She stared moodily at her feet, which she had stuck out from under her dress. The doctor said nothing, but at her last speech his face had lit up with a sort of excitement. For had she not described in those few ill-chosen words the very mental position of the former Valentine? A saint at first with his will, a saint at last against his will—and now a saint no more. That was, perhaps, the key to the whole matter. A good man prays to be no longer good. His prayer is granted. His grievous desire is fulfilled. And then he may pray forever in vain to be as he once was. Yet the change in Valentine was more even than this, more than the gliding from white purity to black sin. There was something.

As Cuckoo and the doctor sat in silence, she staring vacantly and empty of thought, being now utterly and chaotically puzzled, he thinking deeply, the door bell rang. In a moment Mrs. Brigg appeared, went to Cuckoo and muttered in her ear:

"Mr. Haddison wants to come in. I told him you was busy."

"Oh," said Cuckoo, "I say—wait," and then to the doctor, "It's him. It's Julian."

"Let him in," the doctor said quickly.

To see Cuckoo and Julian together might tell him much.

Julian came in, stumbling rather heavily at the entrance of the room.



CHAPTER VI

CLEAR WEATHER

"Damn that mat!" he exclaimed. "I say, Cuckoo, who the—?" The question faded on his lips as he saw Doctor Levillier, on whom he gazed with a vacant surprise that, added to the unsteadiness of his movement upon them, spoke his condition very plainly.

"You, doctor! Well, I'm damned! What are you here for?"

"To see Miss Bright," the doctor said, coolly.

He had pushed forward a chair quickly with his foot. Julian collapsed in it by the table. Beads of the fog lay all over his long greatcoat and upon his hat, which he had not yet taken off. His face was flushed and dull.

"It's an infernal evening," he said. "You doctoring Cuckoo, eh?"

"I have been talking to Miss Bright."

"Oh, all right. I don't mind. Cuckoo, help me off with this coat. There's a good girl."

She obeyed without a word. When the coat was off Julian threw himself back in the chair and heaved a long sigh. His hat fell onto the floor with a bang, but he did not seem to notice it. His face was moody and miserable.

"Molly's thrown me over," he said.

Cuckoo caught her breath sharply and stole a glance at the doctor.

"Have some tea?" she said.

"No; a brandy and soda."

"Haven't got it. You must do with tea."

She rang the bell and ordered it despite his grumblings. Mrs. Brigg made no difficulty. Julian had long ago soothed her delicate susceptibilities with gold.

So, Cuckoo, oddly shy and excited, made tea for the doctor and Julian. The tea cleared the latter's fogged brain a little, but he was still morose and self-centred. He had evidently come to pour some woes out to Cuckoo and was restrained by the presence of the doctor, at whom he looked from time to time with an expression that was near to disfavour. But the doctor began to chat easily and cordially, and Julian gradually thawed.

"I suppose you know Rip's dead," he said presently. "Went out the other night and got frozen in the snow. Poor little beggar. Val's awfully cut up about it."

"Is he?" said the doctor.

"Yes. Dear old Val. Dev'lish hard Rip's never making it up with him again, wasn't it? Rip didn't know a good fellow, did he, doctor?"

"He was devoted to Valentine once," the doctor said.

"Ah, but he changed. Dogs are just like women, just like women, never the same two days together. Curse them."

He appeared to have forgotten Cuckoo's presence, and she sat listening eagerly, quite unmoved by the dagger thrust at her sex.

"Dogs don't usually change. Their faithfulness bears everything without breaking."

"Except a trance, then," Julian said, still with a wavering in-and-out stolidity, at the same time mournful and almost ludicrous.

"That trance did for Rip; did for him, I tell you. He never knew poor old Val again. As if he thought him another man after that, another man."

The doctor's eyes met Cuckoo's. She had a teacup at her rouged lips, and had paused in the act of drinking, fascinated by the words that wound so naturally into the legend of change which she knew and knew not.

"As if Val wasn't just the same," Julian pursued, shaking his head slowly. "Just the same."

"You think so?" the doctor said, quickly.

"Eh?"

"You think that trance made no difference to him?"

"Why, how should it?"

Cuckoo drank her tea hastily and put the cup down.

"How should it?" Julian repeated, as if with a heavy challenge.

"It might in many ways, to his health—"

"He's stronger than ever he was."

"Or to his mind, his nature. You see no change there that might have frightened Rip?"

"Not I. He's more of a man, good old Val, even than he was."

"Ah! You acknowledge there is a change."

"Give me some more tea, Cuckoo," Julian said, thrusting his cup towards her. "Make it strong. It's picking me up." He sat forward in his chair and began to light a cigar, keeping his eyes on the doctor.

"Well, if you call that a change; to get like other men. Old Val was a saint. I loved him then, but I love him ten times more now he's—a—the other thing, you know. Ten times more. He knows the world now, and his advice is worth having. I'd follow him anywhere. He can't go wrong. Takes care of himself, and of me too. I might have been anything—anything, but for him. Instead of what I am—"

He drew himself up with some pride, and pulled at the cup which Cuckoo pushed towards him.

"I'm just what Val makes me; just what he makes me," he said, taking obvious joy in the thought. "Val can make me do anything. You know that, doctor?"

"Yes. Then you have changed with him, become more of a man, as you call it, with him. Is that so, Julian?"

"I suppose so."

Julian was drinking his tea, which had become very strong from standing.

"And are you happier than you were before?"

The doctor spoke insistently and gravely. Cuckoo had taken Jessie onto her lap and now stroked the little dog quickly and softly with a thin, fluttering hand. Julian seemed trying to think, to dive into his mind and discover its real feelings.

"I suppose so," he said presently. "But who's happy? I should like to know. Cuckoo isn't. Are you, Cuckoo?"

It seemed a cruel question, addressed to that spectre of girlhood.

"I dunno," she answered swiftly. "It don't matter much either way."

"She may be," the doctor said. "And you were happy, Julian."

The tea had certainly cleared the boy's brain. His manner was more sensible, and the heavy sensuality had gone from his eyes. Though he still looked haggard and wretched, he was no longer the mere wreck of vice he had seemed when he drifted into the little room out of the fog.

"Was I?" he said slowly. "It seems a devil of a time ago."

The doctor's heart warmed to these two young creatures, children to him, yet who had seen so much, gone so far down into the depths that lie beneath the feet of life. He thought in that moment that he could willingly give up all his own peace of mind, success, fame, restfulness of heart, to set them straight up, face to face with strength and purity once more. One was well born, educated, still handsome, the other a so-called lost woman, and originally only a very poor and hopelessly ignorant girl. Yet their community of misery and sorrow put them side by side, like two children who gather violets in a lane together, or drown together in some strong, sad river.

"It is not so long, Julian," he said. "Only before Valentine's trance."

Julian caught him up quickly.

"Why d'you say that, doctor?"

"Why? Simply because it is truth."

"You're always at that trance. I believe it's just because you told us not to sit again. But there was no harm done."

"You are sure of that?"

As he put the question the doctor's mind was on a hunt round that sleep and waking. He had gradually come to think that night a night of some strange crisis, through which Valentine had passed from what he had been to what he was. Yet his knowledge could not set at the door of that unnatural slumber the blame of all that followed it. His imagination might, but not his knowledge. He wondered whether Julian might not help him to elucidation.

"Sure? of course! Why not? Valentine's all right. I'm all right. Rip's the only one gone. And if he'd only stayed in the house that night he'd be all right too."

"No, Addison."

Julian stared at this flat contradiction.

"Not?"

"Rip never went out of the house."

"But he died in the snow."

"No," the doctor said quietly. "He died in your dining-room, of fear—fear of his old master, Valentine."

"What?" said Julian, gripping the table with his right hand. "Val had been at him?"

In two or three simple, straightforward words, the doctor described the death of Rip. When he had finished Cuckoo gave a little cry, and clasped the astonished and squirming Jessie close in her arms. Julian's brow clouded.

"He might have left Rip alone," he said. "It's odd dogs can't bear Val now."

"Again since that trance," the doctor said.

Julian looked at him with acute irritation, but said nothing. Then, turning his eyes on Cuckoo, who was still hugging Jessie, he snapped his fingers at the little dog and called its name. Cuckoo extended her arms, holding Jessie, to Julian, and he took the small creature gently. And as he took her he bent forward and gazed long and deeply into Cuckoo's eyes. She trembled and flushed, half with pleasure, half with a nervous consciousness of the doctor's presence.

"Oh, why do you?" she murmured, turning her head away. The action seemed to make Julian aware that perhaps his manner was odd, and his subsequent glance at the doctor was very plainly, and even rudely, explanatory of a wish to be alone with Cuckoo. The doctor read its meaning and resolved to go away. With the quick observation and knowledge of men which long years of training had given to him, he saw that, strangely enough, the only creature whose influence could in any way cope with the influence of Valentine was not himself, who once had been as a seer to the two young men, but the thin, spectral, weary, painted Cuckoo. There, in that small room, with the long murmur of London outside, sat these two human beings, desolate woman, vice-ridden man, both fallen down in the deep mire, both almost whelmed in the flood of Fate. And he stood strong, faithful, clean-souled, brave-hearted, yet impotent, regarding them. For some power willed it that misery alone could hold out a helping hand to misery, that vice and degradation must rise to thrust back vice and degradation. The fallen creature was to be the protector, the unredeemed to be the redeemer. Doctor Levillier knew this when he saw Julian's long glance into the hollow eyes of Cuckoo. And he thrilled with the knowledge. It seemed to him a great demonstration of the root, the core, of divine pity which he believed to be the centre of the scheme of the world. Round this centre revolved wheels within wheels of cruelty, of agony, of ruthless passions and of lawless bitterness. Yet they radiated from pity. They radiated from love. How it was so he could not tell, and there the pessimist had him by the throat. But that it was so he felt in his inmost heart, and never more than now, when the tired boy sneered at him, who was an old friend, clean of life, gentle of nature, and turned to this girl, this thing that loathsome men played with and scorned. Cuckoo flushed and trembled; this divine pity outpainted her rouge, and shook that body which had so often betrayed itself to destroyers. This divine pity gave to her, who had lost all, the power to find freedom for another soul that lay in bondage.

