Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 22 – Stockley · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 22Part III · The Way of Love
18
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 22
Part III · The Way of Love
StockleyEnglish
"The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul."--EMERSON.
The Lempriere hat Haidee had on, though it was only a travelling hat of soft silk, turned up in front with one orchid, must have cost at least six guineas, but Westenra had paid it without blenching. It seemed to him that Val had trained him to buying hats and choosing pretty gowns, though the strange thing, if he had analysed it, was that he had never bought Val a hat or gown in his life. Yet because of Val he knew that women needed these things, and because life had gone exceedingly well with him in the last few years, he bought for Haidee all she asked, and made no demur. In America he always travelled second, but now he and Haidee were in a first-class carriage, en route for the South of France, and it seemed natural enough.
Haidee had certainly come into her own, and it was a goodly inheritance of beauty. With her hair coiffe and the hat with the orchid (a wonderful imitation of a rare species found in the Congo forest), she was a lovely dryad come to town. The cut of her tan shantung suit betrayed a master hand, and from its open coat rippled little cascades of fine lace. Yet she looked discontented. Perhaps the bitter moodiness on the face opposite had infected her.
Westenra had not worn that look when they commenced the journey; it was within the last half-hour while they talked of Val that Haidee had watched it creeping like a shadow into his eyes, making harsh lines about his mouth.
"You should have gone to the Lamartine studios and made inquiries," she said suddenly. "Then you 'd have known all about it--far more than I wrote and told you!"
"I have no right to make inquiries about Val, Haidee. She is not my wife and I have no claim whatever over----"
"Not your wife?"
"No. Has she never told you? Her husband whom she thought dead came back. You must never speak of this to any one."
"Of course not. But how funny, Garry!"
"Very funny," he said grimly. "That is, of course, who was staying with her at the studios, with a perfect right to do so. Only"--his face took a harder expression--"she can't go on having Bran too."
"But why not, Garry? She hasn't got the man--her husband--staying at Cannes with her. She 's told me heaps of times she and Bran are there alone. Rupert wrote and told me too."
"That is understood," said Westenra coldly. "Or I should n't let you go to her, even for a few days."
"Where are you going?"
"To a hotel, of course. I 've arranged for a room at the Metropole."
Haidee mused awhile, her brows knitted.
"And afterwards, Garry--when you have got Bran?"
"God knows, Haidee." He did not speak like a man who has won fame and renown and almost all he set out to get--except one small thing! But rather as one whose golden gifts have turned to ashes in the mouth, whose laurels have fallen to dust. Inspiration shot into Haidee's eyes.
"Then you haven't got a wife at all, Garry?"
"Devil a wife!"
"Then I don't see why I can't marry you at last. I 've always wanted to."
Westenra began to laugh.
"There's nothing to laugh at. Lots of girls marry their guardians. Oh, do let me marry you, Garry. I do love you so."
"Dear Silly Billy, I couldn't possibly."
"Why not? Why not? How can I come back to America with you and Bran unless I am married to you? It would not be at all correct." (Haidee had not been brought up in conventional France for nothing!) Westenra grinned sardonically.
"And if you get Bran away from Val, he will need a mother, and you surely would n't marry some old strange pig of a woman to mind him. He 's a gentle little kid and he must be mothered. I believe he 'd just die if he did n't have love and kindness round him all the time."
Westenra left off laughing and for the first time considered her seriously.
"Do you think you 'd make him a good step-mother, Haidee?"
"I love Bran, though I 've often been a pig to him--but that's Val's fault," she ended vindictively. "Oh, do have me, Garry."
"Well, we 'll think about it," said he gravely, though the suspicion of a smile hovered in his eyes. Haidee pounced upon him with her fresh lips.
"Won't I just run your nursing home for you!"
"Oh, that!" said Westenra, startled. "It runs itself now. Besides"--("No more experiments like that," he had been going to say, but did not)--"I have practically given it up. There'll be nothing for you to do in New York but mind Bran and amuse yourself."
Haidee looked glum for a moment. It was plain she was dying to run something.
"Anyway it's settled, is n't it, that I am to marry you and go back with you and Bran?" She flung her arms imploringly round his neck. Gently and a little wearily he unlaced them.
"All right, dearest, if you 're so keen on it, you shall go--but we won't get married just yet, I think--" He patted her hand affectionately.
"You 'll meet some one you like better than me on the voyage, perhaps."
"Never, never," she said almost viciously, and her eyes seemed to look down a long passage which had some one at the end of it.
"At last I 've got some one away from her!" she murmured to herself.
