The Lamp of Fate by Margaret Pedler (page 6)

The fanatical Vallincourt blood which ran in Magda’s veins caused her to respond instinctively to this aspect of the matter. But the strain of her passionate, joy-loving mother which crossed with it tempered the tendency toward quite such drastic self-immolation as had appealed to Hugh Vallincourt.

To Magda, Michael had come to mean the beginning and end of everything –the pivot upon which her whole existence hung. So that if Michael shut her out of his life for ever, that existence would no longer hold either value or significance. From her point of view, then, the primary object of any kind of self-discipline would be that it might make her more fit to be the wife of “Saint Michel.”

He despised her now. The evil she had done stood between them like a high wall. But if she were to make atonement–as Suzette had atoned– surely, when the wickedness had been purged out of her by pain and discipline, Michael would relent!

The idea lodged in her mind. It went with her by day and coloured her thoughts by night, and it was still working within her like yeast when she at last nerved herself to go and see her godmother.

Lady Arabella, as might have been anticipated, concealed her own sore- heartedness under a manner that was rather more militant than usual, if that were possible.

“Why you hadn’t more sense than to spend your time fooling with a sort of cave-man from the backwoods, I can’t conceive,” she scolded. “You must have known how it would end.”

“I didn’t. I never thought about it. I was just sick with Michael because he had gone abroad, and then, when I heard that he was married, it was the last straw. I don’t think–that night–I should have much cared what happened.”

Lady Arabella nodded.

“Women like you make it heaven or hell for the men who love you.”

“And hell, without the choice of heaven, for ourselves,” returned Magda.

The bitterness in her voice wrung the old woman’s heart. She sighed, then straightened her back defiantly.

“We have to bear the burden of our blunders, my dear.”

There was a reminiscent look in the keen old eyes. Lady Arabella had had her own battles to fight. “And, after all, who should pay the price if not we ourselves?”

“But if the price is outrageous, Marraine? What then?”

“Still you’ve got to pay.”

Magda returned home with those words ringing in her ears. They fitted into the thoughts which had been obsessing her with a curious precision. It was true, then. You had to pay, one way or another. Lady Arabella knew it. Little Suzette had somehow found it out.

That night a note left Friars’ Holm addressed to the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence.

CHAPTER XXIV

GILLIAN INTERCEDES

It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced about her curiously–at the plain, straight-backed chairs, at the meticulously tidy desk and bare, polished floor. Everything was scrupulously clean, but the total absence of anything remotely resembling luxury struck poignantly on eyes accustomed to all the ease and beauty of surroundings which unlimited money can procure.

By contrast with the severity of the room Magda felt uncomfortably conscious of her own attire. The exquisite gown she was wearing, the big velvet hat with its drooping plume, the French shoes with their buckles and curved Louis heels–all seemed acutely out of place in this austere, formal-looking chamber.

Her glance came back to the woman sitting opposite her, the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence–tall, thin, undeniably impressive, with a stern, colourless face as clean-cut as a piece of ivory, out of which gleamed cold blue eyes that seemed to regard the dancer with a strange mixture of fervour and hostility.

Magda could imagine no reason for the antagonism which she sensed in the steady scrutiny of those light-blue eyes. As far as she was concerned, the Mother Superior was an entire stranger, without incentive either to like or dislike her.

But to the woman who, while she had been in the world, had been known as Catherine Vallincourt, the name of Magda Wielitzska was as familiar as her own. In the dark, slender girl before her, whose pale, beautiful face called to mind some rare and delicate flower, she recognised the living embodiment of her brother’s transgression–that brother who had made Diane Wielitzska his wife and the mother of his child.

All she had anticipated of evil consequence at the time of the marriage had crystallised into hard fact. The child of the “foreign dancing-woman”–the being for whose existence Hugh’s mad passion for Diane had been responsible–had on her own confession worked precisely such harm in the world as she, Catherine, had foreseen. And now, the years which had raised Catherine to the position of Mother Superior of the community she had entered had brought that child to her doors as a penitent waveringly willing to make expiation.

