Magda sat gazing idly into the fire, watching with abstracted eyes the flames leap up and curl gleefully round the fresh logs with which she had just fed it. She was thinking about nothing in particular—merely revelling in the pleasant warmth and comfort of the room and in the prospect of a lazy evening spent at home, since to-night she was not due to appear in any of the ballets to be given at the Imperial Theatre.
Outside, the snow was falling steadily in feathery flakes, hiding the grime of London beneath a garment of shimmering white and transforming the commonplace houses built of brick and mortar, each capped with its ugly chimneystack, into glittering fairy palaces, crowned with silver towers and minarets.
The bitter weather served to emphasise the easy comfort of the room, and Magda curled up into her chair luxuriously. She was expecting Michael to dinner at Friars’ Holm this evening. They had not seen each other for three whole days, so that there was an added edge to her enjoyment of the prospect. She would have so much to tell him! About the triumphant reception she had had the other night down at the theatre—he had been prevented from being present—and about the unwarrantable attitude Davilof had adopted, which had been worrying her not a little. He would sympathise with her over that—the effortless sympathy of the man in possession!
Then the unwelcome thought obtruded itself that if the snow continued falling Michael might be weather-bound and unable to get out to Hampstead. She uncurled herself from her chair and ran to the window. The sky stretched sombrely away in every direction. No sign of a break in the lowering, snow-filled clouds! She drummed on the window with impatient fingers; and then, drowning the little tapping noise they made, came the sound of an opening door and Melrose’s placid voice announcing:
“Mr. Quarrington.”
Magda whirled round from the window.
“Michael!” she exclaimed joyfully. “I was just wondering if you would be able to get over this evening. I suppose you came while you could!”—laughing. “I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if you were snowed up here. Shall you mind—dreadfully—if you are?”
But Michael made no response to the tenderly mocking question, nor did her smile draw from him any answering smile. She looked at him waveringly. He had been in the room quite long enough to take her in his arms and kiss her. And he hadn’t done it.
“Michael——” She faltered a little. “How queer you are! Have you—brought bad news?” A sudden dread rushed through her. “It’s not—Marraine?”
“No, no.” He spoke hastily, answering the startled apprehension in her eyes. “It’s not that.”
Her mind, alertly prescient, divined significance in the mere wording of the phrase.
“Then there is—something?”
“Yes, there is something.”
His voice sounded forced, and Magda waited with a strange feeling of tension for him to continue.
“I want to ask you a question,” he went on in the same carefully measured accents. “Did you ever stay at a place called Stockleigh—Stockleigh Farm at Ashencombe?”
Stockleigh! At the sound of the word it seemed to Magda as though a hand closed suddenly round her heart, squeezing it so tightly that she could not breathe.
“I—yes, I stayed there,” she managed to say at last.
“Ah-h!” It was no more than a suddenly checked breath. “When were you there?” The question came swiftly, like the thrust of a sword. With it, it seemed to Magda that she could feel the first almost imperceptible pull of the “ropes of steel.”
“I was there—the summer before last,” she said slowly.
Michael made no answer. Only in the silence that followed she saw his face change. Something that had been hope—a fighting hope—died out of his eyes and his jaw seemed to set itself with a curious inflexibility.
She waited for him to speak—waited with a keyed-up intensity of longing that was almost physically painful. At last, unable to bear the continued silence, she spoke again. Her voice cracked a little.
“Why—why do you ask, Michael?”
He looked at her and a sudden cynical amusement gleamed in his eyes—an amusement so bitterly unmirthful that there seemed something almost brutal about it. Her hand went up to her face as though to screen out the sight of it.
“You can’t guess, I suppose?” he said with dry, harsh irony. Then, after a moment: “Why did you never tell me you were there? You never spoke of it. . . . Wasn’t it curious you should never speak of it?”
She made a step towards him. She could not endure this torturing suspense another instant. It was racking her. She must know what Stockleigh signified to him.
“What do you mean? Tell me what you mean!” she asked desperately.
“Do you remember the story I told you down at Netherway—of a man and his wife and another woman?”
“Yes, I remember”—almost whispering.
“That was the story of my sister, June, and her husband, Dan Storran. You—were the other woman.”
She felt his eyes—those eyes out of which all hope had died—fixed on her.
“June—your sister? Your sister? Are you sure?” she stammered stupidly.
