Flames

And with that e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, half an uttered shiver, half a muttered curse, she gave herself to the fog, and was gone.

Doctor Levillier stood for a moment looking into the vague and dreamy darkness. Then he put on his coat and hat, caught up a cab whistle, and with a breath, sent a shrill and piercing note into the night. Long and mournfully it sounded. And only the moist silence answered like that paradox--a voice that is dumb. Again and again the cry went forth, and at last there was an answering rattle. Two bright eyes advanced in the fog very slowly, looking for the sound, it seemed, as for a thing visible.

The doctor got into the cab, and set forth in the fog to visit Valentine.

CHAPTER II

THE VOICE IN THE EMPTY ROOM

When the doctor arrived at the Victoria Street flat Valentine"s man answered his ring. Wade had been with Valentine for many years and was always famous for his great devotion to, and admiration of, his master.

Wade was also especially partial--as he would have expressed himself--to Doctor Levillier, and when he saw who the visitor was, his face relaxed into contentment that strongly suggested a smile.

"Back at last Wade, you see," the doctor said, cheerfully. "Is Mr.

Cresswell in?"

"No, sir. But I expect him every minute to dress for dinner. He"s dining out, and it"s near seven now. Will you come in and wait?"

"Yes."

The doctor entered and walked into the drawing-room, preceded by Wade, who turned on the light.

"Why! what have you been doing to the room?" the doctor said, looking round in some surprise. "Dear me. It"s very much altered."

In truth, the change in it was marked. The grand piano had vanished, and in its place stood an enormous cabinet made of wood, stained black, and covered with grotesque gold figures, whose unnatural faces were twisted into the expressions of all the vices. Some of these faces smiled, others scowled, others protruded forked tongues like snakes and seemed to hiss along the blackness of the background. The shapes of the figures were voluptuous and yet suggested, rather than fully revealed, deformity, as if the minds of these monsters sought to reveal their distortion by the very lines of their curved and wanton limbs. Upon the top of this cabinet stood a gigantic rose-coloured jar filled with orchids, the Messalinas of the hothouse, whose mauve corruption and spotted faces leered down to greet the gold goblins beneath. It was easy to imagine them whispering to each other soft histories of unknown sins, and jeering at the corrupt respectabilities of London, as they cl.u.s.tered together and leaned above the ruddy ramparts of the china, wild flowers as no hedgerow violet, or pale smirking primrose, is ever wild in the farthest wood.

Glancing from this cabinet, and those that stood upon it, the doctor was aware of a deep and dusty note of red in the room, sounding from carpet and walls, tingling drowsily in the window curtains and in the cushions that lay upon the couches. This was not the crude and cheerful sealing-wax red with which the festive Philistine loves to dye the whiteness of his dining-room walls, cooling its chubby absurdity with panels of that old oak, which is forever new. It was a dim and deep colour, such as a dust-filmed ruby might emit if illuminated by a soft light. And Valentine had shrouded it so adroitly that though it pervaded the entire room, it always seemed distant and remote, a background, vast perhaps, but clouded and shadowed by nearer things. These nearer things were many, for Valentine"s original asceticism, which had displayed itself essentially in the slight bareness of his princ.i.p.al sitting-room had apparently been swept away by a tumultuous greed for ornaments. The room was crowded with furniture, chairs, and sofas of the most peculiar shapes, divans and tables, bookstands and settees. One couch was made of wood, carved and painted into the semblance of a woman, between whose outstretched arms was placed the pillow to receive the head of one resting there. Another lay on the bent backs of two grinning Indian boys, whose crouching limbs seemed twined into a knot. Upon the tables and cabinets stood a thousand ornaments, many of them silver toys, sweetmeat-boxes, tiny ivory figures and wriggling atrocities from the East. But what struck the doctor most in the transformation of the room was the panorama presented upon its walls. The pictures that he remembered so well were all gone. The cla.s.sical figures, the landscapes full of atmosphere and of delicacy had vanished. And from their places leered down jockeys and street-women painted by Jan Van Beers and Degas, Chaplin and Gustav Courbet, while above the mantelpiece, where once had hung "The Merciful Knight," a Cocotte by Leibl smoked a pipe into the room. It seemed incredible that Valentine could be at rest in such a livid chamber, and not even the vague communications of Cuckoo woke in the doctor such a definite and alive sensation of discomfort as this vision of outward change that must surely betoken an inward transformation of the most vivid and unusual kind. And everywhere, as a deep and monotonous bell ringing relentlessly through a symphony of discordant and crying pa.s.sions, there sounded that sinister note of deep and dusty red. Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears a monotonous song of dull and weary change. No silence had ever before spoken to him so powerfully. He was greatly affected, and did not scruple to show his discomfort to Wade, who waited respectfully by the door.

