For the first month or two after Magda’s departure Gillian found that she had her hands full in settling up various business and personal matters which had been left with loose ends. She was frankly glad to discover that there were so many matters requiring her attention; otherwise the blank occasioned in her life by Magda’s absence would have been almost unendurable.
The two girls had grown very much into each other’s hearts during the years they had shared together, and when friends part, no matter how big a wrench the separation may mean to the one who goes, there is a special kind of sadness reserved for the one who is left behind. For the one who sets out there are fresh faces, new activities in store. Even though the new life adventured upon may not prove to be precisely a bed of thornless roses, the pricking of the thorns provides distraction to the mind from the sheer, undiluted pain of separation.
But for Gillian, left behind at Friars’ Holm, there remained nothing but an hourly sense of loss added to that crushing, inevitable flatness which succeeds a crisis of any kind.
Nor did a forlorn Coppertop’s reiterated inquiries as to how soon the Fairy Lady might be expected back again help to mend matters.
Lady Arabella’s grief was expressed in a characteristically prickly fashion.
“Young people don’t seem to know the first thing about love nowadays,” she observed with the customary scathing contempt of one age for another.
In my young days! Ah! there will never be times like those again! We are all quite sure of it as our young days recede into the misty past.
“If you loved, you loved,” pursued Lady Arabella crisply. “And the death of half a dozen sisters wouldn’t have been allowed to interfere with the proceedings.”
Gillian smiled a little.
“It wasn’t only that. It was Michael’s bitter disappointment in Magda, I think, quite as much as the fact that, indirectly, he held her responsible for June’s death.”
“It’s ridiculous to try and foist Mrs. Storran’s death on to Magda,” fumed Lady Arabella restively. “If she hadn’t the physical health to have a good, hearty baby successfully, she shouldn’t have attempted it. That’s all! . . . And then those two idiots—Magda and Michael! Of course he must needs shoot off abroad, and equally of course she must be out of the way in a sisterhood when he comes rushing back—as he will do!”—with a grim smile.
“He hasn’t done yet,” Gillian pointed out.
“I give him precisely six months, my dear, before he finds out that, sister or no sister, he can’t live without Magda. Michael Quarrington’s got too much good red blood in his veins to live the life of a hermit. He’s a man, thank goodness, not a mystical dreamer like Hugh Vallincourt. And he’ll come back to his mate as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow.”
“I wish I felt as confident as you do.”
“I wish I could make sure of putting my hand on Magda when he comes,” grumbled Lady Arabella. “That’s the hitch I’m afraid of! If only she hadn’t been so precipitate—only waited a bit for him to come back to her.”
“I don’t agree with you,” rapped out Gillian smartly. “Women are much too ready to do the patient Griselda stunt. I think”—with a vicious little nod of her brown head—“it would do Michael all the good in the world to come back and want Magda—want her badly. And find he couldn’t get her! So there!”
Lady Arabella regarded her with astonishment, then broke into a delighted chuckle.
“Upon my word! If a tame dove had suddenly turned round and pecked at me, I couldn’t have been more surprised! I didn’t know you had so much of the leaven of malice and wickedness in you, Gillian!”
Gillian, a little flushed and feeling, in truth, rather surprised at herself for her sudden heat, smiled back at her.
“But I should have thought your opinion would have been very much the same as mine. I never expected you’d want Magda to sit down and twiddle her thumbs till Michael chose to come back to her.”
Lady Arabella sighed.
“I don’t. Not really. Only I want them to be happy,” she said a little sadly. “Love is such a rare thing—love like theirs. And it’s hard that Magda should lose the beauty and happiness of it all because of mistakes she made before she found herself, so to speak.”
Gillian nodded soberly. Lady Arabella had voiced precisely her own feeling in the matter. It was hard! And yet it was only the fulfilment of the immutable law: Who breaks, pays.
Gillian’s thoughts tried to pierce the dim horizon. Perhaps all the pain and mistakes and misunderstandings of which this workaday world is so full are, after all, only a part of the beautiful tapestry which the patient Fingers of God are weaving—a dark and sombre warp, giving value to the gold and silver and jewelled threads of the weft which shall cross it. When the ultimate fabric is woven, and the tissue released from the loom, there will surely be no meaningless thread, sable or silver, in the consummated pattern.
A few weeks after Magda’s departure Gillian received a letter from Dan Storran, reminding her of her promise to let him see her and asking if she would lunch with him somewhere in town.
It was with somewhat mixed feelings that she met him again. He was much altered—so changed from the hot-headed, primitive countryman she had first known. Some chance remark of hers enlightened him as to her confused sense of the difference in him, and he smiled across at her.
“I’ve been through the mill, you see,” he explained quietly, “since the Stockleigh days.”
The words seemed almost like a key unlocking the door that stands fast shut between one soul and another. He talked to her quite simply and frankly after that, telling her how, after he had left England, the madness in his blood had driven him whither it listed. There had been no depths to which he had not sunk, no wild living from which he had recoiled.
