The Lamp of Fate | Page 7

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,