature as Cuckoo Bright can really love anybody. And even if she did, Julian's the last man—oh, but the whole thing is absurd. Why should you and I talk about a street-girl, a drab whose life begins and ends in the gutter? Julian will be here directly. Meanwhile let us have coffee."

He pushed his cigarette-case over to the doctor and touched the bell.

"Coffee!" he said, when Julian's man answered it.

The door stood open, and as the man murmured, "Yes, sir," a dog close by howled shrilly.

The noise diverted Valentine's attention and roused him from the agitation into which he had fallen. He glanced at the doctor.

"Rip," he said.

"Howling for his master," said the doctor.

"Wait a moment," Valentine said to the man, who was preparing to leave the room. Then, to the doctor:

"I am his master."

"To be sure," rejoined the doctor, who had, in truth, for the moment forgotten the fact, so long a time had elapsed since the little dog took up his residence with Julian.

"You think he's howling for me?" Valentine said.

"I was thinking of Julian at the moment."

"And what do you say now? Still that he is howling for his master?"

The dog's voice was heard again. It sounded almost like a shriek of fear.

"No," the doctor replied, wondering what intention was growing in Valentine's face.

"Oh!" Valentine said curtly.

He turned to the man.

"Bateman, bring Rip in here to us."

The man hesitated.

"I don't think he'll come, sir."

"I said, bring him to us."

The man went out, as if with reluctance. Valentine turned to the doctor.

"We spoke about soul—that is, will—just now," he said. "To deny the will is death, despite Schopenhauer. Death? Worse than death—cowardice. To assert the will is life and victory. With each assertion a man steps nearer to a god. With each conquest of another will a man mounts, and if any man wants to enjoy an eternity he must create it for himself by feeding his will or soul with conquest till it is so strong that it cannot die."

His eyes shone with excitement. It seemed to the doctor that he was caught in the whirlpool of a violent reaction. He had shown fear, weakness; he was aware of it, and determined to reassert himself. The doctor answered nothing, neither agreeing with his fantastic philosophy nor striving to controvert it. And at this moment there was the sound of a struggle and of whining outside. The door was pushed open, and Julian's man appeared, hauling Rip along by the collar. The little dog was hanging back, with all its force, and striving to get away. Having succeeded in getting it into the room, the man quickly retreated, shutting the door hastily behind him. The little dog was left with Valentine and the doctor. It remained shrinking up against the door in a posture that denoted abject fear, its pretty head turned in the direction of Valentine, its eyes glaring, its teeth snapping at the air. The doctor looked at it and at Valentine. His pity for the dog's condition was held in check by a strange fascination of curiosity. He leaned his arms on the table and his eyes were fixed on Valentine, who got up slowly from his chair.

"I have let Rip be the prey of his absurd fancies long enough, doctor," he said. "To-night I will make him like me as he used to, or at least come to me."

And he whistled to the dog and called Rip, standing by the table. Rip howled and trembled in reply, and snapped more fiercely in the direction of Valentine.

"Do you see that, doctor? But he shall come. I will make him."

He shut his lips firmly and stared upon the animal. It was very evident that he was exerting himself strongly in some way. Indeed, he looked like a man performing some tremendous physical feat. Yet all his limbs were still. The violence of his mind created the illusion. Rip wavered against the door. There was foam on his jaws and his white legs trembled. Valentine snapped his fingers as one summoning or coaxing a dog. The doctor started at the sound and leaned further forward along the table to see the upshot of this strange fight between a man's desire and an animal's fear. Rip scarcely whined now, but turning his head rapidly from one side to the other, with a motion that seemed to become merely mechanical, he made a hoarse noise that was like a terrified and distressed growl half strangled in his throat. But though he wavered against the door, he did not obey Valentine and go to him, and the doctor was conscious of a sudden thrill of joy in the dog's obstinacy. This obstinacy angered Valentine greatly. His face clouded. He bent forward. He put out his hands as if to seize Rip. The dog snapped at him frantically, wildly. But Valentine did not recoil. On the contrary, he advanced, bending down over the wretched little creature. Then Rip shrank down on all fours before the door. To the doctor's watching eyes he seemed to wane visibly smaller. He dropped his head. Valentine bent lower. Rip lay right down, pressing himself upon the floor. As Valentine's hand touched him a quiver ran over him, succeeded by a surprising stillness.

