Magda slipped through the tall doorway in the wall which marked the abode of the Sisters of Penitence and stood once more on the pavement of the busy street. The year was over, and just as once before the clicking of the latch had seemed to signify the end of everything, so now it sounded a quite different note—of new beginnings, of release—freedom!
Three months prior to the completion of her allotted span at the sisterhood Magda had had a serious attack of illness. The hard and rigorous life had told upon her physically, while the unaccustomed restrictions, the constant obedience exacted, had gone far towards assisting in the utter collapse of nerves already frayed by the strain of previous happenings.
Probably her fierce determination to go through with her self-elected expiation, no matter what the cost, had a good deal to do with her ultimate breakdown. With unswerving resolution she had forced herself to obedience, to the performance of her appointed tasks in spite of their distastefulness; and behind the daily work and discipline there had been all the time the ceaseless, aching longing for the man who had loved her and who had gone away.
It was not surprising, therefore, that the tired body and nerves at last gave way, and in the delirium of brain fever Magda revealed the whole pitiful story of the mistakes and misunderstandings which had brought her in desperation to the Sisters of Penitence.
Fortunately it was upon Sister Bernardine that the major part of the nursing devolved, and it was into her gentle ears that Magda unwittingly poured out the history of the past. Bit by bit, from the ramblings of delirium, Sister Bernardine pieced together the story, and her shy, virginal heart found itself throbbing in overflowing sympathy—a sympathy that sought expression in the tender care she gave her patient.
During the long, slow days of convalescence Magda, very helpless and dependent, had gradually learned to love the soft-footed little Sister who came and went throughout her illness—to love her as she would not, at one time, have believed it possible she could grow to love anyone behind the high grey walls which encircled the sisterhood.
If the past year had taught her nothing else, it had at least taught her that goodness and badness are very evenly distributed. She had found both good and bad behind those tall grey walls just as she had found them in the great free world outside.
Her last memory, as her first, was of Sister Bernardine’s kind eyes.
“Some of us find happiness in the world,” the little Sister had said at parting, “and some of us out of it. I think you were meant to find yours in the world.”
It was Magda’s own choice to leave the sisterhood on foot. She had nothing to take with her in the way of luggage, and she smiled a little as she realised that, for the moment, she possessed actually nothing but the clothes she stood up in—the same in which she had quitted Friars’ Holm a year ago, and which, on departure, she had substituted for the grey veil and habit she was discarding.
At first, as she made her way along the street, she found the continuous ebb and flow of the crowded thoroughfare somewhat confusing after the absolute calm and quiet of the preceding months, but very soon the Londoner’s familiar love of London and of its ceaseless, kaleidoscopic movement returned to her, and with it the requisite poise to thread her way through the throngs that trod the pavements.
Then her eyes turned to the shop windows—Catherine’s stern discipline had completely failed to stamp out the eternal feminine in her niece—and as they absorbed the silken stuffs and rainbow colours that gleamed and glowed behind the thick plateglass, she became suddenly conscious of her own attire—of its cut and style. When last she had worn it, it had been the final word in fashionable raiment. Now it was out of date. The Wielitzska, whose clothes the newspapers had loved to chronicle, in a frock in which any one of the “young ladies” behind the counters of these self-same shops into which she was gazing would have declined to appear! She almost laughed out loud. And then, quick on the heels of her desire to laugh, came a revulsion of feeling. This little incident, just the disparity between the fashion of her own clothes and the fashion prevailing at the moment, served to make her realise, with a curious clarity of vision, the irrevocable passage of time. A year—a slice out of her life! What other differences would it ultimately show?
Something else was already making itself apparent—the fact that none of the passers-by seemed to recognise her. In the old days, when she had been dancing constantly at the Imperial Theatre, she had grown so used to seeing the sudden look of interest and recognition spring into the eyes of one or another, to the little eager gesture that nudged a companion, pointing out the famous dancer as she passed along the street, that she had thought nothing of it—had hardly consciously noticed it. Now she missed it—missed it extraordinarily.
A sudden sense of intense loneliness swept over her—the loneliness of the man who has been cast on a desert island, only returning to his fellows after many weary months of absence. She felt she could not endure to waste another moment before she saw again the beloved faces of Gillian and Virginie and felt once more the threads of the old familiar life quiver and vibrate between her fingers.
With a quick, imperative gesture she hailed a taxi and was whirled away towards Hampstead.
The first excited greetings and embraces were over. The flurry of broken, scattered phrases, half-tearfully, half-smilingly welcoming her back, had spent themselves, and now old Virginie, drawing away, regarded her with bewildered, almost frightened eyes.
“Mais, mon dieu!” she muttered. “Mon dieu!” Then with a sudden cry: “Cherie! Cherie! What have they done to thee? What have they done?”
“Done to me?” repeated Magda in puzzled tones. “Oh, I see! I’m thinner. I’ve been ill, you know.”
“It is not—that! Hast thou looked in the glass? Oh, my poor——” And the old Frenchwoman incontinently began to weep.
A glass! Magda had not seen her own reflection in a looking-glass since the day she left Friars’ Holm. There were no mirrors hanging on the walls of the house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt. Filled with a nameless, inexplicable terror, she turned and walked out of the room. There was an old Chippendale mirror hanging at the further end, but she avoided it. Something in the askance expression of Virginie’s eyes had frightened her so that she dared not challenge what the mirror might give back until she was alone.
Once outside the door she flew upstairs to her own room and, locking the door, went to the glass. A stifled exclamation of dismay escaped her. She had not dreamed a year could compass such an alteration! Then, very deliberately, she removed her hat and, standing where the light fell full upon her, she examined her reflection. After a long moment she spoke, whisperingly, beneath her breath.
“Why—why—it isn’t me, at all. I’m ugly. Ugly——”
With a quick movement she lifted her arm, screening her face against it for a moment.
