As Gillian mingled once more with the throng on the pavements she felt curiously unwilling to return home. She had set out from Friars’ Holm so full of hope in her errand! It had seemed impossible that she could fail, and she had been almost unconsciously looking forward to seeing Magda’s wan, strained face relax into half-incredulous delight as she confided in her the news that Michael was as eager and longing for a reconciliation as she herself.
And instead—this! This utter, hopeless failure to move him one jot. Only the memory of the man’s stern, desperately unhappy eyes curbed the hot tide of her anger against him for his iron refusal.
He still loved Magda, so he said. And, indeed, Gillian believed it. But—love! It was not love as she and Tony Grey had understood it—simple, forgiving, and wholly trustful. It seemed to her as though Michael and Magda were both wandering in a dim twilight of misunderstanding, neither of them able to see that there was only one thing for them to do if they were ever to find happiness again. They must thrust the past behind them—with all its bitterness and failures and mistakes, and go forward, hand in hand, in search of the light. Love would surely lead them to it eventually.
Yet this was the last thing either of them seemed able to think of doing. Magda was determined to spend the sweetness of her youth in making reparation for the past, while Michael was torn by bitterly conflicting feelings—his passionate love for Magda warring with his innate recoil from all that she had done and with his loyalty to his dead sister.
Gillian sighed as she threaded her way slowly along the crowded street. The lights of a well-known tea-shop beckoned invitingly and, only too willing to postpone the moment of her return home, she turned in between its plate-glass doors.
They swung together behind her, dulling the rumble of the traffic, while all around uprose the gay hum of conversation and the chink of cups and saucers mingling with the rhythmic melodies that issued from a cleverly concealed orchestra.
The place was very crowded. For a moment it seemed to Gillian as though there were no vacant seat. Then she espied an empty table for two in a distant corner and hastily made her way thither. She had barely given her order to the waitress when the swing doors parted again to admit someone else—a man this time.
The new arrival paused, as Gillian herself had done, to search out a seat. Then, noting the empty place at her table, he came quickly towards it.
Gillian was idly scanning the list of marvellous little cakes furnished by the menu, and her first cognisance of the new-comer’s approach was the vision of a strong, masculine hand gripping the back of the chair opposite her preparatory to pulling it out from under the table.
“I’m afraid there’s no other vacant seat,” he was beginning apologetically. But at the sound of his voice Gillian’s eyes flew up from that virile-looking hand to the face of its owner, and a low cry of surprise broke from her lips.
“Dan Storran!”
Simultaneously the man gave utterance to her own name.
Gillian stared at him stupidly. Could this really be Dan Storran—Storran of Stockleigh?
The alteration in him was immense. He looked ten years older. An habitual stoop had lessened his apparent height and the dark, kinky hair was streaked with grey. The golden-tan bestowed by an English sun had been exchanged for the sallow skin of a man who has lived hard in a hot country, and the face was thin and heavily lined. Only the eyes of periwinkle-blue remained to remind Gillian of the splendid young giant she had known at Ashencombe—and even they were changed and held the cynical weariness of a man who has eaten of Dead Sea fruit and found it bitter to the taste.
There were other changes, too. Storran of Stockleigh was as civilised, his clothes and general appearance as essentially “right,” as those of the men around him. All suggestion of the “cave-man from the backwoods,” as Lady Arabella had termed him, was gone.
“I didn’t know you were in England,” said Gillian at last.
“I landed yesterday.”
“You’ve been in South America, haven’t you?”
She spoke mechanically. There seemed something forced and artificial about this exchange of platitudes between herself and the man who had figured so disastrously in Magda’s life. Without warning he brought the conversation suddenly back to the realities.
“Yes. I was in ‘Frisco when my wife died. Since then I’ve been half over the world.”
Behind the harshly uttered statement Gillian could sense the unspeakable bitterness of the man’s soul. It hurt her, calling forth her quick sympathy just as the sight of some maimed and wounded animal would have done.
“Oh!” she said, a sensitive quiver in her voice. “I was so sorry—so terribly sorry—to hear about June. We hadn’t heard—we only knew quite recently.” Her face clouded as she reflected on the tragic happenings with which the news had been accompanied.
At this moment a waitress paused at Storran’s side and he gave his order. Then, looking curiously at Gillian, he said:
“What did you hear? Just that she died when our child was born, I suppose?”
Gillian’s absolute honesty of soul could not acquiesce, though it would have been infinitely the easier course.
“No,” she said, flushing a little and speaking very low. “We heard that she might have lived if—if she had only been—happier.”
