DAN STORRAN’S AWAKENING
“Fairy Lady, we’re going to have a picnic tea!”
Coppertop’s excited voice, shrilling across the garden as he came racing
over the grass, put an abrupt end to a scene that was threatening to
develop along the familiar tempestuous lines dictated by Antoine’s
temperament.
The child’s advent was somewhat differently received--by Magda with
unmixed relief, by Antoine with a baulked gesture of annoyance. However,
he recovered himself almost immediately, and when, a moment later, June
reappeared, laden with the paraphernalia for tea, he rushed forward with
his usual charming manners to assist her.
Presently Gillian joined them, exclaiming with surprise as she perceived
who was the visitor.
“Why, this is like a bit of London appearing in our very midst,” she
declared, shaking hands with Davilof. “Where have you hailed from? I
heard the car but never suspected you were the arrival.”
“I’m on holiday,” he replied. “And it struck me”--his hazel eyes smiled
straight into hers--“that Devonshire might be a very delightful place in
which to spend my holiday.”
Magda looked up suddenly from stirring her tea.
“I think you’ve made a mistake, Davilof,” she said curtly. “You’re not
likely to enjoy a holiday in Devonshire.”
June, innocently unaware of any double entente in Magda’s speech,
glanced across at her in astonishment.
“Oh, but why not, Miss Vallincourt? Devon is a lovely county; most
people like it so much. But perhaps you don’t care for the country,
Mr.--Mr. Davilof?” She stumbled a little over the foreign name.
“I think it would depend upon who my neighbours were--whether I liked it
or nor,” he returned, meeting Magda’s glance challengingly over the top
of June’s head, bent above the teacups. “I feel sure I should like it
here. And there is a charming little inn at Ashencombe where one might
stop.”
Gillian divined that a veiled passage of arms between Magda and the
musician underlay the light discussion. Moreover--though she had no
clue to the cause--she was sensitively conscious that the former was
not quite herself. She had seen that white, set look on her face before.
Something had distressed her, and Gillian felt apprehensive lest Davilof
had been the bearer of unwelcome tidings. It was either that, or else
he must have succeeded in frictioning Magda in some way himself, since,
beyond flinging an occasional double-edged sentence in his direction,
she seemed absent and disinclined to take part in the conversation.
It was almost a relief to Gillian when Dan Storran appeared, although
the recollection of the strained atmosphere which had attended the
previous meal did not hold out much promise of better things to come.
His face was still clouded and he glowered at the tea-table under the
elms with dissatisfied eyes.
“What on earth’s the meaning of this?” he demanded ungraciously of his
wife. “Is it some newfangled notion that’s got you?”
June coloured up nervously, and was about to falter an explanation of
the innovation when Magda suddenly took the matter out of her hands.
“There’s nothing newfangled about tea out-of-doors, on a glorious day
like this,” she said. “It’s the only sensible thing to do. You don’t
really mind, do you?”
She smiled up at him provocatively and his sombre face lightened.
“Not if you like it,” he replied shortly.
“Well, I do. So sit down and be pleased--instead of looking like a
thundercloud, please.” The softness in her voice robbed the speech of
its sharpness. “I have a friend here--and we’re having tea outside in
his honour.”
She introduced the two men, who exchanged a few commonplace words--each,
meanwhile, taking the measure of the other through eyes that were
frankly hostile. They were of such dissimilar type that there was
practically no common ground upon which they could meet, and with the
swift, unerring intuition of the lover each had recognised the other as
standing in some relationship to Magda which premised a just cause for
jealousy. Both men endeavoured to secure her undivided attention and,
failing lamentably, their mutual antagonism deepened, smouldering
visibly beneath the stiff platitudes they exchanged with one another.
Gillian, thrust rather into the position of an onlooker, watched
the proceedings with amused eyes--her amusement only tempered by the
slightly apprehensive feeling concerning Magda of which she had been
vaguely conscious from the first moment she had found her in Davilof’s
company, and which continued to obsess her.
True, she no longer wore that set, still look which Gillian had observed
on her face prior to Dan Storran’s appearance upon the scene. But even
when she smiled and talked, playing the men off one against the other
with a deft skill that was inimitable, there seemed a curious new
hardness underlying it all--a certain reckless deviltry for which
Gillian was at a loss to account.
June watched, too, with troubled eyes. Half an hour ago she had been
feeling ridiculously happy, comfortably assured in her own mind that
this tall, rather exquisite foreigner and the woman whose presence
in her home had occasioned so much bitter heart-burning were only
hesitating, as it were, on the brink of matrimony. And now--now she did
not know what to think! Miss Vallincourt was treating Davilof with an
airy negligence that to June’s honest and candid soul seemed altogether
incompatible with such circumstances.