The doctor gazed for an instant at the boy and girl, and was deeply moved. His lips breathed a word that was a prayer, for Julian, for the lady of the feathers.

Then he got up.

"I have to go," he said.

Julian said nothing; Cuckoo flushed again, and accompanied the doctor to the hall door. When she had opened it, and they looked out, it was very cold, but the fog had lifted, and was floating away to reveal a sky full of stars, which always seem to shine more brightly upon frost. The doctor took the girl's hand.

"I see you in clear weather," he said.

"You don't—you don't think as he'll—as I'll—" stammered Cuckoo, glancing awkwardly towards the lighted doorway of the little sitting-room, and then at the doctor. The church clock striking 7:30 pointed the application of the hesitating murmur. It was unconventionally late for an afternoon call.

"It'll be all right, you know that?" said the lady of the feathers.

"Yes, I know that," he answered. "You have to fight, I feel that; only you can do it. You have to fight this—this—" and here the doctor's loyalty spoke, for he could not betray even this new Valentine,—"this strange madness of Valentine's. Pit your will against his, and conquer for Julian's sake."

"Will," said Cuckoo. "That's what he says I can't have."

"Won't you pray to have it given you?" said the little doctor.

Cuckoo looked at him, wondering. Then she said:

"I believe I could fight better 'n pray."

"Sometimes battle is the greatest of all prayers," said the doctor.

The iron gate clicked. He was gone. Cuckoo cast an oblique glance up at the stars before she shut the door, and retraced her steps down the passage.



CHAPTER VII

BATTLE ARRAY

When Julian left the Marylebone Road that night it was nearly ten o'clock. He was quite sober, and looked preternaturally grave as he opened the little gate and stepped out into the frost-bound street. In the lighted aperture of the doorway behind him Cuckoo stood like a shadow half revealed peeping after him, and he turned and waved his hand to her. Then he walked away slowly, meditating. That night the fight for the possession of his will, his soul, had begun in deadly earnest. He did not know it, yet he was vaguely aware that he began to move in the midst of unwonted circumstances. Cuckoo had not been able wholly to conceal from him her strong mental excitement. Since her conversation with the doctor she had become a different woman. For the one word had been spoken which could change weakness into strength, utter self-distrust into something that at least resembled self-reliance. The doctor had broken Valentine's spell over Cuckoo with that word. He believed in her. He told her to fight. He assumed that she had some power, even more power for Julian than he had. "Only you can do it," he had said. The sentence armed her from head to foot, put weapons in her hands, light in her hollow eyes, a leaping exultation in her heart. The flickering power that she had marvelled at, and then despaired of, burnt up at last into a strong flame. That evening it had dazzled Julian's eyes. He seemed to see a new Cuckoo, and he was thinking of her as he walked along now in the frost under the stars. His meditation was not very intellectual or very profound, for since the change in his life Julian had put his old intellectualities away from him. Passion, so long guarded, so bravely repressed, once it had broken loose stormed all the heights of his nature, and drove every sentiment that tried to oppose it into exile. The animalism that is so generally present in a boy physically strong took possession of him, and would not tolerate any divided allegiance. It declined to permit his life to be a thing of mingled enjoyments, now rejoicing in the leaping desires of the body, now disregarding them for the aspirations and clear contentments of the mind. It seemed vengeful, like a man long kept fasting against his will, and having at last come into its empire made that empire an autocracy, a tyranny. Julian had passed at a step from one extreme to another, and had already so lost the habit of following any mental process to a conclusion that he could no longer think clearly with ease, or observe himself with any acuteness. He was for the time all body, knew his muscles, his flesh, his limbs, like intimates; his mind only distantly, like a stranger. With passion, with greed, he had seized on all those pleasures which he had previously feared and shunned, until his brain was heavy as is the brain of a glutton and a drunkard, and his mind stepped in any direction with a languid lethargy. So to-night he had the face of a man puzzled as he walked in the frost under the stars.

Once the hint of some power lurking in Cuckoo had thrilled and awed him, as only a certain clearness—a certain receptive, appreciative clearness—can be thrilled and awed. Now the abrupt development of that power almost distressed, because it confused him. He had gone down lower in the interval between the two possibilities of sensation.

"What the devil's come over Cuckoo?" so ran his thought with a schoolboy gait. That something had come over her he recognized. She was no longer the girl he had stared at in Piccadilly, the creature he had pitied in the twilight hour of their first friendly interview. Nor was she the woman whose soul he had injured by his cruel whim, the woman who had beaten him with reproaches, and made him for an instant almost ashamed of his lusts. All these humanities perhaps slept, or woke, in her still. Yet it was not they which heavily concerned him on his way to the Marble Arch. There is a vitality about power of whatever kind that makes itself instantly felt, even when it is not understood, even when it is neither beloved nor appreciated. Julian was confused by his dull and sudden recognition of power in Cuckoo. No longer did it flash upon him, a mystery of flame in her eyes, moving him to the awe and the constraint that a man may feel at sight of an unearthly thing, a phantom, or a vision of the night. (He had looked for the flame in her eyes, and he had not found it.) But it glowed upon him more steadily, with a warmth of humanity, of something inherent, rooted, not detached, and merely for the moment and as if by chance prisoned in some particular place, from which at a breath it might escape. It drew him to Cuckoo, and at the same time it slightly repelled him, the latter—though Julian did not know it—by the sharp abruptness of its novelty. For the doctor had lit a blaze of strength in the girl by a word. Julian's eyes were dazzled by the blaze. Custom might teach them to face it more calmly. At present he could look at the stars with greater ease. Indeed, as he walked, he did look at them, and thought of the eyes of Cuckoo, and then of the eyes of all women, and of their strange intensities of suggestion and of realization, of their language of the devil and of the clouds, of their kindling vigours. But the eyes of Cuckoo were no longer as the eyes of any other woman. Julian glanced at a girl who watched him from the corner of the street. He knew that Cuckoo looked each night at men as that girl looked at him. He knew it, yet he felt that he did not believe it. For to him she was dressed already in the fillet of some priestess, in the robes of one tending some strange and unnamed altar. She woke in him a little of the uneasy fear and uneasy attraction that a creature whom a man feels to be greater than himself often wakes in him. That evening, while Julian sat with her, he had been seized with curious conflicting desires to fall before her or to strike her, to draw her close or to fend her off from him, all dull, too, and vague as in heaviness of dreaming. Those feelings, vague in the house, were scarcely clearer in the cold and in the open spaces of the night, and Julian was conscious of a sense of irritation, of anger against himself. He felt as if he were an oaf, a lout. Was it, could it be, Cuckoo who had made him feel so? After all, what was she? Julian tried to hug and soothe himself in the unworthy remembrance of Cuckoo's monotonous life and piteous deeds, to reinstate himself in contented animalism by thoughts of the animalism of this priestess! He laughed aloud under the stars, but the laugh rang hollow. He could not reinstate himself. He could only wearily repeat, "What the devil's come over Cuckoo?" with an iteration of dull, moody petulance.

A hansom suddenly pulled up beside him and a voice called:

"Julian! Julian, where are you coming from?"

It was Valentine. He was muffled in a fur coat, and stretched himself over the wooden apron to attract his friend's attention.

"I have been to your rooms," he continued. "Don't you remember we had arranged to dine together?"

Julian looked at him without animation.

"I had forgotten it," he answered.

"Your memory is becoming very treacherous," Valentine said. "Where are you off to? Get in. I will drive you."

"I hadn't any plan," Julian said, getting into the cab.

"Drive to the Savoy," Valentine called to the cabman. "I want some supper," he added.

"I can't come in. I'm not dressed."

"We will have a private room, then. Have you dined?"

"I? No."

Valentine looked at him narrowly.

"Have you been in the Marylebone Road again?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

The answer was the bald truth. In making it Julian experienced a slight feeling of relief. He was putting into words the vagueness that perplexed him. He wondered why he did go to see Cuckoo.

"But you must know. You must have a reason," said Valentine.

"If I have I don't know what it is. I wish you would tell me, old fellow."

"I can't supply you with reasons for all your actions."

"And I can't supply myself with reasons for any of them," Julian said slowly. The words were leading him to a dawning wonder at his own way of life, a dawning desire to know if there were really any reasons for the things he did. But Valentine did not accept the reply as satisfactory. On the contrary, it evidently irritated him still more, for he said with unusual warmth:

"Your reason for dropping your engagements, throwing me over and wasting my evenings is quite obvious. The blessed damozel of the feathers is attractive to you. Her freshness captivates you. Her brilliant conversation entertains you. She is the powdered and painted reason of these irrelevant escapades."

"Don't sneer at her, Val."

The words came quickly, like a bolt. Valentine frowned, and a deepening suspicion flashed in his eyes.