Her startled eyes had exaggerated the change absurdly. Nevertheless, that a change had taken place was palpable. The arresting radiance, the vivid physical perfection of her, had gone. She was thin, and with the thinness had come lines—lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines born of endurance and self-control. The pliant symmetry of her figure, too, was marred. She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her shoulders was gone. The heavy manual work at the sisterhood, of which, in common with the others, she had done her share, had taken its toll of her suppleness and grace, and the hands she extended in front of her, regarding them distastefully, were roughened and worn by the unwonted usage to which they had been subjected. Her hair, so long, hidden from the light and air by the veil she had worn, was flaccid and lustreless. Only her eyes remained unchangedly beautiful. Splendid and miserable, they stared back at the reflection which the mirror yielded.
It was a long time before Magda reappeared downstairs, so long, indeed, that Gillian was beginning to grow nervously uneasy. When at last she came, she was curiously quiet and responded to all Gillian’s attempts at conversation with a dull, flat indifference that was strangely at variance with the spontaneously happy excitement which had attended the first few moments after her arrival.
Gillian was acutely conscious of the difference in her manner, but even she, with all her intuition, failed to attribute it to its rightful cause. To her, Magda was so indubitably, essentially the Magda she loved that she was hardly sensible of that shadowing of her radiant beauty which had revealed itself with a merciless clarity to the dancer herself. And such change as she observed she ascribed to recent illness.
Meanwhile Magda got through that first evening at Friars’ Holm as best she might. The hours seemed interminable. She was aching for night to come, so that she might be alone with her thoughts—alone to realise and face this new thing which had befallen her.
She had lost her beauty! The one precious gift she had to give Michael, that lover of all beauty! . . . The knowledge seemed to beat against her brain, throbbing and pulsing like a wound, while she made a pretence at doing justice to the little dinner party, which had been especially concocted for her under Virginie’s watchful eye, and responded in some sort to Coppertop’s periodic outbreaks of jubilation over her return.
But the moment of release came at length. A final good-night kiss to Gillian on the landing outside her bedroom door, and then a nerve-racking hour while Virginie fussed over her, undressing her and preparing her for bed with the same tender care she had devoted to thebebeshe had nursed and tended more than twenty years ago.
It was over at last.
“Sleep well!” And Virginie switched off the electric light as she pattered out of the room, leaving Magda alone in the cool dark, with the silken softness of crepe de chine once more caressing her slender limbs, and the fineness of lavender-scented linen smooth against her cheek.
The ease, and comfort, and wellbeing of it all! Yet this first night, passed in the familiar luxury which had lapped her round since childhood, was a harder, more bitter night than any of the preceding three hundred and sixty-five she had spent tossing weary, aching limbs on a lumpy straw mattress with a coarse brown woollen blanket drawn up beneath her chin, vexing her satin skin.
For each of those nights had counted as a step onwards along the hard road that was to lead her back eventually to Michael. Now she knew that they had all been endured in vain. Spiritually her self-elected year of discipline might have fitted her to be the wife of “Saint Michel.” But the undimmed physical beauty and charm which Michael, the man and artist, would crave in the woman he loved was gone.
The recognition of these things rushed over her, overwhelming her with a sense of blank and utter failure. It meant the end of everything. As far as she was concerned, life henceforward held nothing more. There was nothing to hope for in the future—except to hope that Michael might never see her again! At least, she would like to feel that his memory of her—of the Wielitzska whose lithe grace and beauty had swept him headlong even against the tide of his convictions—would remain for ever unmarred.
It was a rather touching human little weakness—the weakness and prayer of many a woman who has lost her lover. . . . Let him remember her—always—as she was before the radiance of youth faded, before grief or pain blurred the perfection that had been hers!
Perhaps for Magda the wish was even stronger, more insistent by reason of the fact that her beauty had been of so fine and rare a quality, setting her in a way apart from other women.
With the instinct of the wounded wild creature she longed to hide—to hide herself from Michael, so that she might never see in his eyes that look of quickly veiled disappointment which she knew would spring into them as he realised the change in her. She felt she could not bear that. It would be like a sword-thrust through her heart. . . . Better if she had never left the sisterhood!
Suddenly every nerve of her tautened. Supposing—supposing she returned there, never to emerge again? No chance encounter could ever then bring her within sight or sound of Michael. She would be spared watching the old, eager look of admiration fade suddenly from the grey eyes she loved.
Hour after hour she lay there, dry-eyed, staring into the darkness. And with the dawn her decision was taken.
“You shan’t do it!”
When first Magda had bruited her idea of rejoining the sisterhood—the decision which had crystallised out of the long black hours of the night of her return to Friars’ Holm—Gillian had merely laughed the notion aside, attaching little importance to it. But now, a week later, when Magda reverted to the subject with a certain purposeful definiteness, she grew suddenly frightened.
“Do you want to throw away every possibility of happiness?” she demanded indignantly. “Just because Michael isn’t here, waiting for you on the doorstep, so to speak, you decide to rush off and make it impossible for him ever to see you again!”
Magda kept her head bent, refusing to meet the other’s eyes.
“I don’t want him to see me now,” she said shrinkingly. “I’m not—not the Magda he knew any longer.”
“That’s an absurd exaggeration. You’re not looking very well, that’s all,” retorted Gillian with her usual practical common sense. “You can’t suppose that would make any difference to Michael! It didn’t make any to me. I’m only too glad to have you back at any price!”
Magda’s faint responsive smile was touched with that bitter knowledge which is the heritage of the woman who has been much loved for her beauty.
“You’re a woman, Gillyflower,” she said. “And Michael is not only a man—but an artist. Men don’t want you when the bloom has been brushed off. And you know how Michael worships beauty! He’s bound to—being an artist.”
“I think you’re morbidly self-conscious,” declared Gillian firmly. “I suppose it’s the result of being out of the world for so long. You’ve lost all sense of proportion. You’re quite lovely enough, now, to satisfy most people. You only look rather tired and worn out.”
But Magda’s face remained clouded.
“But even that isn’t—all,” she answered. “It’s—oh, it’s a heap of things! Somehow I thought when I came back I should see the road clear. But it isn’t. It’s all shadowed—just as it was before. I thought I should have so much to give Michael now. And I haven’t anything. I don’t think I ever quite realised before that, however much you try to atone, you can neverundothe harm you’ve done. But I’ve had time to think things out while I was with the Sisters.”
“And if you go back to them you’ll have time to do nothing but think for the rest of your life!” flashed back Gillian.
“Oh, no!” Magda spoke quickly. “I shouldn’t return under a vow of penitence. There are working sisters attached to the community who go about amongst the sick and poor in the slums. I should join as a working sister if I went back.”
Gillian stared at her in amazement. Magda devoting her life to good works seemed altogether out of the picture! She began to feel that the whole affair was getting too complicated for her to handle, and as usual, when in a difficulty, she put the matter up to Lady Arabella.
The latter, with her accumulated wisdom of seventy years, saw more clearly than the younger woman, although even she hardly understood that sense of the deadly emptiness and failure of her life which had overwhelmed Magda since her return to Friars’ Holm. But the old woman realised that she had passed through a long period of strain, and that, now the reaction had come, the Vallincourt blood in her might drive her into almost any extreme of conduct.
“If only Michael were on the spot!” she burst out irritably. “I own I’m disappointed in the man! I was so sure six months would bring him to his senses.”
“I know,” assented Gillian miserably. “It’s—it’s—the most hopeless state of things imaginable!”
Lady Arabella’s interview with Magda herself proved unproductive.
“Have you written to Michael?” she demanded.
“Written to him?” A flash of the old defiant spirit sounded in Magda’s voice. “No, nor shall I.”
“Don’t be a fool, child. He’s probably learned something during this last twelve months—as well as you. Don’t let pride get in your way now.”
“It’s not pride. Marraine, I never knew—I never thought——Look at me! What have I to give Michael now? Have you forgotten that he’s an artist and that beauty means everything to him?”
“Well?”
“‘Well!’” Magda held out her hands. “Can’t you see that I’m changed? . . . Michael wouldn’t want me to pose for him as Circe now!”
“He wanted you for a wife—not a model, my dear. You can buy models at so much the hour.”
“Oh, Marraine! You won’t understand——”
Lady Arabella took the slender, work-roughened hands in hers.
“Perhaps I understand better than you think,” she said quietly. “There are other ways of assessing life than merely in terms of beauty. And you can believe this, too: you’ve lost nothing from the point of view of looks that a few months of normal healthy life won’t set right. Moreover, if you’d grown as plain as a pikestaff, I don’t think Michael would care twopence! He’s an artist, I know. He can’t help that, but he’s a man first. And he’s a man who knows how to love. Promise me one thing,” she went on insistently. “Promise that you’ll do nothing definite—yet. Not, at least, without consulting me.”
Magda hesitated.
“Very well. I’ll do nothing without—telling you—first.”
That was the utmost concession she would make, and with that her godmother had to be content.
The same evening a letter in Lady Arabella’s spirited, angular handwriting sped on its way to Paris.
“If you’re not absolutely determined to ruin both your own and Magda’s lives, my dear Michael, put your pride and your ridiculous principles in your pocket and come back to England. I don’t happen to be a grandmother, but I’m quite old enough for the job, so you might pay my advice due respect by taking it.”
“I thought I was shelved altogether.”
Thus Dan Storran, rather crossly, when, a day or two later, he met Gillian by appointment for lunch at their favourite little restaurant in Soho. It was the first time she had been able to fix up a meeting with him since Magda’s return, as naturally his customary visits to Friars’ Holm were out of the question now.
“Well, you expected my time to be pretty well occupied the first week or two after Magda came back, didn’t you?” countered Gillian.
She smiled as she spoke and proceeded leisurely to draw off her gloves, while Storran signalled to a waiter.
She was really very glad to see him again. There was something so solid and dependable about him, and she felt it would be very comforting to confide in him her anxieties concerning Magda. Not that she anticipated he would have any particular compassion to bestow upon the latter. But she was femininely aware that inasmuch as Magda’s affairs were disturbing her peace of mind, he would listen to them with sympathetic attention and probably, out of the depths of his man’s consciousness, produce some quite sound and serviceable advice.
Being a wise woman, however, she did not launch out into immediate explanation, but waited for him to work off his own individual grumble at not having seen her recently, trusting to the perfectly cooked little lunch to exercise a tranquillising effect.
It was not until they had reached the cigarette and coffee stage of the proceedings that she allowed a small, well-considered sigh to escape her and drift away into the silence that had fallen between them. Storran glanced across at her with suddenly observant eyes.
“What is it?” he asked quickly. “You look worried. Are you?”
She nodded silently.
“And here I’ve been grousing away about my own affairs all the time! Why didn’t you stop me?”
“You know I’m interested in your affairs.”
“And I’m interested in yours. What’s bothering you, Gillian? Tell me.”
“Magda,” said Gillian simply.
She was rather surprised to observe that Dan’s face did not, as usual, darken at the mere mention of Magda’s name.
“I saw her the other day,” he said quickly. “I was in the Park and she drove by.”
Gillian felt that there was something more to come. She waited in silence.
“She has altered very much,” he went on bluntly. Then, after a moment: “I felt—sorry for her.”
“Youdid, Dan?” Gillian’s face lit up. “I’m glad. I’ve always hated your being so down on her.”
