“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 Imeanit. 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-vieThe 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 ofThe 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.”
The chintzy bedroom under the sloping roof was very still and quiet. The moonlight, streaming in through the open casement, revealed the bed unoccupied, its top-sheet neatly folded back just as when June had made her final round of the house some hours earlier, leaving everything in order for the night.
Magda, crouched by the window, glanced back at it indifferently. She did not want to go to bed. If she went, she knew she would not sleep. She felt as though she would never sleep again.
She had no idea of the time. She might have been there half an hour or half eternity—she did not know which. The little sounds of movement in the different bedrooms had gradually died down into silence, until at least the profound tranquillity and peace of night enshrouded the whole house. Only for her there was neither tranquility nor peace.
She was alone now, face to face with the news which Davilof had brought her—the news of Michael’s marriage. Throughout the rest of the day, after Davilof had gone, she had forced the matter into the background of her thoughts, and during supper she had kept up a light-hearted ripple of talk and laughter which had deceived even Gillian, convincing her that her apprehensions of the afternoon were unfounded.
Perhaps she was helped by the fact that Dan failed to put in an appearance at the supper-table. It was easier to scintillate successfully for the sole benefit of a couple of other women than under the eyes of a man who had just ordered you out of his life. But when at last she was alone in her own room, the sparkle was suddenly quenched. There was no longer any need to pretend.
Michael was married! Married! And the bitterness which she had been strenuously keeping at bay since the day, months ago now, when she had learned from Lady Arabella that he had deliberately left England without seeing her again swept over her in a black flood.
It had hurt her badly enough when he had gone away, but somewhere in the depths of her consciousness there had always lurked a little fugitive hope that he would come back—that she would be given another chance. Now she knew that he would never come back—that one isn’t always given a second chance in this world.
And beneath the sick anguish of the realisation she was aware of a fierce resentment—a bitter, rebellious anger that any man could make her suffer as she was suffering now. It was unjust—a burden that had been forced upon her unfairly. She could not help her own character—that was a heritage with which one comes into the world—and now she was being punished for simply having been herself!
An hour—two hours crept by. Hours of black, stark misery. The clock in the hall struck one—a single, bell-like stroke that reverberated through the silent house. It penetrated the numbed confusion of her mind, rousing her to a sudden recognition of the fact that she had been crouched so long in one position that her limbs were stiff and aching.
She drew herself up to her feet, stretching her cramped muscles. The night was warm and the room felt stiflingly hot. She looked longingly through the window to where the garden lay drenched in moonlight, with cool-looking alleyways of moon-washed paths threading the black gloom of overhanging trees, ebony-edged in the silver light.
She felt as though she could hardly breathe in the confined space of the room. Its low, sloping roof, which she had thought so quaintly attractive, seemed to press down on her like the lid of a box. She must get out—out into the black and silver night which beckoned to her through the open window. She could not stay in this room—this little room, alone with her thoughts.
She glanced down dubiously at the soft, chiffony negligee which she had slipped on in place of a frock. Her feet, too, were bare. She had stripped off her shoes and stockings first thing upon coming upstairs, for the sake of coolness. Certainly her attire was not quite suitable for out-of-doors. . . . But there would be no one to see her. Ashencombe folk did not take their walks abroad at that hour of the night. And she longed to feel the cool touch of the dewy grass against her feet.
Very quietly she opened her door and stole out into the passage. The house was strangely, wonderfully still. Only the ticking of the hall-clock broke the silence. So lightly that not a board creaked beneath her step, Magda flitted down the old stairway, and, crossing the hall, felt gingerly for the massive bolt which barred the heavy oaken door. She wondered if it would slide back quietly; she rather doubted it. She remembered often enough having heard it grate into its place as Storran went his nightly round, locking up the house. But, as her slender, seeking fingers came in contact with the knob, she realised that to-night by some oversight he had forgotten to shoot the bolt and, noiselessly lifting the iron latch, she opened the door and slipped out into the moonlit garden. Down the paths she went and across the lawns, the touch of the earth coming clean and cool to her bare feet. Now and again she paused to draw a long breath of the night air, fresh and sweet with the lingering scents of the day’s blooming.
An arch of rambler roses led into the distant part of the garden towards which she was wending her way, its powdering of tiny blossoms gleaming like star clusters borrowed from the Milky Way. Magda stooped as she passed beneath it to avoid an overhanging branch. Then, as she straightened herself, lifting her head once more, she stood still, suddenly arrested. On a stone bench, barely twenty yards away, sat Dan Storran!