"I did not think you were so easily flattered," he continued.

"Flattered?"

"Yes. Cuckoo Bright admires you, and you go to number 400 to smell the rather rank fumes of the incense which she burns at your shrine."

"Nonsense!" Julian cried warmly.

"What other reason can you have? She has no beauty; she has no conversation, no gaiety, no distinction, no manners—she has nothing. She is nothing."

"Ah, it's there you're wrong."

"Wrong!"

"When you say she is nothing."

"I say it again," Valentine reiterated almost fiercely.

"The lady of the feathers is nothing, nothing at all. God and the devil—they have completely forgotten her. A creature like that is neither good, nor would I call her really evil, for she is evil merely that she may go on living, not because she has a fine pleasure in sin. But if you sell your will for bread and butter, you slip out of the world, the world that must be reckoned with. I say, Cuckoo Bright is nothing."

"And I tell you she is something extraordinary."

As Julian spoke the words the cab stopped at the Savoy. Valentine sprang out and paid the man. His face was flushed as if with heat, despite the piercing cold of the night.

"A private room and supper for two," he said to the man in the vestibule. "Take my coat," and he drew himself with obvious relief from the embrace of his huge coat. Julian and he said nothing more until they were sitting opposite to one another at a small oval table in a small and strongly decorated room, whose windows faced the Thames Embankment. The waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne with the air of one performing a religious rite. The electric light gleamed and a fire chased the frost from recollection. Julian had already forgotten what they had been talking about in the cab. The first sip of champagne swept the heavy meditativeness from him. But Valentine, unfolding his napkin slowly, and with his eyes on the menu, said:

"In what way is she something extraordinary?"

"H'm?" Julian muttered.

"Surely you can define it."

"What, Val?"

"The peculiarity of Cuckoo Bright that you laid so much stress on just now."

"Oh, yes, now I remember. No, I can't define it. How good this soup is. The soup here—"

"Yes, yes; our coming here again and again to eat it proves our appreciation. Julian, do endeavour to answer my question. I am really interested to know exactly what it is that has taken you again to Marylebone Road."

Julian drank some more champagne. His eyes began to sparkle.

"Can you give a reason for everything you do?" he asked.

"I think I certainly could for every act that I reiterate."

"Then you're built differently from me. But I've told you all I can. I like Cuckoo. She's a damned nice girl."

Valentine's lip curled.

"I can't agree with you, Julian."

"You don't know her as I do."

"Not quite."

Julian reddened.

"Come, now," he began, and then checked himself and laughed good-naturedly. "You can't play the saint any more, you know, Val," he said.

"I have no wish to. I discovered long ago that a saint is only the corpse of a man, not a living man at all. But we are talking about this corpse of a woman."

"Cuckoo's no corpse. By Jove, no. I believe she's got a power that no other woman has."

"How so? You haven't been imagining that absurd flame in her eyes again?"

Valentine spoke with furtive uneasiness. He was scarcely eating or drinking, but Julian was doing ample justice to the wine, and displayed a very tolerable appetite. He lifted his glass to his lips and put it down before he answered:

"No. It's gone."

Valentine seemed relieved.

"Of course. I knew it was an hallucination. You went to satisfy yourself, I suppose. And now—"

"Since it's gone Cuckoo seems to me—I don't know—changed somehow. Val, there must be a few people in the world with great power over others. You are one. Marr was another, and—" He paused.

"And what?" Valentine said rather loudly.

"Well," Julian paused again, as if conscious that he was about to say something that would seem ridiculous, "Cuckoo—"

"Is a third! You think it reasonable to bracket me with a woman like that, to compare my will, mine, who have lived the life of thought as well as the life of action, who have trained my powers to the highest point, and offered up sacrifices—yes, sacrifices—to my will, to that degraded, powerless creature! Julian!"

He stopped, clenching his hand as it lay upon the table. Never before had Julian seen him so profoundly moved. All his normal calm and self-possession seemed deserting him. His lips worked like those of a man in the very extremity of rage, and the red glow in his cheeks faded into the grey of suppressed passion. Julian was utterly taken aback by such an exhibition of feeling.

"My dear fellow," he stammered, "I didn't mean—I had no idea—"

"You did mean that. You do. And I—I have been fool enough to believe that you relied upon me, on my judgment; that you looked up to me; that—good God, how absurd!"

He lay back in his chair and burst into a paroxysm of loud and mirthless laughter, while Julian, holding his champagne-glass between his fingers, and twisting it stealthily round and round, regarded him with a blank stare of utter confusion and perplexity. Valentine continued to laugh so long that it seemed as if he were seized in the grip of a horrible hysteria. But just as the situation was becoming actually intolerable, he suddenly controlled himself with an obvious and painful effort. After remaining perfectly silent for two or three minutes, he said, in a voice that struggled to be calm and succeeded in being icy:

"Julian, you have torn the veil of the Holy of Holies from the top to the bottom with a vengeance. But why have you kept up the deception so long, when, after all, there was nothing behind the veil? That was surely unnecessary."

"What is the matter with you, Val? I don't understand you."

"Nor I you. And yet we say that we are intimate friends. There's an irony."

At this point the waiter came in with an omelette, and the conversation ceased, checked by his peripatetic presence. As soon as he had retreated, with all the hushed activity of a mute rolling on casters, Julian exclaimed:

"It's not an irony. You choose to make it so. You're not yourself to-night, Valentine. I do not compare you with poor Cuckoo. How could I? She's down in the dirt and you are far away from the dirt. And of course your power over any one must be a thousand times greater than hers."

"If it came to a battle? If it came to a battle?" interrupted Valentine. "You say that, Julian?"

"A battle! of what?"

"Of wills, naturally, Cuckoo Bright's will against mine?"

"But what a strange idea—"

"You haven't answered my question."

"Because I don't see the force of it."

"Answer it nevertheless."

"Then Cuckoo would be beaten at once," Julian said. But there was no ring of conviction in his voice, and he fell at once into silence after he had spoken the words. Valentine saw by his frowning face and puckered forehead that the idea of such a battle had set in motion a train of thought in his mind.

"You are wondering, Julian," Valentine said.

Julian looked up.

"Who doesn't wonder in this beastly world?" he said morosely.

"I never do. I prefer to act. Drink some more champagne?"

He pushed the bottle over and went on:

"You are wondering why I spoke of a battle between Cuckoo Bright and me. Well, I'll tell you. I spoke because I see that there is to be such a battle."

Julian drank his champagne and looked definitely and increasingly astonished, as Valentine continued:

"There is to be such a battle. I have seen it for a long time. Julian, you may think you know women. You don't. I said just now that a woman like Cuckoo Bright is nothing, but I said it for the sake of uttering a paradox. No woman is ever nothing in a world that is full of the things called men. No woman's ever nothing so long as there is a bottle of hair-dye, a rouge-pot, a dressmaker, and—a man within reach. She may be in the very gutter. That doesn't matter. For from the very gutter she can see—not the stars, but the twinkling vanities of men, and they will light her on her way to Mayfair drawing-rooms, even, perhaps, to Court. Who knows? And God—or the devil—has given to every woman the knowledge of her possibilities. Men have only the ignorance of theirs."

"What has this to do with Cuckoo and me?" Julian said. "This bottle is empty, Valentine."

Valentine rang hastily for another.

"And what on earth has it got to do with a battle between you and Cuckoo?"

"Everything. She hates me. She has told you so again and again."

Julian looked expressively uncomfortable.

"I've always stood up for you," he began.

"I believe it. She hates me not because I am myself, but simply because I am your closest friend. Hush, Julian. It's much better all this should be said once for all. Many women are intensely jealous of the men friends of men whom they either love, or who they mean shall love them. Look at the wives who drive their husbands' old chums from intimacy into the outer darkness of acquaintanceship. Wedding-days break, as well as bind, faith. And you have had your wedding-day with Cuckoo."

"That was an accident. She loathes to think of it."

"She may say so. But it puts a fine edge on her hatred of me, nevertheless."

"No, Valentine, no. Her dislike of you is simply silly—instinctive."

"She tells you so. Ah! I was wrong to call her nothing. But it is her hatred of me that must bring us to battle unless—"

"Unless what?"

"You give her up now, once and for all."

"Give Cuckoo up!"

The words came slowly, and the voice that uttered them sounded startled and even shocked. Valentine began to gauge the new power of the lady of the feathers from that moment.

"That's a—a strong thing to do, Val."

"It won't hurt you to do a strong thing for once in your life."

"Even if it didn't hurt me I think it would hurt her very much. For, Valentine, I believe you said the truth when you said to me once, 'That girl loves you.' Do you remember?"

"Perfectly. Loves you, your birth, your position, your money, your good looks, perhaps your standpoint above the gutter. I can well believe that Miss Bright, like all her sisterhood, loves with undying love that combination of flesh-pots, her notion of the ego of a man."

"She has never accepted a halfpenny from me."

"Because she means eventually to have twenty-one shillings in the pound. Have some more champagne."

"Yes. You are wrong, Val, utterly wrong. Cuckoo's not mercenary. If such a girl could be good, she is good."

There was just a touch of the maudlin in Julian's voice. He went on very earnestly, and nodding his head emphatically over even his conjunctions.

"And if she were what you say, she would have no influence over me, and I should hate her. But to me she is just what a good girl might be. Why, even the doctor—"

"Was he there to-night?" Valentine cried, with a sudden inspiration.