With an abrupt movement he jabbed the glowing stub of his cigarette on to an ash-tray, pressing it down until it went out. Then, taking out his case, he lit another before replying.
“I shan’t be ‘down on her’ any more,” he said at last. “I never guessed she’d felt things—like that.”
“No. No one did. I don’t suppose even Magda herself knew she could ever go through all she has done just for an ideal.”
Then very quietly, very simply and touchingly, she told him the story of all that had happened, of Magda’s final intention of becoming a working member of the sisterhood, and of Lady Arabella’s letter summoning Michael back to England.
“But even when he comes,” added Gillian, “unless he is very careful—unless he loves her in the biggest way a man can love, so thatnothing else matters, he’ll lose her. He’ll have to convince her that she means just that to him.”
Storran was silent for a long time, and when at last he spoke it was with an obvious effort.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s something you don’t know. Perhaps when I’ve told you, you won’t have anything more to say to me—I don’t know.”
Gillian opened her lips in quick disclaimer, but he motioned her to be silent.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait till you’ve heard what I have to say. You think, and Magda thinks, that June died of a broken heart—at least, that the shock of all that miserable business down at Stockleigh helped to kill her.”
“Yes.” Gillian assented mechanically when he paused.
“I thought so, too, once. It was what June’s sister told me—told everyone. But it wasn’t true. She believed it, I know—probably believes it to this day. But, thank God, it wasn’t true!”
“How can you tell? All that strain and heart-break just at a time when she wasn’t strong. Oh, Dan! We can never be sure—sure!”
“Iamsure. Quite sure,” he said steadily. “When I came to my senses out there in ‘Frisco, I couldn’t rest under that letter from June’s sister. It burned into me like a red-hot iron. I was half-mad with pain, I think. I wrote to the doctor who had attended her, but I got no answer. Then I sailed for England, determined to find and see the man for myself. I found him—my letter had miscarried somehow—and he told me that June could not have lived. There were certain complications in her case which made it impossible. In fact, if she had been so happy that she had longed to live—andtriedto—it would only have made it harder for her, a rougher journey to travel. As it was, she went easily, without fighting death—letting go, without any effort, her hold on life.”
He ceased, and after a moment’s silence Gillian spoke in strained, horror-stricken tones.
“And you never told us! Oh! It was cruel of you, Dan! You would have spared Magda an infinity of self-reproach!”
“I didn’t want to spare her. I left her in ignorance on purpose. I wanted her to be punished—to suffer as she had made me suffer.”
There were tears in Gillian’s eyes. It was terrible to her that Dan could be so bitter—so vengefully cruel. Yet she recognised that it had been but the natural outcome of the man’s primitive nature to pay back good for good and evil for evil.
“Then why do you tell me now?” she asked at last.
“Why—because you’ve beaten me—you with your sweetness and courage and tolerance. You’ve taught me that retribution and punishment are best left in—more merciful Hands than ours.”
Gillian’s hand went out to meet his.
“Oh, Dan, I’m so glad!” she said simply.
He kept her hand in his a moment, then released it gently.
“Well, you can tell her now,” he said awkwardly.
“I?” Gillian smiled a little. “No. I want you to tell her. Don’t you see, Dan”—as she sensed his impulse to refuse—“it will make all the difference in Magda if you and she are—are square with each other? She’s overweighted. She’s been carrying a bigger burden than she can bear. Michael comes first, of course, but there’s been her treatment of you, as well. June, too. And—and other things. And it’s crushing her. . . . No, you must tell her.”
“I will—if you say I must. But she won’t forgive me easily.”
“I think she will. I think she’ll understand just what made you do it. So now we’ll go back to Friars’ Holm together.”
An hour later Storran came slowly downstairs from the little room where he and Magda had met again for the first time since that moonlight night at Stockleigh—met, not as lovers, but as a man and woman who have each sinned and each learned, out of their sinning, how to pardon and forgive.
Storran was very quiet and grave when presently he found himself alone with Gillian.
“We men will never understand women,” he said. “There’s an angel hidden away somewhere in every one of you.” His mouth curved into a smile, half-sad, half-whimsical. “I’ve just found Magda’s.”
Lady Arabella and Gillian, both feeling rather like conspirators, waited anxiously for a reply to the former’s letter to Quarrington. But none came. The time slipped by until a fortnight had elapsed, and with the passage of each day their hearts sank lower.
Neither of them believed that Michael would have utterly disregarded the letter, had he received it, but they feared that it might have miscarried, or that he might be travelling and so not receive it in time to prevent Magda’s carrying out her avowed intention of becoming a working member of the sisterhood.
Even though she knew now that at least June Storran’s death need no longer be added to her account, she still adhered to her decision. As she had told Dan with a weary simplicity: “I’m glad. But it won’t make any difference—to Michael and me. Too much water has run under the bridge. Love that is dead doesn’t come to life again.”
Each day was hardening her resolve, and both Lady Arabella and Gillian—those two whose unselfish happiness was bound up in her own—were beginning to realise that it would be a race against time if she was to be saved from taking a step that would divide her from Michael as long as they both should live.
At the end of a fortnight Gillian, driven to desperation, despatched a telegram to his Paris address: “Did you receive communication from Lady Arabella?” But it shared the fate of the letter, failing to elicit any reply. She allowed sufficient time to elapse to cover any ordinary delay in transit, then, unknown to Magda, taxied down to the house in Park Lane.
“I want you to invite Magda to stay with you, please,” she informed Lady Arabella abruptly.
“Of course I will,” she replied. “But why? You’ve got a reason.”
Gillian nodded.
“Yes,” she acknowledged quietly. “I’m going to Paris—to find Michael.”
Lady Arabella, whose high spirits had wilted a little in the face of the double disappointment regarding any answer from Quarrington, beamed satisfaction.
