Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
THE LAMP OF FATE
By Margaret Pedler
Then to the rolling Heav’n itself I cried,
Asking, “What Lamp of Destiny to guide
Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?”
And--“A blind Understanding!” Heaven replied.
The “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam.
To AUDREY HEATH
DEAR AUDREY: I always feel that you have played the part of Fairy
Godmother in a very special and delightful way to all my stories, and
in particular to this one, the plot of which I outlined to you one
afternoon in an old summer-house. So will you let me dedicate it to you?
Yours always,
MARGARET PEDLER.
THE LAMP OF FATE
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
THE NINTH GENERATION
The house was very silent. An odour of disinfectants pervaded the
atmosphere. Upstairs hushed, swift steps moved to and fro.
Hugh Vallincourt stood at the window of his study, staring out with
unseeing eyes at the smooth, shaven lawns and well-kept paths with their
background of leafless trees. It seemed to him that he had been standing
thus for hours, waiting--waiting for someone to come and tell him that a
son and heir was born to him.
He never doubted that it would be a son. By some freak of chance
the first-born of the Vallincourts of Coverdale had been, for eight
successive generations, a boy. Indeed, by this time, the thing had
become so much a habit that no doubts or apprehensions concerning the
sex of the eldest child were ever entertained. It was accepted as a
foregone conclusion, and in the eyes of the family there was a certain
gratifying propriety about such regularity. It was like a hall-mark of
heavenly approval.
Hugh Vallincourt, therefore, was conscious at this critical moment of
no questionings on that particular score. He was merely a prey to the
normal tremors and agitations of a husband and prospective father.
For an ageless period, it seemed to him, his thoughts had clung about
that upstairs room where his wife lay battling for her own life and
another’s. Suddenly they swung back to the time, a year ago, when he
had first met her--an elusive feminine thing still reckoning her age in
teens--beneath the glorious blue and gold canopy of the skies of Italy.
Their meeting and brief courtship had been pure romance--romance such
as is bred in that land of mellow warmth and colour, where the flower of
passion sometimes buds and blooms within the span of a single day.
In like manner had sprung to life the love between Hugh Vallincourt
and Diane Wielitzska, and rarely has the web of love enmeshed two more
dissimilar and ill-matched people--Hugh, a man of seven-and-thirty, the
strict and somewhat self-conscious head of a conspicuously devout old
English family, and Diane, a beautiful dancer of mixed origin, the
illegitimate offspring of a Russian grand-duke and of a French artist’s
model of the Latin Quarter.
The three dread Sisters who determine the fate of men must have laughed
amongst themselves at such an obvious mismating, knowing well how
inevitably it would tangle the threads of many other lives than the two
immediately concerned.
Vallincourt had been brought up on severely conventional lines, reared
in the narrow tenets of a family whose salient characteristics were
an overweening pride of race and a religious zeal amounting almost to
fanaticism, while Diane had had no up-bringing worth speaking of. As for
religious views, she hadn’t any.
Yet neither the one nor the other had counted in the scale when the
crucial moment came.
Perhaps it was by way of an ironical set-off against his environment
that Fate had dowered Hugh with his crop of ruddy hair--and with the
ardent temperament which usually accompanies the type. Be that as it
may, he was swept completely off his feet by the dancer’s magic beauty.
The habits and training of a lifetime went by the board, and nothing
was allowed to impede the swift (not to say violent) course of his
love-making. Within a month from the day of their first meeting, he and
Diane were man and wife.
The consequences were almost inevitable, and Hugh found that his married
life speedily resolved itself into an endless struggle between the
dictates of inclination and conscience. Everything that was man in him
responded passionately to the appeal and charm of Diane’s personality,
whilst everything that was narrow and censorious disapproved her total
inability to conform to the ingrained prejudices of the Vallincourts.
Not that Diane was in any sense of the word a bad woman. She was merely
beautiful and irresponsible--a typical _cigale_ of the stage--lovable
and kind-hearted and pagan, and possessing but the haziest notions of
self-control and self-discipline. Even so, left to themselves, husband
and wife might ultimately have found the road to happiness across the
bridge of their great love for one another.
But such freedom was denied them. Always at Hugh’s elbow stood his
sister, Catherine, a rigidly austere woman, in herself an epitome of all
that Vallincourts had ever stood for.
Since the death of their parents, twenty years previously, Catherine had
shared her brother’s home, managing his house--and, on the strength of
her four years’ seniority in age, himself as well--with an iron hand.
Nor had she seen fit to relinquish the reins of government when he
married.
Privately, Hugh had hoped she might consider the propriety of
withdrawing to the dower house attached to the Coverdale estates, but if
the idea had occurred to her, she had never given it utterance, and Hugh
himself had lacked the courage to propose such an innovation.
So it followed that Catherine was ever at hand to criticise and condemn.
She disapproved of her brother’s marriage wholly and consistently. In
her eyes, he had committed an unpardonable sin in allying himself with
Diane Wielitzska. It was his duty to have married a woman of the type
conventionally termed “good,” whose blood--and religious outlook--were
alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect,
she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic
disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving,
butterfly nature with an aloofly puritanical disdain.
Amid the glacial atmosphere of disapproval into which marriage had
thrust her, Diane found her only solace in Virginie, a devoted French
servant who had formerly been her nurse, and who literally worshipped
the ground she walked on. Conversely, Virginie’s attitude towards Miss
Vallincourt was one of frank hostility. And deep in the hearts of
both Diane and Virginie lurked a confirmed belief that the birth of a
child--a son--would serve to bring about a better understanding between
husband and wife, and in the end assure Diane her rightful place as
mistress of the house.
“_Vois-tu_, Virginie,” the latter would say hopefully. “When I have a
little baby, I shall have done my duty as the wife of a great
English milord. Even Miss Catherine will no longer regard me as of no
importance.”
And Virginie would reply with infinite satisfaction:
“Of a certainty, when madame has a little son, Ma’moiselle Catherine
will be returned to her place.”
And now at last the great moment had arrived, and upstairs Catherine and
Virginie were in attendance--both ousted from what each considered her
own rightful place of authority by a slim, capable, and apparently quite
unconcerned piece of femininity equipped against rebellion in all the
starched panoply of a nurse’s uniform, while downstairs Hugh stared
dumbly out at the frosted lawns, with their background of bare, brown
trees swaying to the wind from the north.
The door behind him opened suddenly. Hugh whirled round. He was a
tall man with a certain rather formal air of stateliness about him,
a suggestion of the _grand seigneur_, and the unwontedly impulsive
movement was significant of the strain under which he was labouring.
Catherine was standing on the threshold of the room with something in
her arms--something almost indistinguishable amid the downy, fleecy
froth of whiteness amid which it lay.
Hugh was conscious of a new and strange sensation deep down inside
himself. He felt rather as though all the blood in his body had rushed
to one place--somewhere in the middle of it--and were pounding there
against his ribs.
He tried to speak, failed, then instinctively stretched out his arms for
the tiny, orris-scented bundle which Catherine carried.
The next thing of which he was conscious was Catherine’s voice as she
placed his child in his arms--very quiet, yet rasping across the tender
silence of the room like a file.
“Here, Hugh, is the living seal which God Himself has set upon the sin
of your marriage.”
Hugh’s eyes, bent upon the pink, crumpled features of the scrap of
humanity nestled amid the bunchy whiteness in his arms, sought his
sister’s face. It was a thin, hard face, sharply cut like carved ivory;
the eyes a light, cold blue, ablaze with hostility; the pale obstinate
lips, usually folded so impassively one above the other, working
spasmodically.
For a moment brother and sister stared at each other in silence. Then,
all at once, Catherine’s rigidly enforced composure snapped.
“A girl child, Hugh!” she jeered violently. “A _girl_--when you prayed
for a boy!”
“A girl?”
Hugh stared stupidly at the babe in his arms.
“Ay, a girl!” taunted Catherine, her voice cracking with rising
hysteria. “_A girl!_ . . . For eight generations the first-born has been
a son. And the ninth is a girl! The daughter of a foreign dancing-woman!