"Of course he was. And you know what a particular little chap he is."

"Why was he there?"

"Just to see Cuckoo, you know, in a friendly way."

Valentine realized then that the battle had begun. He divined the meaning of the doctor's visit. He guessed what it had done for the lady of the feathers. And he sat silent while Julian went on drinking more champagne.

"I believe he likes Cuckoo, Val. I am sure he does. And he behaved quite as if—quite as if he—you know—respected her. And it's all nonsense her hating you, and having a battle, and all that kind of thing, with you. She's only fanciful. She's not—"

"Would you give her up if I asked you to? Mind, Julian, I don't say I ever shall ask you. But if I do?"

"Don't ask me to, don't ask me. Poor Cuckoo, poor girl, she's got no friends, money, or—or anything. Poor Cuckoo. Poor Cuck—Cuck—"

He fell back in his chair, nodding his head, and reiterating his commiseration for the lady of the feathers in a faint and recurring hiccough. Valentine got up and rang the bell.

"The bill, please, waiter."

"Yes, sir."

The man glanced at Julian with the shadow of a pleasing, and apparently also pleased, smile and withdrew. Valentine stood for a moment looking at the leaning figure on the chair, relaxed in the first throes of a drunken slumber. His anger and almost unbridled emotion completely died away as he looked.

"Can it be called a battle after all?" he said to himself. "They may not know it, but it is practically won already."

The waiter re-entered. Valentine paid the bill, and the breath of the frost shortly revived Julian into an attempt at conversation.

"Don't ask me to give her up, Val; don't, don't ask me. Poor girl. Poor, poor Cuck—Cuck."

The name of the lady of the feathers seemed a good one for a tipsy tongue to play with.



CHAPTER VIII

THE DOCTOR RECEIVES A VISIT FROM MRS. WILSON

Doctor Levillier grew more puzzled day by day. His observation of Valentine taught him only one thing certainly, and beyond possibility of doubt and that was the death of the youth he had once loved, the living presence of a youth whom he could not love, whom he could only shrink from and even fear. He held to the theory that this radical and ghastly change must be caused by some obscure dementia, some secret overturning of the mind; but he was obliged to confess to himself that he held to it only because, otherwise, he would be floating helpless, and without a spar, upon a tide of perplexity and confusion. He could not honestly say that he was able to put his finger upon any definite signs of madness exhibited by Valentine, any that would satisfy a mad-doctor. He could only say that Valentine's character had been strangely beautiful and was now strangely evil, and that the soul of Julian was following rapidly the soul of Valentine. The more closely he watched Valentine, the more astounded did he become and the more eager to detach Julian from him. But the strangest thing of all, as the doctor allowed in one of his frequent self-communings, was, that though formerly he had loved Valentine better than Julian, it never occurred to him that the work of rescue might be undertaken on behalf of the former. His mind dismissed the new Valentine into a region that was beyond his scope and power. He felt instinctively that here was a soul, a will, that his soul could not turn from its ends or detach from its pursuits. The new Valentine was a law to himself. What moved the doctor to such horror was that the new Valentine was a law to Julian. And there was something peculiarly dreadful in the idea which he held, that Julian, once under the beautiful influence of Valentine's sanity, was now under the baneful influence of his insanity. The doctor had gone the length of deciding, in his own mind, that Valentine's sane period of life and insane period lay one on each side of a fixed gulf, and that fixed gulf was his long trance succeeding the final sitting of the two young men. This conclusion was arrived at with ease, once the theory of a subtle lunacy was accepted as a fact. For, on sending his mind back along the ways of recollection, the doctor was able to recall hints of the new Valentine dating from that very night, but never before it. The first hint was Rip's manifested fear, and this led on to others which have been already mentioned. Having made up his mind that this trance was the motive power of Valentine's supposed madness, the doctor sought in every direction to increase his knowledge on the subject of simulations of death by the human body. He looked up again the cases of innumerable hysterical patients whom he had himself treated, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure. He consulted other doctors, of course without mentioning the object of his research. He endeavoured to apply to Valentine's case standards by which he was quickly able to form a satisfactory opinion on the cases of others. He even went so far as to examine as closely as possible into the history of table-turning, the uses ascribed to it by its votaries, and the results obtained from it by credible—as opposed to merely credulous—witnesses. But he found no case that seemed in any way analogous to the strange case of Valentine. As was only natural, the doctor did not forget the possibility of hypnotism, which had struck him during his second conversation with the lady of the feathers. Her confused declarations on the subject of Valentine and Marr being one person, if they were really a true account of what Valentine had said to her—which seemed very doubtful—could only be made clear by accepting as a fact that the dead Marr had laid a hypnotic spell upon Valentine, which continued to exist actively long after its weaver slept in the grave. But Marr and Valentine had never met. This fact seemed fully established. Valentine had always denied any knowledge of him before the trance. Julian had always assumed that only he of the two friends had any acquaintance with Marr. And again, when the doctor, one day, quite casually, said to Valentine, "By the way, you never did meet Marr, did you?" Valentine replied, "Never, till I saw him lying dead in the Euston Road."

The doctor could see no ray of light in the darkness that could guide him to the clue of the mystery. He could only say to himself, "It must be, it must be an obscure and horrible madness," and keep his theory to himself. Sometimes, as he sat pondering over the whole affair, he smiled, half sadly, half sarcastically. For the event brought home to his ready modesty the sublime ignorance of all clever and instructed men, taught him to wonder, as he had often wondered, that there exists in such a world as ours such a fantastic growth as the flourishing weed, conceit.

Another matter that puzzled him greatly was this: As the days went on, and as Valentine grew—and he did grow—more certain of his own power for evil over Julian, and as, consequently, he took less and less pains to hide the truth of his personality from the knowledge of the doctor, the latter was frequently seized with the appalled sensation which had long ago overtaken him when he was followed in Regent Street and in Vere Street. This recurrence of sensation, and the certainty forced gradually upon the doctor that it was caused by the presence of Valentine, naturally led him to wonder whether it were possible that the man who had dogged his steps, and eventually fled from him, could have been Valentine himself. If that were indeed so, then this madness—if it did exist—must surely have come upon Valentine before the trance. Nothing but a madness could have led him thus in the night hours to steal out in pursuit of the friend who had just left his house and company. But the doctor knew of no means by which he could satisfy himself of Valentine's movements on the night in question. To ask Valentine himself would be to court a lie. Once the doctor thought for a moment of having recourse to Wade. But then he remembered that the butler did not sleep in the flat, and had no doubt long gone home before the event of the night in question. So, again, he was confronted with a dead-wall, beyond which he could see no clear view or comprehensible country.

About this time there happened an event which struck strongly upon the doctor's mind. He was one day, as usual, in his consulting-room, receiving a multitude of patients, when his man-servant entered with a card on a salver.

"A lady, sir, who wishes to see you. She has no appointment."

The doctor took the card. On it was printed merely "Mrs. Wilson."

"I cannot see the lady to-day," he said, "unless she can call again after five o'clock. But I can see her then, or to-morrow morning at ten. Ask her which she would prefer."

After a moment's absence Lawler returned.

"The lady will come at five o'clock this evening, sir."

"Very well."

And the doctor bent his mind once more steadily upon his work.

At five o'clock the door opened, and a tall, square, and strong-looking woman, dressed in black, walked quietly into the room. She bowed to the doctor and sat down.

"I am glad you could see me to-day," she said. "I leave London early to-morrow morning. I hate London."

She spoke in a full and rather rich voice, with a slightly burring accent, and looked the doctor full in the face with a pair of large and sensible grey eyes. Nature had certainly built her to be one of those towers of women, strong for themselves, for their sex, and often for men also, who possess a peculiar power, given in quite full measure to no male creature, of large sympathy and lofty composure. But the doctor saw at a glance that some adverse fate had disagreed with the intentions of nature, and fought against them with success. Circumstances must have arisen in this woman's life to break down her unusual equipment of courage and resolution, or if not to break it down, to dint and batter the shield she carried over her heart and life. For her fine face was lined with care, her naturally firm mouth was tormented by an apparently irresistible quivering, that, once prompted by long and painful emotion, had now become habitual and mechanical, and her eyes, although they met the eyes of the doctor with a peculiar large reception and return of scrutiny, held in their depths that hunted expression which is only developed by long agony, either physical or mental. So much the doctor read in a glance before his patient began to detail her symptoms. She detailed them with a certain obvious shame and a slow conquering of reticence that made her speak very deliberately.

She began by saying, in no insulting manner, that she had kept clear of doctors during almost the whole of her life; that she had meant to keep clear of them till her death.

"For I was born with a constitution of iron," she said, "and I have always lived on the most sanitary principles, and with the utmost simplicity. So I hoped to go to my grave without much suffering. Certainly I never expected to have to consult any one on the ground of nervous breakdown. Yet that is exactly why I am here with you at this moment. The circumstances of my life have been too much for me, I suppose."

There was a grave pathos in her voice as she uttered the last words.

"At any rate," she continued, after a pause, "I would like you to help me if you can. The cause of my breakdown is remote enough, several years old. I had a tremendous burden to bear then, and I bore it, as I thought bravely, for a long time. At last it grew intolerable, and then I succeeded at last in getting it removed, in getting rid of it, you understand, altogether. The odd thing is, that while I was bearing my burden my strength did not fail me, my courage did not utterly give way. Only when the burden was removed did I faint because of it. My trouble was partially physical—I had to endure grave physical cruelty at that time—but chiefly mental. My agony of mind ran a race with my agony of body, and won easily. It's generally so with women, I believe?"

