The Lamp of Fate Part 52

Without another word he swung round on his heel and turned to leave her.

"Michael . . . don't go!" The lovely voice was a mere thread of sound--hoa.r.s.e and strangulated. "Don't go! . . . Oh, be a little merciful!"

She laid an imploring hand on his arm, and at the touch of her his iron composure shook a little. For a moment the hardness in his eyes was wiped out by a look of intolerable pain. Then, with a quiet, inexorable movement he released himself from her straining clasp.

"There's no question of mercy," he said inflexibly. "I'm not judging you, or punishing you. It's simply that I can't marry you. . . . You must see that June's death--my sister's death--lies at your door."

"No," she said. "No. I suppose you can't marry me--now."

Her breath came in short, painful gasps. Her face seemed to have grown smaller--shrunk. There was a pinched look about the nostrils and every drop of blood had drained away, leaving even her lips a curious greyish-white. She leaned forward, swaying a little.

"I suppose," she said in a clear, dry voice, "you don't even love me any more?"

His hands clenched and he took a sudden impetuous step towards her.

"Not love you?" he said. And at last the man's own agony broke through his enforced calm, shaking his voice so that it was hoa.r.s.e and terrible.

"Not love you? I love you now as I loved you the day I first saw you.

G.o.d in heaven! Did you think love could be killed so easily? Does it die--just because it's forbidden by every decent instinct that a man possesses? If so, nine-tenths of us would find the world an easier place to live in!"

"And there is--no forgiveness, Michael?" The lovely grief-wrung face was uplifted to his beseechingly.

"Don't ask me!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "You know there can be none."

He turned and strode to the door. He did not look back even when his name tore itself like a cry between her lips. The next moment the sound of a door's closing came dully to her ears.

She looked vaguely round the room. The fire was dying, the charred logs sinking down on to a bed of smouldering cinders. A touch would scatter them from their semblance of logs into a heap of grey, formless ash.

Outside the window the snow still fell monotonously, wrapping the world in a pa.s.sionless, chill winding-sheet.

With a little broken cry she stumbled forward on to her knees, her arms outflung across the table.

CHAPTER XXIII

ACCOUNT RENDERED

The long, interminable night was over at last. Never afterwards, all the days of her life, could Magda look back on the black horror of those hours without a shudder. She felt as though she had been through h.e.l.l and come out on the other side, to find stretching before her only the blank grey desolation of chaos.

She was stripped of everything--of love, of happiness, even of hope.

There was nothing in the whole world to look forward to. There never would be again. And when she looked back it was with eyes that had been vouchsafed a terrible enlightenment.

Phrases which had fallen from Michael's lips scourged her anew throughout the long hours of the night. "Women like you make this world into plain h.e.l.l," he had said. "You're like a blight--spreading disease and corruption wherever you go." And the essential truth which each sentence held left her writhing.

It was all true--horribly, hideously true. The magical, mysterious power of beauty which had been given her, which might have helped to lighten the burden of the sad old world wherever she pa.s.sed, she had used to destroy and deface and mutilate. The debt against her--the debt of all the pain and grief which she had brought to others--had been mounting up, higher and higher through the years. And now the time had come when payment was to be exacted.

Quite simply and directly, without seeking in any way to exculpate herself, she had told Gillian the bare facts of what had happened--that her engagement was broken off and the reason why. But she had checked all comment and the swift, understanding sympathy which Gillian would have given. Criticism or sympathy would equally have been more than she could bear.

"There is nothing to be said or done about it," she maintained. "I've sinned, and now I'm to be punished for my sins. That's all."

The child of Hugh Vallincourt spoke in that impa.s.sive summing up of the situation and Lady Arabella, with her intimate knowledge of both Hugh and his sister Catherine, would have ascribed it instantly to the Vallincourt strain in her G.o.d-daughter. To Gillian, however, to whom the Vallincourts were nothing more than a name, the strange submissiveness of it was incomprehensible. As the days pa.s.sed, she tried to rouse Magda from the apathy into which she seemed to have fallen, but without success.

"It's no use, Gillyflower," she would reply with a weary little smile.

"There _is_ no way out. Do you remember I once said I was too happy for it to last? It was quite true. . . . Have you told Marraine?" she asked suddenly.

"Yes. And she wants to see you."

"I don't think I want to see her--or anyone just at present. I've got to think--to think things out."

"What do you mean? What are you going to do?"

"I--don't know--yet."

Gillian regarded her with some anxiety. That Magda, usually so unreserved and spontaneous, should shut her out of her confidence thoroughly disquieted her. She felt afraid. It seemed to her as though the girl were more or less stunned by the enormity of the blow which had befallen her. She went about with a curious absence of interest in anything--composed, quiet, absorbed in her own thoughts, only rousing herself to appear at the Imperial as usual. Probably her work at the theatre was the one thing that saved her from utter collapse.

As far as Gillian knew she had not shed a single tear. Only her face seemed to grow daily more strained-looking, and her eyes held a curious expression that was difficult to interpret.

There were days which she spent entirely in the seclusion of her own room, and then Virginie alone was allowed entrance. The old Frenchwoman would come in with some special little dish she had cooked with her own hands, hoping to tempt her beloved mistress's appet.i.te--which in these days had dwindled to such insignificant proportions that Virginie was in despair.

"Thou must eat," she would say.

"I don't want anything--really, Virginie," Magda would insist.

"And wherefore not?" demanded Virginie indignantly one day. "Thou art not one of the Sisters of Penitence that thou must needs deny thyself the good things of life."

Magda looked up with a sudden flash of interest.

"The Sisters of Penitence, Virginie? Who are they? Tell me about them."

Virginie set a plate containing an epicurean omelet triumphantly in front of her.

"Eat that, then, _cherie_, while I tell thee of them," she replied with masterly diplomacy. "It is good, the omelet. Virginie made it for thee with her own hands."

Magda laughed faintly in spite of herself and began upon the omelet obediently.

"Very well, then. Tell me about the Sisters of Penitence. Are they always being sorry for what they've done?"

"It is a sisterhood, _mademoiselle cherie_, for those who would withdraw themselves from the world. They are very strict, I believe, the sisters, and mortify the flesh exceedingly. Me, I cannot see why we should leave the beautiful world the _bon dieu_ has put us into. For certain, He would not have put us in if He had not meant us to stay there!"

"Perhaps--they are happier--out of the world, Virginia," suggested Magda slowly.

"But my niece, who was in the sisterhood a year, was glad to come out again. Though, of course, she left her sins behind her, and that was good. It is always good to get rid of one's sins, _n'est-ce pas_?"

"Get rid of your sins? But how can you?"

"If one does penance day and night, day and night, for a whole long year, one surely expiates them! And then"--with calm certainty--"of course one has got rid of them. They are wiped off the slate and one begins again. At least, it was so with my niece. For when she came out of the sisterhood, the man who had betrayed her married her, and they have three--no, four _bebes_ now. So that it is evident _le bon dieu_ was pleased with her penance and rewarded her accordingly."

Magda repressed an inclination to smile at the naive simplicity of Virginie's creed. Life would indeed be an easy affair if one could "get rid of one's sins" on such an ingenuous princ.i.p.al of quid pro quo!