He nodded silently, rather as though this was the answer he had anticipated. Presently he spoke abruptly:
“Does Miss Vallincourt know that?”
Gillian hesitated. Then, taking her courage in both hands she told him quickly and composedly the whole story of the engagement and its rupture, and let him understand just precisely what June’s death, owing to the special circumstances in which it had occurred, had meant for Magda of retribution and of heartbreak.
Storran listened without comment, in his eyes an odd look of concentration. The waitress dexterously slid a tray in front of him and he poured himself out a cup of tea mechanically, but he made no attempt to drink it. When Gillian ceased, his face showed no sign of softening. It looked hard and very weary. His strong fingers moved restlessly, crumbling one of the small cakes on the plate in front of him.
“‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small,’” he quoted at last, quietly.
Gillian met his harshly cynical glance with one of brave defiance.
“I don’t think God’s mills have anything to do with it,” she said swiftly. “He’d understand all the excuses and allowances that should be made for her better even than I do. And I shouldn’t want to punish Magda. I’d make her—happy. She’s never known what it means to be really happy. Success and gaiety aren’thappiness.”
“And you?” he asked quickly.
There was a soft and wonderful shining in the brown eyes that were lifted to his.
“I had one year of utter happiness,” she answered gently. “And I’ve got Coppertop—so I can’t ever be quite unhappy.”
“If there were more women like you——” he began abruptly.
She shook her head.
“No, no,” she said, smiling a little. “If there were more men like Tony! You men are so hard—so cruelly hard.”
He looked at her very directly.
“Haven’t I the right to be?” he demanded bitterly.
“Ah! Forgive me!” Gillian spoke with an accent of self-reproach. “I’d forgotten you still—care.”
“For Magda?” He laughed shortly. “No. That’s dead, thank God! I killed it. Worked it out of my system in ‘Frisco”—with exceeding bitterness. “Then I got the news of June’s death. Her sister wrote me. Told me she died because she’d no longer any wish to live. That sobered me-brought me back to my sense. There was a good deal more to the letter—my sister-in-law didn’t let me down lightly. I’ve had to pay for that summer at Stockleigh. And now Magda’s paying. . . . Well, that seems to square things somehow.”
“Oh, you are brutal!” broke out Gillian.
His eyes, hard as steel and as unyielding, met hers.
“Am I?”—indifferently. “Perhaps I am.”
This was a very different Dan from the impetuous, hot-headed Dan of former times. Gillian found his calm ruthlessness difficult to understand, and yet, realising all that he had suffered, she could not but condone it to a certain extent.
When at last she rose to go, he detained her a moment.
“I am remaining in England now. I should like to see you sometimes. May I?”
She hesitated. Then something that appealed in the tired eyes impelled her answer.
“If you wish,” she said gently.
Back once more in the street she made her way as quickly as possible to the nearest tube station, in order to reach it before the usual evening crowd of homeward-wending clerks and typists poured into the thoroughfares from a thousand open office doors. But as soon as she was safely seated in the train her thoughts reverted to the two strange interviews in which she had taken part that afternoon.
She felt very low-spirited. Since she had seen and talked with the two men in whose lives Magda had played so big a part, she was oppressed with a sense of the utter hopelessness of trying to put matters right. Things must take their course—drive on to whatever end, bitter or sweet, lay hidden in the womb of fate.
She had tried to stem the current of affairs, but she had proved as powerless to deflect it as a dried stick tossed on to a river in spate. And now, whether the end were ultimate happiness or hopeless, irretrievable disaster, Michael and Magda must still fight their way towards it, each alone, by the dim light of that “blind Understanding” which is all that Destiny vouchsafes.
The curtains swung together for the last time, the orchestra struck up the National Anthem, and the great audience which had come from all parts to witness the Wielitzska’s farewell performance began to disperse.
A curious quietness attended its departure. It was as though a pall of gravity hung over the big assemblage. Public announcements of the performance had explained that the famous dancer proposed taking a long rest for reasons of health. “But,” as everyone declared, “you know what that means! She’s probably broken down—heart or something. We shall never see her dance again.” And so, beneath the tremendous reception which they gave her, there throbbed an element of sadness, behind all the cheers and the clapping an insistent minor note which carried across the footlights to where Magda stood bowing her thanks, and smiling through the mist of tears which filled her eyes.
The dance which she had chosen for her last appearance was theSwan-Maiden. There had seemed a strange applicability in the choice, and to those who had eyes to see there was a new quality in the Wielitzska’s dancing—a depth of significance and a spirituality of interpretation which was commented upon in the Press the next day.
