The Lamp of Fate | Page 5

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