The Lamp of Fate Part 12

"But--you rather asked for it, you know, didn't you?"

"Yes," she admitted. "I think I did--ask for it." Suddenly she threw up her head and faced him. "If--if it's any satisfaction to you to know it, I think you've paid off at least some of your friend's score." She looked at him with a curious, almost piteous surprise. "You--you've hurt me!" she whispered pa.s.sionately. She turned to the door. "I'll go now."

"No!" He stopped her with a hand on her arm, and she obeyed his touch submissively. For a moment he stood looking down at her with an oddly conflicting expression on his face. It was as though he were arguing out some point with himself. All at once he seemed to come to a decision.

"Look, you can't go till the fog clears a bit. Suppose we call a truce?

Sit down here"--pulling forward a big easy-chair--"and for the rest of your visit let's behave as though we didn't heartily disapprove of one another."

Magda sank into the chair with that supple grace of limb which made it sheer delight to watch her movements.

"I never said I disapproved of you," she remarked.

He seated himself opposite her, on the other side of the hearth, and regarded her quizzically.

"No. But you do, all the same. Naturally, you would after my candour!

And I'd rather you did, too," he added abruptly. "But at least you've no more devoted admirer of your art. You know, dancing appeals to me in a way that nothing else does. My job's painting--"

"House-painting?" interpolated Magda with a smile. Her spirits were rising a little under his new kindliness of manner.

He laughed with sudden boyishness and nodded gaily.

"Why, yes--so long as people continue to cover their wall-s.p.a.ce with portraits of themselves."

Magda wondered whether he was possibly a well-known painter. But he gave her no chance to find out, for he continued speaking almost at once.

"I love my art--but a still, flat canvas, however beautifully painted, isn't comparable with the moving, living interpretation of beauty possible to a dancer. I remember, years ago--ten years, quite--seeing a kiddy dancing in a wood." Magda leaned forward. "It was the prettiest thing imaginable. She was all by herself, a little, thin, black-and-white wisp of a thing, with a small, tense face and eyes like black smudges. And she danced as though it were more natural to her than walking. I got her to pose for me at the foot of a tree. The picture of her was my first real success. So you see, I've good reason to be grateful to one dancer!"

Magda caught her breath. She knew now why the man's face had seemed so familiar! He was the artist she had met in the wood at Coverdale the day Sieur Hugh had beaten her--her _"Saint Michel"_! She was conscious of a queer little thrill of excitement as the truth dawned upon her.

"What was the picture called?" she asked, forcing herself to speak composedly.

"'The Repose of t.i.tania.'"

She nodded. The picture was a very well-known one. Everybody knew by whom it had been painted.

"Then you must be Michael Quarrington?"

"Yes. So now, we've been introduced, haven't we?"

It seemed almost as if he had repented of his former churlish manner, and were endeavouring to atone for it. He talked to her about his work a little, then slid easily into the allied topics of music and books.

Finally he took her into an adjoining room, and showed her a small, beloved collection of coloured prints which he had gathered together, recounting various amusing little incidents which had attended the acquisition of this or that one among them with much gusto and a certain quaint humour that she was beginning to recognise as characteristic.

Magda, to whom the study of old prints was by no means an unknown territory, was thoroughly entertained. She found herself enthusing, discussing, arguing points, in a happy spirit of _camaraderie_ with her host which, half an hour earlier, she would have believed impossible.

The end came abruptly. Quarrington chanced to glance out of the window where the street lamps were now glimmering serenely through a clear dusk. The fog had lifted.

"Perhaps it's just as well," he said shortly. "I was beginning--" He checked himself and glanced at her with a sudden stormy light in his eyes.

"Beginning--what?" she asked a little breathlessly. The atmosphere had all at once grown tense with some unlooked-for stress of emotion.

"Shall I tell you?"

"Yes--tell me!"

"I was beginning to forget that you're the 'type of woman I hate,'" he said. And strode out of the room, leaving her startled and unaccountably shaken.

When he came back he had completely rea.s.sumed his former non-committal manner.

"There's a taxi waiting for you," he announced. "It's perfectly clear outside now, so I think you will be spared any further adventures on your way home."

He accompanied her into the hall, and as they shook hands she murmured a little diffidently:

"Perhaps we shall meet again some time?"

He drew back sharply.

"No, we shan't meet again." There was something purposeful, almost vehemently so, in the curtly spoken words. "If I had thought that----"

"Yes?" she prompted. "If you had?"

"If I'd thought that," he said quietly, "I shouldn't have dared to risk this last half-hour."

A momentary silence fell between them. Then, with a shrug, he added lightly:

"But we shan't meet again. I'm leaving England next week. That settles it."

Without giving her time to make any rejoinder he opened the street-door and stood aside for her to pa.s.s out. A minute later she was in the taxi, and he was standing bare-headed on the pavement beside it.

"Good-bye," she said. "Good-bye--_Saint Michel_."

His hand closed round hers in a grip that almost crushed the slender fingers.

"_You_!" he cried hoa.r.s.ely. There was a note of sudden, desperate recognition in his voice. "_You_!"

As Magda smiled into his startled eyes--the grey eyes that had burned their way into her memory ten years ago--the taxi slid away into the lamp-lit dusk.

CHAPTER III

FRIARS' HOLM

With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came to a standstill at Friars' Holm, the quaint old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired in north London.

Once within the high wall enclosing the old-world garden in which it stood, it was easy enough to imagine oneself a hundred miles from town.

Fir and cedar sentinelled the house, and in the centre of the garden there was a lawn of wonderful old turf, hedged round in summer by a riot of roses so that it gleamed like a great square emerald set in a jewelled frame.

Magda entered the house and, crossing the cheerfully lit hall, threw open the door of a room whence issued the sound of someone--obviously a first-rate musician--playing the piano.