Westenra, even though in the past few weeks he had grown used to her extraordinary childish innocence and ignorance of life, mixed with a leaning for outlawry, an amazing respect for etiquette, and an anxiety to keep up a conventional appearance, found this new phase incomprehensible. He could not understand the gloating triumph of her manner. She behaved as if he were a hunting trophy which she had long yearned to bag. A dozen times she would jump up from her seat, examine him proudly, hug him, and sit down again murmuring:
"I've got you--I've got you, haven't I, Garry? No one can get you away again, can they?"
"Of course not, Silly Billy," came to be his standard reply.
Times are when a traveller arriving at Cannes railway station needs the physique and temper of a thoroughly-aroused buffalo to make any impression on the crowd that surges and sways and laughs and greets and grumbles there. But on the early June morning when Westenra and Haidee Halston descended from the P.M.L. Express there was no one in sight expect a few somnolent porters and a tall woman holding a small arrow-straight boy by the hand. The woman was beautifully dressed in white linen and a hat smothered with red and yellow poppies. The arrowy boy had a waving topknot of shiny, ruddy-gold hair, with bare legs and sandalled feet to make a sculptor rave.
Haidee having seen them last recognised them first. But even she had to give a second glance to make sure that it really was Val and Bran. They both looked so well and charming and beautiful to behold. Bran had never had clothes so truly magnifique before. And Val had roses in her cheeks and lips--a strange thing in so hot a climate! Somehow the triumph Haidee had been exulting over and vengefully trumpeting in her heart died down and faded away when she saw Val coming towards her, hands out in the usual eager fashion, a kiss forming on her lips. Both she and Bran at the back of their welcoming smiles seemed to be wearing their wistful lion-cub expression, and Haidee had to grip hard on to her vengeance not to lose it altogether and just fall upon them both and hug them. Westenra, too, was aware of a sensation that surprised him, at the sight of this woman who had once been so much to his life and now was nothing, standing there with frank outstretched hands smiling a welcome from under her cool flowery hat. The fact was that she did not sufficiently look the part of a shrine-smasher. If he had not happened to know her guilty it might have been quite difficult for him to believe that this was the woman who had destroyed his life-dreams--and ruined his home. As it was he could only marvel at the strangeness of women who could do such things and yet retain a look of honesty and inward peace. He marvelled, too, that as he took her hand and looked into the eyes he knew so well his heart stirred like a live thing. He was more amazed by that strange stirring in his breast than if a body he had certified dead and seen put away into the place of dead things suddenly quickened in its shroud and returned to life. For he had in the last few years deliberately fought down and crushed out his feeling for Val as a man might crush and kill a useless, hopeless thing. It was useless that madness he had felt for her--as useless as she was and always would be to a sane, practical man. There was no use or sense in letting the pain of his longing for her get the upper hand of him and he had not let it, but wrestled with it until he got it under. Had she not shown him in Jersey that she did not care enough for him to change? Shown him, and told him, and proved her words with deeds. And it was all old grief and pain now. Even if he had still retained any feeling for her she had gone back to Valdana. That ended it all as definitely as if she lay before him in her coffin. He would never have risked seeing her again if it had not been for his son.
Ah! his son! That was different. It was natural and justifiable that his veins should thrill at the sight of such a brave stripling. Bran, for all his elfin faun-like grace of body, had a big face, with the promise of big things lurking behind its plastic contours and deep-set eyes. He sprang into his father's arms and kissed him ardently.
"Oh! Daddy, I do love you."
Val's face curiously gave the impression that it had grown pale, while the colour in her cheeks and lips "stayed put"--almost as if it had been "put." Haidee was interested in this phenomenon, but there was no time to give it more than passing observation, for Rupert Lorrain suddenly flashed into the scene with the announcement that he would drive them back in his motor. They engaged in a bustle for luggage, of which Haidee had apparently brought a mountain--and a few moments later all were packed into Rupert's luxurious Panhard and flying along the route Nationale, Bran tooting the siren and singing at the top of his voice.
"Sing before breakfast, you 'll cry before tea," quoted Haidee at him. She had to shriek to be heard.
"Shall we drop you at your hotel, Garrett? Or will you come to breakfast with us at the Villa?" Val's voice was the casual gentle voice of a good friend.
The realisation that he had been calmly and unquestioningly going back with this noisy crowd as though it belonged to him, to her villa which was not his, shocked him into a stiff answer.
"At the hotel, please. And I 'd like Bran to stay with me this morning, if you don't mind."
"Oh, yes," cried Bran, ecstatically. "I'll come."
"I'll bring him back safely to you after lunch."
"Of course," said Val, smiling radiantly. It is on record that martyrs could radiantly smile even when the slow fire was applied.
