Flames Part 86

"Scarcely any human being, if indeed any, is completely hateful. How then can a human being, whose mind is ill and out of control, be hateful?"

said the doctor, gently.

She felt herself rebuked, and a quick thought of herself, of what she was, rebuked her too.

"I'll try not," she murmured, but with no inward conviction of success.

They were on the heath now, and the smoke of London hung in the wintry air beyond and below them. The sun was already beginning to wear the aspect of a traveller on the point of departure for a journey. His once golden face was sinister with that blood-red hue which it so often a.s.sumes on winter afternoons, and which seems to set it in a place more than usually remote, more than usually distant from our world, and in a clime that is sad and strange. Winds danced over the heath like young witches. The horses, whipped by the more intense cold, pulled hard against the bit, and made the coachman's arms ache. The doctor looked away for a moment at the vapours that began to clothe the afternoon in the hollows and depressions of the landscape, and at the sun, whose gathering change of aspect smote on his imagination as something akin to the change that falls over the faces of men towards that hour when the sun of their glory makes ready for its setting. Still keeping his glance on that sad red sun in its nest of radiating vapours, he said, in a withdrawn voice:

"We must hate nothing except the hatefulness of sin in ourselves and in others."

Cuckoo listened as to the voice of some one on a throne, and tears that she could not fully understand rose in her eyes.

But now the doctor turned from the sun to the lady of the feathers, and there was a bright light in his quiet eyes.

"You and I must fight with all our forces," he said. "Have you ever thought about this thing will which Cresswell worships insanely? Have you ever felt it in you, Miss Bright?"

"I don't know as I have," Cuckoo said, secretly wondering if it were that strange and fleeting power which had come to her of late, which had made her for a moment fearless of Valentine as she defied him in the loneliness of her room, which had stirred her even to a faith in herself when she spoke with the doctor under the stars upon her doorstep.

"I think you have. I think you will. It must be there, for Julian feels it in you. He--he calls it a flame."

"Eh? A flame?"

"Yes. He sees it in your eyes, and it holds him near you."

So the doctor spoke, partly out of his conviction, partly because he had definitely resolved to put away from him all the things that fought against his reason and that his imagination perhaps loved too much.

Such things, he thought, floated like clouds across the clearness of his vision, and drowned the light of his power to do good. So his fancies that had fastened on the mystery of the dead Marr and the living Valentine, connecting them together, and weaving a veil of magic about their strange connection, were banished. He would not hold more commerce with them, nor would he accept the fancies of others as realities. Thus, in his mind, Julian's legend of the flame in this girl's eyes, despite the doctor's own vision of flames, became merely a story of the truth of human will and an acknowledgment of its power.

"Is that why he looks at me so?" Cuckoo asked, in a manner unusually meditative. "But then he, Valentine, did the same! Why, could that be what scared him that night--what he struck at?"

"He too may feel that you have a power for good, to fight against his power for evil. Yes, he does feel it. Make him feel it more. Rely on yourself. Trust that there's something great within you, something placed there for you to use. Never mind what your life has been. Never mind your own weakness. You are the home, the temple, of this power of will. Julian feels it, and it draws him to you, but it is as nothing yet compared with the power of Cresswell. You have to make it more powerful, so that you may win Julian back from this danger."

"Eh? How?"

"Rest on it; trust in it; teach it to act. Show Julian more and more that you have it. Can't you think of a way of showing that you have this power?"

"Not I. No," Cuckoo murmured.

The doctor lowered his voice still more. Quite at a venture he drew a bow, and with his first arrow smote the lady of the feathers to the heart.

"Has Julian ever asked you to do anything?" he said.

Suddenly Cuckoo's face was scarlet.

"Why? How d' you know?" she stammered.

"Anything for him that was not evil?" the doctor pursued, following out an abstract theory, not as Cuckoo fancied, dealing with known facts. "I know nothing. I only ask you to try and remember, to search your mind."

There was no need for the lady of the feathers to do that.

"Yes, he did once," she said, looking still confused and furtive.

"Was it difficult?"

She hesitated.

"I s'pose so," she answered at last.

"Did you do it?"

"No."

The doctor had noticed that his questions gave pain.

"I don't want to know what it was and I don't ask," he said. "I have neither the right to, nor the desire to. But can't you do it, and show Julian that you have done it? If you do I think he will see that flame, which he fears and which fascinates him, burn more clearly, more steadily, in your eyes."

"I'll see," Cuckoo said with a kind of gulp.

"Do more than this. This is only a part, one weapon in the fight.

Cresswell is always near Julian; you must be near him. Cresswell pursues Julian; you must pursue him, use your woman's wit, use all your experience of men; use your heart. Wake up and throw yourself into this battle, and make yourself worthy of fighting. Only you can tell how. But this is a fact. Our wills, our powers of doing things, are made strong, or made weak by our own lives. Each time we do a degradingly low, beastly thing"--he chose the words most easily comprehended by such a woman as she was--"we weaken our will, and make it less able to do anything good for another. If you commit loveless actions from to-day--though Julian has nothing to do with them--with each loveless action you will lose a point in the battle against the madness of Cresswell. And you must lose no points. Remember you are fighting a madman, as I believe, for the safety of the man you love. If I could tell you what--"

The doctor pulled himself up short.

"No," he said, "no need to tell you more than that, within these last few days I have found that all you said about Cresswell's present _diablerie_"--he shook his head impatiently at the language he was using to the lady of the feathers--"Cresswell's present impulse for evil is less horribly true than the truth. I shall watch him, day by day, from now. And if I can act, I shall do so. If his insanity is too sharp for me, as it may well be, I shall be checkmated in any effort to forcibly keep him from doing harm. In that case I can only trust to you, and hope that some chance circ.u.mstance may lead to the opening of Julian's eyes. But they are closed--closed fast. In any case you will help me and I will help you. You shall have opportunities of meeting Julian often. I will arrange that. And Cresswell--"

He paused as if in deep thought.

"How to do it," he murmured, almost to himself. "How to bring this battle to the issue!"

Then he turned his eyes on Cuckoo.

She was sitting bolt upright in the carriage. Her cheeks were flushed.

Her hollow eyes were sparkling. She had drawn her hands out from under the rug and clasped them together in her lap.

"Oh, I'll do anything I can," she said, "anything. And--and I can do that one thing!"

"Yes," said the doctor. "Which?"

"The thing that he asked me once, and what I said no to," she answered, but in such a low murmur that the doctor scarcely caught the words.

He leaned forward in the carriage.

"Home now, Grant," he said to the coachman. "Or--no--drive first to 400 Marylebone Road."

The doctor turned again towards Cuckoo. She was looking away from him, so much that he was obliged to believe that she wished to conceal her face, which was towards the sunset.

The sky over London glowed with a dull red like a furnace. It deepened, while they looked, pa.s.sing rapidly through the biting cold of the late winter afternoon.

The red cloud near the fainting sun broke and parted.