The Lamp of Fate Part 14

Then, while she lay back restfully in a chair which he heaped with cushions for her, he played to her, improvising as he played--slow, dreaming melodies that soothed and lulled but held always an undertone of pa.s.sionate appeal. The man himself spoke in his music; his love pleaded with her in its soft, beseeching cadences.

But Magda failed to hear it. Her thoughts were elsewhere--back with the man who, that afternoon, had first rescued her and afterwards treated her with blunt candour that had been little less than brutal. She felt sore and resentful--smarting under the same dismayed sense of surprise and injustice as a child may feel who receives a blow instead of an antic.i.p.ated caress.

Indulged and flattered by everyone with whom she came in contact, it had been like a slap in the face to find someone--more particularly someone of the masculine persuasion--who, far from bestowing the admiration and homage she had learned to look for as a right, quite openly regarded her with contemptuous disapproval--and made no bones about telling her so.

His indictment of her had left nothing to the imagination. She felt stunned, and, for the first time in her life, a little unwilling doubt of herself a.s.saulted her. Was she really anything at all like the woman Michael Quarrington had pictured? A woman without heart or conscience--the "kind of woman he had no place for"?

She winced a little at the thought. It was strange how much she minded his opinion--the opinion of a man whom she had only met by chance and whom she was very unlikely ever to meet again. He himself had certainly evinced no anxiety to renew the acquaintance. And this, too, fretted her in some unaccountable way.

She could not a.n.a.lyse her own emotions. She felt hurt and angry and ashamed in the same breath--and all because an unknown man, an absolute stranger, had told her in no measured terms exactly what he thought of her!

Only--he was not really quite a stranger! He was the "Saint Michel" of her childhood days, the man with whom she had unconsciously compared those other men whom the pa.s.sing years had brought into her life--and always to their disadvantage.

The first time she had seen him in the woods at Coverdale was the day when Hugh Vallincourt had beaten her; she had been smarting with the physical pain and humiliation of it. And now, this second time they had met, she had been once more forced to endure that strange and unaccustomed experience called pain. Only this time she felt as though her soul had been beaten, and it was Saint Michel himself who had scourged her.

The door at the far end of the room opened suddenly and a welcome voice broke cheerfully across the bitter current of her thoughts.

"Well, here I am at last! Has Magda arrived home yet?"

Davilof ceased playing abruptly and the speaker paused on the threshold of the room, peering into the dusk. Magda rose from her seat by the fire and switched on one of the electric burners.

"Yes, here I am," she said. "Did you get held up by the fog, Gillian?"

The newcomer advanced into the circle of light. She was a small, slight woman, though the furs she was wearing served to conceal the slenderness of her figure. Someone had once said of her that "Mrs. Grey was a charming study in sepia." The description was not inapt. Eyes and hair were brown as a beechnut, and a scattering of golden-brown freckles emphasised the warm tints of a skin as soft as velvet.

"Did I get held up?" she repeated. "My dear, I walked miles--miles, I tell you!--in that hideous fog. And then found I'd been walking entirely in the wrong direction! I fetched up somewhere down Notting Hill Gate way, and at last by the help of heaven and a policeman discovered the Tube station. So here I am. But if I could have come across a taxi I'd have been ready to _buy_ it, I was so tired!"

"Poor dear!" Magda was duly sympathetic. "We'll have some tea. You'll stay, Davilof?"

"I think not, thanks. I'm dining out"--with a glance at his watch. "And I shan't have too much time to get home and change as it is."

Magda held out her hand.

"Good-bye, then. Thank you for keeping me company till Gillian came."

There was a sudden sweetness of grat.i.tude in the glance she threw at him which fired his blood. He caught her hand and carried it to his lips.

"The thanks are mine," he said in a stifled voice. And swinging round on his heel he left the room abruptly, quite omitting to make his farewells to Mrs. Grey.

The latter looked across at Magda with a gleam of mirth in her brown eyes. Then she shook her head reprovingly.

"Will you never learn wisdom, Magda?" she asked, subsiding into a chair and extending a pair of neatly shod feet to the fire's warmth.

Magda laughed a little.

"Well, it won't be the fault of my friends if I don't!" she returned ruefully. "Marraine expended a heap of eloquence over my misdeeds this afternoon."

"Lady Arabella? I'm glad to hear it. Though she has about as much chance of producing any permanent result as the gentleman who occupied his leisure time in rolling a stone uphill."

"Cat!" Magda made a small grimace at her. "Ah, here's some tea!"

Melrose, known among Magda's friends as "the perfect butler," had come noiselessly into the room and was arranging the tea paraphernalia with the reverential precision of one making preparation for some mystic rite. "Perhaps when you've had a cup you'll feel more amiable--that is, if I give you lots of sugar."

"What was the text of Lady Arabella's homily?" inquired Gillian presently, as she sipped her tea.

"Oh, that boy, Kit Raynham," replied Magda impatiently. "It appears I'm blighting his young prospects--his professional ones, I mean. Though I don't quite see why an attack of calf-love for me should wreck his work as an architect!"

"I do--if he spends his time sketching 'the Wielitzska' in half a dozen different poses instead of making plans for a garden city."

Magda smiled involuntarily.

"Does he do that?" she said. "But how ridiculous of him!"

"It's merely indicative of his state of mind," returned Gillian. She gazed meditatively into the fire. "You know, Magda, I think it will mean the end of our friendship when Coppertop reaches years of discretion."

Coppertop was Gillian's small son, a young person of seven, who owed his cognomen to the crop of flaming red curls which adorned his round b.u.t.ton of a head.

Magda laughed.

"Pouf! By the time that happens I shall be quite old--and harmless."

Gillian shook her head.

"Your type is never harmless, my dear. Unless you fall in love, you'll be an unexploded mine till the day of your death."

"That nearly occurred to-day, by the way," vouchsafed Magda tranquilly.

"In which case,"--smiling--"you'd have been spared any further anxiety on Coppertop's account."

"What do you mean?" demanded Gillian, startled.

"I mean that I've had an adventure this afternoon. We got smashed up in the fog."

"Oh, my dear! How dreadful! How did it happen?"

"Something collided with the car and shot us bang into a motor-bus, and then, almost at the same moment, something else charged into us from behind. So there was a pretty fair mix-up."

"Why didn't you tell me before! Was anyone badly hurt? And how did you get home?" Gillian's questions poured out excitedly.

"No, no one was badly hurt. I got a blow on the head, and fainted. So a man who'd been inside the bus we ran into performed the rescuing stunt.

His house was close by, and he carried me in there and proceeded to dose me with sal volatile first and tea afterwards. He wound up by presenting me with an unvarnished summary of his opinion of the likes of me."

There was an unwontedly hard note in Magda's voice as she detailed the afternoon's events, and Gillian glanced at her sharply.

"I don't understand. Was he a strait-laced prig who disapproved of dancing, do you mean?"

"Nothing of the sort. He had a most comprehensive appreciation of the art of dancing. His disapproval was entirely concentrated on me--personally."

"But how could it be--since he didn't know you?"