The Lamp of Fate

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THE LAMP OF FATE


By Margaret Pedler


Then to the rolling Heav'n itself I cried,
Asking, "What Lamp of Destiny to guide
Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?"
And--"A blind Understanding!" Heaven replied.
The "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam.


To AUDREY HEATH

DEAR AUDREY: I always feel that you have played the part of Fairy
Godmother in a very special and delightful way to all my stories, and
in particular to this one, the plot of which I outlined to you one
afternoon in an old summer-house. So will you let me dedicate it to you?
Yours always,

MARGARET PEDLER.





THE LAMP OF FATE




PART ONE



CHAPTER I

THE NINTH GENERATION

The house was very silent. An odour of disinfectants pervaded the
atmosphere. Upstairs hushed, swift steps moved to and fro.

Hugh Vallincourt stood at the window of his study, staring out with
unseeing eyes at the smooth, shaven lawns and well-kept paths with their
background of leafless trees. It seemed to him that he had been standing
thus for hours, waiting--waiting for someone to come and tell him that a
son and heir was born to him.

He never doubted that it would be a son. By some freak of chance
the first-born of the Vallincourts of Coverdale had been, for eight
successive generations, a boy. Indeed, by this time, the thing had
become so much a habit that no doubts or apprehensions concerning the
sex of the eldest child were ever entertained. It was accepted as a
foregone conclusion, and in the eyes of the family there was a certain
gratifying propriety about such regularity. It was like a hall-mark of
heavenly approval.

Hugh Vallincourt, therefore, was conscious at this critical moment of
no questionings on that particular score. He was merely a prey to the
normal tremors and agitations of a husband and prospective father.

For an ageless period, it seemed to him, his thoughts had clung about
that upstairs room where his wife lay battling for her own life and
another's. Suddenly they swung back to the time, a year ago, when he
had first met her--an elusive feminine thing still reckoning her age in
teens--beneath the glorious blue and gold canopy of the skies of Italy.

Their meeting and brief courtship had been pure romance--romance such
as is bred in that land of mellow warmth and colour, where the flower of
passion sometimes buds and blooms within the span of a single day.

In like manner had sprung to life the love between Hugh Vallincourt
and Diane Wielitzska, and rarely has the web of love enmeshed two more
dissimilar and ill-matched people--Hugh, a man of seven-and-thirty, the
strict and somewhat self-conscious head of a conspicuously devout old
English family, and Diane, a beautiful dancer of mixed origin, the
illegitimate offspring of a Russian grand-duke and of a French artist's
model of the Latin Quarter.

The three dread Sisters who determine the fate of men must have laughed
amongst themselves at such an obvious mismating, knowing well how
inevitably it would tangle the threads of many other lives than the two
immediately concerned.

Vallincourt had been brought up on severely conventional lines, reared
in the narrow tenets of a family whose salient characteristics were
an overweening pride of race and a religious zeal amounting almost to
fanaticism, while Diane had had no up-bringing worth speaking of. As for
religious views, she hadn't any.

Yet neither the one nor the other had counted in the scale when the
crucial moment came.

Perhaps it was by way of an ironical set-off against his environment
that Fate had dowered Hugh with his crop of ruddy hair--and with the
ardent temperament which usually accompanies the type. Be that as it
may, he was swept completely off his feet by the dancer's magic beauty.
The habits and training of a lifetime went by the board, and nothing
was allowed to impede the swift (not to say violent) course of his
love-making. Within a month from the day of their first meeting, he and
Diane were man and wife.

The consequences were almost inevitable, and Hugh found that his married
life speedily resolved itself into an endless struggle between the
dictates of inclination and conscience. Everything that was man in him
responded passionately to the appeal and charm of Diane's personality,
whilst everything that was narrow and censorious disapproved her total
inability to conform to the ingrained prejudices of the Vallincourts.

Not that Diane was in any sense of the word a bad woman. She was merely
beautiful and irresponsible--a typical _cigale_ of the stage--lovable
and kind-hearted and pagan, and possessing but the haziest notions of
self-control and self-discipline. Even so, left to themselves, husband
and wife might ultimately have found the road to happiness across the
bridge of their great love for one another.

But such freedom was denied them. Always at Hugh's elbow stood his
sister, Catherine, a rigidly austere woman, in herself an epitome of all
that Vallincourts had ever stood for.

Since the death of their parents, twenty years previously, Catherine had
shared her brother's home, managing his house--and, on the strength of
her four years' seniority in age, himself as well--with an iron hand.
Nor had she seen fit to relinquish the reins of government when he
married.

Privately, Hugh had hoped she might consider the propriety of
withdrawing to the dower house attached to the Coverdale estates, but if
the idea had occurred to her, she had never given it utterance, and Hugh
himself had lacked the courage to propose such an innovation.

