The Lamp of Fate Part 41

Of late, circ.u.mstances had combined to impress on Magda an altogether new point of view--the viewpoint from which other people might conceivably regard her actions. She had never troubled about such a thing before, nor was she finding the experience at all a pleasant one.

But it helped her to understand to a certain extent--though still only in a very modified degree--the influences which had sent Michael Quarrington out of England.

And now, in the pa.s.sionate relief bred of the knowledge that he was still free, that he had not gone straight from her to another woman, much of the resentful hardness which had embittered her during the last few months melted away, and she became once more the nonchalant, tantalising but withal lovable and charming personality of former days.

She was even conscious of a certain compunction for her behaviour at Stockleigh. She had been bitterly hurt herself, and since, for the moment, to experiment with a new and, to her, quite unknown type of man had amused her and helped to distract her thoughts, she had not paused to consider the possible resultant consequences to the subject of the experiment.

She endeavoured to solace herself with the belief that after she had gone he would instinctively turn to June once more, and that life on the farm would probably resume the even tenor of its way. Gradually, with the pa.s.sage of time, her thoughts reverted less and less often to the happenings at Stockleigh, and the p.r.i.c.kings of conscience--which beset her return to London--grew considerably fainter and more infrequent.

It was almost inevitable that this should be so. With the autumn came the stir and hustle of the season, with its thousand-and-one claims upon her thought and time. The management of the Imperial Theatre was nothing if not enterprising, and designed to present a series of ballets throughout the course of the winter, in the greater number of which Magda would be the bright and particular star. And in the absorption of work and the sheer joy she found in the art which she loved, the recollection of her holiday at Stockleigh slipped by degrees into the background of her mind. Fraught with such immense significance and catastrophe to those others, Dan and June--to Magda it soon came to occupy no more than an incidental niche in her memory.

CHAPTER XVII

CROSS CURRENTS

Winter had slipped away, pushed from his place by the tender, resistless hands of spring. And now spring had given place to summer, and June, arms filled with flowers, was converting the earth into a garden of roses.

Magda's car, purring its way southward along the great road from London, sped between fields that still gleamed with the first freshness of their young green, while through the open window drifted vagrant little puffs of clean country air, coming delicately to her nostrils, fragrant of leaf and bloom.

She was motoring to Netherway, a delightfully small and insignificant place on the Hampshire coast where Lady Arabella had what it pleased her to term her "cottage in the country," a charming old place, Elizabethan in character--the type of "cottage" which boasted a score or so of rooms and every convenience which an imaginative estate agent, sustained by the knowledge that his client regarded money as a means and not an end, could devise.

Summer invitations to the Hermitage--as the place was quite inaptly called, since no one could be less akin to a hermit than its gregarious owner--were much sought after by the younger generation of Lady Arabella's set. The beautifully wooded park, with its green aisles of shady solitude sloping down from the house to the very edge of the blue waters of the Solent, was an ideal spot in which to bring to a safe and happy conclusion a love affair that might seem to have hung fire a trifle during the hurly-burly of the London season. And if further inducement were needed, it was to be found in the fact that Lady Arabella herself const.i.tuted the most desirable of chaperons, remaining considerately inconspicuous until the moment when her congratulations were requested.

This year a considerable amount of disappointment had been occasioned by the fact that she had left town quite early during the season, and later on had apparently limited her invitations exclusively to the trio at Friars' Holm. She declared that the number of matrimonial ventures for which the Hermitage was responsible was beginning to weigh on her conscience. Also, she wanted a quiet holiday and she proposed to take one.

And now Magda was on her way to join her, Gillian remaining behind in order to close up the house at Hampstead and settle the servants on board wages. It had been arranged that she and Coppertop should come on to Netherway immediately this was accomplished.

Magda could hardly believe that only a year had elapsed since last the roses beckoned her out of London. It seemed far longer since that hot summer's day when she had rushed away to Devonshire, vainly seeking a narcotic for the new and bewildering turmoil of pain that was besetting her.

She had learned now that you carry a heartache with you, and that no change of scenery makes up for the beloved face you can no longer see.

For Michael had not come back. He had remained abroad and had never by sign or letter acknowledged that he even remembered her existence. Magda had come to accept it as a fact now that he had gone out of her life entirely.

A whiff of air tinged with the salt tang of the sea blew in at the window, and she came suddenly out of her musings to find that the car was winding its way up the hill upon which the Hermitage was perched.

A long, low house, clothed in creeper, it stood just below the hill's brow, sheltered to the rear by a great belt of woods, and overlooking a sea which sparkled in the sunlight as though strewn with diamond-dust.

Lady Arabella was waiting in the porch when the car drew up and welcomed her G.o.d-daughter with delight. She seemed bubbling over with good spirits, and there was a half-mischievous, half-guilty twinkle in her keen old eyes which suggested that there might be some ulterior cause for her effervescence.

"If you were poor I should say you'd just come into a fortune,"

commented Magda, regarding her judicially. "As you're not, I should like to know why you're looking as pleased as a child with a new toy. Own up, now, Marraine! What's the secret you've got up your sleeve?"

"Yes, there is a secret," acknowledged Lady Arabella gleefully. "Come along and I'll show it you."

Magda smiled and followed her across the long hall and into a room at the further end of which stood a big easel. On the easel, just nearing completion, rested a portrait of her G.o.dmother. It was rather a wonderful portrait. The artist seemed to have penetrated beyond the mere physical lineaments of his sitter into the very crannies of her soul. It was all there--the thoroughly worldly shrewdness, the mordant, somewhat cynical humour, and the genuine kindness of heart which went to make up Lady Arabella's personality as her world knew it. And something more.

