Flames Part 90

"Possibly."

The voice of Valentine thrilled with triumph as he spoke the word. Again he glanced at the lady of the feathers.

"Cannot you convert the doctor?" he asked her, in tones full of sarcastic meaning. "You know something of my theories, something of their putting into practice."

"I don't know--I don't understand," she murmured helplessly.

She looked down at her plate, flushing scarlet with a sense of shame at her own complete mental impotence.

"What's the matter, Cuckoo?"

The words came slowly from the lips of Julian, whose heavy eyes were now raised and fixed with a stare of lethargic wonder upon Cuckoo.

"What are they saying to you?"

His look travelled on, still slow and unwieldy, to the doctor and to Valentine.

"I won't have Cuckoo worried," he said. And then he relapsed with a mechanical abruptness upon the consideration of his food. Valentine seemed about to make some laughing rejoinder, but, after a glance at Julian, he apparently resigned the idea as absurd, and, turning again to the doctor, remarked:

"It is sometimes injudicious to state all that one knows."

"Still more so all that one does not know. But I have no desire to press you," the doctor said, lightly. "This is wonderful wine. Where did you get it?"

"At the _Cercle Blanc_ sale," Valentine answered quickly.

It seemed that he was slightly irritated. He frowned and cast a glance that was almost threatening upon the doctor.

"Would you a.s.sume weakness in every strong man who refuses to take off his coat, roll up his shirt sleeve and display the muscle of his arm?"

he said, harshly.

"The case is not a.n.a.logous. That muscle exists in the world is a proved fact. When I was at Eton, I was knocked down by a boy stronger than I was. Since then I acknowledge the power of muscle."

"And have you never been knocked down mentally?"

"Not in the way you suggest."

Valentine shifted in his seat. It did not escape the doctor that he had the air of a man longing to either say or do something startling, but apparently held back by tugging considerations of prudence or of expediency.

"Some day you may be," he said at last, obviously conquered by this prompting prudence.

"When I am, the 'Christian scientist' who once declared to me that she cured a sprained ankle by walking on it many miles a day, and thinking it was well while she walked, shall receive my respectful apologies,"

the doctor answered, laughing.

Valentine handed the lady of the feathers some strawberries. On her nervous refusal of them he exclaimed:

"I see you have finished your wine, doctor. No more? Really? Nor you, Julian?"

Julian made no reply. He simply pushed his gla.s.s a little away from him.

"Then shall we accompany Miss Bright into the tentroom? I thought we would have coffee there. You have never seen the tentroom," he added to Cuckoo, getting up from his seat as he spoke.

"I usually sit in it when I am alone or with Julian. You will not mind our cigarettes, I know."

He led the way down the scented corridor, scented with the thin, gently bright scent of violets.

"The tentroom has a history," he continued to Cuckoo, opening a door on the left. "It was once the scene of an--an absurd experiment. Eh, doctor?"

They entered the room. As they did so the hot, sticky scent of the hidden hyacinths poured out to meet them. For a moment it seemed overwhelming, and Cuckoo hung back with an almost unconquerable sensation of aversion and even of fear. The aspect of this small room astonished her; she had never seen any chamber so arranged. Certainly, it looked very unusual to-night. The small fire was hidden by a large screen of white wood, with panels of dull green brocade. Only one of the electric lamps was turned on, and that was shaded, so that the diffused light was faint, a mere unflickering twilight. The ma.s.ses of tulips hung like quant.i.ties of monotonously similar shadows from the tented ceiling, and the flood of scent caused the room to seem even smaller than it really was, a tiny temple dedicated to the uncommon, perhaps to the sinister.

"We will see the old year out and drink our _cafe noir_ here," said Valentine. "Where will you sit, Miss Bright?"

"I don't mind. It's all one to me," murmured Cuckoo. "What a funny room, though!" she could not help adding. "It ain't like a room at all."

"Imagine it an Arab tent, the home of a Bedouin Sheik in a desert of Nubia," said Valentine. "This divan is very comfortable. Let me arrange the cushions for you."

As he bent over her to do so, he murmured in her ear:

"And you, having tossed your will away, are nothing!"

They had been the last words of his gospel, proclaimed to her that night on which she prayed!

The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet; the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action, she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the doctor's trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer, incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that encompa.s.ses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human lives with mystery. She looked up at him with this world of mingling knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling sensation of frigid awe.

"What--what?" he began. Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly away.

"Sit down, doctor. Do you like my flowers? Julian, are you still tired?

The coffee will wake you up. A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar? Here are the matches."

Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo. His unnatural lethargy was gradually pa.s.sing away into a more explicable fatigue, no longer speechless. Leaning on his elbow, he looked into her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim pathos. It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during the evening was still Cuckoo's confusion over her own misunderstanding at dinner, for he now again referred to it.

"Have they been chaffing you, Cuckoo?" he said, striking a match on the heel of his shoe and lighting a cigarette. "Have they been worrying you?

Never mind. It's only Val's fun. He doesn't mean anything by it. I say, how awfully pale you look to-night, and thin."

He paused, considering her with a glance that was almost severe.

"I'm all right," said Cuckoo, trying to repress the agitation she always felt now when speaking to Julian. "I ain't ill. Why don't you come to see me now?" she added. "You don't never come."

Julian glanced over to Valentine, who was standing by the hearth talking to the doctor, who sat in an armchair.

"I've been busy," he said. "I've had a lot of things to do. Do you miss me, Cuckoo, when I don't come?"

"Yes," she replied, but without softness. Then she added, lowering her voice almost to a whisper:

"Don't he want you to come?"

Julian did not reply, but puffed rather moodily at his cigarette, glancing towards Valentine. He was thinking of the conversation at the Savoy and of the antagonism between Valentine and Cuckoo. Suddenly there came into his mind a dull wish to reconcile these two on the last night of the year, to--in Valentine's own words--bury the hatchet. He sat meditating over his plan and trying to revolve different and dramatic methods of accomplishing it. Presently he said:

"Cuckoo, you and Val have got to be friends from to-night."