THE RETURN
Magda slipped through the tall doorway in the wall which marked the
abode of the Sisters of Penitence and stood once more on the pavement of
the busy street. The year was over, and just as once before the clicking
of the latch had seemed to signify the end of everything, so now it
sounded a quite different note--of new beginnings, of release--freedom!
Three months prior to the completion of her allotted span at the
sisterhood Magda had had a serious attack of illness. The hard and
rigorous life had told upon her physically, while the unaccustomed
restrictions, the constant obedience exacted, had gone far towards
assisting in the utter collapse of nerves already frayed by the strain
of previous happenings.
Probably her fierce determination to go through with her self-elected
expiation, no matter what the cost, had a good deal to do with her
ultimate breakdown. With unswerving resolution she had forced herself to
obedience, to the performance of her appointed tasks in spite of their
distastefulness; and behind the daily work and discipline there had been
all the time the ceaseless, aching longing for the man who had loved her
and who had gone away.
It was not surprising, therefore, that the tired body and nerves at last
gave way, and in the delirium of brain fever Magda revealed the whole
pitiful story of the mistakes and misunderstandings which had brought
her in desperation to the Sisters of Penitence.
Fortunately it was upon Sister Bernardine that the major part of the
nursing devolved, and it was into her gentle ears that Magda unwittingly
poured out the history of the past. Bit by bit, from the ramblings of
delirium, Sister Bernardine pieced together the story, and her shy,
virginal heart found itself throbbing in overflowing sympathy--a
sympathy that sought expression in the tender care she gave her patient.
During the long, slow days of convalescence Magda, very helpless and
dependent, had gradually learned to love the soft-footed little Sister
who came and went throughout her illness--to love her as she would not,
at one time, have believed it possible she could grow to love anyone
behind the high grey walls which encircled the sisterhood.
If the past year had taught her nothing else, it had at least taught
her that goodness and badness are very evenly distributed. She had found
both good and bad behind those tall grey walls just as she had found
them in the great free world outside.
Her last memory, as her first, was of Sister Bernardine’s kind eyes.
“Some of us find happiness in the world,” the little Sister had said at
parting, “and some of us out of it. I think you were meant to find yours
in the world.”
It was Magda’s own choice to leave the sisterhood on foot. She had
nothing to take with her in the way of luggage, and she smiled a little
as she realised that, for the moment, she possessed actually nothing but
the clothes she stood up in--the same in which she had quitted Friars’
Holm a year ago, and which, on departure, she had substituted for the
grey veil and habit she was discarding.
At first, as she made her way along the street, she found the continuous
ebb and flow of the crowded thoroughfare somewhat confusing after the
absolute calm and quiet of the preceding months, but very soon the
Londoner’s familiar love of London and of its ceaseless, kaleidoscopic
movement returned to her, and with it the requisite poise to thread her
way through the throngs that trod the pavements.
Then her eyes turned to the shop windows--Catherine’s stern discipline
had completely failed to stamp out the eternal feminine in her
niece--and as they absorbed the silken stuffs and rainbow colours that
gleamed and glowed behind the thick plateglass, she became suddenly
conscious of her own attire--of its cut and style. When last she had
worn it, it had been the final word in fashionable raiment. Now it was
out of date. The Wielitzska, whose clothes the newspapers had loved to
chronicle, in a frock in which any one of the “young ladies” behind the
counters of these self-same shops into which she was gazing would have
declined to appear! She almost laughed out loud. And then, quick on the
heels of her desire to laugh, came a revulsion of feeling. This little
incident, just the disparity between the fashion of her own clothes and
the fashion prevailing at the moment, served to make her realise, with
a curious clarity of vision, the irrevocable passage of time. A year--a
slice out of her life! What other differences would it ultimately show?
Something else was already making itself apparent--the fact that none
of the passers-by seemed to recognise her. In the old days, when she had
been dancing constantly at the Imperial Theatre, she had grown so used
to seeing the sudden look of interest and recognition spring into
the eyes of one or another, to the little eager gesture that nudged
a companion, pointing out the famous dancer as she passed along the
street, that she had thought nothing of it--had hardly consciously
noticed it. Now she missed it--missed it extraordinarily.
A sudden sense of intense loneliness swept over her--the loneliness
of the man who has been cast on a desert island, only returning to
his fellows after many weary months of absence. She felt she could not
endure to waste another moment before she saw again the beloved faces of
Gillian and Virginie and felt once more the threads of the old familiar
life quiver and vibrate between her fingers.
With a quick, imperative gesture she hailed a taxi and was whirled away
towards Hampstead.
The first excited greetings and embraces were over. The flurry of
broken, scattered phrases, half-tearfully, half-smilingly welcoming her
back, had spent themselves, and now old Virginie, drawing away, regarded
her with bewildered, almost frightened eyes.
“_Mais, mon dieu_!” she muttered. “_Mon dieu_!” Then with a sudden cry:
“Cherie! Cherie! What have they done to thee? What have they done?”
“Done to me?” repeated Magda in puzzled tones. “Oh, I see! I’m thinner.
I’ve been ill, you know.”
“It is not--that! Hast thou looked in the glass? Oh, my poor----” And
the old Frenchwoman incontinently began to weep.
A glass! Magda had not seen her own reflection in a looking-glass since
the day she left Friars’ Holm. There were no mirrors hanging on the
walls of the house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt. Filled with a
nameless, inexplicable terror, she turned and walked out of the room.
