The Lamp of Fate Part 3

She heard him with a curious absence of surprise. Somehow, from the instant she had seen his dismantled room she had known, known surely, that the long fight between herself and Catherine was over. And that Catherine had won.

"At an end? Hugh, what do you mean? What are you going to do? You're not, you're not going to send me away?"

"No, not that. I've no right to punish you. You've been guilty of no fault--"

"Except the fault of being myself," she flung back bitterly.

"But I ought never to have married you. I did it, knowing you were not fit--suitable"--he corrected himself hastily. "So I alone am to blame.

You will retain your position here as my wife--mistress of my home."

Diane, remembering Catherine's despotic rule, smiled mirthlessly. "But henceforth you will be my wife in name only. I shall have no wife."

Diane caught that note of dull endurance in his voice, and seized upon it. He still cared!

"Hugh, you've listened to Catherine till you've lost all sense of truth." She spoke gently, pleadingly. "Don't do this thing. We've been guilty of no sin that needs atonement. It isn't wrong to love."

But he was implacable.

"No," he returned. "It isn't wrong to love--but sometimes love should be denied."

Diane drew nearer to him, and laid her hand on his arm.

"Not ours, Hugh," she whispered. "Not love like ours--"

"Be silent!"

Hugh sprang to his feet, his eyes ablaze, his voice hoa.r.s.e and shaking.

"Don't tempt me! Do you think I've found it easy to decide on this? When every fibre of my body is calling out for you? My G.o.d, no!"

"Then don't do it! Hugh--dearest--"

With sudden violence he caught her by the arms.

"Be silent, I tell you! Don't tempt me! I'll make my penance, accept the burden laid on me--that my first-born should be a girl!"

Diane clung to him, resisting his attempt to thrust her from him.

"Hugh! Ah, wait! Listen to me! . . . Dear, some day there may be a little son, yours and mine--"

He flung her from him violently.

"There shall never be a son of ours! Never! It is the Will of G.o.d."

With an immense effort he checked the rising frenzy within him--the ecstasy of the martyr embracing the stake to which he shall be bound. He moved across to the door and held it open for her.

"And now, will you please go? That is my last word on the matter."

Diane turned hesitatingly towards the doorway, then paused.

"Hugh----"

There was an infinite appeal in her voice. Her eyes were those of a frightened, bewildered child.

"Go, please," he repeated mechanically.

A convulsive sob tore its way through her throat. She stepped blindly forward. The next moment the door closed inexorably between husband and wife.

CHAPTER III

SAINT-MICHAEL AND THE WONDER-CHILD

Day by day her husband's complete estrangement from her was rendered additionally bitter to Diane by Catherine's complacent air of triumph.

The latter knew that she had won, severed the tie which bound her brother to "the foreign dancing-woman," and she did not scruple to let Diane see that she openly rejoiced in the fact.

At first Diane imagined that Catherine might rest content with what she had accomplished, but the grim, hard-featured woman still continued to exhibit the same self-righteous disapproval towards her brother's wife as. .h.i.therto.

Diane endured it in resentful silence for a time, but one day, stung by some more than usually acid speech of Catherine's, she turned on her, demanding pa.s.sionately why she seemed to hate her even more since the birth of the child.

"I nearly gave my life for her," she protested with fierce simplicity.

"I could do no more! Is it because _le bon dieu_ has sent me a little daughter instead of a little son that you hate me so much?"

And Catherine had answered her in a voice of quiet, concentrated animosity:

"If you had died then--_died childless_--I should have thanked G.o.d day and night."

Diane, isolated and unhappy, turned to her baby for consolation. It was all that was left to her out of the wreck of her life, and the very fact that both Hugh and Catherine seemed to regard the little daughter with abhorrence only served to strengthen the pa.s.sionate worship which she herself lavished upon her.

The child--they had called her Magda--was an odd little creature, as might have been expected from the violently opposing characteristics of her parents.

She was slenderly made--built on the same lithe lines as her mother--and almost as soon as she was able to walk she manifested an amazing balance and suppleness of limb. By the time she was four years old she was trying to imitate, with uncertain little feet and dimpled, aimlessly waving arms, the movements of her mother, when to amuse the child, she would sometimes dance for her.

However big a tragedy had occurred in Magda's small world--whether it were a crack across the insipid china face of a favourite doll or the death of an adored Persian kitten--there was still balm in Gilead if _"pet.i.te maman"_ would but dance for her. The tears shining in big drops on her cheeks, her small chest still heaving with the sobs that were a pa.s.sionate protest against unkind fate, Magda would sit on the floor entranced, watching with adoring eyes every swift, graceful motion of the dancer, and murmuring in the quaint shibboleth of French and English she had imbibed from old Virginie.

On one of these occasions Hugh came upon the two unexpectedly and brought the performance to a summary conclusion.

"That will do, Diane," he said icily. "I should have thought you would have had more self-respect than to dance--in that fashion--in front of a child."

"It is, then, a sin to dance--as it is to be married?" demanded Diane bitterly, abruptly checked in an exquisite spring-flower dance of her own invention.

"I forbid it; that is sufficient," replied Hugh sternly.

His a.s.sumption of arrogant superiority was unbearable. Diane's self-control wavered under it and broke. She turned and upbraided him despairingly, alternately pleading and reproaching, battering all her slender forces uselessly against his inflexible determination.

"This is a waste of time, Diane--mine, anyway," he told her. And left her shaken with grief and anger.

Driven by a sense of utter revolt, she stormed her way to Catherine, who was composedly sorting sheets in the linen room.