“You shan’t do it!”
When first Magda had bruited her idea of rejoining the sisterhood—the decision which had crystallised out of the long black hours of the night of her return to Friars’ Holm—Gillian had merely laughed the notion aside, attaching little importance to it. But now, a week later, when Magda reverted to the subject with a certain purposeful definiteness, she grew suddenly frightened.
“Do you want to throw away every possibility of happiness?” she demanded indignantly. “Just because Michael isn’t here, waiting for you on the doorstep, so to speak, you decide to rush off and make it impossible for him ever to see you again!”
Magda kept her head bent, refusing to meet the other’s eyes.
“I don’t want him to see me now,” she said shrinkingly. “I’m not—not the Magda he knew any longer.”
“That’s an absurd exaggeration. You’re not looking very well, that’s all,” retorted Gillian with her usual practical common sense. “You can’t suppose that would make any difference to Michael! It didn’t make any to me. I’m only too glad to have you back at any price!”
Magda’s faint responsive smile was touched with that bitter knowledge which is the heritage of the woman who has been much loved for her beauty.
“You’re a woman, Gillyflower,” she said. “And Michael is not only a man—but an artist. Men don’t want you when the bloom has been brushed off. And you know how Michael worships beauty! He’s bound to—being an artist.”
“I think you’re morbidly self-conscious,” declared Gillian firmly. “I suppose it’s the result of being out of the world for so long. You’ve lost all sense of proportion. You’re quite lovely enough, now, to satisfy most people. You only look rather tired and worn out.”
But Magda’s face remained clouded.
“But even that isn’t—all,” she answered. “It’s—oh, it’s a heap of things! Somehow I thought when I came back I should see the road clear. But it isn’t. It’s all shadowed—just as it was before. I thought I should have so much to give Michael now. And I haven’t anything. I don’t think I ever quite realised before that, however much you try to atone, you can never undo the harm you’ve done. But I’ve had time to think things out while I was with the Sisters.”
“And if you go back to them you’ll have time to do nothing but think for the rest of your life!” flashed back Gillian.
“Oh, no!” Magda spoke quickly. “I shouldn’t return under a vow of penitence. There are working sisters attached to the community who go about amongst the sick and poor in the slums. I should join as a working sister if I went back.”
Gillian stared at her in amazement. Magda devoting her life to good works seemed altogether out of the picture! She began to feel that the whole affair was getting too complicated for her to handle, and as usual, when in a difficulty, she put the matter up to Lady Arabella.
The latter, with her accumulated wisdom of seventy years, saw more clearly than the younger woman, although even she hardly understood that sense of the deadly emptiness and failure of her life which had overwhelmed Magda since her return to Friars’ Holm. But the old woman realised that she had passed through a long period of strain, and that, now the reaction had come, the Vallincourt blood in her might drive her into almost any extreme of conduct.
“If only Michael were on the spot!” she burst out irritably. “I own I’m disappointed in the man! I was so sure six months would bring him to his senses.”
“I know,” assented Gillian miserably. “It’s—it’s—the most hopeless state of things imaginable!”
Lady Arabella’s interview with Magda herself proved unproductive.
“Have you written to Michael?” she demanded.
“Written to him?” A flash of the old defiant spirit sounded in Magda’s voice. “No, nor shall I.”
“Don’t be a fool, child. He’s probably learned something during this last twelve months—as well as you. Don’t let pride get in your way now.”
“It’s not pride. Marraine, I never knew—I never thought——Look at me! What have I to give Michael now? Have you forgotten that he’s an artist and that beauty means everything to him?”
“Well?”
“‘Well!’” Magda held out her hands. “Can’t you see that I’m changed? . . . Michael wouldn’t want me to pose for him as Circe now!”
“He wanted you for a wife—not a model, my dear. You can buy models at so much the hour.”
“Oh, Marraine! You won’t understand——”
Lady Arabella took the slender, work-roughened hands in hers.
