Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 3 – Stockley · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 3Part I · Fate's Winding Paths
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Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 3
Part I · Fate's Winding Paths
StockleyEnglish
"Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the weary end."
With Westenra's kiss still warm on her lips Valentine Valdana knelt in her cabin, elbows plunged in the low plush-covered lounge, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, her upturned face resting in the palms of her hands as still and rapt as the face of a visionnaire, and indeed it was in visionary scenes that her mind wandered: scenes of the past peopled with the absent and the dead. Sometimes her lips moved and she spoke a name--her mother's, her father's, a child's, an old woman's, that of a man who lay by her mother's side in the Durban cemetery--one whom the world had known as a brilliant but drunken journalist, but whom she remembered only as a great heart and loved friend. For she had a great capacity for loving, this woman; she did not know how to merely like people; when she cared at all she loved and gave her best. She loved all the people with whom she was dreaming now, and she loved them still with a love that reached over seas and past the grave; in her radiant new-found happiness her thoughts flew to them wishing that they too might be glad with her.
"Dear Dick ... I am so happy," she said, visualising the drunken journalist, not as others had seen him, a short red-faced man with bright, haggard eyes and a sardonic mouth, but as the big-hearted man of letters who had generously taught a young uneducated girl all he knew of his craft.
In memory she sat again in the stuffy Johannesburg newspaper office with the maps on the wall, tables hidden under a jumble of papers, chairs covered with tobacco ash, books, whiskey bottles, and heard the voice of Dick Rowan pounding "style" into her while the mine batteries drummed outside, and the windows reddened and rattled under the assault of a blinding Rand dust storm. Her thoughts passed to another man who had worked with them, and who lay now in the little cemetery behind the Primrose Deep; to another sniped in the streets of Mafeking who had written to her by the last post that came from the beleaguered town; to another dead in the shadow of the Himalayas of whom she could not think without remembering the paddy-birds in the rice fields near Benares; another sleeping on the shores of Lake Chad.
For like all women thrown early on the world to make a living she had found her best friends among men, and the very adventurousness of her own life had brought her into contact with adventurous men of the kind whose lives are full and vivid and of sudden ending. Of the men who "did things, and died in far places" she had known a-many, and been proud of their friendship, and with all the ardour of an ardent nature she had loved them every one in her boyish, good-comrade way. And they had all passed on or passed away! But she wanted them to be with her in this hour. She called on every one she had loved, or been loved by, to rejoice with her now. She even laid in thought a flower of amnesty upon the memory of Horace Valdana, but with him she did not linger, for in the memory of her husband was neither beauty nor joy, and in that hour she wished only to remember things that gave no hurt.
For she too believed that the fate which through the open and winding passages of life had been seeking after her had found her at last; that of all the men she had been loved by, and she had been greatly loved, here at last was the one whom her heart and mind had awaited--a real man with something of the lion in the hold of his head and in the quality of his sure glance and careless smile, who "did before the sun and moon whatsoever his heart appointed," and was no man's man but his own. She saw that Westenra was big in mind and spirit, self-trusting, self-reliant; and every woman's heart responds to those iron strings. Every woman hopes to find in the man she loves something big and vast and eternal in which she can become absorbed, and lose herself. For every woman has the secret fear that by herself she is nothing, can be nothing, and has no eternal life except in and through love.
She had loved Westenra from the first with all the wise and foolish reasons a woman will find for putting her hands under the feet of the beloved, for his boyish laugh, and the way his hair grew, his witty tongue, the simplicity of his heart, and the subtlety of his mind; for his big head and broad shoulders, for the grace and strength of him, for his curious personal shyness and his wide, impersonal outlook; for the twist his race had given to his speech, and for his handsome face which was not handsome at all, but the face of a thinker who has been up against the hardest problem in the world--ignorance.
These were the things she knew that she loved him for, but she was aware without going too deeply into the matter that the other and more important ones that she had long sought were there too. Dimly she knew that the maternal woman in her, the subconscious mother who seeks for greatness in the father of her children, was satisfied with Westenra and that promise of eternity in his eyes. And because of this she was willing to renounce all that her life had been and might be, to change all in herself that he did not like, to become of him and for him. She had always known that a time like this would come, when she would throw all she had worked for and earned to the winds, for the sake of a man who wanted her not because she was a famous journalist, but because she was a woman and the woman for him. But the condition was that he must be the man for her too. She had waited long for that condition to be fulfilled, passing over many a fine heart because her own refused or was unable to give the countersign to his challenge.
