Julian looked at Cuckoo. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone with dancing excitement.
"Did you, Cuckoo?"
"Not I, dearie. I say, ain't he funny to-night?"
Then the voice must have spoken in his own brain. He listened for it and fancied he could hear it again and again, driving him on like a phantom fate. But the voice was in timbre like the voice of Valentine, and he felt as if Valentine spoke with a strange insistence and reiteration. His heart, his whole being, made answer to the whisper.
"To-morrow we die. It is true. Ah, then, let us—let us eat and let us drink."
The man in the boots wriggled furiously into the wings, and the curtain rose on the ballet. Wenzel had ascended to the conductor's platform amid loud applause. The first weary melodies of "Faust" streamed plaintively from the orchestra, and a gravity came over the rows of faces in the stalls. Julian's face, too, was grave, but his excitement and his sense of his own power of youth grew as he looked on. The old Faust appeared, heavy with the years and with the trouble of useless thought, and Julian felt that he could sneer at him for his venerable age. As he watched the philosopher's grandiloquent pantomime of gesture, like a mist there floated over him the keen imagination of the hell of regret in which the old age, that never used to the full its irrevocable youth, must move, and a passion of desire to use his own youth rushed over him as fire rushes over a dry prairie. Even a sudden anger against Valentine came to him,—against Valentine for the protection he had given through so many years. For had he not been protecting Julian against joy? and does not the capacity for joy pass away with a tragic swiftness? As Faust was transformed into youth, and the ballet danced in the market-place, Julian turned to Valentine and said:
"We will live to-night."
Valentine laughed.
"You look excited."
"I feel excited. Don't you?"