Читать книгу The Lamp of Fate - Margaret Pedler - Страница 20

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With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came to a standstill at Friars’ Holm, the quaint old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired in north London.

Once within the high wall enclosing the old-world garden in which it stood, it was easy enough to imagine oneself a hundred miles from town. Fir and cedar sentinelled the house, and in the centre of the garden there was a lawn of wonderful old turf, hedged round in summer by a riot of roses so that it gleamed like a great square emerald set in a jewelled frame.

Magda entered the house and, crossing the cheerfully lit hall, threw open the door of a room whence issued the sound of someone—obviously a first-rate musician—playing the piano.

As she opened the door the twilight, shot by quivering spears of light from the fire’s dancing flames, seemed to rush out at her, bearing with it the mournful, heart-shaking music of some Russian melody. Magda uttered a soft, half-amused exclamation of impatience and switched on the lights.

“All in the dark, Davilof?” she asked in a practical tone of voice calculated to disintegrate any possible fabric of romance woven of firelight and fifths.

The flood of electric light revealed a large, lofty room, devoid of furniture except for a few comfortable chairs grouped together at one end of it, and for a magnificent grand piano at the other. The room appeared doubly large by reason of the fact that the whole of one wall was taken up by four immense panels of looking-glass, cleverly fitted together so that in effect the entire wall was composed of a single enormous mirror. It was in front of this mirror that Magda practised. The remaining three walls were hung with priceless old tapestry woven of sombre green and greys.

As she entered the room a man rose quickly from the piano and came forward to meet her. There was a kind of repressed eagerness in the action, as though he had been waiting with impatience for her coming.

He was a striking-looking man, tall, and built with the slender-limbed grace of a foreigner. Golden-brown hair, worn rather longer than fashion dictates, waved crisply over his head, and the moustache and small Vandyck beard which partially concealed the lower part of his face were of the same warmly golden colour.

The word “musician” was written all over him—in the supple, capable hands, in the careless stoop of his loosely knit shoulders, and, more than all, in the imaginative hazel eyes with their curious mixture of abstraction and fire. They rather suggested lightning playing over some dreaming pool.

Magda shook hands with him carelessly.

“We shall have to postpone the practice as I’m so late, Davilof,” she said. “I had a smash-up in the fog. My car ran into a bus—”

“And you are hurt?” Davilof broke in sharply, his voice edged with fear.

“No, no. I was stunned for a minute and then afterwards I fainted, but I’m quite intact otherwise.”

“You are sure—sure?”

“Quite.” Hearing the keen anxiety in his tone she smiled at him reassuringly and held out a friendly hand. “I’m all right—really, Antoine.”

He took the hand in both his.

“Thank God!” he said fervently.

Antoine Davilof had lived so long in England that he spoke without trace of accent, though he sometimes gave an unEnglish twist to the phrasing of a sentence, but his quick emotion and the simplicity with which he made no effort to conceal it stamped him unmistakably as a foreigner.

A little touched, Magda allowed her hand to remain in his.

“Why, Davilof!” She chided him laughingly. “You’re quite absurdly upset about it.”

“I could not have borne it if you had been hurt,” he declared vehemently. “You ought not to go about by yourself. It’s horrible to think of you—in a street accident—alone!”

“But I wasn’t alone. A man who was in the other half of the accident—the motor-bus half—played the good Samaritan and carried me into his house, which happened to be close by. He looked after me very well, I assure you.”

Davilof released her hand abruptly. His face darkened.

“And this man? Who was he?” he demanded jealously. “I hate to think of any man—a stranger—touching you.”

“Nonsense! Would you have preferred me to remain lying in the middle of the road?”

“You know I would not. But I’d rather some woman had looked after you. Do you know who the man was?”

“I did not—at first.”

“But you do now. Who was it?”

“No one you know, I think,” she answered provokingly. His eyes flashed.

“Why are you making a mystery about it?” he asked suspiciously. “You’re keeping something from me! Who was this man? Tell me his name.”

Magda froze.

“My dear Antoine! Why this air of high tragedy?” she said lightly. “And what on earth has it to do with you who the man was?”

“You know what it has to do with me——”

“With my accompanist?”—raising her brows delicately.