Behind all these one sensed the glamour of a long-past romance, the unquenched spark of a faith that, as Lady Arabella had herself once put it in a rare moment of self-revelation, "love is the best thing this queer old world of ours has to offer." The portrait on the easel was that of a woman who had visioned the miracle of love only to be robbed of its fulfilment.

Magda stood silently in front of the picture, marvelling at its keen perceptive powers. And then quite suddenly she realised who must have painted it. It almost seemed to her as though she had really known it from the first moment her eyes had rested on the canvas. The brushwork, and that uncannily clever characterisation, were unmistakable.

"Good likeness, don't you think?"

Lady Arabella's snapping speech broke the silence.

"It's rather more than that, isn't it?" said Magda. "How did you seduce Michael Quarrington? I thought"--for an instant her voice wavered, then steadied again--"I thought he was abroad."

"He was. At the present moment he's at the Hermitage."

"_Here_?"

Magda turned her head aside so that Lady Arabella might not see the wave of scarlet which flooded her face and then receded, leaving it milk-white. Michael . . . _here_! She felt her heart beating in great suffocating throbs, and the room seemed to swim round her. If he were here, knowing that she was to be his fellow-guest, surely he could not hate her so badly! She was conscious of a sudden wild uprush of hope.

Perhaps--perhaps happiness was not so far away, after all!

And then she heard Lady Arabella's voice breaking across the riot of emotion which stirred within her.

"Yes, he has been here the last three weeks painting my portrait. It's for you, the portrait. I thought you'd like to have it when you haven't got the original any longer."

Magda turned to her suddenly, her affection for her G.o.dmother alertly apprehensive.

"What do you mean?" she said anxiously. "You're--you're not ill, Marraine?"

"Ill? No. But I'm over seventy. And after seventy you've had your allotted span, you know. Anything beyond that's an extra. And whether fate gives me a bit more rope or not, I've nothing to grumble at. I've _lived_, not vegetated--and I've had a very good time, too." She paused, then added slowly: "Though I've missed the best."

Magda slipped her hand into the old woman's thin, wrinkled one with a quick gesture of understanding, and a little sympathetic silence fell between them.

"Then you'll find the hanging-room for the portrait at Friars' Holm?"

queried Lady Arabella, breaking it at last in practical tones.

"You know we'd love to have it," replied Magda warmly. In a studiously casual voice she pursued: "By the way, does Mr. Quarrington know I'm here?"

Lady Arabella nodded. Secretly she was congratulating herself on having successfully tided over the awkwardness of explaining Michael's presence at the Hermitage. She had been somewhat apprehensive as to how Magda would take it. It was quite on the cards that she might have ordered her car round again and driven straight back to London!

But she had accepted the fact with apparent composure--one's mental states, fortunately, being invisible to the curious eyes of the outside world!--and Lady Arabella felt proportionately relieved. Nor had Quarrington himself evinced any particular emotion, either of dissatisfaction or otherwise, when she had confided to him the fact that she was expecting her G.o.d-daughter. And although the extreme composure exhibited by both Michael and Magda was a trifle baffling, Lady Arabella was fain to comfort herself with her confirmed belief in propinquity as the resolution of most lovers' problems and misunderstandings.

She was fully determined to bring these two together once more if it were in any way possible, and the commission to paint her portrait had been merely part of her scheme. Her three score years and ten had had little enough to do with it. They weighed extremely lightly on her erect old shoulders, and her spirit was as unquenchable as it had been twenty years ago. It seemed more than likely that fate was preparing to allow her quite a good deal of rope.

As for Quarrington, he would probably have refused to return to England at this juncture to please anyone other than Lady Arabella. But somehow no one ever did refuse Lady Arabella anything that she particularly set her heart upon. Moreover, as he reflected upon receipt of her a.s.sured little missive commissioning him to paint her portrait, he would be obliged to return to England sooner or later, and by now he felt he had himself sufficiently in hand to risk the contingency of a possible meeting with Magda. But he had hardly counted upon finding himself actually under the same roof with her for days together, and, although outwardly unmoved, he was somewhat taken aback when halfway through his visit to the Hermitage, Lady Arabella cheerfully communicated the prospect to him.

He could read between the lines and guess her purpose, and it afforded him a certain sardonic amus.e.m.e.nt. It was like Lady Arabella's temerity, he reflected! No other woman, knowing as much of the special circ.u.mstances as she did, would have ventured so far.

Well, she would soon realise that her attempt to bridge matters over between himself and her G.o.d-daughter was foredoomed to failure. He would never trust Magda, or any other woman, again. From the moment he had left England he had made up his mind that henceforth no woman should have any place in his life, and certain subsequent occurrences had confirmed him in this determination.

At the same time he was not going to run away. He would stay and face it out. He would remain at the Hermitage until he had finished the portrait upon which he was at work, and then he would pack up and depart.

So that when finally he and Magda met in the sun-filled South Parlour at the Hermitage each of them was prepared to treat the other with a cool detachment.

But Magda found it difficult to maintain her pose after her first glance at his face. The alteration in it sent a swift pang to her heart. It had hardened--hardened into lines of a grim self-control that spoke of long mental conflict. The mouth, too, had learned to close in a new line of bitterness, and in the grey eyes as they rested on her there lay a certain cynical indifference which seemed to set her as far away from him as the north is from the south. She realised that the gulf between them was almost as wide and impa.s.sable as though he were in very truth the Spanish dancer's husband. This man proposed to give her neither love nor forgiveness. Only the feminine instinct of pride--the pride of woman who must be sought and never the seeker--carried her through the ordeal of the first meeting. Nor did he seek to make it easier for her.

"It is a long time since you were in England," she remarked after the first interchange of civilities.