So he and Bran were dropped at the Metropole, not without many proprietary grumblings from Haidee and warnings from Rupert that he would be back to join them ere long. The car drove off amidst a shower of shouts and calls and farewells. Only Val sat silent under her poppies.
As soon as they were on their way once more, under cover of the motor's burr, Haidee said, staring Val defiantly in the eyes:
"Garry and I are engaged."
It never occurred to her that Rupert had in any way prepared the way for her announcement, and she was blinded with amazement and fury that Val took it so serenely. True she once more got the impression of pallor under that unwonted colour in Val's cheeks, but the latter's eyes were very big and bright and friendly when she said quietly:
"That is very wonderful news, chicken."
That was all! The lovely dark face under the Congo orchid grew darker.
"We shall be awfully happy," she said fiercely. "And never think of this rotten old Europe or any one in it again."
Val spoke a strange saying, laying her hand on the girl's.
"One should try alway to keep a little dew in one's heart, Haidee, or else, in the heat and weariness of the desert it may dry up and blow away like a leaf."
Haidee wrenched her hand away.
"And what do you think of being when you 're a man, Bran?"
Bran reflected a while, balancing a spoonful of strawberry ice-cream on the edge of his glass.
"Well, Daddy, sometimes I 'd like to be one of those professors that feed the animals at the Zoo, you know. But after all, I think I prefer to be an engine driver." The little golden face looked up into Westenra's with the perfect confidence and frankness of a nature that has never been snubbed or thwarted. "You see one could be always going to new places."
Westenra's heart sank. He got a sudden vision of Val smiling that very smile of boyish confidence as she looked up from a deck chair saying:
"I would love to wake up in a new place every morning of my life."
Good God! was it possible that it was after all only a child, no better or worse than this golden-headed stripling, whom he had had in his hands all these years, treating harshly, misjudging, scolding, neglecting? The thought was horrible, but it pierced as though it were true.
"What is the good of that, my boy?" he said gently. He shrank from losing that lovely confidence by an unsympathetic word, but--"What would you do in all those new places?"
"Do?" Bran mused a while. "Oh, there'd always be something to do, Daddy. Sometimes the people there would want a bridge made, or a tower built, or there might be a giant there eating all the little boys and girls. Then I would stay just long enough to kill the giant, you know, or make the bridge----"
"I see."
"Or sometimes I would just make a picture of the place."
"A picture?"
"Yes, I love to make pictures--then get on my engine again and away I 'd go."
So! This was what she had made his son into? A vagabond like herself, a wanderer, a seeker after nothingness? He said it bitterly to himself, yet there was no echoing bitterness in his heart. The boy's eyes were so sweet and clear. There seemed no base thought in any corner of him. And that big head and wide glance--surely something great would come of them! The boy looked at the world as if it had been made for him. Surely Raleigh had that spirit, and Drake, and Napoleon, and Cecil Rhodes. Surely it was the spirit of great adventure!
He spent a strangely happy day with his son. Unreal, yet as natural as if he himself had lived every moment of it before. When at last they came to the Villa of Little Days it was to find the others gathered together in the garden, sitting under the spiking pines. Capacious easy-chairs with bright cushions stood about on the gravelled terrace and everywhere was colour, colour. Blue above, and blue below, and round them on shrub and tree and plant every known and lovely shade that Nature could invent, all woven and blended as skilfully as the broidering on some masterpiece of tapestry. Val too had returned in jewels and dress to her love of oriental colouring. She had two large silver rings set with turquoises in her ears, and round her neck a chain of rugged chunks of malachite and turquoise-matrix. None of these things were expensive. She never bought jewels because they were valuable, but for the sheer colour of them and the joy that colour gave. Diamonds said nothing to her and she would never have worn them if she had been a millionairess. The ear-rings were a spare pair of Marietta's which she had been delighted to sell Val for a couple of louis; matrix and malachite are, as every one knows, almost as common as sea-shells--and so are violets common, and poppies of the field, and forget-me-nots; but none the less are they the colour-gifts of God and the world would be a less beautiful place without them. Her gown of some kind of flexible opaline silk blended with the colours of the garden, even with the poppy hat which she still wore. Westenra had never seen her look so much at peace with herself and her surroundings or realised before that she possessed beauty. He did not realise indeed that never had he seen Val in beautiful clothes nor in surroundings that were full of grace and peace. Always he had the picture of her rushing about the house in 68th Street like some driven wild thing, the worried look of a hunted creature in her eyes, the grey linen overalls typical of the grey hurrying life, making her eyes grey only, without a glint of the blueness which now made them so attractive.