And then had come the news of June’s death. Not tenderly conveyed, but charged to his account by her sister with a fierce bitterness that had suddenly torn the veil from his eyes. Followed days and nights of agonised remorse, and after that the slow, steady, infinitely difficult climb back from the depths into which he had allowed himself to sink to a plane of life where, had June still lived, he would not have been ashamed to meet her eyes nor utterly unworthy to take her hand.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he ended. “But she would have wished it. I can never tell her now how I regret, never ask her forgiveness. And this was the only thing I could do to atone.”
Gillian’s eyes were very soft as she answered:
“I expect she knows, Dan, and is glad.”
After a moment she went on thoughtfully.
“It’s rather the same kind of feeling that has driven Magda into a sisterhood, I think—the desire to do something definite, something tangible, as a sort of reparation. And a woman is much more limited that way than a man.”
Storran’s mouth hardened. Any mention of Magda would bring that look of concentrated hardness into his face, and as the months went on, giving Gillian a closer insight into the man, she began to realise that he had never forgiven Magda for her share in the ruin of his life. On this point he was as hard as nether millstone. He even seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from the knowledge that she was paying, and paying heavily, for all the harm she had wrought.
It troubled Gillian—this incalculable hardness in Dan’s nature towards one woman. She found him kindly and tolerant in his outlook on life—with the understanding tolerance of the man who has dragged himself out of the pit by his own sheer force of will, and who, knowing the power of temptation, is ready to give a helping hand to others who may have fallen by the way. So that his relentlessness towards Magda was the more inexplicable.
More than once she tried to soften his attitude, tried to make him realise something of the conflicting influences both of temperament and environment which had helped to make Magda what she was. But he remained stubbornly unmoved.
“No punishment is too severe for a woman who has done what Magda Vallincourt has done. She has wrecked lives simply in order to gratify her vanity and insensate instinct for conquest.”
Gillian shook her head.
“No, you’re wrong. You won’t understand! It’s all that went before—her parents’ mistakes—that should be blamed for half she’s done. I think you’re very merciless, Dan.”
“Perhaps I am—in this case. Frankly, if I could lessen her punishment by lifting my little finger—I wouldn’t do it.”
Yet this same man when, as often happened, he took Gillian and Coppertop for a run into the country in his car, was as simple and considerate and kindly as a man could be. Coppertop adored him, and, as Gillian reflected, the love of children is rarely misplaced. Some instinct leads them to divine unfailingly which is gold and which dross.
The car was a recent acquisition. As Storran himself expressed it, rather bitterly: “Now that I can’t buy a ha’p’orth of happiness with the money, my luck has turned.” He explained to Gillian that after he had left England he had sold his farm in Devonshire, and that a lucky investment of the capital thus realised had turned him into a comparatively rich man.
“Even when I was making ducks and drakes of my life generally, I didn’t seem to make a mistake over money matters. If I played cards, I won; if I backed a horse, he romped in first; it I bought shares, they jumped up immediately.”
“What a pity!” replied Gillian ingenuously. “If only your financial affairs hadn’t prospered, you’d have had to settle down and work—instead of—of——”
“Playing the fool,” he supplemented. “No, I don’t suppose I should. I hadn’t learned—then—that work is the only panacea, the one big remedy.”
“And now?”
“I’ve learned a lot of things in the last two years,” quietly. “And I’m still learning.”
As the months went on, Dan’s friendship began to mean a good deal to Gillian. It had come into her life just at a time when she was intolerably lonely, and quite unconsciously she was learning to turn to him for advice on all the large and small affairs of daily life as they came cropping up.
She was infinitely glad of his counsel with regard to Coppertop, who was growing to the age when the want of a father—of a man’s broad outlook and a man’s restraining hand—became an acute lack in a boy’s life. And to Gillian, who had gallantly faced the world alone since the day when death had abruptly ended her “year of utter happiness,” it was inexpressibly sweet to be once more shielded and helped in all the big and little ways in which a man—even if he was only a staunch man-friend—can shield and help a woman.
It seemed as though Dan Storran always contrived to interpose his big person betwixt her and the sharp corners of life, and she began to wonder, with a faint, indefinable dread, what must become of their friendship when Magda returned to Friars’ Holm. Feeling as he did towards the dancer, it would be impossible for him to come there any more, and somehow a snatched hour here and there—a lunch together, or a motor-spin into the country—would be a very poor substitute for his almost daily visits to the old Queen Anne house tucked away behind its high walls at Hampstead.
Once she broached the subject to him rather diffidently.
“My dear”—he had somehow dropped into the use of the little term of endearment, and Gillian found that she liked it and knew that she would miss it if it were suddenly erased from his speech—“my dear, why cross bridges till we come to them? Perhaps, when the time comes, there’ll be no bridge to cross.”
Gillian glanced at him swiftly.
“Do you mean that she—that you’re feeling less bitter towards her, Dan?” she asked eagerly.
He smiled down at her whimsically.
“I don’t quite know. But I know one thing—it’s very difficult to be a lot with you and keep one’s anger strictly up to concert pitch.”
Gillian made no answer. She was too wise—with that intuitive wisdom of woman—to force the pace. If Dan were beginning to relent ever so little towards Magda—why, then, her two best friends might yet come together in comradeship and learn to forget the bitter past. The gentle hand of Time would be laid on old wounds and its touch would surely bring healing. But Gillian would no more have thought of trying to hasten matters than she would have tried to force open the close-curled petals of a flower in bud.
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