Margaret Pedler - The Splendid Folly

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"And why--why have you come to me--now?"

"I found your note--the note you had left on my desk, so I thought I
would like to say good-bye," he answered carelessly.

"You could have waited till to-morrow morning," she returned coldly.
"You--you"--she stammered a little, and a faint flush tinged her
pallor--"you should not have come . . . here."

A sudden light gleamed in his eyes, mocking and triumphant.

"It is my wife's room. A husband"--slowly--"has certain rights."

"Ah-h!" She caught her breath, and her hand flew her throat.

"And since," he continued cruelly, never taking his eye from her face,
"since those rights are to be rescinded to-morrow for ever--why, then,
to-night--"

"No! . . . No!" She shrank from him, her hands stretched out as though
to ward him off.

"You've said 'no' to me for the last six months," he said grimly.
"But--that's ended now."

Her eyes searched his face wildly, reading only a set determination in
it. Slowly, desperately, she backed away from him; then, suddenly, she
made a little rush, and, reaching the door, pulled at the handle. But it
remained fast shut.

"_It's locked_!" she cried, frantically tugging at it. She flashed round
upon him. "The key! Where's the key?"

The words came sobbingly.

He put his fingers in his pocket.

"Here," he answered coolly.

Despairingly she retreated from the door. There was an expression in his
eyes that terrified her--a furnace heat of passion barely held in check.
The Englishman within him was in abeyance; the hot, foreign blood was
leaping in his veins.

"Max!" she faltered appealingly.

He crossed swiftly to her side, gripping her soft, bare arms in a hold so
fierce that his fingers scored them with red weals.

"By God, Diana! What do you think I'm made of?" he burst out violently.
"For months you've shut yourself away from me and I've borne it,
waiting--waiting always for you to come back to me. Do you think it's
been easy?" His limbs were shaking, and his eyes burned into hers. "And
now--now you tell me that you've done with me. . . You take everything
from me! My love is to count for nothing!"

"You never loved me!" she protested, with low, breathless vehemence.
"It--it could never have been love."

For a moment he was silent, staring at her.

Then he laughed.

"Very well. Call it desire, passion--what you will!" he exclaimed
brutally. "But--you married me, you know!"

She cowered away from him, looking to right and left like a trapped
animal seeking to escape, but he held her ruthlessly, forcing her to face
him.

All at once, her nerve gave way, and she began to cry--helpless,
despairing weeping that rocked the slight form in his grasp. As she
stood thus, the soft silk of her wrapper falling in straight folds about
her; her loosened hair shadowing her white face, she looked pathetically
small and young, and Errington suddenly relinquished his hold of her and
stepped back, his hands slowly clenching in the effort not to take her in
his arms.

Something tugged at his heart, pulling against the desire that ran riot
in his veins--something of the infinite tenderness of love which exists
side by side with its passion.

"Don't look like that," he said hoarsely. "I'll--I'll go."

He crossed the room, reeling a little in his stride, and, unlocking the
door, flung it open.

She stared at him, incredulous relief in her face, while the tears still
slid unchecked down her cheeks.

"Max--" she stammered.

"Yes," he returned. "You're free of me. I don't suppose you'll believe
it, but I love you too much to . . . take . . . what you won't give."

A minute later the door closed behind him and she heard his footsteps
descending the stairs.

With a low moan she sank down beside the bed, her face hidden in her
hands, sobbing convulsively.

CHAPTER XXIII

PAIN

Summer had come and gone, and Diana, after a brief visit to Crailing,
had returned to town for the winter season.

The Crailing visit had not been altogether without its embarrassments.
It was true that Red Gables was closed and shuttered, so that she had
run no risk of meeting either her husband or Adrienne, but Jerry, in
the character of an engaged young man, had been staying at the Rectory,
and he had allowed Diana to see plainly that his sympathies lay
pre-eminently with Max, and that he utterly condemned her lack of faith
in her husband.