They sat and talked, spying with field-glasses at the warships in the bay. Naval manoeuvres had been going on for some days, and a large portion of the French fleet lay out in the blue, throwing great purple shadows upon the water and sending up streamers of black smoke to heaven.
Rupert, as much at home in the family circle as if he belonged to it, seemed to wish to monopolise Haidee, but she kept withdrawing from his advances and plying herself to the task of playing proprietress to Westenra. She sat on the arm of his chair with her arm along his shoulders, deferring to him in everything, constantly referring to New York and their premeditated return there. Westenra, with Bran perched on the back of his chair, legs dangling round his father's neck, hands occupied with his father's hair, was forced into announcing plans of some kind. He disclosed a contemplated return to Paris to deliver two important lectures at the Sorbonne. That done, he should return South, and book by some tramp steamer which would take him home via Greece and Algeria, sailing from Marseilles.
"Don't forget that I'm coming too," said Haidee feverishly.
"How could I?" Westenra's smile was dry.
"Me too, Daddy," chirruped Bran. A kind of breathless stillness fell for an instant. Every one save Bran, busy with his father's hair, looked swiftly at Val and as swiftly away again. Val sat like a stone woman. In the silence Bran, who had gone on twisting his father's hair into little spikes, spoke again placidly:
"Me too, Daddy. I don't want to be away from you any more."
A pang of joy and triumph shot through Westenra, but it was mingled with something that cut like a knife on an open wound. Val was staring before her sightlessly. Yet a little smile played round her lips--a smile of some feeling Westenra hardly understood. There was something infinite in it, yet terribly human.
"You would rather go back to America than stay with me, Brannie?"
It was not pleading, nor sad, nor coaxing. Just a little simple question. Only she and Westenra knew how much hung on it, though one of the others had a very good notion of what was behind. Bran looked across at his mother hesitatingly. She had always trained him to truth and directness, yet he searched her face for a moment as if for a clue. Bran hated to hurt any one's feelings--most of all his mother's. But she smiled on, and he could read nothing. He had never seen her eyes so empty before, and could not know by what great effort she had emptied them of all the fierce love and terror in her heart, so as to play fair, and not bias the issue. So after a little moment Bran said:
"I like daddy. He's got a hard smell--like steel. I don't want to be away from him any more." He slid an arm round his father's neck. No one looked at Val. Suddenly and amazingly Haidee cried out in a fury of indignation:
"You are a little pig, Bran! ... an ungrateful little pig!"
She burst out crying, and jumping up ran to the house. Bran's eyes slowly filled with tears.
"Haidee is nasty!" he said in a trembling voice. "What have I done?" In his trouble he turned naturally to his mother and the tenderness that had never failed him.
"Nothing, my Wing. Haidee will be all right by and by. Here is Marietta with the tea."
But Westenra would not take tea. He appeared to stiffen at the sight of it. After Bran had swallowed a hurried gouter, as the French call it, his father took him by the hand and they went away together for a walk by the sea. When they came back at seven, Westenra excused himself, and returned to the hotel with a promise to call after dinner.
That evening he and Val walked together through the twilight garden in which Gambetta had pondered his plans and philosophies. They, too, had a problem to consider. It had to come, this talk together. They both had felt the imperativeness of it. And now both were remembering that other walk on the moonlit cliffs above St. Brelade's Bay, when the curlew wailed and cruel words were said that separated them as only cruel words can separate, driving them apart for ever. Even as Val had struggled that long-ago night for words to explain and condone the situation Westenra struggled now, while Val walked beside him still and white, but with some hidden strength in her which he felt while he could not understand it.
The curious thing was that, though he had meant to upbraid her, though his heart was bitter against her, he found himself speaking as if he, not she, were the defalcator.
"I suppose you think me a cold-blooded brute?"
With that which Haidee had told her still tingling in her mind she could not pretend to misunderstand, but she tried to be fair.
"You know your own interests best, Garrett."
"Oh, as to my interests--" He found that a strange answer, and cogitated on it for a while.
"Haidee is devoted to you and your interests."
"Haidee? I should not be such a fool as to expect that--again?" No doubt he meant that javelin to reach her. If it did she gave no sign. Only her next words might have been a faint attempt at a return thrust.
"Even Haidee would not find it a very difficult life since things are so prosperous with you now."
He answered swiftly: "Yes; the law of compensation has been busy with my affairs. Unlucky in love--" The sentence remained unfinished.
They found that they were standing still, staring white-faced at each other. For a moment they stayed so, then she said gently:
"Surely we have not come here to gibe at one another? I--I bear you no ill-will, Garrett." It was such a strange way of expressing her feelings that she could not help but stammer a little.
He laughed. Strange, that he who felt so old in the train that morning should now feel young enough for fierce anger and rage.
