"What has this to do with Cuckoo and me?" Julian said. "This bottle is empty, Valentine."

Valentine rang hastily for another.

"And what on earth has it got to do with a battle between you and Cuckoo?"

"Everything. She hates me. She has told you so again and again."

Julian looked expressively uncomfortable.

"I've always stood up for you," he began.

"I believe it. She hates me not because I am myself, but simply because I am your closest friend. Hush, Julian. It's much better all this should be said once for all. Many women are intensely jealous of the men friends of men whom they either love, or who they mean shall love them. Look at the wives who drive their husbands' old chums from intimacy into the outer darkness of acquaintanceship. Wedding-days break, as well as bind, faith.

And you have had your wedding-day with Cuckoo."

"That was an accident. She loathes to think of it."

"She may say so. But it puts a fine edge on her hatred of me, nevertheless."

"No, Valentine, no. Her dislike of you is simply silly--instinctive."

"She tells you so. Ah! I was wrong to call her nothing. But it is her hatred of me that must bring us to battle unless--"

"Unless what?"

"You give her up now, once and for all."

"Give Cuckoo up!"

The words came slowly, and the voice that uttered them sounded startled and even shocked. Valentine began to gauge the new power of the lady of the feathers from that moment.

"That's a--a strong thing to do, Val."

"It won't hurt you to do a strong thing for once in your life."

"Even if it didn't hurt me I think it would hurt her very much. For, Valentine, I believe you said the truth when you said to me once, 'That girl loves you.' Do you remember?"

"Perfectly. Loves you, your birth, your position, your money, your good looks, perhaps your standpoint above the gutter. I can well believe that Miss Bright, like all her sisterhood, loves with undying love that combination of flesh-pots, her notion of the ego of a man."

"She has never accepted a halfpenny from me."

"Because she means eventually to have twenty-one shillings in the pound.

Have some more champagne."

"Yes. You are wrong, Val, utterly wrong. Cuckoo's not mercenary. If such a girl could be good, she is good."

There was just a touch of the maudlin in Julian's voice. He went on very earnestly, and nodding his head emphatically over even his conjunctions.

"And if she were what you say, she would have no influence over me, and I should hate her. But to me she is just what a good girl might be. Why, even the doctor--"

"Was he there to-night?" Valentine cried, with a sudden inspiration.

"Of course he was. And you know what a particular little chap he is."

"Why was he there?"

"Just to see Cuckoo, you know, in a friendly way."

Valentine realized then that the battle had begun. He divined the meaning of the doctor's visit. He guessed what it had done for the lady of the feathers. And he sat silent while Julian went on drinking more champagne.

"I believe he likes Cuckoo, Val. I am sure he does. And he behaved quite as if--quite as if he--you know--respected her. And it's all nonsense her hating you, and having a battle, and all that kind of thing, with you.

She's only fanciful. She's not--"

"Would you give her up if I asked you to? Mind, Julian, I don't say I ever shall ask you. But if I do?"

"Don't ask me to, don't ask me. Poor Cuckoo, poor girl, she's got no friends, money, or--or anything. Poor Cuckoo. Poor Cuck--Cuck--"

He fell back in his chair, nodding his head, and reiterating his commiseration for the lady of the feathers in a faint and recurring hiccough. Valentine got up and rang the bell.

"The bill, please, waiter."

"Yes, sir."

The man glanced at Julian with the shadow of a pleasing, and apparently also pleased, smile and withdrew. Valentine stood for a moment looking at the leaning figure on the chair, relaxed in the first throes of a drunken slumber. His anger and almost unbridled emotion completely died away as he looked.

"Can it be called a battle after all?" he said to himself. "They may not know it, but it is practically won already."

The waiter re-entered. Valentine paid the bill, and the breath of the frost shortly revived Julian into an attempt at conversation.

"Don't ask me to give her up, Val; don't, don't ask me. Poor girl. Poor, poor Cuck--Cuck."