Catherine was conscious of a strange elevation of spirit. She felt ecstatically uplifted at the thought that it might be given to her to purge from Hugh’s daughter, by severity of discipline and penance, the evil born within her. In some measure she would thus be instrumental in neutralising her brother’s sin.

She was supremely conscious that to a certain extent–though by no means altogether–her zealous ardour had its origin in her rooted antipathy to Hugh’s wife and hence to the child of the marriage. But, since beneath her sable habit there beat the heart of just an ordinary, natural woman, with many faults and failings still unconquered in spite of the austerities of her chosen life, a certain very human element of satisfaction mingled itself with her fervour for Magda’s regeneration.

With a curious impassivity that masked the intensity of her desire she had told Magda that, by the rules of the community, penitents who desired to make expiation were admitted there, but that if once the step were taken, and the year’s vow of penitence voluntarily assumed, there could be no return to the world until the expiration of the time appointed.

Somehow the irrevocability of such a vow, undertaken voluntarily, had not struck her in its full significance until Catherine had quietly, almost tonelessly, in the flat, level voice not infrequently acquired by the religious, affirmed it.

“Supposing”–Magda looked round the rigidly bare room with a new sense of apprehension–“supposing I felt I simply couldn’t stand it any longer? Do you mean to say, /then/, that I should not be allowed to leave here?”

“No, you would not be permitted to. Vows are not toys to be broken at will.”

“A year is a long time,” murmured Magda.

The eyes beneath the coifed brow with its fine network of wrinkles were adamant.

“The body must be crucified that the soul may live,” returned the cold voice unflinchingly.

Magda’s thoughts drew her this way and that. A year! It was an eternity! And yet, if only she could emerge purified, a woman worthy to be Michael’s wife, she felt she would be willing to go through with it.

It was as though the white-faced, passionless woman beside her read her thoughts.

“If you would be purified,” said Catherine, “if you would cast out the devil that is within you, you will have to abide meekly by such penance as is ordained. You must submit yourself to pain.”

At the words a memory of long ago stirred in Magda’s mind. She remembered that when her father had beaten her as a child he had said: “If you hurt people enough you can stop them from committing sin.”

Groping dimly for some light that might elucidate the problems which bewildered her, Magda clutched at the words as though they were a revelation. They seemed to point to the only way by which she might repair the past.

Catherine, watching closely the changes on the pale, sensitive face, spoke again.

“Of course, if you feel you have not the strength of will to keep your vow, you must not take it.”

The words acted like a spur. Instantly, Magda’s decision was taken.

“If I take the vow, I shall have strength of mind to keep it,” she said.

The following evening Magda composedly informed Gillian that she proposed to take a vow of expiation and retire into the community of the Sisters of Penitence for a year. Gillian was frankly aghast; she had never dreamed of any such upshot to the whole miserable business of Magda’s broken engagement.

“But it is madness!” she protested. “You would hate it!”

Magda nodded.

“That’s just it. I’ve done what I liked all my life. And you know what the result has been! Now I propose to do what I /don’t/ like for a year.”

Neither persuasion nor exhortation availed to shake her resolution, and in despair Gillian referred the matter to Lady Arabella, hoping she might induce Magda to change her mind.

Lady Arabella accepted the news with unexpected composure.

“It is just what one might expect from the child of Hugh Vallincourt,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s the swing of the pendulum. There’s always been that tendency in the Vallincourts–the tendency towards atonement by some sort of violent self-immolation. They are invariably /excessive/–either excessively bad like the present man, Rupert, or excessively devout like Hugh and Catherine! By the way, the Sisters of Penitence is the community Catherine first joined. I wonder if she is there still? Probably she’s dead by now, though. I remember hearing some years ago that she was seriously ill–somewhere about the time of Hugh’s death. That’s the last I ever heard of her. I’ve been out of touch with the whole Vallincourt family for so many years now that I don’t know what has become of them.”

“You don’t mean to say that you’re going to /let/ Magda do what she proposes?” exclaimed Gillian, in dismayed astonishment.

“There’s never much question of ‘letting’ Magda do things, is there?” retorted Lady Arabella. “If she’s made up her mind to be penitential– penitential she’ll be! I dare say it won’t do her any harm.”