"That is good of you. I am sorry I cannot with truth claim to reciprocate your generosity."
The calmness that had amazed him sustained her now.
"Well, let us leave the subject then, and speak of one that matters more to our future life--Bran. What about Bran?"
"You saw yourself to-day--you heard." He did not care to keep exultation from his voice.
"You think it fair, then, to take away from me what I have lived and worked for these last six years?"
"Have not I worked for him too?"
"You may have done so. It has made no difference to him."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that since we parted in Jersey, Bran, like myself, has neither eaten nor drunk nor been clothed at your expense."
"But...?"
"The exact half of all moneys you have sent is lying at the Credit Lyonnais. The other half has been spent explicitly on Haidee. You have seen the bills."
His face darkened.
"How dared you treat me so?--my own son!"
"If you had come to see him it would have been different, but to stay away year after year, and expect money to fill the gap that a father's influence and love and tenderness should have filled ... that seemed to me too mercenary, too unworthy treatment of my son."
"No matter ... no matter ... it is an infamous thing you have done--a crowning act of cruelty. I should have believed you incapable of it. By God! how dared you let any one else feed and clothe my child?"
She looked at his furious face in genuine amazement.
"Had I no right to work for him?"
"You, yes; and I know you have--Haidee has told me. But this last year ... and now. Who is paying for all this?" He swung his arm savagely at the beauties of the garden. His gaze was full of rage and contempt.
"In leaving Bran I left my honour with you--and you have sold it for this mess of pottage! It is time he went with me!"
She faced him steadily, with the calmness born of long vigils with misery.
"You are insulting me unnecessarily. No one has supported your son but myself."
He stared at her in unbelieving wrath. But something about her words and still gaze presently quieted the fury in his veins, and he spoke more temperately.
"I will be glad to accept that. It is strange that by your own efforts you should have become wealthy enough to surround him with beauty and ease such as this--but if you say so I accept it."
There was a silence.
"My own efforts had nothing to do with it, Garrett. It is only that God has been good to me. Did you ever hear the saying, that 'God takes care of drunkards and children'?"
He regarded her long and earnestly.
"Are you a drunkard?" Anything less like one he had never seen. His medical experience told him that she could not be one. No drunkard could look as she did.
"No, Garrett. I can faithfully and truthfully say that I am not a drunkard."
Then she was a child. It was a child that he----!
"Let me tell you about it," she was saying. "About eleven months ago something that might be regarded in the light of a family legacy came to me. The necklace my mother gave me turned out to be of extremely valuable pearls. I sold it for seventy-five thousand pounds--it has since realised one hundred and twenty thousand. That is the secret of such comfort and ease as you now see us enjoying."
The story was amazing, but Westenra instinctively knew it to be true. He had often been struck by the wonderful pearly beauty of the Comfort necklace.
"I am glad for your sake," he said at last; "it must simplify the future a great deal. I beg your pardon for what I said a moment ago. It is bad enough that I should have been denied the right to support my own son--but I could not bear that that other fellow should have done it. It even sticks in my gorge that you should have allowed Bran to come into contact with him."
"Whom are you speaking of, Garrett?"
"Why do you ask that? Surely you do not think me unaware of the fact of your return to Valdana?"
"Ah!" she said softly, and drew in her breath. "You know that?"
"Of course I know. It was that knowledge which brought me to France. I could not allow Bran or even Haidee, to be anywhere within the radius of that--" He bit off "scoundrel."
"Neither of them has ever seen him----"
"I thank you for that at least."
"Nor would ever have seen him."
"Oh, as to----"
"Is that the reason you would not enter my house nor accept my hospitality?"
He did not answer, but his neck stiffened, and he gave her the direct look which she well knew meant assent. And she thought to herself:
"There is not anything base and odious of which he does not think me capable. It is well that he and I should part for ever. The soul constantly suspected of baseness and cruelty must become degraded in time and shrink away to nothing. I will go away from here to places where my soul can grow and not shrink." These thoughts passed swiftly through her mind. All she said aloud was:
"You need not have feared. Horace Valdana has never come here, nor ever will. He and I will not meet again."
They had come out of the shadowy whispering paths and reached the open gravelled terrace, with the still waters of the Mediterranean lying below, silent under the stars, sombre as a pool of blue ink. The little group of chairs stood inviting. By mutual consent they sat down. Inside the Villa Haidee was at the piano playing wide, gallant chords, to which Rupert, in a rather strong tenor, sang snatches of the Paimpolaise.
"Et le pauvre gars ... fredonne tout has:
* * * * *
'J'aime Paimpol et sa falaise,
Son cloche et son grand Pardon.
