Flames Part 48

"It was all his doing."

Her voice grew shrill with feeling.

"He's a devil," she said. "I hate him. I hate him worse than I hate that copper west side of Regent Street. And I hate you, too,--yes, I do,--to-day."

The tears gathered in her eyes and began to fall, tears of rage and shame and regret, tears of one who had lost a great possession. Julian looked embarra.s.sed and pained, almost guilty, too. He put out his hand and tried to take Cuckoo's. But she drew hers away and went on crying. She spoke again with vehemence.

"I told you what I wanted you to be; yes, I did," she exclaimed. "Yes, I told you. You said you only come here to talk to me."

"It was true."

"No; it wasn't. You're just like all the others. And I did so want to have a pal. I've never had one."

With the words the sense of her desolation seemed to strike her with stunning force. She leaned her head against the back of the chair, and cried bitterly, catching at the horsehair with violent hands, as if she longed to hurt something, to revenge her loss even upon an object without power of feeling. Julian sprang up and went over to the window. He looked out onto the road and watched the people moving by in the fitful suns.h.i.+ne beyond the dirty railings. That day, he, too, was in a tumult. He felt like a monk who had suddenly thrown off his habit, broken his vows, and come forth into the world. The cell and the cloister were left behind, were things to be forgotten, with the grating of the confessional and the dim routine of service and of asceticism. He had been borne on by the wave of a brilliant, a violent hour, away from them. Let the angelus bell ring; he no longer heard it. Let the drone of prayers and praises rise in a monotonous music by day and by night; he no longer had the will to heed them. For there was another music in his ears. Soon it would be in his heart. Imagine a Trappist suddenly transported from the desert of his long silence to a gay _plage_ on which a bra.s.s band was playing. Julian was that Trappist in mind. And though he knew Cuckoo was sobbing at his back, and though his heart held a sense of pity for her trouble, yet he heard her grief with a strange cruelty, at which he wondered, without being able to soften it. That afternoon it seemed to him useless for anybody to cry. No grief was quite worth tears. The violence of life was present with him, gave him light and blinded him at the same time. He found delight in the thought of violence, because it held action in its grasp. Even cruelty was worth something. Was he cruel to Cuckoo?

He turned from the window and looked at her, with the observation of a nature not generally his own. He noted the desolation of her hair, and he noted, too, that she wore the gown he had given to her. Would she have put it on if she had hated him as she said she did? Somehow it scarcely seemed to suit her to-day. It looked draggled, and as if it had been up all night, he thought. The black back of it heaved as Cuckoo sobbed, like a little black wave. Was the eternal movement of the sea caused by some horrible, inward grief which, though secret, must come thus to the eye of G.o.d and of the world? Julian found himself wondering in an unreasonable abstraction as he contemplated the crying girl. Then suddenly his mind swerved to more normal paths; he was seized by the natural feeling of a man who has made a woman weep, and had the impulse to comfort.

"Don't cry, Cuckoo," he said, coming over to her and sitting on the edge of her chair. "You must not. Let us say I was mad last night. Perhaps I was. Men are often mad, surely. To-day I'm sane, and I want you to forgive me."

He put his arm round her shoulder. She glanced up at him. Then, with the odd penetration that so often gilds female ignorance till it dazzles and distracts, she said quickly:

"You don't mean what you say; you don't really care."

Julian was taken aback by her sharpness, and by the self-revelation that immediately stabbed him.

"You mustn't say that," he began. But she stopped him on the instant.

"You don't care; you think it's nothing. So it ought to be to me, I know."

That had perhaps actually been his thought, the thought of a mind unimaginative to-day, because deadened by the excitement of action.

But if it was his thought he hastened to deny it.

"You know I don't think of you in that way," he said.

"You will now. You do."

That was the scourge that had lashed her all through this weary day of miserable reaction; that now stung her to a pa.s.sion that was like the pa.s.sion of purity. As she made this statement there was a question in her eyes, but it was a question of despair, that scarcely even asked for the negative which Julian hastened to give. He was both perplexed and troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself as the cause. But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was irrevocable had none of the poignancy of Cuckoo's. For a long time he had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine. Now he had left the cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past. He did not, for the moment, look back at all. Action had lifted scales from his eyes, had stirred the youth in him, had stung him as if with bright fire, and given him, at a breath, a thousand thoughts, visions, curiosities. A sense of power came to him. He did not ask whether the power made for evil or for good. Simply, he was inclined to glory in it, as a man glories in his recovered strength when he wakes from a long sleep following fatigue. Cuckoo, with feeble hands, seemed tugging to hold back this power, with feeble voice seemed crying against it as a deadly thing.

And Julian, though he strove to console her, scarcely sympathized with her fully. He could not, if he would, be quite unhappy to-day. Only in Cuckoo's grief he began to read a curious legend. In her tears there was a pa.s.sion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the depths of a nature. Julian began to suspect that through all her sins and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened.

And beyond this door was surely that holy of holies, an unspoiled woman's heart. From what other dwelling could rush forth such a pa.s.sion for a man's respect, such a fury to be rightly and chivalrously considered? As he half vaguely realized something of the true position of Cuckoo and of himself, Julian felt stirred by the wonder of life, in which such strange blossoms flower out of the very dust. He looked at Cuckoo with new eyes.

She looked back at him with the old ones of a girl who loves.

As he looked she stopped crying. Perhaps the sudden understanding in his gaze thrilled her. He put out his hand to touch hers, and again repeated his negative, but this time with greater conviction.

"I do not think of you in that way. I never shall," he said.

Her face was still full of doubt, and thin with anxiety. She was not rea.s.sured, that seemed apparent; for in her ignorance she had a strange knowledge of life, and especially a strange intuition which guided her instincts as to the instinctive proceedings of men.

"They always do," she murmured. "Why should you be different?"

"All men aren't alike," he said, pretending to laugh at her.

"Yes, in some things, though," she contradicted. "They all think dirt of you for doing what they want."

Seeing how unsatisfied she was, and how restlessly her anxiety paced up and down, Julian resolved on more plain-speaking.

"Look here, Cuckoo," he said, and his voice had never sounded more boyish, "last night I was drunk. Last night I woke up, and I'd been asleep for years."

"Eh?" she interrupted, looking puzzled, but he went on:

"I was emanc.i.p.ated, and I was mad. Mind, I didn't mean to do you any wrong, but if you have thought of me in a different way, I'm sorry.

Tell me what you want me to be to you, and in future I'll be it."

Hope and eagerness sprang up in her eyes then.

"I say," she began,

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

The dull blood rose in her tired face.

"I want just a--just a friend," she said, as if almost ashamed.

Julian smiled.

"Not a lover," he said, with a fleeting air of gallantry. She shrank visibly from the word, and hurriedly went on:

"Not I. I've had too much of love." The last word was spoken with a violence of contempt. "I want a man as likes me, just really likes me, as he might another man. See?"

"And you'll not love him?"

His eyes searched hers with a gaiety of inquiry that was almost laughter.

Cuckoo looked away.

"I'll not love him either," she said steadily. "I'll just like him too."

Seeing her earnestness and obvious emotion, Julian dropped his gently quizzing manner, and became earnest, too, in his degree.

"Then it's a bargain," he said. "You and I are to like each other thoroughly, never anything more, never anything less. Like two men, eh?"

She began at last to look relieved and happier.

"Yes, like that," she said. "Ain't it--ain't it truer than the other thing? There's something beastly about love; that's what I always think."

And she spoke with the sincerest conviction. When Julian left her that day, he shook hands with her by the door; she stood after he had done it as if still half expectant.