"Some day, Diana, you'll be sorry that you chucked one of the best
chaps in the world," he told her, with a fierce young championship that
was rather touching, warring, as it did, with his honest affection for
Diana herself. "Oh! It makes me sick! You two ought to have had such
a splendid life together."

Rather wistfully, Diana asked the Rector if he, too, blamed her
entirely for what had occurred. But Alan Stair's wide charity held no
room for censure.

"My dear," he told her, "I don't think I want to _blame_ either you or
Max. The situation was difficult, and you weren't quite strong enough
to cope with it. That's all. But"--with one of his rare smiles that
flashed out like sunshine after rain--"you haven't reached the end of
the chapter yet."

Diana shook her head.

"I think we have, Pobs. I, for one, shall never reopen the pages. My
musical work is going to fill my life in future."

Stair's eyes twinkled with a quiet humour.

"Sponge cake is filling, my dear, very," he responded. "But it's not
satisfying--like bread."

Since Diana had left her husband, fate had so willed it that they had
never chanced to meet. She had appeared very little in society,
excusing herself on the plea that her professional engagements demanded
all her energies. And certainly, since the immediate and overwhelming
success which she had achieved at Covent Garden, her operatic work had
made immense demands both upon her time and physical strength.

But, with the advent of autumn, the probabilities of a meeting between
husband and wife were increased a hundredfold, since Diana's
engagements included a considerable number of private receptions in
addition to her concert work, and she never sang at a big society crush
without an inward apprehension that she might encounter Max amongst the
guests.

She shrank from meeting him again as a wounded man shrinks from an
accidental touch upon his hurt. It had been easy enough, in the first
intolerant passion which had overwhelmed her, to contemplate life apart
from him. Indeed, to leave him had seemed the only obvious course to
save her from the daily flagellation of her love, the hourly insult to
her dignity, that his relations with Adrienne de Gervais and the whole
mystery which hung about his actions had engendered.

But when once the cord had been cut, and life in its actuality had to
be faced apart from him, Diana found that love, hurt and buffeted
though it may be, still remains love, a thing of flame and fire, its
very essence a desire for the loved one's presence.

Every fibre of her being cried aloud for Max, and there were times when
the longing for the warm, human touch of his hand, for the sound of his
voice, grew almost unbearable. Yet any meeting between them could be
but a barren reminder of the past, revitalising the dull ache of
longing into a quick and overmastering agony, and, realising this,
Diana recoiled from the possibility with a fear almost bordering upon
panic.

She achieved a certain feeling of security in the fact that she had
made her home with Baroni and his sister. Signora Evanci mothered her
and petted her and fussed over her, much as she did over Baroni
himself, and the old _maestro_, aware of the tangle of Diana's
matrimonial affairs, and ambitious for her artistic future, was likely
to do his utmost to avert a meeting between husband and wife--since
emotional crises are apt to impair the voice.

From Baroni's point of view, the happenings of life were chiefly of
importance in so far as they tended towards the perfecting of the
artiste.

"Love is good," he had said on one occasion. "No one can interpret
romantic music who has not loved. And a broken heart in the past, and
plenty of good food in the present--these may very well make a great
artiste. But a heart that _keeps on_ breaking, that is not permitted
to heal itself--no, that is not good. _A la fin_, the voice breaks
also."

Hence he regarded his favourite pupil with considerable anxiety. To
his experienced eye it was palpable that the happenings of her married
life had tried Diana's strength almost to breaking point, and that the
enthusiasm and energy with which, seeking an anodyne to pain, she had
flung herself into her work, would act either one way or the
other--would either finish the job, so that the frayed nerves gave way,
culminating in a serious breakdown of her health, or so fill her
horizon that the memories of the past gradually receded into
insignificance.

The cup of fame, newly held to her lips, could not but prove an
intoxicating draught. There was a rushing excitement, an exhilaration
about her life as a well-known public singer, which acted as a constant
stimulus. The enthusiastic acclamations with which she was everywhere
received, the adulation that invariably surrounded her, and the intense
joy which, as a genuine artist, she derived from the work itself, all
acted as a narcotic to the pain of memory, and out of these she tried
to build up a new life for herself, a life in which love should have
neither part nor lot, but wherein added fame and recognition was to be
the ultimate goal.

