Part 56 (1/2)
Valentine met his eyes calmly.
”If I have changed,” he said slowly, ”it cannot be in essentials. Look at me. Is my face altered? Is my expression different?”
”No, Valentine.”
Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater happiness. To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at rest. No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was really and radically evil. Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick motion, its powers of varied movement. Where could be the harm of that?
And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely too. He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.
”You mean you are beginning to play with life?” he said.
”That is it exactly. I am putting life through its paces. After all, no man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps--but only after he has seen and known it--to reject. To do that is like living in the midst of a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm.”
”Yes, yes, I see. Then you think that Cuckoo is jealous of me?--that that was all she meant?”
Julian again returned to the old question. Valentine replied:
”I feel sure of it. Women are always governed by their hearts. So much so that my last sentence is a truism, scarcely worthy the saying. Besides, my dear Julian, what would it matter if she were not? What could the att.i.tude of such a woman on any subject under the sun matter to you?”
The words were not spoken without intentional sarcasm. They stung Julian a little, but did not lead him, from any sense of false shame, to a feeble concealment of his real feeling.
”It does seem absurd, I dare say,” he said. ”But she's--well, she's not an ordinary woman, Val.”
”Let us hope not.”
”No; you don't understand. There's something strong about her. What she says might really matter, I think, to a cleverer man than I. She knows men, and then, Valentine, there's something else.”
He stopped. There was a queer look of mystery in his face.
”Something else! What is it? What can there be?”
”I saw the flame as if it was burning in her eyes.”
Valentine made an abrupt movement. It might have been caused by surprise, annoyance, anger, or simply by the desire to fidget which overcomes every one, not paralyzed, at some time or another. His action knocked over a chair, and he stooped to pick it up and set it in its place before he spoke. Then he said:
”The flame, you say! What on earth is your theory about this extraordinary flame? You seem to attach a strange importance to it. Yet it can only be the fire of a fancy, a jet from the imagination. Tell me, have you any theory about it, honestly? and if so, what is it?”
Julian was rather taken aback by this very sledgehammer invitation.
Hitherto the flame, and his thought of it, had seemed to have the pale vagueness and the mystery of a dream. When the flame appeared, it is true, he was oppressed by a sense of awe; but the awe was indefinite, blurred, resisting a.n.a.lysis, and quite inexplicable to another.
”I did not say I had any theory about it,” he answered.
”But then, why do you consider it at all? And why seem to think that its supposed presence in the eyes of a woman makes that woman in any way different from others?”
”But I did not say I thought so,” Julian said, rather hastily. ”How you jump to conclusions to-day!”
”You implied it, and you meant it. Now, didn't you?”
”Perhaps I may have.”
”This is all too much for me,” Valentine said, showing now a very unusual irritation. He even began to pace up and down the room with a slow, soft footstep, monotonous and mechanical in its regularity. As he was walking he went on: