Magda sat gazing idly into the fire, watching with abstracted eyes the flames leap up and curl gleefully round the fresh logs with which she had just fed it. She was thinking about nothing in particular—merely revelling in the pleasant warmth and comfort of the room and in the prospect of a lazy evening spent at home, since to-night she was not due to appear in any of the ballets to be given at the Imperial Theatre.
Outside, the snow was falling steadily in feathery flakes, hiding the grime of London beneath a garment of shimmering white and transforming the commonplace houses built of brick and mortar, each capped with its ugly chimneystack, into glittering fairy palaces, crowned with silver towers and minarets.
The bitter weather served to emphasise the easy comfort of the room, and Magda curled up into her chair luxuriously. She was expecting Michael to dinner at Friars’ Holm this evening. They had not seen each other for three whole days, so that there was an added edge to her enjoyment of the prospect. She would have so much to tell him! About the triumphant reception she had had the other night down at the theatre—he had been prevented from being present—and about the unwarrantable attitude Davilof had adopted, which had been worrying her not a little. He would sympathise with her over that—the effortless sympathy of the man in possession!
Then the unwelcome thought obtruded itself that if the snow continued falling Michael might be weather-bound and unable to get out to Hampstead. She uncurled herself from her chair and ran to the window. The sky stretched sombrely away in every direction. No sign of a break in the lowering, snow-filled clouds! She drummed on the window with impatient fingers; and then, drowning the little tapping noise they made, came the sound of an opening door and Melrose’s placid voice announcing:
“Mr. Quarrington.”
Magda whirled round from the window.
“Michael!” she exclaimed joyfully. “I was just wondering if you would be able to get over this evening. I suppose you came while you could!”—laughing. “I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if you were snowed up here. Shall you mind—dreadfully—if you are?”
But Michael made no response to the tenderly mocking question, nor did her smile draw from him any answering smile. She looked at him waveringly. He had been in the room quite long enough to take her in his arms and kiss her. And he hadn’t done it.
“Michael——” She faltered a little. “How queer you are! Have you—brought bad news?” A sudden dread rushed through her. “It’s not—Marraine?”
“No, no.” He spoke hastily, answering the startled apprehension in her eyes. “It’s not that.”
Her mind, alertly prescient, divined significance in the mere wording of the phrase.
“Then there is—something?”
“Yes, there is something.”
His voice sounded forced, and Magda waited with a strange feeling of tension for him to continue.
“I want to ask you a question,” he went on in the same carefully measured accents. “Did you ever stay at a place called Stockleigh—Stockleigh Farm at Ashencombe?”
Stockleigh! At the sound of the word it seemed to Magda as though a hand closed suddenly round her heart, squeezing it so tightly that she could not breathe.
“I—yes, I stayed there,” she managed to say at last.
“Ah-h!” It was no more than a suddenly checked breath. “When were you there?” The question came swiftly, like the thrust of a sword. With it, it seemed to Magda that she could feel the first almost imperceptible pull of the “ropes of steel.”
“I was there—the summer before last,” she said slowly.
Michael made no answer. Only in the silence that followed she saw his face change. Something that had been hope—a fighting hope—died out of his eyes and his jaw seemed to set itself with a curious inflexibility.
She waited for him to speak—waited with a keyed-up intensity of longing that was almost physically painful. At last, unable to bear the continued silence, she spoke again. Her voice cracked a little.
“Why—why do you ask, Michael?”
He looked at her and a sudden cynical amusement gleamed in his eyes—an amusement so bitterly unmirthful that there seemed something almost brutal about it. Her hand went up to her face as though to screen out the sight of it.
“You can’t guess, I suppose?” he said with dry, harsh irony. Then, after a moment: “Why did you never tell me you were there? You never spoke of it. . . . Wasn’t it curious you should never speak of it?”
She made a step towards him. She could not endure this torturing suspense another instant. It was racking her. She must know what Stockleigh signified to him.
“What do you mean? Tell me what you mean!” she asked desperately.
“Do you remember the story I told you down at Netherway—of a man and his wife and another woman?”
“Yes, I remember”—almost whispering.
“That was the story of my sister, June, and her husband, Dan Storran. You—were the other woman.”