She waited as if for a reply.

"Yes, it is often so," Doctor Levillier answered.

"Ever since the burden was lifted from my shoulders," she continued, "I have been getting steadily worse. Each month, each year, I became more and more degraded in my cowardice, my fear of trifles, even of things which have no existence at all. All this is perhaps—perhaps—peculiarly painful to me because I am naturally, you must understand, what sane people call a strong-minded woman. I had originally complete physical courage, didn't know the meaning of the word 'fear,' despised those who did, I am afraid. So you see this is very bad for me; it cuts so deep into my mind, you see. It makes me hate and loathe myself so. I sleep badly, and have the usual symptoms of nervous collapse, I believe. I'm strong one moment, feeble, no good at all, the next. My appetite has long been bad, and so on. But it isn't that sort of thing I mind. I could fight with that well enough. It's my horrible deterioration of mind that troubles me, that has brought me here, to you, in spite of my hatred of London, of every city. It was in a city, though not in London, that I bore that burden I told you of. It doesn't seem possible to me, but I'm told, and I read, that my mind diseased may be an effect, and that the cause may lie in my body. That's why I come to you. Doctor Levillier, root out the disease if you can."

She ended speaking almost with passion, her lips trembling all the time and her eyes never leaving his face. Then she added with a curious characteristic abruptness:

"I will tell you that I've plenty of money. Lack of funds is no weapon against my return to health—if my return is in any way possible."

Doctor Levillier smiled slightly.

"You are anticipating the usual 'long-sea voyage' formula, I see," he said.

"Possibly."

"I should not prescribe it for you off-hand," he said. "Sea air is not a specific for all nervous complaints, as some people seem to think. You have no bodily pain?"

"No. I often wish I had."

"What you tell me about your gradual collapse coming on after the crisis of your troubles was over, and not during it, does not surprise me. Nor am I puzzled by your malady increasing if, as I suppose, you are living idly."

"I am. I have no courage to do anything or see anybody."

"Exactly. You live in a sort of hiding."

"Why—yes. You see, once I was well known to a good many people. My troubles became known to them too. I could not get rid of that burden I told you of except by blazoning them abroad. I shrink from meeting any people now. Therefore I live very quietly. I—"

Suddenly she seemed to grow tired of the half measures in frankness that had so far governed her communications. She spread forth her hands with a very characteristic, ample gesture of sudden confidence.

"I think I'll tell you exactly what it was," she said. "You may have read of me. Long ago, some years at least, I was obliged to take action against my husband, a Mr. Wilson, who afterwards assumed the name of Marr. I charged him with cruelty, won my case, and obtained a judicial separation."

Then Dr. Levillier knew that he looked on the former wife of the strange, cruel, dead man, whose influence had entered into the lives of his two friends.

"You may have heard of my case?" Mrs. Wilson said.

"Certainly I have."

"It was bad, even from a newspaper point of view, I believe. People congratulated me on getting rid of a brute, and thought I was all right and ought to be happy. But the newspapers and the world never knew what I had gone through, the real horrors, before I insisted on release. You started when I called my husband a brute just now, Dr. Levillier; I noticed it. The phrase hurt you, coming from any wife about any husband. I know why, a boy once told me that his mother was always drunk. He hurt me then into hating him for the rest of my days. But I called a stranger a brute, not the man I loved and married, not the man I loved after I married him. Dr. Levillier, do you believe in possessions?"

She had been gradually getting excited while she spoke, and, on the last words, she leaned forward in her chair and struck her hand down in her lap.

"Do you mean possession by the devil?" said the doctor, very quietly, opposing a strong calm to her intensity.

"Yes. I do. My experience obliges me to. I knew, for a year before I married him, I married, I lived for two years after I married him, with a man who was my conception of what a man should be, strong, gentle, tender, brave, a hero to me. I got rid of a devil, after I had endured two years of torture at his hands. It is no use to tell me those two distinct men I knew were one and the same man. My soul, my heart, declare that it's a lie. There were such differences. My husband loved music; this man hated it; yet had the power to use it as a means of tormenting me. But I needn't dwell on the evidences of change. Suffice it to say that the thing that crushed me, the thing that has brought me down into the dust where I am, dust of cowardice, and weakness, and impotence to do or to be anything, was the horror of awakening to a knowledge of that change, of having to live as wife with this devil, whom I knew not, who was a stranger to me. Only the features were my husband's, nothing else. I got rid of a stranger. The man found dead in the Euston Road was a stranger whom I hated, nothing more to me than that."

As she spoke, in a deep, resonant voice that pulsated through the room, Dr. Levillier recalled, almost with a thrill, Julian's words to him in Harley Street, on the night of the fracas with the mastiffs, words spoken about the dead Marr: "His face dead was the most absolutely direct contradiction possible to his face alive. He was not the same man." He recalled these words and the thought shot through his mind: "Did the man this woman loved return at the moment of death?"

And that change in Valentine!

He said to Mrs. Wilson, betraying none of the excitement that he really felt:

"You spoke of cruelty. You had to endure physical cruelty?"

"Worse, to see it endured by others, dumb, helpless creatures, by my own dog."

A great shudder ran through her.

"I can't talk of it," she said. "But it made me what I am. Can you do anything for me? Why do you look at me like that?"

For, at her word about the dog, the doctor had fallen into a tense reverie, looking steadily upon her, yet as one who sees little or nothing. He roused himself quickly.

"Tell me something of the symptoms of your mental malady," he said. "These fancies that distress you, of what nature are they?"

She told him. Many of them were symptoms well known to all those who have suffered acutely after some great shock, imagined sounds, movements, and so forth. The doctor listened. He had heard such a story many times before.

"I, I am full of these ghastly, these degrading fancies," Mrs. Wilson cried, with a sort of large indignation against herself, and yet an uncertain terror. "Is it not—?"

She suddenly stopped speaking.

"There's some one at your door," she said, after a second or two of apparent attention to some sound without.

"I dare say. A patient."

At this moment a voice, which Dr. Levillier immediately recognized as the voice of Valentine, was audible in the hall.

Mrs. Wilson turned suddenly very pale, and began to tremble and gnaw her nether lip with her teeth in an access of nervous disturbance.

"In God's name tell me who that is," she whispered, turning her head in the direction of the door. "It can't be—it can't be—" Valentine's voice rose a little louder. "It is his voice."

"Fancy!" the doctor said firmly. "It is the voice of a friend of mine, Mr. Valentine Cresswell."

Mrs. Wilson said nothing. She was trying to force herself to believe the evidence of another's sense against her own. Such a task is always difficult. At last she looked up and said:

"There, doctor, there you have an exhibition of my illness. It's horrible to me. Can you cure it?"

"I will try," the doctor answered.

But he found it very difficult just at that moment to say the three words quietly, to let Valentine go after leaving his message, without confronting him with this haggard patient who was entering the pool of Bethesda.



CHAPTER IX

A SHADOW ON FIRE

When a naturally calm, clear, and courageous mind finds itself besieged by what seem hysterical fancies, it is troubled and perplexed, and is inclined to take drastic measures to restore itself to its normal condition. Dr. Levillier found himself the prey of such fancies after his interview with Mrs. Wilson. He had prescribed for her. He had very carefully considered what way of life would be likely to restore her to health, and to banish the demons which had brought her strength and unusual self-reliance so low. He had received her gratitude, and had dismissed her to the following of his plans for her benefit. All this he had done with calm deliberation, the very cheerful composure which he always practiced towards the victims of nervous complaints. But even while he did this his own mind was in a turmoil. For this woman had let fall statements with regard to her dead husband which most curiously bolstered up Cuckoo's fantastic assertion that Valentine and Marr were the same man. Marr had been cruel to animals, to dogs, had evidently taken a keen enjoyment in torturing them, and on hearing Valentine's voice she had turned pale and declared that it was the voice of her husband. Then her strange declaration about her husband's use of music as a mode of cruelty! These circumstances appealed powerfully to the doctor's mind, or at least to that unscientific side of it which inclined him to romance, and to a certain sympathy with the mysteries of the world. Many Europeans who go to India return to their own continent imbued with a belief in miracles, modern miracles, which no argument, no sarcasm, can shake. But there are miracles in Europe too. The magicians of the East work wonders in the strange atmosphere of that strange country, whose very air is heavy with magic. Yet England, too, has her magicians. London holds in the arms of its yellow fogs and dust-laden clouds miracles. Doctor Levillier found himself assailed by ideas like these as he thought of that transformed Marr, "possessed," as the pale, strongly built wreck of a grand, powerful woman had named it, as he thought of the transformed Valentine, the hour of whose transformation coincided with the hour of Marr's death. Why had this new, horrible, yet beautiful creature risen out of the ashes of the trance that was practically a death? Why had he such amazing points of resemblance to Marr? Why had the influence of Marr been deliberately intruded into the calm, happy, and safe lives of Julian and Valentine? Marr was cruel to dogs, and dogs showed rage and terror when the new Valentine approached them. Marr had a hatred, yet a knowledge of music. The new Valentine, when forced to sing, sang like some wild, desolate thing, with reluctant and terrible voice. And at this point the doctor used the curb suddenly and pulled himself up sharply. He felt that is was useless, that it was unworthy, to plunge himself thus in romance, and to hang veils of mystery around these facts which he had to accept and to deal with. A touch of humanity is worth all the unhuman romance in the world. Humanity lay at the doctor's gate, sore distressed, sinking to something that was beyond distress. So, putting his fancies resolutely behind him, Doctor Levillier resolved to fight through that frail weapon, the lady of the feathers, the battle of Julian's will against the will—which he now fully and once for all recognized as malign—of the man he must still call Valentine. Valentine had said to Julian, at the Savoy, "If it came to a battle—Cuckoo Bright's will against mine!" The doctor had not heard those words. Yet, under the stars on the doorstep of Cuckoo's dwelling he, too, had spoken to the girl of a fight. Thus he had poured a great ardour into her heart. The three souls, Cuckoo's, Doctor Levillier's, Valentine's, were thus set in battle array. They understood what they faced, or at least that they faced warfare. Only Julian did not understand—yet. He was besotted by the spell of the one he called friend laid upon him, and by the vices in which he had been taught to wallow. His brain was clouded and his eyes were dim, as the brains and eyes of the malades imaginaires who carry on the scheme of sin and sorrow in the world, and prolong by their deeds the long travail of their race. Julian did not understand. For now he seldom thought sincerely. Sincere thoughts and the incessant and violent acts of passion do not often dwell together.

