The Lamp of Fate Part 36

"Not if you like it," he replied shortly.

"Well, I do. So sit down and be pleased--instead of looking like a thundercloud, please." The softness in her voice robbed the speech of its sharpness. "I have a friend here--and we're having tea outside in his honour."

She introduced the two men, who exchanged a few commonplace words--each, meanwhile, taking the measure of the other through eyes that were frankly hostile. They were of such dissimilar type that there was practically no common ground upon which they could meet, and with the swift, unerring intuition of the lover each had recognised the other as standing in some relationship to Magda which premised a just cause for jealousy. Both men endeavoured to secure her undivided attention and, failing lamentably, their mutual antagonism deepened, smouldering visibly beneath the stiff plat.i.tudes they exchanged with one another.

Gillian, thrust rather into the position of an onlooker, watched the proceedings with amused eyes--her amus.e.m.e.nt only tempered by the slightly apprehensive feeling concerning Magda of which she had been vaguely conscious from the first moment she had found her in Davilof's company, and which continued to obsess her.

True, she no longer wore that set, still look which Gillian had observed on her face prior to Dan Storran's appearance upon the scene. But even when she smiled and talked, playing the men off one against the other with a deft skill that was inimitable, there seemed a curious new hardness underlying it all--a certain reckless deviltry for which Gillian was at a loss to account.

June watched, too, with troubled eyes. Half an hour ago she had been feeling ridiculously happy, comfortably a.s.sured in her own mind that this tall, rather exquisite foreigner and the woman whose presence in her home had occasioned so much bitter heart-burning were only hesitating, as it were, on the brink of matrimony. And now--now she did not know what to think! Miss Vallincourt was treating Davilof with an airy negligence that to June's honest and candid soul seemed altogether incompatible with such circ.u.mstances.

Meanwhile, with her own ears attuned to catch each varying shade of Dan's beloved voice, she could not but perceive its change of quality, slight, but unmistakable, when he spoke to Magda--the sudden deepening of it--and the unconscious self-betrayal of his glance as it rested on her. It was a relief when at last he got up and moved off, excusing himself on the plea that he had some work he must attend to. As he shook hands with Davilof the eyes of the two men met, hard as steel and as hostile.

Storran's departure was the signal for the breaking-up of the party.

June returned to the house, while Gillian allowed herself to be carried off by Coppertop to visit the calves, which were a never-failing source of interest to him.

Left alone, an awkward pause ensued between Davilof and Magda, backwash of the obvious clash of antagonism between the two men.

"So!" commented Davilof, at last. "It looks as though there might be another Raynham episode down here before long."

The colour rushed up into Magda's face.

"Don't you think that remark is in rather bad taste?" she replied icily.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Perhaps it was. But the men who love you get rather beyond considering the matter of good or bad taste."

She made a petulant gesture.

"Oh, don't begin that old subject again. We've had it all out before.

It's finished."

"It's not finished."

There was a clipped, curt force about the brief denial. The good-humoured, big-child mood in which Davilof had joyously narrated to her how he had circ.u.mvented the unfortunate Melrose had pa.s.sed, leaving the man--turbulent and pa.s.sionately demanding as of old.

"It's not finished," he repeated. "It never will be--till you're my wife."

Magda laughed lightly.

"Then I'm afraid it will have to remain unfinished--a continued-in-our-next kind of thing. For I certainly haven't the least intention of becoming your wife. Do understand that I _mean_ it. And please go away. You had no business to come down here at all."

A smouldering fire lit itself in his eyes.

"No!" he said, taking a step nearer her. "No! I'm not going. I came because I can't bear it any longer without you. Since you went away I've been half-mad, I think. I can't eat or sleep! I can't even play!"--he flung out his sensitive musician's hands in a gesture of despair.

Magda glanced at him quickly. It was true. The man looked as though he had been suffering. She had not noticed it before. His face had altered--worn a trifle fine; the line from chin to cheek-bone had hollowed somewhat and his eyes held a certain feverish brightness. But although she could see the alteration, it did not move her in the least.

She felt perfectly indifferent. It was as though the band of ice which seemed to have clasped itself about her heart when she heard of Michael's marriage had frozen her capacity for feeling anything at all.

"I thought once"--Davilof was speaking again--"I thought once that you had said 'no' to me because of Quarrington. But now I know you never cared for him----"

"How do you know?"

The question sprang from her lips before she was aware.

"How do I know?" Davilof laughed harshly. "Why, because the man who was loved by Magda Wielitzska wouldn't marry any other woman. There would be no other woman in the world for him. . . . There's no other woman in the world for me." His control was rapidly deserting him. "Magda, I can't live without you! I've told you--I can neither eat nor sleep. I burn for you! If you refuse to give yourself to me, you destroy me!"

Swept by an emotion stronger than himself, his acquired Englishisms went by the board. He was all Pole in the picturesque ardour of his speech.

Magda regarded him calmly.

"My dear Davilof," she said quietly. "What weight do you suppose such an argument would have with me?"

The cool, ironic little question, with its insolent indifference, checked him like the flick of a lash across the face. He turned away.

"None, I suppose," he admitted bitterly. "You are fire and flame--but within, you are ice."

"Yes," she said, almost as though to herself. "Within, I'm ice. I believe that's true."

"True!" he repeated. "Of course it's true. If it were not----"

A slight smile tilted her mouth.

"Well?" she echoed. "If it were not?"

He swung round. With a quick stride he was beside her. His eyes blazing with a sudden fury of pa.s.sion and resentment, he caught her by the shoulders, forcing her to face him.

"G.o.d!" he muttered thickly. "What are you made of? You make men go through h.e.l.l for you! Even here--here in this little country place--you do it! Storran's wife--one can see her heart breaks, and it is you who are breaking it. Yet nothing touches you! You've no conscience like other women--no heart--"

Magda pulled herself out of his grasp.

"Oh, do forget that I'm a woman, Davilof! I'm a dancer. Nothing else matters. I don't want to be troubled with a heart. And--and I think they left out my soul."

"Yes," he agreed with intense bitterness. "I think they did. One day, Magda some man will kill you. You'll try him too far."

"Indeed? Is that what you contemplate doing when you finally lose patience with me?"

He shook his head.

"I shall not lose patience--until you are another man's wife," he said quietly. "And I don't intend you to be that."

An hour later, Gillian, having dispatched her small son to bed and seen him safely tucked up between the lavender-scented sheets, discovered Magda alone in the low-raftered sitting-room. She was lying back idly in a chair, her hands resting on the arms, in her eyes a curious abstracted look as though she were communing with herself.

Apparently she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice Gillian's entrance, for she did not speak.

"What are you thinking about? Planning a new dance that shall out-vie _The Swan-Maiden_?" asked Gillian at last, for the sake of something to say. The silence and Magda's strange aloofness frightened her in some way.