. . . God has indeed taken your punishment into His own Hands!”
CHAPTER II
THE WIDENING GULF
The birth of a daughter came upon Hugh in the light of an almost
overwhelming shock. He was quite silent when, in response to Catherine’s
imperative gesture, he surrendered the child into her arms once more.
As she took it from him he noticed that those thin, angular arms of hers
seemed to close round the little swaddled body in an almost jealously
possessive clasp. But there was none of the tender possessiveness of
love about it. In some oddly repugnant way it reminded him of the motion
of a bird of prey at last gripping triumphantly in its talons a victim
that has hitherto eluded pursuit.
He turned back dully to his contemplation of the wintry garden, nor, in
his absorption, did he hear the whimpering cry--almost of protest--that
issued from the lips of his first-born as Catherine bore the child away.
For a space it seemed as though his mind were a blank, every thought and
feeling wiped out of it by the stupendous, nullifying fact that his wife
had given birth to a daughter. Then, with a rush as torturing as the
return of blood to benumbed limbs, emotions crowded in upon him.
Catherine’s incessant denunciations of his “sin” in marrying Diane
Wielitzska--poured upon him without stint throughout this first year of
his marriage--seemed to din in his ears anew. Such phrases as “selling
your soul,” “putting a woman of that type in our sainted mother’s
place,” “mingling the blood of a foreign dancing-woman with our own,”
jangled against each other in his mind.
Had he really been guilty of a sin against his conscience--satisfied his
desires irrespective of all sense of duty?
He began to think he had, and to wonder in a disturbed fashion if God
thought so too. What was it Catherine had said? _“God has indeed taken
your punishment into His own Hands.”_
Hugh was only too well aware of the facts which gave the speech its
trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of
an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother
to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of
succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert
Vallincourt, a cousin--a gay and debonair young rake of much charm of
manner and equal absence of virtue. From both Catherine’s and Hugh’s
point of view he was the last man in the world fitted to become the head
of the family. Hence the eagerness with which they had anticipated the
arrival of a son and heir.
And now, prompted by Catherine’s bitter taunt, the birth of a daughter
as his first-born--the first happening of the kind for eight successive
generations--appeared to Hugh in the light of a direct manifestation of
God’s intention that no son born of Diane Wielitzska should be dowered
with such influence as the heir to the Vallincourts must necessarily
wield.
Better, even, that the title and estates should go to Rupert! Bad as
his reputation might be, good blood ran in his veins on either side--an
inherited tradition of right-doing which was bound to assert itself in
succeeding generations. Whereas in the offspring of Diane heaven alone
knew what hidden inherited tendencies towards evil might lie fallow, to
develop later and work incalculable mischief in the world.
Hugh felt crushed by the unexpected blow which had befallen him. Since
his marriage, he had opposed a forced indifference to his sister’s
irreconcilable attitude, finding compensation in the glowing moments of
his passion for Diane. Nevertheless--since living in an atmosphere of
disapproval tends to fray the strongest nerves--his temper had worn a
little fine beneath the strain; and with Diane’s faults and failings
thrust continually on his notice he had unconsciously grown more
critical of her.
And now, all at once, it seemed as though scales had been torn from his
eyes. He saw his marriage for the first time from the same standpoint as
Catherine saw it, and in the unlooked-for birth of a daughter he thought
he recognised the Hand of God, sternly uprooting his most cherished
hopes and minimising, as much as possible, the inevitable evil
consequences of his weakness in marrying Diane.
He was conscious of a rising feeling of resentment against his wife.
Words from an old Book flashed into his mind: _“The woman tempted me.”_
With the immediate instinct of a weak nature--the very narrowness
and rigidity of his views was a manifestation of weakness, had he but
realised it--he was already looking for someone with whom to share the
blame for his lapse from the Vallincourt standard of conduct, and in
that handful of wayward charm, red lips, and soft, beguiling eyes which
was Diane he found what he sought.
Again the room door opened. This time, instead of putting a longed-for
end to a blank period of suspense, the little quiet clicking of the
latch cut almost aggressively across the conflict of Hugh’s thoughts. He
turned round irritably.
“What is it?” he demanded.
A uniformed nurse was standing in the doorway. At the sound of his
curtly-spoken question she glanced at him with a certain contemplative
curiosity in her eyes. They might have held surprise as well as
curiosity had she not lately stood beside that huge, canopied bed
upstairs, listening pitifully to a woman’s secret fears and longings,
unveiled in the delirium of pain.
“I know you sometimes wish you hadn’t married me. . . . I’m not good
enough. And Catherine hates me. Yes, she does, she does! And she’ll make
you hate me too! But you won’t hate me when my baby comes, will you,
Hugh? You want a little son . . . a little son . . .”
Nurse Maynard could hear again the weary, complaining voice, trailing
off at last in the silence of exhaustion, and an impulse of indignation
added a sharp edge to her tone as she responded to Hugh’s query.
“Her ladyship is asking to see you, Sir Hugh. She ought to rest now, but
she is too excited. She has been expecting you.”
There was no mistaking the implied rebuke in the last sentence, and
Hugh’s face darkened.
“I’ll come,” he said, briefly, and followed the crisp starched figure
up the stairs and into a half-darkened room, smelling faintly of
antiseptics.
Vaguely the white counterpane outlined the slim figure of Diane upon the
bed. The nurse raised the blind a little, and the light of the westering
sun fell across the pillow, revealing a small, dark head which turned
eagerly at the sound of Hugh’s entrance.
“Hugh!” The voice from the bed came faintly.
Hugh looked down at his wife. Probably never had Diane looked more
beautiful.
The little worldly, sophisticated expression common to her features had
been temporarily obliterated by the holy suffering of motherhood, and
the face of the “foreign dancing-woman,” born and bred in a quarter of
the world where virtue is a cheap commodity, was as pure and serene as
the face of a Madonna.
She held out her hands to her husband, her lips curving into a smile
that was all love and tenderness.
“Hugh--_mon adore!_”
The lover in him sent him swiftly to her side, and as he drew her
into his arms she let her head fall back against his shoulder with a
tremulous sigh of infinite content.
And then, from the firelit corner of the room, came the sound of a
feeble wailing. Hugh started as though stung, and his eyes left his
wife’s face and riveted themselves upon the figure in the low chair by
the hearth--Virginie, rocking a little as she sat, and crooning a Breton
lullaby to the baby in her arms.
In a moment remembrance rushed upon him, cutting in twain as though
with a dividing sword this exquisite moment of reunion with his wife.
Insensibly his arms relaxed their clasp of the frail body they held, and
Diane, sensing their slackening, looked up startled and disconcerted.
Her eyes followed the direction of his glance, then, coming back to
his face, searched it wildly. Instantly she knew the meaning of that
suddenly limp clasp and all that it implied.
“Hugh!” The throbbing tenderness had gone out of her voice, leaving it
dry and toneless. “Hugh! You don’t mean . . . you’re _angry_ that it’s a
girl?”
He looked down at her--at the frightened eyes, the lovely face fined by
recent pain, and all his instinct was to reassure and comfort her. But
something held him back. The old, narrow creed in which he had been
reared, whose shackles he had broken through when he had recklessly
followed the bidding of his heart and married Diane, was once more
mastering him--bidding him resist the natural human impulses of love and
kindliness evoked by his wife’s appeal.
_“God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands.”_
Again he seemed to hear Catherine’s accusing tones, and the fanatical
strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no
more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong.
He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied
his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement.
He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed. In his
light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot
which had shone in Catherine’s.
“No,” he said. “I am not angry that the child is a girl. I accept it as
a just retribution.”
No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have
so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted,
from woman’s supreme conflict with death. But the fanatic loses sight of
normal values, and Hugh, obsessed by his newly conceived idea of atoning
for the sin of his marriage, was utterly oblivious of the enormity of
his conduct as viewed through unbiased eyes.