Against the pallid ghost-white of the bench his motionless figure showed black and sombre like some sable statue. His big shoulders were bowed, his hands hung loosely clasped between his knees, the white mask of his face, mercilessly revealed in the clear moonlight, was twisted into harsh lines of mental conflict. A certain grim triumph manifested itself in the set of his mouth and out-thrust jaw.
He did not see the slight figure standing just within the shade of the rose-twined arch, and Magda remained for a moment or two watching him in silence. The unbarred door was explained now. Storran had not come in at all that night. She guessed the struggle which had sent him forth to seek the utter solitude of the garden. Almost she thought she could divine the processes of thought which had closed his lips in that strange line of ironic triumph. He had told her to go—when every nerve of him ached to bid her stay. And he was glad that the strength in him had won.
A bitter smile flitted across her face. Men were all the same! They idolised a woman just because she was beautiful—for her lips and eyes and hair and the nameless charm that was in her—and set her up on an altar at which they could kneel becomingly. Then, when they found she was merely an ordinary human being like themselves, with her bundle of faults and failings, hereditary and acquired, the prig in them was appropriately shocked—and they went away!
An unhappy woman is very often a bitter one. And Magda had been slowly learning the meaning of unhappiness for the first time in her life—a life that had been hitherto roses and laurel all the way.
The devils that lie in wait for our weak moments prompted her then. The bitterness faded from her lips and they curved in a smile that subtly challenged the stern decision in Dan Storran’s face. She hesitated an instant. Then, with feet that scarcely seemed to brush the grass, she glided forward, swaying, bending to some rhythmic measure, floating spirit-like across the lawn.
With a great cry Dan leaped to his feet and stared at her, transfixed. At the sound of his voice she paused, poised on one bare foot, leaning a little towards him with curving, outstretched arms. Then, before he could touch her, she drew away, step by step, and Dan Storran, standing there in tense, breathless silence, beheld what no one else had ever seen—the Wielitzska dancing in the moonlight as she alone could dance.
He knew nothing of art, nor of the supreme technique which went to make each supple movement a thing of sheer perfection, instinct with rhythm and significance. But he was a man, and a man in love, fighting the strongest instincts of his nature; and the bewildering beauty of her as she danced, the languorous, ethereal allure, delicately sensuous as the fragrance of a La France rose, sent the hot blood rioting through his veins. . . . She was going—slowly retreating from him. The primal man in him, the innate hunter who took his mate by capture, swept him headlong. With a bound he sprang past the dusky shrubbery that hedged the lawn and overtook her, catching her in his arms. She did not struggle. He felt her yield, and strained the soft, panting body closer to him. Beneath his hand he could feel the hurrying beat of her heart. Her breath, quickened by the exertion of the dance, came unevenly between her lips as she smiled at him.
“Do you still want me to go away, Dan Storran?”
There was a note of half-amused, half-triumphant mockery in her voice. The last bonds that held him snapped suddenly: “Yes!” he cried hoarsely. “Yes, I do. To go away with me!”
He crushed his mouth down on hers, draining the sweetness of her in burning kisses he had thwarted through all these weeks that they had been together, pouring out his love in disjointed, stumbling phrases which halted by very reason of the force of passion which evoked them.
Frightened by the tempest of emotion she had aroused she strained away from him. But she was powerless against his huge strength, helpless to resist him.
At length the fierce tensity of his grip relaxed, though his arms still clasped her.
“Tell me,” he commanded triumphantly. “Tell me you love me. I want to hear it!” His voice vibrated and his eyes sought her face hungrily.
She summoned up all her forces to deny him—to deny him in such a manner that he should realise his mistake absolutely and at once. “But I don’t! I don’t love you! If you thought that, you misunderstood me.”
His hands released their hold of her and fell heavily to his sides. “Misunderstood?” he muttered. The glad triumph went suddenly out of his voice. “Misunderstood?” he repeated dully.
“Yes. Misunderstood me altogether.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“But youmustbelieve it,” she insisted. “It’s the truth!”
He stared at her.
“Then what have you meant all these weeks?”
“I’ve not meant anything.”
“It’s a lie!” he gave back savagely. “Unless”—he came closer to her—“unless—is it that man, that damned foreigner, who was here to-day?”