“I don’t see how it can do her any good,” protested Gillian. “Magda isn’t cut out for a sisterhood.”

“That’s just why it may be good for her.”

“I don’t believe in mortification of the flesh and all that sort of thing, either,” continued Gillian obstinately.

“My dear, we must all work out our own salvation–each in his own way. Prayer and fasting would never be my method. But for some people it’s the only way. I believe it is for the Vallincourts. In any case, it’s only for a year. And a year is very little time out of life.”

Nevertheless, at Gillian’s urgent request, Lady Arabella made an effort to dissuade Magda from her intention.

“If you live long enough, my dear,” she told her crispy, “providence will see to it that you get your deserts. You needn’t be so anxious to make sure of them. Retribution is a very sure-footed traveller.”

“It isn’t only retribution, punishment, I’m looking for,” returned Magda. “It is–I can’t quite explain it, Marraine, but even though Michael never sees me or speaks to me again, I’d like to feel I’d made myself into the sort of woman he /would/ speak to.”

From that standpoint she refused to move, declining even to discuss the matter further, but proceeded quietly and unswervingly with her arrangements. The failure to complete her contract at the Imperial Theatre involved her in a large sum of money by way of forfeit, but this she paid ungrudgingly, feeling as though it were the first step along the new road of renunciation she designed to tread.

To the manager she offered no further explanation than that she proposed to give up dancing, “at any rate for a year or so,” and although he was nearly distracted over the idea, he found his arguments and persuasions were no more effective than those King Canute optimistically addressed to the encroaching waves. The utmost concession he could extract from Magda was her assent to giving a farewell appearance–for which occasion the astute manager privately decided to quadruple the price of the seats. He only wished it were possible to quadruple the seating capacity of the theatre as well!

Meanwhile Gillian, whose normal, healthy young mind recoiled from the idea of Magda’s self-imposed year of discipline, had secretly resolved upon making a final desperate venture in the hope of straightening out the tangle of her friend’s life. She would go herself and see Michael and plead with him. Surely, if he loved Magda as he had once seemed to do, he would not remain obdurate when he realised how bitterly she had repented–and how much she loved him!

It was not easy for Gillian to come to this decision. She held very strong opinions on the subject of the rights of the individual to manage his own affairs without interference, and as she passed out of the busy main street into the quiet little old-world court where Michael had his rooms and studio she felt as guilty as a small boy caught trespassing in an orchard.

The landlady who opened the door in response to her somewhat timid ring regarded her with a curiously surprised expression when she inquired if Mr. Quarrington were in.

“I’ll see, miss,” she answered non-committally, “if you’ll step inside.”

The unusual appearance of the big double studio where she was left to wait puzzled Gillian. All the familiar tapestries and cushions and rare knick-knacks which wontedly converted the further end of it into a charming reception room were gone. The chairs were covered in plain holland, the piano sheeted. But the big easel, standing like a tall cross in the cold north light, was swathed in a dust-sheet. Gillian’s heart misgave her. Was she too late? Had Michael–gone away?

A moment later a quick, resolute footstep reassured her. The door opened and Michael himself came in. He paused on the threshold as he perceived who his visitor was, then came forward and shook hands with his usual grave courtesy. After that, he seemed to wait as though for some explanation of her visit.

Gillian found herself nervously unready. All the little opening speeches she had prepared for the interview deserted her suddenly, driven away by her shocked realisation of the transformation which the few days since she had last seen him had wrought in the man beside her.

His face was lined and worn. The grey eyes were sunken and burned with a strange, bitter brilliance. Only the dogged, out-thrust jaw remained the same as ever–obstinate and unconquerable. Twice she essayed to speak and twice failed. The third time the words came stumblingly.

“Michael, what–what does it mean–all this?” She indicated the holland-sheeted studio with a gesture.

“It means that I’m going away,” he replied. “I’m packing now. I leave England to-morrow.”

“You mustn’t go!”

The words broke from her imperatively, like a mandate.

He glanced at her quickly and into his eyes came a look of comprehension.

“You’re a good friend,” he said quietly. “But I must go.”

