Part 55 (2/2)
”That is true enough.”
”Were you studying it when we met you the other night?”
”Yes.”
”With what result?” Julian asked with eager curiosity.
”That I understand something I never understood before--the charm of sin.”
Julian was greatly surprised at this deliverance of his friend, who uttered it in his coldly pure voice, looking serenely high-minded and even loftily intellectual.
”You find the charm of sin in Piccadilly?”
”I begin to find it everywhere, in every place in which human beings gather together.”
”You no longer feel yourself aloof from the average man, then?”
Valentine pressed his right hand slowly upon Julian's shoulder.
”No longer,” he answered quietly. ”Julian, you and I are emerging together from the hermitage in which we have dwelt retired for so long.
I always thought you would emerge some day. I never thought I should. But so it is. Don't think that I am standing still while you are travelling.
It is not so.”
The strength of his hand's grip upon Julian's shoulder seemed to indicate a violence of feeling which the tones of his voice did not imply. Julian listened, and then said, in a hesitating, irresolute manner:
”Yes, I see, Val; but I say, where are we travelling? or, at least, where shall we travel if we don't pull up, if we keep on? That's the thing, I suppose.”
As he spoke he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind. Yet so it was. And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil. For he said lightly:
”After all, do human souls travel? I often think they are like eyes looking at a whirling zoetrope. It is the zoetrope that travels.”
”You think souls don't go up or down?”
”I think that none of us knows really much about souls, and that, after all, it is best not to bother ourselves too much about them.”
”Marr thought a great deal about them. I used to fancy that as some maniacs have been known to murder people in order to tear out their hearts, he could have murdered them to tear out their souls.”
Valentine took his hand from Julian's shoulder.
”Marr is dead and forgotten,” he said almost sternly.
”I can't quite forget him, Val; and I still feel as if he had had some influence over both of us. We have changed since those days of the sittings, since that night of your trance and his death.”
Julian was looking at Valentine in a puzzled way while he spoke.
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