Flames. Robert Hichens

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СКАЧАТЬ dear doctor," he said, "what a pandemonium! I nearly came to your assistance."

      "It's very lucky you didn't, Cresswell," the doctor answered, almost grimly.

      "Why?"

      "Because if you had you might chance to be a dead man by this time."

      Out on the sea, under the streaming clouds that fled before the wind, Julian recalled the strange terseness of that reply, and the perhaps stranger silence that followed it. For Valentine had made no comment, had asked for no explanation. He had simply dropped the subject, and the three men had remained together for a few minutes, constrained and ill at ease. Then the doctor had said:

      "Let us go back now to my room."

      Valentine and he assented, and got upon their feet to follow him, but when he opened the door there came up from the servants' quarters the half-strangled howling of the mastiffs. Involuntarily Dr. Levillier paused to listen, his hand behind his ear. Then he turned to the young men, and held out his right hand.

      "Good-night," he said. "I must go down to them, or there will be a summons applied for against me in the morning by one of my neighbours."

      And they let themselves out while he retreated once more down the stairs.

      The drive home had been a silent one. Only when Julian was bidding

       Valentine good-night had he found a tongue to say to his friend:

      "The devil's in all this, Valentine."

      And Valentine had merely nodded with a smile and driven off.

      Now, in the sea solitude that was to be a medicine to his soul, Julian went round and round in his mental circus, treading ever the same saw dust under foot, hearing ever the same whip crack to send him forward. His isolation bent him upon himself, and the old salt's hoarse murmurings of the "Chiney" seas in no way drew him to a healthier outlook. Why Valentine returned for him that night he did not know. That might have been merely the prompting of a vagrant impulse. Julian cursed that impulse, on account of the circumstances to which it directly led; for there was a peculiar strain of enmity in them which had affected, and continued to affect, him most disagreeably. To behold the instinctive hostility of another towards a person whom one loves is offensively grotesque to the observer, and at moments Julian hated the doctor's mastiffs, and even hated the unconscious Rip, who lay, in a certain shivering discomfort and apprehension, seeking sleep with the determination of sorrow. There are things, feelings, and desires, which should surely be kicked out of men and dogs. Such a thing, beyond doubt, was a savage hatred of Valentine. What prompted it, and whence it came, were merely mysteries, which the dumbness of dogs must forever sustain. But what specially plunged Julian into concern was the latent fear that Dr. Levillier might echo the repulsion of his dogs and come to look upon Valentine with different eyes. Julian's fine jealousy for his friend sharpened his faculties of observation and of deduction, and he had observed the little doctor's dry reception of Valentine after the struggle on the stairs, and his eager dismissal of them both to the street door on the howling excuse that rose up from the basement. Such a mood might probably be transient, and only engendered by the fatigue of excitement, or even by the physical exhaustion attendant upon the preservation of Valentine from the rage of Rupert and Mab. Julian told himself that to dwell upon it, or to conceive of it as permanent, was neither sensible nor acute, considering his intimate knowledge of the doctor's nature, and of his firm friendship for Valentine. That he did continue most persistently to dwell upon it, and with a keen suspicion, must be due to the present desolation of his circumstances, and to the vain babble of the blue-coated Methuselah, whose intellect roamed incessantly through a marine past, peopled with love episodes of a somewhat Rabelaisian character.

      At the end of five days Julian abruptly threw up the sponge and returned to London, abandoning the old salt to the tobacco-chewing, which was his only solace during the winter season, now fast drawing to a close. He went at once to see Valentine, who had a narrative to tell him concerning Marr.

      "You have probably read all about Marr in the papers?" he asked, when he met Julian.

      The question came at once with his hand-grasp.

      "No," Julian said. "I shunted the papers, tried to give myself up entirely to the sea, as the doctor advised. What has there been?"

      "Oh, a good deal. I may as well tell it to you, or no doubt Lady Crichton will. People exaggerate so much."

      "Why—what is there to exaggerate about?"

      "The inquest was held," Valentine answered. "And every effort was made to find the woman who came with Marr to the hotel and evaporated so mysteriously, but there was no one to identify her. The Frenchman had not noticed her features, and the housemaid, as you remember, was a fool, and could only say she was a common-looking person."

      "Well," Julian said, rather eagerly, "but what was the cause of death?"

      "That was entirely obscure. The body seemed healthy—at least the various organs were sound. There was no obvious reason for death, and the verdict was, simply, 'Died from failure of the heart's action.'"

      "Vague, but comprehensive."

      "Yes; I suppose we shall all die strictly from the same cause."

      "And that is all?"

      "Not quite. It appears that a description of the dead man got into the papers and that he was identified by his wife, who read the account in some remote part of the country, took the train to town, and found that Marr was, as she suspected, the man whom she had married, from whom she had separated, and whose real name was Wilson, the Wilson of a notorious newspaper case. Do you remember it?"

      "What, an action against a husband for gross cruelty, for incredible, unspeakable inhumanity—some time ago?"

      "Yes. The wife got a judicial separation."

      "And that is the history of Marr?"

      "That is, such of his history as is known," Valentine said in his calm voice.

      While he had been speaking his blue eyes had always been fixed on

       Julian's face. When Julian looked up they were withdrawn.

      "I always had a feeling that Marr was secretly a wretch, a devil," Julian said now. "It seems I was right. What has become of the wife?"

      "I suppose she has gone back to her country home. Probably she is happy. Her first mate chastised her with whips. To fulfil her destiny as a woman she ought now to seek another who is fond of scorpions."

      "Women are strange," Julian said, voluptuously generalizing after the manner of young men.

      Valentine leaned forward as if the sentence stirred some depth in his mind and roused him to a certain excitement.

      "Julian," he exclaimed, "are you and I wasting our lives, do you think? Since you have been away I have thought again over our conversation before we had our first sitting. Do you remember it?"

      "Yes, Valentine."

      "You said then I had held you back from so much."

      "Yes."

      "And I have been asking myself СКАЧАТЬ