The progress of Julian towards degradation had now become so rapid that his many acquaintances talked of him openly as of one who had practically "gone under." Not that he had ever done any of those few things at which society, whose door is generally ajar, with Mrs. Grundy's large ear glued to the keyhole, resolutely shuts the door. He had not forged, or stolen a watch, or killed anybody, or married a grocer's widow, or anything of that kind. But he had thrown his life to the pleasures of the body, and made no secret of the fact. And the pleasures of the body, like eager rats, had gnawed away his power of self-control until he could resist nothing, no wish of the moment, no desire born illegitimately of passing excitement or the prompting of wine. So he committed many follies, and his follies had loud voices. They shrieked and shouted. And society heard their cries, held the door a little more ajar, and listened with that passion of attention which virtue accords to vice. But society, having heard a good deal, shook its head over Julian. He had acquired such a taste for low company that he ought to have been born a peer. Certainly, he had money. That made his errors chink rather pleasantly, and filled the bosoms of many mothers with an expansive charity towards him. Still, the general opinion was that he was sinking very low. In fact, the legend of Julian's shame was now written on his face in such legible and vital characters that the most short-sighted eyes could not fail to read it. The eager beauty of untarnished youth had faded into the dull, and often sulky, languors of the utterly indulged body. Julian was often exhausted and passing through those leaden-footed dreams that fitfully entrance the vicious,—those dreams that are colourless and sombre, that press upon all the faculties, and yet have no real meaning, that stifle all intentions, and put an end, for the moment, to all active desires. People talk of the vicious as "living," but half their time they are curiously dead, for their sins blunt their energies and lull them into a condition that resembles rather paralysis than slumber.

Since the night on which he had supped with Valentine at the Savoy, Julian had given himself up to the company and influence of his friend more than ever, and London, which had once nicknamed Valentine the Saint of Victoria Street, began to dub him with quite another name. For it gradually became apparent to those who only knew the two young men slightly that Valentine exerted an extraordinarily powerful influence over Julian, and that the influence was imperatively evil. At first many were deceived by the clear beauty of Valentine's face, but that was beginning to fade. A thin line, pencilled here and there with a fairylike delicacy, a slight puffiness beneath the blue eyes, a looseness of the cheeks, a droop of the lips, all very demure, as it were, and furtive, shed alteration upon his fair beauty. He himself noticed it, as he looked in a mirror one night, and silently cursed the inevitable effect which mind produces upon matter. No man's face can forever remain an entirely deceptive mask. The saintly expression of Valentine's was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. He wondered whether Julian noticed it. But Julian was too much preoccupied with his own energies of dreary action and lacerating fatigues of subsequent thought, or it would be truer to say moodiness, to notice anything. He was self-centred, as are all sinners, immersed in his own downfall, like a man in an ocean. He was unconscious that he was the subject of battle, that four wills were to contend for his soul's sake. Four wills, yet one expressed itself in no outward form. It was in exile, till the day of its redemption should dawn.

* * * * *

On the night when Valentine heard Julian babble incoherently the name of the lady of the feathers, he said to himself that the battle should be his, and he leaned upon his will to feel its power and its glory. That night he forgot its fury, the intense emotion that had overtaken him at the supper-table as he gauged, or strove to gauge, the influence that Cuckoo was obtaining over Julian. He forgot Doctor Levillier. He remembered only himself and his own strength, which he was now to test to its foundations. And when he woke again to thoughts of others, it was only to laugh at the force arrayed against him. The lady of the feathers moved, to his fancy, like the most piteous of puppets, a jeering fate manipulating the strings. This manipulator had kept her long to one set of motions, stiff pleading arm, anxious head, interrogative joints, and a strut of wolfish eagerness and hunger. But such a game was now to be abandoned. And behold the puppet a warrior forsooth, a very Amazon, hounded to fight by the doctor's voice, the doctor's word of encouragement, battling with the stiff arms that had abandoned the pleading gesture, stern in a wooden attitude of defiance. And Fate, in fits of laughter at the string-holding! Then Valentine lost his fear, and could have been angry that such a scarecrow was the creature selected by Fate to draw a sword against him. He chose to forget the vision in the mirror when he struck at the staring reflection of the lady of the feathers and shivered under the influence of a cold terror. He chose to remember only the thin and fearful woman who had given her body to the world, and so had surely given her soul to a mill that had long ago ground it to powder.

There is nothing so terrible to one screwed up to the highest pitch of action as a monotony of waiting. Scourging were better, the hemp or the fire. The lady of the feathers had been stirred to a strange enthusiasm, and to a belief in herself, a faith more wonderful to some, more unaccustomed and remote than any faith in God or devil. A flood of energy flowed over her, warm as blood, strong as love, keen with the salt of beautiful novelty, turbulent as the seas when the great tides take hold on them. It was to her as if for the moment the world's centre was just there where she was in the winter, and in the Marylebone Road, within sound of the great church clock, the great church bells, the cries of the street, the very steam panting up from the Baker Street Station. Cuckoo was in the core of things, and the core of things is fierce and hot and action-prompting. That half-revealed shadow waving good-bye to Julian, as he stepped into the frosty night, was a shadow on fire. Yet he had scarcely looked back at it. But Cuckoo was to learn to the last word the lesson of patience. Inspired by the sympathy of the doctor and by something deep in her own heart, she was, for the moment, all courage, all flame. She was ready to fight. She was ready to do supreme things, to touch the stars. The stars went out and she had not touched them. The morning dawned very chilly, very dark, the morning that brought Mrs. Brigg to her room yellow and complaining. Still, Cuckoo was conscious of a high, beating courage that made summer in that winter day. She astonished the old keeper of that weary house by the vivacity of her manner, the brightness of her look. For Mrs. Brigg was well accustomed to sad morning moods, to petulant lassitude, and dull grimness of unpainted and unpowdered fatigue, but had long been a stranger to early moods of hope or of gaiety. Mornings in houses such as hers are recurring tragedies, desolating pulses of Time, shaking human hearts with each beat nearer and nearer to the ultimatum of sorrow. She knew not what to make of this new morning mood of Cuckoo, and wagged a heavily pensive head over it, unresponsive and muttering. Jessie, too, was astonished, but more pleasantly. The little dog, dwelling ignorantly in the midst of degradation, had learned quickly the swing of its beloved mistress's moods. In the dim morning it was ever the comforter of misery it could not rightly understand, not the playfellow of happiness that stirred it to leaps and barks of wonder and excitement. In the mornings Cuckoo held it long against her thin bosom, sometimes crushed it nearly breathless, pushing its little head down in the nest of her arms and telling it a tale of the world's woe that sent long and thin whimpers twittering through its body. The fluttering whisper of morning misery, or the silence of vacant fatigue, these were accustomed things to Jessie. Even if she did not thoroughly understand them, she was ready for them, and eagerly responsive, as dogs are, to emotions along whose verges they tread with the soft feet of sympathy, the sweeter for the ignorance that paints their generosity in such tender colours. But Jessie was bouleverse by this passionate, eager Cuckoo; this shadow on fire, who was alive almost ere London was alive, instead of half dead until half London slept. The shadow on fire snatched her out of her sleep, tossed her in air, spoke to her with a voice that thrilled her to quick barking excitement, played with her till the little dog's flux of emotions threatened to consummate in a canine apoplexy, and Mrs. Brigg battered at the door with a shrill, "Keep that beast quiet, can't yer?" All this was Cuckoo fighting; battle in the bedclothes, battle with soap and water, curling-pins, corset, shoes. Each little act was performed with an energy it did not demand. The sponge was squeezed dry like a live thing being strangled; the toothbrush played as Maxim guns on an enemy; buttons went into button-holes with a manner of ramrods going into muskets; hooks met eyes as one army meets another. Battle in all that morning's common tasks, setting them high, dressing them with chivalry and strong endeavour. Cuckoo went into her sitting-room swiftly, with glowing cheeks and flaming eyes, as one ardently expectant. And then—? Mrs. Brigg had lit the fire, but it had spluttered out into a mass of blackened, ghostly paper and skeleton sticks. A little more battle in the relighting of it. But then—the blank day of the girl of the streets. Cuckoo sat down, watched the growing fire, and wondered what she had expected. She was conscious that she had expected something, and something not small. Her mood had demanded it. But our moods are often like disappointed brigands, who, having waylaid a pauper, demand with levelled pistols that which the pauper has so vainly prayed for all his life. Moods come from within. They are not evoked to dance valses with suitable partners from without. And so Cuckoo's strong excitement and energy found nothing to dance with. She sat there growing gradually less alive, and wondering why she had hastened to get up; why she was fully dressed instead of wrapped in the usual staring pink dressing-gown with the chiffon cascades down the front. Mornings were of no use to her—never had been. God might as well never have included them in the scheme of His days, so far as she was concerned. But this morning she had thought, had felt—it seemed impossible that she should feel so unusual and that nothing should happen. She was ready, but Fate was in bed and asleep. That was really the gist of the feeling that came over her. She thought of Dr. Levillier, the man who had set a torch at last to her nature and fired it with a new ardour. He was at his work in the morning, seeing, speaking to, that passing line of strangers, who walked on forever through his life. His energies were employed. Perhaps he had forgotten Cuckoo and her empty mornings. Almost for the first time in her life the lady of the feathers definitely longed for a legitimate occupation. How she could have flown at it to-day. But already the bright mood was fading. It could not last in such an atmosphere. As Cuckoo had said, she could fight better than she could pray. But it seemed to her, after a while, that there was only room in this cheerless, dark house to pray, no room at all to fight. She tried reading yesterday's evening paper, left on the horsehair sofa by Julian. But reading had never been a favourite occupation of hers, and to-day she wanted to save Julian, to make him love her, and so to win him from Valentine. She did not want to sit in the twilight of a winter's day reading about people she had never seen, things she did not understand. And she threw the paper down.