She felt his eyes—those eyes out of which all hope had died—fixed on her.
“June—your sister? Your sister? Are you sure?” she stammered stupidly.
It couldn’t be true! Not even God could have thought of a punishment so cruel, so awful as this. That June—the woman who had died just because she “had no heart to go on living”—should be Michael’s sister! Oh, it was a crazy tangling of the threads—mad! Like some macabre invention sprung from a disordered brain. She wanted to laugh, and she knew if she began to laugh she should never stop. She felt she was losing her hold over herself. With a violent effort she clutched at her self-control.
“Will you say it all over again, please?” she said in a flat voice. “I don’t think I understand.”
“Nor did I till to-day,” he replied shortly. “Davilof made me understand—this morning.”
“Davilof?” The word seemed to drag itself from her throat. . . . Davilof—who had been at Stockleigh that summer! Then it was all going to be true, after all.
“Yes, Davilof. He had chanced on the fact that June was my sister. Very few people knew it, because, when she married, it was against our father’s wishes, and she had cut herself adrift from the family. I wanted to help her, but she would never let me.” He paused, then went on tonelessly: “It’s all quite clear, isn’t it? You know everything that happened while you were at Stockleigh. I’ve told you what happened afterwards. Storran cleared out of the country at once, and June had nothing left to live for. The only thing I didn’t know was the name of the woman who had smashed up both their lives. I saw Dan in Paris . . . He came to me at my studio. But he was a white man. He never gave away the name of the woman who had ruined him. I only knew she had spent that particular summer at Stockleigh. It was Davilof who told me who the woman was.”
“I can prevent your marrying Quarrington!”Magda could hear again the quiet conviction of Antoine’s utterance. So he had known, then, when he threatened her, that June was Michael’s sister! She wondered dully how long he had been aware of the fact—how he had first stumbled across it and realised its value as a hammer with which to crush her happiness. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered any more. The main fact was that hehadknown.
June was dead! Amid the confused welter of emotions which seemed to have utterly submerged her during the last few minutes, Magda had almost lost sight of this as a fact by itself—as distinct from its identity with the fact that Michael’s sister was dead. She felt vaguely sorry for June.
Since the day she and Gillian had left Ashencombe she had heard nothing of Storran or his wife. No least scrap of news relating to them had come her way. In the ordinary course of events it was hardly likely that it would. The circles of their respective lives did not overlap each other. And Magda had made no effort to discover what had happened at Stockleigh after she had left there. She had been glad to shut the door on that episode in her life. She was not proud of it.
There were other incidents, too, which she could have wished were blotted out—the Raynham incident amongst them. With the new insight which love had brought her she was beginning to rate these things at their true value, to realise how little she had understood of all love’s exquisite significance when she played with it as lightly as a child might play with a trinket. She had learned better now—learned that love was of the spirit as well as of the body, and that in playing at love she had played with men’s souls.
She believed she had put that part of her life behind her—all those unrecognising days before love came to her. And now, without warning, sudden as an Eastern night, the past had risen up and confronted her. The implacable ropes of steel held her in bondage.
“Michael . . . can’t you—forgive me?”
Her voice wavered and broke as she realised the utter futility of her question. Between them, now and always, there must lie the young, dead body of June Storran.
“Forgive you?” Michael’s voice was harsh with an immeasurable bitterness. “Good God! What are you made of that you can even ask me? It’s women like you who turn this world into plain hell! . . . Look back! Have you ever looked back, I wonder?” He paused, and she knew his eyes were searching her—those keen, steady eyes, hard, now, like flint—searching the innermost recesses of her being. She felt as though he were dragging the soul out of her body, stripping it naked to the merciless lash of truth.
“June—my little sister, the happiest of mortals—dead, through you. And Storran—he was a big man, white all through—down and out. And God knows who else has had their sun put out by you. . . . You’re like a blight—spreading disease and corruption wherever you go.”
A little moan broke from her lips. For a moment it was a physical impossibility for her to speak. She could only shrink, mute and quivering, beneath the flail of his scorn.
At last: “Is—is that what you think of me?” she almost whispered.
“Yes.”
She winced at the harsh monosyllable. There was a finality about it—definite, unalterable. She looked at him dry-eyed, her face tragically beautiful in its agony. But he seemed impervious to either its beauty or its suffering. There was no hint of softening in him. Without another word he swung round on his heel and turned to leave her.
“Michael . . . don’t go!” The lovely voice was a mere thread of sound—hoarse and strangulated. “Don’t go! . . . Oh, be a little merciful!”
She laid an imploring hand on his arm, and at the touch of her his iron composure shook a little. For a moment the hardness in his eyes was wiped out by a look of intolerable pain. Then, with a quiet, inexorable movement he released himself from her straining clasp.
“There’s no question of mercy,” he said inflexibly. “I’m not judging you, or punishing you. It’s simply that I can’t marry you. . . . You must see that June’s death—my sister’s death—lies at your door.”
“No,” she said. “No. I suppose you can’t marry me—now.”
Her breath came in short, painful gasps. Her face seemed to have grown smaller—shrunk. There was a pinched look about the nostrils and every drop of blood had drained away, leaving even her lips a curious greyish-white. She leaned forward, swaying a little.
“I suppose,” she said in a clear, dry voice, “you don’t even love me any more?”
His hands clenched and he took a sudden impetuous step towards her.
“Not love you?” he said. And at last the man’s own agony broke through his enforced calm, shaking his voice so that it was hoarse and terrible. “Not love you? I love you now as I loved you the day I first saw you. God in heaven! Did you think love could be killed so easily? Does it die—just because it’s forbidden by every decent instinct that a man possesses? If so, nine-tenths of us would find the world an easier place to live in!”
“And there is—no forgiveness, Michael?” The lovely grief-wrung face was uplifted to his beseechingly.
“Don’t ask me!” he said hoarsely. “You know there can be none.”
He turned and strode to the door. He did not look back even when his name tore itself like a cry between her lips. The next moment the sound of a door’s closing came dully to her ears.
She looked vaguely round the room. The fire was dying, the charred logs sinking down on to a bed of smouldering cinders. A touch would scatter them from their semblance of logs into a heap of grey, formless ash. Outside the window the snow still fell monotonously, wrapping the world in a passionless, chill winding-sheet.
With a little broken cry she stumbled forward on to her knees, her arms outflung across the table.
The long, interminable night was over at last. Never afterwards, all the days of her life, could Magda look back on the black horror of those hours without a shudder. She felt as though she had been through hell and come out on the other side, to find stretching before her only the blank grey desolation of chaos.
She was stripped of everything—of love, of happiness, even of hope. There was nothing in the whole world to look forward to. There never would be again. And when she looked back it was with eyes that had been vouchsafed a terrible enlightenment.
Phrases which had fallen from Michael’s lips scourged her anew throughout the long hours of the night. “Women like you make this world into plain hell,” he had said. “You’re like a blight—spreading disease and corruption wherever you go.” And the essential truth which each sentence held left her writhing.
It was all true—horribly, hideously true. The magical, mysterious power of beauty which had been given her, which might have helped to lighten the burden of the sad old world wherever she passed, she had used to destroy and deface and mutilate. The debt against her—the debt of all the pain and grief which she had brought to others—had been mounting up, higher and higher through the years. And now the time had come when payment was to be exacted.
Quite simply and directly, without seeking in any way to exculpate herself, she had told Gillian the bare facts of what had happened—that her engagement was broken off and the reason why. But she had checked all comment and the swift, understanding sympathy which Gillian would have given. Criticism or sympathy would equally have been more than she could bear.
“There is nothing to be said or done about it,” she maintained. “I’ve sinned, and now I’m to be punished for my sins. That’s all.”
The child of Hugh Vallincourt spoke in that impassive summing up of the situation and Lady Arabella, with her intimate knowledge of both Hugh and his sister Catherine, would have ascribed it instantly to the Vallincourt strain in her god-daughter. To Gillian, however, to whom the Vallincourts were nothing more than a name, the strange submissiveness of it was incomprehensible. As the days passed, she tried to rouse Magda from the apathy into which she seemed to have fallen, but without success.
“It’s no use, Gillyflower,” she would reply with a weary little smile. “Thereisno way out. Do you remember I once said I was too happy for it to last? It was quite true. . . . Have you told Marraine?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes. And she wants to see you.”
“I don’t think I want to see her—or anyone just at present. I’ve got to think—to think things out.”
“What do you mean? What are you going to do?”
“I—don’t know—yet.”
Gillian regarded her with some anxiety. That Magda, usually so unreserved and spontaneous, should shut her out of her confidence thoroughly disquieted her. She felt afraid. It seemed to her as though the girl were more or less stunned by the enormity of the blow which had befallen her. She went about with a curious absence of interest in anything—composed, quiet, absorbed in her own thoughts, only rousing herself to appear at the Imperial as usual. Probably her work at the theatre was the one thing that saved her from utter collapse.
As far as Gillian knew she had not shed a single tear. Only her face seemed to grow daily more strained-looking, and her eyes held a curious expression that was difficult to interpret.
There were days which she spent entirely in the seclusion of her own room, and then Virginie alone was allowed entrance. The old Frenchwoman would come in with some special little dish she had cooked with her own hands, hoping to tempt her beloved mistress’s appetite—which in these days had dwindled to such insignificant proportions that Virginie was in despair.
“Thou must eat,” she would say.
“I don’t want anything—really, Virginie,” Magda would insist.
“And wherefore not?” demanded Virginie indignantly one day. “Thou art not one of the Sisters of Penitence that thou must needs deny thyself the good things of life.”
Magda looked up with a sudden flash of interest.
“The Sisters of Penitence, Virginie? Who are they? Tell me about them.”
Virginie set a plate containing an epicurean omelet triumphantly in front of her.
“Eat that, then,cherie, while I tell thee of them,” she replied with masterly diplomacy. “It is good, the omelet. Virginie made it for thee with her own hands.”
Magda laughed faintly in spite of herself and began upon the omelet obediently.
“Very well, then. Tell me about the Sisters of Penitence. Are they always being sorry for what they’ve done?”
“It is a sisterhood,mademoiselle cherie, for those who would withdraw themselves from the world. They are very strict, I believe, the sisters, and mortify the flesh exceedingly. Me, I cannot see why we should leave the beautiful world thebon dieuhas put us into. For certain, He would not have put us in if He had not meant us to stay there!”
“Perhaps—they are happier—out of the world, Virginia,” suggested Magda slowly.
“But my niece, who was in the sisterhood a year, was glad to come out again. Though, of course, she left her sins behind her, and that was good. It is always good to get rid of one’s sins,n’est-ce pas?”
“Get rid of your sins? But how can you?”
“If one does penance day and night, day and night, for a whole long year, one surely expiates them! And then”—with calm certainty—“of course one has got rid of them. They are wiped off the slate and one begins again. At least, it was so with my niece. For when she came out of the sisterhood, the man who had betrayed her married her, and they have three—no, fourbebesnow. So that it is evidentle bon dieuwas pleased with her penance and rewarded her accordingly.”
Magda repressed an inclination to smile at the naive simplicity of Virginie’s creed. Life would indeed be an easy affair if one could “get rid of one’s sins” on such an ingenuous principal of quid pro quo!
But Virginie came of French peasant stock, and to her untutored mind such a process of wiping the slate clean seemed extremely reasonable. She continued with enthusiasm:
“She but took the Vow of Penitence for a year. It is a rule of the sisterhood. If one has sinned greatly, one can take a vow of penitence for a year and expiate the sin. Some remain altogether and take the final vows. But my niece—no! She sinned and she paid. And then she came back into the world again. She is a good girl, my niece Suzette. Mademoiselle has enjoyed her omelet? Yes?”
Magda nodded.
“Yes, Virginie, I’ve enjoyed it. And I think your niece was certainly a bravefille. I’m glad she’s happy now.”
For long after Virginie had left her, Magda sat quietly thinking. The story of the old Frenchwoman’s niece had caught hold of her imagination. Like herself she had sinned, though differently. Within her own mind Magda wondered whether she or Suzette were in reality the greater sinner of the two. Suzette had at least given all, without thought of self, whereas she had only taken—taken with both hands, giving nothing in return.
Probably Suzette had been an attractive little person—of the same type of brown-eyed, vivacious youth which must have been Virginie’s five-and-thirty years ago—and her prettiness had caused her downfall. Magda glanced towards the mirror. It was through her beauty she herself had sinned. It had given her so much power, that exquisite, perfect body of hers, and she had pitifully misused the power it had bestowed. The real difference between herself and Suzette lay in the fact that the little French girl had paid the uttermost farthing of the price demanded—had submitted herself to discipline till she had surely expiated all the evil she had done. What if she, likewise, were to seek some such discipline?
The idea had presented itself to her at precisely the moment when she was in the grip of an agony of recoil from her former way of life. Like her father, she had been suddenly brought up short and forced to survey her actions through the eyes of someone else, to look at all that she had done from another’s angle of vision. And coincidentally, just as in the case of her father, the abrupt downfall of her hopes, the sudden shattering of her happiness, seemed as though it were due to the intervention of an angry God.
The fanatical Vallincourt blood which ran in Magda’s veins caused her to respond instinctively to this aspect of the matter. But the strain of her passionate, joy-loving mother which crossed with it tempered the tendency toward quite such drastic self-immolation as had appealed to Hugh Vallincourt.
To Magda, Michael had come to mean the beginning and end of everything—the pivot upon which her whole existence hung. So that if Michael shut her out of his life for ever, that existence would no longer hold either value or significance. From her point of view, then, the primary object of any kind of self-discipline would be that it might make her more fit to be the wife of “Saint Michel.”
He despised her now. The evil she had done stood between them like a high wall. But if she were to make atonement—as Suzette had atoned—surely, when the wickedness had been purged out of her by pain and discipline, Michael would relent!
The idea lodged in her mind. It went with her by day and coloured her thoughts by night, and it was still working within her like yeast when she at last nerved herself to go and see her godmother.
Lady Arabella, as might have been anticipated, concealed her own sore-heartedness under a manner that was rather more militant than usual, if that were possible.
“Why you hadn’t more sense than to spend your time fooling with a sort of cave-man from the backwoods, I can’t conceive,” she scolded. “You must have known how it would end.”
“I didn’t. I never thought about it. I was just sick with Michael because he had gone abroad, and then, when I heard that he was married, it was the last straw. I don’t think—that night—I should have much cared what happened.”
Lady Arabella nodded.
“Women like you make it heaven or hell for the men who love you.”
“And hell, without the choice of heaven, for ourselves,” returned Magda.
The bitterness in her voice wrung the old woman’s heart. She sighed, then straightened her back defiantly.
“We have to bear the burden of our blunders, my dear.”
There was a reminiscent look in the keen old eyes. Lady Arabella had had her own battles to fight. “And, after all, who should pay the price if not we ourselves?”
“But if the price is outrageous, Marraine? What then?”
“Still you’ve got to pay.”
Magda returned home with those words ringing in her ears. They fitted into the thoughts which had been obsessing her with a curious precision. It was true, then. You had to pay, one way or another. Lady Arabella knew it. Little Suzette had somehow found it out.
That night a note left Friars’ Holm addressed to the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence.
It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced about her curiously—at the plain, straight-backed chairs, at the meticulously tidy desk and bare, polished floor. Everything was scrupulously clean, but the total absence of anything remotely resembling luxury struck poignantly on eyes accustomed to all the ease and beauty of surroundings which unlimited money can procure.
By contrast with the severity of the room Magda felt uncomfortably conscious of her own attire. The exquisite gown she was wearing, the big velvet hat with its drooping plume, the French shoes with their buckles and curved Louis heels—all seemed acutely out of place in this austere, formal-looking chamber.
Her glance came back to the woman sitting opposite her, the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence—tall, thin, undeniably impressive, with a stern, colourless face as clean-cut as a piece of ivory, out of which gleamed cold blue eyes that seemed to regard the dancer with a strange mixture of fervour and hostility.
Magda could imagine no reason for the antagonism which she sensed in the steady scrutiny of those light-blue eyes. As far as she was concerned, the Mother Superior was an entire stranger, without incentive either to like or dislike her.
But to the woman who, while she had been in the world, had been known as Catherine Vallincourt, the name of Magda Wielitzska was as familiar as her own. In the dark, slender girl before her, whose pale, beautiful face called to mind some rare and delicate flower, she recognised the living embodiment of her brother’s transgression—that brother who had made Diane Wielitzska his wife and the mother of his child.
All she had anticipated of evil consequence at the time of the marriage had crystallised into hard fact. The child of the “foreign dancing-woman”—the being for whose existence Hugh’s mad passion for Diane had been responsible—had on her own confession worked precisely such harm in the world as she, Catherine, had foreseen. And now, the years which had raised Catherine to the position of Mother Superior of the community she had entered had brought that child to her doors as a penitent waveringly willing to make expiation.
Catherine was conscious of a strange elevation of spirit. She felt ecstatically uplifted at the thought that it might be given to her to purge from Hugh’s daughter, by severity of discipline and penance, the evil born within her. In some measure she would thus be instrumental in neutralising her brother’s sin.
She was supremely conscious that to a certain extent—though by no means altogether—her zealous ardour had its origin in her rooted antipathy to Hugh’s wife and hence to the child of the marriage. But, since beneath her sable habit there beat the heart of just an ordinary, natural woman, with many faults and failings still unconquered in spite of the austerities of her chosen life, a certain very human element of satisfaction mingled itself with her fervour for Magda’s regeneration.
With a curious impassivity that masked the intensity of her desire she had told Magda that, by the rules of the community, penitents who desired to make expiation were admitted there, but that if once the step were taken, and the year’s vow of penitence voluntarily assumed, there could be no return to the world until the expiration of the time appointed.
Somehow the irrevocability of such a vow, undertaken voluntarily, had not struck her in its full significance until Catherine had quietly, almost tonelessly, in the flat, level voice not infrequently acquired by the religious, affirmed it.
“Supposing”—Magda looked round the rigidly bare room with a new sense of apprehension—“supposing I felt I simply couldn’t stand it any longer? Do you mean to say,then, that I should not be allowed to leave here?”
“No, you would not be permitted to. Vows are not toys to be broken at will.”
“A year is a long time,” murmured Magda.
The eyes beneath the coifed brow with its fine network of wrinkles were adamant.
“The body must be crucified that the soul may live,” returned the cold voice unflinchingly.
Magda’s thoughts drew her this way and that. A year! It was an eternity! And yet, if only she could emerge purified, a woman worthy to be Michael’s wife, she felt she would be willing to go through with it.
It was as though the white-faced, passionless woman beside her read her thoughts.
“If you would be purified,” said Catherine, “if you would cast out the devil that is within you, you will have to abide meekly by such penance as is ordained. You must submit yourself to pain.”
At the words a memory of long ago stirred in Magda’s mind. She remembered that when her father had beaten her as a child he had said: “If you hurt people enough you can stop them from committing sin.”
Groping dimly for some light that might elucidate the problems which bewildered her, Magda clutched at the words as though they were a revelation. They seemed to point to the only way by which she might repair the past.
Catherine, watching closely the changes on the pale, sensitive face, spoke again.
“Of course, if you feel you have not the strength of will to keep your vow, you must not take it.”
The words acted like a spur. Instantly, Magda’s decision was taken.
“If I take the vow, I shall have strength of mind to keep it,” she said.
The following evening Magda composedly informed Gillian that she proposed to take a vow of expiation and retire into the community of the Sisters of Penitence for a year. Gillian was frankly aghast; she had never dreamed of any such upshot to the whole miserable business of Magda’s broken engagement.
“But it is madness!” she protested. “You would hate it!”
Magda nodded.
“That’s just it. I’ve done what I liked all my life. And you know what the result has been! Now I propose to do what Idon’tlike for a year.”
Neither persuasion nor exhortation availed to shake her resolution, and in despair Gillian referred the matter to Lady Arabella, hoping she might induce Magda to change her mind.
Lady Arabella accepted the news with unexpected composure.
