Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 18 – Stockley · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 18Part III · The Way of The Sea
18
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 18
Part III · The Way of The Sea
StockleyEnglish
"All the great things of life are simply done,
Creation, Death, and Love the Double Gate."
MASEFIELD.
One morning Harriott came into Val's room and found her writing at the table with the blue veil fallen off, lying on her shoulders.
"Why, Val!" she exclaimed in genuine astonishment. "Your hair is perfectly lovely! Never, never cover it up any more!"
"Really?" said Val shyly and flushing deep rose. "Do you think I might go without the veil now?"
"Do I think! Look at yourself!" She gave Val a gentle push towards her mirror, where the pale oval face was reflected, a very girlish face still in spite of sorrows, and framed now in a nebulous, wavering frame of feathery, fluttering curls.
"I never saw anything so dear," said Harriott, dipping her hand into the airy softness. "It is ten times prettier than it was before. How on earth did you manage it?"
"It must be the salad oil," said Val laughing. "I 've rubbed in a whole quart bottle during the winter. Poor Bran! Many is the morning he has come sniffing to my pillow with the question, 'Did you have potato salad for supper last night, Mammie?' Is n't it extraordinary what we women will do for vanity's sake, Harry. You 'd think I ought to know better at thirty-two, wouldn't you?"
"Thirty-two, what's that? Women are only just beginning to find themselves at thirty. You 're an infant still, my dear, and fortunately you look it." She added inconsequently, "I think that man of yours must be a pig."
A grave sadness came back into Val's face.
"Never say anything like that, Harry. Those are the kind of words that separate friends."
For a moment Mrs. Kesteven regarded her reproachfully, but her soul was too loyal a one to misunderstand Val's feelings. There was a great soul-likeness between the two women. Only that Val would be always more or less primitive, while Harriott Kesteven had come of a long line of cultivated ancestors, and was more highly civilised. But in the simple elementary things the two felt and saw alike.
"Forgive me, dearest," she said gently. "It is only that I hate to see you so alone--and lonely. You were not meant for such a life."
"I must be unworthy of companionship, for it is always taken from me," said Val, as if to herself, staring at her image in the glass. "I sometimes tremble because of Bran. Oh, Harry, if Bran--if Bran--!" Her eyes darkened with tears, her lips twisted in an anguish of terror and love and foreboding.
"Never think of such a thing," cried Harriott. "It is like inviting the daughter of Zeus to come after you. You will have Bran and much more than Bran, dear. Your life is far from over. There are those whom Sorrow elects her own for many years only to bless them in the end. All will come right with you yet, Val."
"Bless you, Harry! What would one do without friendship?"
"Well, you'll never have to do without me wherever you are, darling. Mine is one of the hands stretched across seas and hills to you. But I fear that my material body must leave you this day week; all sorts of things call me back to London."
"So soon?"
"My dear, do you realise that the summer is nearly over? While we have sat in the sunshine talking of old days, and watching the children grow their wings, two of our precious months are gone. Two of the hundred and twenty, Val!"
"Never mind, they 've left us something," said Val, kissing her.
From that day forward she discarded the blue veil. The French friends were amazed when they saw her without her shroudings. It had a curiously different effect upon them all. Something discontented and critical came into the still-lake eyes of Madame de Vervanne, but Celine used to like to come close and brush her cheek against Val's head as if she or Val were a kitten. The two boys seemed suddenly to wake up and realise that Val was still a factor in the game, at least Sacha did, and the look half gallant, half appraising, which he had so far kept only for Kitty and Haidee or any other pretty girl who happened along, began to lurk in his eye for Val also. With Rupert it was a little different. He had from the first recognised something vital and alluring behind the blue veil, and had never shown himself averse to leaving the girls to walk with Val, carrying her things, or holding one of Bran's hands while she held the other. There had come to exist between them one of those wordless sympathies that make for friendship. They spoke the same language, for there was one great bond between them--the wanderlust. Rupert, strange and rare thing in a Frenchman, had "the love for other lands!" Hoping to assuage his thirst for travel in a legitimate way, and one traditional in his family, he had entered for the Navy and had worked hard to get in from the Lycee St. Louis. But though his physical qualifications for that profession were perfect, he was no student and the exams. had been too much for him. Three times he had gone up, and failed, and the third time was the last. He was over nineteen, and the age limit for men entering the Navy was passed.
