“CHILDREN STUMBLING IN THE DARK”
As Gillian mingled once more with the throng on the pavements she felt
curiously unwilling to return home. She had set out from Friars’ Holm
so full of hope in her errand! It had seemed impossible that she could
fail, and she had been almost unconsciously looking forward to seeing
Magda’s wan, strained face relax into half-incredulous delight as she
confided in her the news that Michael was as eager and longing for a
reconciliation as she herself.
And instead--this! This utter, hopeless failure to move him one jot.
Only the memory of the man’s stern, desperately unhappy eyes curbed the
hot tide of her anger against him for his iron refusal.
He still loved Magda, so he said. And, indeed, Gillian believed
it. But--love! It was not love as she and Tony Grey had understood
it--simple, forgiving, and wholly trustful. It seemed to her as
though Michael and Magda were both wandering in a dim twilight of
misunderstanding, neither of them able to see that there was only one
thing for them to do if they were ever to find happiness again. They
must thrust the past behind them--with all its bitterness and failures
and mistakes, and go forward, hand in hand, in search of the light. Love
would surely lead them to it eventually.
Yet this was the last thing either of them seemed able to think of
doing. Magda was determined to spend the sweetness of her youth in
making reparation for the past, while Michael was torn by bitterly
conflicting feelings--his passionate love for Magda warring with his
innate recoil from all that she had done and with his loyalty to his
dead sister.
Gillian sighed as she threaded her way slowly along the crowded street.
The lights of a well-known tea-shop beckoned invitingly and, only too
willing to postpone the moment of her return home, she turned in between
its plate-glass doors.
They swung together behind her, dulling the rumble of the traffic, while
all around uprose the gay hum of conversation and the chink of cups and
saucers mingling with the rhythmic melodies that issued from a cleverly
concealed orchestra.
The place was very crowded. For a moment it seemed to Gillian as though
there were no vacant seat. Then she espied an empty table for two in a
distant corner and hastily made her way thither. She had barely given
her order to the waitress when the swing doors parted again to admit
someone else--a man this time.
The new arrival paused, as Gillian herself had done, to search out a
seat. Then, noting the empty place at her table, he came quickly towards
it.
Gillian was idly scanning the list of marvellous little cakes furnished
by the menu, and her first cognisance of the new-comer’s approach was
the vision of a strong, masculine hand gripping the back of the chair
opposite her preparatory to pulling it out from under the table.
“I’m afraid there’s no other vacant seat,” he was beginning
apologetically. But at the sound of his voice Gillian’s eyes flew up
from that virile-looking hand to the face of its owner, and a low cry of
surprise broke from her lips.
“Dan Storran!”
Simultaneously the man gave utterance to her own name.
Gillian stared at him stupidly. Could this really be Dan
Storran--Storran of Stockleigh?
The alteration in him was immense. He looked ten years older. An
habitual stoop had lessened his apparent height and the dark, kinky hair
was streaked with grey. The golden-tan bestowed by an English sun had
been exchanged for the sallow skin of a man who has lived hard in a
hot country, and the face was thin and heavily lined. Only the eyes of
periwinkle-blue remained to remind Gillian of the splendid young giant
she had known at Ashencombe--and even they were changed and held the
cynical weariness of a man who has eaten of Dead Sea fruit and found it
bitter to the taste.
There were other changes, too. Storran of Stockleigh was as civilised,
his clothes and general appearance as essentially “right,” as those of
the men around him. All suggestion of the “cave-man from the backwoods,”
as Lady Arabella had termed him, was gone.
“I didn’t know you were in England,” said Gillian at last.
“I landed yesterday.”
“You’ve been in South America, haven’t you?”
She spoke mechanically. There seemed something forced and artificial
about this exchange of platitudes between herself and the man who had
figured so disastrously in Magda’s life. Without warning he brought the
conversation suddenly back to the realities.
“Yes. I was in ‘Frisco when my wife died. Since then I’ve been half over
the world.”
Behind the harshly uttered statement Gillian could sense the unspeakable
bitterness of the man’s soul. It hurt her, calling forth her quick
sympathy just as the sight of some maimed and wounded animal would have
done.
“Oh!” she said, a sensitive quiver in her voice. “I was so sorry--so
terribly sorry--to hear about June. We hadn’t heard--we only knew quite
recently.” Her face clouded as she reflected on the tragic happenings
with which the news had been accompanied.