It couldn’t be true! Not even God could have thought of a punishment so cruel, so awful as this. That June—the woman who had died just because she “had no heart to go on living”—should be Michael’s sister! Oh, it was a crazy tangling of the threads—mad! Like some macabre invention sprung from a disordered brain. She wanted to laugh, and she knew if she began to laugh she should never stop. She felt she was losing her hold over herself. With a violent effort she clutched at her self-control.
“Will you say it all over again, please?” she said in a flat voice. “I don’t think I understand.”
“Nor did I till to-day,” he replied shortly. “Davilof made me understand—this morning.”
“Davilof?” The word seemed to drag itself from her throat. . . . Davilof—who had been at Stockleigh that summer! Then it was all going to be true, after all.
“Yes, Davilof. He had chanced on the fact that June was my sister. Very few people knew it, because, when she married, it was against our father’s wishes, and she had cut herself adrift from the family. I wanted to help her, but she would never let me.” He paused, then went on tonelessly: “It’s all quite clear, isn’t it? You know everything that happened while you were at Stockleigh. I’ve told you what happened afterwards. Storran cleared out of the country at once, and June had nothing left to live for. The only thing I didn’t know was the name of the woman who had smashed up both their lives. I saw Dan in Paris . . . He came to me at my studio. But he was a white man. He never gave away the name of the woman who had ruined him. I only knew she had spent that particular summer at Stockleigh. It was Davilof who told me who the woman was.”
“I can prevent your marrying Quarrington!” Magda could hear again the quiet conviction of Antoine’s utterance. So he had known, then, when he threatened her, that June was Michael’s sister! She wondered dully how long he had been aware of the fact—how he had first stumbled across it and realised its value as a hammer with which to crush her happiness. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered any more. The main fact was that he had known.
June was dead! Amid the confused welter of emotions which seemed to have utterly submerged her during the last few minutes, Magda had almost lost sight of this as a fact by itself—as distinct from its identity with the fact that Michael’s sister was dead. She felt vaguely sorry for June.
Since the day she and Gillian had left Ashencombe she had heard nothing of Storran or his wife. No least scrap of news relating to them had come her way. In the ordinary course of events it was hardly likely that it would. The circles of their respective lives did not overlap each other. And Magda had made no effort to discover what had happened at Stockleigh after she had left there. She had been glad to shut the door on that episode in her life. She was not proud of it.
There were other incidents, too, which she could have wished were blotted out—the Raynham incident amongst them. With the new insight which love had brought her she was beginning to rate these things at their true value, to realise how little she had understood of all love’s exquisite significance when she played with it as lightly as a child might play with a trinket. She had learned better now—learned that love was of the spirit as well as of the body, and that in playing at love she had played with men’s souls.
She believed she had put that part of her life behind her—all those unrecognising days before love came to her. And now, without warning, sudden as an Eastern night, the past had risen up and confronted her. The implacable ropes of steel held her in bondage.
“Michael . . . can’t you—forgive me?”
Her voice wavered and broke as she realised the utter futility of her question. Between them, now and always, there must lie the young, dead body of June Storran.
“Forgive you?” Michael’s voice was harsh with an immeasurable bitterness. “Good God! What are you made of that you can even ask me? It’s women like you who turn this world into plain hell! . . . Look back! Have you ever looked back, I wonder?” He paused, and she knew his eyes were searching her—those keen, steady eyes, hard, now, like flint—searching the innermost recesses of her being. She felt as though he were dragging the soul out of her body, stripping it naked to the merciless lash of truth.
“June—my little sister, the happiest of mortals—dead, through you. And Storran—he was a big man, white all through—down and out. And God knows who else has had their sun put out by you. . . . You’re like a blight—spreading disease and corruption wherever you go.”
A little moan broke from her lips. For a moment it was a physical impossibility for her to speak. She could only shrink, mute and quivering, beneath the flail of his scorn.
At last: “Is—is that what you think of me?” she almost whispered.
“Yes.”
She winced at the harsh monosyllable. There was a finality about it—definite, unalterable. She looked at him dry-eyed, her face tragically beautiful in its agony. But he seemed impervious to either its beauty or its suffering. There was no hint of softening in him. 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—hoarse 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 hoarse and terrible. “Not love you? I love you now as I loved you the day I first saw you. God 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 hoarsely. “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 passionless, chill winding-sheet.
With a little broken cry she stumbled forward on to her knees, her arms outflung across the table.
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