Flames | Page 7

after an instant of reflection.
"Why do we? I wonder."
"That is what I am wondering."
He flicked the ash from his cigarette.

"But I don't come to any conclusion," he presently added, meditatively.
"We sit in the dark for an hour and a quarter, with our hands solemnly
spread out upon a table; we don't talk; the table doesn't move; we hear
no sound; we see nothing; we feel nothing that we have not felt before.
And yet we find the function interesting. This problem of sensation is
simply insoluble. I cannot work it out."
"It is awfully puzzling," said Julian. "I suppose our nerves must have
been subtly excited because the thing was an absolute novelty."
"Possibly. But, if so, we are a couple of children, mere schoolboys."
"That's rather refreshing, however undignified. If we sit long enough,
we may even recover our long-lost babyhood."
And so they laughed the matter easily away. Soon afterwards, however,
Julian got up to go home to his chambers. Valentine went towards the
door, intending to open it and get his friend's coat. Suddenly he
stopped.
"Strange!" he exclaimed.
"What's the row?"
"Look at the door, Julian."
"Well?"
"Don't you see?"
"What?"
"The curtain is half drawn back again."
Julian gave vent to a long, low whistle.
"So it is!"
"It always does that when the door is opened."

"And only then, of course?"
"Of course."
"But the door hasn't been opened."
"I know."
They regarded each other almost uneasily. Then Valentine added, with
a short laugh:
"I can't have drawn it thoroughly over the door when Wade went
away."
"I suppose not. Well, good-night, Val."
"Good-night. Shall we sit again tomorrow?"
"Yes; I vote we do."
Valentine let his friend out. As he shut the front door, he said to
himself:
"I am positive I did draw the curtain thoroughly."
He went back into the tentroom and glanced again at the curtain.
"Yes; I am positive."
After an instant of puzzled wonder, he seemed to put the matter
deliberately from him.
"Come along, Rip," he said. "Why, you are cold and miserable to-night!
Must I carry you then?"
He picked the dog up, turned out the light, and walked slowly into his
bedroom.
CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND SITTING
On the following night Valentine sat waiting for Julian's arrival in his
drawing-room, which looked out upon Victoria Street, whereas the
only window of the tentroom opened upon some waste ground where
once a panorama of Jerusalem, or some notorious city, stood, and
where building operations were now being generally carried on.
Valentine very seldom used his drawing-room. Sometimes pretty
women came to tea with him, and he did them honour there. Sometimes
musicians came. Then there was always a silent group gathered round
the Steinway grand piano. For Valentine was inordinately fond of
music, and played so admirably that even professionals never hurled at
him a jeering "amateur!" But when Valentine was alone, or when he
expected one or two men to smoke, he invariably sat in the tentroom,
where the long lounges and the shaded electric light were suggestive of
desultory conversation, and seemed tacitly to forbid all things that
savour of a hind-leg attitude. To-night, however, some whim, no doubt,
had prompted him to forsake his usual haunt. Perhaps he had been
seized with a dislike for complete silence, such as comes upon men in
recurring hours of depression, when the mind is submerged by a thin
tide of unreasoning melancholy, and sound of one kind or another is as
ardently sought as at other times it is avoided. In this room Valentine
could hear the vague traffic of the dim street outside, the dull tumult of
an omnibus, the furtive, flashing clamour of a hansom, the cry of an
occasional newsboy, explanatory of the crimes and tragedies of the
passing hour. Or perhaps the eyes of Valentine were, for the moment,
weary of the monotonous green walls of his sanctum, leaning tent-wise
towards the peaked apex of the ceiling, and longed to rest on the many
beautiful pictures that hung in one line around his drawing-room. It
seemed so, for now, as he sat in a chair before the fire, holding Rip
upon his knee, his blue eyes were fixed meditatively upon a picture
called "The Merciful Knight," which faced him over the mantelpiece.
This was the only picture containing a figure of the Christ which
Valentine possessed. He had no holy children, no Madonnas. But he
loved this Christ, this exquisitely imagined dead, drooping figure,
which, roused into life by an act of noble renunciation, bent down and
kissed the armed hero who had been great enough to forgive his enemy.

He loved those weary, tender lips, those faded limbs, the sacred tenuity
of the ascetic figure, the wonderful posture of benign