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 hell 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 hell,” 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 passed, 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 impassive 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 god-daughter. To Gillian, however, to whom the Vallincourts were nothing more than a name, the strange submissiveness of it was incomprehensible. As the days passed, 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 appetite—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 principal of quid pro quo!
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 God.
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 passionate, 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 godmother.
Lady Arabella, as might have been anticipated, 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 hell for the men who love you.”
“And hell, 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.
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