Flames Part 87

Spears of gold were thrust forth.

"Flames," the doctor whispered to himself. "Flames! The will, the soul of G.o.d in nature."

PART V--FLAMES

CHAPTER I

VALENTINE INVITES HIS GUESTS

Valentine and Julian sat together in the tentroom at night, as they sat together many months ago, when Julian confessed his secret and Valentine expressed his strange desire to have a different soul. Now it was deep winter. The year was old. In three days it must die. It lay in the snow, like some abandoned beggar waiting for the inevitable end. Some, who were happy, would fain have succoured it and kept it with them. Others, who were sad, said: "Let it go--this beggar. Already it has taken too many alms from us." But neither the happy nor the sad could affect its fate. So it lay in the snow and in the wind, upon its deathbed.

The tentroom had not been altered. Still the green draperies, veiled walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling. The fire danced and shone. The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness.

Only Rip was gone from the broad and cus.h.i.+oned divan upon which he had loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and Julian listened or replied. The room was the same, and this very fact emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it. They leaned in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to time in cigarette-smoke. No sound of London reached them in this small room. Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain.

Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul. The face of Julian was drawn and heavy. His eyes were downcast. His arms hung over the cus.h.i.+oned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued. From time to time he opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if he ground them together. The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth.

The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the steps of evening on an autumn day--grey, as if it clothed processes of decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the creaking threshold of premature age.

The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye. There was still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in his features. The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were the lips of Julian. The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease. Yet he, too, was changed. Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, a.s.serted itself.

It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pa.s.s in a fleeting gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed immobility of a mask. Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness. Valentine's was a hard and shameless face, although his features, if coa.r.s.er than of old, were still n.o.ble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.

He was looking across at Julian, who held idly between his lax fingers a letter written with violet ink upon pink paper, which had a little bird stamped in the left-hand corner.

"When did you get it?" he said.

"Two or three days ago, I think. I can't remember. I can't remember anything now," Julian answered heavily.

"And you have had two since?"

"Yes. And to-day she called."

"You were out?"

"Yes."

"She shows herself very exigent all of a sudden. She is afraid of losing you. I told you long ago she cherished absurd ambitions with regard to you. Do you intend to answer her notes?"

"Oh yes," Julian said. "Cuckoo has always been very fond of me; very fond."

He glanced at the absurdly vulgar little bird in the corner of the letter. "And that's something," he added slowly.

"You are weighed down with grat.i.tude? No wonder. Are you grateful to others who have always cared for you in a different way--unselfishly, that is?"

"I don't seem to feel very much about anybody now," Julian said. "I do such a lot. The more you do, the less you feel. d.a.m.nable life! All cruelty. I can't feel satisfied. But there must be something; something I haven't tried. I must find it," he said, almost fiercely, and, stirring in a sudden energy, "I must find it--or--curse you, Val, why don't you find it for me?"

Valentine laughed.

"The last novelty has failed? You are a very discontented sinner, Julian.

And yet London begins to think you too enterprising. I hear that Lady Crichton is the last person to shut her doors against you. What did she hear of?"

"How should I know?"

He laughed bitterly.

"She oughtn't to be particular. She used to receive Marr. I met him first in her yellow drawing-room."

"London had not discussed him, perhaps. You are rapidly becoming a legend and a warning. That is fame. To be the accepted warning for others."

"Or infamy; which is much the same thing."

"But you are only at the first posting-station of your journey,"

Valentine continued, looking at him with a smile. "If you are dissatisfied, it is because you have not tasted yet half that strength of the spring we once talked of. You have not completely thrown off the foolish yoke of public opinion. The chains still jangle about you.

Cast them away and you will yet be happy."

"Shall I? Shall I, Valentine?"

The exhausted, worn, and weary figure leaned abruptly forward in its chair. Julian's tired eyes glittered greedily.

"To be happy, I'd commit any crime," he said.

"Crime is merely opinion," Valentine answered. "Everything is opinion.

You will commit crimes probably. Most brave men do."

"But shall I be happy?"

"You are greedy, Julian, greedy of everything, knowledge of life, l.u.s.t, joy. You are never satisfied. That's because you and I fasted for so long; and the greedy man is never quite happy while he is eating, for he is always antic.i.p.ating the next course. And, let philosophers say what they will, happiness does not lie in antic.i.p.ation. Go on eating. Pa.s.s on from course to course. At last there will come a time, a beautiful time, when your appet.i.te will be satisfied and you will rest contented. But, remember, not till you have journeyed through the whole _menu_, played with your dessert and even drunk your black coffee. Go on, only go on.

Men and women are unhappy. They think it is because they have done too much. They reproach themselves for a thousand things that they have done.

Fools! They are unhappy because they have not done enough. The text which will haunt me on my deathbed will be: 'I have left undone those things which I ought to have done.' Yes, during my long cursed years of inaction, when I was called the Saint of Victoria Street. Ah! Julian, you and I slept; we are awake now. You and I were dead; we are now alive. But we are only at the beginning of our lives. We have those years, those white and empty years, to drown in the waters of Lethe. They are like monstrous children that should have been strangled almost ere they were born, white, vacant children. And now, day by day, we are pressing them down in the waters with our hands. At last they will sink. The waves will flow over their haggard faces. The waves will sweep them away. Then we shall be happy. We shall redeem those years on which the locust fed, and we shall be happy."

"Yes, by G.o.d, we shall be happy, we will--we will be happy. Only teach me to be happy, Valentine, anywhere, anyhow."

"Not with the lady of the feathers. She will not make you happy."

"Cuckoo? No! For she's terribly unhappy herself. Poor old Cuckoo. I wonder what she's doing now."

"Searching in the snow for her fate," Valentine said, with a sneer.

It was not so. Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible. And the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows and night-fellows.

"I am going to write to Cuckoo," Julian said a day later. "What shall I say?"