“You blessed child!” she exclaimed. “I’d have gone myself, but my old body is so stiff with rheumatism that I don’t believe they’d get me on board the boat except in an ambulance!”
“Well, I’m going,” said Gillian. “Only the point is, Magda mustn’t know. If she thought I was going off in pursuit of Michael I believe she’d lock me up in the cellar. She intends never to let him see her again. Melrose will manage about the letters, and somehow you’ve got to prevent Magda from coming to Friars’ Holm and finding out that I’m not there.”
“I’ll take her away with me,” declared Lady Arabella. “Rheumatism—Harrogate. It’s quite simple.”
Gillian heaved a sigh of relief.
“Yes. That would be a good plan,” she agreed. “Then I’d let you know when we should arrive—”
“‘We?’”
“Michael and I. I’m not coming back without him. And you could bring Magda straight back to town with you.”
Lady Arabella’s keen old eyes searched her face.
“You sound very certain of success. Supposing you find Michael still unforgiving—and he refuses to return with you?”
“I believe in Michael,” replied Gillian steadily. “He’s made mistakes. People in love do. But when he knows all that Magda has endured—for his sake, really—why, he’ll come back. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know, my dear.Iwas sure he would come back within six months. But, you see, I was wrong. Men are kittle cattle—and often very slow to arrive at the intrinsic value and significance of things. A woman jumps to it while a man is crawling round on his hands and knees in the dark, looking for it with a match.”
Gillian laughed and got up to go, and Lady Arabella—whose rheumatism was quite real at the moment—rose rather painfully and hobbled down the room beside her, her thin, delicate old hand resting on the silver knob of a tall, ebony walking-stick.
“Now, remember,” urged Gillian. “Magda mustn’t have the least suspicion Michael may be coming back—or she’d be off into her slums before you could stop her.Whatever happens, you’ve got to prevent her rushing back to the Sisters of Penitence.”
“Only over my dead body, my dear,” Lady Arabella assured her determinedly. “She shan’t go any other way.”
So Gillian returned to Friars’ Holm bearing with her a note from Lady Arabella in which she asked her god-daughter to pay her a visit. In it, however, the wily old lady made no mention of her further idea of going to Harrogate, lest it should militate against an acceptance of the invitation. Magda demurred a little at first, but Gillian, suddenly endowed with diplomacy worthy of a Machiavelli, pointed out that if she really had any intention of ultimately withdrawing into a community the least she could do was to give her godmother the happiness of spending a few days with her.
“She will only urge me to give up the idea all the time,” protested Magda. “And I’ve quite made up my mind. The sooner I can get away from—from everything”—looking round her with desperate, haunted eyes—“the better it will be.”
Gillian’s impulse to combat her decision to rejoin the sisterhood died on her lips stillborn. It was useless to argue the matter. There was only one person in the world who could save Magda from herself, and that was Michael. The main point was to concentrate on getting him back to England, rather than waste her energies upon what she knew beforehand must prove a fruitless argument.
“I’ll go to Marraine for a couple of nights, anyway,” said Magda at last. “After that, I want to make arrangements for my reception into the sisterhood.”
Gillian returned no answer. She felt her heart contract at the quiet decision in Magda’s voice, but she pinned her faith on Lady Arabella’s ability to hold her, somehow, till she herself had accomplished her errand to Paris.
Gillian, dashing headlong into Victoria Station, encountered Storran sauntering leisurely out of it, a newspaper under his arm.
“Where are you off to?” he demanded, stopping abruptly. “You look as if you were in a hurry.”
“I am. Don’t stop me. I’m catching the boat-train.”
Storran pulled out his watch as he turned and fell into step beside her.
“Then you’ve got a good half-hour to spare. No hurry,” he returned placidly.
Gillian glanced at the watch on her wrist.
“Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully. “If so, my watch must be altogether wrong!”
“Unbeliever! Come and look at the clock. And, incidentally, give me that suit-case.”
She yielded up the case obediently and, having verified the time, proceeded towards the platform at a more reasonable gait.
Storran, his long legs leisurely keeping pace with her shorter ones, smiled down at her.
“And now, for the second time of asking, where are you off to?”
“I’m going to France—to fetch Michael.”
He gave a quick exclamation—whether of surprise or disapproval she was not quite sure.
“You haven’t heard from him, then?”
“No. And unless something happensquick, it will be too late.”
“But if he were at his studio he would surely have answered Lady Arabella’s letter.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Gillian absently, her eyes following the queue of passengers passing through the gate on the platform. By mutual consent they had come to a standstill outside it.
“Then if he isn’t there, what’s the use of your rushing over to Paris?” protested Storran. “It’s absurd—an absolute wild-goose chase. You can’t go!”
Gillian’s brown eyes came back to his face.
“But I’m going,” she said calmly.
He frowned.
“If Michael’s not at his studio he may be—anywhere!”
She nodded.
“I know. If so, I shall follow—anywhere.”
Storran looked down at her and read the quiet determination in her face.
“Then let me come too,” he said. “Sort of courier, you know. I’d just be at hand in case of a tangle.”
“Oh, no! I couldn’t let you. There’s not the least need. Good heavens, I’m not a baby!”
There was a curious softness in Dan’s blue eyes as they rested on her.
“No. I think you’re—a very good friend,” he said. “But I don’t see why you should have the monopoly! Let me show I know how to be a good pal, too, if I want to.”
“No—no.” Gillian still protested, but her tone betrayed signs of weakening.
“We’ll be as conventional as you like,” urged Dan, twinkling. “I’d stop at different hotels.”
“Well, but—”
“Say ‘yes’!” he insisted.
Gillian smiled.
“You obstinate person! Yes, then!”
“Thank you. Then I’ll go along and buy a ticket.”