It had been quite unmistakable. She had gripped her audience so that throughout the final scene of the ballet no word was spoken. The big crowd, drawn from all classes, sat tense and silent, sensitive to every movement, every exquisite, appealing gesture of the Swan-Maiden. And when at last she had lain, limp in death, in her lover’s embrace, and the music had quivered into silence, there followed a vibrant pause—almost it seemed as though a sigh of mingled ecstasy and regret went up—before the thunderous applause roared through the auditorium.
The insatiable few were still clapping and stamping assiduously when Magda, after taking innumerable calls, at last came off the stage. It had been a wonderful night of triumph, and as she made her way towards her dressing-room she was conscious of a sudden breathless realisation of all that she was sacrificing. For a moment she felt as though she must rush back on to the stage and tell everybody that she couldn’t do it, that it was all a mistake—that this was not a farewell! But she set her teeth and moved resolutely towards her dressing-room.
As her fingers closed round the handle of the door, someone stepped out from the shadows of the passage and spoke:
“Magda!”
The voice, wrung and urgent, was Antoine Davilof’s.
Her first impulse was to hurry forward and put the dressing-room door betwixt herself and him. She had not seen him since that night when he had come down to the theatre and implored her to be his wife, warning her that he would prevent her marriage with Michael. He had carried out his threat with a completeness that had wrecked her life, and although, since the breaking-off of her engagement, he had both written and telephoned, begging her to see him, she had steadfastly refused. Once he had come to Friars’ Holm, but had been met with an inexorable “Not at home!” from Melrose.
“Magda! For God’s sake, give me a moment!”
Something in the strained tones moved her to an unexpected feeling of compassion. It was the voice of a man in the extremity of mental anguish.
Silently she opened the door of the dressing-room and signed to him to follow her.
“Well,” she said, facing him, “what is it? Why have you come?”
The impulse of compassion died out suddenly. His was the hand that had destroyed her happiness. The sight of him roused her to a fierce anger and resentment.
“Well?” she repeated. “What do you want? To know the result of your handiwork?”—bitterly. “You’ve been quite as successful as even you could have wished.”
“Don’t,” he said unevenly. “Magda, I can’t bear it. You can’t give up—all this. Your dancing—it’s your life! I shall never forgive myself . . . I’ll see Quarrington and tell him—”
“You can’t see him. He’s gone away.”
“Then I’ll find him.”
“If you found him, nothing you could say would make any difference,” she answered unemotionally. “It’s the facts that matter. You can’t alter—facts.”
Davilof made a gesture of despair.
“Is it true you’re going into some sisterhood?” he asked hoarsely.
“Yes.”
“And it is I—I who have driven you to this!Dieu! I’ve been mad—mad!”
His hands were clenched, his face working painfully. The hazel eyes—those poet’s eyes of his which she had seen sometimes soft with dreams and sometimes blazing with love’s fire—were blurred by misery. They reminded her of the contrite, tortured eyes of a dog which, maddened by pain, has bitten the hand of a beloved master. Her anger died away in the face of that overwhelming remorse. She herself had learned to know the illimitable bitterness of self-reproach.
“Antoine——” Her voice had grown very gentle.
He swung round on her.
“And I can’t undo it!” he exclaimed desperately. “I can’t undo it! . . . Magda, will you believe me—will youtryto believe that, if my life could undo the harm I’ve done, I’d give it gladly?”
“I believe you would, Antoine,” she replied simply.
With a stifled exclamation he turned away and, dropping into a chair, leaned his arms on the table and hid his face. Once, twice she heard the sound of a man’s hard-drawn sob, and the dry agony of it wrung her heart. All that was sweet and compassionate in her—the potential mother that lies in every woman—responded to his need. She ran to him and, kneeling at his side, laid a kind little hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t Antoine!” she said pitifully. “Ah, don’t, my dear!”
He caught the hand and held it against his cheek.
“It’s unforgivable!” he muttered.
“No, no. I do forgive you.”
“You can’t forgive! . . . Impossible!”
“I think I can, Antoine. You see, I need forgiveness so badly myself. I wouldn’t want to keep anyone else without it. Besides, Michael would have been bound to learn—what you told him—sooner or later.” She rose to her feet, pushing back the hair from her forehead rather wearily. “It’s better as it is—that he should know now. It—it would have been unbearable if it had come later—when I was his wife.”
Antoine stumbled to his feet. His beautiful face was marred with grief.
“I wish I were dead!”
The words broke from him like an exceeding bitter cry. To Magda they seemed to hold some terrible import.
