"There was two of them, was there?" she persisted, but still with the accent of a hopeless dullard.
"Oh yes. One will must always work upon another, or else there could be no story worth the telling."
"Oh, I see; that's it."
Valentine again broke into laughter.
"You see, do you?" he said. "You see that, but do you see the truth of what I told you before about the connection of the will with the body? Do you see why you have no power now, can never have power again? Do you understand that the wreck of your body inevitably causes the wreck of your will, so that it really dies and ceases, because it can no more influence others? Do you understand that? I'll make you understand it now. Come here."
He got up from his chair and seized her two hands in his, dragging her almost violently up from the sofa. Her fear of him, always lurking near, came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back, moved by an irresistible repulsion. The slight and momentary struggle between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to come down. It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour. Valentine's hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was useless. She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the glass that stood over the mantelpiece. Pushing back the table behind them, he made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.
"Look there!" he cried; "look at yourself well! How can you have power over anybody?"
Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from the mirror, and Cuckoo—forced to obedience—examined them as if indeed they were a picture. She saw the man's face, fair, beautiful, refined, triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that filled the face with amazingly vivid expression. She saw the bright blue eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile. There was health in the face as well as thought. And there was power, which is greater than health, more beautiful even than beauty. And then she turned her eyes to the face's companion. Thin, sharp, faded, it met her eyes, half-shrouded in the thick, tumbled hair that shone in the mirror with the peculiar frigid glare that can only be imparted by a chemical dye, and can never be simulated by nature. One cheek was chalk-white. The other, which had been pressed against the horsehair of the sofa, showed a harsh, scarlet patch. All the varying haggard expressions of the world seemed crowding in the eyes of this scarecrow, and peering beneath the thickly blackened eyelashes that struck a violent discord against the yellow hair. The thin lips of the mouth were pressed together in an expression of pain, fear, and weariness. Shadows slept under the eyes where the face had fallen into hollows. To-night there seemed no vestige of prettiness in those peaked features. Nothing of health, youth, gaiety, or even girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed in its reflection.
How, indeed, could such a creature have power over fellow man or woman for good or for evil? If weakness can be written without words, it seemed written in that wasted countenance, which Cuckoo examined with a creeping horror that numbed her like frost. As she did so, Valentine was watching the ungraciousness of her face in the glass deepen and glide, moment by moment, into greater ugliness, greater degradation. And as the little light there had ever been behind those unquiet eyes, faded gradually away, in his reflected eyes the light leaped up into fuller glare, sparkling to unbridled triumph. And his reflected lips smiled more defiantly, until the smile was no longer touched merely with triumph, but with something more vehement and more malign! Cuckoo did not see the change. She saw only herself, and her heart cried and wailed, What good—what good to love Julian? What good to hate Valentine? What good to fight for the man she loved against the man she loathed? As well set a doll to move its tense joints against an army, or a scarecrow to defy a god! Never before had she realized thoroughly the complete tragedy of her life. Hitherto she had assisted at it in fragments, coming in for a scene here, a scene there. Now she sat through the whole of the five acts, and the only thing she missed was the fall of the curtain. That remained up. But why? There was—there could be—nothing more to come, unless a dreary recapitulation of such dreary events as had already been displayed. Such a cup could hold no wine that was not foul, thick, and poisonous. And she had known herself so little as to imagine that she could really love, and that her love might fulfil itself in protection instead of sensual gratification. Yes, vaguely she had believed that. She had even believed that she could put on armour and do battle against—and at this point in her desperate meditation the lady of the feathers shifted her eyes from her own face mirrored to the face beside it. As she did so, a sudden cry escaped from her lips. For a moment she thought she saw the face of the dead Marr, and the hallucination was so vivid that when it was gone and the mirror once more revealed the face of Valentine, Cuckoo had no thought but that she had really seen Marr. She turned sharply round and cast a glance behind her. Then:
"Did you see him?" she whispered to Valentine.