"Because he is away from home at present."
"Oh!"
"Do you want to see him?"
"I suppose I can see him, like any one else, if I"ve a mind to."
"Well! He"s--he doesn"t see quite every one. His practice is only among the richest and smartest people in town. Some one else might answer your purpose better."
He spoke suavely, but the words he said cemented Cuckoo"s previously vague thought of trying, perhaps, to see Doctor Levillier into a sudden, strong determination. She divined that, for some reason, Valentine was anxious that she should not see him. That was enough. She would, at whatever cost, make his acquaintance.
"I"ll see him if I like," she said hastily, lost to any appreciation of wisdom, through the desire of aiming an instant blow at Valentine.
"Of course! Why not?" was his reply.
"You don"t want me to. I can see that," she went on, still more unadvisedly. "You needn"t think as you can get over me so easily."
Valentine"s smile showed a certain contempt that angered her.
"I know you," she cried.
"Do you?" he said. "I wonder if you would like to know me? Do you remember Marr?"
The lady of the feathers turned cold.
"Marr!" she faltered; "what of him?"
"You have not forgotten him."
"He"s dead!"
A pause.
"He"s dead, I say."
"Exactly! As dead as a strong man who has lived long in the world ever can be."
"What d"you mean? I say he"s dead and buried and done with." Her voice was rather noisy and shrill.
"That"s just where you make a mistake," Valentine said quite gravely, rather like a philosopher about to embark upon an argument. "He is not done with. Suppose you fear a man, you hate him, you kill him, you put him under the ground, you have not done with him."
"I didn"t kill him! I didn"t, I didn"t!" Cuckoo cried out, shrilly, half rising from the sofa. A wild suspicion suddenly came over her that Valentine was pursuing her as an avenger of blood, under the mistaken idea that she had done Marr to death in the night.
"Hush! I know that. He died naturally, as a doctor would say, and he has been buried; and by now probably he is a sh.e.l.l that can only contain the darkness of his grave. Yet, for all that, he"s not done with, Miss Bright."
"He is! he is!" she persisted.
The mention of Marr always woke terror in her. She sat, her eyes fixed on Valentine, her memory fixed on Marr. Perhaps for this reason what her memory saw and what her eyes saw seemed gradually to float together, and fuse and mingle, till eyes and memory mingled, too, into one sense, observant of one being only, neither wholly Marr nor wholly Valentine, but both in one. She had linked them together vaguely before, but never as now. Yet even now the clouds were floating round her and the vapours.
She might think she saw, but she could not understand, and what she saw was rather a phantom standing in a land of mirage than a man standing in the world of men.
"Some day, perhaps, I will prove to you that he is not," Valentine said.
"Eh, how?"
She had lost all self-consciousness now, and in her eagerness of fear, wonder, and curiosity seemed tormented by the veil of yellow hair that was flopping in frizzy strands round her face and over her eyes. She seized it in her two hands, and with a few shooting gestures, in and out, wound it into a dishevelled lump, which she stuck to the back of her head with two or three pins. All the time she was looking at Valentine for an answer to her question.
"Perhaps I don"t know how yet."
"Yes, you do, though. I can see you do. What have you got to do with him, with Marr?"
"I never said I had anything to do with him."
"Ah! but you have. I always knew it!"
"Many men are linked together by thin, perhaps invisible threads, impalpable and impossible to define."
The lady of the feathers was out of her depth in this sentence, so she only tossed her head and murmured:
"Oh, I dessay!" with an effort after contempt.
But Valentine"s mood seemed to change. An abstracted gaiety stole over him. If it was simulated, the simulation was very perfect and complete.
Sitting back in his chair, the cigarette smoke curling lightly round him, his large blue eyes glancing gravely now at Cuckoo crumpled up on the horsehair sofa, now meditatively at some object in the little room, or at the ceiling, he spoke in a low, clear, level voice, as if uttering his thoughts aloud, careless or oblivious of any listener.
"Every man who lives, and who has a personality, has something to do with many men whom he has never seen, whom he will never see. Messengers go from him as carrier-pigeons go from a ship. He may live alone, as a ship is alone in mid-ocean, but the messengers are winged, and their wings are strong. They fly high and they fly far, and wherever they pause and rest, that man has left a mark, has stamped himself, has uttered himself, has planted a seed of his will. Have you a religion?"
Valentine stopped abruptly after uttering this question, and waited for an answer. It was characteristic enough.
"What?" said the lady of the feathers, staring wide-eyed.
"I say, have you a religion?"
"Not I. How can I when I don"t go to no church?"
"That is, no doubt, a convincing proof of heathendom. And yet I have a religion that never leads me to a church door. My religion is will, my gospel is the gospel of influence, and my G.o.d is power. Will binds the world into a net, whose strands are like iron. Will dies if it is weak, but if it is strong enough it becomes practically immortal. But, though it lives itself, it has the power to kill others. It can murder a soul in a man or a woman, and throw it into the grave to decay and go to dust, and in the man it can create a soul diametrically opposite to the corpse, and the world will say the man is the same; but he is not the same. He is another man. Or if the will is not strong enough actually to kill a soul"--at this point Valentine spoke more slowly, and there was a certain note of uneasiness, even almost of agitation, in his voice--"it can yet expel it from the body in which it resides, and drive it, like a new Ishmael, into the desert, where it must hover, useless, hopeless, degraded, and naked, because it has no body to work in. Yes! yes! that must be so! The soul can have no power divorced from the body! none!
none!"
He got up from his chair, and began to pace the little room. Cuckoo watched him as a child might watch a wild animal in its cage. His face was hard and thin with deep thought, and hers was contorted under her yellow hair--contorted in a frantic effort to grasp and to understand what he was saying; for, stupid, ignorant as the lady of the feathers was, she had a sharp demon in her that often told her the truth, and this demon whispered now in her ear:
"Listen, and you may learn things that you long to know!"
And she listened motionless, her eyes bright and eager, her lips shut together, her slim body a-quiver with intensity, mental and physical.
"How can it?" Valentine went on. "What is a soul without a body? You cannot see it. You cannot hear it, and if you think you can, that is a vile trick of the mind, an hallucination. For if one man can see it, why not another? Here, let me look into your eyes again."
As he said the last words, he stopped opposite to Cuckoo, suddenly caught her chin in his two hands, which felt hard and cold, and forcibly pushed up her face towards his. She was terrified, beginning now to think him mad, and to fear personal injury. Gazing hard and furtively into her eyes, he said:
"No; it"s a lie! It is not there. It never was! It is dead and finished with, and I won"t fear it."