At odds and ends of times he told Val these things, and her heart went out to him while her mind greatly wondered at the stupidity of the French Government. Here was an ideal sailor lost to his country because he could not pass a difficult exam., that dealt largely with languages and mathematics, though you had only to watch him with his inferiors, the villagers and fishermen, to know that he possessed all the qualities characteristic of the good sailor and commander of men. Above all he was a lover of the sea. As an Englishman or American other gates to that "lover and mother of men" would have been open to him. But as a French gentleman having failed to get into the Navy, he was obliged to renounce the love of his life, for there was no other way, compatible with honour, of wooing her.
The next best thing then he declared was to join the Colonial Infantry, and achieve travel and adventure in foreign service. But such a decision thoroughly scandalised his family, for the Colonial Infantry is looked upon as the last resort of the destitute. Only men who have n't a penny of private income go to the Colonies, and it was considered a most unfitting fate for a man of such brilliant fortune as Rupert would be master of in a year or so. Even Sacha, who had no more than two hundred and twenty francs a year, disdained the Colonial Infantry and was in the "Dragons," preferring a cavalry regiment likely to be stationed within reach of Paris, living a life of gaiety on credit, always in debt, but always with an open chance of catching an heiress whose fortune would regulate his affairs and settle him in life.
The Colonial Infantry very often means quick promotion, but it also means travel and rough life in far places, and these things do not appeal to the ordinary young Frenchman, who is out for "life" of a very different kind. That they appealed to Rupert showed that he was far from being an ordinary Frenchman. In his family everything was still being done to try and dissuade him. But he showed no signs of budging from his purpose--for him the Colonial Infantry or nothing, he said, and had already accomplished the one year's military service essential to a candidate for St. Cyr. He told Val of his intentions, and she secretly upheld them and encouraged him to go his own way. For to her Rupert looked like one of those whom Nature chooses to track her across deserts and mountains and seas. He had the vague yet ardent eyes of the follower of the Lone Trail. Val recognised in him, boy as he was, a wanderer like herself, and it seemed to her that it would be a tragic thing to confine such a boy to the smug and conventional paths of life in France.
While the Kestevens were still in Mascaret, Rupert was looked upon as being more or less property at the disposal of Kitty, and Val had only an occasional opportunity for the long rambling talks she liked with him. But after the Kestevens had gone, and Val made her debut, veilless, indeed hatless, with shining fluffy hair curling in the sun, her eyes containing a secret, and about her that certain flower-like grace which is the peculiar attribute of those who keep always a little dew in the heart, Rupert came hovering continually about her and she grew fonder than ever of him. A reef was taken in their friendship, and no one seemed to mind very much except Christiane de Vervanne. The little Comtesse took rather more than an ordinary interest in Rupert, and when she was about, Val with her seventh sense often felt in the air the presence of the little silken cobwebs that some women, spiderlike, spin out and weave about all young male things. However, Rupert so far appeared to be immune to any spells except those of the sea, and other lands. And because Val too felt these spells he loved to be with her. The Comtesse, on the other hand, looked upon such talk as the ravings of madness. She strongly opposed the Colonial Infantry scheme, and declared it a shame to think of one of La France's sons departing to other stupid countries. It was plain that she meant to do all she could to prevent such a catastrophe.
It was lovely autumn weather, and in the cool of every afternoon the party went forth on blackberrying expeditions, gathering the fruit which the peasants despise and leave to rot upon the hedges. Every morning Villa Duval was fragrant with the fresh scent of blackberries stewing in their own juice, to be eaten at tea time the same day. The flies and the wasps swarmed in, and at intervals all doors and windows would be closed and the family, assisted by the granite-eyed Azalie and armed with bath towels, would engage in a grande battue, and the wooden walls of the villa resounded with slaps and bangs. Only Bran would take no part in these massacres. He had a funny little objection to killing anything, and strongly disapproved of Azalie's methods.
"She is very unkind," he complained. "She just kills the flies. She does n't look into their eyes first to see whether they are poor or good or naughty."
"How do they look when they 're good, assie?" jeered Haidee.
Bran strangely but immediately glazed his eyes, and with some odd movement of his hands acutely suggested the attitude of a sick fly suffering with cold.
"And a naughty one?"
His eyes rolled, and he lifted a paw to his nose. A sprightly fly!
