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Life is all autumn, it seems to me!" Mr. Stone's eyes grew very blue. "That is a foul heresy," he stammered; "I cannot listen to it. Life is the cuckoo's song; it is a hill-side bursting into leaf; it is the wind; I feel it in me every day!" He was trembling like a leaf in the wind he spoke of, and Bianca moved hastily towards him, holding out her arms.
"Well, Griselda," whispered a voice, which she knew was the cuckoo's; "so you don't like to be told you are like your grandmother, eh?" Griselda turned round sharply to look for the speaker, but he was not to be seen. And when she turned again, the picture of the great saloon had faded away. One more picture. Griselda looked again.
Two of the Fujiwara have been pilloried in native records for ostentation: one for carrying inside his clothes hot rice-dumplings to keep himself warm, and, more important, to fling them away one after another as they got cold; and the other for carrying a fan decorated with a painting of a cuckoo and for imitating the cuckoo's cry whenever he opened the fan.
"Perhaps she went to seek you in your capacity of a doctor of the mind rather than of the body. Perhaps, after all, she sought your aid." As he spoke the doctor could not help having driven into him the conviction that the words were spoken with meaning, that Valentine knew the nature of Cuckoo's mission to Harley Street. There rose in him suddenly a violent sensation of enmity against Valentine.
"Kiss me once again, my pet, and then thou must go; thy little friends will be waiting." As he said these words the mist slowly gathered, again before Griselda's eyes the first of the cuckoo's pictures faded from her sight. When she looked again the scene was changed, but this time it was not a strange one, though Griselda had gazed at it for some moments before she recognized it.
This was Cuckoo's ruse to get into the house, and was based upon Julian's long-ago remark that the doctor could never resist helping any one who was in trouble. Standing on the doorstep, she had histrionically simulated faintness for the special benefit of Lawler, who regarded her with deep suspicion. "I suppose I must see her," the doctor said with a sigh. "Show her in, Lawler."
Not certainly where she had been when she went to sleep. Not on the cuckoo's back, for there he was standing beside her, as tiny as usual. Either he had grown little again, or she had grown big which, she supposed, it did not much matter. Only it was very queer! "Where am I, cuckoo?" she said. "Where you wished to be," he replied. "Look about you and see." Griselda looked about her.
He put out his hand and tried to take Cuckoo's. But she drew hers away and went on crying. She spoke again with vehemence. "I told you what I wanted you to be; yes, I did," she exclaimed. "Yes, I told you. You said you only come here to talk to me." "It was true." "No; it wasn't. You're just like all the others. And I did so want to have a pal. I've never had one."
His first act was to turn on the electric light. In a flash the rustling shadow was converted into substance. Cuckoo and the doctor stood face to face, and Cuckoo's tired eyes fastened with a hungry, almost a wolfish, scrutiny upon this stranger. She wanted so much of him. The look was so full of intense meaning that, coming in a flash with the electric flash, it startled the doctor.
What would such a morning as this be, for instance? Cuckoo's imagination set tempestuously to work, with physical aids such as the following. She drew away her feet from the bottom of the bed, where they touched the little dog's back. Doing this she said to herself, "Now, Jessie is gone." Curled up, she set herself to realize the lie.
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