“Perhaps I understand better than you think,” she said quietly. “There are other ways of assessing life than merely in terms of beauty. And you can believe this, too: you’ve lost nothing from the point of view of looks that a few months of normal healthy life won’t set right. Moreover, if you’d grown as plain as a pikestaff, I don’t think Michael would care twopence! He’s an artist, I know. He can’t help that, but he’s a man first. And he’s a man who knows how to love. Promise me one thing,” she went on insistently. “Promise that you’ll do nothing definite—yet. Not, at least, without consulting me.”
Magda hesitated.
“Very well. I’ll do nothing without—telling you—first.”
That was the utmost concession she would make, and with that her godmother had to be content.
The same evening a letter in Lady Arabella’s spirited, angular handwriting sped on its way to Paris.
“If you’re not absolutely determined to ruin both your own and Magda’s lives, my dear Michael, put your pride and your ridiculous principles in your pocket and come back to England. I don’t happen to be a grandmother, but I’m quite old enough for the job, so you might pay my advice due respect by taking it.”
“I thought I was shelved altogether.”
Thus Dan Storran, rather crossly, when, a day or two later, he met Gillian by appointment for lunch at their favourite little restaurant in Soho. It was the first time she had been able to fix up a meeting with him since Magda’s return, as naturally his customary visits to Friars’ Holm were out of the question now.
“Well, you expected my time to be pretty well occupied the first week or two after Magda came back, didn’t you?” countered Gillian.
She smiled as she spoke and proceeded leisurely to draw off her gloves, while Storran signalled to a waiter.
She was really very glad to see him again. There was something so solid and dependable about him, and she felt it would be very comforting to confide in him her anxieties concerning Magda. Not that she anticipated he would have any particular compassion to bestow upon the latter. But she was femininely aware that inasmuch as Magda’s affairs were disturbing her peace of mind, he would listen to them with sympathetic attention and probably, out of the depths of his man’s consciousness, produce some quite sound and serviceable advice.
Being a wise woman, however, she did not launch out into immediate explanation, but waited for him to work off his own individual grumble at not having seen her recently, trusting to the perfectly cooked little lunch to exercise a tranquillising effect.
It was not until they had reached the cigarette and coffee stage of the proceedings that she allowed a small, well-considered sigh to escape her and drift away into the silence that had fallen between them. Storran glanced across at her with suddenly observant eyes.
“What is it?” he asked quickly. “You look worried. Are you?”
She nodded silently.
“And here I’ve been grousing away about my own affairs all the time! Why didn’t you stop me?”
“You know I’m interested in your affairs.”
“And I’m interested in yours. What’s bothering you, Gillian? Tell me.”
“Magda,” said Gillian simply.
She was rather surprised to observe that Dan’s face did not, as usual, darken at the mere mention of Magda’s name.
“I saw her the other day,” he said quickly. “I was in the Park and she drove by.”
Gillian felt that there was something more to come. She waited in silence.
“She has altered very much,” he went on bluntly. Then, after a moment: “I felt—sorry for her.”
“You did, Dan?” Gillian’s face lit up. “I’m glad. I’ve always hated your being so down on her.”
With an abrupt movement he jabbed the glowing stub of his cigarette on to an ash-tray, pressing it down until it went out. Then, taking out his case, he lit another before replying.
“I shan’t be ‘down on her’ any more,” he said at last. “I never guessed she’d felt things—like that.”
“No. No one did. I don’t suppose even Magda herself knew she could ever go through all she has done just for an ideal.”
Then very quietly, very simply and touchingly, she told him the story of all that had happened, of Magda’s final intention of becoming a working member of the sisterhood, and of Lady Arabella’s letter summoning Michael back to England.
“But even when he comes,” added Gillian, “unless he is very careful—unless he loves her in the biggest way a man can love, so that nothing else matters, he’ll lose her. He’ll have to convince her that she means just that to him.”
Storran was silent for a long time, and when at last he spoke it was with an obvious effort.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s something you don’t know. Perhaps when I’ve told you, you won’t have anything more to say to me—I don’t know.”
