THE ROPES OF STEEL
Magda sat gazing idly into the fire, watching with abstracted eyes the
flames leap up and curl gleefully round the fresh logs with which she
had just fed it. She was thinking about nothing in particular--merely
revelling in the pleasant warmth and comfort of the room and in the
prospect of a lazy evening spent at home, since to-night she was not due
to appear in any of the ballets to be given at the Imperial Theatre.
Outside, the snow was falling steadily in feathery flakes, hiding the
grime of London beneath a garment of shimmering white and transforming
the commonplace houses built of brick and mortar, each capped with its
ugly chimneystack, into glittering fairy palaces, crowned with silver
towers and minarets.
The bitter weather served to emphasise the easy comfort of the room, and
Magda curled up into her chair luxuriously. She was expecting Michael
to dinner at Friars’ Holm this evening. They had not seen each other for
three whole days, so that there was an added edge to her enjoyment of
the prospect. She would have so much to tell him! About the triumphant
reception she had had the other night down at the theatre--he had been
prevented from being present--and about the unwarrantable attitude
Davilof had adopted, which had been worrying her not a little. He would
sympathise with her over that--the effortless sympathy of the man in
possession!
Then the unwelcome thought obtruded itself that if the snow continued
falling Michael might be weather-bound and unable to get out to
Hampstead. She uncurled herself from her chair and ran to the window.
The sky stretched sombrely away in every direction. No sign of a break
in the lowering, snow-filled clouds! She drummed on the window with
impatient fingers; and then, drowning the little tapping noise they
made, came the sound of an opening door and Melrose’s placid voice
announcing:
“Mr. Quarrington.”
Magda whirled round from the window.
“Michael!” she exclaimed joyfully. “I was just wondering if you would
be able to get over this evening. I suppose you came while you
could!”--laughing. “I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if you were
snowed up here. Shall you mind--dreadfully--if you are?”
But Michael made no response to the tenderly mocking question, nor
did her smile draw from him any answering smile. She looked at him
waveringly. He had been in the room quite long enough to take her in his
arms and kiss her. And he hadn’t done it.
“Michael----” She faltered a little. “How queer you are! Have
you--brought bad news?” A sudden dread rushed through her. “It’s
not--Marraine?”
“No, no.” He spoke hastily, answering the startled apprehension in her
eyes. “It’s not that.”
Her mind, alertly prescient, divined significance in the mere wording of
the phrase.
“Then there is--something?”
“Yes, there is something.”
His voice sounded forced, and Magda waited with a strange feeling of
tension for him to continue.
“I want to ask you a question,” he went on in the same
carefully measured accents. “Did you ever stay at a place called
Stockleigh--Stockleigh Farm at Ashencombe?”
Stockleigh! At the sound of the word it seemed to Magda as though a hand
closed suddenly round her heart, squeezing it so tightly that she could
not breathe.
“I--yes, I stayed there,” she managed to say at last.
“Ah-h!” It was no more than a suddenly checked breath. “When were you
there?” The question came swiftly, like the thrust of a sword. With it,
it seemed to Magda that she could feel the first almost imperceptible
pull of the “ropes of steel.”
“I was there--the summer before last,” she said slowly.
Michael made no answer. Only in the silence that followed she saw his
face change. Something that had been hope--a fighting hope--died out of
his eyes and his jaw seemed to set itself with a curious inflexibility.
She waited for him to speak--waited with a keyed-up intensity of
longing that was almost physically painful. At last, unable to bear the
continued silence, she spoke again. Her voice cracked a little.
“Why--why do you ask, Michael?”
He looked at her and a sudden cynical amusement gleamed in his eyes--an
amusement so bitterly unmirthful that there seemed something almost
brutal about it. Her hand went up to her face as though to screen out
the sight of it.
“You can’t guess, I suppose?” he said with dry, harsh irony. Then, after
a moment: “Why did you never tell me you were there? You never spoke of
it. . . . Wasn’t it curious you should never speak of it?”
She made a step towards him. She could not endure this torturing
suspense another instant. It was racking her. She must know what
Stockleigh signified to him.
“What do you mean? Tell me what you mean!” she asked desperately.
“Do you remember the story I told you down at Netherway--of a man and
his wife and another woman?”
“Yes, I remember”--almost whispering.
“That was the story of my sister, June, and her husband, Dan Storran.
You--were the other woman.”
She felt his eyes--those eyes out of which all hope had died--fixed on
her.
“June--your sister? Your sister? Are you sure?” she stammered stupidly.
It couldn’t be true! Not even God could have thought of a punishment so
cruel, so awful as this. That June--the woman who had died just because
she “had no heart to go on living”--should be Michael’s sister! Oh, it
was a crazy tangling of the threads--mad! Like some macabre invention
sprung from a disordered brain. She wanted to laugh, and she knew if she
began to laugh she should never stop. She felt she was losing her hold
over herself. With a violent effort she clutched at her self-control.
“Will you say it all over again, please?” she said in a flat voice. “I
don’t think I understand.”
“Nor did I till to-day,” he replied shortly. “Davilof made me
understand--this morning.”
“Davilof?” The word seemed to drag itself from her throat. . . .
Davilof--who had been at Stockleigh that summer! Then it was all going
to be true, after all.
“Yes, Davilof. He had chanced on the fact that June was my sister.