Her singing had improved; there was a new depth of feeling in her
interpretation which her own pain and suffering had taught her, and it
was no infrequent thing for part of her audience to be moved to tears,
wistfully reminded of some long-dead romance, when she sang "The Haven
of Memory"--a song which came to be associated with her name much in
the same way that "Home, Sweet Home" was associated with another great
singer, whose golden voice gave new meaning to the familiar words.

Olga Lermontof still remained her accompanist. For some unfathomed
reason she no longer flung out the bitter gibes and thrusts at
Errington which had formerly sprung so readily to her lips, and Diana
grimly ascribed this forbearance to an odd kind of delicacy--the
generosity of the victor who refuses to triumph openly over the
vanquished!

Once, in a bitter mood, Diana had taxed her with it.

"You must feel satisfied now that you have achieved your object," she
told her.

The Russian, idly improvising on the piano, dropped her hands from the
keys, and her eyes held a queer kind of pain in them as she made answer.

"And what exactly did you think my object was?" she queried.

"Surely it was obvious?" replied Diana lightly. "When Max and I were
together, you never ceased to sow discord between us--though why you
hated him so, I cannot tell--and now that we have separated, I suppose
you are content."

"Content?" Olga laughed shortly. "I never wanted you to separate.
And"--she hesitated--"I never hated Max Errington."

"I don't believe it!" The assertion leaped involuntarily from Diana's
lips.

"I can understand that," Olga spoke with a curious kind of patience.
"But, believe it or not as you will, I was working for quite other
ends. And I've failed," she added dispiritedly.

With the opening of the autumn season and the ensuing rebirth of
musical and theatrical life, London received an unexpected shock. It
was announced that Adrienne de Gervais was retiring from her position
as leading lady at the Premier Theatre, and for a few days after the
launching of this thunderbolt the theatre-going world hummed with the
startling news, while a dozen rumours were set on foot to account for
what must surely prove little less than a disaster to the management of
the Premier.

But, as usual, after the first buzz of surprise and excitement had
spent itself, people settled down, and reluctantly accepted the
official explanation furnished by the newspapers--namely, that the
popular actress had suffered considerably in health from the strain of
several successive heavy seasons and intended to winter abroad.

To Diana the news yielded an odd sense of comfort. Somehow the thought
of Adrienne's absence from England seemed to bring Max nearer, to make
him more her own again. Even though they were separated, there was a
certain consolation in the knowledge that the woman whose close
friendship with her husband had helped to make shipwreck of their
happiness was going out of his life, though it might be only for a
little time.

One day, impelled by an irresistible desire to test the truth of the
newspaper reports, Diana took her way to Somervell Street, pausing
opposite the house that had been Adrienne's. She found it invested
with a curious air of unfamiliarity, facing the street with blank and
shuttered windows, like blind eyes staring back at her unrecognisingly.

So it was true! Adrienne had gone away and the house was empty and
closed.

Diana retraced her steps homeward, conscious of a queer feeling of
satisfaction. Often the thought that Max and Adrienne might be
together had tortured her almost beyond endurance, adding a keener edge
to the pain of separation.

Pain! Life seemed made up of pain these days. Sometimes she wondered
how much a single human being was capable of bearing.

It was months--an eternity--since she and Max had parted, and still her
heart cried out for him, fighting the bitter anger and distrust that
had driven her from him.

She felt she could have borne it more easily had he died. Then the
remembrance of his love would still have been hers to hold and keep,
something most precious and unspoilt. But now, each memory of their
life together was tarnished with doubt and suspicion and mistrust. She
had put him to the test, bade him choose betwixt her and Adrienne,
claiming his confidence as her right--and he had chosen Adrienne and
declined to trust her with his secret.

She told herself that had he loved her, he must have yielded. No man
who cared could have refused her, and the scourge of wounded pride
drove her into that outer darkness where bitterness and "proper
self-respect" defile the face of Love.