“Not that, Antoine!” she answered in a frightened voice. “You’re not thinking—you’re not meaning——”
He shook his head, smiling faintly.
“No,” he said quietly. “The Davilofs have never been cowards. I shan’t take that way out. You need have no fears, Magda.” The sudden tension in her face relaxed. “But I shall not stay in England. England—without you—would be hell. A hell of memories.”
“What shall you do, then, Antoine? You won’t give up playing?”
He made a fierce gesture of distaste.
“I couldn’t play in public! Not now. Not for a time. I think I shall go to my mother. She always wants me, and she sees me very little.”
Magda nodded. Her eyes were wistful.
“Yes, go to her. I think mothers must understand—as other people can’t ever understand. She will be glad to have you with her, Antoine.”
He was silent for a moment, his eyes dwelling on her face as though he sought to learn each line of it, so that when she would be no more beside him he might carry the memory of it in his heart for ever.
“Then it is good-bye,” he said at last.
Magda held out her hands and, taking them in his, he drew her close to him.
“I love you,” he said, “and I have brought you only pain.” There was a tragic simplicity in the statement.
“No,” she answered steadily. “Never think that. I spoiled my own life. And—love is a big gift, Antoine.”
She lifted her face to his and very tenderly, almost reverently, he kissed her. She knew that in that last kiss there was no disloyalty to Michael. It held renunciation. It accepted forgiveness.
“Did you know that Dan Storran was in front to-night?” asked Gillian, as half an hour later she and Magda were driving back to Hampstead together. She had already confided the fact of her former meeting with him in the tea-shop.
Magda’s eyes widened a little.
“No,” she said quietly. “I think I’m glad I didn’t know.”
She was very silent throughout the remainder of the drive home and Gillian made no effort to distract her. She herself felt disinclined to talk. She was oppressed by the knowledge that this was the last night she and Magda would have with each other. To-morrow Magda would be gone and one chapter of their lives together ended. The gates of the Sisters of Penitence would close upon her and Friars’ Holm would be empty of her presence.
Everything had been said that could be said, every persuasion used. But to each and all Magda had only answered: “I know it’s the only thing for me to do. It probably wouldn’t be for you, or for anyone else. But it is for me. So you must let me go, Gillyflower.”
Gillian dreaded the morrow with its inevitable moment of farewell. As for Virginie, she had done little else but weep for the last three days, and although Lady Arabella had said very little, she had kissed her god-daughter good-bye with a brusqueness that veiled an inexpressible grief and tenderness. Gillian foresaw that betwixt administering comfort to Lady Arabella and Virginie, and setting Magda’s personal affairs in order after her departure, she would have little time for the indulgence of her own individual sorrow. Perhaps it was just as well that these tasks should devolve on her. They would serve to occupy her thoughts.
The morning sunlight, goldenly gay, was streaming in through the windows as Magda, wrapped in a soft silken peignoir, made her way into the bathroom. Virginie, her eyes reddened from a night’s weeping, was kneeling beside the sunken bath of green-veined marble, stirring sweet-smelling salts in to the steaming water. Their fragrance permeated the atmosphere like incense.
“My tub ready, Virginie?” asked Magda, cheerfully.
Virginie scrambled to her feet.
“Mais oui, mademoiselle. The bath is ready.”
Then, her face puckering up suddenly, she burst into tears and ran out of the room. Magda smiled and sighed, then busied herself with her morning ablutions—prolonging them a little as she realised that this was the last occasion for a whole year when she would step down into a bath prepared and perfumed for her in readiness by her maid.
A year! It was a long time to look forward to. So much can happen in a year. And no one can foresee what the end may bring.
Presently she emerged from her bath, her skin gleaming like wet ivory, her dark hair sparkling with the drops of water that had splashed on to it. As she stepped up from its green-veined depths, she caught a glimpse of herself in a panel mirror hung against the wall, and for a moment she was aware of the familiar thrill of delight in her own beauty—in the gleaming, glowing radiance of perfectly formed, perfectly groomed flesh and blood.
Then, with a revulsion of feeling, came the sudden realisation that it was this very perfection of body which had been her undoing—like a bitter blight, leaving in its wake a trail of havoc and desolation. She was even conscious of a fierce eagerness for the period of penance to begin. Almost ecstatically she contemplated the giving of her body to whatever discipline might be appointed.
To anyone hitherto as spoiled and imperious as Magda, whose body had been the actual temple of her art, and so, almost inevitably, of her worship, this utter renouncing of physical self-government was the supremest expiation she could make. As with Hugh Vallincourt, whose blood ran in her veins, the idea of personal renunciation made a curious appeal to her emotional temperament, and she was momentarily filled with something of the martyr’s ecstasy.