He turned and went towards the booking-office, while Gillian, inwardly much relieved, awaited his return. She could not but acknowledge that in the “wild-goose chase” upon which she was embarking it would be an enormous comfort to have Storran at hand in case of an emergency. As to the proprieties—well, Gillian was far too honest and independent a soul to worry about them in the circumstances. Her friend’s happiness was at stake. And whether people chose to talk because she and Dan Storran travelled to Paris together—or to Timbuctoo, for the matter of that, if Michael had chanced to depart thither—troubled her not at all.
When Storran rejoined her a much more practical consideration presented itself to her mind.
“But, my dear man, you can’t fly with me to Paris without even a tooth-brush! I’d forgotten you’d no luggage!”
Her face fell as she spoke. But Storran dismissed the matter with a smile.
“Oh, I can buy clean collars and shirts as I go along,” he replied, entirely unruffled. “The dickens was to get on to the train at all! They assured me there wasn’t a seat. However, I make a point of never believing official statements—on principle.”
And as a consequence of such well-directed incredulity, Storran accompanied Gillian to Dover and thence to Calais.
They had a good crossing—sun up and blue sky. Looking back, afterwards, it always seemed to Gillian as though the short time it occupied had been a merciful breathing space—a tranquil interval, specially vouchsafed, in which she was able to brace herself for the coming race against time. Just so long as they were on board, nothing she could do was of any importance whatever, either to help or hinder the fulfilment of her errand. She could not quicken the speed of the boat by a single throb of its engine. So, like a sensible woman, she sat on deck with Dan and enjoyed herself amazingly.
Afterwards, in quick succession, came the stir and bustle of landing and the journey to Paris. They arrived too late to make any inquiries that night, but ten o’clock the following morning found them outside the building where Michael had his apartment.
“Oh, Dan!”—Gillian was seized with sudden panic. “Supposing he is here, after all, and hasdeliberatelynot answered Lady Arabella’s letter?”
“I shouldn’t suppose anything so foolish. Michael may be many kinds of a fool—artists very often are, I believe. It’s part of the temperament. But whatever he proposed to do regarding Magda, there’s no reason in the world to suppose he wouldn’t answer Lady Arabella’s letter.”
“No—no. Perhaps not,” agreed Gillian hurriedly. But it was in rather a shaky voice that she asked to see Mr. Quarrington when finally they found themselves confronted by the concierge.
“Monsieur Quarrington?” Hands, shoulders, and eyebrows all seemed to gesticulate at once as madame la concierge made answer. “But he has been gone from here two—no, three months. Perhaps madame did not know?”
“No,” said Gillian. “I didn’t know. But I thought he might possibly be away, because I—I have had no answer to a letter I wrote him.”
“What misfortune!”
The concierge regarded Gillian with a pair of shrewd, gimlet eyes while a stream of inquiry and comment issued from her lips. Madame was the sister of monsieur, perhaps? Truly, they resembled each other! One could see at a glance. No, not a sister? Ah, a friend, then? And there had been no answer to a letter! But monsieur had left an address. Oh, yes. And all letters were forwarded. She herself saw to that.
At last Gillian managed to stem the torrent of garrulity and interposed a question concerning the telegram she had sent.
A telegram! Now that was another affair altogether. Yes, the concierge remembered the telegram. She had opened it to see if it were of life or death importance, in which case she would have, of course, telegraphed its contents to monsieur at his present address.
Gillian was nearly crying with impatience as the woman’s voluble tongue ran on complacently.
“Then you did send it on?” she managed to interpolate at last.
The letter—yes. Not, of course, the telegram. That would have been a needless expense seeing that monsieur would already have had the letter, since all the letters were sent on.All!She, Madame Ribot, could vouch for that.
At the end of half an hour Gillian succeeded in extracting Michael’s address from amid the plethora of words and, bidding the voluble conciergebon jour, she and Storran beat a masterly retreat.
It appeared that Michael had been commissioned to paint the portrait of some Italian society beauty and had gone to Rome. Gillian screwed up her small face resolutely.
“I shall go to Rome!” she announced succinctly. There was a definite defiance in her tone, and Storran concealed a smile.
“Of course you will,” he replied composedly. “Just as well I came with you, isn’t it?” he added with great cheerfulness.
Her expression relaxed.
“You really are rather a nice person, Dan,” she allowed graciously. “I was horribly afraid you’d suggest wiring Michael again, or something silly like that. I’m not going to trust to anything of that kind.”
Accordingly, the only wire despatched was one to Lady Arabella, informing her as to their movements, and a few hours later found Dan and Gillian rushing across Europe as fast as the thunderous whirl of the express could take them. They travelled day and night, and it was a very weary Gillian who at last opened her eyes to the golden sunshine of Italy.
At the hotel whither Madame Ribot had directed them, fresh disappointment awaited them. The manager—when he found that the two dusty and somewhat dishevelled-looking travellers who presented themselves at the inquiry bureau were actually friends of Signor Quarrington, the famous English artist who had stayed at his hotel—was desolated, but the signor had departed a month ago! Had he the address? But assuredly. He would write it down for the signora.
“He’s in Normandy!” exclaimed Gillian in tones of bitter disappointment. “At—what’s the name of the place?—Armanches. Oh, Dan! We’ve got to go right back to Paris again and then on to the coast.”
Her face was full of anxiety. This would mean at least a delay of several days before they could possibly see Michael, and meanwhile it was a moot question as to how much longer Lady Arabella could restrain Magda from taking definite steps with regard to joining the sisterhood.
Storran nodded.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But all the same, you’ll not start back till to-morrow—”
“Oh, but I must!” interrupted Gillian. “We can’t afford to waste a moment.”
