He went by the Chapel, and struck across to the right, not looking behind him, but analyzing his feelings. Being strongly intuitive, he had no need to turn his head. He knew now for certain the cause of his uneasiness. Some dreadful human being was very near to him, full of hateful thoughts, sinister recollections, possibly evil intentions. Something, the very vibrations of the night air, it might be, carried, as a telegraph wire conveys a message, the soul-aroma of this human being to the doctor. As he walked on, not hurrying, he mutely diagnosed the heart of this unseen being. It seemed full of deadly disease. Never had he suspected man or woman of such wickedness as he divined here; never had he felt from any of his kind such a sick repulsion as from this unseen monster who was journeying steadily in his steps. Doctor Levillier was puzzled at the depth of the horror which beleaguered him. He remembered once driving a staid, well-behaved horse in a country lane. The animal ambled forward at a gentle pace, flicking its ears lazily to circumvent the flies, apparently at ease with its driver and with the world. But suddenly it raised its head, drew the air into its distended nostrils, stopped, quivered in every limb, and then, with a strange cry, bolted like a mad thing. Far away a travelling menagerie was encamping. It had scented the wild animals.
Doctor Levillier felt like that horse. A longing to bolt for his life came upon him. He had an impulse to cry out, to run forward, to escape out of the atmosphere created by this evil nature, this deadly life. He could have crept like a coward into the shadow of one of the areas of Henrietta Street, and sheltered there till the thing went past. And, just because he had this almost overmastering desire to flee, he stood still, paused abruptly, and, without turning his head, listened. At a distance, and he judged, round the corner of the street he heard the sound of a quickening footstep advancing in his direction. He waited, under the obligation of exerting all his powers of self-control; for his limbs trembled to movement, his heart beat to the march, and every separate vein, every separate hair of his body, seemed crying out piercingly to begone. The footstep approached. Doctor Levillier heard it turning the corner.
"Now," thought he, "this person will see me waiting here. Will he come on? Will he pass me? And if he does, shall I be able to await, to endure the incident?"
And he listened, as a scout might listen in the night for sounds of the hidden enemy. Upon turning the corner, the footsteps advanced a pace or two, faltered, slackened, stopped. For an instant there was silence. The doctor knew that the man had been struck by his attentive figure, and was pausing to regard it, to consider it. What would be the result of the inspection? In a moment the doctor knew. The footsteps sounded again, this time in retreat.
On this the impulse of the doctor to flee changed, giving way to a strict desire and determination. He was resolved to interview this night-wanderer, to see his face. A greedy anxiety for view, for question, of this person came upon him. He, too, wheeled round, and followed hastily in pursuit. The man had already escaped from his sight into Vere Street, and the doctor broke into a soft run until he reached the corner, skirting which, the man was immediately in his view, but at a considerable distance from him. As the doctor sprang upon the pavement the man turned round, and, evidently observing that he was pursued, quickened his steps impulsively. The doctor was now absolutely determined to address him, and began openly to run. And he was not far from coming up with the fellow when he suddenly whistled a passing hansom, bounded in, and thrust up the trapdoor in the roof. The direction given was sufficiently obvious, for the cabby glanced round at the doctor, lifted his whip, brought it down with a sweep over the horse's loins, and the cab disappeared down Oxford Street at a rocking gallop.
The doctor paused. He was breathing hard, and the perspiration stood upon his face. His disappointment was absurdly keen, and for an instant he had even some idea of hailing another cab, and of following in pursuit. But, upon reflection, he deemed it more reasonable to return upon his steps, and to seek his bed in Harley Street. This accordingly he did, wondering what had moved him so strangely, and wondering, also, not a little, at the abrupt flight of the unknown person. In the brief and distant view of him, which was all that the doctor had obtained, he judged him to be tall, spare, and pale of countenance, with the figure of a gentleman. The aspect of his face had not been revealed before the shelter of the cab concealed him.
CHAPTER VIII
PAUSE
It chanced that for three or four days after the night of the theatre expedition Valentine and Julian did not meet. They were rarely apart for so long a period, and each was moved to wonder at this unwonted abstinence of their friendship. What was the cause of it? Each found it in a curious hesitation that enveloped him, and impelled him to avoidance of the other. Valentine went about as usual. He looked in at White's, dined out, rode in the park, visited two theatres, lived the habitual London life which contents so many and disgusts not a few. But he did not ask Julian to share any of these well-worn doings, and at first he did not acknowledge to himself why he did not do so. He sought, more definitely than ever before, to gain amusement from amusements, and this definite intention, of course, frustrated his purpose. His power of pleasure was, in fact, clogged by an abiding sense of dissatisfaction and depression. And it was really his eventual knowledge of this depression's cause that led him to bar Julian out from these few days of his life. All that he did bored him, and the more decidedly because he came to know that there was something which did not bore, which even excited him, something which he had resolved to give up. He was, in fact, strangely pursued by an unreasonable desire to fly in the face of Doctor Levillier's advice, and of his own secondary antagonistic desire, and to sit again with Julian. Everything in which he sought to find distraction, lacked savour. As he sat watching a ballet that glittered with electricity, and was one twinkle of coloured movement, he found himself longing for the silence, the gloom, the live expectation of the tentroom, night, and Julian. At White's the conversation of the men struck him as even more scrappy, more desultorily scandalous, than usual. His morning ride was an active ennui, an ennui revolving, like a horse in a circus, round and round the weariness of the park.
Yet he had made up his mind quite fully that it would be better not to sit any more. It was not merely Doctor Levillier's urgency that had impressed him thus. A personal conviction had gradually forced itself upon him that if anything resulted from such apparently imbecile proceedings it would certainly not be of an agreeable nature. But, too, this very sense that a secret danger might be lurking against him and Julian, if only they would consent together to give it power by the united action of sitting, spurred him on to restless desire. It is not only the soldier who has a bizarre love of peril. Many of those who sit at home in apparent calmness of safety seek perils with a maniacal persistence, perils to the intricate scheme of bodily health, perils to the mind. More human mules than the men of the banner and the sword delight in journeying at the extreme edge of the precipice. And Valentine now had to the full this secret hankering after danger. As he knew it, he despised himself for it, for this attitude of the schoolboy in which he held himself. Until now he had believed that he was free from such a preposterous and morbid bondage, free on account of his constitutional indifference towards vice, his innate love of the brooding calms of refinement and of the upper snowfields of the intellect. The discovery of his mistake irritated him, but the irritation could not conquer its cause, and each day the longing to sit once more grew upon him until it became almost painful. It was this longing which occasioned Valentine's avoidance of Julian. He knew that if they were together he would yield to this foolish, witless temptation, and at any rate try to persuade Julian into an act which might be attended with misfortune, if not with disaster. And then Valentine's profound respect for Doctor Levillier, a respect which the doctor inspired without effort in every one who knew him, was a chain almost of steel to hold the young man back from gratification of his longing. Valentine never sought any one's advice except the little doctor's, and he had a strong feeling of the obligation laid upon him by such sought advice. To ask it and to reject it was a short course to insult.