Gillian’s arms clung round Magda’s neck convulsively as she kissed her at the great gates of Friars’ Holm a few hours later.
“Good-bye! . . . Ah, Magda! Come back to me!”
“I shall come back.”
One more lingering kiss, and then Magda stepped into the open car. Virginie made a rush forward before the door closed and, dropping on to her knees on the footboard, convulsively snatched her adored young mistress’s hand between her two old worn ones and covered it with kisses.
“Oh, mademoiselle, thy old Virginie will die without thee!” she sobbed brokenly.
And then the car slid away and Magda’s last glimpse was of the open gates of Friars’ Holm with its old-world garden, stately and formal, in the background; and of Virginie weeping unrestrainedly, her snowy apron flung up over her head; and of Gillian standing erect, her brown eyes very wide and winking away the tears that welled up despite herself, and her hand on Coppertop’s small manful shoulder, gripping it hard.
As the car passed through the streets many people, recognising its occupant, stopped and turned to follow it with their eyes. One or two women waved their hands, and a small errand-boy—who had saved up his pennies and squeezed into the gallery of the Imperial Theatre the previous evening—threw up his hat and shouted “Hooray!”
Once, at a crossing, the chauffeur was compelled to pull up to allow the traffic to pass, and a flower-girl with a big basket of early violets on her arm, recognising the famous dancer, tossed a bunch lightly into the car. They fell on Magda’s lap. She picked them up and, brushing them with her lips, smiled at the girl and fastened the violets against the furs at her breast. The flower-girl treasured the smile of the great Wielitzska in her memory for many a long day, while in the arid months that were to follow Magda treasured the sweet fragrance of that spontaneous gift.
Half an hour later the doors of the grey house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt apart from the world opened to receive Magda Vallincourt, and closed again behind her.
Magda felt a sudden stab of fear. The sound of the latch clicking into its place brought home to her the irrevocability of the step she had taken. That tall, self-locking door stood henceforth betwixt her and the dear, familiar world she had known—the world of laughter and luxury and success. But beyond, on the far horizon, there was Michael—her “Saint Michel.” If these months of discipline brought her nearer him, then she would never grudge them.
The serene eyes of the Sister who received her—Sister Bernardine—helped to steady her quivering pulses.
There was something in Sister Bernardine that was altogether lacking in Catherine Vallincourt—a delightfully human understanding and charity for all human weakness, whether of the soul or body.
It was she who reassured Magda when a sudden appalling and unforeseen idea presented itself to her.
“My hair!” she exclaimed breathlessly, her hand going swiftly to the heavy, smoke-black tresses. “Will they cut off my hair?”
As Sister Bernardine comfortingly explained that only those who joined the community as sisters had their heads shaven, a strange expression flickered for an instant in her eyes, a fleeting reminiscence of that day, five-and-twenty years ago, when the shears had cropped their ruthless way through the glory of hair which had once been hers.
And afterwards, as time went on and Magda, wearing the grey veil and grey serge dress of a voluntary penitent, found herself absorbed into the daily life of the community, it was often only the recollection of Sister Bernardine’s serene, kind eyes which helped her to hold out. Somehow, somewhere out of this drastic, self-denying life Sister Bernardine had drawn peace and tranquillity of soul, and Magda clung to this thought when the hard rules of the sisterhood, the distastefulness of the tasks appointed her, and the frequent fasts ordained, chafed and fretted her until sometimes her whole soul seemed to rise up in rebellion against the very discipline she had craved.
Most of her tasks were performed under the lynx eyes of Sister Agnetia, an elderly and sour-visaged sister to whom Magda had taken an instinctive dislike from the outset. The Mother Superior she could tolerate. She was severe and uncompromising. But she was at least honest. There was no doubting the bedrock genuineness of her disciplinary ardour, harsh and merciless though it might appear. But with Sister Agnetia, Magda was always sensible of the personal venom of a little mind vested with authority beyond its deserts, and she resented her dictation accordingly. And equally accordingly, it seemed to fall always to her lot to work under Sister Agnetia’s supervision.
Catherine had been quick enough to detect Magda’s detestation of this particular sister and to use it as a further means of discipline. It was necessary that Magda’s pride and vanity should be humbled, and Catherine saw to it that they were. It was assuredly by the Will of Heaven that the child of Diane Wielitzska had been led to her very doors, and to the subject of her chastening Catherine brought much thought and discrimination.“If you hurt people enough you can make them good.”It had been her brother’s bitter creed and it was hers. Pain, in Catherine’s idea, was the surest means of chastening, and Magda was to remember her year at the sisterhood by two things—by the deadly, unbearable monotony of its daily routine and by her first acquaintance with actual bodily pain.