“It is just what one might expect from the child of Hugh Vallincourt,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s the swing of the pendulum. There’s always been that tendency in the Vallincourts—the tendency towards atonement by some sort of violent self-immolation. They are invariablyexcessive—either excessively bad like the present man, Rupert, or excessively devout like Hugh and Catherine! By the way, the Sisters of Penitence is the community Catherine first joined. I wonder if she is there still? Probably she’s dead by now, though. I remember hearing some years ago that she was seriously ill—somewhere about the time of Hugh’s death. That’s the last I ever heard of her. I’ve been out of touch with the whole Vallincourt family for so many years now that I don’t know what has become of them.”
“You don’t mean to say that you’re going toletMagda do what she proposes?” exclaimed Gillian, in dismayed astonishment.
“There’s never much question of ‘letting’ Magda do things, is there?” retorted Lady Arabella. “If she’s made up her mind to be penitential—penitential she’ll be! I dare say it won’t do her any harm.”
“I don’t see how it can do her any good,” protested Gillian. “Magda isn’t cut out for a sisterhood.”
“That’s just why it may be good for her.”
“I don’t believe in mortification of the flesh and all that sort of thing, either,” continued Gillian obstinately.
“My dear, we must all work out our own salvation—each in his own way. Prayer and fasting would never be my method. But for some people it’s the only way. I believe it is for the Vallincourts. In any case, it’s only for a year. And a year is very little time out of life.”
Nevertheless, at Gillian’s urgent request, Lady Arabella made an effort to dissuade Magda from her intention.
“If you live long enough, my dear,” she told her crispy, “providence will see to it that you get your deserts. You needn’t be so anxious to make sure of them. Retribution is a very sure-footed traveller.”
“It isn’t only retribution, punishment, I’m looking for,” returned Magda. “It is—I can’t quite explain it, Marraine, but even though Michael never sees me or speaks to me again, I’d like to feel I’d made myself into the sort of woman hewouldspeak to.”
From that standpoint she refused to move, declining even to discuss the matter further, but proceeded quietly and unswervingly with her arrangements. The failure to complete her contract at the Imperial Theatre involved her in a large sum of money by way of forfeit, but this she paid ungrudgingly, feeling as though it were the first step along the new road of renunciation she designed to tread.
To the manager she offered no further explanation than that she proposed to give up dancing, “at any rate for a year or so,” and although he was nearly distracted over the idea, he found his arguments and persuasions were no more effective than those King Canute optimistically addressed to the encroaching waves. The utmost concession he could extract from Magda was her assent to giving a farewell appearance—for which occasion the astute manager privately decided to quadruple the price of the seats. He only wished it were possible to quadruple the seating capacity of the theatre as well!
Meanwhile Gillian, whose normal, healthy young mind recoiled from the idea of Magda’s self-imposed year of discipline, had secretly resolved upon making a final desperate venture in the hope of straightening out the tangle of her friend’s life. She would go herself and see Michael and plead with him. Surely, if he loved Magda as he had once seemed to do, he would not remain obdurate when he realised how bitterly she had repented—and how much she loved him!
It was not easy for Gillian to come to this decision. She held very strong opinions on the subject of the rights of the individual to manage his own affairs without interference, and as she passed out of the busy main street into the quiet little old-world court where Michael had his rooms and studio she felt as guilty as a small boy caught trespassing in an orchard.
The landlady who opened the door in response to her somewhat timid ring regarded her with a curiously surprised expression when she inquired if Mr. Quarrington were in.
“I’ll see, miss,” she answered non-committally, “if you’ll step inside.”
The unusual appearance of the big double studio where she was left to wait puzzled Gillian. All the familiar tapestries and cushions and rare knick-knacks which wontedly converted the further end of it into a charming reception room were gone. The chairs were covered in plain holland, the piano sheeted. But the big easel, standing like a tall cross in the cold north light, was swathed in a dust-sheet. Gillian’s heart misgave her. Was she too late? Had Michael—gone away?
A moment later a quick, resolute footstep reassured her. The door opened and Michael himself came in. He paused on the threshold as he perceived who his visitor was, then came forward and shook hands with his usual grave courtesy. After that, he seemed to wait as though for some explanation of her visit.