Gillian opened her lips in quick disclaimer, but he motioned her to be silent.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait till you’ve heard what I have to say. You think, and Magda thinks, that June died of a broken heart—at least, that the shock of all that miserable business down at Stockleigh helped to kill her.”
“Yes.” Gillian assented mechanically when he paused.
“I thought so, too, once. It was what June’s sister told me—told everyone. But it wasn’t true. She believed it, I know—probably believes it to this day. But, thank God, it wasn’t true!”
“How can you tell? All that strain and heart-break just at a time when she wasn’t strong. Oh, Dan! We can never be sure—sure!”
“I am sure. Quite sure,” he said steadily. “When I came to my senses out there in ‘Frisco, I couldn’t rest under that letter from June’s sister. It burned into me like a red-hot iron. I was half-mad with pain, I think. I wrote to the doctor who had attended her, but I got no answer. Then I sailed for England, determined to find and see the man for myself. I found him—my letter had miscarried somehow—and he told me that June could not have lived. There were certain complications in her case which made it impossible. In fact, if she had been so happy that she had longed to live—and tried to—it would only have made it harder for her, a rougher journey to travel. As it was, she went easily, without fighting death—letting go, without any effort, her hold on life.”
He ceased, and after a moment’s silence Gillian spoke in strained, horror-stricken tones.
“And you never told us! Oh! It was cruel of you, Dan! You would have spared Magda an infinity of self-reproach!”
“I didn’t want to spare her. I left her in ignorance on purpose. I wanted her to be punished—to suffer as she had made me suffer.”
There were tears in Gillian’s eyes. It was terrible to her that Dan could be so bitter—so vengefully cruel. Yet she recognised that it had been but the natural outcome of the man’s primitive nature to pay back good for good and evil for evil.
“Then why do you tell me now?” she asked at last.
“Why—because you’ve beaten me—you with your sweetness and courage and tolerance. You’ve taught me that retribution and punishment are best left in—more merciful Hands than ours.”
Gillian’s hand went out to meet his.
“Oh, Dan, I’m so glad!” she said simply.
He kept her hand in his a moment, then released it gently.
“Well, you can tell her now,” he said awkwardly.
“I?” Gillian smiled a little. “No. I want you to tell her. Don’t you see, Dan”—as she sensed his impulse to refuse—“it will make all the difference in Magda if you and she are—are square with each other? She’s overweighted. She’s been carrying a bigger burden than she can bear. Michael comes first, of course, but there’s been her treatment of you, as well. June, too. And—and other things. And it’s crushing her. . . . No, you must tell her.”
“I will—if you say I must. But she won’t forgive me easily.”
“I think she will. I think she’ll understand just what made you do it. So now we’ll go back to Friars’ Holm together.”
An hour later Storran came slowly downstairs from the little room where he and Magda had met again for the first time since that moonlight night at Stockleigh—met, not as lovers, but as a man and woman who have each sinned and each learned, out of their sinning, how to pardon and forgive.
Storran was very quiet and grave when presently he found himself alone with Gillian.
“We men will never understand women,” he said. “There’s an angel hidden away somewhere in every one of you.” His mouth curved into a smile, half-sad, half-whimsical. “I’ve just found Magda’s.”
Lady Arabella and Gillian, both feeling rather like conspirators, waited anxiously for a reply to the former’s letter to Quarrington. But none came. The time slipped by until a fortnight had elapsed, and with the passage of each day their hearts sank lower.
Neither of them believed that Michael would have utterly disregarded the letter, had he received it, but they feared that it might have miscarried, or that he might be travelling and so not receive it in time to prevent Magda’s carrying out her avowed intention of becoming a working member of the sisterhood.
Even though she knew now that at least June Storran’s death need no longer be added to her account, she still adhered to her decision. As she had told Dan with a weary simplicity: “I’m glad. But it won’t make any difference—to Michael and me. Too much water has run under the bridge. Love that is dead doesn’t come to life again.”
Each day was hardening her resolve, and both Lady Arabella and Gillian—those two whose unselfish happiness was bound up in her own—were beginning to realise that it would be a race against time if she was to be saved from taking a step that would divide her from Michael as long as they both should live.