The woman who had just fought her way through the Valley of the Shadow
stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Retribution?” she repeated blankly.
“For my marriage--our marriage.”
Diane’s breath came faster.
“What--what do you mean?” she asked falteringly. Suddenly a look of
sheer terror leaped into her eyes, and she clutched at Hugh’s sleeve.
“Oh, you’re not going to be like Catherine? Say you’re not! Hugh, you’ve
always said she was crazy to call our marriage a sin. . . . _A sin!_”
She tried to laugh, but the laugh stuck in her throat, caught and pinned
there by the terror that gripped her.
“Yes, I’ve said that. I’ve said it because I wanted to think it,” he
returned remorselessly, “not because I really thought it.”
Diane dragged herself up on to her elbow.
“I don’t understand. You’ve not changed?” Then, as he made no answer:
“Hugh, you’re frightening me! What do you mean? What has Catherine been
saying to you?”
Her voice rose excitedly. A patch of feverish colour appeared on either
cheek. Old Virginie sprung up from her chair by the fire, alarmed.
“You excite madame!”
Hugh turned to leave the room.
“We’ll discuss this another time, Diane,” he said.
Diane moved her head fretfully.
“No. Now--now! Don’t go! Hugh!”
Her voice rose almost to a scream and simultaneously the nurse came
hurrying in from the adjoining room. She threw one glance at the
patient, huddled flushed and excited against the pillows, then without
more ado she marched up to Hugh and, taking him by the shoulders with
her small, capable hands, she pushed him out of the room.
“Do you want to _kill_ your wife?” she demanded in a low voice of
concentrated anger. “If so, you’re going the right way about it.”
The next moment the door closed behind her, and Hugh found himself
standing alone on the landing outside it.
Although the scene with her husband did not kill Diane, it went very
near it. For some time she was dangerously ill, but at last the combined
efforts of doctor and nurse restored her once more to a frail hold upon
life, and the resiliency of youth accomplished the rest.
Curiously enough, the remembrance of Hugh’s brief visit to her bedside
held for her no force of reality. When the fever which had ensued
abated, she described the whole scene in detail to Virginie and the
nurse as an evil dream which she had had--and pitifully they let her
continue in this belief.
Even Hugh himself had been compelled, under protest, to take part in
this deception. The doctor, a personal friend of his, had not minced
matters.
“You’ve acted the part of an unmitigated coward, Vallincourt--salving
your own fool conscience at your wife’s expense. Even if you no longer
love her--”
“But I do love her,” protested Hugh. “I--I _worship_ her!”
Jim Lancaster stared. In common with most medical men he was more or
less used to the odd vagaries of human nature, but Hugh’s attitude
struck him as altogether incomprehensible.
“Then what in the name of thunder have you been getting at?” he
demanded.
“I both love and hate her,” declared Hugh wretchedly.
“That’s rot,” retorted the other. “It’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible.”
Hugh rose and began pacing backwards and forwards. Lancaster’s eyes
rested on him thoughtfully. The man had altered during the last few
weeks--altered incredibly. He was a stone lighter to start with, and
his blond, clear-cut face had the worn look born of mental conflict. His
eyes were red-rimmed as though from insufficient sleep.
“It’s not impossible.” Hugh paused in his restless pacing to and fro. “I
love her because I can’t help myself. I hate her because I ought never
to have married her--never made a woman of her type the mother of my
child.”
“All mothers are sacred,” suggested the doctor quietly.
Hugh seemed not to hear him.
“How long is this pretence to go on, Lancaster?” he demanded irritably.
“What pretence?”
“This pretence that nothing is changed--nothing altered--between my wife
and myself?”
“For ever, I hope. So that, after all, there will have been no
pretence.”
But the appeal of the speech was ineffectual. Hugh looked at the other
man unmoved.
“It’s no use hoping that you and I can see things from the same
standpoint,” he added stubbornly. “I’ve made my decision--laid down
the lines of our future life together. I’m only waiting till you, as a
medical man, tell me that Diane’s health is sufficiently restored for me
to inform her.”
“No woman is ever in such health that you can break her heart with
impunity.”
Hugh’s light-grey eyes gleamed like steel.
“Will you answer my question?” he said curtly.
Lancaster sprang up.
“Diane is in as good health now as ever she was,” he said violently. And
strode out of the room.
During the period of her convalescence Diane, attended by Nurse Maynard,
had occupied rooms situated in a distant wing of the house, where the
invalid was not likely to be disturbed by the coming and going of other
members of the household, and it was with almost the excitement of
a schoolgirl coming home for the holidays that, when she was at last
released from the doctor’s supervision, she retook possession of her
own room. She superintended joyously the restoration to their accustomed
place her various little personal possessions, and finally peeped into
her husband’s adjoining room, thinking she heard him moving there.
On the threshold she paused irresolutely, conscious of an odd sense of
confusion. The room was vacant. But, beyond that, its whole aspect was
different somehow, unfamiliar. Her eyes wandered to the dressing-table.
Instead of holding its usual array of silver-backed brushes and polished
shaving tackle, winking in the sunshine, it was empty. She stared at
it blankly. Then her glance travelled slowly round the room. It had a
strangely untenanted look. There was no sign of masculine attire left
carelessly about--not a chair or table was a hairbreadth out of its
appointed place.
Her hand, resting lightly on the door-handle, gripped it with a sudden
tensity. The next moment she had crossed the room and torn open the
doors of the great armoire where Hugh kept his clothes. This, too, was
empty--shelves and hanger alike. Impulsively she rang the bell and,
when a maid appeared in response, demanded to know the meaning of the
alteration.
The girl glanced at her with the veiled curiosity of her class.
“It was made by Sir Hugh’s orders, my lady.”
With an effort, Diane hid the sudden tumult of bewilderment and fear
that filled her. Her dream! Had it been only a dream? Or had it been
an actual happening--that terrible little scene with her husband when,
standing rigid and unbending beside her bed, he had told her that the
birth of their daughter was a just retribution for a union he regarded
as a sin?
Memories of their brief year of marriage came surging over her in a
torrent--Catherine’s narrow-minded opposition and disapproval, Hugh’s
own moodiness and irritability and, latterly, his not infrequent
censure. There had been times when Diane--rebuked incessantly--had
fancied she must be the Scarlet Woman herself, or at least a very near
relative. And then had come moments when Hugh, carried away by his
ardour, had once more played the lover as he alone knew how, with all
the warmth and abandon of those days when he had wooed her in Italy, and
Diane would forget her unhappiness and fears in the sure knowledge that
she was a passionately beloved woman.
But always she was subconsciously aware of a sense of strife--of
struggle, as though Hugh loved her in spite of himself, in defiance of
some inner mandate of conscience which accused him.
And now, fear mastered her. Her dream had been a reality. And this--this
sweeping away from what had been his room of every familiar little
personal possession--was the symbol of some new and terribly changed
relation between them.
Forcing herself to move composedly while the maid still watched her,
she walked slowly out of the room, but the instant the door had closed
behind her she flew downstairs to her husband’s study and, not pausing
to comply with the unwritten law which forbade entrance there without
express permission, broke in upon him as he sat at his desk, busily
occupied with his morning mail.
“Diane!”
Hugh turned towards her with a cold light of astonished disapproval in
his eyes.
“You know I don’t like to be interrupted----”
“I know, I know. But I _had_ to come. Something’s happened. There’s been
a mistake. . . . Hugh, they’ve taken everything out of your room. All
your things.”
She stood beside him breathlessly awaiting his reply--her passionate
dark eyes fixed on his face, two patches of brilliant colour showing on
the high cheek-bones that bore witness to her Russian origin.
They made a curious contrast--husband and wife. She, a slender thing of
fire and flame, hands clenched, lips quivering--woman every inch of her;
he, immaculate and composed, his face coldly expressionless, yet with
a hint of something warmer, a suppressed glow, beneath the deliberately
chill glance of those curious light-grey eyes--the man and bigoted
fanatic fighting for supremacy within him.