Gillian found herself nervously unready. All the little opening speeches she had prepared for the interview deserted her suddenly, driven away by her shocked realisation of the transformation which the few days since she had last seen him had wrought in the man beside her.
His face was lined and worn. The grey eyes were sunken and burned with a strange, bitter brilliance. Only the dogged, out-thrust jaw remained the same as ever—obstinate and unconquerable. Twice she essayed to speak and twice failed. The third time the words came stumblingly.
“Michael, what—what does it mean—all this?” She indicated the holland-sheeted studio with a gesture.
“It means that I’m going away,” he replied. “I’m packing now. I leave England to-morrow.”
“You mustn’t go!”
The words broke from her imperatively, like a mandate.
He glanced at her quickly and into his eyes came a look of comprehension.
“You’re a good friend,” he said quietly. “But I must go.”
“No, no, you mustn’t! Listen—”
“Nothing can alter my decision,” he interrupted in a tone of absolute finality. “Nothing you could say, Gillian—so don’t say it.”
“But I must!” she insisted. “Oh, Michael, I’m not going to pretend that Magda hasn’t been to blame—that it isn’t all terrible! But if you saw her—now—you’dhaveto forgive her and love her again.” She spoke with a simple sincerity that was infinitely appealing.
“I’ve never ceased to love her,” he replied, still in that quiet voice of repressed determination.
“Then if you love, her, can’t you forgive her? She’s had everything against her from the beginning, both temperament and upbringing, and on top of that there’s been the wild success she’s had as a dancer. You can’t judge her by ordinary standards of conduct. Youcan’t! It isn’t fair.”
“I don’t presume to judge her”—icily. “I simply say I can’t marry her.”
“If you could see her now, Michael——” Her voice shook a little. “It hurts me to see Magda—like that. She’s broken——”
“And my sister, June, is dead,” he said in level, unemotional tones.
Gillian wrung her hands.
“But even so——! Magda didn’t kill her, Michael. She couldn’t tell—she didn’t know that June——” She halted, faltering into silence.
“That June was soon to have a child?” Michael finished her sentence for her. “No. But she knew she loved her husband. And she stole him from her. When I think of it all, of June . . . little June! . . . And Storran—gone under! Oh, what’s the use of talking?”—savagely. “You know—and I know—that there’s nothing left. Nothing!”
“If you loved her, Michael—”
“If I loved her!” he broke out stormily. “You’re not a man, and you don’t know what it means to want the woman you love night and day, to ache for her with every fibre of your body—and to know that you can’t have her and keep your self-respect!”
“Oh—self-respect!” There was a note of contempt in Gillian’s voice. “If you set your ‘self-respect’ above your love—”
“You don’t understand!” he interrupted violently. “You’re a woman and you can’t understand! I must honour the woman I love—it’s the kernel of the whole thing. I must look up to her—not down!”
Gillian clasped her hands.
“Oh!” she said in a low, vehement voice. “I don’t think we womenwantto be ‘looked up to.’ It sets us so far away. We’re not goddesses. We’re only women, Michael, with all our little weaknesses just the same as men. And we want the men who love us to be comrades—not worshippers. Good pals, who’ll forgive us and help us up when we tumble down, just as we’d be ready to forgive them and help them up. Can’t you—can’t you do that for Magda?”
“No,” he said shortly. “I can’t.”
Gillian was at the end of her resources. She would not tell him that Magda proposed joining the Sisters of Penitence for a year. Somehow she felt she would not wish him to know this or to be influenced by it.
She had made her appeal to Michael himself, to his sheer love for the woman he had intended to make his wife. And she had failed because the man was too bitter, too sore, to see clearly through the pain that blinded him.
His voice, curt and clipped, broke the silence which had fallen.
“Have you said all you came to say?” he asked with frigid politeness.
“All,” she returned sadly.
He moved slowly towards the door.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand.
He took it and held it in his. For a moment the hard eyes softened a little.
“I’m sorry I can’t do what you ask,” he said abruptly.
Gillian opened her lips to speak, but no words came. Instead, a sudden lump rose in her throat, choking her into silence, at the sight of the man’s wrung face, with its bitter, pain-ridden eyes and the jaw that was squared implacably against love and forgiveness, and against his own overwhelming desire.