"What an alteration!" he said again, but in a lower and more withdrawn voice. "I cannot recognize the room I once knew--and loved!"

"Mr. Valentine has been doing it up, sir."

"But why, Wade; why?"

"I don"t know, sir; a fancy, I suppose, sir."

"An evil one," the doctor murmured to himself.

He glanced at Wade. It struck him that the man"s mind might possibly march with Cuckoo"s in detection of his master"s transformation, if transformation there were. Wade returned the doctor"s glance with calm, good breeding.

"Mr. Valentine is well, I hope, Wade?" he said.

"Very well, sir, I believe."

"And Mr. Addison?"

"I couldn"t quite say, sir, as to that."

"Do you mean that he looks ill?"

"I couldn"t say, sir. Mr. Julian don"t look quite what he was, to my view, sir."

"Oh."

The butler"s level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and again a prophetic chord of change was struck.

"Thank you, Wade" said the doctor.

The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room.

Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose nerves played him tricks. He was, above all things, sane, both in mind and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation.

Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was, perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by the action of the imagination. Half, at least, of his great success in life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity. No man, in fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he.

Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there.

The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded chamber.

The hour was quiet. No fire danced in the grate. Doctor Levillier leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting Valentine"s return. But the composure which had already been slightly shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the empty room.

Sitting thus in it alone the doctor examined it with more detail, and with a more definite remembrance of Valentine"s habit of mind than before. And he found himself increasingly amazed and confounded. For not only was the change great, but it was not governed and directed by good taste, or even by any definite taste, either good or bad. A number of people might have devised the arrangement and selection of the ma.s.s of furniture and ornaments, and have thrown things down here and there in sheer defiance of each other"s predilections. Only in the setting, the red setting of the picture, was there evidence of the presence of a presiding genius. In that red setting the doctor supposed that he was to read Valentine. He could read n.o.body in the rest of the room, or perhaps everybody whose taste refused purity and calm as foolish Dead Sea growths. Some of the silver ornaments might have a.s.sembled in the garish boudoir of a Parisian _fille de joie_, as the carved woman might have been the couch to which Thais tempted Paphnuce, and the Indian boys the lifeless slaves of Aphrodite. The jockeys on the wall would have been at home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the _jeunesse doree_ of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds." The golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the masculine and feminine, the corrupt "modern" and the flagrant Philistine, the vaguely suggestive Nineteenth Century Athenian and the larky and unbridled schoolboy. A neurotic woman seemed to have been at work here, a sordid youth there. On a sidetable the hysterical man of our civilization fought a duel in taste with some Amazon whose kept vow had evidently wrought a cancer in her mind. In every corner there was the clash of civil war. Yet there was always the cloudy red, visible through the lattice-work of decoration, as the blue sky is visible through the lattice-work of a Tadema interior. In that clouded red the doctor felt himself reading a new yet powerful Valentine, and in the grotesque orchids leaning their misshapen chins upon the rosy rim of their vase.