And at last the hour had come, as it always does come to those who know how to wait. From the moment she first spoke to Westenra and looked him in the eyes she had felt that mystic stirring of flesh and spirit that comes only once and is so unmistakable. She had realised then that to have this man always in her life would be to touch the highest peaks of the far blue mountains of romance. And the moment she realised it she felt hopeless. For never in her life had she got anything that she ardently desired. Happiness had evaded her and joy had passed her by. To know now at last that Westenra loved her, that the greatest desire in her life was to be fulfilled, seemed too wonderful to be true. The gratitude that filled her was curious in so clever a woman, and one who had had many men at her feet; but a childlike humility concerning herself was one of her sweetest qualities.
In the presence of those she loved she never remembered that she was famous, gifted, travelled, and honoured, and withal young and attractive. It always amazed her that any one should find her clever and charming. And that Westenra, who did not even know or care what she had done as a journalist, should find her desirable just because she was Valentine Valdana and a woman was the most amazing and beautiful thing in the world. It opened life out upon a boundless horizon, and flooded the future with a love great enough to cast out all devils of the past.
She knelt long by her bed, half-praying, half-pondering on sad things gone by and glad things to come. Out of it all came a resolve that the next day she would tell Westenra the whole story of her life of strange adventure and misery.
There were many things that to speak of would cause her wretchedness, but it was not the shameful wretchedness of those who, resisting no temptation, have taken all they wished from life, leaving nothing for the future but regrets. Her sorrows were sweet and untainted. There were many things of which perhaps people of hedged-in lives might think she should be ashamed, but which seemed to her to be natural and simple and nothing. She had gone up and down the world and seen so much in the way of suffering, known so many complications of love and life, that nothing astonished or even shocked her any more. She had been through the mill and "seen life," as the phrase goes; and whether or not that is a good thing for a woman, and whether or not the spiritual vision gets a little dimmed in the process, and the senses a little dulled, is a matter of opinion. The fact remains that at the age of twenty-six Valentine Valdana still retained such freshness of heart that she could kneel for an hour or two at her bedside in a state of contemplative prayer, unembittered by the past and full of hope for the future.
A witty but unhappy writer whose life proved the truth of his epigram wrote that "good resolutions are cheques which we draw on a bank where we have no account." But at twenty-six Valentine Valdana could still, with serene confidence in her power to honour them, draw cheques upon this bank of the soul: so perhaps after all life had not done so ill by her as might have been supposed.
Her life-story was a curiously unusual one. The touch of Orientalism in her eyes and hair was a legacy from her grandmother, a beautiful Egyptian girl born in a harem and stolen therefrom by an adventurer who was deep in the counsels and intrigues of its lord and owner, her father. The two fled from Egypt to Zanzibar, where, under the protection of the Sultan, they married and lived, the Irishman making himself as useful and necessary to the negro Sultan as he had to the Egyptian chief. The beautiful little harem-born wife from association with her husband and the few Europeans in the place learned to speak English, and her only child, a girl who resembled one of the wonderful tropical flowers she lived among, was brought up in European fashion by an Irish nurse sent for from Ireland. In time the Egyptian mother died, and the Irishman, fallen on evil days through Court intrigues and an affliction of the eyes, was obliged to flee from Zanzibar and make for the only country where he and his child could keep warm and live cheaply--Italy. There, the girl, Iolita, learned to perfect a gift of dancing she had always delighted in, and when later her father became totally blind and penniless, it was she who bravely maintained the affair of living for both of them by dancing at the theatres and the opera until she danced her way into fame.
Child of a passionate love-marriage it was only natural that Iolita too should follow her heart. In London, at the very zenith of her success and just when Fate was unrolling before her a vista of luxurious years, she proved the heritage of her blood by eloping to Africa with the youngest son of an English peer, a being as romantic and irresponsible as herself.
Gay Haviland had tried his hand at most things, from Shakespearean acting in London to horse-breaking in Mexico, before he found his true metier as a transport-rider on the South African veldt. The home to which he took his eager-hearted bride was an ox-waggon drawn by a span of twenty magnificent red bullocks, which earned their living and his by carrying loads of wool and grain from the Free State and the Transvaal to the Cape. It was on a St. Valentine's Day from the tent of that waggon as it lay under the shadow of the Catberg Range, that little Val first saw the light, and the same tent was the only home she knew, except for occasional sojourns in Dutch towns, for the first nine years of her life. From a child's point of view it was an ideal existence, full of beauty and variety as far at least as scenery was concerned, adventures with big game, long days of camping on the banks of wild rivers or in the shade of purple mountains, and an absolute absence of the tasks and training common to children brought up in the ordinary way. It is true that at camping times the dancer amused herself by teaching little Val to read and write in Italian, while the transport-rider successfully imparted to the child, together with his poetical if vagabond views of life, a very real love and knowledge of Literature. For if ever scholar turned gipsy it was Gay Haviland, and though the book he loved best was Nature, and his library the Open Road, his waggon-boxes were always well stocked with works of classical and modern writers.
