Flames Part 56

Valentine met his eyes calmly.

"If I have changed," he said slowly, "it cannot be in essentials. Look at me. Is my face altered? Is my expression different?"

"No, Valentine."

Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater happiness. To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at rest. No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was really and radically evil. Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick motion, its powers of varied movement. Where could be the harm of that?

And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely too. He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.

"You mean you are beginning to play with life?" he said.

"That is it exactly. I am putting life through its paces. After all, no man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps--but only after he has seen and known it--to reject. To do that is like living in the midst of a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm."

"Yes, yes, I see. Then you think that Cuckoo is jealous of me?--that that was all she meant?"

Julian again returned to the old question. Valentine replied:

"I feel sure of it. Women are always governed by their hearts. So much so that my last sentence is a truism, scarcely worthy the saying. Besides, my dear Julian, what would it matter if she were not? What could the att.i.tude of such a woman on any subject under the sun matter to you?"

The words were not spoken without intentional sarcasm. They stung Julian a little, but did not lead him, from any sense of false shame, to a feeble concealment of his real feeling.

"It does seem absurd, I dare say," he said. "But she's--well, she's not an ordinary woman, Val."

"Let us hope not."

"No; you don't understand. There's something strong about her. What she says might really matter, I think, to a cleverer man than I. She knows men, and then, Valentine, there's something else."

He stopped. There was a queer look of mystery in his face.

"Something else! What is it? What can there be?"

"I saw the flame as if it was burning in her eyes."

Valentine made an abrupt movement. It might have been caused by surprise, annoyance, anger, or simply by the desire to fidget which overcomes every one, not paralyzed, at some time or another. His action knocked over a chair, and he stooped to pick it up and set it in its place before he spoke. Then he said:

"The flame, you say! What on earth is your theory about this extraordinary flame? You seem to attach a strange importance to it. Yet it can only be the fire of a fancy, a jet from the imagination. Tell me, have you any theory about it, honestly? and if so, what is it?"

Julian was rather taken aback by this very sledgehammer invitation.

Hitherto the flame, and his thought of it, had seemed to have the pale vagueness and the mystery of a dream. When the flame appeared, it is true, he was oppressed by a sense of awe; but the awe was indefinite, blurred, resisting a.n.a.lysis, and quite inexplicable to another.

"I did not say I had any theory about it," he answered.

"But then, why do you consider it at all? And why seem to think that its supposed presence in the eyes of a woman makes that woman in any way different from others?"

"But I did not say I thought so," Julian said, rather hastily. "How you jump to conclusions to-day!"

"You implied it, and you meant it. Now, didn't you?"

"Perhaps I may have."

"This is all too much for me," Valentine said, showing now a very unusual irritation. He even began to pace up and down the room with a slow, soft footstep, monotonous and mechanical in its regularity. As he was walking he went on:

"I do really think, Julian, that it is a mistake to allow any fancy to get upon your nerves. You know what the doctor thought about this flame."

"Yes."

"And you know what I think."

"Do I?"

"Yes, that it is a mere chimera. But my opinion on such a subject has no particular value. The doctor is different. He is a great specialist. The nerves have been his constant study for years. If this vision continues to haunt you, you really ought to put yourself definitely into his hands."

"Perhaps I will," said Julian.

He spoke rather seriously and meditatively. Valentine, possibly because he was in the sort of peculiarly irritable frame of mind that will sometimes cause a man to dislike having his tendered advice taken, seemed additionally vexed by this reply, or at any rate struck by it. He paused in his walk, and seemed for an instant as if he were going to say something sharply sarcastic. Then suddenly he laughed.

"After all," he exclaimed in a calmer voice, "we are taking an absurdity mighty seriously."

But Julian would not agree to this view of the matter.

"I don't know that we are," he said.

"You don't know!"

"That is an absurdity. No, Valentine, I don't; I can't think that it is.

I saw it in Cuckoo's eyes only once, and that was--just--"

"Tell me just when you saw it."

The words came from Valentine's lips with a pressure, a hurry almost of anxiety. He seemed curiously eager about the history of this chimera. But Julian, eager too, and engrossed in thoughts that moved as yet in a maze full of vapors and of mists, did not find time to notice it.

"I noticed it just after, or when, she was begging me to go home."

"Like a good boy," Valentine hastily interposed. "Because her jealousy prompted her to hate the thought of your having any pleasure in which she did not share. Oh, you noticed the flame then. Did it, too, tell you to go home?"

He spoke rather harshly and flippantly, and apparently put the question without desire of an answer, and rather with the intention of ridicule than for any other reason. But Julian took it seriously and replied to it.

"Somehow I felt as if, perhaps, it did wish to speak some message to me, and that the message came, or might come, through her."

He spoke slowly, for indeed it was this action of words that was beginning to make clear to himself his own impression, so vague and so unpresentable before. As he thus traced it out, like a man following the blurred letters of an old inscription with the point of his stick, and gradually coming at their meaning, his excitement grew. He said, speaking with a rising emphasis of conviction:

"I'm not a mere fool. There is--there is something in all this; I feel it; I cannot be simply imagining. There is something. But I'm like a man in the dark. I can't see what it is; I can't tell. But you, Valentine, you, with your nature, so much better than I am, with so much deeper an insight, how is it you don't see this flame? Unless,"--and here Julian struck his hand violently on the table,--"unless it comes, as it seemed to come that night in the darkness, from you. If it's part of yourself--but then"--and his manner clouded again--"how can that be?"

"How indeed?" said Valentine, who had been watching him all through this outburst with a scrutiny that seemed almost uneasy, so narrow and so determined was it.

"Julian, listen to me; you trust me, don't you, and think my opinion worth something?"

"Worth everything."

"Well, I believe you're getting into an unnatural, if you weren't a man I should say a hysterical--habit of mind. If you can't throw it off by yourself, I must help you to do so."