"Light up, doctor," he cried. "You are a boon to this modern world. For you see all the sorrows of life, I suppose, and yet you always manage to convey the impression that the joys win the battle after all."
Valentine had gone over to the piano and was dreamily opening it. He did not seem to hear what they were saying. The doctor obeyed the injunction to light up. He was one of the hardest and most assiduous toilers in all London, and he appreciated a good cigar and a comfortable arm-chair more than some men could appreciate Paradise, or some women appreciate love.
"And I believe that joy will win the battle in the end," he said, with a puff that proved successful.
"Why?"
"I see evidences of it, or think I do. The colour will fade out of bad acts, Addison, but the colour of a good act is eternal. A noble deed will never emulate a Sir Joshua Reynolds—never. Play to us, Cresswell."
"Yes, but I wish you to talk. I want to improvise to-night. The murmur of your conversation will help me."
Julian sat down by the doctor. He, too, looked very happy. It was a pleasant hour. Sympathy was in that pretty room, complete human sympathy, and a sympathy that sprang from their vitality, avoiding the dusky dumbness of the phlegmatic. Valentine sat down at the piano and began gently to play. The smoke from the cigars curled away towards the watching pictures; the room was full of soft music.
"Yes, Addison," Doctor Levillier continued, in a low voice, "I am perpetually sitting with sorrow, communing with disease. That consulting-room of mine is as a pool of Bethesda, only not all who come to it, alas! can be healed. I sit day by day in my confessional—I like to call it that; perhaps I was meant to be a priest—and I read the stories of the lives of men and of women, most of them necessarily, from the circumstances which bring them to me, sad. And yet I have a belief in joy and its triumph which nothing can ever shake, a belief in the final glory of good which nothing can ever conquer."
"That's fine, doctor. But do you know why you have it?"
"I daresay that question is difficult to answer. I often seek for my reasons, Addison, and I find many, though I can hardly say which is the best, or whether any quite explains the faith that is always in me. Apropos of this evening, by the bye, I long ago found one of my reasons in the theatre, the theatre which some really good men hate and condemn."