At the end of a fortnight Gillian, driven to desperation, despatched a telegram to his Paris address: “Did you receive communication from Lady Arabella?” But it shared the fate of the letter, failing to elicit any reply. She allowed sufficient time to elapse to cover any ordinary delay in transit, then, unknown to Magda, taxied down to the house in Park Lane.
“I want you to invite Magda to stay with you, please,” she informed Lady Arabella abruptly.
“Of course I will,” she replied. “But why? You’ve got a reason.”
Gillian nodded.
“Yes,” she acknowledged quietly. “I’m going to Paris—to find Michael.”
Lady Arabella, whose high spirits had wilted a little in the face of the double disappointment regarding any answer from Quarrington, beamed satisfaction.
“You blessed child!” she exclaimed. “I’d have gone myself, but my old body is so stiff with rheumatism that I don’t believe they’d get me on board the boat except in an ambulance!”
“Well, I’m going,” said Gillian. “Only the point is, Magda mustn’t know. If she thought I was going off in pursuit of Michael I believe she’d lock me up in the cellar. She intends never to let him see her again. Melrose will manage about the letters, and somehow you’ve got to prevent Magda from coming to Friars’ Holm and finding out that I’m not there.”
“I’ll take her away with me,” declared Lady Arabella. “Rheumatism—Harrogate. It’s quite simple.”
Gillian heaved a sigh of relief.
“Yes. That would be a good plan,” she agreed. “Then I’d let you know when we should arrive—”
“‘We?’”
“Michael and I. I’m not coming back without him. And you could bring Magda straight back to town with you.”
Lady Arabella’s keen old eyes searched her face.
“You sound very certain of success. Supposing you find Michael still unforgiving—and he refuses to return with you?”
“I believe in Michael,” replied Gillian steadily. “He’s made mistakes. People in love do. But when he knows all that Magda has endured—for his sake, really—why, he’ll come back. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know, my dear. I was sure he would come back within six months. But, you see, I was wrong. Men are kittle cattle—and often very slow to arrive at the intrinsic value and significance of things. A woman jumps to it while a man is crawling round on his hands and knees in the dark, looking for it with a match.”
Gillian laughed and got up to go, and Lady Arabella—whose rheumatism was quite real at the moment—rose rather painfully and hobbled down the room beside her, her thin, delicate old hand resting on the silver knob of a tall, ebony walking-stick.
“Now, remember,” urged Gillian. “Magda mustn’t have the least suspicion Michael may be coming back—or she’d be off into her slums before you could stop her. Whatever happens, you’ve got to prevent her rushing back to the Sisters of Penitence.”
“Only over my dead body, my dear,” Lady Arabella assured her determinedly. “She shan’t go any other way.”
So Gillian returned to Friars’ Holm bearing with her a note from Lady Arabella in which she asked her god-daughter to pay her a visit. In it, however, the wily old lady made no mention of her further idea of going to Harrogate, lest it should militate against an acceptance of the invitation. Magda demurred a little at first, but Gillian, suddenly endowed with diplomacy worthy of a Machiavelli, pointed out that if she really had any intention of ultimately withdrawing into a community the least she could do was to give her godmother the happiness of spending a few days with her.
“She will only urge me to give up the idea all the time,” protested Magda. “And I’ve quite made up my mind. The sooner I can get away from—from everything”—looking round her with desperate, haunted eyes—“the better it will be.”
Gillian’s impulse to combat her decision to rejoin the sisterhood died on her lips stillborn. It was useless to argue the matter. There was only one person in the world who could save Magda from herself, and that was Michael. The main point was to concentrate on getting him back to England, rather than waste her energies upon what she knew beforehand must prove a fruitless argument.
“I’ll go to Marraine for a couple of nights, anyway,” said Magda at last. “After that, I want to make arrangements for my reception into the sisterhood.”
Gillian returned no answer. She felt her heart contract at the quiet decision in Magda’s voice, but she pinned her faith on Lady Arabella’s ability to hold her, somehow, till she herself had accomplished her errand to Paris.
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