Val imbibed his tastes and vagabond creeds as a flower imbibes dew, but for the rest she was as free and idle as a little wild buck prancing across the veldt in the wake of its mother, and as unthinkingly happy.
With Haviland's tragic death from snake-bite, however, the veldt life came to a sudden end and passed for ever into the realms of memory, seeming to Val in the hard years that followed to have been a wonderful dream, yet remaining always the most poignant and cherished part of her existence.
Poverty showed its jagged teeth to the beautiful dancer, frightening her back to Europe, where she essayed to gain her living once more with flying seductive feet. But her dancing was not what it had been. Ten years of idle and ideal love on the veldt had spoiled her art, or perhaps the wife and mother had absorbed it. At any rate she was unable to step back into the vacancy created when as Iolita Fitzpatrick she had left the stage for love of Gay Haviland. Other stars had arisen, and the public had forgotten her. Engagements were difficult to find, and when found were at best of the second-rate order. Neither help nor sympathy was forthcoming from the proud English family who, having always detested poor Gay Haviland's mesalliance, absolutely repudiated any connection with the dancer or her child.
Years of arduous struggle followed during which the two trailed from one great continental city to another, often miserably poor and in desperate straits, sometimes perilously near starvation, but thanks to the generous Freemasonry of Art, and grace to their own happy charm in good and evil times, never quite without friends, or some last resource. It may truly be said that Val's education was received in the school of Life, for she never attended any other; but the love of books inculcated by her father stayed with her, and because book lovers will always, whatever their straits, get books, Val was able to educate herself as many another has done, and done well, by reading. Then, too, with the open mind of the untaught she received and retained all the beauty and colour and picturesque event of their wandering Bohemian life, finding even in their grimmest adventure food for thought and amusement.
When she was fourteen, and Iolita still astonishingly beautiful in spite of poverty and defeat, an engagement took them to the Argentine Republic, but ending up disastrously left them stranded and almost penniless at Buenos Aires. Things were at their darkest when good luck dawned once more in the shape of Dick Rowan, an old friend of Haviland's, and who together with the latter had adored the dancer in the days when she was a star. Rowan was a brilliant but eccentric man of letters, afflicted by the wanderlust. His adventurous temperament, irked by life in cities, had driven him forth as a journalist to far lands, where he had become as famous for his war and political correspondence as for his dissipated ways and generous heart. He was an expert on the political situation of various Colonies and smaller Powers, and whenever little wars were on the carpet there also was Rowan. In times when wars were not, he occupied himself with the internal wranglings of Colonial governments. Wherever he could force his way in he made himself felt. It was not for nothing he was known as "Gadfly" Rowan. At the period of his re-meeting with Iolita he was interesting himself in the Transvaal with the affairs of Paul Kruger and the Uitlander, up to his eyes in political intrigue, and editing a Johannesburg journal with Imperialistic leanings. His presence in the Argentine on some business of his own was the veriest accident, but a happy one for Iolita, for, faithful to his early passion, he was overjoyed to find her again, and asked nothing better than to take her burdens upon his shoulders and be a father to Gay Haviland's daughter. Iolita, on her part, had always felt a great affection for the journalist. It seemed a pleasant end of weariness to consign her fate into his eager if improvident hands. So they were married, and the family of three sailed for Africa, where for the next two years they spent a busy, happy, and erratic existence together, surrounded by journalists, politicians, and all the quick wits of the Rand. From the first Val showed a keen liking which Rowan was swift to foster for newspaper writing. He took her as his secretary, and taught her on broad lines all that is most useful for a journalist to know. None knew better than Dick Rowan how to direct a natural talent for journalism, and in Val he recognised splendid material, a born vocabulary, a keen sense of observation, love of phrase, and a knowledge of books and places. Above all, she was full of ardour for the work. Nothing lacked but training to apply her genius, and this Rowan, erratic and irresponsible in all things but his profession, was the best person in the world to give her.