“Antoine? No. Oh, Dan”—she forced an uncertain little laugh to her lips—“if you knew me better you’d know that I neverdo—‘mean anything’!”
The bitter intonation in her voice—the gibe at her own poor ruins of love fallen about her—was lost on him. He was in total ignorance of her friendship with Quarrington. But the plain significance of her words came home to him clearly enough. He did not speak for a minute or two. Then: “You’ve been playing with me, then—fooling me?” he said heavily.
Magda remained silent. The heavy, laboured speech seemed to hold something minatory in it—the sullen lowering which precedes a tempest.
“Answer me!” he persisted. “Was that it?”
“I—I suppose it was,” she faltered.
He drew still closer and instinctively she shrank away. A consciousness of repressed violence communicated itself to her. She half expected him to strike her.
“And you don’t love me? You’re quite sure?”
There was an ominous kind of patience in the persistent questioning. It was as though he were deliberately giving her every possible chance to clear herself. Her nerves frayed a little.
“Of course I’m sure—perfectly sure,” she said with nervous asperity. “I wish you’d believe me, Dan!”
“I only wanted to make sure,” he returned.
Something in the careful precision of his answer struck her with a swift sense of apprehension. She looked up at him and what she saw made her catch her breath convulsively. His face was ashen, the veins in his forehead standing out like weals, and his eyes gleamed like blue flame—mad eyes. His hands, hanging at his sides, twitched curiously.
“I’m sure now,” he said. “Sure. . . . Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve smashed up my life. Smashed it. June and I were happy enough till you came. Now we’ll never be happy again. I expect you’ve smashed other lives, too. But you won’t do it any more. I’m the last. Women like you are better dead!”
His great arms swung out and gripped her.
“No, don’t struggle. It wouldn’t be any good, you know.” He went on speaking very carefully and quietly, and while he spoke she felt his left arm tighten round her, binding her own arms down to her sides as might a thong, while his right hand slid up to the base of her throat. She writhed, twisting her body desperately in his grip. “Keep still. I’ve kissed you. And now I’m going to kill you. You’ll be better dead.”
There was implacable purpose in his strangely quiet, unhurried accents. Magda recognised it—recognised that death was very close to her. It would be useless to scream. Before help could come—if anyone heard her cries, which was unlikely—Dan would have accomplished what he meant to do.
In the last fraction of time these thoughts flashed through her mind. Her brain seemed to be working with abnormal clarity and speed. This was death, then—unavoidable, inevitable.
She felt Dan’s hand creep upward, closing round her throat. Quite suddenly she ceased to struggle and lay still in his grasp. After all, she didn’t know that she would much mind dying. Life was not so sweet. There would be pain, she supposed . . . a moment’s agony. . . .
All at once, Storran’s hands fell away from her passive, silent body and he stepped back. “I can’t do it!” he muttered hoarsely. “I can’t do it!”
For a moment the suddenness of her release left Magda swaying dizzily on her feet. Then her brain clearing, she looked across to where Dan Storran’s big figure faced her. The nonchalance with which she usually met life, and with which a few moments earlier she had been prepared to face inevitable death, stood by her now. A faint, quizzical smile tilted her mouth.
“So you couldn’t do it after all, Dan?” The familiar note of half-indifferent mockery sounded in her voice.
Storran stared at her. “By God! I don’t believe you are a woman!” he exclaimed thickly.
She regarded him contemplatively, her hands lightly touching the red marks scored by his fingers on the whiteness of her throat.
“Do you know,” she replied dispassionately, “I sometimes wonder if I am? I don’t seem to have—feelings, like other women. It doesn’t matter to me, really, a bit that I’ve—what was it you said?—smashed up your life. I don’t know that it would have mattered much if you had strangled me.” She paused, then stepped towards him. “Now you know the truth. Do you still want to kill me, Dan Storran! . . . Or may I go?”
He swung aside from her.
“Go!” he muttered sullenly. “Go tohell!”
“Magda, how could you?” Gillian’s voice was full of blank dismay. “You ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourself!”
Magda perched on the foot of Gillian’s bed, her hands clasped round her knees, nodded.
“Yes, I suppose I ought. I don’t know what made me do it—except that he’d suggested I should leave Stockleigh! I’m not used to being—shunted!”