Very few people knew it, because, when she married, it was against
our father’s wishes, and she had cut herself adrift from the family. I
wanted to help her, but she would never let me.” He paused, then went
on tonelessly: “It’s all quite clear, isn’t it? You know everything
that happened while you were at Stockleigh. I’ve told you what happened
afterwards. Storran cleared out of the country at once, and June had
nothing left to live for. The only thing I didn’t know was the name of
the woman who had smashed up both their lives. I saw Dan in Paris . . .
He came to me at my studio. But he was a white man. He never gave away
the name of the woman who had ruined him. I only knew she had spent
that particular summer at Stockleigh. It was Davilof who told me who the
woman was.”
_“I can prevent your marrying Quarrington!”_ Magda could hear again the
quiet conviction of Antoine’s utterance. So he had known, then, when he
threatened her, that June was Michael’s sister! She wondered dully how
long he had been aware of the fact--how he had first stumbled across it
and realised its value as a hammer with which to crush her happiness.
Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered any more. The main fact was that
he _had_ known.
June was dead! Amid the confused welter of emotions which seemed to have
utterly submerged her during the last few minutes, Magda had almost lost
sight of this as a fact by itself--as distinct from its identity with
the fact that Michael’s sister was dead. She felt vaguely sorry for
June.
Since the day she and Gillian had left Ashencombe she had heard nothing
of Storran or his wife. No least scrap of news relating to them had come
her way. In the ordinary course of events it was hardly likely that it
would. The circles of their respective lives did not overlap each other.
And Magda had made no effort to discover what had happened at Stockleigh
after she had left there. She had been glad to shut the door on that
episode in her life. She was not proud of it.
There were other incidents, too, which she could have wished were
blotted out--the Raynham incident amongst them. With the new insight
which love had brought her she was beginning to rate these things at
their true value, to realise how little she had understood of all love’s
exquisite significance when she played with it as lightly as a child
might play with a trinket. She had learned better now--learned that love
was of the spirit as well as of the body, and that in playing at love
she had played with men’s souls.
She believed she had put that part of her life behind her--all those
unrecognising days before love came to her. And now, without warning,
sudden as an Eastern night, the past had risen up and confronted her.
The implacable ropes of steel held her in bondage.
“Michael . . . can’t you--forgive me?”
Her voice wavered and broke as she realised the utter futility of her
question. Between them, now and always, there must lie the young, dead
body of June Storran.
“Forgive you?” Michael’s voice was harsh with an immeasurable
bitterness. “Good God! What are you made of that you can even ask me?
It’s women like you who turn this world into plain hell! . . . Look
back! Have you ever looked back, I wonder?” He paused, and she knew
his eyes were searching her--those keen, steady eyes, hard, now, like
flint--searching the innermost recesses of her being. She felt as though
he were dragging the soul out of her body, stripping it naked to the
merciless lash of truth.
“June--my little sister, the happiest of mortals--dead, through you.
And Storran--he was a big man, white all through--down and out. And God
knows who else has had their sun put out by you. . . . You’re like a
blight--spreading disease and corruption wherever you go.”
A little moan broke from her lips. For a moment it was a physical
impossibility for her to speak. She could only shrink, mute and
quivering, beneath the flail of his scorn.
At last: “Is--is that what you think of me?” she almost whispered.
“Yes.”
She winced at the harsh monosyllable. There was a finality about
it--definite, unalterable. She looked at him dry-eyed, her face
tragically beautiful in its agony. But he seemed impervious to either
its beauty or its suffering. There was no hint of softening in him.
Without another word he swung round on his heel and turned to leave her.
“Michael . . . don’t go!” The lovely voice was a mere thread of
sound--hoarse and strangulated. “Don’t go! . . . Oh, be a little
merciful!”
She laid an imploring hand on his arm, and at the touch of her his iron
composure shook a little. For a moment the hardness in his eyes was
wiped out by a look of intolerable pain. Then, with a quiet, inexorable
movement he released himself from her straining clasp.
“There’s no question of mercy,” he said inflexibly. “I’m not judging
you, or punishing you. It’s simply that I can’t marry you. . . . You
must see that June’s death--my sister’s death--lies at your door.”
“No,” she said. “No. I suppose you can’t marry me--now.”
Her breath came in short, painful gasps. Her face seemed to have grown
smaller--shrunk. There was a pinched look about the nostrils and
every drop of blood had drained away, leaving even her lips a curious
greyish-white. She leaned forward, swaying a little.
“I suppose,” she said in a clear, dry voice, “you don’t even love me any
more?”
His hands clenched and he took a sudden impetuous step towards her.
“Not love you?” he said. And at last the man’s own agony broke through
his enforced calm, shaking his voice so that it was hoarse and terrible.
“Not love you? I love you now as I loved you the day I first saw you.
God in heaven! Did you think love could be killed so easily? Does it
die--just because it’s forbidden by every decent instinct that a man
possesses? If so, nine-tenths of us would find the world an easier place
to live in!”
“And there is--no forgiveness, Michael?” The lovely grief-wrung face was
uplifted to his beseechingly.
“Don’t ask me!” he said hoarsely. “You know there can be none.”
He turned and strode to the door. He did not look back even when his
name tore itself like a cry between her lips. The next moment the sound
of a door’s closing came dully to her ears.
She looked vaguely round the room. The fire was dying, the charred logs
sinking down on to a bed of smouldering cinders. A touch would scatter
them from their semblance of logs into a heap of grey, formless ash.
Outside the window the snow still fell monotonously, wrapping the world
in a passionless, chill winding-sheet.
With a little broken cry she stumbled forward on to her knees, her arms
outflung across the table.