He glanced down at her and shook his head. Her face was white and drawn, and there were deep violet shadows underneath her eyes. Suspense and her anxious impatience had told upon her, and she had slept but little on the journey. And now, with the addition of this last, totally unexpected disappointment, she looked as though she could not stand much more.
“We can afford to waste a single day better than we can afford the three or four which it would cost us if you collapsed en route,” said Storran.
“I shan’t collapse,” she protested with white lips.
“So much the better. But all the same, you’ll stay here till to-morrow and get a good night’s rest.”
“I shouldn’t sleep,” she urged. “Let’s go right on, Dan. Let’s go——”
But the sentence was never finished. Quite suddenly she swayed, stretching out her hands with a blind, groping movement. Dan was just in time to catch her in his arms as she toppled over in a dead faint.
It was a week later when, in the early morning, a rather wan and white-faced Gillian sprang up from her seat as the train ran into Bayeux.
“Thank goodness we’re here at last!” she exclaimed.
Storran put out his hand to steady her as the train jolted to a standstill.
“Yes, we’re here at last,” he said. “Now to find a vehicle of some description to take us out to Armanches.”
As he had suggested it would, Gillian’s collapse had delayed them some time. Probably she had caught a slight chill while travelling, and that, together with the fatigue from which she was suffering, combined to keep her in bed at the hotel in Rome for a couple of days.
When the slight feverishness had abated, she slept the greater part of the time, her weary body exacting the price for all those wakeful hours she had passed on the train. But it was not until four days had elapsed that Dan would agree to a resumption of the journey. Even then, consent was only wrung from him by the fear that she would fret herself ill over any further delay. He did not consider her by any means fit to travel. But Gillian was game to the core, and they had reached Bayeux without furthercontretemps.
“The thing that puzzles me,” she said as they started on the long drive from Bayeux to Armanches, “is why Michael didn’t send his Normandy address to Madame Ribot. We should have been saved all that long journey to Rome if he had.”
“Perhaps he intended to, and forgot,” suggested Dan. “Artists are proverbially absent-minded.”
But Gillian shook her head with a dissatisfied air. Michael was not of the absent-minded type.
Armanches was a tiny place on the Normandy coast, in reality not much more than a fishing village, but its possession of a beautifulplage—smooth, fine, golden sands—brought many visitors to the old-fashioned hostelry it boasted.
The landlady, a smiling, rosy-cheeked woman, with a chubby little brown-faced son hiding shy embarrassment behind her ample skirts, greeted the travellers hospitably. But when they mentioned Quarrington’s name a look of sympathetic concern overspread her comely face.
Yes, he was there. And of course madame could not know, but he had been ill, seriously ill withla grippe—taken ill the very day he had arrived, nearly a month ago. He had a nurse. Oh, yes! One had come from Bayeux. But this influenza! It was a veritable scourge. One was here to-day and gone to-morrow. However, Michael Quarrington was recovering, the saints be praised! Monsieur and madame wished to see him? The good woman looked doubtful. She would inquire. What name? Grey? But there was a telegram awaiting madame!
Gillian’s face blanched as the landlady bustled away in search of the wire. Had Magda already——Oh, but that was impossible! Lady Arabella was in charge at that end, and Gillian had a great belief in Lady Arabella’s capacity to deal with any crisis that might arise. Nevertheless, they had wired her the Normandy address from Rome, in case of necessity. The next moment Gillian had torn open the telegram and she and Dan were reading it together.
“Magda insists we return to London on Wednesday. She has completed preliminary arrangements to join sisterhood and goes there Thursday. Impossible to dissuade her.—ARABELLA WINTER.”
Gillian’s mouth set itself in a straight line of determination as her eyes raced along the score or so of pregnant words. She was silent a moment. Then she met Storran’s questioning glance.
“We can just do it,” she said sternly. “To-day is Wednesday. By crossing to Southampton to-night, we can make London to-morrow.”
Without waiting for his reply she entered the inn and ran quickly up the stairs which the landlady had already ascended.
“But, madame, I am not sure that monsieur will receive anyone,” protested the astonished woman, turning round as Gillian caught up with her.
“I must see him,” asserted Gillian quietly.
Perhaps something in the tense young face touched a sympathetic chord in the Frenchwoman’s honest heart. She scented romance, and when she emerged from the invalid’s bedroom her face was wreathed in smiles.
“It is all arranged. Will madame please to enter?”
A moment later Gillian found herself standing in front of a tall, gaunt figure of a man, whose coat hung loosely from his shoulders and whose face was worn and haggard with something more thanla grippealone.
“Oh, Michael!”
A little, stricken cry broke from her lips. What men and women make each other suffer! She realised it as she met the stark, bitter misery of the grey eyes that burned at her out of the thin face and remembered the look on Magda’s own face when she had last seen her.
She went straight to the point without a word of greeting or of explanation. There was no time for explanations, except the only one that mattered.
“Michael, why didn’t you answer Lady Arabella’s letter?”
He stared at her. Then he passed his hand wearily across his forehead.
“Letter? I don’t remember any letter.”
“She wrote to you about a month ago. I know the letter was forwarded on to Rome. It must have followed you here.”
“A month ago?” he repeated.
Then a light broke over his face. He turned and crossed the room to where a small pile of letters lay on a table, dusty and forgotten.
“Perhaps it’s here,” he said. “I was taken ill directly I arrived. I never even sent this address to the concierge at Paris. I believe I was off my head part of the time—‘flue plays the deuce with you. But I remember now. The nurse told me there were some letters which had come while I was ill. I—didn’t bother about them.”
While he spoke he was turning over the envelopes, one by one, in a desultory fashion.
“Yes. This is Lady Arabella’s writing.” He paused and looked across at Gillian.
“Will you read it, please?” she said. “And—oh, you ought to sit down! You don’t look very strong yet.”
He smiled a little.