“Hugh! Answer me! Don’t sit staring at me like that!” Diane’s voice held
a sharpened sound.
At last he spoke, very slowly and carefully.
“There has been no mistake, Diane. Everything that has been done has
been with my sanction--by my order. Our marriage has been a culpable
mistake. Catherine realised it from the beginning. I only realise
my full guilt now that I am punished. But whatever I can do in
atonement--reparation, that I have made up my mind to do. The first--the
chief thing--is that our married life is at an end.”
She heard him with a curious absence of surprise. Somehow, from the
instant she had seen his dismantled room she had known, known surely,
that the long fight between herself and Catherine was over. And that
Catherine had won.
“At an end? Hugh, what do you mean? What are you going to do? You’re
not, you’re not going to send me away?”
“No, not that. I’ve no right to punish you. You’ve been guilty of no
fault--”
“Except the fault of being myself,” she flung back bitterly.
“But I ought never to have married you. I did it, knowing you were not
fit--suitable”--he corrected himself hastily. “So I alone am to blame.
You will retain your position here as my wife--mistress of my home.”
Diane, remembering Catherine’s despotic rule, smiled mirthlessly. “But
henceforth you will be my wife in name only. I shall have no wife.”
Diane caught that note of dull endurance in his voice, and seized upon
it. He still cared!
“Hugh, you’ve listened to Catherine till you’ve lost all sense of
truth.” She spoke gently, pleadingly. “Don’t do this thing. We’ve been
guilty of no sin that needs atonement. It isn’t wrong to love.”
But he was implacable.
“No,” he returned. “It isn’t wrong to love--but sometimes love should be
denied.”
Diane drew nearer to him, and laid her hand on his arm.
“Not ours, Hugh,” she whispered. “Not love like ours--”
“Be silent!”
Hugh sprang to his feet, his eyes ablaze, his voice hoarse and shaking.
“Don’t tempt me! Do you think I’ve found it easy to decide on this? When
every fibre of my body is calling out for you? My God, no!”
“Then don’t do it! Hugh--dearest--”
With sudden violence he caught her by the arms.
“Be silent, I tell you! Don’t tempt me! I’ll make my penance, accept the
burden laid on me--that my first-born should be a girl!”
Diane clung to him, resisting his attempt to thrust her from him.
“Hugh! Ah, wait! Listen to me! . . . Dear, some day there may be a
little son, yours and mine--”
He flung her from him violently.
“There shall never be a son of ours! Never! It is the Will of God.”
With an immense effort he checked the rising frenzy within him--the
ecstasy of the martyr embracing the stake to which he shall be bound. He
moved across to the door and held it open for her.
“And now, will you please go? That is my last word on the matter.”
Diane turned hesitatingly towards the doorway, then paused.
“Hugh----”
There was an infinite appeal in her voice. Her eyes were those of a
frightened, bewildered child.
“Go, please,” he repeated mechanically.
A convulsive sob tore its way through her throat. She stepped blindly
forward. The next moment the door closed inexorably between husband and
wife.
CHAPTER III
SAINT-MICHAEL AND THE WONDER-CHILD
Day by day her husband’s complete estrangement from her was rendered
additionally bitter to Diane by Catherine’s complacent air of triumph.
The latter knew that she had won, severed the tie which bound her
brother to “the foreign dancing-woman,” and she did not scruple to let
Diane see that she openly rejoiced in the fact.
At first Diane imagined that Catherine might rest content with what she
had accomplished, but the grim, hard-featured woman still continued to
exhibit the same self-righteous disapproval towards her brother’s wife
as hitherto.
Diane endured it in resentful silence for a time, but one day, stung by
some more than usually acid speech of Catherine’s, she turned on her,
demanding passionately why she seemed to hate her even more since the
birth of the child.
“I nearly gave my life for her,” she protested with fierce simplicity.
“I could do no more! Is it because _le bon dieu_ has sent me a little
daughter instead of a little son that you hate me so much?”
And Catherine had answered her in a voice of quiet, concentrated
animosity:
“If you had died then--_died childless_--I should have thanked God day
and night.”
Diane, isolated and unhappy, turned to her baby for consolation. It was
all that was left to her out of the wreck of her life, and the very fact
that both Hugh and Catherine seemed to regard the little daughter with
abhorrence only served to strengthen the passionate worship which she
herself lavished upon her.
The child--they had called her Magda--was an odd little creature, as
might have been expected from the violently opposing characteristics of
her parents.
She was slenderly made--built on the same lithe lines as her mother--and
almost as soon as she was able to walk she manifested an amazing balance
and suppleness of limb. By the time she was four years old she was
trying to imitate, with uncertain little feet and dimpled, aimlessly
waving arms, the movements of her mother, when to amuse the child, she
would sometimes dance for her.
However big a tragedy had occurred in Magda’s small world--whether it
were a crack across the insipid china face of a favourite doll or the
death of an adored Persian kitten--there was still balm in Gilead if
_“petite maman”_ would but dance for her. The tears shining in big drops
on her cheeks, her small chest still heaving with the sobs that were
a passionate protest against unkind fate, Magda would sit on the floor
entranced, watching with adoring eyes every swift, graceful motion of
the dancer, and murmuring in the quaint shibboleth of French and English
she had imbibed from old Virginie.
On one of these occasions Hugh came upon the two unexpectedly and
brought the performance to a summary conclusion.
“That will do, Diane,” he said icily. “I should have thought you would
have had more self-respect than to dance--in that fashion--in front of a
child.”
“It is, then, a sin to dance--as it is to be married?” demanded Diane
bitterly, abruptly checked in an exquisite spring-flower dance of her
own invention.
“I forbid it; that is sufficient,” replied Hugh sternly.
His assumption of arrogant superiority was unbearable. Diane’s
self-control wavered under it and broke. She turned and upbraided him
despairingly, alternately pleading and reproaching, battering all her
slender forces uselessly against his inflexible determination.
“This is a waste of time, Diane--mine, anyway,” he told her. And left
her shaken with grief and anger.
Driven by a sense of utter revolt, she stormed her way to Catherine, who
was composedly sorting sheets in the linen room.
“I will not bear it!” she burst out at her furiously. “What have I done
that I should be treated as an outcast--a pariah?”
Catherine regarded the tense, quivering little figure with chill
dislike.
“You married my brother,” she replied imperturbably.
“And you have separated us! But for you, we should be happy together--he
and baby and I! But you have spoilt it all. I suppose”--a hint of the
Latin Quarter element in her asserting itself--“I suppose you think no
one good enough to marry into your precious family!”
Catherine paused on her way to the cupboard, a pile of fine linen
pillowslips in her hands.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “It is I who have separated you--spoilt your
happiness, if you like. And I am glad of it. I can’t expect anyone like
you to understand”--there was the familiar flavour of disparagement in
her tones--“but I am thankful that my brother has seen the wickedness of
his marriage with you, that he has repented of it, and that he is making
the only atonement possible!”
She turned and composedly laid the pile of pillowslips in their
appointed place on the shelf. A faint fragrance of dried lavender
drifted out from the dark depths of the cupboard. Diane always
afterwards associated the smell of lavender with her memories of
Catherine Vallincourt, and the sweet, clean scent of it was spoiled for
her henceforward.
“I hate you!” she exclaimed in a low voice of helpless rage. “I hate
you--and I wish to God Hugh had never had a sister!”
“Well”--composedly--“he will not have one much longer.”
Diane stared.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that as far as our life together is concerned, it is very nearly
over.”
“Do you mean”--Diane bent towards her breathlessly--“do you mean that
you are _going away_--going away from Coverdale?”
“Yes. I am entering a sisterhood--that of the Sisters of Penitence, a
community Hugh is endowing with money that is urgently needed.”
“Endowing?”
“As part of the penance he has set himself to perform.” Catherine’s
steely glance met and held the younger woman’s. “Thanks to you, the
remainder of his life will be passed in expiation.”
