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 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 more. As she took it from him he noticed that those thin, angular arms of hers seemed to close round the little swaddled body in an almost jealously possessive clasp. But there was none of the tender possessiveness of love about it. In some oddly repugnant way it reminded him of the motion of a bird of prey at last gripping triumphantly in its talons a victim that has hitherto eluded pursuit.

He turned back dully to his contemplation of the wintry garden, nor, in his absorption, did he hear the whimpering cry—almost of protest—that issued from the lips of his first-born as Catherine bore the child away.

For a space it seemed as though his mind were a blank, every thought and feeling wiped out of it by the stupendous, nullifying fact that his wife had given birth to a daughter. Then, with a rush as torturing as the return of blood to benumbed limbs, emotions crowded in upon him.

Catherine’s incessant denunciations of his “sin” in marrying Diane Wielitzska—poured upon him without stint throughout this first year of his marriage—seemed to din in his ears anew. Such phrases as “selling your soul,” “putting a woman of that type in our sainted mother’s place,” “mingling the blood of a foreign dancing-woman with our own,” jangled against each other in his mind.

Had he really been guilty of a sin against his conscience—satisfied his desires irrespective of all sense of duty?

He began to think he had, and to wonder in a disturbed fashion if God thought so too. What was it Catherine had said? “God has indeed taken your punishment into His own Hands.”

Hugh was only too well aware of the facts which gave the speech its trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert Vallincourt, a cousin—a gay and debonair young rake of much charm of manner and equal absence of virtue. From both Catherine’s and Hugh’s point of view he was the last man in the world fitted to become the head of the family. Hence the eagerness with which they had anticipated the arrival of a son and heir.

And now, prompted by Catherine’s bitter taunt, the birth of a daughter as his first-born—the first happening of the kind for eight successive generations—appeared to Hugh in the light of a direct manifestation of God’s intention that no son born of Diane Wielitzska should be dowered with such influence as the heir to the Vallincourts must necessarily wield.

Better, even, that the title and estates should go to Rupert! Bad as his reputation might be, good blood ran in his veins on either side—an inherited tradition of right-doing which was bound to assert itself in succeeding generations. Whereas in the offspring of Diane heaven alone knew what hidden inherited tendencies towards evil might lie fallow, to develop later and work incalculable mischief in the world.

Hugh felt crushed by the unexpected blow which had befallen him. Since his marriage, he had opposed a forced indifference to his sister’s irreconcilable attitude, finding compensation in the glowing moments of his passion for Diane. Nevertheless—since living in an atmosphere of disapproval tends to fray the strongest nerves—his temper had worn a little fine beneath the strain; and with Diane’s faults and failings thrust continually on his notice he had unconsciously grown more critical of her.

And now, all at once, it seemed as though scales had been torn from his eyes. He saw his marriage for the first time from the same standpoint as Catherine saw it, and in the unlooked-for birth of a daughter he thought he recognised the Hand of God, sternly uprooting his most cherished hopes and minimising, as much as possible, the inevitable evil consequences of his weakness in marrying Diane.

He was conscious of a rising feeling of resentment against his wife. Words from an old Book flashed into his mind: “The woman tempted me.”

With the immediate instinct of a weak nature—the very narrowness and rigidity of his views was a manifestation of weakness, had he but realised it—he was already looking for someone with whom to share the blame for his lapse from the Vallincourt standard of conduct, and in that handful of wayward charm, red lips, and soft, beguiling eyes which was Diane he found what he sought.

Again the room door opened. This time, instead of putting a longed-for end to a blank period of suspense, the little quiet clicking of the latch cut almost aggressively across the conflict of Hugh’s thoughts. He turned round irritably.

“What is it?” 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, 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 me! What do you mean? What has Catherine been saying to you?”

Her voice rose excitedly. A patch of feverish colour appeared on either cheek. Old Virginie sprung up from her chair by the fire, alarmed.

“You excite madame!”

Hugh turned to leave the room.

“We’ll discuss this another time, Diane,” he said.

Diane moved her head fretfully.

“No. Now—now! Don’t go! Hugh!”