There was an old Chippendale mirror hanging at the further end, but she
avoided it. Something in the askance expression of Virginie’s eyes had
frightened her so that she dared not challenge what the mirror might
give back until she was alone.
Once outside the door she flew upstairs to her own room and, locking the
door, went to the glass. A stifled exclamation of dismay escaped her.
She had not dreamed a year could compass such an alteration! Then, very
deliberately, she removed her hat and, standing where the light fell
full upon her, she examined her reflection. After a long moment she
spoke, whisperingly, beneath her breath.
“Why--why--it isn’t me, at all. I’m ugly. Ugly----”
With a quick movement she lifted her arm, screening her face against it
for a moment.
Her startled eyes had exaggerated the change absurdly. Nevertheless,
that a change had taken place was palpable. The arresting radiance, the
vivid physical perfection of her, had gone. She was thin, and with the
thinness had come lines--lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines
born of endurance and self-control. The pliant symmetry of her figure,
too, was marred. She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her
shoulders was gone. The heavy manual work at the sisterhood, of which,
in common with the others, she had done her share, had taken its toll
of her suppleness and grace, and the hands she extended in front of her,
regarding them distastefully, were roughened and worn by the unwonted
usage to which they had been subjected. Her hair, so long, hidden from
the light and air by the veil she had worn, was flaccid and lustreless.
Only her eyes remained unchangedly beautiful. Splendid and miserable,
they stared back at the reflection which the mirror yielded.
It was a long time before Magda reappeared downstairs, so long, indeed,
that Gillian was beginning to grow nervously uneasy. When at last she
came, she was curiously quiet and responded to all Gillian’s attempts
at conversation with a dull, flat indifference that was strangely at
variance with the spontaneously happy excitement which had attended the
first few moments after her arrival.
Gillian was acutely conscious of the difference in her manner, but even
she, with all her intuition, failed to attribute it to its rightful
cause. To her, Magda was so indubitably, essentially the Magda she loved
that she was hardly sensible of that shadowing of her radiant beauty
which had revealed itself with a merciless clarity to the dancer
herself. And such change as she observed she ascribed to recent illness.
Meanwhile Magda got through that first evening at Friars’ Holm as best
she might. The hours seemed interminable. She was aching for night to
come, so that she might be alone with her thoughts--alone to realise and
face this new thing which had befallen her.
She had lost her beauty! The one precious gift she had to give Michael,
that lover of all beauty! . . . The knowledge seemed to beat against her
brain, throbbing and pulsing like a wound, while she made a pretence
at doing justice to the little dinner party, which had been especially
concocted for her under Virginie’s watchful eye, and responded in some
sort to Coppertop’s periodic outbreaks of jubilation over her return.
But the moment of release came at length. A final good-night kiss
to Gillian on the landing outside her bedroom door, and then a
nerve-racking hour while Virginie fussed over her, undressing her and
preparing her for bed with the same tender care she had devoted to the
_bebe_ she had nursed and tended more than twenty years ago.
It was over at last.
“Sleep well!” And Virginie switched off the electric light as she
pattered out of the room, leaving Magda alone in the cool dark, with the
silken softness of crepe de chine once more caressing her slender limbs,
and the fineness of lavender-scented linen smooth against her cheek.
The ease, and comfort, and wellbeing of it all! Yet this first
night, passed in the familiar luxury which had lapped her round since
childhood, was a harder, more bitter night than any of the preceding
three hundred and sixty-five she had spent tossing weary, aching limbs
on a lumpy straw mattress with a coarse brown woollen blanket drawn up
beneath her chin, vexing her satin skin.
For each of those nights had counted as a step onwards along the hard
road that was to lead her back eventually to Michael. Now she knew that
they had all been endured in vain. Spiritually her self-elected year of
discipline might have fitted her to be the wife of “Saint Michel.”
But the undimmed physical beauty and charm which Michael, the man and
artist, would crave in the woman he loved was gone.
The recognition of these things rushed over her, overwhelming her with a
sense of blank and utter failure. It meant the end of everything. As
far as she was concerned, life henceforward held nothing more. There
was nothing to hope for in the future--except to hope that Michael might
never see her again! At least, she would like to feel that his memory
of her--of the Wielitzska whose lithe grace and beauty had swept him
headlong even against the tide of his convictions--would remain for ever
unmarred.
It was a rather touching human little weakness--the weakness and
prayer of many a woman who has lost her lover. . . . Let him remember
her--always--as she was before the radiance of youth faded, before grief
or pain blurred the perfection that had been hers!
Perhaps for Magda the wish was even stronger, more insistent by reason
of the fact that her beauty had been of so fine and rare a quality,
setting her in a way apart from other women.
With the instinct of the wounded wild creature she longed to hide--to
hide herself from Michael, so that she might never see in his eyes that
look of quickly veiled disappointment which she knew would spring into
them as he realised the change in her. She felt she could not bear that.
It would be like a sword-thrust through her heart. . . . Better if she
had never left the sisterhood!
Suddenly every nerve of her tautened. Supposing--supposing she returned
there, never to emerge again? No chance encounter could ever then bring
her within sight or sound of Michael. She would be spared watching
the old, eager look of admiration fade suddenly from the grey eyes she
loved.
Hour after hour she lay there, dry-eyed, staring into the darkness. And
with the dawn her decision was taken.