To make Julian love her. Cuckoo flushed, yes, even sitting there quite alone, for Jessie had retired to the warmth of the bedroom blankets, as she said it in her mind. The doctor had told her to do so. Her heart had told her to try to do it long ago. But she trusted the doctor and she did not trust her heart. And how could she trust her power to make Julian love her? Cuckoo had once known very well how to make a man desire her. In the very early days of her career she had been a very pretty girl. Her old mother, who believed her dead, had often cried and said to the neighbours that her beauty had been Cuckoo's undoing. Thus do we lay blame on the few fine gifts that should gild our lives. But Cuckoo had been very pretty and had soon learnt the first foul lesson of her mtier, to wake swift desire. As time went on and she wasted her gift of beauty along the pavements of London, she found this poor power failing in strength and in certainty. As to the power of wakening that slower, deeper, kindred, yet opposed desire of love, Cuckoo had never known whether she possessed it. She had had many lovers, but nobody to love her really, and this in days of her beauty, or at any rate her gracious prettiness. No wonder, then, that now a chill ran over her at the thought of the task that lay before her if she was to gain her battle. To break Valentine's influence she had to make Julian love her. How? Instinctively, and with a sense of horror, she knew that her usual practised arts, instead of helping, almost fatally handicapped her now. She loved Julian purely, so purely that she could not endure that he should meet her degradation as he had met it on that one night she never thought of but with repentance. Yet to her ignorance, to her, rising towards purity now, yet ever steeped in the coarsest knowledge, it seemed that the thing called love could hardly utter itself save by some threadbare blandishment, or parrot combination of words, used each night by a hundred women of the town. Cuckoo knew no language of love that was not, so to say, bad language, inasmuch as it was used by those whom she hated. And hitherto she had been content to keep her love for Julian a silent love, except on the few occasions when she had obliquely showed it by the anger of jealousy or of reproach. She wished nothing bodily from him, or if she did, stifled the wish in the mutely repeated record of her own unworthiness. But now, if she was to draw his soul to hers, she must move forward, she must surely commit some sacrifice, perform some deed. What deed could she perform? What sacrifice could she make that would win upon him, that would alter his relation towards her from one of eccentric friendship to one of affection that might even be governed?

The lady of the feathers did not reason this all out in her mind as she sat before the spluttering fire, but she felt it, a tangled mass of thoughts, catching her brain as in a net, catching her life as in a net too. How could she make Julian love her? What could she do? And all the time, as she asked herself passionately that question, the hours were gliding by towards the evening refrain of her life. Cuckoo began to consider this evening refrain as she had never considered it before, as it might affect another if he loved her. If she made Julian love her, if she succeeded in this attempt that seemed as if it must be impossible, what of her evening refrain then? And what would be the conclusion of such a love? She could not tell; she could only wonder. The strange thing about the lady of the feathers, and about many of her kind, was, that she never dreamed of such a thing as owing a duty to herself, to her own body, her own soul, or nature. Cuckoo knew not the meaning of self-respect. Had you told her that her body was a temple—not of the Holy Ghost, but of a wonderful, exquisite thing called womanhood, and for that reason should not be defiled, she would have stared at you under drawn eyebrows, like a fierce boy, and wondered what in heaven or earth you were talking jargon about. To get at her sympathy you must talk to her of duty to another; and if she had a soft feeling for that other, then she understood you, and then alone. It was the cause of Julian and his safety that made her now consider this evening refrain of her life as she sat there. And her mind ran back to Julian's first visit to her and to his first request. He asked her to stay at home just for one night with Jessie. And she refused. If she had not refused. If she had stayed at home. If she had at that moment, from that moment, given up her life of the street, would Julian have loved her then? Would she have been able to do something for him? For hours Cuckoo sat there pondering in her vague, desolate way over questions such as these. But she could give no answer to them. And then she thought of that horrible night when the hours danced to the music of the devil, when she gave Julian that first little impetus which started him on his journey to the abyss. And at that thought she grew white, and she grew hot, and she wondered why she had been born to be the lady of the feathers, and the wrecker, not of men's lives—she never thought of men tenderly in the mass—but of this one life, of this one man, whom she loved in a strange, wild, good-woman way.

"C-r-r-r!" she said, her tongue flickering against her teeth. Jessie stirred in the blankets, came to the floor with a "t'bb" and ran into the room with curved attitudes of submission. But Cuckoo would not notice the little dog. She stared at the fire and looked so old, and almost intellectual. But there was nobody to see her. What a long, empty day it had been, this day for which she had risen eagerly as to a day of battle! What a long, empty day, and no deed done in it. And now the hour of the evening refrain was come. Cuckoo had wanted this day to be a special day, for it was the first of those new days which were to come after the doctor's word of hope. And nothing had happened in it. Nobody had come. The doctor was with his patients. Julian was—ah, surely—with Valentine. And she, Cuckoo, this poor, pale girl, who wanted to fight and to do battle, was alone. And she had been so eager in the morning. And now the night was falling and she had not struck a blow. The hour chimed. It was the hour of the evening refrain.

Suddenly Cuckoo got up. She went over to the window and pulled down the blind so sharply that she nearly broke it. She struck a match violently and lit the gas. She ran into the bedroom, caught her hat, which lay ready for service on the top of the chest of drawers, and cast it with a crash into a cardboard box, jamming the lid down on it. She seized her jacket, which lay on the bed, and strung it up on a hook, as if she were hanging a criminal. Then she came back into the sitting-room, sat down in the chair, took up the evening paper of yesterday and began to read, with eyes that gleamed under frowning brows, about "Foreign Affairs" and "Bimetallism."

And that night the evening refrain of Cuckoo's life did not follow the verse of her day.

She sat there all alone.

It was her way—the only way she could devise—of beginning to fight the battle for Julian.

She did not stay at home with any thought of purifying herself by the action. Another day she might go out as usual. But Julian had once asked her not to go. She had gone then. Now she obeyed him, and the obedience seemed to bring him a little nearer to her.



CHAPTER X

THE DOCTOR DRIVES OUT WITH THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Some days later Cuckoo received a telegram from Harley Street. It came in the morning, and ran as follows:

"Call here to-day if possible. Important. Levillier."

Cuckoo read it, trembling. In her early days telegrams came often to her door—"Meet me at Verrey's, four-thirty"; "Piccadilly Circus, five o'clock to-day." Such messages flickered through her youth, forming gradually a legend of her life. But this summons from the doctor at the same time frightened her and braced her heart. It might mean that Julian was ill, in danger—she knew not what. But at least it broke through the appalling inaction, the dreary stagnation, of her days. The lady of the feathers had fought indeed, of late, that worst enemy, mental despair, bred of grim patience at last grown weary. That was not the battle she had been inspired to expect, to prepare for. The doctor's telegram at least swept the unforeseen foe from the field, and seemed to set the real enemy full in view.

"There ain't any answer," the lady of the feathers said to Mrs. Brigg, who waited in an attitude expressive of greedy curiosity.

"Which of 'em is it?" demanded that functionary.

"Shan't tell you," Cuckoo hissed at her.

The filthy groove in which the landlady's mind forever ran began to rouse her to an intense animosity.

"Well, it's all one to me so long as I'm paid regular," muttered Mrs. Brigg, with a swing of her dusty skirts and a toss of her grey head, governed by pomade, since it was a Saturday. Mrs. Brigg must once have held Christian principles, as she always prepared the ground for certain Sabbath curls the day before.

