The Lamp of Fate Part 37

It was quite a moment before Magda made any answer. When she did, it was to say with a bitter kind of wonder in her voice:

"What centuries ago it seems since the first night of _The Swan-Maiden_!"

"It's not very long," began Gillian, then checked herself and asked quickly: "Is there anything the matter, Magda? Did Antoine bring you bad news of some kind?"

"He brought me the offering of his hand and heart. That's no news, is it?"

The opening was too good to be lost. With the remembrance of June's wistful face before her eyes, Gillian plunged in recklessly.

"Apropos of such offerings--don't you think it would be wiser if you weren't quite so nice to Dan Storran?"

"Am I nice to him?"

"Too much so for my peace of mind--or his! It worries me, Magda--really.

You'll play with fire once too often."

"My dear Gillian, I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself. Do you imagine"--with a small, fine smile--"that I'm in danger of losing my heart to a son of the soil?"

Gillian could have shaken her.

"_You?_ You don't suppose I'm afraid for you! It's Dan Storran who isn't able to look after himself." She stooped over Magda's chair and slipped an arm persuasively round her shoulders. "Come away, Magda. Let's leave Stockleigh--go home to London."

"Certainly not." Magda stood up suddenly. "I'm quite well amused down here. I don't propose to leave till our time is up."

She spoke with unmistakable decision, and Gillian, feeling that it would be useless to urge her further at the moment, went slowly out of the room and upstairs. As she went she could hear Dan's footstep in the pa.s.sage below. It sounded tired--quite unlike his usual swinging stride with its suggestion of impetuous force.

But it was not work that had tired Dan Storran that afternoon. When he had quitted the little party gathered beneath the elms, he had started off across the fields, unheeding where he went, and for hours he had been tramping, deaf and blind to the world around him, immersed in the thoughts that had driven him forth.

The full significance of the last few weeks had suddenly come home to him. Till now he had been drifting--drifting unthinkingly, conscious only that life had become extraordinarily full of interest and of a breathless kind of happiness, half sweet, half bitter. Bitter when Magda was not with him, sweet with a maddening sweetness when she was.

He had not stopped to consider what it all meant--why the dull, monotonous round of existence on the farm to which he had long grown accustomed should all at once have come alive--grown vibrant and quick with some new impulse.

But the happenings of to-day had suddenly shown him where he stood. That revealing moment by the river's edge with Magda, the swift, unreasoning jealousy of Davilof which had run like fire through his veins--jealousy because the other man was so evidently an old acquaintance with prior rights in her which seemed to set him, Dan Storran, quite outside the circle of their intimacy--had startled him into recognition of how far he had drifted.

He loved her--craved for her with every fibre of his being. She was his woman, and beside the tumultuous demand for her of all his l.u.s.ty manhood the quiet, unexacting affection which he bore his wife was as water is to wine.

And since in Dan's simple code of ethics a man's loyalty to his wife occupied a very definite and una.s.sailable position, the realisation came to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love which had come to him was a forbidden thing--a thing which must be fought and thrust outside his life. For the sake of June he must see no more of Magda. She must go--leave Stockleigh. Afterwards he would tear the very memory of her out of his heart.

Dan was a very direct person. Having taken his decision he did not stop to count the cost. That could come afterwards. Dimly he apprehended that it might be a very heavy one. But he was strong, now--strong to do the only possible thing. As he stood with his hand on the latch of the living-room door, he wondered whether what he had to say would mean to Magda all, or even a part, of what it meant to him--wondered with a sudden uncontrollable leaping of his pulses. . . . The latch grated raucously as he jerked it up and flung open the door. Magda was standing by the window, the soft glow of the westering sun falling about her.

Dan's eyes rested hungrily on the small dark head outlined against the tender light.

"Why--Dan----" She faltered into tremulous silence before the look on his face--the aching demand of it.

The huskily sweet voice robbed him of his strength. He strode forward and caught her in his arms, staring down at her with burning eyes. Then, almost violently, he thrust her away from him, unkissed, although the soft curved lips had for a moment lain so maddeningly near his own.

"When can you and Mrs. Grey make it convenient to leave Stockleigh Farm?" he asked, his voice like iron.

The crudeness of it whipped her pride--that pride which Michael had torn down and trampled on--into fresh, indignant life.

"To leave? Why should we leave?"

Storran's face was white under his tan.

"Because," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "because you're coming between me and my wife. That's why."

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOONLIT GARDEN

The chintzy bedroom under the sloping roof was very still and quiet.

The moonlight, streaming in through the open cas.e.m.e.nt, revealed the bed unoccupied, its top-sheet neatly folded back just as when June had made her final round of the house some hours earlier, leaving everything in order for the night.

Magda, crouched by the window, glanced back at it indifferently. She did not want to go to bed. If she went, she knew she would not sleep. She felt as though she would never sleep again.

She had no idea of the time. She might have been there half an hour or half eternity--she did not know which. The little sounds of movement in the different bedrooms had gradually died down into silence, until at least the profound tranquillity and peace of night enshrouded the whole house. Only for her there was neither tranquility nor peace.