Diane shook her head carelessly. Such side-issues were of relatively
small importance compared with the one outstanding, amazing fact:
Catherine was going away! Going away from Coverdale--for ever!
“Yes”--Catherine read her thoughts shrewdly--“yes, you will be rid of
me. I shall not be here much longer.”
Diane struck her hands together. For once, not even the fear of
Catherine’s gibing tongue could hold her silent.
“I’m glad--glad--_glad_ you’re going away!” she exclaimed passionately.
“When you are gone I will win back my husband.”
“Do you think so?” was all she said.
But to Diane’s keyed-up consciousness it was as though the four short
words contained a threat--the germ of future disaster.
In due time Catherine quitted Coverdale for the austere seclusion of
the sisterhood, and a very few weeks sufficed to convince Diane that her
forebodings had been only too well founded.
Catherine had long been anxious to enter a community, restrained from
doing so solely by Hugh’s need of her as mistress of his house, and
now that her wish was an accomplished fact, it seemed as though he
were spurred on to increasing effort by the example of his sister’s
renunciation of the world. He withdrew himself even more completely from
his wife, sometimes avoiding her company for days at a time, and adopted
a stringently ascetic mode of life, denying himself all pleasure,
fasting frequently, and praying and meditating for hours at a stretch
in the private chapel which was attached to Coverdale. As far as it was
possible, without actually entering a community, his existence resembled
that of a monk, and Diane came to believe that he had voluntarily vowed
himself to a certain form of penance and expiation for the marriage
which the bigotry of his nature had led him to regard as a sin.
His life only impinged upon his wife’s in so far as the upbringing of
their child was concerned. He was unnecessarily severe with her, and,
since Diane opposed his strict ruling at every opportunity, Magda’s
early life was passed in an atmosphere of fierce contradictions.
The child inherited her mother’s beauty to the full, and, as she
developed, exhibited an extraordinary faculty for getting her own way.
Servants, playmates, and governesses all succumbed to the nameless charm
she possessed, while her mother and old Virginie frankly worshipped her.
The love of dancing was instinctive with her, and this, unknown to Hugh,
her mother cultivated assiduously, fostering in her everything that
was imaginative and delicately fanciful. Magda believed firmly in
the existence of fairies and regarded flowers as each possessed of
a separate entity with personal characteristics of its own. The
originality of the dances she invented for her own amusement was the
outcome.
But, side by side with this love of all that was beautiful, she absorbed
from her mother a certain sophisticated understanding of life which was
somewhat startling in one of her tender years, and this, too, betrayed
itself in her dancing. For it is an immutable law that everything--good,
bad, and indifferent--which lies in the soul of an artist ultimately
reveals itself in his work.
And Magda, inheriting the underlying ardour of her father’s temperament
and the gutter-child’s sharp sense of values which was her mother’s
Latin Quarter garnering, at the age of eight danced, with all the
beguilement and seductiveness of a trained and experienced dancer.
Even Hugh himself was not proof against the elusive lure of it. He
chanced upon her one day, dancing in her nursery, and was so carried
away by the charm of the performance that for the moment he forgot that
she was transgressing one of his most rigid rules.
In the child’s gracious, alluring gestures he was reminded of the first
time that he had seen her mother dance, and of how it had thrilled him.
Beneath the veneer with which his self-enforced austerity had overlaid
his emotions, he felt his pulses leap, and was bitterly chagrined at
being thus attracted.
He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable
consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his
weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the
world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and
backed--here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in
him--by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a
Vallincourt.
“Never let me see you dance again, Magda,” he told her. “It is
forbidden. If you disobey you will be severely punished.”
Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour
of black smoke. With that precociously sophisticated instinct of hers
she realised that the man had been emotionally stirred, and divined in
her funny child’s mind that it was her dancing which had so stirred him.
It gave her a curious sense of power.
“Sieur Hugh is _afraid_ because he likes me to dance,” she told her
mother, with an impish little grin of enjoyment.
(On one occasion Hugh had narrated for her benefit the history of an
ancestor, one Sieur Hugues de Vallincourt, whose effigy in stone adorned
the church, and she had ever afterwards persisted in referring to her
father as “Sieur Hugh”--considerably to his annoyance, since he regarded
it as both disrespectful and unseemly.)
From this time onwards Magda seemed to take a diabolical delight
in shocking her father--experimenting on him, as it were. In some
mysterious way she had become conscious of her power to allure. Young
as she was, the instinct of conquest was awakened within her, and she
proceeded to “experiment” on certain of her father’s friends--to their
huge delight and Hugh’s intense disgust. Once, in an outburst of fury,
he epitomised her ruthlessly.
“The child has the soul of a courtesan!”
If this were so, Hugh had no knowledge of how to cope with it. His
fulminations on the subject of dancing affected her not at all, and a
few days after he had rebuked her with all the energy at his command he
discovered her dancing on a table--this time for the delectation of an
enraptured butler and staff in the servants’ hall.
Without more ado Hugh lifted her down and carried her to his study,
where he administered a sound smacking. The result astonished him
considerably.
“Do you think you can stop me from dancing by beating me?”
Magda arraigned him with passionate scorn.
“I do,” he returned grimly. “If you hurt people enough you can stop them
from committing sin. That is the meaning of remedial punishment.”
“I don’t believe it!” she stormed at him. “You might hurt me till I
_died_ of hurting, but you couldn’t make me good--not if I hated your
hurting me all the time! Because it isn’t good to hate,” she added out
of the depths of some instinctive wisdom.
“Then you’d better learn to like being punished--if that will make you
good,” retorted Hugh.
Magda sped out into the woods. Hugh’s hand had been none too light,
and she was feeling physically and spiritually sore. Her small soul was
aflame with fierce revolt.
Just to assure herself of the liberty of the individual and of the fact
that “hurting couldn’t make her good,” she executed a solitary little
dance on the green, mossy sward beneath the trees. It was rather a
painful process, since certain portions of her anatomy still tingled
from the retributive strokes of justice, but she set her teeth and
accomplished the dance with a consciousness of unholy glee that added
appreciably to the quality of the performance.
“Are you the Fairy Queen?”
The voice came suddenly out of the dim, enfolding silence of the woods,
and Magda paused in the midst of a final pirouette. A man was standing
leaning against the trunk of a tree, watching her with whimsical grey
eyes. Behind him, set up in the middle of a clearing amongst the trees,
an easel and stool evidenced his recent occupation.
Magda returned the scrutiny of the grey eyes. She was no whit
embarrassed and slowly lowered her foot--she had been toe-dancing--to
its normal position while she surveyed the newcomer with interest.
He was a tall, lean specimen of mankind, and the sunlight, quivering
between the interlacing boughs above his head, flickered on to kinky
fair hair that looked almost absurdly golden contrasted with the brown
tan of the face beneath it. It was a nice face, Magda decided, with a
dogged, squarish jaw that appealed to a certain tenacity of spirit which
was one of her own unchildish characteristics, and the keen dark-grey
eyes she encountered were so unlike the cold light-grey of her father’s
that it seemed ridiculous the English language could only supply the one
word “grey” to describe things that were so totally dissimilar.
“They’re like eyes with little fires behind them,” Magda told herself.
Then smiled at their owner radiantly.
“Are you the Fairy Queen?” he repeated gravely.
She regarded him with increasing approval.
“Yes,” she assented graciously. “These are my woods.”
“Then I’m afraid I’ve been trespassing in your majesty’s domain,”
admitted the grey-eyed man. “But your woods are so beautiful I simply
had to try and make a sketch of them.”
Magda came back to earth with promptitude.
“Oh, are you an artist?” she demanded eagerly.
He nodded, smiling.
“I’m trying to be.”
“Let me look.” She flashed past him and planted herself in front of the
easel.
“_Mais, c’est bon!_” she commented coolly. “Me, I know. We have good
pictures at home. This is a good picture.”
The man with the grey eyes looked suitably impressed.