The days were slipping along very peacefully when suddenly Val's eyes were opened to the fact that Haidee was in danger. Her little girlish flirtation with Sacha Lorrain was growing into something more serious.
One afternoon, as Val was sitting in the Jules, with Bran at the imaginary wheel, a puff of wind blew a sheet of paper up into the air and over the side of the boat. Carelessly she took it up, but her idle glance crystallised into consternation when she found that it was a rough draft of what was evidently meant to be a poem, in Haidee's writing.
That an out-of-door, tomboy creature like Haidee should take to writing poems was strange enough, but what startled Val still more was its open dedication to Sacha. It ran into several verses:
"You are more beautiful than the rising sun,
And I love you more,
And I wish to steal you and keep you
As in the old, old law.
"For you are mine, you were born for me:
It is written in the book of Fate
That thou should 'st love me, and I love thee--
Do now, 'fore it is too late.
"Come to me now, to my ever open arms,
And make me glad,
And I will mark our meeting with an everlasting kiss
To make us sad."
Poor Haidee!
When Val had finished reading it her eyes were full of tears, though her lips smiled. It was not poetry, but in its broken, ill-balanced phrases it revealed what poetry does not always do--the heart of the writer and the big things in the writer's nature struggling to get out. The old cowboy rudeness and lawlessness were there, but Val was so thankful to God to see the sign of big things--of generosity, of the courage that dares, of soul. Yes, there under the beat of young passion's wing was another still small sweet sound--the voice of soul. What else did those two last lines reveal?
"...an everlasting kiss
To make us sad."
Only the soul knows the secret of that great sadness lurking under passion's wing!
Poor Haidee! So her feet, too, were touching the outer waves of that stormy sea where women sink or swim, and few reach the happy shore! Yet Val was proud to recognise that she was not afraid to put forth. This was no suppliant cry of one afraid to drown! Here was not one of the world's little clinging creatures that grip round a man's neck and pull him under. She, too, had the strong arm and the stout heart. She would give help, not only seek to take it. Yes, that was what Haidee's poor little poem revealed more than anything to Val--that she was one of life's givers.
"Thank God for it," said Val, "and let her give." After long thought, doubled up in Bran's boat and staring at the sea as was her way, she added: "but not to Sacha Lorrain."
It is not to be supposed that she had spent a whole summer of intimacy with the Lorrain family without drawing up some kind of a moral estimate of each member of it. They were not very harsh affairs, these little estimates. For it was ever Val's way to "heave her log" into the heart rather than the mind, and to what was in the pocket she never gave a thought. Like many of the cleverest women, she had no judgment, no gift of looking past the hardy eye and the smooth smile into the mind to see what was brewing there. But she had instincts, and sometimes inspirations, and a highly tuned ear for sincerity. Also, no act or look or word containing beauty was ever lost on her.
Well! it must be confessed that Sacha had emerged but poorly from her process of assessment. She had turned her ear and inclined her eye for many a long day for grace in him--and both had gone unrequited.
If Sacha's worldly possessions were small, they still predominated over his jewels of the heart, while in mind he possessed much the same qualities as Christiane de Vervanne--gaiety, egotism, the hard, cold brilliance of a diamond, a straining ambition for all the worldly "good things of life." In their alikeness these two might have been brother and sister, while Celine and Rupert, though only cousins, much more closely resembled each other in nature and bearing.
It seemed the usual irony of circumstance that had ordained for Sacha, who loved the good things of the world, comparative poverty, while to Rupert, the John o' Dreams and lover of seas and skies, was given wealth! The latter's father (the general's brother), with a head for finance, had gone into banking instead of the army, and thereafter married a banker's daughter with a fortune, which he had trebled and quadrupled to leave to their only son.
However, Sacha, with a small income squeezed out of his father's pension, gave himself a very good time, and had every intention and likelihood of making a rich marriage. In the meantime he was open to any love experiences that came to hand. Like all young Frenchmen, he preferred women older than himself, and went in fear of the young girl--when she was French. But this summer no flirtations with women older than himself had offered; Mrs. Kesteven treated him like a grandson, Val was secret behind her veil, while the Comtesse's beguilements were not for him--he and she understood each other too well. Remained Haidee, who was jeune fille indeed, without being French.
Her daring boyish ways and fresh beauty attracted him immensely, and though he was an honourable fellow, according to his lights, the lights of a young French officer make no very great illumination, and apparently he had not been able to resist the temptation of making her fall in love with him.