“No!”—with sudden violence—“With the man who loves you! I’m that—and you know it, Magda! Could I play for you as I do if I did not understand your every mood and emotion? You know I couldn’t! And then you ask what it matters to me when some unknown man has held you in his arms, carried you into his house—kissed you, perhaps, while you were unconscious!”—his imagination running suddenly riot.

“Stop! You’re going too far!” Magda checked him sharply. “You’re always telling me you love me. I don’t want to hear it.” She paused, then added cruelly: “I want you for playing my accompaniments, Davilof. That’s all. Do you understand?”

His eyes blazed. With a quick movement he stepped in front of her.

“I’m a man—as well as an accompanist,” he said hoarsely. “One day you’ll have to reckon with the man, Magda!”

There was a new, unaccustomed quality in his voice. Hitherto she had not taken his ardour very seriously. He was a Pole and a musician, with all the temperament that might be expected from such a combination, and she had let it go at that, pushing his love aside with the careless hand of a woman to whom the incense of men’s devotion has been so freely offered as to have become commonplace. But now the new ring of determination, of something unexpectedly dogged in his voice, poignantly recalled the warning uttered by Lady Arabella earlier in the day.

Magda’s nerve wavered. A momentary panic assailed her. Then she intuitively struck the right note.

“Ah, Davilof, don’t worry me now—not to-night!” she said appealingly. “I’m tired. It’s been a bit of a strain—the accident and—and——”

“Forgive me!” In a moment he was all penitence—overwhelmed with compunction. “Forget it! I’ve behaved like a brute. I ought to have seen that you were worn out.”

He was beside himself with remorse.

“It’s all right, Antoine.” She smiled forgiveness at him. “Only I felt—I felt I couldn’t stand any more to-night. I suppose it’s taken it out of me more than I knew—the shock, and fainting like that.”

“Of course it has. You ought to rest. I wish Mrs. Grey were in.”

“Is she not?”

“No. The maid told me she was out when I came, and she hasn’t returned yet.”

“She’s been held up by the fog, I expect,” answered Magda. “Never mind. I’ll sit here—in this big chair—and you shall switch off these glaring lights and play to me, Antoine. That will rest me better than anything.”

She was a little sorry for the man—trying to make up to him for the pain she knew she had inflicted a moment before, and there was a dangerous sweetness in her voice.

Davilof’s eyes kindled. He stooped swiftly and kissed her hand.

“You are too good to me!” he said huskily.

Then, while she lay back restfully in a chair which he heaped with cushions for her, he played to her, improvising as he played—slow, dreaming melodies that soothed and lulled but held always an undertone of passionate appeal. The man himself spoke in his music; his love pleaded with her in its soft, beseeching cadences.

But Magda failed to hear it. Her thoughts were elsewhere—back with the man who, that afternoon, had first rescued her and afterwards treated her with blunt candour that had been little less than brutal. She felt sore and resentful—smarting under the same dismayed sense of surprise and injustice as a child may feel who receives a blow instead of an anticipated caress.

Indulged and flattered by everyone with whom she came in contact, it had been like a slap in the face to find someone—more particularly someone of the masculine persuasion—who, far from bestowing the admiration and homage she had learned to look for as a right, quite openly regarded her with contemptuous disapproval—and made no bones about telling her so.

His indictment of her had left nothing to the imagination. She felt stunned, and, for the first time in her life, a little unwilling doubt of herself assaulted her. Was she really anything at all like the woman Michael Quarrington had pictured? A woman without heart or conscience—the “kind of woman he had no place for”?

She winced a little at the thought. It was strange how much she minded his opinion—the opinion of a man whom she had only met by chance and whom she was very unlikely ever to meet again. He himself had certainly evinced no anxiety to renew the acquaintance. And this, too, fretted her in some unaccountable way.

She could not analyse her own emotions. She felt hurt and angry and ashamed in the same breath—and all because an unknown man, an absolute stranger, had told her in no measured terms exactly what he thought of her!

Only—he was not really quite a stranger! He was the “Saint Michel” of her childhood days, the man with whom she had unconsciously compared those other men whom the passing years had brought into her life—and always to their disadvantage.

The first time she had seen him in the woods at Coverdale was the day when Hugh Vallincourt had beaten her; she had been smarting with the physical pain and humiliation of it. And now, this second time they had met, she had been once more forced to endure that strange and unaccustomed experience called pain. Only this time she felt as though her soul had been beaten, and it was Saint Michel himself who had scourged her.

