The Lamp of Fate Part 4

"I will not bear it!" she burst out at her furiously. "What have I done that I should be treated as an outcast--a pariah?"

Catherine regarded the tense, quivering little figure with chill dislike.

"You married my brother," she replied imperturbably.

"And you have separated us! But for you, we should be happy together--he and baby and I! But you have spoilt it all. I suppose"--a hint of the Latin Quarter element in her a.s.serting itself--"I suppose you think no one good enough to marry into your precious family!"

Catherine paused on her way to the cupboard, a pile of fine linen pillowslips in her hands.

"Yes," she said quietly. "It is I who have separated you--spoilt your happiness, if you like. And I am glad of it. I can't expect anyone like you to understand"--there was the familiar flavour of disparagement in her tones--"but I am thankful that my brother has seen the wickedness of his marriage with you, that he has repented of it, and that he is making the only atonement possible!"

She turned and composedly laid the pile of pillowslips in their appointed place on the shelf. A faint fragrance of dried lavender drifted out from the dark depths of the cupboard. Diane always afterwards a.s.sociated the smell of lavender with her memories of Catherine Vallincourt, and the sweet, clean scent of it was spoiled for her henceforward.

"I hate you!" she exclaimed in a low voice of helpless rage. "I hate you--and I wish to G.o.d Hugh had never had a sister!"

"Well"--composedly--"he will not have one much longer."

Diane stared.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that as far as our life together is concerned, it is very nearly over."

"Do you mean"--Diane bent towards her breathlessly--"do you mean that you are _going away_--going away from Coverdale?"

"Yes. I am entering a sisterhood--that of the Sisters of Penitence, a community Hugh is endowing with money that is urgently needed."

"Endowing?"

"As part of the penance he has set himself to perform." Catherine's steely glance met and held the younger woman's. "Thanks to you, the remainder of his life will be pa.s.sed in expiation."

Diane shook her head carelessly. Such side-issues were of relatively small importance compared with the one outstanding, amazing fact: Catherine was going away! Going away from Coverdale--for ever!

"Yes"--Catherine read her thoughts shrewdly--"yes, you will be rid of me. I shall not be here much longer."

Diane struck her hands together. For once, not even the fear of Catherine's gibing tongue could hold her silent.

"I'm glad--glad--_glad_ you're going away!" she exclaimed pa.s.sionately.

"When you are gone I will win back my husband."

"Do you think so?" was all she said.

But to Diane's keyed-up consciousness it was as though the four short words contained a threat--the germ of future disaster.

In due time Catherine quitted Coverdale for the austere seclusion of the sisterhood, and a very few weeks sufficed to convince Diane that her forebodings had been only too well founded.

Catherine had long been anxious to enter a community, restrained from doing so solely by Hugh's need of her as mistress of his house, and now that her wish was an accomplished fact, it seemed as though he were spurred on to increasing effort by the example of his sister's renunciation of the world. He withdrew himself even more completely from his wife, sometimes avoiding her company for days at a time, and adopted a stringently ascetic mode of life, denying himself all pleasure, fasting frequently, and praying and meditating for hours at a stretch in the private chapel which was attached to Coverdale. As far as it was possible, without actually entering a community, his existence resembled that of a monk, and Diane came to believe that he had voluntarily vowed himself to a certain form of penance and expiation for the marriage which the bigotry of his nature had led him to regard as a sin.

His life only impinged upon his wife's in so far as the upbringing of their child was concerned. He was unnecessarily severe with her, and, since Diane opposed his strict ruling at every opportunity, Magda's early life was pa.s.sed in an atmosphere of fierce contradictions.

The child inherited her mother's beauty to the full, and, as she developed, exhibited an extraordinary faculty for getting her own way.

Servants, playmates, and governesses all succ.u.mbed to the nameless charm she possessed, while her mother and old Virginie frankly worshipped her.