“I’m glad you find it so,” he replied meekly. “I think it wants just one
thing more. If”--he spoke abstractly--“if the Fairy Queen were resting
just there”--his finger indicated the exact point on the canvas--“tired,
you know, because she had been dancing to one of the Mortals--lucky
beggar, wasn’t he?--why, I think the picture would be complete.”
Magda shot him a swift glance of comprehension. Then, without a word,
she moved towards the bole of a tree and flung herself down with all the
supple grace of a young faun. The artist snatched up his palette; the
pose she had assumed without a hint from him was inimitable--the slender
limbs relaxed and drooping exactly as though from sheer fatigue. He
painted furiously, blocking in the limp little figure with swift, sure
strokes of his brush.
When at last he desisted he flung a question at her.
“Who taught you to pose--and to dance like that, you wonder-child?”
Magda surveyed him with that mixture of saint and devil in her long,
suddenly narrow eyes which, when she grew to womanhood, was the measure
of her charm and the curse of her tempestuous life.
“_Le bon dieu_,” she responded demurely.
The man smiled and shook his head. It was a crooked little smile, oddly
humorous and attractive.
“No,” he said with conviction. “No. I don’t think so.”
The daylight was beginning to fade, and he started to pack up his
belongings.
“What’s your name?” asked Magda suddenly.
“Michael.”
She looked at him with sudden awe.
“Not--not _Saint Michel_?” she asked breathlessly.
Virginie had told her all about “_Saint Michel_.” He was a very great
angel indeed. It would be tremendously exciting to find she had been
talking to him all this time without knowing it! And the grey-eyed man
had fair hair; it shone in the glinting sunset-light _almost_ like a
halo!
He quenched her hopes with that brief, one-sided smile of his.
“No,” he said. “I’m not Saint Michael. I’m only a poor devil of a
painter who’s got his way to make in the world. Perhaps, you’ve helped
me, Fairy Queen.”
And seeing that “The Repose of Titania” was the first of his paintings
to bring Michael Quarrington that meed of praise and recognition which
was later his in such full measure, perhaps she had.
“I think I’m glad you’re not a saint, after all,” remarked Magda
thoughtfully. “Saint’s are dreadfully dull and superior.”
He smiled down at her.
“Are they? How do you know?”
“Because Sieur Hugh is preparing to be one. At least Virginie says
so--and she sniffs when she says it. So you see, I know all about it.”
“I see,” he replied seriously. “And who are Sieur Hugh and Virginie?”
“Sieur Hugh is my father. And Virginie is next best to _petite maman_.
Me, I love Virginie.”
“Lucky Virginie!”
Magda made no answer, but she stood looking at him with an odd,
unchildlike deviltry in her sombre eyes.
“Fairy Queen, I should like to kiss you,” said the man suddenly. Then he
jerked his head back. “No, I wouldn’t!” he added quickly to himself. “By
Jove, it’s uncanny!”
Magda remained motionless, still staring at him with those long dark
eyes of hers. He noticed that just at the outer corners they slanted
upwards a little, giving her small, thin face a curiously Eastern look.
At last--
“Please kiss me, Saint Michael,” she said.
For a moment he hesitated, a half-rueful, half-whimsical smile on his
lips, rather as though he were laughing at himself. Then, with a shrug
of his shoulders, he stooped quickly and kissed her.
“Witch-child!” he muttered as he strode away through the woods.
CHAPTER IV
THE SEED OF EVIL
Diane sat in the twilight, brooding. Winter had come round again,
gripping the world with icy fingers, and she shivered a little as she
crouched in front of the fire.
She felt cold--cold in body and soul. The passage of time had brought no
cheery warmth of love or loving-kindness to her starved heart, and the
estrangement between herself and Hugh was as definite and absolute as
it had been the day Catherine quitted Coverdale for the Sisterhood of
Penitence.
But the years which had elapsed since then had taken their inevitable
toll. Hugh had continued along the lines he had laid down for himself,
rigidly ascetic and austere, and his mode of life now revealed itself
unmistakably in his thin, emaciated face and eyes ablaze with fanatical
fervour.
Diane, thrust into a compulsory isolation utterly foreign to her
temperament, debarred the fulfilment of her womanhood which her
spontaneous, impetuous nature craved, had drooped and pined, gradually
losing both her buoyant spirit and her health in the loveless atmosphere
to which her husband had condemned her.
She had so counted on the prospect that a better understanding between
herself and Hugh would ensue after Catherine’s departure that the
downfall of her hopes had come upon her as a bitter disappointment. Once
she had stifled her pride and begged him to live no longer as a stranger
to her. But he had repulsed her harshly, refusing her pleading with an
inexorable decision there was no combating.
Afterwards she had given herself up to despair, and gradually--almost
imperceptibly at first--her health had declined until finally, at the
urgent representations of Virginie, Hugh had called in Dr. Lancaster.
“There is no specific disease,” he had said. “But none the
less”--looking very directly at Hugh--“your wife is dying, Vallincourt.”
Diane had been told the first part of the doctor’s pronouncement, and
recommended by her husband to “rouse herself” out of her apathetic
state.
“‘No specific disease!’” she repeated bitterly, as she sat brooding in
the firelight. “No--only this death in life which I have had to endure.
Well, it will be over soon--and the sooner the better.”
The door burst open suddenly and Magda came in to the room, checking
abruptly, with a child’s stumbling consciousness of pain, as she caught
sight of her mother curled up in front of the fire, staring mutely into
its glowing heart.
“_Maman_?” she begin timidly. “_Petite maman_?”
Diane turned round.
“Cherie, is it thou?”
She kneeled up on the hearthrug and, taking the child in her arms,
searched her face with dry, bright eyes.
“Baby,” she said. “Listen! And when thou art older, remember always what
I have said.”
Magda stared at her, listening intently.
“Never, never give your heart to any man,” continued Diane. “If you
do, he will only break it for you--break it into little pieces like the
glass scent-bottle which you dropped yesterday. Take everything. But do
not give--anything--in return. Will you remember?”
And Magda answered her gravely.
“_Oui, maman_, I will remember.”
What happened after that remained always a confused blur in Magda’s
memory--a series of pictures standing out against a dark background of
haste and confusion, and whispered fears.
Suddenly her mother gave a sharp little cry and her hands went up to
her breast, while for a moment her eyes, dilated and frightened-looking,
stared agonisingly ahead. Then she toppled over sideways and lay in a
little heap on the great bearskin rung in front of the fire.
After that Virginie came running, followed by a drove of scared-looking
servants and, last of all, by Hugh himself, his face very white and
working strangely.
The car was sent off in frantic haste in search of Dr. Lancaster, and
later in the day two white-capped nurses appeared on the scene. Then
followed hours of hushed uncertainty, when people went to and fro
with hurried, muffled footsteps and spoke together in whispers, while
Virginie’s face grew yellow and drawn-looking, and the tears trickled
down her wrinkled-apple cheeks whenever one spoke to her.
Last of all someone told Magda that “_petite maman_” had gone away--and
on further inquiry Virginie vouchsafed that she had gone to somewhere
called Paradise to be with the blessed saints.
“When will she come back again?” demanded Magda practically.
Upon which Virginie had made an unpleasant choking noise in her throat
and declared:
“Never!”
Magda was frankly incredulous. _Petite maman_ would never go away like
that and leave her behind! Of that she felt convinced, and said so.
Gulping back her sobs, Virginie explained that in this case madame had
been given no choice, but added that if Magda comported herself like a
good little girl, she would one day go to be with her in Paradise. Magda
found it all very puzzling.
But when, later, she was taken into her mother’s room and saw the
slender, sheeted figure lying straight and still on the great bed,
hands meekly crossed upon the young, motionless breast, while tall white
candles burned at head and foot, the knowledge that _petite maman_ had
really gone from her seemed all at once to penetrate her childish mind.
That aloofly silent figure could not be her gay, pretty _petite
maman_--the one who had played and laughed with her and danced so
exquisitely that sometimes Magda’s small soul had ached with the sheer
beauty and loveliness of it. . . .
