The hour was quiet. No fire danced in the grate. Doctor Levillier leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting Valentine's return. But the composure which had already been slightly shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the empty room.
Sitting thus in it alone the doctor examined it with more detail, and with a more definite remembrance of Valentine's habit of mind than before. And he found himself increasingly amazed and confounded. For not only was the change great, but it was not governed and directed by good taste, or even by any definite taste, either good or bad. A number of people might have devised the arrangement and selection of the mass of furniture and ornaments, and have thrown things down here and there in sheer defiance of each other's predilections. Only in the setting, the red setting of the picture, was there evidence of the presence of a presiding genius. In that red setting the doctor supposed that he was to read Valentine. He could read nobody in the rest of the room, or perhaps everybody whose taste refused purity and calm as foolish Dead Sea growths. Some of the silver ornaments might have assembled in the garish boudoir of a Parisian fille de joie, as the carved woman might have been the couch to which Thais tempted Paphnuce, and the Indian boys the lifeless slaves of Aphrodite. The jockeys on the wall would have been at home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the jeunesse dorée of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds." The golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the masculine and feminine, the corrupt "modern" and the flagrant Philistine, the vaguely suggestive Nineteenth Century Athenian and the larky and unbridled schoolboy. A neurotic woman seemed to have been at work here, a sordid youth there. On a sidetable the hysterical man of our civilization fought a duel in taste with some Amazon whose kept vow had evidently wrought a cancer in her mind. In every corner there was the clash of civil war. Yet there was always the cloudy red, visible through the lattice-work of decoration, as the blue sky is visible through the lattice-work of a Tadema interior. In that clouded red the doctor felt himself reading a new yet powerful Valentine, and in the grotesque orchids leaning their misshapen chins upon the rosy rim of their vase. Those flowers had evil faces, and they seemed strangely at home in the silent room where no clock ticked and no caged bird twittered. Only the red cloud spoke like a dull voice, and Doctor Levillier sat and listened to it, until he felt as if he began to know a new Valentine. There is an influence that emanates from lifeless things, strong, subtle, and penetrating; an influence in form, in colour, in scent, even in juxtaposition. And such influence is like a voice speaking to the soul. There was a voice in that empty room; and the words it uttered stirred the doctor to a greater surprise, a greater dread than the words of Cuckoo. Her painted lips related that which might well be a legend of her fancy or of her hate. This voice related a reality and no legend.
As the doctor sat there he conversed of many strange and evil matters, of many discomforting affairs. He was the interrogator, the perpetual anxious questioner, and the voice in the empty room gave vague and sinister answers. That was a terrible catechism, a catechism of the devil, not of God. Question and answer flowed on, and in the doctor's soul the anxiety and the distress ever deepened. Nor could he control their development, although at moments his common sense broke into the catechism like a cool voice from without, and sought to interrupt it finally. But the twig could not stay the torrent. And the darkness deepened, darkness in which there was a vision of fire, the vision of a man, fantastic and menacing. He was the genius of this room. This room sang of him. Yes, even now the twisted silver goblins, the curved monstrosities on the cabinet, the crouched Indian boys, the leering pictures, and always the dull red cloud on wall and carpet, cushion and hanging. And then a strange deception overtook the doctor and shook his usually steady nerves. The red cloud seemed to his observing eyes to tremble, like a flame shaken in a breath of wind, and to glow all around him. He looked again, endeavouring to laugh at his delusion. But the glow deepened and there was surely distinct movement. Everywhere on walls, floor, hangings, couches, faint, thin shadows took shape, grew more definite. He watched them and saw that they were tiny flames, glowing red relieved against the red. It was as if he sat in the midst of a ghostly furnace; for these flames had no pleasant crackling voices. Silently they burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly. He saw them move this way and that. Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly, as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided. The doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing to tremble and to murmur from their lips. Yet they sang no chorus, but always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him. He knew himself to be the victim of a delusion. He knew what he would have said to a patient seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses. In his common sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the actual. These flames were real. They had forms. They moved. They enclosed him in a circle. They embraced him. As he watched them he fancied that they longed to be near to him, and—and—yes—so ran his thoughts—to communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his. They trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire. They tried to escape from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a leash. The doctor was impelled ardently to believe that they yearned to find voices and to utter some word. And then, on a sudden, he recalled Julian's declaration on the night of Valentine's trance, that he had seen a flame shine from his friend's lips, and fade away in the darkness. He recalled, too, Julian's question about death-beds. Was the soul of a man a flame? And, if so, were these flames many souls, or one soul reproduced on all sides by his excitement, and by the intensity of his gaze after them?
They burned more clearly. Their forms were more defined. Then suddenly they grew vague, blurred, faint all around him. They faded. They died into the red of the room. And once more the doctor sat alone.
He listened and heard the click of a key in the front door. And then suddenly the horror that he had felt long ago, on the night when he was followed in Regent Street, once more possessed him. He got on his feet to face it, and, as the drawing-room door was pushed slowly open, faced Valentine.
CHAPTER III
THE DOCTOR MEETS TWO STRANGERS
Upon seeing the doctor, Valentine paused on the threshold of the door, and, as he paused, the doctor's horror fled.
"Valentine," he said, holding out his hand.
"Doctor."