Her health had always been magnificent, and—with the exception of the trivial punishments of childhood and those few moments when she was sitting for the picture of Circe—physical suffering was unknown to her. The penances, therefore, which Catherine appointed her—to kneel for a stated length of time until it seemed as though every muscle she possessed were stretched to breaking-point, to fast when her whole healthy young body craved for food, to be chastened with flagellum, a scourge of knotted cords—all these grew to be a torment almost beyond endurance.
Almost! . . . Yet in the beginning the thought of Michael sustained her triumphantly.
It was a curious sensation—that first stroke of the flagellum.
As Magda, unversed in physical suffering, felt the cords shock against her flesh, she was conscious of a strange uplifting of spirit. This, then, this smarting, blinding thing called pain, was the force that would drive the will to do evil out of her soul.
She waited expectantly—almost exultantly—for the second fall of the thongs. The interval between seemed endless. Sister Agnetia was very deliberate, pausing between each stroke. She knew to a nicety the value of anticipation as a remedial force in punishment.
Again the cords descended on the bared shoulders. Magda winced away from them, shivering. For a moment Sister Agnetia’s arm hung flaccid, the cords of the flagellum pendant and still.
“Are you submitting to the discipline, Sister Penitentia?” came her voice. It was an unpleasant voice, suggestive of a knife that has been dipped in oil.
Magda caught her breath.
“Yes . . . yes . . . I submit myself.”
Dimly she felt that by means of this endurance she would win back Michael, cleanse herself to receive his love.
“I submit,” she repeated in a rapt whisper of self-surrender.
Sister Agnetia’s voice swam unctuously into her consciousness once more.
“I thought you tried to avoid that last stroke. If you flinch from punishment it is not submission, but rebellion.”
Magda gripped her hands together and pressed her knees into the hard stone floor, her muscles taut with anticipation as she heard the soft whistle of the thongs cleaving the air.
This time she bore the pang of anguish motionless, but the vision of Michael went out suddenly in a throbbing darkness of swift agony. Her shoulders felt red-hot. The pain shot up into her brain like fingers of flame. It clasped her whole body in a torment, and the ecstasy of self-surrender was lost in a sick groping after sheer endurance.
The next stroke, crushing across that fever of intolerable suffering, wrung a hoarse moan from her dry lips. Her hands locked together till she felt as though their bones must crack with the strain as she waited for the next inexorable stroke.
One moment! . . . Two! An eternity of waiting!
“Go on!” she breathed. “Oh! . . . Be quick . . .” Her voice panted.
No movement answered her. Unable to endure the suspense, she straightened her bowed shoulders and turned in convulsive appeal to where she had glimpsed the flail-like rise and fall of Sister Agnetia’s serge-clad arm.
There was no one there! The bare, cell-like chamber was empty, save for herself. Sister Agnetia had stolen away, completing the penance of physical pain by the refinement of anguish embodied in those hideous moments of mental dread.
Magda almost fancied she could hear an oily chuckle outside the door.
For the first month or two after Magda’s departure Gillian found that she had her hands full in settling up various business and personal matters which had been left with loose ends. She was frankly glad to discover that there were so many matters requiring her attention; otherwise the blank occasioned in her life by Magda’s absence would have been almost unendurable.
The two girls had grown very much into each other’s hearts during the years they had shared together, and when friends part, no matter how big a wrench the separation may mean to the one who goes, there is a special kind of sadness reserved for the one who is left behind. For the one who sets out there are fresh faces, new activities in store. Even though the new life adventured upon may not prove to be precisely a bed of thornless roses, the pricking of the thorns provides distraction to the mind from the sheer, undiluted pain of separation.
But for Gillian, left behind at Friars’ Holm, there remained nothing but an hourly sense of loss added to that crushing, inevitable flatness which succeeds a crisis of any kind.
Nor did a forlorn Coppertop’s reiterated inquiries as to how soon the Fairy Lady might be expected back again help to mend matters.
Lady Arabella’s grief was expressed in a characteristically prickly fashion.
“Young people don’t seem to know the first thing about love nowadays,” she observed with the customary scathing contempt of one age for another.
Inmyyoung days! Ah! there will never be times like those again! We are all quite sure of it as our young days recede into the misty past.
“If you loved, you loved,” pursued Lady Arabella crisply. “And the death of half a dozen sisters wouldn’t have been allowed to interfere with the proceedings.”