The doctor made a slight sound. He knew that Rip was dead. Valentine took the little dog by the scruff of its neck and lifted it up. Then he, too, saw what he held. He glanced at the doctor, and there was a glare of defeat in his eyes. Then he passed across the room to the window, still holding the dog, pulled aside the curtain and thrust up the window. The ground was white and the snow was falling. With an angry gesture he flung the body out. It dropped with a soft noise in the snow and lay there.

Valentine closed the window, but the doctor felt as if he still saw the poor little corpse in the snow. And he shuddered.

A moment afterwards there was a step in the passage and Julian entered. He was looking haggard and excited, and ill with dissipation. His eyes shone in deep hollows that seemed to have been painted with indigo, and his lips were parched and feverish.

"Where have you been, Julian?" said Valentine.

"Oh, with her—with Molly, of course," he replied.

"What? Till now?"

Julian seemed uneasy under his scrutiny.

"Till this morning," he replied, almost suddenly.

"Well, but since then?"

"With Cuckoo. Oh! don't bother me."

He went over towards the window.

"Oh, how hot it is here," he said.

He glanced at the bright fire.

"Intolerably!" he murmured.

And he opened the window to the drifting snow.

"Am I mad?" he suddenly cried to them. "I saw the flame in her eyes again to-day, in Cuckoo's eyes. It held me with her. I'll swear it held me. It wouldn't let me go—wouldn't let me—till now!"

He sank down in a chair by the window, and turning his back on them, pushed his head out to get air.

"I say," he suddenly called. "What's that, that lying there?"

Valentine and the doctor joined him. He was pointing to the body of Rip, which was already almost covered by the snow.

"That," Valentine said; "that is—"

"The body of a creature that died fighting," the doctor interrupted. "A fine fashion of dying. Look at it, Julian. Its soul was indomitable to the last, and so it won the battle it fought. It won by its very death even. Nature is at work on its winding-sheet."

Valentine said nothing.



CHAPTER V

DOCTOR LEVILLIER VISITS THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Julian's utterance about the flame that held him with the lady of the feathers struck Dr. Levillier forcibly at the time it was made, and remained in his mind. He could not fail to connect it with his own experience in Valentine's empty room, and, going further back, with the last sitting of the two young men which was succeeded by the long trance of Valentine. And as he thought of these things, it suddenly occurred to him that the ghastly change which had taken place in Valentine might well date from that night. Since the death of Rip the doctor had formed the opinion that Valentine was no longer perfectly sane. His excitement, the fury of his eyes when he spoke of the triumphs of will, seemed to give the clue to his transformation. The insane perpetually glorify themselves, and are transcendent egoists. Surely the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine's diatribe upon the eternity of a strong man's individual will. The night of the trance had been a strange crisis of his life. He had seemed to recover from it, to come back from that wonderful simulation of death healthy, calm, reasonable as before. This might have been only seeming. In that sleep the sane and beautiful Valentine might have died, the insane and unbeautiful Valentine have been born. There are many instances of a sudden and acute shock to the nervous system leaving an indelible and dreary writing upon the nature. If Valentine had thus been tossed to madness, it was very possible that his dog, an instinctive creature, should recognize the change with terror. It was even possible that other instinctive creatures should divine the hideous mind of a maniac hidden in the beautiful body of an apparently normal man. And Cuckoo, she too was instinctive, a girl without education, culture, the reading that opens the mind and sometimes shuts the eyes. Cuckoo Bright, she had divined the evil of Valentine. To her he had made confession. In her eyes Julian had seen the mysterious flame. Some influence from her had kept him from his invited guests and from his house. Yes, Cuckoo, the lady of the feathers, the blessed damozel of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, the painted and possessed, faded and degraded, wanderer of the pavements, seemed to become the centre of this wheel of circumstances, as Doctor Levillier reflected upon her.

It was time for him to go to Cuckoo. Julian's descent must be stayed, before he went down, like a new Orpheus without a mission, into Hades. Valentine's influence, whether mad or sane, must be fought. It was to be a struggle, a battle of wills, of what Valentine chose to consider souls. And some prompting led the doctor to think of Cuckoo as a possible weapon. Why? Because she had even once held Julian against his will, against the intention of his soul.

