The Lamp of Fate Part 53

But Virginie came of French peasant stock, and to her untutored mind such a process of wiping the slate clean seemed extremely reasonable.

She continued with enthusiasm:

"She but took the Vow of Penitence for a year. It is a rule of the sisterhood. If one has sinned greatly, one can take a vow of penitence for a year and expiate the sin. Some remain altogether and take the final vows. But my niece--no! She sinned and she paid. And then she came back into the world again. She is a good girl, my niece Suzette.

Mademoiselle has enjoyed her omelet? Yes?"

Magda nodded.

"Yes, Virginie, I've enjoyed it. And I think your niece was certainly a brave _fille_. I'm glad she's happy now."

For long after Virginie had left her, Magda sat quietly thinking. The story of the old Frenchwoman's niece had caught hold of her imagination.

Like herself she had sinned, though differently. Within her own mind Magda wondered whether she or Suzette were in reality the greater sinner of the two. Suzette had at least given all, without thought of self, whereas she had only taken--taken with both hands, giving nothing in return.

Probably Suzette had been an attractive little person--of the same type of brown-eyed, vivacious youth which must have been Virginie's five-and-thirty years ago--and her prettiness had caused her downfall.

Magda glanced towards the mirror. It was through her beauty she herself had sinned. It had given her so much power, that exquisite, perfect body of hers, and she had pitifully misused the power it had bestowed. The real difference between herself and Suzette lay in the fact that the little French girl had paid the uttermost farthing of the price demanded--had submitted herself to discipline till she had surely expiated all the evil she had done. What if she, likewise, were to seek some such discipline?

The idea had presented itself to her at precisely the moment when she was in the grip of an agony of recoil from her former way of life. Like her father, she had been suddenly brought up short and forced to survey her actions through the eyes of someone else, to look at all that she had done from another's angle of vision. And coincidentally, just as in the case of her father, the abrupt downfall of her hopes, the sudden shattering of her happiness, seemed as though it were due to the intervention of an angry G.o.d.

The fanatical Vallincourt blood which ran in Magda's veins caused her to respond instinctively to this aspect of the matter. But the strain of her pa.s.sionate, joy-loving mother which crossed with it tempered the tendency toward quite such drastic self-immolation as had appealed to Hugh Vallincourt.

To Magda, Michael had come to mean the beginning and end of everything--the pivot upon which her whole existence hung. So that if Michael shut her out of his life for ever, that existence would no longer hold either value or significance. From her point of view, then, the primary object of any kind of self-discipline would be that it might make her more fit to be the wife of "Saint Michel."

He despised her now. The evil she had done stood between them like a high wall. But if she were to make atonement--as Suzette had atoned--surely, when the wickedness had been purged out of her by pain and discipline, Michael would relent!

The idea lodged in her mind. It went with her by day and coloured her thoughts by night, and it was still working within her like yeast when she at last nerved herself to go and see her G.o.dmother.

Lady Arabella, as might have been antic.i.p.ated, concealed her own sore-heartedness under a manner that was rather more militant than usual, if that were possible.

"Why you hadn't more sense than to spend your time fooling with a sort of cave-man from the backwoods, I can't conceive," she scolded. "You must have known how it would end."

"I didn't. I never thought about it. I was just sick with Michael because he had gone abroad, and then, when I heard that he was married, it was the last straw. I don't think--that night--I should have much cared what happened."

Lady Arabella nodded.

"Women like you make it heaven or h.e.l.l for the men who love you."

"And h.e.l.l, without the choice of heaven, for ourselves," returned Magda.

The bitterness in her voice wrung the old woman's heart. She sighed, then straightened her back defiantly.

"We have to bear the burden of our blunders, my dear."

There was a reminiscent look in the keen old eyes. Lady Arabella had had her own battles to fight. "And, after all, who should pay the price if not we ourselves?"

"But if the price is outrageous, Marraine? What then?"

"Still you've got to pay."

Magda returned home with those words ringing in her ears. They fitted into the thoughts which had been obsessing her with a curious precision.

It was true, then. You had to pay, one way or another. Lady Arabella knew it. Little Suzette had somehow found it out.

That night a note left Friars' Holm addressed to the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence.