“Heaven knows you’re not!” agreed Gillian ruefully. “It would be a wholesome tonic for you if you were. I told you only yesterday that it would be better if we left here. And on top of that you must needs go and dance in the moonlight, of all things, while Dan Storran looks on! What ordinary man is going to keep his head in such circumstances, do you suppose? Especially when he was more than half in love with you to start with. . . . Oh, I should like to shake you!”
“Well, I’ll leave now—as soon as ever you like,” replied Magda, slipping down from the bed. She was unwontedly meek, from which Gillian judged that for once she felt herself unable to cope with the situation she had created. “Will you arrange it?”
Gillian shrugged her shoulders.
“I suppose so,” she returned resignedly. “As usual, you break the crockery and someone else has to sweep up the pieces.”
Magda bent down and kissed her.
“You’re such a dear, Gillyflower,” she said with that impulsive, lovable charm of manner which it was so difficult to resist. “Still”—her voice hardening a little—“perhaps there are a few odd bits that I’ll have to sweep up myself.”
And she departed to her own room to complete her morning toilette, leaving Gillian wondering rather anxiously what she could have meant.
When, half an hour later, the two girls descended for breakfast, Dan Storran was not visible. He had gone off early to work, June explained, and Magda experienced a sensation of distinct relief. She had dreaded meeting Dan this morning. The mad, bizarre scene of the night before, with sudden unleashing of savage and ungoverned passions, had shaken even her insouciant poise, though she was very far from seeing it in its true proportions.
June received Gillian’s intimation that they proposed leaving Stockleigh Farm that day without comment. She was very quiet and self-contained, and busied herself in making the necessary arrangements for their departure, sending a boy into Ashencombe to order the wagonette from the Crown and Bells to take them to the station whilst she herself laboriously made out the account that was owing. When she presented the latter, with a perfectly composed and business-like air, and proceeded conscientiously to stamp and receipt it, no one could have guessed how bitter a thing it was to her to accept Miss Vallincourt’s money. Within herself she recognised that every penny of it had been earned at the cost of her own happiness.
But as she stood at the gate, watching the ancient vehicle from the Crown and Bells bearing the London visitors towards the station, a little quiver of hope stirred in her heart. Early that morning Dan himself had said to her before starting out to his work: “Get those people away! They must be out of the house before I come into it again. Pay them a week’s money instead of notice if necessary. We can afford it.” So it was evident that he, too, had realised the danger of their happiness—hers and his—if Miss Vallincourt remained at Stockleigh any longer.
He did not come in till late in the evening, when June was sitting in the lamplight, adding delicate stitchery to some tiny garments upon which she was at work. She hid them hastily at the sound of his footsteps, substituting one of his own socks that stood in need of repair. Not yet could she share with him that wonderful secret joy which was hers. There must be a clearer understanding between them first. They must get back to where they were before Miss Vallincourt came between them, so that nothing might mar the sweetness of the telling.
Presently Dan came into the room and sat down heavily. June looked across at him.
“She has gone, Dan,” she said quietly. She did not use the word “they.” Those others did not count as far as she was concerned. Her use of the pronoun sounded significantly in Storran’s ears.
“You know, then?” he said dully. Adding, after a moment’s pause. “Did she tell you?”
“Tell me?” repeated June doubtfully. “Tell me what?”
“That she’s robbed you of all that belongs to you.”
Her face blanched. “What do you mean, Dan?” she asked falteringly. “I don’t think I understand.”
Her wide, questioning blue eyes, with that softness and depth of expression dawning in them which motherhood gives to women’s eyes, searched his face. The innocent appeal of them cut him to the heart. He had loved his wife; and now he had to tell her that he loved her no longer.
“You’ve got to understand,” he said roughly. His hatred of being compelled to hurt her made him almost brutal. “I—everything is changed between us, June.” He stopped, not knowing how to go on.
“Changed? How, Dan?” Her voice sharpened with apprehension. “Do you mean—that you don’t—care any longer?”
“Yes. It’s that. It’s Magda—Oh, good God! Can’t you understand?”
“You love Miss Vallincourt?” June spoke in carefully measured accents. She felt that if she did not speak very quietly indeed she should scream. She wanted to laugh, too. It sounded so absurd to be asking her husband if he loved Miss Vallincourt!
Dan’s eyes met her own.
“Yes,” he said. “I love her.” He paused a moment, then added: “I asked her to go away with me.”