So it followed that Catherine was ever at hand to criticise and condemn.
She disapproved of her brother's marriage wholly and consistently. In
her eyes, he had committed an unpardonable sin in allying himself with
Diane Wielitzska. It was his duty to have married a woman of the type
conventionally termed "good," whose blood--and religious outlook--were
alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect,
she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic
disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving,
butterfly nature with an aloofly puritanical disdain.

Amid the glacial atmosphere of disapproval into which marriage had
thrust her, Diane found her only solace in Virginie, a devoted French
servant who had formerly been her nurse, and who literally worshipped
the ground she walked on. Conversely, Virginie's attitude towards Miss
Vallincourt was one of frank hostility. And deep in the hearts of
both Diane and Virginie lurked a confirmed belief that the birth of a
child--a son--would serve to bring about a better understanding between
husband and wife, and in the end assure Diane her rightful place as
mistress of the house.

"_Vois-tu_, Virginie," the latter would say hopefully. "When I have a
little baby, I shall have done my duty as the wife of a great
English milord. Even Miss Catherine will no longer regard me as of no
importance."

And Virginie would reply with infinite satisfaction:

"Of a certainty, when madame has a little son, Ma'moiselle Catherine
will be returned to her place."

And now at last the great moment had arrived, and upstairs Catherine and
Virginie were in attendance--both ousted from what each considered her
own rightful place of authority by a slim, capable, and apparently quite
unconcerned piece of femininity equipped against rebellion in all the
starched panoply of a nurse's uniform, while downstairs Hugh stared
dumbly out at the frosted lawns, with their background of bare, brown
trees swaying to the wind from the north.

The door behind him opened suddenly. Hugh whirled round. He was a
tall man with a certain rather formal air of stateliness about him,
a suggestion of the _grand seigneur_, and the unwontedly impulsive
movement was significant of the strain under which he was labouring.

Catherine was standing on the threshold of the room with something in
her arms--something almost indistinguishable amid the downy, fleecy
froth of whiteness amid which it lay.

Hugh was conscious of a new and strange sensation deep down inside
himself. He felt rather as though all the blood in his body had rushed
to one place--somewhere in the middle of it--and were pounding there
against his ribs.

He tried to speak, failed, then instinctively stretched out his arms for
the tiny, orris-scented bundle which Catherine carried.

The next thing of which he was conscious was Catherine's voice as she
placed his child in his arms--very quiet, yet rasping across the tender
silence of the room like a file.

"Here, Hugh, is the living seal which God Himself has set upon the sin
of your marriage."

Hugh's eyes, bent upon the pink, crumpled features of the scrap of
humanity nestled amid the bunchy whiteness in his arms, sought his
sister's face. It was a thin, hard face, sharply cut like carved ivory;
the eyes a light, cold blue, ablaze with hostility; the pale obstinate
lips, usually folded so impassively one above the other, working
spasmodically.

For a moment brother and sister stared at each other in silence. Then,
all at once, Catherine's rigidly enforced composure snapped.

"A girl child, Hugh!" she jeered violently. "A _girl_--when you prayed
for a boy!"

"A girl?"

Hugh stared stupidly at the babe in his arms.

"Ay, a girl!" taunted Catherine, her voice cracking with rising
hysteria. "_A girl!_ . . . For eight generations the first-born has been
a son. And the ninth is a girl! The daughter of a foreign dancing-woman!
. . . God has indeed taken your punishment into His own Hands!"



CHAPTER II

THE WIDENING GULF

The birth of a daughter came upon Hugh in the light of an almost
overwhelming shock. He was quite silent when, in response to Catherine's
imperative gesture, he surrendered the child into her arms once more.
As she took it from him he noticed that those thin, angular arms of hers
seemed to close round the little swaddled body in an almost jealously
possessive clasp. But there was none of the tender possessiveness of
love about it. In some oddly repugnant way it reminded him of the motion
of a bird of prey at last gripping triumphantly in its talons a victim
that has hitherto eluded pursuit.

He turned back dully to his contemplation of the wintry garden, nor, in
his absorption, did he hear the whimpering cry--almost of protest--that
issued from the lips of his first-born as Catherine bore the child away.

For a space it seemed as though his mind were a blank, every thought and
feeling wiped out of it by the stupendous, nullifying fact that his wife
had given birth to a daughter. Then, with a rush as torturing as the
return of blood to benumbed limbs, emotions crowded in upon him.

Catherine's incessant denunciations of his "sin" in marrying Diane
Wielitzska--poured upon him without stint throughout this first year of
his marriage--seemed to din in his ears anew. Such phrases as "selling
your soul," "putting a woman of that type in our sainted mother's
place," "mingling the blood of a foreign dancing-woman with our own,"
jangled against each other in his mind.

Had he really been guilty of a sin against his conscience--satisfied his
desires irrespective of all sense of duty?