The door at the far end of the room opened suddenly and a welcome voice broke cheerfully across the bitter current of her thoughts.

“Well, here I am at last! Has Magda arrived home yet?”

Davilof ceased playing abruptly and the speaker paused on the threshold of the room, peering into the dusk. Magda rose from her seat by the fire and switched on one of the electric burners.

“Yes, here I am,” she said. “Did you get held up by the fog, Gillian?”

The newcomer advanced into the circle of light. She was a small, slight woman, though the furs she was wearing served to conceal the slenderness of her figure. Someone had once said of her that “Mrs. Grey was a charming study in sepia.” The description was not inapt. Eyes and hair were brown as a beechnut, and a scattering of golden-brown freckles emphasised the warm tints of a skin as soft as velvet.

“Did I get held up?” she repeated. “My dear, I walked miles—miles, I tell you!—in that hideous fog. And then found I’d been walking entirely in the wrong direction! I fetched up somewhere down Notting Hill Gate way, and at last by the help of heaven and a policeman discovered the Tube station. So here I am. But if I could have come across a taxi I’d have been ready to buy it, I was so tired!”

“Poor dear!” Magda was duly sympathetic. “We’ll have some tea. You’ll stay, Davilof?”

“I think not, thanks. I’m dining out”—with a glance at his watch. “And I shan’t have too much time to get home and change as it is.”

Magda held out her hand.

“Good-bye, then. Thank you for keeping me company till Gillian came.”

There was a sudden sweetness of gratitude in the glance she threw at him which fired his blood. He caught her hand and carried it to his lips.

“The thanks are mine,” he said in a stifled voice. And swinging round on his heel he left the room abruptly, quite omitting to make his farewells to Mrs. Grey.

The latter looked across at Magda with a gleam of mirth in her brown eyes. Then she shook her head reprovingly.

“Will you never learn wisdom, Magda?” she asked, subsiding into a chair and extending a pair of neatly shod feet to the fire’s warmth.

Magda laughed a little.

“Well, it won’t be the fault of my friends if I don’t!” she returned ruefully. “Marraine expended a heap of eloquence over my misdeeds this afternoon.”

“Lady Arabella? I’m glad to hear it. Though she has about as much chance of producing any permanent result as the gentleman who occupied his leisure time in rolling a stone uphill.”

“Cat!” Magda made a small grimace at her. “Ah, here’s some tea!” Melrose, known among Magda’s friends as “the perfect butler,” had come noiselessly into the room and was arranging the tea paraphernalia with the reverential precision of one making preparation for some mystic rite. “Perhaps when you’ve had a cup you’ll feel more amiable—that is, if I give you lots of sugar.”

“What was the text of Lady Arabella’s homily?” inquired Gillian presently, as she sipped her tea.

“Oh, that boy, Kit Raynham,” replied Magda impatiently. “It appears I’m blighting his young prospects—his professional ones, I mean. Though I don’t quite see why an attack of calf-love for me should wreck his work as an architect!”

“I do—if he spends his time sketching ‘the Wielitzska’ in half a dozen different poses instead of making plans for a garden city.”

Magda smiled involuntarily.

“Does he do that?” she said. “But how ridiculous of him!”

“It’s merely indicative of his state of mind,” returned Gillian. She gazed meditatively into the fire. “You know, Magda, I think it will mean the end of our friendship when Coppertop reaches years of discretion.”

Coppertop was Gillian’s small son, a young person of seven, who owed his cognomen to the crop of flaming red curls which adorned his round button of a head.

Magda laughed.

“Pouf! By the time that happens I shall be quite old—and harmless.”

Gillian shook her head.

“Your type is never harmless, my dear. Unless you fall in love, you’ll be an unexploded mine till the day of your death.”

“That nearly occurred to-day, by the way,” vouchsafed Magda tranquilly. “In which case,”—smiling—“you’d have been spared any further anxiety on Coppertop’s account.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Gillian, startled.

“I mean that I’ve had an adventure this afternoon. We got smashed up in the fog.”

“Oh, my dear! How dreadful! How did it happen?”