“I’m not quite such a crock as I look. But won’t you sit down yourself while I read this letter? Is it of importance?”
“Oh! Please read it!” exclaimed Gillian with sudden nervous impatience.
It seemed to her an eternity while he read the letter. But at last he looked up from its perusal.
“Well?” she asked under her breath.
Very deliberately he refolded the sheet of notepaper and slipped it back into its envelope.
“It would have made no difference if I had received it earlier,” he said composedly.
“No difference”
“None. Because, you see, this letter—asking me to go back to Magda—is written under a misapprehension.
“How? What do you mean?”
“I mean—that Magda has—no further use for me.”
Gillian leaned forward.
“You’re wrong,” she said tersely—“quite wrong.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not blaming her. Looking back, I’m not even very much surprised. But still, the fact remains, she has no further use for me.”
“Will you tell me what makes you think that?” With an effort Gillian forced herself to speak quietly and composedly.
He was silent a moment, staring out of the window at the gay blue sea beyond, sparkling in the morning sunlight. All at once he swung round on her, his face wrung with a sudden agony.
“Iknow,” he said in a roughened voice. “I know, because I wrote to her—six months ago. I was hard, I know, brutally hard to her that last day at Friars’ Holm. But—God! I paid for it afterwards! And I wrote to her—bared my very soul to her. . . . Wrote so that if she had ever cared she must at least have answered me.”
He stopped abruptly, his face working.
“And she didn’t answer?”
A wry smile twisted his lips.
“I got my own letter back,” he said quietly. “After all, that was an answer—a conclusive one.”
Gillian was thinking rapidly. Six months ago! A momentary flash of recollection came to her. So Lady Arabella, that wise old citizen of the world, had been quite right after all! She had given Michael six months to find out his imperative need of Magda. And he had found it. Only—something had gone wrong.
“Magda never had that letter,” she said quietly at last.
She was gradually beginning to piece together the separate parts of the puzzle. All letters that came for Magda had been forwarded on to the sisterhood, and had she herself readdressed this of Michael’s she would have recognised the handwriting. But probably she had been away from home, or had chanced to be out at post time, in which case Melrose, or old Virginie, would have readdressed the envelope and dropped it in the pillar box at the corner of the road.
Then—as was the case with any correspondence addressed to one of the Sisters of Penitence—the letter would be read by the Mother Superior and passed on to its destined recipient if she thought good. If not——
Gillian had learned a great deal about Catherine Vallincourt by now, both from Lady Arabella and from Magda herself, who, before leaving the community, had discovered the identity of its head. And she could visualise the stern, fanatical woman, obsessed by her idea of disciplining Magda and of counteracting the effects of her brother’s marriage with Diane Wielitzska, opening the letter and, after perusal, calmly sealing it up in its envelope again and returning it to the sender.
“Magda never had that letter, Michael,” she repeated. “Listen!” And then, without preamble, but with every word vibrant with pity for the whole tragedy, she poured out the story of Magda’s passionate repentance and atonement, of her impetuous adoption of her father’s remorseless theory, mistaken though it might be, that pain is the remedy for sin, and of the utter, hopeless despair which had overwhelmed her now that she believed it had all proved unavailing.
“She has come to believe that you don’t want her—never could want her, Michael—because she has failed so much.”
There was more than one reproach mingled with the story, but Michael made no protest. It was only when she had finished that Gillian could read in his tortured eyes all that her narrative had cost him.
“Yes,” he said at last. “It’s true. I wanted the impossible. I was looking for a goddess—not a woman. . . . But now I want—just a woman, Gillian.”
“Then, if you want her, you must save her from herself. You’ve just twenty-four hours to do it in. To-morrow she’s still Magda. The next day she’ll be Sister Somebody. And you’ll have lost her.”
Half an hour later, when Michael’s nurse returned, she found her patient packing a suit-case with the assistance of a pretty, brown-haired girl whose eyes shone with the unmistakable brightness of recent tears.
“But you’re not fit to travel!” she protested in horrified dismay. “You mustn’t think of it, Mr. Quarrington.”
But Michael only laughed at her, defying her good-humouredly.
“If the man you loved were waiting for you in England, nurse, you know you’d go—and you wouldn’t care a hang whether you were fit to travel or not!”
The nurse smiled in spite of herself.
“No,” she admitted. “I suppose I shouldn’t.”
As the Havre-Southampton boat steamed through the moonlit night, Dan and Gillian were pacing the deck together.
“I’m so glad Michael is going back to Magda without knowing—about June,” said Gillian, coming to a standstill beside the deck-rail. “Going back just because his love is too big for anything else to matter now.”
“Haven’t you told him?”—Storran’s voice held surprise.
“No. I decided not to. I should like Magda to tell him that herself.”
They were both silent for a little while. Gillian bent over the rail, looking down at the phosphorescent water breaking away from the steamer’s bow. Suddenly a big hand covered hers.
“I think I’m—lonely,” said Storran.
“Gillian,” he went on, his voice deepening. “Gillian . . . dear. We’re two rather lonely people. We shall be lonelier still when Michael and Magda are married. Couldn’t we be lonely—in company?”
Gillian’s hand moved a little beneath his, then stayed still.
“Why, Dan—Dan——” she stammered.
“Yes,” went on the strong, tender voice. “I’m asking you to marry me, Gillian, I’d never expect too much of you. We both know all that’s in the past of each of us. But we might help each other to be less lonely—good comrades together, Gillian.”
And suddenly Gillian realised how good it would be to rest once more in the shelter of a man’s affection and good comradeship—to have someone to laugh with or to be sorry with. There’s a tender magic in the word “together.” And she, too, had something to give in return—sympathy, and understanding, and a warm friendship. . . . She would not be going to him empty-handed.
“Is it yes, Gillian?”
She bent her head.
“Yes, Dan.”