June stared at him dumbly. The whole thing seemed unreal. She could not feel as though what Dan was saying had any relation to herself, any bearing on their life together. At last:
“Why didn’t you go, then?” she heard herself say—at least, she supposed she must be saying it, although the voice didn’t sound a bit like her own.
Dan turned on her with sudden savagery. His nerves were raw.
“You speak as though you were disappointed,” he said roughly.
“No. But if you care for Miss Vallincourt and she cares for you, I’m wondering what stopped you.”
“She doesn’t care for me”—shortly.
June felt a thrill of pure joy. If Magda didn’t care, then she could win him back—win back her husband! Within her she was instinctively aware that if Magdahadcared, no power of hers could have won back Dan’s allegiance. A faint doubt assailed her.
“She—sheseemedas if she cared?” she ventured.
Dan nodded indifferently.
“Yes. I was a summer holiday’s amusement for her.”
“And—was that all?”
As June spoke, her direct gaze sought her husband’s face. He met it fair and square, unflinchingly.
“That’s all,” he replied quietly.
She crossed the room swiftly to his side.
“Then, if that’s all, Dan, we—we won’t speak of it again—ever,” she said steadily. “It—it was just a mistake. It need never come between us. You’ll get over it, and I”—her small head reared itself bravely—“I’ll forget it.”
The pathetic courage of her! Storran turned away with a groan.
“No,” he answered. “I shan’t ‘get over it.’ When a man loves a woman as I love Magda he doesn’t ‘get over it.’ That’s what I meant when I told you she had robbed you.”
“Youwillget over it, Dan,” she persisted. “I’ll help you.”
“You can’t,” he returned doggedly. “You, least of all! Every touch of your hand—I should be thinking what her touch would have meant! The sound of your step—I’d be listening for hers!”
He saw her wince. He wanted to kick himself for hurting her like this. But he knew what he intended doing; and sooner or later she must know too. It would be better for her in the long run to face it now than to be endlessly waiting and hoping and longing for what he knew could never be.
“Dan, I’ll be very patient. Don’t you think—if you tried—you could conquer this love of yours for Miss Vallincourt?”
He shook his head.
“It’s conquered me, June. It’s—it’s torture!”
“It will be easier now she’s gone away,” she suggested.
“Gone away? . . . Aye, as far as London! And in five hours I could be with her—see her again——”
He broke off. At the bare thought his heart was pounding against his ribs, his breath labouring in his throat.
“Won’t you try, Dan?” Even to herself June’s voice sounded faint and far away.
“It would be useless.” He got up and strode aimlessly back and forth, coming at last to a standstill in front of her. “A man knows his own limits, June. And I’ve reached mine. England can’t hold the two of us.”
June gave a little stifled cry.
“What do you mean? You’re not—you’re not going to leave me? To go abroad—now?”
There would be need for him in England soon—in a few months. But of course he couldn’t know that. Should she tell him. Tell him why hemust notleave her now? Keep him with her by a sure and certain chain—the knowledge that she was soon to be the mother of his child?
She debated the question wildly in her mind, tempted to tell him, yet feeling that even if then he stayed with her it would not be because he loved her or had ceased to care for Miss Vallincourt, but only because he was impelled by a sense of duty. And her pride rebelled against holding him by that.
His voice broke in upon her conflicting thoughts.
“Yes. I’m going abroad. It’s the only thing, June. I can’t stay in England—and keep away from her.”
June was silent a moment. Then she said in a very low voice, almost as though speaking to herself:
“I wonder if—if you ever loved me.”
He wheeled round, and the desperate misery in his eyes hurt her almost physically.
“Yes,” he said harshly. “I did love you. In a way, I do now. But it’s nothing—nothing to the madness in my blood! I’m a brute to leave you. But I’m going to do it. No civilised country can hold me now!”
So that was to be the end of it! June recognised the bitter truth at last. Magda had indeed robbed her of everything she possessed. And robbed her wantonly, seeing that she herself set no value on Dan’s love—had, in fact, tossed it aside like an outworn plaything.
June ceased to plead with Dan then. She would not wish to hold him by any other chain than his love for her. And if that chain had snapped—broken irrevocably—then the child born of what had once been love would only be an encumbrance in his eyes, an unwelcome tie, shackling him to a duty from which he longed to escape.
So she let him go—let him go in silence. . . .