Cuckoo ran to dress herself. It was seldom indeed that she stirred out in the morning, so seldom that that alone was an experience. Arrived in the bedroom, she pounced mechanically on rouge and powder, and was about to decorate herself when she suddenly paused with outstretched hands. She was going out into the bright wintry sunlight, and she was going to the doctor's house, full, perhaps, of those smart patients of whom Valentine had once spoken to her. What sort of an apparition would she be among them? She dropped her hands, hesitating. Then she turned to a cupboard, drew out the one famous black gown, and put it on. She crowned her head with Julian's hat, hid her hands in black silk gloves, pulled down her veil and seized an umbrella. Somehow Cuckoo vaguely connected respectability with umbrellas, although even the most vicious are fain to carry them in showery London. Then she looked at herself in the glass and wondered if her appearance were deceptive enough to trick the sharp eyes of the patients. The glance reassured her. She seemed to herself an epitome of black propriety, and she set forth with a more easy heart. As she walked, her mind ran on before, seeking what this summons meant and debating possibilities without arriving at conclusions. At the end of Harley Street her walk, which had been rapid, achieved a ritardando and nearly came to a full close before she gained the doctor's door. Cuckoo could be a brazen hussy. A year ago she could scarcely be anything else. But that love of hers for Julian had, it seemed, a strange power of undermining old habits. It laid hands upon so many perceptions, so many emotions, with which it should surely have had nothing to do, and made subtle inroads upon every dark corner of the girl's nature. From it came this ritardando. For Cuckoo was filled with a very human dread of exposing Doctor Levillier to misconception by her appearance in the midst of his patients. Had it been late afternoon instead of morning her fortitude would certainly have been greater, and might even have drawn near to impudence. But the clear light of approaching noontide set her mind blinking with rapid eyelids, and when she actually gained the street door her discomfort was acute.

As she put up her hand to touch the bell the door opened softly and a stout Duchess issued forth. Cuckoo didn't know she was a Duchess, but she quailed before the plethoric glance cast upon her, and her voice was uneven as she asked for the doctor.

"Have you an appointment, ma'am?" asked Lawler, who did not recognize her behind her black veil.

"I was asked to come," Cuckoo murmured.

"What name, ma'am?"

"Cuck—Miss Bright."

She was admitted. The doctor, in a hurry of business, had omitted to give Lawler any instructions in the event of Cuckoo's prompt response to his telegram. So she was shown into the waiting-room, in which three or four people were turning over illustrated papers with an air of watchful idleness and attentive leisure. Cuckoo sat down in a corner as quietly as possible, and Lawler vanished. The leaves of the illustrated papers rustled in the air with a dry sound. To Cuckoo they seemed to be crackling personal remarks about her, and to be impregnated with condemnation. She cast a furtive glance upon the square room and perceived that they were returned by four ladies, and that three of these ladies were looking straight at her. The eight eyes met in a glance of inquiry and were instantly cast down. Again the leaves of the illustrateds rustled, this time, Cuckoo felt convinced, more fiercely than before. The frou-frou of the skirts of one of the ladies joined in the chorus, which was far from crying "Hallelujah!" Cuckoo began to feel a growing certainty that, despite the black veil and the neat umbrella, feminine instinct had divined her. She was totally unaccustomed to such an atmosphere as that which prevailed in this room, and began to be the victim of an odd, prickly sensation, which she believed to be physical, but which was certainly more than half moral. A wave of heat ran over her body. It was like the heat which follows on a received slap. One of the illustrateds deleted its voice from the general chorus. Cuckoo was aware of this, and looked up again to find two eyes fixed upon her with an expression of thin distaste that was incapable of misinterpretation. A second illustrated ceased to sing, two heads were inclined towards one another, and the "t'p, t'p, t'p" of a low whisper set the remaining two ladies at their posts as sentinels on the lady of the feathers.

Cuckoo put her hand to her face to pull her veil a little lower down. By accident she tugged too hard, or it had been badly fastened to her hat, for one side got loose instantly and it fell down, revealing her face frankly.

The "t'p, t'p, t'p" sounded again, multiplied by two. Cuckoo, thrown into confusion by the malign behaviour of her veil, caught awkwardly at the dropped end with an intention of readjusting it, but something in the sound of the whispering suddenly moved her to a different action. She snatched the veil quite off, set her feet firmly against the thick Turkey carpet, raised her eyes and stared with all her might at the four ladies, hurling, as a man hurls a bomb, an expression of savage defiance into her gaze. The whispers stopped; a thin and repeated cough, dry as Sahara, attacked the silence, and eight eyes were vehemently cast down. Cuckoo continued staring, folding her hands in her lap. The prickly sensation increased, but she considered it now as a thing to be jumped on. Recognizing that she was recognized, she was instantly moved to play up to her part, and she longed to stare the four women out into Harley Street. If the energy of a gaze could have achieved that object, they must have backed through the doctor's plate glass into the area forthwith. They were, in fact, most obviously moved, and their attitudes expressed, by a community of lines, virtue rampant and agitation gules. A shattering silence endured till Lawler appeared to bid two of these virgins with lit lamps of self-righteousness to the consulting-room. As they rose the two other ladies rose also and followed in their wake. Lawler politely protested, but they were now to proclaim their beauty of character.

"We should prefer to wait in another room," said the lady who had coughed as a communication with heaven.

"Yes, another room," added the other, and as she spoke she half turned, indicating the corner where Cuckoo sat.

Without a word Lawler showed them out and closed the door. For another twenty minutes Cuckoo sat alone, glaring at the table by which these members of her sex had sat, and seeing no material objects but only—as is the way of humanity—her own point of view. The ladies saw only theirs. In this respect, at least, they closely resembled the lady of the feathers. When Lawler at length returned with his grave: "This way, if you please, ma'am," Cuckoo rose to her feet with the inflexibility of some iron thing set in motion by mechanism, and marched in his wake to the doctor's presence.

The doctor was standing up by a bright fire; he looked very grave.

"I am very sorry to have kept you," he said, "very sorry. I did not think you could get here so quickly."

Cuckoo cleared her throat.

"I wish I hadn't," she answered bluntly.

"Why?"

"It don't matter. I started directly your wire came."

"That was good of you. Please sit down."

Cuckoo sat with a straight back in the straightest chair she could perceive. The doctor still remained standing by the fire. He appeared to be thinking deeply. His eyes looked downward at his gaily shining boots. After a minute or two he said:

"I speak to you now in strict confidence, trusting your secrecy implicitly."

The back of Cuckoo became less straight. Even a gentle curve made it more gracious if less admirable from the dancing-mistress point of view.

"Honour!" she interjected rapidly, like a schoolboy.

The doctor looked up at her and a smile came to his lips. And as he looked up he noticed the neatness of her black gown, the simplicity of her hat, the absence of paint and powder. Being, after all, only a man, he was surprised at Cuckoo's appearance of propriety. The four ladies had been surprised at her appearance of impropriety. But the doctor, seeing her so much better than usual, thought her—in looks—quite well, as indeed she was in comparison with the tout ensemble of her usual days. He looked from her black gloves, which held the thick black veil, to the winter sunshine sparkling, like a dancing, eager child, at the window.

"Do you like driving?" he said.

"What?"

"Driving—do you like it?"

"Pretty well, if the horse don't come down," said Cuckoo, at once concentrated on cabs.

"My horses won't."

"Yours!"

"Yes. I have no more patients to-day. I have a half-holiday and I want to talk to you. Shall we go for a drive to Hampstead and talk out in the open air and the sunshine?"

The four ladies, the illustrateds, the cough, dry as Sahara, were instantly forgotten. Cuckoo became all curves, almost like Jessie in moments of supreme emotion.

"Me and you?" she exclaimed. "Oh yes!"

The doctor rang the bell.

"Take this lady to the dining-room and give her some lunch," he said to Lawler. "And please order the victoria round at once."

"Yes, sir."

"While you lunch," he said to Cuckoo, "I'll just get through two letters that must be written, and then we'll start."

Cuckoo followed Lawler with a sense of airy wonder and delight.

A quarter of an hour later she was seated with the doctor in the victoria, the veil tightly stretched across her face, her poor mode of living up to his trust in her, and deserving the honour now conferred upon her. The coachman let his horses go, and Harley Street was left behind. Such a bright day it was. Even the cold seemed a gay and festive thing, spinning the circulation like a gold coin till it glittered, decorating the poorest cheeks with the brightest rose as if in honour of a festival. To Cuckoo London, as seen from a private carriage, was a wonder and a dream of novelty, a city of kings instead of a city of beggars, a city of crystal morning instead of a city of dreadful night. She gazed at it out of a new heart as these horses—that never came down—trotted briskly forward. Through the silk of her gloves her thumbs and fingers felt silently the warm sables of the rug that caressed her knees. And she thought that this feeling, and the feeling in her heart, must be constituent parts of the emotion called happiness. If the four ladies could see her now! If they could see her now, Cuckoo thought, she would take off her veil, just for a moment. When the aspect of the street began to change, when little gardens appeared, and bare trees standing bravely in the sun behind high walls and iron gates, the doctor said to Cuckoo:

"Now I will tell you why I telegraphed to you."

And then Cuckoo remembered that she was in this wonderful expedition for a reason. The doctor continued speaking in a low voice, with the obvious intention of being inaudible to the coachman, whose large furred back presented an appearance of broad indifference to their two lives.

"You remember what I said to you the other day—that perhaps you could help Julian from great evil."

Cuckoo nodded earnestly.

"And you are prepared to do anything you can?"

"Yes."

She had forgotten the smart carriage, and the horses that never came down, now.

"Good," said the doctor, shortly and decisively. "I will speak to you quite plainly to-day, for something leads me to trust you, and to say to you what I would say to no other person. Something leads me to believe that you can do more for Addison than any one else. Addison once implied it; but what I have observed for myself in your house leads me to be certain of it."