Val, reviewing the position, knew that it would be fatal to let Haidee lose her head over this young worldling. He was only amusing himself. No Frenchman who is poor ever contemplates marriage with a girl unless she happens to have a dot worthy of consideration, in which case the affair becomes a ceremonious one in which parents and relations take an even more important part than the young people themselves. Val knew all this well, and that there was not the faintest idea of anything serious in Sacha Lorrain's mind. But, no doubt, it was very amusing to make a little American girl fall in love--and to him appeared harmless enough. Only, it would have to be put a stop to at once, though at first Val did not quite see how. Impossible to break off friendly relations all at once with the occupants of Shai-poo. They had all become too intimate for that. Besides, such an act would not serve its purpose. Haidee was too wilful and lawless not to find means of being with the Lorrains whatever Val did, and opposition would simply have the effect of making her keener. The only course open to Val was one that Sacha himself had suggested by his manner since she came out from behind her blue veil. Whether it was that he was piqued by her preference for his cousin, or whether he thought a little jealousy might be good for Haidee, it would be hard to say, but at any rate he had shown distinct signs and symbols of being attracted to Val. So far she had disregarded, while being greatly amused by his not very subtle efforts to flirt with her, but she now resolved to make a change in her tactics. If Sacha wanted a flirtation with a woman older than himself he should have it.
She gave him an opening the very next day on one of their long excursions, and he grabbed it with a fervour that astonished her. She kept him at her side all the afternoon. Rupert took her defection good-naturedly, and devoted himself to Haidee, who rebuffed him and sulked. The next day, on the beach, Val did the same thing. Sacha became more fervent. Rupert began to look wounded. Haidee glared, and would not speak when they reached home.
After all, it was an easy matter. What inexperienced girl, however pretty, can hold her own against a woman of the world, determined on capture--especially when the prey is only a youth? Sacha, his vanity flattered by Val's sudden interest in him, paid little attention to Haidee's scowls and sulks. And when Val realised how serious it was, saw how Haidee paled and flushed and lost her appetite, she lured the mothlike Sacha all the more within the radius of the flame which attracted him. She did not mean to burn him, only to dazzle him a little; but if his wings were slightly scorched, that was his affair. Haidee had got to be saved from unhappiness even at that cost.
The thing was made easier by the departure of the Comtesse and Celine to pay a week's visit to some army friends stationed at Cherbourg. With no one left but the two boys, it was simple for Val to take entire possession of Sacha. Haidee was left to the share of Rupert. She liked Rupert well enough--no one could help it. But she was in love with Sacha. Before long the look of an assassin came into her eyes when she turned them upon Val. But Val did not falter in her purpose. Not even when Rupert withdrew from the quartette and let Sacha come alone to the villa. On such occasions they all went out together as usual, but Val kept Sacha by her side. She was the soul of gaiety, she flirted and spun fine threads. Haidee gloomed and grew paler. Val's heart ached for the girl, and she was sick of the business herself, but Sacha's leave was almost up. It was only a matter of days. She determined to stick at the wicket.
On Sacha's last evening the whole party from Shai-poo came to Villa Duval with the suggestion of a moonlight walk to the cliff point near the lighthouse. The Comtesse and Celine had returned from Cherbourg bringing in tow a young cavalry lieutenant, a friend of Sacha's, and plainly a satellite of Christiane de Vervanne. The object of the walk was to re-cement a wooden cross upon the ruined walls of the old church of Mascaret. The village in some by-gone age had been situated on the North Foreland, but the gales and storms that besieged it there had driven the villagers inland, and no trace remained of habitation except the four walls of a primitive church, battered and time-stained, pitched perilously on the side of the cliff, like wreckage flung there by some wild storm from the sea below. The little wooden cross that leaned crazily on the east wall had been put there many years past by Rupert and Sacha, and it was a sort of religious rite with them to re-cement it upright in its place every year.