Gillian smiled a little.
“It wasn’t only that. It was Michael’s bitter disappointment in Magda, I think, quite as much as the fact that, indirectly, he held her responsible for June’s death.”
“It’s ridiculous to try and foist Mrs. Storran’s death on to Magda,” fumed Lady Arabella restively. “If she hadn’t the physical health to have a good, hearty baby successfully, she shouldn’t have attempted it. That’s all! . . . And then those two idiots—Magda and Michael! Of course he must needs shoot off abroad, and equally of course she must be out of the way in a sisterhood when he comes rushing back—as he will do!”—with a grim smile.
“He hasn’t done yet,” Gillian pointed out.
“I give him precisely six months, my dear, before he finds out that, sister or no sister, he can’t live without Magda. Michael Quarrington’s got too much good red blood in his veins to live the life of a hermit. He’s a man, thank goodness, not a mystical dreamer like Hugh Vallincourt. And he’ll come back to his mate as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow.”
“I wish I felt as confident as you do.”
“I wish I could make sure of putting my hand on Magda when he comes,” grumbled Lady Arabella. “That’s the hitch I’m afraid of! If only she hadn’t been so precipitate—only waited a bit for him to come back to her.”
“I don’t agree with you,” rapped out Gillian smartly. “Women are much too ready to do the patient Griselda stunt. I think”—with a vicious little nod of her brown head—“it would do Michael all the good in the world to come back and want Magda—want herbadly. And find he couldn’t get her! So there!”
Lady Arabella regarded her with astonishment, then broke into a delighted chuckle.
“Upon my word! If a tame dove had suddenly turned round and pecked at me, I couldn’t have been more surprised! I didn’t know you had so much of the leaven of malice and wickedness in you, Gillian!”
Gillian, a little flushed and feeling, in truth, rather surprised at herself for her sudden heat, smiled back at her.
“But I should have thought your opinion would have been very much the same as mine. I never expected you’d want Magda to sit down and twiddle her thumbs till Michael chose to come back to her.”
Lady Arabella sighed.
“I don’t. Not really. Only I want them to be happy,” she said a little sadly. “Love is such a rare thing—love like theirs. And it’s hard that Magda should lose the beauty and happiness of it all because of mistakes she made before she found herself, so to speak.”
Gillian nodded soberly. Lady Arabella had voiced precisely her own feeling in the matter. Itwashard! And yet it was only the fulfilment of the immutable law:Who breaks, pays.
Gillian’s thoughts tried to pierce the dim horizon. Perhaps all the pain and mistakes and misunderstandings of which this workaday world is so full are, after all, only a part of the beautiful tapestry which the patient Fingers of God are weaving—a dark and sombre warp, giving value to the gold and silver and jewelled threads of the weft which shall cross it. When the ultimate fabric is woven, and the tissue released from the loom, there will surely be no meaningless thread, sable or silver, in the consummated pattern.
A few weeks after Magda’s departure Gillian received a letter from Dan Storran, reminding her of her promise to let him see her and asking if she would lunch with him somewhere in town.
It was with somewhat mixed feelings that she met him again. He was much altered—so changed from the hot-headed, primitive countryman she had first known. Some chance remark of hers enlightened him as to her confused sense of the difference in him, and he smiled across at her.
“I’ve been through the mill, you see,” he explained quietly, “since the Stockleigh days.”
The words seemed almost like a key unlocking the door that stands fast shut between one soul and another. He talked to her quite simply and frankly after that, telling her how, after he had left England, the madness in his blood had driven him whither it listed. There had been no depths to which he had not sunk, no wild living from which he had recoiled.
And then had come the news of June’s death. Not tenderly conveyed, but charged to his account by her sister with a fierce bitterness that had suddenly torn the veil from his eyes. Followed days and nights of agonised remorse, and after that the slow, steady, infinitely difficult climb back from the depths into which he had allowed himself to sink to a plane of life where, had June still lived, he would not have been ashamed to meet her eyes nor utterly unworthy to take her hand.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he ended. “But she would have wished it. I can never tell her now how I regret, never ask her forgiveness. And this was the only thing I could do to atone.”
Gillian’s eyes were very soft as she answered:
“I expect she knows, Dan, and is glad.”
After a moment she went on thoughtfully.
“It’s rather the same kind of feeling that has driven Magda into a sisterhood, I think—the desire to do something definite, something tangible, as a sort of reparation. And a woman is much more limited that way than a man.”