Those flowers had evil faces, and they seemed strangely at home in the silent room where no clock ticked and no caged bird twittered. Only the red cloud spoke like a dull voice, and Doctor Levillier sat and listened to it, until he felt as if he began to know a new Valentine. There is an influence that emanates from lifeless things, strong, subtle, and penetrating; an influence in form, in colour, in scent, even in juxtaposition. And such influence is like a voice speaking to the soul.

There was a voice in that empty room; and the words it uttered stirred the doctor to a greater surprise, a greater dread than the words of Cuckoo. Her painted lips related that which might well be a legend of her fancy or of her hate. This voice related a reality and no legend.

As the doctor sat there he conversed of many strange and evil matters, of many discomforting affairs. He was the interrogator, the perpetual anxious questioner, and the voice in the empty room gave vague and sinister answers. That was a terrible catechism, a catechism of the devil, not of G.o.d. Question and answer flowed on, and in the doctor"s soul the anxiety and the distress ever deepened. Nor could he control their development, although at moments his common sense broke into the catechism like a cool voice from without, and sought to interrupt it finally. But the twig could not stay the torrent. And the darkness deepened, darkness in which there was a vision of fire, the vision of a man, fantastic and menacing. He was the genius of this room. This room sang of him. Yes, even now the twisted silver goblins, the curved monstrosities on the cabinet, the crouched Indian boys, the leering pictures, and always the dull red cloud on wall and carpet, cushion and hanging. And then a strange deception overtook the doctor and shook his usually steady nerves. The red cloud seemed to his observing eyes to tremble, like a flame shaken in a breath of wind, and to glow all around him. He looked again, endeavouring to laugh at his delusion. But the glow deepened and there was surely distinct movement. Everywhere on walls, floor, hangings, couches, faint, thin shadows took shape, grew more definite. He watched them and saw that they were tiny flames, glowing red relieved against the red. It was as if he sat in the midst of a ghostly furnace; for these flames had no pleasant crackling voices. Silently they burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly. He saw them move this way and that. Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly, as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided. The doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing to tremble and to murmur from their lips. Yet they sang no chorus, but always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him. He knew himself to be the victim of a delusion. He knew what he would have said to a patient seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses. In his common sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the actual. These flames were real. They had forms. They moved. They enclosed him in a circle. They embraced him. As he watched them he fancied that they longed to be near to him, and--and--yes--so ran his thoughts--to communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his. They trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire. They tried to escape from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a leash. The doctor was impelled ardently to believe that they yearned to find voices and to utter some word. And then, on a sudden, he recalled Julian"s declaration on the night of Valentine"s trance, that he had seen a flame shine from his friend"s lips, and fade away in the darkness. He recalled, too, Julian"s question about death-beds. Was the soul of a man a flame? And, if so, were these flames many souls, or one soul reproduced on all sides by his excitement, and by the intensity of his gaze after them?

They burned more clearly. Their forms were more defined. Then suddenly they grew vague, blurred, faint all around him. They faded. They died into the red of the room. And once more the doctor sat alone.

He listened and heard the click of a key in the front door. And then suddenly the horror that he had felt long ago, on the night when he was followed in Regent Street, once more possessed him. He got on his feet to face it, and, as the drawing-room door was pushed slowly open, faced Valentine.

CHAPTER III

THE DOCTOR MEETS TWO STRANGERS

Upon seeing the doctor, Valentine paused on the threshold of the door, and, as he paused, the doctor"s horror fled.

"Valentine," he said, holding out his hand.

"Doctor."

Their hands met and their eyes. And then Levillier had an instant sensation that he shook hands with a stranger. He looked upon the face of Valentine certainly, but he was aware of a subtle, yet large, change in it. All the features were surely coa.r.s.er, heavier. There was a line or two near the eyes, a loose fullness about the mouth. Yet, as he looked again, he could not be certain if it were so, or if his memory were at fault, groping after a transformation that was not there. The words he now said truthfully expressed his real feeling in the matter.

"You are quite a stranger to me," he said.