So the doctor at length sought the lady of the feathers. She had been passing through a period of great and benumbing desolation, believing that her last appeal, her great effort for Julian, had been a failure. For the doctor had not come to her, and Cuckoo could not tell that he was making observations for himself and that she was often in his mind. She supposed that he, like all others, laughed at her pretensions to gravity, swept her exhibition of real and honest emotion away from his memory with a sneer, considered her despair over another's ruin a vile travesty, a grinning absurdity and trick. Never had Cuckoo felt more lonely than in these days, though a vast loneliness is the constant companion of her large sisterhood. Even Jessie failed to comfort her, and she could find little courage within herself. And yet there were moments when the vigour that had led her once to defy Valentine, when the fire that had sprung up in her, as a flame may burst forth in a swamp, seemed to be near to her again. She felt a new possibility within her, stirring, striving. It was at such moments that she longed to see the doctor, and could have cursed him for not coming to her. For at such moments she seemed only waiting for a touch of sympathy, a word of encouragement, to perform some great action, some momentous deed. But the touch, the word, were lacking, and her life and experience of constant and monotonous degradation dulled the impulse, stifled the enthusiasm that she could not understand. And she fell again to brooding, and to an ignorant and vague consciousness of impotence.

She bought a new hair-dye, painted her thin cheeks more heavily than ever before, and sought, almost with a wild exultation that swiftly fled away, to sink lower.

The monotony of sin is one of the scourges of sin. In those days Cuckoo suffered many stripes. Her eyes grew more weary, her smile in Piccadilly more mechanical, her walk more puppet-like than ever. Life was like a moving dream of horror. And yet no day passed without a gleam of that strange sensation of ignorant power, fluttering upward, fading away, pausing, passing, dead.

She did not know what it meant. She could not keep it nor use it. She could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength. It was gone almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers. It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a weary desert, yet makes of that desert the plot men call a garden. Like a thread of steel, it held up this girl from the uttermost abyss, until at last the doctor's hand struck upon her door.

Julian's occasional visits were as the scourgings of God, giving to Cuckoo a vision of shifting ruin, in which she—so she told herself, thinking of the dance of the hours—had been the first to have a share.

It was a wintry afternoon when the doctor came. Frost clung stealthily round the grimy black trees, outlining their naked boughs with meagre lines of white sewn with smuts. Above the frost hung the fog as if in charge of the town, a despondent and gloomy sentinel. During the morning the sun had lain in the fog like a faint blood-red jewel in a thick and awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did come, but no one was much the wiser. The lamps had been alight all day, and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever, could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have appreciably increased its density. In the darkness the cold gathered, and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,—of desolate, solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the grimy earth in places that children named gardens.

Fog and frost had taken a strong grip, too, upon the heart of the lady of the feathers. Somewhere about eleven o'clock in the morning she had stirred wearily in her bed, had stretched out her arms to the stagnant air of the room, and crouched up on her pillow in a grotesque hump. For a while the hump remained motionless. Then Cuckoo rolled round and extended a bare thin leg to test the atmosphere. The leg was quickly withdrawn, the atmosphere having been evidently tried in the balance and found wanting. Cuckoo's bell rang, and Mrs. Brigg was called for tea and toast, while once more the hump decorated the upper part of the disordered bed. Jessie, awakened in her basket at the foot of the bed, joined the hump, whining a greeting, and wriggling furiously in an effort to tunnel her way to the ultimate depths of sheets and blankets. Then Mrs. Brigg, of yellowish and bleak aspect, beneath a tumbled appurtenance that she called a cap, appeared with a tray.

"Going to stop abed?" she asked, in a husky voice, in which the smuts seemed floating.

"Yes. What's there to get up for?" Cuckoo groaned.

"Nothun' as I know of."

And Mrs. Brigg was gone about her business.

All the morning Cuckoo lay staring at the blank square of the window, and Jessie snored under the blankets. The tea was drunk, the toast lay about in fragments. One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo's every movement with uncompromising grittiness. No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it. The bed seemed full of hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid upon her by this slight evil. But, indeed, the horror of her existence reached a culminating point to-day,—a point of loneliness, vacant dreariness, squalor, and degradation that could not be surpassed. The preceding night had been peculiarly horrible, and as Cuckoo now lay on the tumbled bed, in the dim, cold room, with the fog gazing in, the leaden hours of winter crawling by, she felt as if she could bear no more. She could bear no more addition to her sick weariness; no more addition to her useless hunger of love for Julian, that could never be crowned with anything but despair; no more addition to her bodily fatigue, born of tramping monotony succeeded by yet more enervating weariness of the flesh. She could bear no more. Yes, but she must bear more. For Cuckoo knew that she was not dying, was not even ill. She was only tired in body, prostrate in heart, deserted in life, and forced to witness the quick and running ruin of the man she had the farcical absurdity to love. Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires. For they seemed thin and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole of her was. How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a clear heaven?

