Flames Part 58

"Like what?"

"Why d'you stare at me? Anything wrong?"

"I wasn't staring at you," she a.s.serted. "The sun gets in my eyes if I look the other way."

"I'll draw the blind down," he said.

He got up from the table and shut the afternoon sun out. The tea-tray, the photographs, the little dogs, they two, were plunged in a greenish twilight manufactured by the sun with the a.s.sistance of the Venetian blind.

"There," Julian said, sitting down again, "now we shall all look ghostly."

"But if I do take a fancy to look at you, why shouldn't I, then?" Cuckoo asked.

"I don't mind," he laughed. "But you didn't seem pleased with me, I thought."

"Rot!"

"Oh! you were pleased, then?"

"I don't say as I was, or wasn't."

"You're rather like the Sphinx."

"What's that?"

"Enigmatic."

She didn't understand, and looked rather cross.

"I told you I wasn't looking at you," she exclaimed pettishly.

"Then you told a lie," Julian said, with supreme gravity. "Think of that, Cuckoo."

"And what would you ever tell me but lies if I was to ask you things?"

she rejoined quickly.

Julian began to see that there was something lurking in the background behind her show of temper. He wondered what on earth it was.

"Why should I tell you lies?" he said.

"Oh! to kid me. Men like that. You're just like the rest, I suppose."

"I suppose so."

She seemed vexed at his a.s.sent, and went on:

"Now, aren't you, though?"

"I say, yes."

"Well, you usen't to be," she exclaimed, with actual bitterness of accent and of look. "That's just why I was lookin' at you,--for I was lookin',--makin' out the difference."

"I'm just the same as I was," Julian said, and he spoke with quite sincere conviction.

"No, you ain't."

Having uttered this very direct contradiction, Cuckoo proceeded with great energy:

"You've been lettin' him do it. I know you have."

Julian was completely puzzled.

"What do you mean?" he asked, with a real desire for information.

"You know well enough. He's leadin' you wrong."

Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second, Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during the interval.

"Cuckoo, you're talking great nonsense," he said, forcing himself to speak quietly.

But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned from the subject or silenced.

"No, I ain't," she said. "Where was you last week? You didn't come in once."

"I was in Paris."

Cuckoo's brow clouded still more. Her knowledge of Paris was not intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of geographical or artistic. Julian's mention of the French capital drove a sword into her.

"With him?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, with Valentine."

"Oh, what did you do there?"

She spoke with angry insistence, and Julian could not help thinking of Valentine's remark, "That girl loves you." It seemed indeed that Cuckoo must have some deep and wholly personal reason prompting her to this strange demonstration of vexation.

"I can't tell you everything," Julian answered.

"Oh, you can't kid me over that. I know well enough what men go to Paris for!" she rejoined, with almost hysterical bitterness.

Julian was silent. It was curious, but this girl stirred his conscience from its sleep, as once Valentine alone could stir it. But by how different a method! The stillness and calm of one who was sinless were replaced by the vehemence and the pa.s.sion of one who was steeped in sin.

And yet the two opposites had, to some extent, the same effect. Julian did not yet realize this thoroughly, and did not a.n.a.lyze it at all. Had any one hinted to him that the waning influence of Valentine for good could ever be balanced by the waxing influence of the lady of the feathers, he would have laughed at the crazy notion. And in the first place he would have denied that Valentine's spell upon him had changed in nature; for Valentine was still as a G.o.d to him. And Cuckoo could never be a G.o.ddess, either to him or to any one else. But, though he would scarcely acknowledge it even to himself, he did not care for Cuckoo to know fully the changing way of his life. Perhaps it was the curiously strong line she had from the first taken with regard to his actions that made him careful with her. Perhaps it was the incident of the vision of the flame--but no; remembrance of that had been well-nigh lulled to sleep by the lullabies of Valentine, by his disregard of it, his certainty that it was an hallucination, a mirage. Whatever the cause might be, Julian felt somewhat like a naughty boy in the angry presence of Cuckoo. As he looked at her the greenish twilight painted a chill and menacing gleam in her eyes, and made her twisting lips venomous and acrid to his glance.

Her rouge vanished in the twilight, or seemed only as a dull, darkish cloud upon her thin and worn cheeks. She sat at the table almost like a scarecrow, giving the tables of some strange law to a trembling and an unwilling votary.

"I know!" she reiterated.

Julian said nothing. He did not choose to deny what was in fact the truth, that his stay in Paris had not been free from fault, and yet he did not feel inclined to do what most men in his situation must by all means have done, challenge Cuckoo's right to sit in judgment, or even for a moment to criticise any action of his. There was something about her, a frankness perhaps, which made it impossible to put her out of court by any allusion to her own life. And indeed that must have been cowardice and an impossibility. Besides, she put herself and her own deeds calmly away as unworthy and impossible of discussion, as things sunk down beneath the wave of notice or comment, remote from criticism or condemnation, because the life of their hopelessness had been so long and sunless.