Flames Part 64

"Oh yes. One will must always work upon another, or else there could be no story worth the telling."

"Oh, I see; that's it."

Valentine again broke into laughter.

"You see, do you?" he said. "You see that, but do you see the truth of what I told you before about the connection of the will with the body?

Do you see why you have no power now, can never have power again? Do you understand that the wreck of your body inevitably causes the wreck of your will, so that it really dies and ceases, because it can no more influence others? Do you understand that? I'll make you understand it now. Come here."

He got up from his chair and seized her two hands in his, dragging her almost violently up from the sofa. Her fear of him, always lurking near, came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back, moved by an irresistible repulsion. The slight and momentary struggle between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to come down. It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour.

Valentine's hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was useless. She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the gla.s.s that stood over the mantelpiece. Pus.h.i.+ng back the table behind them, he made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.

"Look there!" he cried; "look at yourself well! How can you have power over anybody?"

Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from the mirror, and Cuckoo--forced to obedience--examined them as if indeed they were a picture. She saw the man's face, fair, beautiful, refined, triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that filled the face with amazingly vivid expression. She saw the bright blue eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile. There was health in the face as well as thought. And there was power, which is greater than health, more beautiful even than beauty. And then she turned her eyes to the face's companion. Thin, sharp, faded, it met her eyes, half-shrouded in the thick, tumbled hair that shone in the mirror with the peculiar frigid glare that can only be imparted by a chemical dye, and can never be simulated by nature. One cheek was chalk-white. The other, which had been pressed against the horsehair of the sofa, showed a harsh, scarlet patch. All the varying haggard expressions of the world seemed crowding in the eyes of this scarecrow, and peering beneath the thickly blackened eyelashes that struck a violent discord against the yellow hair. The thin lips of the mouth were pressed together in an expression of pain, fear, and weariness. Shadows slept under the eyes where the face had fallen into hollows. To-night there seemed no vestige of prettiness in those peaked features. Nothing of health, youth, gaiety, or even girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed in its reflection.

How, indeed, could such a creature have power over fellow man or woman for good or for evil? If weakness can be written without words, it seemed written in that wasted countenance, which Cuckoo examined with a creeping horror that numbed her like frost. As she did so, Valentine was watching the ungraciousness of her face in the gla.s.s deepen and glide, moment by moment, into greater ugliness, greater degradation. And as the little light there had ever been behind those unquiet eyes, faded gradually away, in his reflected eyes the light leaped up into fuller glare, sparkling to unbridled triumph. And his reflected lips smiled more defiantly, until the smile was no longer touched merely with triumph, but with something more vehement and more malign! Cuckoo did not see the change. She saw only herself, and her heart cried and wailed, What good--what good to love Julian? What good to hate Valentine? What good to fight for the man she loved against the man she loathed? As well set a doll to move its tense joints against an army, or a scarecrow to defy a G.o.d! Never before had she realized thoroughly the complete tragedy of her life. Hitherto she had a.s.sisted at it in fragments, coming in for a scene here, a scene there. Now she sat through the whole of the five acts, and the only thing she missed was the fall of the curtain. That remained up. But why? There was--there could be--nothing more to come, unless a dreary recapitulation of such dreary events as had already been displayed. Such a cup could hold no wine that was not foul, thick, and poisonous. And she had known herself so little as to imagine that she could really love, and that her love might fulfil itself in protection instead of sensual gratification. Yes, vaguely she had believed that.

She had even believed that she could put on armour and do battle against--and at this point in her desperate meditation the lady of the feathers s.h.i.+fted her eyes from her own face mirrored to the face beside it. As she did so, a sudden cry escaped from her lips. For a moment she thought she saw the face of the dead Marr, and the hallucination was so vivid that when it was gone and the mirror once more revealed the face of Valentine, Cuckoo had no thought but that she had really seen Marr.

She turned sharply round and cast a glance behind her. Then:

"Did you see him?" she whispered to Valentine.

"Whom?"

"Him--Marr! He's not dead; he's here; he's here, I tell you. I see him in the gla.s.s!"

She s.h.i.+vered. The room seemed spinning round with her, and the two faces danced and sprang in the mirror, as if a hand shook it up and down, from side to side.