She met Dr. Lancaster as she came out from the candle-lit room and
clutched him convulsively by the hand.
“Is that--being dead?” she whispered, pointing to the room she had just
quitted.
Very gently he tried to explain things to her. Afterwards Magda
overheard the family lawyer asking him in appropriately shocked tones of
what complaint Lady Vallincourt had died, and there had been a curious
grim twist to Lancaster’s mouth as he made answer.
“Heart,” he said tersely.
“Ah! Very sad. Very sad indeed,” rejoined the lawyer feelingly. “These
heart complaints are very obscure sometimes, I believe?”
“Sometimes,” said Lancaster. “Not always.”
The next happening that impressed itself on Magda’s cognisance as an
event was the coming of Lady Arabella Winter. She arrived on a day of
heavy snow, and Magda’s first impression of her, as she came into the
hall muffled up to the tip of her patrician nose in a magnificent sable
wrap, was of a small, alert-eyed bird huddled into its nest.
But when the newcomer had laid aside her furs Magda’s impression
qualified itself. Lady Arabella was not in the least of the “small
bird” type, but rather suggested a hawk endowed with a grim sense
of humour--quick and decisive in movement, with eyes that held an
incalculable wisdom and laughed a thought cynically because they saw so
clearly.
Her hair was perfectly white, as white as the snow outside, but her
complexion was soft and fine-grained as that of a girl of sixteen--pink
and white like summer roses. She had the manner of an empress with
extremely modern ideas.
Magda was instructed that this great little personage was her godmother
and that she would in future live with her instead of at Coverdale.
She accepted the information without surprise though with considerable
interest.
“Think you’ll like it?” Lady Arabella shot at her keenly.
“Yes,” Magda replied unhesitatingly. “But why am I going to live with
you? Sieur Hugh isn’t dead, too, is he?”--with impersonal interest.
“And who in the name of fortune is Sieur Hugh?”
Lady Arabella looked around helplessly, and Virginia, who was hovering
in the background, hastened to explain the relationship.
“Then, no,” replied Lady Arabella. “Sieur Hugh is not dead--though to be
sure he’s the next thing to it!”
Magda eyed her solemnly.
“Is he very ill?” she asked.
“No, merely cranky like all the Vallincourts. He’s in a community,
joined a brotherhood, you know, and proposes to spend the rest of
his days repenting his sins and making his peace with heaven. I’ve no
patience with the fool!” continued the old lady irascibly. “He marries
to please himself and then hasn’t the pluck of a rabbit to see the thing
through decently. So you’re to be my responsibility in future--and a
pretty big one, too, to judge by the look of you.”
Magda hardly comprehended the full meaning of this speech. Still she
gathered that her father had left her--though not quite in the same way
as _petite maman_ had done--and that henceforth this autocratic old lady
with the hawk’s eyes and quick, darting movements was to be the arbiter
of her fate. She also divined, beneath Lady Arabella’s prickly exterior,
a humanness and ability to understand which had been totally lacking in
Sieur Hugh. She proceeded to put it to the test.
“Will you let me dance?” she asked.
“Tchah!” snorted the old woman. “So the Wielitzska blood is coming
out after all!” She turned to Virginia. “Can she dance?” she demanded
abruptly.
“Mais oui, madame!” cried Virginie, clasping her hands ecstatically.
“Like a veritable angel!”
“I shouldn’t have thought it,” commented her ladyship drily.
Her shrewd eyes swept the child’s tense little face with its long,
Eastern eyes and the mouth that showed so vividly scarlet against its
unchildish pallor.
“Less like an angel than anything, I should imagine,” muttered the old
woman to herself with a wicked little grin. Then aloud: “Show me what
you can do, then, child.”
“Very well.” Magda paused, reflecting. Then she ran forward and laid
her hand lightly on Lady Arabella’s knee. “Look! This is the story of
a Fairy who came to earth and lost her way in the woods. She met one of
the Mortals, and he loved her so much that he wouldn’t show her the way
back to Fairyland. So”--abruptly--“she died.”
Lady Arabella watched the child dance in astonished silence. Technique,
of course, was lacking, but the interpretation, the telling of the
story, was amazing. It was all there--the Fairy’s first wonder and
delight in finding herself in the woods, then her realisation that she
was lost and her frantic efforts to find the way back to Fairyland.
Followed her meeting with the Mortal and supplication to him to guide
her, and finally the Fairy’s despair and death. Magda’s slight little
figure sank to the ground, drooping slowly like a storm-bent snowdrop,
and lay still.
Lady Arabella sat up with a jerk.
“Good gracious! The child’s a born dancer! Lydia Tchinova must see her.
She’ll have to train. Poor Hugh!” She chuckled enjoyably. “This will be
the last straw! He’ll be compelled to invent a new penance.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
THE FLOWERING
“You’re very trying, Magda. Everyone is talking about you, and I’m tired
of trying to explain you to people.”
Lady Arabella paused in her knitting and spoke petulantly, but a secret
gleam of admiration in her sharp old eyes as they rested upon her
god-daughter belied the irritation of her tones.
Magda leaned back negligently against the big black velvet cushions in
her chair and lit a cigarette.
“I _want_ everyone to talk about me,” she returned composedly. Her voice
was oddly attractive--low-pitched and with a faint blur of huskiness
about it that caught the ear with a distinctive charm. “It increases
the box-office receipts. And there’s no reason in the world for you to
‘explain’ me to people.”
Her godmother regarded her with increasing irritation, yet at the same
time acutely conscious of the arresting quality of the young, vividly
alive face that gleamed at her from its black-velvet background.
Ten years had only served to emphasise the unusual characteristics
of the child Magda. Her skin was wonderful, of a smooth, creamy-white
texture which gave to the sharply angled face something of the pale,
exotic perfection of a stephanotis bloom. Her eyes were long, the colour
of black pansies--black with a suggestion of purple in their depths.
They slanted upwards a little at the outer corners, and this together
with the high cheek-bones, alone would have betrayed her Russian
ancestry. When Lady Arabella wanted to be particularly obnoxious
she told her that she had Mongolian eyes, and Magda would shrug her
shoulders and, thrusting out a foot which was so perfect in shape that
a painting of it by a certain famous artist had been the most talked-of
picture of the year, would reply placidly: “Well, thank heaven, _that’s_
not English, anyway!”
“It certainly required some explanation when you chose to leave me
and go off and live by yourself,” pursued Lady Arabella, resuming her
knitting. “A girl of twenty! Of course people have talked. Especially as
half the men in town imagine themselves in love with you.”
“Well, I’m perfectly respectable now. I’ve engaged a nice, tame
pussy-cat person to take charge of my morals and chaperon me
generally. Not--like you, Marraine--an Early Victorian autocrat with a
twentieth-century tongue.”
“If you mean Mrs. Grey, she doesn’t give me the least impression of
being a ‘nice, tame pussy-cat,’” retorted Lady Arabella. “You’ll find
that out, my dear.”
Magda regarded her thoughtfully.
“Do you think so?”
“I do.”
“Oh, Gillian is all right,” affirmed Magda, dismissing the matter
airily. “She’s a gorgeous accompanist, anyway--almost as good as Davilof
himself. Which reminds me--I must go home and rehearse my solo dance in
the _Swan-Maiden_. I told Davilof I’d be ready for him at four o’clock;
and it’s half-past three now. I shall never get back to Hampstead
through this ghastly fog in half an hour.” She glanced towards the
window through which was visible a discouraging fog of the “pea-soup”
variety.
Lady Arabella sniffed.
“You’d better be careful for once in your life, Magda. Davilof is in
love with you.”
“Pouf! What if he is?”
Magda rose, and picking up her big black hat set it on her head at
precisely the right angle, and proceeded to spear it through with a
wonderful black-and-gold hatpin of Chinese workmanship.
Lady Arabella shot a swift glance at her.
“He’s just one of a crowd?” she suggested tartly.
Magda assented indifferently.
