"What are you come for?" she asked, never taking her eyes from his.
"To see you. I have never yet returned your kind call upon me."
"Eh?"
Cuckoo spoke in the tone of one who had become deaf, and she felt as if the agitation of her mind actually clamoured within her like a crowd of human voices, deadening sounds from without. Valentine repeated his remark, adding:
"Won"t you ask me to sit down?"
He put his hand on the back of a chair.
"May I?"
Cuckoo gave her body a jerk which brought her feet down to the floor, so that she was sitting upright. She pushed out one of her hands as if in protest.
"You can"t sit here," she murmured.
"I? Why not?"
"I can"t have you here, nor I won"t either."
Her voice was growing louder and fiercer as the first paralysis of surprise died gradually away from her. After all, she had not buckled on her armour only to run away from the enemy in it. The street Arab impudence was not quite killed in her by the strange influence of this man. The mere fact of having her feet firmly planted upon the floor gave Cuckoo a certain fillip of courage, and she tossed her head with that old vulgar gesture of hers which suggested the harridan. She pointed to the door.
"Out you go!" she cried.
For her intrepidity had not risen to calm contemplation of an interview.
She was only bracing herself up to the necessary momentary endurance of his presence, which followed upon Mrs. Brigg"s admittance of him within the door.
Valentine heard the gentle hint unmoved, and replied to it by drawing a chair out from the table and sitting down upon it. A sort of rage, stirred by terror, ran over Cuckoo. She seized the back of his chair with both hands and shook it violently.
"No, you don"t stay," she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; "I won"t have it!"
It was characteristic of her to lose all sense of dignity at an instant, when dignity might have served her purpose. Her outburst might have been directed against a statue. Valentine neither moved nor looked in any way affected. Glancing at Cuckoo with a whimsical amus.e.m.e.nt, he said:
"What a child you are! When will you learn wisdom!"
Cuckoo took away her hands. A conviction pierced her that the weapons a woman may use with effect against an ordinary man could be of no service now, and with this man. She faded abruptly from anger and violence into fatigue, always closely accompanied by fear.
"I"m awfully tired to-night," she said. "Please do go! I"m home because I"m tired."
"The walk from Harley Street was too much for you. You shouldn"t make such exertions."
For the first time a sinister note rang in his voice.
"I shall go where I like," Cuckoo answered, and this time with some real st.u.r.diness of manner. "It ain"t nothin" to you where I go, nor what I do."
"How can you tell that?"
She laid her chin in the upturned palms of her two hands, planting her elbows on her knees.
"How can it be?" she said. "I"m nothin" to you, nor I ain"t going to be either."
"That"s what you say."
"And it"s G.o.d"s truth too!" she cried again with violence, as the sense of Valentine"s inflexible power grew in her.
"I"m going to smoke if you will allow me," Valentine said.
Slowly he drew out and lit a cigarette, Cuckoo neither refusing nor permitting it. With protruding lips he threw the light smoke round him.
Then speaking through it he said:
"Tell me why you go to Harley Street."
"I ain"t goin" to talk to you."
"Tell me why. It lies out of your beat; it"s a respectable thoroughfare."
The words were said to sting. Cuckoo let them go by. She had been stung too often, and repet.i.tion of cruelty sometimes kills what it repeats. She set her lips to silence, with a look of obstinacy not impressive, but merely mulish and childish.
"Well?" Valentine said.
She made no answer. He did not seem angry, but continued:
"You find few fish for your net there, I imagine. But perhaps you don"t go for fish. What was the name you read upon the door while I watched you?"
This time Cuckoo, changing her mind, as she often did, with all the swiftness of a crude nature, answered him:
"You know well enough!"
"It was Dr. Levillier, wasn"t it?"
She nodded her head silently.
"Why do you go to his door? What do you want with him?"
Cuckoo"s quick woman"s instinct detected a suspicion of something that was like anxiety in his voice as he said the words. In an instant the warm impulse that, in her silent meditation, had led her to buckle on her armour and to think, with a certain courage, that she was to fight one day, stirred and glowed and leaped up, an impulse greater than herself.
The fear that had fallen upon her was lessened, for she felt that this man, too, might, nay did, know fear.
"What"s that to you?"
She turned upon him boldly with the question, and he knew her for the first time as an antagonist, who might actively attack as well as pa.s.sively hate. He leaned forward, and looked into her eyes searchingly, with a sort of rapture, of anxiety, too. It recalled something to Cuckoo.
She tried to remember what, but for a moment could not. Then, as if rea.s.sured, he resigned his eager and nervous posture of inquiry. That second movement brought the light that Cuckoo"s puzzled mind sought.
It was Julian who had looked first into her eyes with that strange watchfulness. These men echoed one another in that glance which she could not understand. What they sought in her eyes she could not tell.
If it were the same thing it could not be love. And it seemed to be a thing that they feared to find.
"Doctor Levillier is a great friend of mine," Valentine said. "He is a famous nerve-doctor. Seeing you hovering about his door led me to suppose you might be ill, and were going to consult him. I hope you are not ill."
"Not I!"