She caught at the hand-glass, leaning far out on the bed, as the blessed damozel o'er the bright bar of heaven, and tried to see, with staring eyes, how the new hair-dye that she was now using became her. Her mind was vagrant, coming and going miserably, from that love of hers which was strangely strong and subtle, to the powder-box with its arsenic-green lid, or the rouge-pot of dirty white china. And by each event it paused and sank, as if benumbed by the increasing frost. Leaning again to put back the hand-glass she fell over too far and dropped it. The glass fell face downwards and was smashed. Cuckoo laughed aloud, revelling feebly in the additional misery a superstitious mind now began to promise her. The fragments of broken glass actually pleased her, and, on a sudden, she resolved to set her feet in them, that she might be cut and wounded, that she might bleed outwardly as she had been bleeding inwardly for so long. She swung her legs over the breadth of the bed, disorganizing Jessie, planted her feet in the array of glass and stood up. As she did so the doctor mounted her doorstep, plied the knocker and rang the bell. Cuckoo stood listening. A fragment of glass had really penetrated the bare sole of her foot, which bled a little gently on the carpet. But she scarcely knew it. She heard Mrs. Brigg go by, and then steps sounding in the passage. Then there came to her ears a quiet voice with a very characteristic note of bright calmness in it. Standing in her frilled nightdress among the bits of glass, Cuckoo flushed scarlet all over her face and neck. She knew who the visitor was. With one dart she reached the washhand-stand. Sponges, brushes, combs, all her weapons of the toilet, were immediately in commotion, and when Mrs. Brigg opened her door, the room was a whirlpool of quick activities, in the midst of which, as on a frouzy throne, Jessie stood upon the bed barking excitedly. Mrs. Brigg came in and closed the door. Her thin lips were pursed.

"Light the fire!" Cuckoo called at her from the basin.

"What do you want the doctor for?"

Mrs. Brigg uttered the words with some suspicion.

"Hurry up and light the fire!"

Cuckoo turned round, her hands darting in her hair, and actually laughed with a touch of merriment.

"You old owl! He's not come to doctor me, only to see me."

Mrs. Brigg looked relieved, but still surprised.

"Oh," she said. "That's it, is it?"

She paused as if in consideration.

Suddenly Cuckoo sprang on her, twisted her round, and spun her out into the cold passage. "Light the fire, I tell you!"

She banged the bedroom door and went on with her rapid toilet.

When she came into the sitting-room an uneasy fire was sputtering in the grate, one gas-jet flared, and Doctor Levillier was standing by the window looking out at the fog. He turned to greet her.

"I thought you'd forgotten—or didn't mean to come," Cuckoo said; "they often do—people that say they will to me, I mean."

The doctor held out his hand with a smile.

"No. Am I interrupting you?"

"Me!" said Cuckoo, in amazement, thinking of her empty days. "Lord, no."

Her accent was convincing. The little doctor sat down by the fire and put his hat and gloves on the table.

"Mrs. Brigg thought I was ill—you bein' a doctor," Cuckoo said, with an attempt at a laugh. She felt nervous now, and was not sustained today by the strung-up enthusiasm which had supported her in Harley Street. "Funny there bein' a fog again this time, ain't it?"

"Yes. I hope we shall meet some day in clear weather."

As the doctor said that, following a tender thought of the girl, he glanced round the room and at Cuckoo. "I hope so," he repeated. Then, rather abruptly:

"Two or three nights ago I went to dine with Mr. Addison. He was out. He was here with you."

Cuckoo got red. She could still be very sensitive with a few people, and perhaps Mrs. Brigg and her kind had trained her into irritable suspicion of suspicion in others.

"Only for a friendly visit," she said hastily. "Nothin' else. He would stop."

"I understand perfectly," the doctor said gently. Cuckoo was reassured.

"Did he say as he'd been?"

"Yes."

Cuckoo looked at the doctor and a world of reproach dawned in her eyes.

"I say," she said, "you haven't done nothin'. He's worse than ever. He's gettin'—oh, he's gettin' cruel bad."

Tears came up over the world of reproach.

"It's all him, all Valentine," she said.

And Doctor Levillier was moved to cast reticence, the usual loyalty of one man to another who has been his friend, away. Somehow the dead body of Rip lying in the snow put that old friendship far off. And also an inward thrill caught him near to Cuckoo. An impulse, swift and vital, thrust his mind to hers.