The name of the lady of the feathers seemed a good one for a tipsy tongue to play with.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DOCTOR RECEIVES A VISIT FROM MRS. WILSON

Doctor Levillier grew more puzzled day by day. His observation of Valentine taught him only one thing certainly, and beyond possibility of doubt and that was the death of the youth he had once loved, the living presence of a youth whom he could not love, whom he could only shrink from and even fear. He held to the theory that this radical and ghastly change must be caused by some obscure dementia, some secret overturning of the mind; but he was obliged to confess to himself that he held to it only because, otherwise, he would be floating helpless, and without a spar, upon a tide of perplexity and confusion. He could not honestly say that he was able to put his finger upon any definite signs of madness exhibited by Valentine, any that would satisfy a mad-doctor. He could only say that Valentine's character had been strangely beautiful and was now strangely evil, and that the soul of Julian was following rapidly the soul of Valentine. The more closely he watched Valentine, the more astounded did he become and the more eager to detach Julian from him. But the strangest thing of all, as the doctor allowed in one of his frequent self-communings, was, that though formerly he had loved Valentine better than Julian, it never occurred to him that the work of rescue might be undertaken on behalf of the former. His mind dismissed the new Valentine into a region that was beyond his scope and power. He felt instinctively that here was a soul, a will, that his soul could not turn from its ends or detach from its pursuits. The new Valentine was a law to himself. What moved the doctor to such horror was that the new Valentine was a law to Julian. And there was something peculiarly dreadful in the idea which he held, that Julian, once under the beautiful influence of Valentine's sanity, was now under the baneful influence of his insanity.

The doctor had gone the length of deciding, in his own mind, that Valentine's sane period of life and insane period lay one on each side of a fixed gulf, and that fixed gulf was his long trance succeeding the final sitting of the two young men. This conclusion was arrived at with ease, once the theory of a subtle lunacy was accepted as a fact. For, on sending his mind back along the ways of recollection, the doctor was able to recall hints of the new Valentine dating from that very night, but never before it. The first hint was Rip's manifested fear, and this led on to others which have been already mentioned. Having made up his mind that this trance was the motive power of Valentine's supposed madness, the doctor sought in every direction to increase his knowledge on the subject of simulations of death by the human body. He looked up again the cases of innumerable hysterical patients whom he had himself treated, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure. He consulted other doctors, of course without mentioning the object of his research.

He endeavoured to apply to Valentine's case standards by which he was quickly able to form a satisfactory opinion on the cases of others. He even went so far as to examine as closely as possible into the history of table-turning, the uses ascribed to it by its votaries, and the results obtained from it by credible--as opposed to merely credulous--witnesses.

But he found no case that seemed in any way a.n.a.logous to the strange case of Valentine. As was only natural, the doctor did not forget the possibility of hypnotism, which had struck him during his second conversation with the lady of the feathers. Her confused declarations on the subject of Valentine and Marr being one person, if they were really a true account of what Valentine had said to her--which seemed very doubtful--could only be made clear by accepting as a fact that the dead Marr had laid a hypnotic spell upon Valentine, which continued to exist actively long after its weaver slept in the grave. But Marr and Valentine had never met. This fact seemed fully established. Valentine had always denied any knowledge of him before the trance. Julian had always a.s.sumed that only he of the two friends had any acquaintance with Marr. And again, when the doctor, one day, quite casually, said to Valentine, "By the way, you never did meet Marr, did you?" Valentine replied, "Never, till I saw him lying dead in the Euston Road."

The doctor could see no ray of light in the darkness that could guide him to the clue of the mystery. He could only say to himself, "It must be, it must be an obscure and horrible madness," and keep his theory to himself.

Sometimes, as he sat pondering over the whole affair, he smiled, half sadly, half sarcastically. For the event brought home to his ready modesty the sublime ignorance of all clever and instructed men, taught him to wonder, as he had often wondered, that there exists in such a world as ours such a fantastic growth as the flourishing weed, conceit.