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 becausele bon dieuhas 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 aregoing 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—gladyou’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 isafraidbecause 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 Idiedof 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—notSaint 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-lightalmostlike 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 topetite 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.
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 mamanwould 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 thatpetite mamanhad really gone from her seemed all at once to penetrate her childish mind.
That aloofly silent figure could not be her gay, prettypetite 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 aspetite mamanhad 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.”
“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.
“Iwanteveryone 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’snot 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 theSwan-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.”