It was a glorious night for a walk, and when they came to claim her, Val could make no excuse for not going, though all that day a wave of dreariness had possessed and submerged her, making her long to be alone. She could not plead that Bran would be lonely, for, tired out from an afternoon's net-fishing in the shallows of the river, he was deep asleep, and Hortense by some unwonted chance was available to watch over him. Besides, Haidee looked so wretched and wistful that compassion overcame reason in Val. She began to half doubt her right of interference. Because of this she allowed herself to be taken possession of by Rupert and Celine, while the Comtesse and her lieutenant went on ahead, so that nothing was left for Sacha to do but walk with Haidee. He did it with so bad a grace that the latter was even more unhappy than if she had been left to herself. The two walked in silence and when they were winding in single file round the face of the cliff Sacha made a determined effort to regain Val, but she cold-bloodedly hedged him off. She saw now very plainly that her labour was at an end. He and Haidee were so thoroughly estranged that all danger was past, and her task over. Subtly her manner changed then to one of half quizzing gaiety extremely disconcerting to the amorous Sacha, and yet with which he could find no fault, for her flirtation with him had been so delicately done that it could hardly bear that name. Puzzled and savage at the change in her he turned back to Haidee, but Haidee had her pride that wrestled with her poor little crushed love and for the time at least conquered it. She would not be left and again taken at will. She retired behind a sullen scowl. Sacha, for once, was at a loose end and did not like it a bit.
Arrived at the vieille eglise, the two cousins climbed cautiously up the crumbling walls, Rupert with the string handle of the cement pot between his teeth. The rest of the party, scattered on the sloping cliff-side in the mother-of-pearl moonlight, sat watching them. Below, the sea, a star-spangled mirror, stretched from France to where Alderney humped against the sky-line. On the Jersey coast a powerful light winked spasmodically. The sky, clear in the east, was flecked overhead and in the west with tiny snatches of snowy cloud, regular as knitted stitches, or the scales on a mackerel's back.
Softly the Comtesse began to sing to them:
I
"Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami Pierrot,
Prete-moi ta plume
Pour ecrire un mot.
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n' ai plus de feu.
Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour 1' amour de Dieu!
II
"Au clair de la lune
Pierrot repondit:
'Je n'ai pas de plume,
Je suis dans mon lit!
Va chez la voisine,
Je crois qu' elle y est,
Car dans sa cuisine
On bat le briquet.'
III
"Au clair de la lune
L'aimable Lubin
Frappe chez la Brune,
Elle repond soudain:
'Qui frappe de la sorte?'
Il dit a son tour:
'Ouvrez votre porte
Pour le dieu d'amour!'
IV
"Au clair de la lune
On n' y voit qu' un peu,
On cherche la plume
On cherche du feu.
En cherchant de la sorte
Je ne sais ce qu' on trouva,
Mais je sais que la porte
Sur eux se ferma!"
"Ah!" she sighed softly in the silence that followed her song. "And now we all go back to Paris! That dear Paris! C'est comme un amant qu'il faut quitter pour un revoir plus chaud, et comme tout neuf! If you do not budge from it, it becomes like a husband, fatiguing and exigeant, who makes you work too much and never gives you room to breathe. But----" she gazed ecstatically towards Alderney in which direction the lieutenant and Rupert happened to be sitting. "Go away for a little while and you find yourself dreaming of the sweet suffocating embrace that exalts the veins----"
"How white the sea looks!" suddenly broke in Val. It troubled her to see how Haidee hung upon the pretty immodest phrases that slipped so easily from Christiane de Vervanne's lips. "What were those lines of yours, Sacha, about when the sea is milk-white and Jersey black as ink and a storm coming to-morrow?"
"Quand la mer est comme le lait, et Jersey tout noir
On peut attendre un orage avant demain soir,"
quoted Sacha sulkily.
The Comtesse shot an icy glance at Val. She did not like her rhapsodies interrupted.
"Epatant, that woman!" she murmured to her cavalry-man.
On the walk home Sacha tried once more to re-arrange the order of the party and get Val to himself, but pitilessly she left him to the mercy of Haidee, furious and vengeful as a Gorgon. When they reached home it would have been hard to say whose was the crossest-looking of their two faces. Trinkling back farewells, the Shai-poo party continued on its way down the Terrasse, but Sacha stayed. He had gripped Val's hand over the little fence that enclosed the yard and would not let it go.
"I must speak to you," he said urgently, fiercely, and did not care that Haidee lingered within earshot, and when she heard his words started, then tore up the flight of steps into the villa.
"What is it, Sacha?" said Val, gently.
"You have been playing with me!" He was white-lipped and furious. She felt ashamed though her intention had been good.
"Oh, Sacha!--do not be angry! Surely you too were playing?--I----"
"No!" he shot out at her. "It was not play for me--I----"
But she would have no declarations.
