The Lamp of Fate | Page 7

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