J'aime encore mieux, la Paimpolaise
Qui m'attend au pays breton.'"
"Of course," said Westenra slowly, "if you are alone, and are going to be alone ... I have no right to take Bran."
"There is no question of right--" She put her hand over her heart--she could not speak calmly of this last savage blow fate was dealing her by the hand of her loved son. "He wants to go. That is enough."
"You know I will mind him well," he said gently.
"No one can mind him as I do," was her inward cry, but she said nothing, only pressed her hand harder to her side.
"----and that he will come back to you. It is only fair that I should have him for a little while, but naturally I do not want to keep him from you, and I am very sure he would not stay."
She was still silent. He looked at her keenly. Each knew what the other suffered, for at the heart of each the parent hunger gnawed with cruel teeth.
"You will not beguile him from his wish to come with me?--I am very sure you could. It would be natural for him to stick to you after all you 've done for him--but you won't?" Almost he was pleading with her.
"Did I to-day?" Her face was bleak.
"No, God knows--and it would have been easy enough!"
"I know he needs you. A boy begins to need a father's influence, and Bran has always had a hunger for men and their ways ... but, oh! mind him well, Garrett Westenra ... mind him well ... give him back to me as sweet and whole in soul and body as I lend him to you--" Her voice broke. She could bear no more. Swiftly she rose, and with a little gesture full of despair and abnegation and farewell, left him.
The next day Westenra was gone, presumably to Paris to give his lectures. Rupert, who had walked home with him the night before, brought a brief message of farewell to the Villa of Little Days, and the news that they might expect him back in anything under ten days.
As for Val, she went to bed for a week. At least she retired to her room, declaring a fear that a slight cold she had might develop into grippe, and that summer grippe was the most boring of all illnesses, and that she was not going to risk becoming the greatest of bores. So she lay down a good deal in a darkened room. When she was not resting she wrote many letters, and in the cool of the evening she would sit on her clematis-wreathed balcony with Bran in her arms, her lips on his hair, listening to his account of the day's doings. For Rupert's car was perpetually at the gate, and never a day passed but he and Haidee and Bran set off on some long excursion into the surrounding country.
Haidee came up to Val's room sometimes to make perfunctory inquiries. She would stare hard at the latter lying so lazily amongst her cushions, and narrowly search the smiling face. But, except that colour had fled from cheek and lip, Val showed no signs of trouble, only a vivid interest in all they had been doing.
"You do take it easy, I must say," Haidee remarked half grudgingly the fourth evening after Westenra's departure. "Lying here in the cool while we have to scoot about in the heat and dust."
Val laughed.
"You don't have to, chicken. And scooting in a motor is not so very disagreeable after all. You look as if it agreed with you, anyway."
Indeed the girl was radiant, and her half-hearted grumblings were entirely contradicted by her eager air of enjoying life. She need not have resented that Val smiled so brightly from her bed, and perhaps she would not have done so if she could have seen that when the door closed on her the light went out of the smoke-coloured eyes, and the smile withered, leaving only weariness upon Val's lips.
But on the day Westenra's return was notified by telegram Val came down very bright and gay and presided over the tea-table under the pines. Rupert had just brought the others back from Grasse in a condition of physical flop, and all three were distributed upon chairs in attitudes of utter abandon. Val, with all the colour back again in her pale dark face, looked fresher than any of them. Westenra's wire was a subject of great intrigue. It had come not from Paris, but from a little out-of-the-way place called Baurem les Mimosas, which lay about two hours from Cannes and not even on the main line! No one knew by which train he was coming, or where to go and meet him.
"I don't believe he has been in Paris at all," said Haidee discontentedly, and certainly the man who at that moment appeared at the top of one of the winding paths and came strolling towards them bore no stamp of Paris on himself or his raiment. His face, in spite of the protecting brim of a cow-puncher's hat which had clearly seen life and experience in other climes, was badly sunburnt, and he wore a truly disreputable grey flannel suit of the reach-me-down class, and evidently made for the French figure rather than for an Irishman of large and athletic build. The waist and hip measurements were of such amplitude as to give a slightly bouffant effect, but the calf accommodation was limited to bursting point; the rest of the trouser-leg would have hung in frills round the ankles had they not been secured tightly by large white safety-pins. A pair of "Weary Willie" canvas shoes completed Westenra's outfit.
"Garry!" gasped Haidee, shocked beyond words. But Bran leaped upon his father and embraced him joyously.
"Where you been, Daddy?"
"I been bicycling," responded daddy affably and saluted every one, beginning with Val and ending with Rupert. "That's where I been!"
"Bicycling! What a thing!" cried Haidee, while Val made him fresh tea. "How could you come through Cannes such a sight, Garry?"