Meanwhile, with her own ears attuned to catch each varying shade of
Dan’s beloved voice, she could not but perceive its change of quality,
slight, but unmistakable, when he spoke to Magda--the sudden deepening
of it--and the unconscious self-betrayal of his glance as it rested
on her. It was a relief when at last he got up and moved off, excusing
himself on the plea that he had some work he must attend to. As he shook
hands with Davilof the eyes of the two men met, hard as steel and as
hostile.
Storran’s departure was the signal for the breaking-up of the party.
June returned to the house, while Gillian allowed herself to be carried
off by Coppertop to visit the calves, which were a never-failing source
of interest to him.
Left alone, an awkward pause ensued between Davilof and Magda, backwash
of the obvious clash of antagonism between the two men.
“So!” commented Davilof, at last. “It looks as though there might be
another Raynham episode down here before long.”
The colour rushed up into Magda’s face.
“Don’t you think that remark is in rather bad taste?” she replied icily.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps it was. But the men who love you get rather beyond considering
the matter of good or bad taste.”
She made a petulant gesture.
“Oh, don’t begin that old subject again. We’ve had it all out before.
It’s finished.”
“It’s not finished.”
There was a clipped, curt force about the brief denial. The
good-humoured, big-child mood in which Davilof had joyously narrated to
her how he had circumvented the unfortunate Melrose had passed, leaving
the man--turbulent and passionately demanding as of old.
“It’s not finished,” he repeated. “It never will be--till you’re my
wife.”
Magda laughed lightly.
“Then I’m afraid it will have to remain unfinished--a
continued-in-our-next kind of thing. For I certainly haven’t the least
intention of becoming your wife. Do understand that I _mean_ it. And
please go away. You had no business to come down here at all.”
A smouldering fire lit itself in his eyes.
“No!” he said, taking a step nearer her. “No! I’m not going. I came
because I can’t bear it any longer without you. Since you went away I’ve
been half-mad, I think. I can’t eat or sleep! I can’t even play!”--he
flung out his sensitive musician’s hands in a gesture of despair.
Magda glanced at him quickly. It was true. The man looked as though
he had been suffering. She had not noticed it before. His face had
altered--worn a trifle fine; the line from chin to cheek-bone had
hollowed somewhat and his eyes held a certain feverish brightness. But
although she could see the alteration, it did not move her in the least.
She felt perfectly indifferent. It was as though the band of ice
which seemed to have clasped itself about her heart when she heard of
Michael’s marriage had frozen her capacity for feeling anything at all.
“I thought once”--Davilof was speaking again--“I thought once that you
had said ‘no’ to me because of Quarrington. But now I know you never
cared for him----”
“How do you know?”
The question sprang from her lips before she was aware.
“How do I know?” Davilof laughed harshly. “Why, because the man who was
loved by Magda Wielitzska wouldn’t marry any other woman. There would be
no other woman in the world for him. . . . There’s no other woman in the
world for me.” His control was rapidly deserting him. “Magda, I can’t
live without you! I’ve told you--I can neither eat nor sleep. I burn for
you! If you refuse to give yourself to me, you destroy me!”
Swept by an emotion stronger than himself, his acquired Englishisms went
by the board. He was all Pole in the picturesque ardour of his speech.
Magda regarded him calmly.
“My dear Davilof,” she said quietly. “What weight do you suppose such an
argument would have with me?”
The cool, ironic little question, with its insolent indifference,
checked him like the flick of a lash across the face. He turned away.
“None, I suppose,” he admitted bitterly. “You are fire and flame--but
within, you are ice.”
“Yes,” she said, almost as though to herself. “Within, I’m ice. I
believe that’s true.”
“True!” he repeated. “Of course it’s true. If it were not----”
A slight smile tilted her mouth.
“Well?” she echoed. “If it were not?”
He swung round. With a quick stride he was beside her. His eyes blazing
with a sudden fury of passion and resentment, he caught her by the
shoulders, forcing her to face him.
“God!” he muttered thickly. “What are you made of? You make men go
through hell for you! Even here--here in this little country place--you
do it! Storran’s wife--one can see her heart breaks, and it is you who
are breaking it. Yet nothing touches you! You’ve no conscience like
other women--no heart--”
Magda pulled herself out of his grasp.
“Oh, do forget that I’m a woman, Davilof! I’m a dancer. Nothing else
matters. I don’t want to be troubled with a heart. And--and I think they
left out my soul.”
“Yes,” he agreed with intense bitterness. “I think they did. One day,
Magda some man will kill you. You’ll try him too far.”
“Indeed? Is that what you contemplate doing when you finally lose
patience with me?”
He shook his head.
“I shall not lose patience--until you are another man’s wife,” he said
quietly. “And I don’t intend you to be that.”
An hour later, Gillian, having dispatched her small son to bed and seen
him safely tucked up between the lavender-scented sheets, discovered
Magda alone in the low-raftered sitting-room. She was lying back idly in
a chair, her hands resting on the arms, in her eyes a curious abstracted
look as though she were communing with herself.
