"Can it be called a battle after all?" he said to himself. "They may not know it, but it is practically won already."
The waiter re-entered. Valentine paid the bill, and the breath of the frost shortly revived Julian into an attempt at conversation.
"Don't ask me to give her up, Val; don't, don't ask me. Poor girl. Poor, poor Cuck—Cuck."
The name of the lady of the feathers seemed a good one for a tipsy tongue to play with.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DOCTOR RECEIVES A VISIT FROM MRS. WILSON
Doctor Levillier grew more puzzled day by day. His observation of Valentine taught him only one thing certainly, and beyond possibility of doubt and that was the death of the youth he had once loved, the living presence of a youth whom he could not love, whom he could only shrink from and even fear. He held to the theory that this radical and ghastly change must be caused by some obscure dementia, some secret overturning of the mind; but he was obliged to confess to himself that he held to it only because, otherwise, he would be floating helpless, and without a spar, upon a tide of perplexity and confusion. He could not honestly say that he was able to put his finger upon any definite signs of madness exhibited by Valentine, any that would satisfy a mad-doctor. He could only say that Valentine's character had been strangely beautiful and was now strangely evil, and that the soul of Julian was following rapidly the soul of Valentine. The more closely he watched Valentine, the more astounded did he become and the more eager to detach Julian from him. But the strangest thing of all, as the doctor allowed in one of his frequent self-communings, was, that though formerly he had loved Valentine better than Julian, it never occurred to him that the work of rescue might be undertaken on behalf of the former. His mind dismissed the new Valentine into a region that was beyond his scope and power. He felt instinctively that here was a soul, a will, that his soul could not turn from its ends or detach from its pursuits. The new Valentine was a law to himself. What moved the doctor to such horror was that the new Valentine was a law to Julian. And there was something peculiarly dreadful in the idea which he held, that Julian, once under the beautiful influence of Valentine's sanity, was now under the baneful influence of his insanity. The doctor had gone the length of deciding, in his own mind, that Valentine's sane period of life and insane period lay one on each side of a fixed gulf, and that fixed gulf was his long trance succeeding the final sitting of the two young men. This conclusion was arrived at with ease, once the theory of a subtle lunacy was accepted as a fact. For, on sending his mind back along the ways of recollection, the doctor was able to recall hints of the new Valentine dating from that very night, but never before it. The first hint was Rip's manifested fear, and this led on to others which have been already mentioned. Having made up his mind that this trance was the motive power of Valentine's supposed madness, the doctor sought in every direction to increase his knowledge on the subject of simulations of death by the human body. He looked up again the cases of innumerable hysterical patients whom he had himself treated, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure. He consulted other doctors, of course without mentioning the object of his research. He endeavoured to apply to Valentine's case standards by which he was quickly able to form a satisfactory opinion on the cases of others. He even went so far as to examine as closely as possible into the history of table-turning, the uses ascribed to it by its votaries, and the results obtained from it by credible—as opposed to merely credulous—witnesses. But he found no case that seemed in any way analogous to the strange case of Valentine. As was only natural, the doctor did not forget the possibility of hypnotism, which had struck him during his second conversation with the lady of the feathers. Her confused declarations on the subject of Valentine and Marr being one person, if they were really a true account of what Valentine had said to her—which seemed very doubtful—could only be made clear by accepting as a fact that the dead Marr had laid a hypnotic spell upon Valentine, which continued to exist actively long after its weaver slept in the grave. But Marr and Valentine had never met. This fact seemed fully established. Valentine had always denied any knowledge of him before the trance. Julian had always assumed that only he of the two friends had any acquaintance with Marr. And again, when the doctor, one day, quite casually, said to Valentine, "By the way, you never did meet Marr, did you?" Valentine replied, "Never, till I saw him lying dead in the Euston Road."
The doctor could see no ray of light in the darkness that could guide him to the clue of the mystery. He could only say to himself, "It must be, it must be an obscure and horrible madness," and keep his theory to himself. Sometimes, as he sat pondering over the whole affair, he smiled, half sadly, half sarcastically. For the event brought home to his ready modesty the sublime ignorance of all clever and instructed men, taught him to wonder, as he had often wondered, that there exists in such a world as ours such a fantastic growth as the flourishing weed, conceit.
Another matter that puzzled him greatly was this: As the days went on, and as Valentine grew—and he did grow—more certain of his own power for evil over Julian, and as, consequently, he took less and less pains to hide the truth of his personality from the knowledge of the doctor, the latter was frequently seized with the appalled sensation which had long ago overtaken him when he was followed in Regent Street and in Vere Street. This recurrence of sensation, and the certainty forced gradually upon the doctor that it was caused by the presence of Valentine, naturally led him to wonder whether it were possible that the man who had dogged his steps, and eventually fled from him, could have been Valentine himself. If that were indeed so, then this madness—if it did exist—must surely have come upon Valentine before the trance. Nothing but a madness could have led him thus in the night hours to steal out in pursuit of the friend who had just left his house and company. But the doctor knew of no means by which he could satisfy himself of Valentine's movements on the night in question. To ask Valentine himself would be to court a lie. Once the doctor thought for a moment of having recourse to Wade. But then he remembered that the butler did not sleep in the flat, and had no doubt long gone home before the event of the night in question. So, again, he was confronted with a dead-wall, beyond which he could see no clear view or comprehensible country.
About this time there happened an event which struck strongly upon the doctor's mind. He was one day, as usual, in his consulting-room, receiving a multitude of patients, when his man-servant entered with a card on a salver.