At this moment a waitress paused at Storran’s side and he gave his
order. Then, looking curiously at Gillian, he said:
“What did you hear? Just that she died when our child was born, I
suppose?”
Gillian’s absolute honesty of soul could not acquiesce, though it would
have been infinitely the easier course.
“No,” she said, flushing a little and speaking very low. “We heard that
she might have lived if--if she had only been--happier.”
He nodded silently, rather as though this was the answer he had
anticipated. Presently he spoke abruptly:
“Does Miss Vallincourt know that?”
Gillian hesitated. Then, taking her courage in both hands she told
him quickly and composedly the whole story of the engagement and its
rupture, and let him understand just precisely what June’s death, owing
to the special circumstances in which it had occurred, had meant for
Magda of retribution and of heartbreak.
Storran listened without comment, in his eyes an odd look of
concentration. The waitress dexterously slid a tray in front of him and
he poured himself out a cup of tea mechanically, but he made no attempt
to drink it. When Gillian ceased, his face showed no sign of softening.
It looked hard and very weary. His strong fingers moved restlessly,
crumbling one of the small cakes on the plate in front of him.
“‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding
small,’” he quoted at last, quietly.
Gillian met his harshly cynical glance with one of brave defiance.
“I don’t think God’s mills have anything to do with it,” she said
swiftly. “He’d understand all the excuses and allowances that should
be made for her better even than I do. And I shouldn’t want to punish
Magda. I’d make her--happy. She’s never known what it means to be really
happy. Success and gaiety aren’t _happiness_.”
“And you?” he asked quickly.
There was a soft and wonderful shining in the brown eyes that were
lifted to his.
“I had one year of utter happiness,” she answered gently. “And I’ve got
Coppertop--so I can’t ever be quite unhappy.”
“If there were more women like you----” he began abruptly.
She shook her head.
“No, no,” she said, smiling a little. “If there were more men like Tony!
You men are so hard--so cruelly hard.”
He looked at her very directly.
“Haven’t I the right to be?” he demanded bitterly.
“Ah! Forgive me!” Gillian spoke with an accent of self-reproach. “I’d
forgotten you still--care.”
“For Magda?” He laughed shortly. “No. That’s dead, thank God! I killed
it. Worked it out of my system in ‘Frisco”--with exceeding bitterness.
“Then I got the news of June’s death. Her sister wrote me. Told me she
died because she’d no longer any wish to live. That sobered me-brought
me back to my sense. There was a good deal more to the letter--my
sister-in-law didn’t let me down lightly. I’ve had to pay for that
summer at Stockleigh. And now Magda’s paying. . . . Well, that seems to
square things somehow.”
“Oh, you are brutal!” broke out Gillian.
His eyes, hard as steel and as unyielding, met hers.
“Am I?”--indifferently. “Perhaps I am.”
This was a very different Dan from the impetuous, hot-headed Dan
of former times. Gillian found his calm ruthlessness difficult to
understand, and yet, realising all that he had suffered, she could not
but condone it to a certain extent.
When at last she rose to go, he detained her a moment.
“I am remaining in England now. I should like to see you sometimes. May
I?”
She hesitated. Then something that appealed in the tired eyes impelled
her answer.
“If you wish,” she said gently.
Back once more in the street she made her way as quickly as possible to
the nearest tube station, in order to reach it before the usual
evening crowd of homeward-wending clerks and typists poured into the
thoroughfares from a thousand open office doors. But as soon as she
was safely seated in the train her thoughts reverted to the two strange
interviews in which she had taken part that afternoon.
She felt very low-spirited. Since she had seen and talked with the two
men in whose lives Magda had played so big a part, she was oppressed
with a sense of the utter hopelessness of trying to put matters right.
Things must take their course--drive on to whatever end, bitter or
sweet, lay hidden in the womb of fate.
She had tried to stem the current of affairs, but she had proved as
powerless to deflect it as a dried stick tossed on to a river in
spate. And now, whether the end were ultimate happiness or hopeless,
irretrievable disaster, Michael and Magda must still fight their way
towards it, each alone, by the dim light of that “blind Understanding”
which is all that Destiny vouchsafes.