"What's the matter with me? I feel good in these togs. In future I shall always dress like this."
Haidee shuddered.
"You did n't go to Paris after all?"
"No, Haidee, I did not go to Paris. I hired a bicycle, bought this bicycling suit you don't admire, and took to the open road. There isn't any village between here and Toulon that I haven't explored inside out, nor any 'cafe debitant' where I have n't sampled the chianti or the astispumanti or anything else that was tanti."
"But what for, Garry? Why?"
"I had some thinking to do," said Garry, "and I thought I could do it better on a bicycle than in Paris."
"Have you thought about when you're going to take me in a ship, Daddy?"
Bran had climbed on his knee.
"Yes; I 've been thinking about that, my son."
Haidee said abruptly:
"Did n't you say we would take one of those tramp steamers that go from Marseilles, and touch at all sorts of ports?"
"That was the idea." Westenra held up a cigar to Val, and she nodded permission to smoke. "Why?"
"Well, as Rupert is going to Morocco next week I thought we might as well take the same ship." Haidee sounded rather breathless.
"Ah!" remarked Westenra thoughtfully and lay back in his chair, his face between the knees of Bran, who had climbed up into his favourite position.
Rupert murmured something about that being "an idea bien gentille" and hunted nervously for a cigarette.
"In that case," announced Val quietly, "we shall all be sailing from Marseilles at much the same time."
"All?" Every eye was immediately focused upon her.
"You----?"
"But you 're not coming--" Haidee broke off confusedly.
"No; but I am leaving France."
"Leaving France?" ejaculated Rupert.
"Yes, leaving France, and all cities, to go back to the life I lived as a child and which has been pulling and calling me ever since."
"What, that life in a waggon?" Haidee had heard of it so often it was strange she should become so excited about it now.
"Yes; a waggon that starts every late afternoon, and treks throughout the night; and brings you to a fresh place every morning." Her face suddenly lost the veil of shadows that had hung over it so long. Space, and joy and distance, and a fierce wistfulness came into her gaze. "One goes on and on to places one has never seen before, sometimes to places no one has ever seen before--that is best, that is wonderful----"
Strangely the veil that had passed from her face seemed to fall upon the faces of her listeners. Not one among them but looked curiously disturbed.
"I shall see the wildebeeste grazing on the horizon once more--and hear the guinea-fowl in the bush crying 'come back! come back!"
Westenra stared at her. Was this the woman who had run his nursing home!
"Everything in nature, if you leave it alone, will come back--to the ways of its early life."
"If you leave it alone?" Westenra spoke almost involuntarily. She laughed.
"Am not I going to be left alone?"
There was a silence. Every one sat staring at her.
"Who but I would care for such a foolish life!" she said more sombrely.
"But wouldn't I?" burst out Rupert. "It is what I have always longed for. To coucher a la belle etoile! Zut, alors! I will come too. It is understood."
Val laughed.
"You would soon be bored. One must be a wanderfoot by birth and instinct."
But he repudiated the saying, and there was no boredom in his eye nor in the eyes of any. An odd uneasiness possessed them all. Haidee looked paler and was biting her lip. Bran had descended from his father's shoulders and advancing on Val stood looking at her, a startling reflection of her fierce wistfulness in his own eyes. But he still kept a hand on his father's knee.
It was Marietta who broke up the seance by coming out to announce in an autocratic manner that dinner would be ready in ten minutes. No one had realised that it was so late. Westenra did not accept the invitation to stay and dine as he was, but having secured its extension to the evening sprang on his bicycle and rode for his hotel to the endangerment of several lives on the route Nationale.
It hardly seemed an hour before he was back again, very big and handsome in conventional dress, among the tranquil trees of the garden. The place was silvered and transformed by the light of the moon, which, at the full, hung like a great luminous pearl on the radiant breast of heaven. The windows of the Villa were all set wide, and in the drawing-room Haidee's fingers were weaving fairy tales at the piano with such magic that they seemed real voices and hands that called and tugged at Val and Rupert under the trees. The boy stirred restlessly in his chair, gripping its sides. Since dinner Val had been sitting there, very silent, while Haidee played.
When he heard the bell tinkle on the garden gate far below, and knew that some one, probably Westenra, was entering, he said suddenly:
"I forgot to tell you that the other night when I walked home with the doctor I happened to mention to him ... that ... well, that I was with you at the funeral of Mr. Valdana."
"Ah!" Val sighed strangely and sat up straight in her chair. It was too late for anything more to be said. Westenra was upon them. And since Rupert, vacating his chair, was already on his way to the drawing-room, it was quite simple and natural that Westenra should sit down beside her. They talked, a little disjointedly about the beauty of the night, how well Haidee played, what a charming fellow Rupert was. Then he said suddenly:
"And you are really going back to that wild wandering life of yours, Val?"