“Something collided with the car and shot us bang into a motor-bus, and then, almost at the same moment, something else charged into us from behind. So there was a pretty fair mix-up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before! Was anyone badly hurt? And how did you get home?” Gillian’s questions poured out excitedly.

“No, no one was badly hurt. I got a blow on the head, and fainted. So a man who’d been inside the bus we ran into performed the rescuing stunt. His house was close by, and he carried me in there and proceeded to dose me with sal volatile first and tea afterwards. He wound up by presenting me with an unvarnished summary of his opinion of the likes of me.”

There was an unwontedly hard note in Magda’s voice as she detailed the afternoon’s events, and Gillian glanced at her sharply.

“I don’t understand. Was he a strait-laced prig who disapproved of dancing, do you mean?”

“Nothing of the sort. He had a most comprehensive appreciation of the art of dancing. His disapproval was entirely concentrated on me—personally.”

“But how could it be—since he didn’t know you?”

Magda gave a little grin.

“You mean it would have been quite comprehensible if he had known me?” she observed ironically.

The other laughed.

“Don’t be so provoking! You know perfectly well what I meant! You deserve that I should answer ‘yes’ to that question.”

“Do, if you like.”

“I would—only I happen to know you a good deal better than you know yourself.”

“What do you know about me, then, that I don’t?”

Gillian’s nice brown eyes smiled across at her.

“I know that, somewhere inside you, you’ve got the capacity for being as sweet and kind and tender and self-sacrificing as any woman living—if only something would happen to make it worth while. I wish—I wish to heaven you’d fall in love!”

“I’m not likely to. I’m in love with my art. It gives you a better return than love for any man.”

“No,” answered Gillian quietly. “No. You’re wrong. Tony died when we’d only been married a year. But that year was worth the whole rest of life put together. And—I’ve got Coppertop.”

Magda leaned forward suddenly and kissed her.

“Dear Gillyflower!” she said. “I’m so glad you feel like that—bless you! I wish I could. But I never shall. I was soured in the making, I think”—laughing rather forlornly. “I don’t trust love. It’s the thing that hurts and tortures and breaks a woman—as my mother was hurt and tortured and broken.” She paused. “No, preserve me from falling in love!” she added more lightly. “‘A Loaf of Bread, and Thou beside me in the Wilderness’ doesn’t appeal to me in the least.”

“It will one day,” retorted Gillian oracularly. “In the meantime you might go on telling me about the man who fished you out of the smash. Was he young? And good-looking? Perhaps he is destined to be your fate.”

“He was rather over thirty, I should think. And good-looking—quite. But he ‘hates my type of woman,’ you’ll be interested to know. So that you can put your high hopes back on the top shelf again.”

“Not at all,” declared Gillian briskly. “There’s nothing like beginning with a little aversion.”

Magda smiled reminiscently.

“If you’d been present at our interview, you’d realise that ‘a little aversion’ is a cloying euphemism for the feeling exhibited by my late preserver.”

“What was he like, then?”

“At first, because I wouldn’t take the sal volatile—you know how I detest the stuff!—and sit still where he’d put me like a good little girl, he ordered me about as though I were a child of six. He absolutely bullied me! Then it apparently occurred to him to take my moral welfare in hand, and I should judge he considered that Jezebel and Delilah were positively provincial in their methods as compared with me.”

“Nonsense! If he didn’t know you, why should he suppose himself competent to form any opinion about you at all—good, bad, or indifferent?”

“I don’t know,” replied Magda slowly. Then, speaking with sudden defiance: “Yes, I do know! A pal of his had—had cared about me some time or other, and I’d turned him down. That’s why.”

“Oh, Magda!” There was both reproach and understanding in Gillian’s voice.

Magda shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, if he wanted to pay off old scores on his pal’s behalf, he succeeded,” she said mirthlessly.

Gillian looked at her in surprise. She had never seen Magda quite like this before; her sombre eyes held a curious strained look like those of some wild thing of the forest caught in a trap and in pain.

“And you don’t know who he was—I mean the man who came to your help and then lectured you?”

“Yes, I do. It was Michael Quarrington, the artist.”

“Michael Quarrington? Why, he has the reputation of being a most charming man!”

Magda stared into the fire.

“I dare say he might have a great deal of charm if he cared to exert it. Apparently, however, he didn’t think I was worth the effort.”