He began to think he had, and to wonder in a disturbed fashion if God
thought so too. What was it Catherine had said? _"God has indeed taken
your punishment into His own Hands."_

Hugh was only too well aware of the facts which gave the speech its
trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of
an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother
to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of
succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert
Vallincourt, a cousin--a gay and debonair young rake of much charm of
manner and equal absence of virtue. From both Catherine's and Hugh's
point of view he was the last man in the world fitted to become the head
of the family. Hence the eagerness with which they had anticipated the
arrival of a son and heir.

And now, prompted by Catherine's bitter taunt, the birth of a daughter
as his first-born--the first happening of the kind for eight successive
generations--appeared to Hugh in the light of a direct manifestation of
God's intention that no son born of Diane Wielitzska should be dowered
with such influence as the heir to the Vallincourts must necessarily
wield.

Better, even, that the title and estates should go to Rupert! Bad as
his reputation might be, good blood ran in his veins on either side--an
inherited tradition of right-doing which was bound to assert itself in
succeeding generations. Whereas in the offspring of Diane heaven alone
knew what hidden inherited tendencies towards evil might lie fallow, to
develop later and work incalculable mischief in the world.

Hugh felt crushed by the unexpected blow which had befallen him. Since
his marriage, he had opposed a forced indifference to his sister's
irreconcilable attitude, finding compensation in the glowing moments of
his passion for Diane. Nevertheless--since living in an atmosphere of
disapproval tends to fray the strongest nerves--his temper had worn a
little fine beneath the strain; and with Diane's faults and failings
thrust continually on his notice he had unconsciously grown more
critical of her.

And now, all at once, it seemed as though scales had been torn from his
eyes. He saw his marriage for the first time from the same standpoint as
Catherine saw it, and in the unlooked-for birth of a daughter he thought
he recognised the Hand of God, sternly uprooting his most cherished
hopes and minimising, as much as possible, the inevitable evil
consequences of his weakness in marrying Diane.

He was conscious of a rising feeling of resentment against his wife.
Words from an old Book flashed into his mind: _"The woman tempted me."_

With the immediate instinct of a weak nature--the very narrowness
and rigidity of his views was a manifestation of weakness, had he but
realised it--he was already looking for someone with whom to share the
blame for his lapse from the Vallincourt standard of conduct, and in
that handful of wayward charm, red lips, and soft, beguiling eyes which
was Diane he found what he sought.



Again the room door opened. This time, instead of putting a longed-for
end to a blank period of suspense, the little quiet clicking of the
latch cut almost aggressively across the conflict of Hugh's thoughts. He
turned round irritably.

"What is it?" he demanded.

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.

"Hugh--_mon adore!_"

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.

"Hugh!" The throbbing tenderness had gone out of her voice, leaving it
dry and toneless. "Hugh! You don't mean . . . you're _angry_ that it's a
girl?"

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.

_"God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands."_

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.

"What--what do you mean?" she asked falteringly. Suddenly a look of
sheer terror leaped into her eyes, and she clutched at Hugh's sleeve.
"Oh, you're not going to be like Catherine? Say you're not! Hugh, you've
always said she was crazy to call our marriage a sin. . . . _A sin!_"
She tried to laugh, but the laugh stuck in her throat, caught and pinned
there by the terror that gripped her.

"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.

"Do you want to _kill_ your wife?" she demanded in a low voice of
concentrated anger. "If so, you're going the right way about it."

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--"

"But I do love her," protested Hugh. "I--I _worship_ 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."

But the appeal of the speech was ineffectual. Hugh looked at the other
man unmoved.

"It's no use hoping that you and I can see things from the same
standpoint," he added stubbornly. "I've made my decision--laid down
the lines of our future life together. I'm only waiting till you, as a
medical man, tell me that Diane's health is sufficiently restored for me
to inform her."

"No woman is ever in such health that you can break her heart with
impunity."

Hugh's light-grey eyes gleamed like steel.

"Will you answer my question?" he said curtly.

Lancaster sprang up.

"Diane is in as good health now as ever she was," he said violently. And
strode out of the room.



During the period of her convalescence Diane, attended by Nurse Maynard,
had occupied rooms situated in a distant wing of the house, where the
invalid was not likely to be disturbed by the coming and going of other
members of the household, and it was with almost the excitement of
a schoolgirl coming home for the holidays that, when she was at last
released from the doctor's supervision, she retook possession of her
own room. She superintended joyously the restoration to their accustomed
place her various little personal possessions, and finally peeped into
her husband's adjoining room, thinking she heard him moving there.

On the threshold she paused irresolutely, conscious of an odd sense of
confusion. The room was vacant. But, beyond that, its whole aspect was
different somehow, unfamiliar. Her eyes wandered to the dressing-table.
Instead of holding its usual array of silver-backed brushes and polished
shaving tackle, winking in the sunshine, it was empty. She stared at
it blankly. Then her glance travelled slowly round the room. It had a
strangely untenanted look. There was no sign of masculine attire left
carelessly about--not a chair or table was a hairbreadth out of its
appointed place.