"How is Julian?" the doctor asked, dropping his eyes.
"Very well, I think. He will be here directly. He's coming to fetch me. We are dining at the Prince's in Piccadilly in the same party. That reminds me, I must dress. But do stay, and have some coffee."
"No coffee, thank you."
"But you will stay and see Julian. I dare say he will be here early."
"Yes, I will stay. I should like to meet him."
After a word or two more Valentine vanished to dress, and the doctor was once more alone. He was much perplexed and saddened, but keenly interested too, and, getting up from the chair in which he had been sitting, he moved about the grotesque and vulgar room, threading his way through the graceless furniture with a silent and gentle caution. And as he walked meditatively he remembered a conversation he had held with Valentine long ago, when the latter had spoken complainingly of the tyranny of an instinctive purity. The very words he had used came back to him now:
"The minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly poised, and a little push can send them one way or the other. Remember if you lose heaven, the space once filled by heaven will not be left empty."
Had not the little push been given? Had not heaven been lost? That was the problem. But Doctor Levillier, if he saw a little way into effect, was quite at a loss as to cause. And already he had a suspicion that the change in Valentine was not quite on the lines of one of those strange and dreadful human changes familiar to any observant man. This suspicion, already latent, and roused, perhaps, in the first instance long ago by the mystery of Rip's avoidance of his master, and by the shattering of Valentine's musical powers, was confirmed in the strongest way when Julian appeared a few minutes later. Yet the change in Julian would have seemed to most people far more remarkable.
He came into the drawing-room rather hastily, in evening dress with a coat over it. Wade had forewarned him of the doctor's presence, and he entered, speaking loud words of welcome, and holding out a greeting hand. The too-ready voice and almost premature hand betokened his latent uneasiness. Vice makes some people unconscious, some self-conscious. Julian belonged at present to the latter tribe. Whether he was thoroughly aware of self-alteration or not, he evidently stirred uneasily under an expectation of the doctor's surprise. This drove his voice to loud notes and his manner to a boisterous heartiness, belied by the shifting glance of his brown eyes.
The doctor was astounded as he looked at him. Yet the change here was far less inexplicable than that other change in Valentine. Its mystery was the familiar mystery of humanity. Its horror was the horror that we all accept as one of the elements of life. Deterioration, however rapid, however complete, does not come upon us like a ghost in the night to puzzle us absolutely. It is not altogether out of the range of our experience. Most men have seen a man crumble gradually, through the action of some vice, as a wall crumbles through the action of time, falls into dust and decay, filters away into the weed-choked ditches of utter ruin and degradation. Most women have watched some woman slip from the purity and hope and innocence of girlhood into the faded hunger and painted and wrinkled energies of animalism. Such tragedies are no more unfamiliar to us than are the tragedies of Shakespeare. And such a tragedy—not complete yet, but at a third-act point, perhaps—now faced Doctor Levillier in Julian. The wall that had been so straight and trim, so finely built and carefully preserved, was crumbling fast to decay. A ragged youth slunk in the face, beggared of virtue, of true cheerfulness, of all lofty aspiration and high intent. It was youth still, for nothing can entirely massacre that gift of the gods, except inevitable Time. But it was youth sadder than age, because it had run forward to meet the wearinesses that dog the steps of age but that should never be at home with age's enemy. Julian had been the leaping child of healthy energy. He was now quite obviously the servant of lassitude. His foot left the ground as if with a tired reluctance, and his hands were fidgetty, yet nerveless. The eyes, that looked at the doctor and looked away by swift turns, burned with a haggard eagerness unutterably different from their former bright vivacity. Beneath them wrinkles crept on the puffy white face as worms about a corpse. Busy and tell-tale, they did not try to conceal the story of the body into which they had prematurely cut themselves. Nor did Julian's features choose to back up any reserve his mind might possibly feel about acknowledging the consummate alteration of his life. They proclaimed, as from a watch-tower, the arrival of enemies. The cheeks were no longer firm, but heavy and flaccid. The mouth was deformed by the down-drawn looseness of the sensualist, and the complexion beaconed with an unnatural scarlet that was a story to be read by every street-boy.