The Lamp of Fate | Page 4

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