"Well--I am truly sorry--you must forgive me--I, am very fond of you, Sacha--both you and Rupert--but you must not think--Why, I am a very serious woman. Think, I have a son, and am almost old enough to be your mother!"
"Why did you not say that to me before? Why have you been to me these last weeks so full of allure, so attirant?" he asked savagely. "Sapristi! you have been fooling me. It has pleased you to play with my heart!"
She thought it the wisest thing then to tell him the flat ungentle truth.
"As it pleased you to play with Haidee's."
He glared at her, and she stood staring steadily back, the light of battle in her eye.
"Haidee is only a child--her heart is very tender and romantic. I could not have its first bloom rubbed off by you, Sacha--a sophisticated Frenchman who would laugh and go on your way. She is too good for that."
He breathed hard.
"So!" He muttered at last, "That is it?"
"Yes, that is it." There was a silence. Then she said gently:
"And in your heart you do not blame me, Sacha. Think if it had been your little sister, and you had seen her trying to waste her heart's first freshness foolishly, uselessly. What would you have done? I know well enough what you would have done."
"You had no right to play----" he began, but he was softened.
"Oh yes, every right. Haidee is like my little sister."
She put her left hand over the gate and laid it on the one which gripped her right.
"Come! There are no bones broken, Sacha. You know very well that you do not really care about me. This was just one of the little experiences of which you will have scores in your life; the remembrance of it may help you in others. But I have not found it uninteresting. You are a charming and attractive fellow--if I did not happen to be immune--(this was sheer guile on her part, but honey has a great healing quality in such cases). I assure you that I have found it anything but an uninteresting experience. Will you not pay me the same compliment and shake hands on it?"
After a little pause he let go his grip of her right hand and took the other into a more gentle grasp. The scowl passed from his face. He was not a bad-hearted fellow--only one of his kind! A smile came into his hard blue eyes.
"B'en! All rite," he accepted, and kissed her hand, not without a show of grace.
Val sighed as she went softly indoors, and a pain shot through her breast as she came upon Haidee in the sitting-room, head on the table, hair spread in every direction, absolute abandonment in her pose. A longing seized Val to sit down and put her arm round the girl's waist, but she knew Haidee too well to succumb to it. Instead, she pretended to notice nothing unusual.
"A headache, chicken?" she asked casually, and went to hang her hat behind the door. At the sound of her voice Haidee sprang up and stood facing her.
"I hate you--I hate you--" she cried passionately. "You always take away the people I love from me!"
"Oh, Haidee!" cried Val, sorrowfully, suddenly remembering the night she had found the child on Westenra's bed.
"I hate you!" she screamed in concentrated rage, her face dark with passion. "I will hurt you some day. You'll see!"
She flung out of the room.
"So that is my reward for putting up with that silly ass for three weeks!" said Val to herself, and sighed once more. Wearily she lighted her candle and went to warm her heart with a glimpse of her son. He lay flung on the pillow like a warm pink rose. She burrowed her nose gently into his soft neck, scenting the lovely puppy dog scent that all young things have round their throats, scenting, too, the little stinky hands that in his yearning for bed he had only half-washed. With a wet sponge and some drops of eau-de-cologne she gently removed from them the mingled odour of shell-fish, bread and jam, and night dews. Then she made the sign of the Cross over him, and went to bed.
The mackerel sky had not lied! The next morning was all glittering with sunlight under a steel blue sky swept clear by a September wind that tore up the sea and sent it pounding in great grey-green walls with spittering spraying tops to crash upon the shore. They were delicious to jump in, those great tawny breakers, and carried the jumper fifteen or twenty feet high before they hurled themselves with a roaring swish to cream along the beach. It was not a day to venture out far. Even good swimmers in such a sea contented themselves with going in only up to the armpits, waiting for the breaker to gather them up, then pass and leave them in flat, clear water ready for the next.
The Comtesse and Celine, tired from their journey the day before, sat and looked on, but Rupert, Val, Haidee, and Sacha, with half a dozen others, were in the water jumping like maniacs, diving through sheer solid green walls, disappearing under avalanches of foam, gasping, laughing, panting. Sometimes short, wild screams, almost as of terror, were jerked out of them as the breaker moved on them like some monster determined on destruction.
"Quelle courage!" said Christiane de Vervanne wonderingly. "And did you ever see anything like Madame Valdana screaming and jumping like a mad thing! She behaves with a great curiousness at times, that lady!"
