His mind, as the time of the darkness grew longer, continued to grow more and more clear, until he felt thoroughly, and was able to try to analyze its unnatural condition. Scales had fallen from him and from his companions for him. Their bodies were clothed, their souls, their flames, seemed stripped bare and offered to him naked. He had examined them with this greedy, yet sane, attention and curiosity. He had led them into the empty room and stayed with them there. He had heard the Litany of the Glory of Valentine, and the suffocation, and the anger, and the stirring beneath his yoke of Julian. He had heard the many women sing in the heart of the lady of the feathers. But all this seemed leading him forward and onward, step by step, as to a threshold beyond which was some greater, some more importunate, thing. And he took the last step with Cuckoo. It was as if he was handed on from one room to another, as is the fashion in the palace of a great king, his name being called in each, and sent before, like a voice sent on the wind, and as if Cuckoo was in the last anteroom that gave upon the audience-chamber. Now he had arrived, and suddenly a great wave of mysterious expectation ran over him and filled the cup of his soul. He felt that he stood still and waited. The sense of Cuckoo, of all she felt and thought in the darkness, gradually dropped away from him, like leaves from a tree, till every branch was leafless. And this autumnal ravishment, like the ravishment of nature, was but a preparation surely for a future spring.
The doctor waited outside that door, beyond which, perhaps, spring blossomed and sang. He lost at last all sense of being in a company of people, and felt as one feels who is entirely alone, expectant, calm, ready. And still only the darkness and the silence. Nothing more at first. But presently what seemed to him a marvel.
He had by this time grown at ease with his power of thought-reading, at ease with this new sense of the hearing of silence. The differing scents of these three flowers hidden in the night had been breathed out to him. With infallible certainty he had recognized each one, differentiated the one from the other. And as the scent of one flower had failed, the scent of another had risen upon him, until he had known the heart of each of the three. Then for a while was the night scentless, silent, blank, empty. But presently the doctor was aware of an uneasiness and of an anxiety stealing upon him. Whence it came he could not tell. Only this he knew, that he received it from something, but that it came neither from the lady of the feathers, from Valentine, nor from Julian. From whom, then, could it emanate, this weird eagerness, this fluttering, pulsing fear, and hope, and intention? From himself only? He asked himself that question. Was he communing in the dark with his own soul? He knew that he was not. The scent of this new and unknown flower grew stronger in the night, more penetrating and intentional. Yet was it vaguer, more distant, than that emitted by those other three flowers. The exact impression received by the doctor at this moment was very subtle. Precisely it was this: It seemed to him that he was gradually coming into communication with a fourth mind, or soul; that this soul was actually more strong, more vehement, even more determined, than the souls of his three companions, but that some barrier removed it from him, set it very far of. The flame of a match held to a man's eyes may dazzle him more than the flame of a great fire on the horizon. This new flame was as the latter in comparison to match-flames that had been flaring in the doctor's eyes. And this great and distant flame burned slowly in a smoke of mystery and upon the verge of dense darkness.
Never had the doctor known so peculiar, and even awe-striking, an experience as that which he now underwent. What utterly bewildered him was the circumstance of this undoubted new and definite personality enclosed in this tiny room with him and with his three companions. He was receiving the impression of the thoughts of a stranger. Yet there was no stranger in the chamber. And he was vexed and curiously irritated by the fact of the impression being at the same time very vague and very violent, like the cry of a man which reaches you faintly from a very long distance, but which you feel instinctively to have been uttered with the frantic force of death or of despair. And the mind of this stranger was tugging at the doctor's mind, anxiously, insistently. There was a depth of distress in it that was as no mere human distress, and that moved the doctor to a mood beyond the mood of tears or of prayers. There came over him an awful sense of pity for this stranger-soul. What had it done? How was it circumstanced? In what ghastly train of events did it move? It was surely powerful and helpless at the same time; a cripple with a mind on fire with fight; Samson blind. He felt that it wanted something—of him, or of his companions, some light in its severe desolation. Deeper and deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of its ill fate. The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe. Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance: a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more bizarre still—God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim the souls to which He had Himself given being; lonely God in a lonely heaven, seeing far-off hell bursting with the countless multitudes of the writhing lost. This last simile stayed with him. He fancied, he felt—not heard—the voice of this frustrate God calling to him: "Do what I could not do. Strive to help My impotence. A little—a little—and even yet hell would stand empty, the vacant courts of heaven be filled. Act—act—act."
"Doctor, why are you trembling? Why are you trembling?"
It was the voice of Valentine that spoke. The doctor, by an effort so painful that the memory of it remained with him to the end of his life, recalled his mind from its journey.
"Trembling!" he said. "What do you mean? I am all right. I am quietly in my place. How long have we been sitting?"
"An immense time I fancy. It seems fruitless, Julian!"
"Yes."
Julian's voice sounded heavy and weary.