"If he is here," Valentine said, "it is not in the way you fancy. Your imagination has played you a trick."

"Didn't you--didn't you see him? Don't you see him now?"

"I see only you and myself."

As if for a joke he bent his head and peered closely at the mirror, like a man endeavouring to discern some very pale and dim reflection there.

"No, he's--he's not there!" he murmured, "but--"

With a harsh exclamation he dashed his fist against the mirrored face of the lady of the feathers. The gla.s.s cracked and broke from top to bottom.

Cuckoo cried out. Valentine's hand had blood upon it. He did not seem to know this, and swung round upon her with an almost savage fury.

"Don't--don't, for G.o.d's sake," she cried, fearing an attack.

But he made no movement against her. On the contrary, an expression of relief chased the anger from his lips and eyes.

"Ah!" he said, "that's a lying mirror! It lied to you and to me. I smashed it. Well, I'll give you another that is more truthful, and more ornamental too."

"What was it you saw?" she murmured.

"A silly vision, power where there is only weakness; a will, a soul, where there could not be one!"

"Eh? was it that you struck at?"

"Why do you ask?" he said with sudden suspicion.

"You struck where my face was," she said doggedly. "You did, you did!"

"Nonsense!"

"It ain't! Why did you do it, then?"

A gleam of hope had shot into her eyes, lit by his weird attack upon her mirrored image. After all, despite his sneers at her faded body, his gibes at her faded and decaying soul, he struck at her as a man strikes at the thing he fears. In that faded soul a wild hope and courage leaped up, banis.h.i.+ng all the sick despair which had preceded it. The lady of the feathers faced Valentine with a deathless resolution of glance and of att.i.tude.

"You've been telling lies," she said "you've been telling me d.a.m.ned lies!"

"What do you mean?"

"You said as I was--was done with."

A forced smile came like a hissing snake on Valentine's lips.

"So you are!"

"I ain't! I ain't! What's more, you know it!"

"You have broken yourself to pieces as I have broken that mirror!"

He spoke with an effort after scathing contempt, but she detected a quiver of agitation in his voice.

"If I have, I'll break you yet!" she cried.

"Me? What are you talking about?"

"You know well enough."

"But do you know--do you know that I--I am Marr?"

He almost whispered the last words! A chill of awe fell over the lady of the feathers. She did not understand what he meant, and yet she felt as if he spoke the truth, as if this inexplicable mystery were yet indeed no fiction, no phantasy, but stern fact, and as if, strangely, she had at the back of her mind divined it, known it when she first knew Valentine, yet only realized it now that he himself told her. She did not speak. She only looked at him, turning white slowly as she looked.

"I am Marr," he repeated. "Now do you understand my gospel? Understand it if you can, for you are bereft of the power that belongs of right only to the woman who is pure. Long ago, perhaps, you might have fought me. Who knows, you might even have conquered me? But you have thrown yourself to the wolves, and they have torn you till you are only a skeleton. And how can a soul dwell in a skeleton? Your soul, your will, is as useless as that vagrant soul of Valentine, which I expelled into the air and into the night. It can do nothing; you can do nothing either. If I have ever feared you, and hated you because I feared you, I have fooled myself. I have divined your thoughts. I have known your enmity against me, and your love--_yours_!--for Julian. But if the soul and the will of Valentine could not save Julian from my possession, how can yours? You are an outcast of the streets! Go back to the streets. Live in them! Die in them! They are your past, your present, your future. They are your h.e.l.l, your heaven. They are everything to you. I tell you that you are as much of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as you tread night after night. And what soul can a street thing have? What can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons, and who follows every voice that calls? I feared you. I might as well have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an autumn leaf. I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men raise up for themselves as a bogey. Will is G.o.d! Will is the Devil! Will is everything! And you--you, having tossed your will away--are nothing."

He had spoken gravely, even sombrely. On the last word he was gone.

The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight. Her face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered canary-coloured hair. Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror, and with awe. Yet she looked undaunted. Staring at the door through which the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered:

"It ain't true! It ain't! Nothin' does for a woman; not when she loves a man! Nothin'. Nothin'."

She fell down against the hard horsehair sofa, and stretched her arms upon it, and laid her head against them, as if she prayed.