Storran’s mouth hardened. Any mention of Magda would bring that look of concentrated hardness into his face, and as the months went on, giving Gillian a closer insight into the man, she began to realise that he had never forgiven Magda for her share in the ruin of his life. On this point he was as hard as nether millstone. He even seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from the knowledge that she was paying, and paying heavily, for all the harm she had wrought.
It troubled Gillian—this incalculable hardness in Dan’s nature towards one woman. She found him kindly and tolerant in his outlook on life—with the understanding tolerance of the man who has dragged himself out of the pit by his own sheer force of will, and who, knowing the power of temptation, is ready to give a helping hand to others who may have fallen by the way. So that his relentlessness towards Magda was the more inexplicable.
More than once she tried to soften his attitude, tried to make him realise something of the conflicting influences both of temperament and environment which had helped to make Magda what she was. But he remained stubbornly unmoved.
“No punishment is too severe for a woman who has done what Magda Vallincourt has done. She has wrecked lives simply in order to gratify her vanity and insensate instinct for conquest.”
Gillian shook her head.
“No, you’re wrong. Youwon’tunderstand! It’s all that went before—her parents’ mistakes—that should be blamed for half she’s done. I think you’re very merciless, Dan.”
“Perhaps I am—in this case. Frankly, if I could lessen her punishment by lifting my little finger—I wouldn’t do it.”
Yet this same man when, as often happened, he took Gillian and Coppertop for a run into the country in his car, was as simple and considerate and kindly as a man could be. Coppertop adored him, and, as Gillian reflected, the love of children is rarely misplaced. Some instinct leads them to divine unfailingly which is gold and which dross.
The car was a recent acquisition. As Storran himself expressed it, rather bitterly: “Now that I can’t buy a ha’p’orth of happiness with the money, my luck has turned.” He explained to Gillian that after he had left England he had sold his farm in Devonshire, and that a lucky investment of the capital thus realised had turned him into a comparatively rich man.
“Even when I was making ducks and drakes of my life generally, I didn’t seem to make a mistake over money matters. If I played cards, I won; if I backed a horse, he romped in first; it I bought shares, they jumped up immediately.”
“What a pity!” replied Gillian ingenuously. “If only your financial affairs hadn’t prospered, you’d have had to settle down andwork—instead of—of——”
“Playing the fool,” he supplemented. “No, I don’t suppose I should. I hadn’t learned—then—that work is the only panacea, the one big remedy.”
“And now?”
“I’ve learned a lot of things in the last two years,” quietly. “And I’m still learning.”
As the months went on, Dan’s friendship began to mean a good deal to Gillian. It had come into her life just at a time when she was intolerably lonely, and quite unconsciously she was learning to turn to him for advice on all the large and small affairs of daily life as they came cropping up.
She was infinitely glad of his counsel with regard to Coppertop, who was growing to the age when the want of a father—of a man’s broad outlook and a man’s restraining hand—became an acute lack in a boy’s life. And to Gillian, who had gallantly faced the world alone since the day when death had abruptly ended her “year of utter happiness,” it was inexpressibly sweet to be once more shielded and helped in all the big and little ways in which a man—even if he was only a staunch man-friend—can shield and help a woman.
It seemed as though Dan Storran always contrived to interpose his big person betwixt her and the sharp corners of life, and she began to wonder, with a faint, indefinable dread, what must become of their friendship when Magda returned to Friars’ Holm. Feeling as he did towards the dancer, it would be impossible for him to come there any more, and somehow a snatched hour here and there—a lunch together, or a motor-spin into the country—would be a very poor substitute for his almost daily visits to the old Queen Anne house tucked away behind its high walls at Hampstead.
Once she broached the subject to him rather diffidently.
“My dear”—he had somehow dropped into the use of the little term of endearment, and Gillian found that she liked it and knew that she would miss it if it were suddenly erased from his speech—“my dear, why cross bridges till we come to them? Perhaps, when the time comes, there’ll be no bridge to cross.”
Gillian glanced at him swiftly.
“Do you mean that she—that you’re feeling less bitter towards her, Dan?” she asked eagerly.
He smiled down at her whimsically.
“I don’t quite know. But I know one thing—it’s very difficult to be a lot with you and keep one’s anger strictly up to concert pitch.”
Gillian made no answer. She was too wise—with that intuitive wisdom of woman—to force the pace. If Dan were beginning to relent ever so little towards Magda—why, then, her two best friends might yet come together in comradeship and learn to forget the bitter past. The gentle hand of Time would be laid on old wounds and its touch would surely bring healing. But Gillian would no more have thought of trying to hasten matters than she would have tried to force open the close-curled petals of a flower in bud.