She had turned desperately to her work for distraction from the
ceaseless torture of her thoughts, but not all the work in the world
had been able to silence the cry of her heart.

For work can do no more than fill the day, and though Diana feverishly
crammed each day so full that there was little time to think and
remember, the nights remained--the interminable nights, when she was
alone with her own soul, and when the memories which the day's work had
beaten back came pressing in upon her.

Oh, God! The nights--the endless, intolerable nights! . . .

CHAPTER XXIV

THE VISION OF LOVE

A week after her visit to Somervell Street, the thing which Diana had
dreaded came to pass.

She was attending a reception at the French Embassy, and as she made
her way through the crowded rooms, followed by Olga Lermontof--who
frequently added to the duties of accompanist those of _dame de
compagnie_ to the great _prima donna_--she came suddenly face to face
with Max.

To many of us the anticipation of an unpleasant happening is far more
agonising than the actual thing itself. The mind, brooding
apprehensively upon what may conceivably occur, exaggerates the
possibilities of the situation, enhancing all the disagreeable details,
and oblivious of any mitigating circumstances which may, quite
probably, accompany it. There is sound sense and infinite comfort, if
you look for it, in the old saying which bids us not to cross our
bridges till we come to them.

The fear of the unknown, the unexperienced, is a more haunting,
insidious fear than any other, and sometimes one positively longs to
hasten the advent of an unwelcome ordeal, in order that the worst may
be known and the menace of the future be transformed into a memory of
the past.

So it was with Diana. She had been for so long beset by her fear of
the first meeting that she experienced a sensation almost of relief
when her eyes fell at last upon the tall figure of her husband.

He was deep in conversation with the French Ambassador at the moment,
but as Diana approached it was as though some sensitive, invisible live
wire had vibrated, apprising him of her nearness, and he looked up
suddenly, his blue eyes gazing straight into hers.

To Diana, the brief encounter proved amazingly simple and easy in
contrast with the shrinking apprehensions she had formed. A slight bow
from her, its grave return from him, and the dreaded moment was past.

It was only afterwards that she realised, with a sense of sick dismay,
how terribly he had altered. She caught at the accompanist's arm with
nervous force.

"Olga!" she whispered. "Did you see?"

The Russian's expression answered her. Her face wore a curious stunned
look, and her mouth twitched as she tried to control the sudden
trembling of her lips.

"Come outside--on to this balcony." Olga spoke with a fierce
imperativeness as she saw Diana sway uncertainly and her face whiten.

Once outside in the cool shelter of the balcony, dimly lit by swaying
Chinese lanterns, Diana sank into a chair, shaken and unnerved. For an
instant her eyes strayed back to where, through the open French window,
she could see Max still conversing with the Ambassador, but she averted
them swiftly.

The change in him hurt her like the sudden stab of a knife. His face
was worn and lined; there was something ascetic-looking in the hollowed
line from cheek-bone to chin and in the stern, austere closing of the
lips, while the eyes--the mocking blue eyes with the laughter always
lurking at the back of them--held an expression of deep, unalterable
sadness.

"Olga!" The word broke from Diana's white lips like a cry of appeal,
tremulous and uncertain.

But Miss Lermontof made no response. She seemed quite unmoved by the
distress of the woman sitting huddled in the chair before her, and her
light green eyes shone with a curious savage glint like the eyes of a
cat.

Diana spoke again nervously.

"Are you--angry with me?"

"Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see
what you're doing?"

"What I'm doing?" repeated Diana. "What am I doing?"

Olga replied with a grim incisiveness.

"You're killing Max--that's all. This--this is going to break
him--break him utterly."

There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into
pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns
illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy
curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining
room.

Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense
silence.

Diana lifted her head.

"I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ."

"And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an
element of contemptuous wonder in her voice.

The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's
mind.

"_You don't know what love means!_"

Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed
beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls
wheeling above it, and Max--Max standing tall and straight beside her,
with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love
illimitable in his eyes.

