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.
