Flames Part 69

Valentine accepted the remark in the conventional sense.

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

The voice was cool and careless.

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

"Yes. Do you like it?"

"Well, frankly, no."

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

"Julian! Did he devise the colour scheme?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For the worse."

"Is it for the worse?"

"Surely."

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

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

"Very well, I think. He will be here directly. He's coming to fetch me.

We are dining at the Prince's in Piccadilly in the same party. That reminds me, I must dress. But do stay, and have some coffee."

"No coffee, thank you."

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

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

After a word or two more Valentine vanished to dress, and the doctor was once more alone. He was much perplexed and saddened, but keenly interested too, and, getting up from the chair in which he had been sitting, he moved about the grotesque and vulgar room, threading his way through the graceless furniture with a silent and gentle caution.

And as he walked meditatively he remembered a conversation he had held with Valentine long ago, when the latter had spoken complainingly of the tyranny of an instinctive purity. The very words he had used came back to him now:

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

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

He came into the drawing-room rather hastily, in evening dress with a coat over it. Wade had forewarned him of the doctor's presence, and he entered, speaking loud words of welcome, and holding out a greeting hand. The too-ready voice and almost premature hand betokened his latent uneasiness. Vice makes some people unconscious, some self-conscious.

Julian belonged at present to the latter tribe. Whether he was thoroughly aware of self-alteration or not, he evidently stirred uneasily under an expectation of the doctor's surprise. This drove his voice to loud notes and his manner to a boisterous heartiness, belied by the shifting glance of his brown eyes.

The doctor was astounded as he looked at him. Yet the change here was far less inexplicable than that other change in Valentine. Its mystery was the familiar mystery of humanity. Its horror was the horror that we all accept as one of the elements of life. Deterioration, however rapid, however complete, does not come upon us like a ghost in the night to puzzle us absolutely. It is not altogether out of the range of our experience. Most men have seen a man crumble gradually, through the action of some vice, as a wall crumbles through the action of time, falls into dust and decay, filters away into the weed-choked ditches of utter ruin and degradation. Most women have watched some woman slip from the purity and hope and innocence of girlhood into the faded hunger and painted and wrinkled energies of animalism. Such tragedies are no more unfamiliar to us than are the tragedies of Shakespeare. And such a tragedy--not complete yet, but at a third-act point, perhaps--now faced Doctor Levillier in Julian. The wall that had been so straight and trim, so finely built and carefully preserved, was crumbling fast to decay. A ragged youth slunk in the face, beggared of virtue, of true cheerfulness, of all lofty aspiration and high intent. It was youth still, for nothing can entirely ma.s.sacre that gift of the G.o.ds, except inevitable Time. But it was youth sadder than age, because it had run forward to meet the wearinesses that dog the steps of age but that should never be at home with age's enemy. Julian had been the leaping child of healthy energy.

He was now quite obviously the servant of la.s.situde. His foot left the ground as if with a tired reluctance, and his hands were fidgetty, yet nerveless. The eyes, that looked at the doctor and looked away by swift turns, burned with a haggard eagerness unutterably different from their former bright vivacity. Beneath them wrinkles crept on the puffy white face as worms about a corpse. Busy and tell-tale, they did not try to conceal the story of the body into which they had prematurely cut themselves. Nor did Julian's features choose to back up any reserve his mind might possibly feel about acknowledging the consummate alteration of his life. They proclaimed, as from a watch-tower, the arrival of enemies. The cheeks were no longer firm, but heavy and flaccid. The mouth was deformed by the down-drawn looseness of the sensualist, and the complexion beaconed with an unnatural scarlet that was a story to be read by every street-boy.

Yet, even so, the doctor, as he looked pitifully and with a gnawing grief upon Julian, felt not the mysterious thrill communicated to him by Valentine. These two men, these old time friends of his, were both in a sense strangers. But it was as if he had at least heard much of Julian, knew much of him, understood him, comprehended exactly why he was a stranger. Valentine was the total stranger, the unknown, the undivined.

Long ago the doctor had foreseen the possibility of the Julian who now stood before him. He had never foreseen the possibility of the new Valentine. The one change was summed up in an instant. The other walked in utter mystery. The doctor had been swift to notice Julian's furtive glance, and was equally swift in banishing all trace of surprise from his own manner. So they met with a fair show of cordiality, and Julian developed a little of his old cheerfulness.

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

"Better."

"You've cured him! Bravo!"

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

Julian looked up hastily.

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

He laughed, not without a tinge of bitterness.

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

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