Apparently she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice Gillian’s
entrance, for she did not speak.
“What are you thinking about? Planning a new dance that shall out-vie
_The Swan-Maiden_?” asked Gillian at last, for the sake of something to
say. The silence and Magda’s strange aloofness frightened her in some
way.
It was quite a moment before Magda made any answer. When she did, it was
to say with a bitter kind of wonder in her voice:
“What centuries ago it seems since the first night of _The
Swan-Maiden_!”
“It’s not very long,” began Gillian, then checked herself and asked
quickly: “Is there anything the matter, Magda? Did Antoine bring you bad
news of some kind?”
“He brought me the offering of his hand and heart. That’s no news, is
it?”
The opening was too good to be lost. With the remembrance of June’s
wistful face before her eyes, Gillian plunged in recklessly.
“Apropos of such offerings--don’t you think it would be wiser if you
weren’t quite so nice to Dan Storran?”
“Am I nice to him?”
“Too much so for my peace of mind--or his! It worries me, Magda--really.
You’ll play with fire once too often.”
“My dear Gillian, I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. Do you
imagine”--with a small, fine smile--“that I’m in danger of losing my
heart to a son of the soil?”
Gillian could have shaken her.
“_You?_ You don’t suppose I’m afraid for you! It’s Dan Storran who isn’t
able to look after himself.” She stooped over Magda’s chair and slipped
an arm persuasively round her shoulders. “Come away, Magda. Let’s leave
Stockleigh--go home to London.”
“Certainly not.” Magda stood up suddenly. “I’m quite well amused down
here. I don’t propose to leave till our time is up.”
She spoke with unmistakable decision, and Gillian, feeling that it would
be useless to urge her further at the moment, went slowly out of the
room and upstairs. As she went she could hear Dan’s footstep in the
passage below. It sounded tired--quite unlike his usual swinging stride
with its suggestion of impetuous force.
But it was not work that had tired Dan Storran that afternoon. When he
had quitted the little party gathered beneath the elms, he had started
off across the fields, unheeding where he went, and for hours he had
been tramping, deaf and blind to the world around him, immersed in the
thoughts that had driven him forth.
The full significance of the last few weeks had suddenly come home to
him. Till now he had been drifting--drifting unthinkingly, conscious
only that life had become extraordinarily full of interest and of a
breathless kind of happiness, half sweet, half bitter. Bitter when Magda
was not with him, sweet with a maddening sweetness when she was.
He had not stopped to consider what it all meant--why the dull,
monotonous round of existence on the farm to which he had long grown
accustomed should all at once have come alive--grown vibrant and quick
with some new impulse.
But the happenings of to-day had suddenly shown him where he stood. That
revealing moment by the river’s edge with Magda, the swift, unreasoning
jealousy of Davilof which had run like fire through his veins--jealousy
because the other man was so evidently an old acquaintance with prior
rights in her which seemed to set him, Dan Storran, quite outside the
circle of their intimacy--had startled him into recognition of how far
he had drifted.
He loved her--craved for her with every fibre of his being. She was his
woman, and beside the tumultuous demand for her of all his lusty manhood
the quiet, unexacting affection which he bore his wife was as water is
to wine.
And since in Dan’s simple code of ethics a man’s loyalty to his wife
occupied a very definite and unassailable position, the realisation came
to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did
he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he
tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love
which had come to him was a forbidden thing--a thing which must be
fought and thrust outside his life. For the sake of June he must see no
more of Magda. She must go--leave Stockleigh. Afterwards he would tear
the very memory of her out of his heart.
Dan was a very direct person. Having taken his decision he did not stop
to count the cost. That could come afterwards. Dimly he apprehended that
it might be a very heavy one. But he was strong, now--strong to do
the only possible thing. As he stood with his hand on the latch of the
living-room door, he wondered whether what he had to say would mean
to Magda all, or even a part, of what it meant to him--wondered with
a sudden uncontrollable leaping of his pulses. . . . The latch grated
raucously as he jerked it up and flung open the door. Magda was standing
by the window, the soft glow of the westering sun falling about her.
Dan’s eyes rested hungrily on the small dark head outlined against the
tender light.
“Why--Dan----” She faltered into tremulous silence before the look on
his face--the aching demand of it.
The huskily sweet voice robbed him of his strength. He strode forward
and caught her in his arms, staring down at her with burning eyes. Then,
almost violently, he thrust her away from him, unkissed, although the
soft curved lips had for a moment lain so maddeningly near his own.
“When can you and Mrs. Grey make it convenient to leave Stockleigh
Farm?” he asked, his voice like iron.
The crudeness of it whipped her pride--that pride which Michael had torn
down and trampled on--into fresh, indignant life.
“To leave? Why should we leave?”
Storran’s face was white under his tan.
“Because,” he said hoarsely, “because you’re coming between me and my
wife. That’s why.”