CHAPTER XXIV

GILLIAN INTERCEDES

It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced about her curiously--at the plain, straight-backed chairs, at the meticulously tidy desk and bare, polished floor. Everything was scrupulously clean, but the total absence of anything remotely resembling luxury struck poignantly on eyes accustomed to all the ease and beauty of surroundings which unlimited money can procure.

By contrast with the severity of the room Magda felt uncomfortably conscious of her own attire. The exquisite gown she was wearing, the big velvet hat with its drooping plume, the French shoes with their buckles and curved Louis heels--all seemed acutely out of place in this austere, formal-looking chamber.

Her glance came back to the woman sitting opposite her, the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence--tall, thin, undeniably impressive, with a stern, colourless face as clean-cut as a piece of ivory, out of which gleamed cold blue eyes that seemed to regard the dancer with a strange mixture of fervour and hostility.

Magda could imagine no reason for the antagonism which she sensed in the steady scrutiny of those light-blue eyes. As far as she was concerned, the Mother Superior was an entire stranger, without incentive either to like or dislike her.

But to the woman who, while she had been in the world, had been known as Catherine Vallincourt, the name of Magda Wielitzska was as familiar as her own. In the dark, slender girl before her, whose pale, beautiful face called to mind some rare and delicate flower, she recognised the living embodiment of her brother's transgression--that brother who had made Diane Wielitzska his wife and the mother of his child.

All she had antic.i.p.ated of evil consequence at the time of the marriage had crystallised into hard fact. The child of the "foreign dancing-woman"--the being for whose existence Hugh's mad pa.s.sion for Diane had been responsible--had on her own confession worked precisely such harm in the world as she, Catherine, had foreseen. And now, the years which had raised Catherine to the position of Mother Superior of the community she had entered had brought that child to her doors as a penitent waveringly willing to make expiation.

Catherine was conscious of a strange elevation of spirit. She felt ecstatically uplifted at the thought that it might be given to her to purge from Hugh's daughter, by severity of discipline and penance, the evil born within her. In some measure she would thus be instrumental in neutralising her brother's sin.

She was supremely conscious that to a certain extent--though by no means altogether--her zealous ardour had its origin in her rooted antipathy to Hugh's wife and hence to the child of the marriage. But, since beneath her sable habit there beat the heart of just an ordinary, natural woman, with many faults and failings still unconquered in spite of the austerities of her chosen life, a certain very human element of satisfaction mingled itself with her fervour for Magda's regeneration.

With a curious impa.s.sivity that masked the intensity of her desire she had told Magda that, by the rules of the community, penitents who desired to make expiation were admitted there, but that if once the step were taken, and the year's vow of penitence voluntarily a.s.sumed, there could be no return to the world until the expiration of the time appointed.

Somehow the irrevocability of such a vow, undertaken voluntarily, had not struck her in its full significance until Catherine had quietly, almost tonelessly, in the flat, level voice not infrequently acquired by the religious, affirmed it.

"Supposing"--Magda looked round the rigidly bare room with a new sense of apprehension--"supposing I felt I simply couldn't stand it any longer? Do you mean to say, _then_, that I should not be allowed to leave here?"

"No, you would not be permitted to. Vows are not toys to be broken at will."

"A year is a long time," murmured Magda.

The eyes beneath the coifed brow with its fine network of wrinkles were adamant.

"The body must be crucified that the soul may live," returned the cold voice unflinchingly.

Magda's thoughts drew her this way and that. A year! It was an eternity!

And yet, if only she could emerge purified, a woman worthy to be Michael's wife, she felt she would be willing to go through with it.

It was as though the white-faced, pa.s.sionless woman beside her read her thoughts.

"If you would be purified," said Catherine, "if you would cast out the devil that is within you, you will have to abide meekly by such penance as is ordained. You must submit yourself to pain."

At the words a memory of long ago stirred in Magda's mind. She remembered that when her father had beaten her as a child he had said: "If you hurt people enough you can stop them from committing sin."

Groping dimly for some light that might elucidate the problems which bewildered her, Magda clutched at the words as though they were a revelation. They seemed to point to the only way by which she might repair the past.