"You don't know what love means!"

The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way
sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp
blade of the surgeon's knife cuts deep into a festering wound. And
before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana's soul recoiled in dumb
dismay.

No, she hadn't known what love meant--love, which, with an exquisite
unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt--hadn't
understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood
it. And she recognised the scorn on Olga's white, contemptuous face as
the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own
achieving.

The vision of Culver Point faded away, and an impalpable wall of
darkness seemed to close about her. Dimly, as though it were some one
else's voice speaking, she heard herself say slowly:--

"I thought I loved him." Then, after a pause, "Will you go? Please
go. I should like to be . . . quiet . . . a little while."

For a moment Olga gazed down at her, eagerly, almost hungrily, as
though silently beseeching her. Then, still silently, she went away.

Diana sat very still. Above her, the gay-coloured Chinese lanterns
swayed to and fro in the little breeze that drifted up the street, and
above again, far off in the sombre sky, the stars looked
down--pitiless, unmoved, as they have looked down through all the ages
upon the pigmy joys and sufferings of humanity.

For the first time Diana was awake to the limitations she had set to
love.

The meeting with her husband had shaken her to the very foundations of
her being, the shock of his changed appearance sweeping away at a
single blow the whole fabric of artificial happiness that she had been
trying to build up.

She had thought that the wound in her heart would heal, that she could
teach herself to forget the past. And lo! At the first sight of his
face the old love and longing had reawakened with a strength she was
powerless to withstand.

The old love, but changed into something immeasurably more than it had
ever been before, and holding in its depths a finer understanding. And
with this clearer vision came a sudden new knowledge--a knowledge
fraught with pain and yet bearing deep within it an unutterable sense
of joy.

Max had cared all the time--cared still! It was written in the lines
of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut
mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married
life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all
that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger
understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved
her. With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that it was
her hand which had graved those fresh lines about his mouth, brought
that look of calm sadness to his eyes, and the realisation held a
strange mingling of exquisite joy and keen anguish.

She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding
dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.

She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the
secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart
of happiness. Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it
seemed so pitifully mean and paltry, a profanation of the whole inner,
hidden meaning of love.

So long as she and Max cared for each other, nothing else mattered,
nothing in the whole world. And the long battle between love and
pride--between love, that had turned her days and nights into one
endless ache of longing to return to Max, and pride, that had barred
the way inflexibly--was over, done with.

Love had won, hands down. She would go back to Max, and all thought
that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect,
was swept aside. Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the
dark places where the lesser gods hold sway, out into the light of day,
and she knew that to return to Max, to give herself afresh to him,
would be the veritable triumph, of love itself.

She would go back, back to the shelter of his love which had been
waiting for her all the time, unswerving and unreproaching. She had
read it in his eyes when they had met her own an hour ago.

"I want you---body and soul I want you!" he had told her there by the
cliffs at Culver.

And she had not given him all her soul. She had kept back that supreme
belief in the beloved which is an integral part of love. But now, now
she would go to him and give with both hands royally--faith and trust,
blindly, as love demanded.

She smiled a little. Happiness and the haven of Max's arms seemed very
near her just then.

She was very silent as she and Olga Lermontof drove home together from
the Embassy, but just at the last, when the limousine stopped at
Baroni's house, she leaned closer to Olga in the semi-darkness, and
whispered a little breathlessly:--

"I'm going back to him, Olga."

Somehow the mere putting of it into words seemed to give it substance,
convert it into an actual fact that could be talked about, just like
the weather, or one's favourite play, or any other commonplace matter
which can be spoken of because it has a knowledgeable existence. And
the Russian's quick "Thank God!" set the seal of assuredness upon it.

"Yes--thank God," answered Diana simply.

The car, which was to take the accompanist on to Brutton Square,
slipped away down the lamp-lit street, and Diana fled upstairs to her
room.

She must be alone--alone with her thoughts. She no longer dreaded the
night and its quiet solitude. It was a solitude pervaded by a deep,
abiding peace, the anteroom of happiness.

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