Flames Part 51

"I said my voice was out of order," Valentine said, simply and with a smile.

"You did not say you had another voice, the voice of--of a devil," Julian said, almost falteringly, for he was still shaken by his distress of the senses, into a mental condition that was almost anger.

Dr. Levillier said nothing. More sensitive to musical sounds than Julian, he dared not speak, lest he should say something that might stand like a fixed gulf to eternally separate him from Valentine. He knew the future that stretches out like a spear beyond one word. So he sat quietly with his eyes on the ground. His lips were set firmly together. Valentine turned to observe him.

"Doctor, you're not angry?" he asked.

The doctor made no reply.

"You know I warned you," Valentine went on. "You brought this thing on yourself."

"Yes," said Levillier.

But Julian interposed.

"No Valentine," he exclaimed. "For, of course, it is all a trick of yours. You didn't want to sing. We made you. This is your revenge, eh?

I didn't know you had it in you to be so--so beastly and cantankerous."

Valentine shook his head.

"It's no trick. It's simply as I said. My talent for music is dead. You have been listening to the voice of its corpse."

Dr. Levillier looked up at length.

"You really mean that?" he said, and there was an awakening within him of his normal ready interest in all things.

"I mean it absolutely."

"That is the only event in which I can forgive the torture you have been inflicting upon me."

"That is the true event."

"But it's not possible," Julian said. "It's not conceivable. Surely, doctor, you would not say--"

The doctor interrupted him.

"I cannot believe that Cresswell would deliberately commit an outrage upon me," he said. "And it would be an outrage to sing like that to a tired man. Weeks of work would not fatigue me as I am fatigued by Cresswell's music."

Julian was silent and looked uneasy. Valentine repeated again:

"I couldn't help it. I am sorry."

Doctor Levillier ignored the remark. His professional interest was beginning to be aroused. For the first time he felt convinced that some very peculiar and bizarre change was dawning over the youth he knew so well. He wanted to watch it grow or fade, to a.n.a.lyze it, to study it, to be aware of its exact nature. But he did not want to put either Valentine or Julian upon the alert. So he spoke lightly as he said:

"But I shall soon get the better of my fatigue, even without the usual medicine. Cresswell, take my advice, give your music a rest. Lock your piano again for a while. It will be better."

Valentine shut down the lid on the instant, and turned the little key in the lock.

"Adieu to my companion of many lonely hours!" he said with a half whimsical pensiveness. Then, as if in joke, he held out his hand with the key in it, to the doctor.

"Will you take charge of this hostage?" he asked.

"Yes," the doctor replied.

Quite gravely he took the key and put it into his pocket.

And so it was that silence fell round the Saint of Victoria Street.

CHAPTER III

THE FLIGHT OF THE BATS

Julian had resolved to keep his compact with the lady of the feathers. He had learned partially to understand the curious and beautiful att.i.tude which her mind had a.s.sumed towards him, polluted as it must be by the terror and working out of her fate, by many dreary actions, and by many vile imaginings. But although he held to his promise he did not, after that night of crisis, resume his former career of asceticism tempered by winds of temptation which could never blow his cas.e.m.e.nt open. There are men who can vary the fine monotony of virtue by an occasional deliberate error, and who return from such an excursion into dangerous by-paths drilled and comforted, as it appears, for further journeying along the main road of their respectability. But Julian was not such a man. He resembled rather the morphia victim, or the inebriate, who must at all hazards abstain from any indulgence, even the smallest, in drug or draught, lest the demon who has such charm for him clasp him in imperturbable arms, and refuse with the steadfastness of a once-tricked Venus ever to let him go again.

Valentine's empire of five years was broken in one night.

At first Julian was scarcely conscious that his descent was not momentary, but rather tending to the permanent. Certainly, at the first, he was inclined to have the schoolboy outlook upon it, and the schoolboy outlook is as a glance through the wrong end of a telescope, dwindling giant sins to the stature of pigmies, and pigmy sins to mere points of darkness which equal nothingness. But, strangely enough, it was his interview with the weeping Cuckoo, that Magdalen of the streets, which drove the schoolboy to limbo, and set virtue and vice for the moment rightly on the throne and in the gutter. Despite his comparatively dull mood and tendency to a calm of self-satisfaction in the Marylebone Road, Julian could not be wholly unmoved by the pa.s.sion of Cuckoo's regret, nor entirely unaware that it was a pa.s.sion in which he must have some share, whether now or at some more distant time, when the thrall of recently moved senses was weakened, and the numbness really born of excitement melted in the quiet expansion of a manly and a reasonable calm. His understanding of her pa.s.sion, none too definite at first, gave him a moment's wonder, both at her and at himself. It seemed strange that the shattered influence of Valentine should be of less account to him who had known and loved it than to her who had never known it. It seemed stranger still that the streets--those wolves which tear one by one the rags of good from human nature, till it stands naked and tearless beneath the lamps, which are the eyes of the wolves--stranger that those streets should have left to one of their children a veil so bridal and so beautiful as that which hung round Cuckoo when she wept. Julian was almost driven to believe that sin and purity can dwell together in one woman, yet never have intercourse. Yet he knew that to be impossible. The fact remained that the tarnished Cuckoo, in the first moments of regret, was more conscious of his sin for him than he was conscious of it for himself; that she led him, with her dingy hands, to such repentance as he experienced, and that she, too, guarded him against repet.i.tion of the sin, so far as she was concerned. Julian considered these circ.u.mstances; and there was a time when they were not without effect upon him, and when, with the a.s.sistance of a word from Valentine, they might have worked upon him an easy salvation. But Valentine did not speak that word.

His peculiar purity had saved Julian in the past by its mere existence.

Its presence was enough. That _satis_ was dead now. Julian did not ask why. Nor did he find himself troubled by its decease. There is nothing like action for making man un.o.bservant. Julian was no longer a ship in dock, nor even a ship riding at anchor. The anchor was up, the sails were set, the water ran back from the vessel's prow.

Cuckoo was not conscious of this. Sometimes she was subtle by intuition; often she was not subtle at all. When she understood Julian's nature for the moment, it was because his nature was, for the moment, in close relation to hers. Her fate was affected by it, or its pa.s.sages of arms clashed near her heart. Then intuition, woman's guardian, had eyes and ears, saw and heard with a distinctness that was nearly brilliant. But when Julian's nature wandered, and the wanderings did not bring it where hers was dwelling, her observation slept soundly enough. So she was not conscious at first of Julian's gentle progress in a new direction.

Whether Valentine was conscious of it did not immediately appear, for Julian said nothing. For five years he had not had a secret from Valentine. Now he had to have one. He ranked Valentine with Doctor Levillier as too good to be told of the evil thing. When he had had temptations and resisted them he had told Valentine of them frankly. Now he had temptations, and was beginning not to resist them; he kept silence about them. This silence lasted for a little while, and then Valentine swept it away, involuntarily it seemed, and by means of action, not of words.

One day Julian met a man at his club, a lively, devil-may-care soldier of fortune in the world. The man came to where he was sitting and said:

"So, Addison, your G.o.d has fallen from his pedestal. He's only a Dagon after all."

Julian looked at him ignorantly.

"What G.o.d?" he asked.

"Your saint has tumbled from his perch. I never believed in him."

He was of the species that never believes in anything except vice and the _Sporting Times_.

Julian rejoined:

"I don't understand you."

"Cresswell," said the man.

Julian began to wonder what was coming, and silently got ready for the defence, as he always did instinctively when Valentine was the subject of attack.

"What have you got to say about Cresswell?" he asked curtly.