“No, no, you mustn’t! Listen–“

“Nothing can alter my decision,” he interrupted in a tone of absolute finality. “Nothing you could say, Gillian–so don’t say it.”

“But I must!” she insisted. “Oh, Michael, I’m not going to pretend that Magda hasn’t been to blame–that it isn’t all terrible! But if you saw her–now–you’d /have/ to forgive her and love her again.” She spoke with a simple sincerity that was infinitely appealing.

“I’ve never ceased to love her,” he replied, still in that quiet voice of repressed determination.

“Then if you love, her, can’t you forgive her? She’s had everything against her from the beginning, both temperament and upbringing, and on top of that there’s been the wild success she’s had as a dancer. You can’t judge her by ordinary standards of conduct. You /can’t/! It isn’t fair.”

“I don’t presume to judge her”–icily. “I simply say I can’t marry her.”

“If you could see her now, Michael—-” Her voice shook a little. “It hurts me to see Magda–like that. She’s broken—-“

“And my sister, June, is dead,” he said in level, unemotional tones.

Gillian wrung her hands.

“But even so—-! Magda didn’t kill her, Michael. She couldn’t tell– she didn’t know that June—-” She halted, faltering into silence.

“That June was soon to have a child?” Michael finished her sentence for her. “No. But she knew she loved her husband. And she stole him from her. When I think of it all, of June . . . little June! . . . And Storran–gone under! Oh, what’s the use of talking?”–savagely. “You know–and I know–that there’s nothing left. Nothing!”

“If you loved her, Michael–“

“If I loved her!” he broke out stormily. “You’re not a man, and you don’t know what it means to want the woman you love night and day, to ache for her with every fibre of your body–and to know that you can’t have her and keep your self-respect!”

“Oh–self-respect!” There was a note of contempt in Gillian’s voice. “If you set your ‘self-respect’ above your love–“

“You don’t understand!” he interrupted violently. “You’re a woman and you can’t understand! I must honour the woman I love–it’s the kernel of the whole thing. I must look up to her–not down!”

Gillian clasped her hands.

“Oh!” she said in a low, vehement voice. “I don’t think we women /want/ to be ‘looked up to.’ It sets us so far away. We’re not goddesses. We’re only women, Michael, with all our little weaknesses just the same as men. And we want the men who love us to be comrades– not worshippers. Good pals, who’ll forgive us and help us up when we tumble down, just as we’d be ready to forgive them and help them up. Can’t you–can’t you do that for Magda?”

“No,” he said shortly. “I can’t.”

Gillian was at the end of her resources. She would not tell him that Magda proposed joining the Sisters of Penitence for a year. Somehow she felt she would not wish him to know this or to be influenced by it.

She had made her appeal to Michael himself, to his sheer love for the woman he had intended to make his wife. And she had failed because the man was too bitter, too sore, to see clearly through the pain that blinded him.

His voice, curt and clipped, broke the silence which had fallen.

“Have you said all you came to say?” he asked with frigid politeness.

“All,” she returned sadly.

He moved slowly towards the door.

“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand.

He took it and held it in his. For a moment the hard eyes softened a little.

“I’m sorry I can’t do what you ask,” he said abruptly.

Gillian opened her lips to speak, but no words came. Instead, a sudden lump rose in her throat, choking her into silence, at the sight of the man’s wrung face, with its bitter, pain-ridden eyes and the jaw that was squared implacably against love and forgiveness, and against his own overwhelming desire.

CHAPTER XXV

“CHILDREN STUMBLING IN THE DARK”

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’t /happiness/.”

“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.

CHAPTER XXVI

FAREWELL

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 the /Swan- 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 you /try/ to 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.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE GREY VEIL

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.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THOSE THAT WERE LEFT BEHIND

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.

In /my/ young 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 her /badly/. 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. It /was/ hard! 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. You /won’t/ understand! 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 and /work/– 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.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE RETURN

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 the /bebe/ she 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.

CHAPTER XXX

AN UNANSWERED LETTER

“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 never /undo/ the 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.”

“/You/ did, 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 that /nothing 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/!”

“I /am/ sure. 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–and /tried/ to–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.