“You’re wrong--quite wrong,” returned her godmother crisply. “Antoine
Davilof is not one of a crowd--never will be! He’s half a Pole,
remember.”
Magda smiled.
“And I’m half a Russian. It must be a case of deep calling to deep,” she
suggested mockingly.
Lady Arabella’s shining needles clicked as they came to an abrupt stop.
“Does that mean you’re in love with him?” she asked.
Magda stared.
“Good gracious, no! I’m never in love. You know that.”
“That doesn’t prevent my hoping you may develop--some day--into a normal
God-fearing woman,” retorted the other.
“And learn to thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love?” Magda
laughed lightly. “I shan’t. At least, I hope not. Judging from my
friends and acquaintances, the condition of being in love is a most
unpleasant one--reduces a woman to a humiliating sense of her own
unworthiness and keeps her in a see-saw state of emotional uncertainty.
No, thank you! No man is worth it!”
Lady Arabella looked away. Her hard, bright old eyes held a sudden
wistfulness foreign to them.
“My dear--one man is. One man in every woman’s life is worth it. Only we
don’t always find it out in time.”
“Why, Marraine--you don’t mean--you weren’t ever----”
Lady Arabella rose suddenly and came across to where Magda stood by the
fire, one narrow foot extended to the cheerful warmth.
“Never mind what I mean,” she said, and her voice sounded a little
uncertain. “Only, if it comes your way, don’t miss the best thing this
queer old world of ours has to offer. If it brings you nothing else,
love at least leaves you memories. Even that’s something.”
Magda glanced at her curiously. Somehow she had never imagined that
behind the worldly-wise old woman’s sharp speeches and grim, ironic
humour there lay the half-buried memory of some far-distant romance. Yet
now in the uneven tones of her voice she recognised the throb of an old
wound.
“And meanwhile”--Lady Arabella suddenly resumed in her usual curt
manner--“meanwhile you might play fair with one or two of those boys you
have trailing around--Kit Raynham for instance.”
“I don’t understand,” began Magda.
“You understand perfectly. A man of the world’s fair game. He can
look after himself--and probably sizes you up for what you are--a
phenomenally successful dancer, who regards her little court of admirers
as one of the commonplaces of existence--like her morning cup of tea.
But these boys--they look upon you as a woman, even a possible wife. And
then they proceed to fall in love with you!”
Magda’s foot tapped impatiently on the floor.
“What’s this all leading up to?”
Lady Arabella met her glance squarely.
“I want you to leave Kit Raynham alone. His mother has been to
me--Magda, I’m sick of having their mothers come to me!--and begged
me to interfere. She says you’re ruining the boy’s prospects. He’s a
brilliant lad, and they expect him to do something rather special. And
now he’s slacking completely. He’s always on your doorstep. If you care
about him--do you, Magda?--tell him so. But, if you don’t, for goodness’
sake send him about his business.”
She waited quietly for an answer. Magda slipped into a big fur-coat and
caught up her gloves. Then she turned to her godmother abruptly.
“Lady Raynham is absurd. I can’t prevent Kit’s making a fool of himself
if he wants to. And--and”--rather helplessly--“I can’t help it if I
don’t fall in love to order.” She kissed her godmother lightly. “So
that’s that.”
A minute later Lady Arabella’s butler had swung open the front door, and
Magda crossed the pavement and entered her waiting car.
Outside, the fog hung like a thick pall over London--thick enough to
curtain the windows of the car with a blank, grey veil and to make
progress through the streets a difficult and somewhat dangerous process.
Magda snuggled into her furs and leant back against the padded cushions.
All sight of the outside world was cut off from her, except for the
blurred gleam of an occasional street-lamp or the menacing shape of a
motor-bus looming suddenly alongside, and she yielded herself to the
train of thought provoked by her talk with Lady Arabella.
In a detached sort of way she felt sorry about Kit Raynham--principally
because Lady Arabella, of whom she was exceedingly fond, seemed vexed
about the matter. It had not taken her long to discover, when as a child
she had come to live with her godmother, the warm heart that concealed
itself beneath the old lady’s somewhat shrewish exterior. And to
Lady Arabella the advent of her god-child had been a matter for pure
rejoicing.
Having no children of her own, she lavished a pent-up wealth of
affection upon Magda of which few would have thought her capable, and
though she was by no means niggardly in her blame of Hugh Vallincourt
for his method of shelving his responsibilities, she was grateful that
his withdrawal into the monastic life had been the means of throwing
Magda into her care. Five years later, when death claimed him, she found
he had appointed her the child’s sole guardian.
True to her intention, she had asked the opinion of Lydia Tchinova, the
famous dancer, and under Madame Tchinova’s guidance Magda had received
such training that when she came to make her debut she leaped into fame
at once. Hers was one of those rare cases where the initial drudgery and
patient waiting that attends so many careers was practically eliminated,
and at the age of twenty she was probably the most talked-of woman in
London.
She had discarded the family surname for professional purposes, and
appeared in public under the name of Wielitzska--“to save the reigning
Vallincourts from a soul convulsion,” as she observed with a twinkle.
During the last year, influenced by the growing demands of her vocation,
she had quitted her godmother’s hospitable roof and established herself
in a house of her own.
Nor had Lady Arabella sought to dissuade her. Although she and Magda
were the best of friends, she had latterly found the onus of chaperoning
her god-child an increasingly heavy burden. As she herself remarked:
“You might as well attempt to chaperon a comet!”
It was almost inevitable that Magda, starred and feted wherever she
went, should develop into a rather erratic and self-willed young person,
but on the whole she had remained singularly unspoilt. Side by side with
her gift for dancing she had also inherited something of her mother’s
sweetness and wholesomeness of nature. There was nothing petty or mean
about her, and many a struggling member of her own profession had had
good cause to thank “the Wielitzska” for a helping hand.
Women found in her a good pal; men, an elusive, provocative personality
that bewitched and angered them in the same breath, coolly accepting all
they had to offer of love and headlong worship--and giving nothing in
return.
It was not in the least that Magda deliberately set herself to wile a
man’s heart out of his body. She seemed unable to help it! Apart from
everything else, her dancing had taught her the whole magic of the art
of charming by every look and gesture, and the passage of time had only
added to the extraordinary physical allure which had been hers even as a
child.
Yet for all the apparent warmth and ardour of her temperament, to which
the men she knew succumbed in spite of themselves, she herself seemed
untouched by any deeper emotion than that of a faintly amused desire
to attract. The lessons of her early days, the tragedy of her mother’s
married life, had permeated her whole being, and her ability to
remain emotionally unstirred was due to an instinctive reserve and
self-withdrawal--an inherent distrust of the passion of love.
_“Take everything. But do not give--anything--in return.”_
Subconsciously Diane’s words, wrested from her at a moment of poignant
mental anguish, formed the credo of her daughter’s life.
No man, so far, had ever actually counted for anything in Magda’s scheme
of existence, and as she drove slowly home from Lady Arabella’s house in
Park Lane she sincerely hoped none ever would. Certainly--she smiled a
little at the bare idea--Kit Raynham was not destined to be the man!
He was clever, and enthusiastic, and adoring, and she liked him quite a
lot, but his hot-headed passion failed to waken in her breast the least
spark of responsive emotion.
Her thoughts drifted idly backward, recalling this or that man who had
wanted her. It was odd, but of all the men she had met the memory of one
alone was still provocative of a genuine thrill of interest--and
that was the unknown artist whom she had encountered in the woods at
Coverdale.
Even now, after the lapse of ten years, she could remember the young,
lean, square-jawed face with the grey eyes, “like eyes with little fires
behind them,” and hear again the sudden jerky note in the man’s voice as
he muttered, “Witch-child!”
That brief adventure with “Saint Michel”--she remembered calling
him “Saint Michel”--stood out as one of the clearest memories of her
childhood. That, and the memory of her mother, kneeling on the big
bearskin rug and saying in a hard, dry voice: “Never give your heart to
any man. Take everything. But do not give--anything--in return.”