"She is an original!" said Celine, who was fond of Val, and felt for her none of the antagonism which the generality of Frenchwomen, in spite of the entente cordiale and Edward the Peacemaker, always will feel for Englishwomen. True, Val was not English, but Celine was unaware of the fact.
In time Val gave Haidee the signal to come out. They had been in quite half an hour, the breakers appeared to be getting worse, and the wind had turned bitterly cold. Every one but the members of their party had already left the water. The Frenchmen, however, Sacha, Rupert, and the young officer, were disinclined to come out. Instead it seemed as though with the departure of the ladies they felt free to go farther in. Val stood in the creaming froth watching them for a moment before she raced Haidee to the cabins.
"I wish they would n't," she said uneasily, and suddenly threw out her voice in a coo-ee.
"Venez! Venez, you boys! You've been in long enough!"
The laugh and shout in Sacha's voice that came blowing back seemed to be snatched by the waves and torn to ribbons by the wind before it reached the beach. Val found herself shivering, and ran for the cabins. Just as she was dressed she heard a scream, and looking through the diamond-shaped hole in the door, saw Celine standing up stripping off her clothes to her knickerbockers, while the Comtesse stood by screaming and wringing her hands. A moment later every one was pouring out of the cabins, and Val and Haidee back in their wet bathing suits were running down to the water's edge. Only two heads were bobbing in the waves--the third had disappeared!
It was nearly half an hour later when they brought Sacha Lorrain's body to the beach. The delay came of no one knowing where he went down. Only Celine had seen the wave hit him full in the face and knock him backwards stunned, but when, followed by Val and Haidee, she swam out to the spot she had marked with her mind's eye, he was not there. They dived and swam under water all round the place. In that rough sea, with the waves growing every moment more violent and blinding, and churning up the sands, they could scarcely see a yard before them under water. And of course every moment was of value. Some one had run to the digue to get the lifeboat manned; some one else to Villa Duval for hot bottles. Azalie, her harsh face grown amazingly soft, stood laden with blankets. Fishermen joined the searchers in the water. Fishwives walked up and down the beach wringing their hands.
"The General's son! The Admiral's grandson! Monsieur Sacha!"
"Only the other day he was a petit gars in his sailor's suit. It was my man who taught him to swim."
"He made his first communion the same day as my Jean!"
"Ah! The gay eyes he had!"
Before they found him every one from the village was grouped on the beach. Sacha's father--General Lorrain--the cure, the doctor, the mayor. All stood waiting with strained, fearful faces, while the boat pulled up and down, battered by the waves. The swimmers exhausted would come up to rest in the surf, then enter again. The sunshine had gone, and the storm Sacha had prophesied the night before was creeping like a black beast across the horizon. It was a sailor in the lifeboat who spied the body at last, and diving down into the water heaved it over the side. Then they pushed the boat in through the surf, and poor Sacha was taken out and laid on the sands he had trodden so blithely an hour before.
After the first half an hour every one knew there was no hope, though none voiced the knowledge. People just stood in silent groups a little way off from the central group that knelt, and swayed, and jerked and moved unceasingly. Rupert, white and exhausted, wrapped in his bathing toga, walked up and down the beach, stopping every now and then to try and get Celine away, but Celine would not come. She was rubbing Sacha's feet, and staring, staring at his cold, calm face. Every now and then she would say imploringly:
"Listen, Sacha! Sacha, my brother! Veux tu ecoute?"
The General, very calm and stern-faced, stood at the head of the group. But sometimes he would go away suddenly and walk swiftly up and down with Rupert, for a moment or two, his head high, the little ribbon of honour a red dot on his upright breast, then return to look down again at the still, still face of his only son. He could do nothing. The operations were in the hands of competent men. The doctor from Barleville had come rushing in his motor to reinforce the Mascaret doctor. Val, when she was dressed, sat on a rock with her arms round Bran, and could not bear to see the General's eyes. Haidee and Christiane de Vervanne were crouched close by.
All the sailors and lifeboatmen were acquainted with the business of resuscitation, and there was no lack of relays. When one batch of men wearied another took its place. But all was in vain. The body of Sacha Lorrain lay there, very gallant in its youth and beauty, but his soul was gone beyond recall, and
"...might not come again
Homeward to any shore on any tide."
