Flames. Robert Hichens

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СКАЧАТЬ his white face.

      It was the dawn, and, standing there, he looked like the spirit of the dawn, painted against the dying night in such pale colours, white, blue, and shadowy gold, a wonder of death and of life.

      In the silence Dr. Levillier and Julian gazed at him, and he seemed a mystery to them both, a strange enigma of purity and of unearthliness.

      "Good-bye, Cresswell," Levillier said at last.

      "Good-bye, doctor."

      "Good-bye, Valentine."

      Julian held out his hand to grasp his friend's, but Valentine began looping up the curtain and did not take it. In his gentlest voice he said to Julian:

      "Good-bye, dear Julian, good-bye. The dawn is on our friendship, Julian."

      "Yes, Valentine."

      Valentine added, after a moment of apparent reflection:

      "Take Rip away with you just for to-night. I don't want to be bitten in my sleep."

      And when Julian went away, the little dog eagerly followed him, pressing close to his heels, so close that several times Julian could not avoid kicking him.

      As soon as the flat door had closed on his two friends, Valentine walked down the passage to the drawing-room, which was shrouded in darkness. He entered it without turning on the light, and closed the door behind him. He remained in the room for perhaps a quarter of an hour. At length the door opened again. He emerged out of the blackness. There was a calm smile on his face. Two of his fingers were stained with blood, and to one a fragment of painted canvas adhered.

      When Valentine's man-servant went into the room in the morning and drew up the blinds, he found, to his horror, the picture of "The Merciful Knight" lying upon the floor. The canvas hung from the gold frame in shreds, as if rats had been gnawing it.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      THE PICCADILLY EPISODE

      Doctor Levillier and Julian bade each other good-bye on the doorstep. The doctor hailed a hansom, but Julian preferred to walk. He wished to be alone, to feel the cold touch of the air on his face. The dawn was indeed just breaking, ever so wearily. A strong wind came up with it over the housetops, and Victoria Street looked dreary in the faint, dusky, grey light, which grew as slowly in the cloudy sky as hope in a long-starved heart. Julian lived in Mayfair, and he now walked forward slowly towards Grosvenor Place, making a deliberate detour for the sake of exercising his limbs. He was glad to be out under the sky, glad to feel the breeze on his face, and to be free from the horror of that little room in which he had kept so appalling a vigil. The dull lines of the houses stretching away through the foggy perspective were gracious to his eyes. His feet welcomed the hard fibre of the pavement. They had learned in that night almost to shudder at the softness of a thick carpet. And all his senses began to come out of their bondage and to renew their normal sanity. Only now did Julian realize how strenuous that bondage had been, a veritable slavery of the soul. Such a slavery could surely only have been possible within the four walls of a building. An artificial environment must be necessary to such an artificial condition of feeling. For Julian now gradually began to believe that Dr. Levillier was right, and that he had somehow allowed himself to become unnaturally affected and strung up. He could believe this in the air and in the dawn. For he escaped out of prison as he walked, and heard the dirty sparrows begin to twitter as they sank to the brown puddles in the roadway, or soared to the soot that clung round the chimneys which they loved.

      And yet he had been communing with death, had for the first time completely realized the fact and the meaning of death. What a demon of the world it was, sly, bitter, chuckling at its power, the one thing, surely, that has perfect enjoyment of all the things in the scheme of the earth. What a trick it had played on Julian and on Valentine. What a trick! And as this idea struck into Julian's mind he found himself on the pavement by the chemist's shop that is opposite to the underground railway station of Victoria. His eyes fell on the hutch of the boy-messengers, and he beheld through the glass shutter three heads. He crossed the road and tapped on the glass. A young man pulled it up.

      "Want to send a message, sir?"

      "No. I wish to speak to one of your boys, if the one I mean is here. Ah, there he is."

      Julian pointed to his little Hermes of the midnight, who was crouched within, uneasily sleeping, his chin nestling wearily among the medals which his exemplary conduct had won for him. The young man shook the child by the shoulder.

      "Hulloh, Bob!" he yelled. "Here's a gentleman wants to speak to yer."

      Bob came from his dreams with a jerk, and stared upon Julian with his big brown eyes. Presently he began to realize matters.

      "Want another doctor, sir? It ain't no manner of good," he remarked airily, beginning to search for his cap, and to glow in the prospect of another cab-ride.

      "No," said Julian. "I stopped to tell you that you were wrong. The gentleman is quite well again."

      He put his hand into his pocket and produced half a crown.

      "There's something for your mistake," he said.

      Bob took it solemnly, and, as Julian walked on, called after him:

      "It wasn't my fault, sir; it was father's."

      He had more desire to shine as an intellectual authority on great matters of dissolution than to respect the departed. Julian could not help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by, a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there with the stray bugles which survived from some bygone era of comparative respectability. Her penetrating snores denoted that she was oblivious of the lounging approach of the policeman, whose blue and burly form was visible in the extreme distance. Julian stopped to observe her reflectively. His eye, which loved the grotesque, was pleased by the bedragglement of her attitude, by the flat foot, in its bursting boot, which protruded from the ocean of her mud-stained petticoats, by the wisps of coarse hair wandering in the breeze above her brazen wrinkles. Poor soul! she kept a diary of her deeds, even though she could perhaps only make a mark where her signature should have been. Julian stared at her very intently, and as he did so he started violently, for across the human background which her sleeping dissipation supplied there seemed to float the vague shadow, suggestion, call it what you will, of a tongue of flame.

      He walked hastily on, angrily blaming his nerves. As he passed the policeman he fancied he noticed that the man glanced at him with a certain flickering suspicion. Was horror legibly written in his face? he wondered uneasily, confessing to himself that even in the dawn and the lap of Grosvenor Place a horror had again seized him. What did this shadow which he had now twice seen portend? Surely his nerves were not permanently upset. He was at first heartily ashamed of himself. Near St. George's Hospital, gaunt and grey in the morning, he stopped again, bent his left arm forcibly, and with his right hand felt the hard lump of muscle, that sprang up like a ball of iron under his coat sleeve. And as he felt it he cursed himself for the greatest of all fools. Thin, meagre little men of the town, СКАЧАТЬ