She was alone now, face to face with the news which Davilof had brought her--the news of Michael's marriage. Throughout the rest of the day, after Davilof had gone, she had forced the matter into the background of her thoughts, and during supper she had kept up a light-hearted ripple of talk and laughter which had deceived even Gillian, convincing her that her apprehensions of the afternoon were unfounded.

Perhaps she was helped by the fact that Dan failed to put in an appearance at the supper-table. It was easier to scintillate successfully for the sole benefit of a couple of other women than under the eyes of a man who had just ordered you out of his life. But when at last she was alone in her own room, the sparkle was suddenly quenched.

There was no longer any need to pretend.

Michael was married! Married! And the bitterness which she had been strenuously keeping at bay since the day, months ago now, when she had learned from Lady Arabella that he had deliberately left England without seeing her again swept over her in a black flood.

It had hurt her badly enough when he had gone away, but somewhere in the depths of her consciousness there had always lurked a little fugitive hope that he would come back--that she would be given another chance.

Now she knew that he would never come back--that one isn't always given a second chance in this world.

And beneath the sick anguish of the realisation she was aware of a fierce resentment--a bitter, rebellious anger that any man could make her suffer as she was suffering now. It was unjust--a burden that had been forced upon her unfairly. She could not help her own character--that was a heritage with which one comes into the world--and now she was being punished for simply having been herself!

An hour--two hours crept by. Hours of black, stark misery. The clock in the hall struck one--a single, bell-like stroke that reverberated through the silent house. It penetrated the numbed confusion of her mind, rousing her to a sudden recognition of the fact that she had been crouched so long in one position that her limbs were stiff and aching.

She drew herself up to her feet, stretching her cramped muscles. The night was warm and the room felt stiflingly hot. She looked longingly through the window to where the garden lay drenched in moonlight, with cool-looking alleyways of moon-washed paths threading the black gloom of overhanging trees, ebony-edged in the silver light.

She felt as though she could hardly breathe in the confined s.p.a.ce of the room. Its low, sloping roof, which she had thought so quaintly attractive, seemed to press down on her like the lid of a box. She must get out--out into the black and silver night which beckoned to her through the open window. She could not stay in this room--this little room, alone with her thoughts.

She glanced down dubiously at the soft, chiffony negligee which she had slipped on in place of a frock. Her feet, too, were bare. She had stripped off her shoes and stockings first thing upon coming upstairs, for the sake of coolness. Certainly her attire was not quite suitable for out-of-doors. . . . But there would be no one to see her. Ashencombe folk did not take their walks abroad at that hour of the night. And she longed to feel the cool touch of the dewy gra.s.s against her feet.

Very quietly she opened her door and stole out into the pa.s.sage.

The house was strangely, wonderfully still. Only the ticking of the hall-clock broke the silence. So lightly that not a board creaked beneath her step, Magda flitted down the old stairway, and, crossing the hall, felt gingerly for the ma.s.sive bolt which barred the heavy oaken door. She wondered if it would slide back quietly; she rather doubted it. She remembered often enough having heard it grate into its place as Storran went his nightly round, locking up the house. But, as her slender, seeking fingers came in contact with the k.n.o.b, she realised that to-night by some oversight he had forgotten to shoot the bolt and, noiselessly lifting the iron latch, she opened the door and slipped out into the moonlit garden. Down the paths she went and across the lawns, the touch of the earth coming clean and cool to her bare feet. Now and again she paused to draw a long breath of the night air, fresh and sweet with the lingering scents of the day's blooming.

An arch of rambler roses led into the distant part of the garden towards which she was wending her way, its powdering of tiny blossoms gleaming like star cl.u.s.ters borrowed from the Milky Way. Magda stooped as she pa.s.sed beneath it to avoid an overhanging branch. Then, as she straightened herself, lifting her head once more, she stood still, suddenly arrested. On a stone bench, barely twenty yards away, sat Dan Storran!

Against the pallid ghost-white of the bench his motionless figure showed black and sombre like some sable statue. His big shoulders were bowed, his hands hung loosely clasped between his knees, the white mask of his face, mercilessly revealed in the clear moonlight, was twisted into harsh lines of mental conflict. A certain grim triumph manifested itself in the set of his mouth and out-thrust jaw.

He did not see the slight figure standing just within the shade of the rose-twined arch, and Magda remained for a moment or two watching him in silence. The unbarred door was explained now. Storran had not come in at all that night. She guessed the struggle which had sent him forth to seek the utter solitude of the garden. Almost she thought she could divine the processes of thought which had closed his lips in that strange line of ironic triumph. He had told her to go--when every nerve of him ached to bid her stay. And he was glad that the strength in him had won.

A bitter smile flitted across her face. Men were all the same! They idolised a woman just because she was beautiful--for her lips and eyes and hair and the nameless charm that was in her--and set her up on an altar at which they could kneel becomingly. Then, when they found she was merely an ordinary human being like themselves, with her bundle of faults and failings, hereditary and acquired, the prig in them was appropriately shocked--and they went away!