Read Ebook: The Lamp of Fate by Pedler Margaret

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Ebook has 1948 lines and 93779 words, and 39 pages

A uniformed nurse was standing in the doorway. At the sound of his curtly-spoken question she glanced at him with a certain contemplative curiosity in her eyes. They might have held surprise as well as curiosity had she not lately stood beside that huge, canopied bed upstairs, listening pitifully to a woman's secret fears and longings, unveiled in the delirium of pain.

"I know you sometimes wish you hadn't married me. . . . I'm not good enough. And Catherine hates me. Yes, she does, she does! And she'll make you hate me too! But you won't hate me when my baby comes, will you, Hugh? You want a little son . . . a little son . . ."

Nurse Maynard could hear again the weary, complaining voice, trailing off at last in the silence of exhaustion, and an impulse of indignation added a sharp edge to her tone as she responded to Hugh's query.

"Her ladyship is asking to see you, Sir Hugh. She ought to rest now, but she is too excited. She has been expecting you."

There was no mistaking the implied rebuke in the last sentence, and Hugh's face darkened.

"I'll come," he said, briefly, and followed the crisp starched figure up the stairs and into a half-darkened room, smelling faintly of antiseptics.

Vaguely the white counterpane outlined the slim figure of Diane upon the bed. The nurse raised the blind a little, and the light of the westering sun fell across the pillow, revealing a small, dark head which turned eagerly at the sound of Hugh's entrance.

"Hugh!" The voice from the bed came faintly.

Hugh looked down at his wife. Probably never had Diane looked more beautiful.

The little worldly, sophisticated expression common to her features had been temporarily obliterated by the holy suffering of motherhood, and the face of the "foreign dancing-woman," born and bred in a quarter of the world where virtue is a cheap commodity, was as pure and serene as the face of a Madonna.

She held out her hands to her husband, her lips curving into a smile that was all love and tenderness.

The lover in him sent him swiftly to her side, and as he drew her into his arms she let her head fall back against his shoulder with a tremulous sigh of infinite content.

And then, from the firelit corner of the room, came the sound of a feeble wailing. Hugh started as though stung, and his eyes left his wife's face and riveted themselves upon the figure in the low chair by the hearth--Virginie, rocking a little as she sat, and crooning a Breton lullaby to the baby in her arms.

In a moment remembrance rushed upon him, cutting in twain as though with a dividing sword this exquisite moment of reunion with his wife. Insensibly his arms relaxed their clasp of the frail body they held, and Diane, sensing their slackening, looked up startled and disconcerted.

Her eyes followed the direction of his glance, then, coming back to his face, searched it wildly. Instantly she knew the meaning of that suddenly limp clasp and all that it implied.

He looked down at her--at the frightened eyes, the lovely face fined by recent pain, and all his instinct was to reassure and comfort her. But something held him back. The old, narrow creed in which he had been reared, whose shackles he had broken through when he had recklessly followed the bidding of his heart and married Diane, was once more mastering him--bidding him resist the natural human impulses of love and kindliness evoked by his wife's appeal.

Again he seemed to hear Catherine's accusing tones, and the fanatical strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong. He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement. He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed. In his light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot which had shone in Catherine's.

"No," he said. "I am not angry that the child is a girl. I accept it as a just retribution."

No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted, from woman's supreme conflict with death. But the fanatic loses sight of normal values, and Hugh, obsessed by his newly conceived idea of atoning for the sin of his marriage, was utterly oblivious of the enormity of his conduct as viewed through unbiased eyes.

The woman who had just fought her way through the Valley of the Shadow stared at him uncomprehendingly.

"Retribution?" she repeated blankly.

"For my marriage--our marriage."

Diane's breath came faster.

"Yes, I've said that. I've said it because I wanted to think it," he returned remorselessly, "not because I really thought it."

Diane dragged herself up on to her elbow.

"I don't understand. You've not changed?" Then, as he made no answer: "Hugh, you're frightening me! What do you mean? What has Catherine been saying to you?"

Her voice rose excitedly. A patch of feverish colour appeared on either cheek. Old Virginie sprung up from her chair by the fire, alarmed.

"You excite madame!"

Hugh turned to leave the room.

"We'll discuss this another time, Diane," he said.

Diane moved her head fretfully.

"No. Now--now! Don't go! Hugh!"

Her voice rose almost to a scream and simultaneously the nurse came hurrying in from the adjoining room. She threw one glance at the patient, huddled flushed and excited against the pillows, then without more ado she marched up to Hugh and, taking him by the shoulders with her small, capable hands, she pushed him out of the room.

The next moment the door closed behind her, and Hugh found himself standing alone on the landing outside it.

Although the scene with her husband did not kill Diane, it went very near it. For some time she was dangerously ill, but at last the combined efforts of doctor and nurse restored her once more to a frail hold upon life, and the resiliency of youth accomplished the rest.

Curiously enough, the remembrance of Hugh's brief visit to her bedside held for her no force of reality. When the fever which had ensued abated, she described the whole scene in detail to Virginie and the nurse as an evil dream which she had had--and pitifully they let her continue in this belief.

Even Hugh himself had been compelled, under protest, to take part in this deception. The doctor, a personal friend of his, had not minced matters.

"You've acted the part of an unmitigated coward, Vallincourt--salving your own fool conscience at your wife's expense. Even if you no longer love her--"

Jim Lancaster stared. In common with most medical men he was more or less used to the odd vagaries of human nature, but Hugh's attitude struck him as altogether incomprehensible.

"Then what in the name of thunder have you been getting at?" he demanded.

"I both love and hate her," declared Hugh wretchedly.

"That's rot," retorted the other. "It's impossible."

"It's not impossible."

Hugh rose and began pacing backwards and forwards. Lancaster's eyes rested on him thoughtfully. The man had altered during the last few weeks--altered incredibly. He was a stone lighter to start with, and his blond, clear-cut face had the worn look born of mental conflict. His eyes were red-rimmed as though from insufficient sleep.

"It's not impossible." Hugh paused in his restless pacing to and fro. "I love her because I can't help myself. I hate her because I ought never to have married her--never made a woman of her type the mother of my child."

"All mothers are sacred," suggested the doctor quietly.

Hugh seemed not to hear him.

"How long is this pretence to go on, Lancaster?" he demanded irritably.

"What pretence?"

"This pretence that nothing is changed--nothing altered--between my wife and myself?"

"For ever, I hope. So that, after all, there will have been no pretence."

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