The love of dancing was instinctive with her, and this, unknown to Hugh, her mother cultivated a.s.siduously, fostering in her everything that was imaginative and delicately fanciful. Magda believed firmly in the existence of fairies and regarded flowers as each possessed of a separate ent.i.ty with personal characteristics of its own. The originality of the dances she invented for her own amus.e.m.e.nt was the outcome.

But, side by side with this love of all that was beautiful, she absorbed from her mother a certain sophisticated understanding of life which was somewhat startling in one of her tender years, and this, too, betrayed itself in her dancing. For it is an immutable law that everything--good, bad, and indifferent--which lies in the soul of an artist ultimately reveals itself in his work.

And Magda, inheriting the underlying ardour of her father's temperament and the gutter-child's sharp sense of values which was her mother's Latin Quarter garnering, at the age of eight danced, with all the beguilement and seductiveness of a trained and experienced dancer.

Even Hugh himself was not proof against the elusive lure of it. He chanced upon her one day, dancing in her nursery, and was so carried away by the charm of the performance that for the moment he forgot that she was transgressing one of his most rigid rules.

In the child's gracious, alluring gestures he was reminded of the first time that he had seen her mother dance, and of how it had thrilled him.

Beneath the veneer with which his self-enforced austerity had overlaid his emotions, he felt his pulses leap, and was bitterly chagrined at being thus attracted.

He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and backed--here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in him--by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a Vallincourt.

"Never let me see you dance again, Magda," he told her. "It is forbidden. If you disobey you will be severely punished."

Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour of black smoke. With that precociously sophisticated instinct of hers she realised that the man had been emotionally stirred, and divined in her funny child's mind that it was her dancing which had so stirred him.

It gave her a curious sense of power.

"Sieur Hugh is _afraid_ because he likes me to dance," she told her mother, with an impish little grin of enjoyment.

(On one occasion Hugh had narrated for her benefit the history of an ancestor, one Sieur Hugues de Vallincourt, whose effigy in stone adorned the church, and she had ever afterwards persisted in referring to her father as "Sieur Hugh"--considerably to his annoyance, since he regarded it as both disrespectful and unseemly.)

From this time onwards Magda seemed to take a diabolical delight in shocking her father--experimenting on him, as it were. In some mysterious way she had become conscious of her power to allure. Young as she was, the instinct of conquest was awakened within her, and she proceeded to "experiment" on certain of her father's friends--to their huge delight and Hugh's intense disgust. Once, in an outburst of fury, he epitomised her ruthlessly.

"The child has the soul of a courtesan!"

If this were so, Hugh had no knowledge of how to cope with it. His fulminations on the subject of dancing affected her not at all, and a few days after he had rebuked her with all the energy at his command he discovered her dancing on a table--this time for the delectation of an enraptured butler and staff in the servants' hall.

Without more ado Hugh lifted her down and carried her to his study, where he administered a sound smacking. The result astonished him considerably.

"Do you think you can stop me from dancing by beating me?"

Magda arraigned him with pa.s.sionate scorn.

"I do," he returned grimly. "If you hurt people enough you can stop them from committing sin. That is the meaning of remedial punishment."

"I don't believe it!" she stormed at him. "You might hurt me till I _died_ of hurting, but you couldn't make me good--not if I hated your hurting me all the time! Because it isn't good to hate," she added out of the depths of some instinctive wisdom.

"Then you'd better learn to like being punished--if that will make you good," retorted Hugh.

Magda sped out into the woods. Hugh's hand had been none too light, and she was feeling physically and spiritually sore. Her small soul was aflame with fierce revolt.

Just to a.s.sure herself of the liberty of the individual and of the fact that "hurting couldn't make her good," she executed a solitary little dance on the green, mossy sward beneath the trees. It was rather a painful process, since certain portions of her anatomy still tingled from the retributive strokes of justice, but she set her teeth and accomplished the dance with a consciousness of unholy glee that added appreciably to the quality of the performance.