It was the first time he had called her Val in all these years. She trembled a little, answering sadly:
"Like water, I must return to my own level."
"Then you should live on the mountain tops."
She trembled again and her heart ached a little more poignantly. Why should he mock her?
"You think you will be happy?" His voice was not mocking, only very gentle.
"Oh! happy?" she echoed. "Who is happy? But--
'Give me the long white road, and the grey path of the sea, And the wind's will, and the birds' will, and the heartache still in me,'
and I will reproach no one."
"Reproaching has never been a pastime of yours, I think--and you may be glad of it, Val, for reproaches, like curses, have a way of coming home to roost. My conscience is no better than an aviary----"
Her involuntary laugh lightened the strain a little, but Westenra was a thorough man, and did not mean to leave it at that. Sombrely he finished.
"I beg your forgiveness, Val, for every reproach I have ever made you in your capacity as wife, mother--or lover. They were undeserved, every one!"
Why should his voice have grown hoarse at the last, and her heart come climbing up into her throat as if to suffocate her? It was some moments before she could half-whisper, half-mutter a response.
"You are too generous; I deserved everything you ever said--but after long thinking I see--that--we cannot all win out as wives and mothers. Of some of us, when you 've said we are good lovers you 've said all. I hoped I was a good mother too--but it is plain that I am not, for Bran, even Bran on whom I had staked my last throw--even Bran leaves me--"
Strange that Haidee should choose this moment to launch forth into the first trembling plaintive notes of the 17th Sonata, that wonderful paean of terror and beauty under whose rushing spell seven and a half years agone Val had lain her face against her husband's and shared with him the greatest, sweetest secret that can ever lie between man and woman!
"Bran shall never leave you--if you will have me with him--or even if you will not."
"Garrett--what are you saying?"
"'The years teach much that the days never know.' Val, I have realised during the last seven days what I have been learning ever since you came into my life, that everything is worthless but the love and happiness of the woman you love."
"Oh, Joe!" she cried in great humility and wonder. "You with all your gifts of mind and brain; with all you have done for science, and still will do----!"
"It can all go to the devil," he said cheerfully. "I 'm coming to live with you in a waggon on the veldt, to see the wildebeeste, whatever they may be, grazing on the horizon, and hear the guinea-fowl calling from the bush. These things have got a hold on my imagination and will never let go. And if I can't do something for science, even out there on the veldt, I 'm a poor sort of fellow and will deserve to be forgotten."
"But the rewards you have already won--that are just within your grasp?--the chair at Columbia--the Nobel--the--" (She herself set no store by such things, but well she knew how men value them more than their immortal souls.)
"Too bad!" said Westenra, with an ironical smile. "Did you ever hear of what John L. Sullivan said the day after his defeat at New Orleans? A sympathiser came wheedling up to him, saying: 'It's too bad, Jawn! Too bad! What 'll you do now?' Sullivan, real man that he always was, even in defeat, growled back at him: 'What 'll I do now? Pugh! Ain't I John L. Sullivan still?' Pretty good philosophy for a pug, Val! I can only say in all humility--same here! Even in defeat I----"
His words were cut short by a very whirlwind of lace and tears and laughter. A pair of arms were thrown round Val's neck, and a sobbing, happy voice cried, loud enough for all who wished to hear:
"Oh, Val--I love you, and I beg your pardon. I am a pig from away back--and a cat and a beast--but oh! I am so happy! Rupert and I are going to get married to-morrow, and after we have been in Morocco a little we shall come out and join you in your waggon."
Westenra stood up big and grim in the moonlight.
"Hell's blood and blazes!--and is this the way I am thrown down at the eleventh or any moment?--bring me the bridegroom, and I 'll eat him up at one mouthful. I 'll beat the gizzard out of him--I'll----"
"M'voila, Monsieur le Docteur! Here I am," said Rupert, not without dignity, and with great goodwill.
"Well, get out," said Westenra softly, "and take your bride to be with you. That's all that's required of you for the time being."
He cared not how they went nor where, so long as he was alone once more with this only woman of his life. He took her hand in his and drew her close until her cheek lay against his as on a long-ago night, driving up Broadway to 68th Street. Before them, through the trees, glimmered a silver expanse of water, with grim warships lying at rest and little red-sailed fishing boats rocking softly.
"Heart of my heart--does n't this seem to you a fair sea on which to launch a new ship of dreams."
"No. Not a new ship, Joe. The same old ship. I have never been out of it for an hour, or a moment."