"You are right," he answered. "I believe that it is all Valentine."

"There! Didn't I tell you?" Cuckoo cried with eyes of triumph. "It's been him from the first. Oh, get him—get Julian away."

The doctor laid his hand upon Cuckoo's, which was stretched upon the tablecloth, very gently, almost abstractedly.

"Will you tell me something?" he said.

"What's it?"

"You love Julian?"

"Me!" the lady of the feathers said.

Her voice trembled over the word. She stole a hasty, hunted glance at the doctor. Was he, too, going to jeer at her? Would no one allow her to have a clean corner in her heart?

"You're laughin' at me. What's the good of such as me doin' a thing like that—lovin' a man?"

"I think you must love Julian. If you do, perhaps you are meant to protect and save him."

A secret voice prompted the doctor with the words he spoke, gave them to him, bent him irresistibly to repeat them. Never before had he felt what it is to be between the strong hands of destiny.

"Me! Me save any one!" Cuckoo said, trembling.

"Yes, you. There is something in you—I feel it and I can't tell you why, nor what it is—something that has hold of Julian. He told us so the other night. Don't you know what it is?"

"Eh?"

"Perhaps he feels that you love him—purely, cleanly."

"I do—oh! I do that!" Cuckoo cried.

A wonder as to the relations between Julian and this girl shot through the doctor. He was the last man in the world to think evil of any one, but just then, as Cuckoo moved, the gaslight struck fully on her. The dye on her hair shone crudely. The red and white of her face burned as on the face of a clown. And then even the doctor's good heart wondered. Cuckoo knew it in an instant, and her face hardened and looked older.

"Oh, go on," she said rudely. "Think as the others do. Damn you men! Damn you! Damn you!"

And without warning she put her head down on the table and broke into a wild passion of tears. She sobbed, and as she sobbed she cursed and clenched her hands. She lost herself in fury and in despair. The Fates had stung her too hard this time, and she must blaspheme against them with her voice of the streets, her language of the streets, her poor heart—not quite of the streets. The Fates had stung her too hard, for they had put a flaw even in this one self-respect of hers. That one night accused her whenever she thought of Julian, whenever she saw the dissipation deepen round his eyes. She was not to have even one thing that she could be quite proud of; not one thing of which she could say, "This has been always pure." And then she turned on the doctor and cried:

"Go on—think it—think it! Think what you like! But I'll tell you the truth. There was only once I did him any harm, and that wasn't my fault. I never wanted to. I hated it. I told him I hated it. I didn't want him to be that, like the others. And that was Valentine, too. And now—just because of that I'm no use. And you'd said I might be, you'd said I might be."

"And I say you shall be."

The wail died in Cuckoo's throat. The tears were arrested as by a spell. Dr. Levillier had got upon his feet. All the truth and tenderness of his heart was roused and quickened. He knew real passion, real grief, and from that moment he knew and trusted the lady of the feathers. And by the strength of her bitterness, even by the broken curses that would have shocked so many of the elect of this world, he measured the width and the depth of her possibilities. She had sent to damnation—what? The vile cruelty, the loathsome, unspeakable, dastardly mercilessness of the world. To damnation with it! That was the loud echo in his man's heart.

"That one night is nothing," he said. "Or rather it is something that you must redeem. It is good to have to pay for a thing. It is that makes one work. There is a work for you to do, a work which I believe no one else can do. You love Julian. Love him more. Make him love you. My will cannot fight the will of Valentine over him. No man's will can. A woman's may. Yours may, shall."

His pale, small, delicate face flamed with excitement as he spoke. Few of his patients looking upon him just then would have known their calm little doctor. But Cuckoo had cried to him out of the very depths, and out of the very depths he answered her, still prompted—though now he knew it not—by that secret voice which sometimes rules a man, at which he wonders ignorantly, the voice of some soul, some great influence, hidden from him in the spaces of the air, the voice of a flame, warm, keen, alive, and power-prompting.

And Cuckoo, as she listened to the doctor, had once again a hint of her own strength, a thrill of hope, a sense that she, even she, was not broken quite in pieces upon the cruel wheel of the world.

"Whatever can I do?" she said; "Valentine's got him."

As she spoke, the doctor, restless, as men are in excitement, had moved over to the mantelpiece, and stood with one foot upon the edge of the fender. Thinking deeply, he glanced over the photographs of Cuckoo's acquaintance, without actually seeing them. But presently one, at which he had looked long and fixedly, dawned upon him, cruelly, powerfully. It was the face of Marr.

