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 familiarity that was more majestic than any reserve.  Yes, Valentine loved this Christ, and Julian knew it well.  Often, late at night, Julian had leaned back lazily listening while Valentine played, improvising in a light so dim as to be near to darkness.  And Julian had noticed that the player’s eyes perpetually sought this picture, and rested on it, while his soul,