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Updated: August 15, 2024
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.
"My dear, we must all work out our own salvation each in his own way. Prayer and fasting would never be my method. But for some people it's the only way. I believe it is for the Vallincourts. In any case, it's only for a year. And a year is very little time out of life." Nevertheless, at Gillian's urgent request, Lady Arabella made an effort to dissuade Magda from her intention.
Lady Arabella looked around helplessly, and Virginia, who was hovering in the background, hastened to explain the relationship. "Then, no," replied Lady Arabella. "Sieur Hugh is not dead though to be sure he's the next thing to it!" Magda eyed her solemnly. "Is he very ill?" she asked. "No, merely cranky like all the Vallincourts.
The child of Hugh Vallincourt spoke in that impassive summing up of the situation and Lady Arabella, with her intimate knowledge of both Hugh and his sister Catherine, would have ascribed it instantly to the Vallincourt strain in her god-daughter. To Gillian, however, to whom the Vallincourts were nothing more than a name, the strange submissiveness of it was incomprehensible.
She had discarded the family surname for professional purposes, and appeared in public under the name of Wielitzska "to save the reigning Vallincourts from a soul convulsion," as she observed with a twinkle. During the last year, influenced by the growing demands of her vocation, she had quitted her godmother's hospitable roof and established herself in a house of her own.
"It is just what one might expect from the child of Hugh Vallincourt," she said thoughtfully. "It's the swing of the pendulum. There's always been that tendency in the Vallincourts the tendency towards atonement by some sort of violent self-immolation. They are invariably excessive either excessively bad like the present man, Rupert, or excessively devout like Hugh and Catherine!
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.
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.
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.
Where do you think she gets it all from, Gillian, my dear? Not from the Vallincourts, I'll swear!" chuckling. Mrs. Grey shook her head. "I don't know. But I think Magda is a standing argument in favour of the doctrine of reincarnation! She always seems to me to be a kind of modern embodiment of Helen of Troy or Cleopatra." "Only without the capacity for falling in love!
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