Flames Part 75

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

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

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

"Him?"

"Valentine."

The doctor looked at her in blank astonishment.

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

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

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

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

"Marr," said the doctor, sharply. "Why, he is dead. Julian told me so.

He died--he died in the Euston Road on the night of Valentine's trance.

Ah, but you know nothing about that. Did you know Marr, then?"

"Yes, I knew him."

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

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

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

"He says he's really Marr."

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

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

"He says to me--'I'm Marr.'"

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

She went on:

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

"The real Valentine gone. Yes," said the doctor, gravely, "that is true.

Does he then know that he is--?" "Mad" was on his lips, but he checked himself.

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

Cuckoo frowned till her long, broad eyebrows nearly met. The grimace gave her the aspect of a sinister boy, bold and audacious. For she protruded her under lip, too, and the graces of ardent feeling, of pain and of pa.s.sion, died out of her eyes. But this abrupt and hard mask was only caused by the effort she was making after thought, after understanding.

She pressed her feet upon the ground, and the toes inside her worn shoes curved themselves inwards. What had Valentine said? What--what? She stared dully at the doctor under her corrugated brows.

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

Yes. He said that?"

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

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

She hesitated.

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

"Valentine, no longer himself, but endowed with the influence of Marr,"

the doctor muttered; "she means that he told her something like that.

The phantasy of an unsteady brain."--"Go on," he added to her.

But Cuckoo was relapsing into confusion already.

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

"Try to."

She was silent, knitting her brows.

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

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

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

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.