"Who is that?" he said abruptly to Cuckoo.

"That?" She too got up and came near to him, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. "That's really him."

"Him?"

"Valentine."

The doctor looked at her in blank astonishment.

"Yes, it is," Cuckoo reiterated, and nodding her head with the obstinacy of a child.

"That—Valentine! It has no resemblance to him."

The doctor took up the photograph, and examined it closely. "This is not Valentine."

"He told me it was. It's Marr—and somehow it's him now."

"Marr," said the doctor, sharply. "Why, he is dead. Julian told me so. He died—he died in the Euston Road on the night of Valentine's trance. Ah, but you know nothing about that. Did you know Marr, then?"

"Yes, I knew him."

Cuckoo hesitated. But something taught her to be perfectly frank with the doctor. So she added:

"I'd been with him at that hotel the night he died."

"You were the woman! But, then, how can you say that this (he touched the photograph with his finger) is Valentine?"

"He says he's really Marr."

Cuckoo spoke in the most mulish manner, following her habit when she was completely puzzled, but sticking to what she believed to be the truth.

"Marr and Valentine one man! He told you that?"

"He says to me—'I'm Marr.'"

Cuckoo repeated the words steadily, but like a parrot. The doctor said nothing, only looked at her and at the photograph. He was thinking now of his suspicion as to Valentine's sanity. Had he, perhaps in his madness, been playing on the ignorance of the lady of the feathers? She went on:

"It was on the night he told me all that. I couldn't understand what he is and what he's doing. And he said that the real Valentine had gone. And then he said—'I am Marr.'"

"The real Valentine gone. Yes," said the doctor, gravely, "that is true. Does he then know that he is—?" "Mad" was on his lips, but he checked himself.

"What else did he say that night?" he asked. "Can you remember? If you succeed, you may help Julian."

Cuckoo frowned till her long, broad eyebrows nearly met. The grimace gave her the aspect of a sinister boy, bold and audacious. For she protruded her under lip, too, and the graces of ardent feeling, of pain and of passion, died out of her eyes. But this abrupt and hard mask was only caused by the effort she was making after thought, after understanding. She pressed her feet upon the ground, and the toes inside her worn shoes curved themselves inwards. What had Valentine said? What—what? She stared dully at the doctor under her corrugated brows.

"What did he say?" she murmured in an inward voice, "Well—he didn't want me to see you. He came here about that—my seeing you."

"Yes."

"And—and Marr's not dead, he says, at least not done with. Yes, that was it—he says as no strong man who's lived long's done with when he's put away. See?"

Her face lighted up a little. She was beginning to trust her memory.

"The influence of men lives after them," the doctor said. "Marr's too. Yes. He said that?"

She nodded. Then with a flash of understanding, a flash of that smouldering power which she had felt in loneliness and longed to tear out from its prison, she cried:

"That's it. That's how he's Marr, then."

She hesitated.

"Isn't it?" she said, flushing with the thought that she might be showing herself a fool. For she scarcely understood what she really meant.

"Valentine, no longer himself, but endowed with the influence of Marr," the doctor muttered; "she means that he told her something like that. The phantasy of an unsteady brain."—"Go on," he added to her.

But Cuckoo was relapsing into confusion already.

"And then he talked a lot about will, as he called it. Can't remember what he said."

"Try to."

She was silent, knitting her brows.

"It's no use. I can't," she said, despairingly. "But I know he says that he's really Marr and that he's killed Valentine. He said that; I know he did."

She glanced eagerly at the doctor, in the obvious hope that his cleverness, which she believed to be unlimited and profound, would in a flash divine all the strange secret from this exposition of her disjointed recollection. With each word she spoke, however, the doctor became more and more convinced that Valentine had only been cruelly amusing himself with her, or weaving for her benefit some intricate web of vain madness. And Cuckoo, noticing this now, and recollecting the momentary clearness of comprehension which had seized her at one point in Valentine's wild sermon to her, was mad with herself for not being able to seize again that current of inspiration, almost mad with the doctor for not unravelling the mystery. This excess of feeling finally drowned and swept away as a corpse the memory of the gospel of influence.

"I can't remember no more," she said stolidly. "There was ever such a lot about—about some one as was good and didn't want to be good any more, and so it was driven away—I don't know. P'rhaps he was only gamin' me."