From being his amanuensis she soon became his assistant. A great devotion sprang up between the stepfather and daughter. Later, when Iolita, visiting Durban, died and was buried in that beautiful seaside town, the two drew closer in their loneliness and sorrow. Val was eighteen then, and Rowan ageing rapidly, for he always lived every moment of his life, and always he "poured spirits down to keep his spirits up." Because of this his energy and brain were both beginning to fail; and here the value of the hand and head he had trained was proved. Work was offered to him that he would never have been able to accept but for Val. It was she who urged him on, worked with him and for him, repaying her own and her mother's debt by unwearying devotion. A commission to proceed to Somaliland, a splendid opportunity for glory, came from a great London Daily, but Rowan's initiative would never have been equal to it without Val. She not only made him go, but went with him, and when he fell ill there, and the newspaper correspondence devolved upon her, as well as the nursing of her stepfather, so well did she accomplish both, that Rowan got well and she reaped recognition. For Rowan, rigid as all good writers about the identity of work, insisted on the authorship of the letters being known. Shyly she appended "Wanderfoot," the nom-de-plume she had chosen, to her first unaided work. It looked like a special effort on the part of the god of irony that before the end of the expedition she nearly lost her feet through inflammation caused by overwalking.
After Somaliland, commissions came to her singly, but from a sense of loyalty she would do nothing except in connection with Rowan; so they worked and travelled together going to different parts of Africa from the Cape to Egypt, until one day landing in Durban to make a flying visit to the Transvaal, Rowan paid with dramatic suddenness the penalty for burning up his brain and liver for years with whiskey and the best wines.
Val found herself alone in the world, though not helpless, for her own and Rowan's efforts had given her a weapon with which to fight for and hold her place among the journalists of the day. But she was only twenty, and as hopelessly impractical as the conditions of her life and Rowan's happy-go-lucky methods could make her. He was one of those who knew no use for money except to make it fly faster than it came, living gaily ahead of his income to the tune of the old saw:
"Happy-go-lucky,
Penny loaf for twopence,
Got no shoes go without."
Val's journalistic intelligence had been developed at the expense of her practicability for everyday purposes. She could already make money, but she had no sense of the value of it. A number of things she had gathered hi the course of her vivid life could not be tabulated, for they were intangible, nor valued, for they were priceless; but of common or garden prudence and horse-sense she possessed no single jot or iota.
What she did possess and wear for all the world to recognise was a disquietingly attractive appearance, and the fascination that hangs about the personality of one who is able to do something, and that something well. To this was now added the wistful charm that sorrow stamps upon her elect. All those whom Val had loved had left her one by one. She began to believe herself doomed to loneliness--that she had but to love to suffer the bitterness of loss. The cerebral hemorrhage with which Rowan had been smitten had left him a few merciful clear hours before death, and during that time he had impressed upon her the wisdom of going straight to England and making the most of his literary connections there. But, in spite of this injunction, she had lingered on from day to day in the expensive Durban hotel where he died. She could not drag herself away from the two graves that lay in the heart of the town, sheltered by palms and feathery trees, with the naked feet of Zulus pattering past up and down the Berea hill, and ricksha bells echoing between the marble crosses and headstones of the dead. She shrank and faltered from turning her face towards a new life empty of love.
That was a propitious moment for Horace Valdana to step upon the scene.
Handsome, with the marks of race on him, and no outward sign of his dark heart, he was of the exact type to attract a romantic girl's interest. Val, lonely, impulsive, but lacking in judgment, fell in love with the man she believed him to be, and without hesitation placed her fate in his hands. There was no one to warn her (and if there had been it is doubtful whether she would have believed that he was a thorough-paced blackguard, whose family, sure by bitter experience that he would some day openly disgrace an old and honoured name, and deciding that it were better for him to do it in the Colonies than at their door, had financed him to go abroad and stay there. Africa is full of such--"remittance boys," ne'er-do-wells, men who have left their country for their country's good. Most of them, when they arrive at least, have good manners, often the stamp of a public school on them. Nearly all possess the charm and guile that are special attributes of the professional black sheep.
Valdana was a perfect example of this professional black sheep--whom novelists and playwrights have encouraged into existence--the man who talks rather sadly about his family never having seen any good in him, but who, by "carving out a career" for himself means to show them some day that he is "not such a waster after all!" Any woman of the world would have seen through him in a very short time; but poor Val was no woman of the world, only a gifted, romantic girl, with all the worldly stupidity and shortsightedness of her kind. It should, perhaps, be counted to Valdana's credit that he married her instead of playing some trick upon the innocence of which her varied life had not yet robbed her. But trickery would have meant plotting, and Horace Valdana was too lazy to plot. Besides, he was well informed enough to know that Val had value as a wife who could make money. So Val got a real marriage certificate, and became a real wife, and in a very short time knew the meaning of real misery. Until then the hard luck and misfortunes which Fate had dealt her had at least been shared by loyal hearts and faced with courage and gaiety; but now it was her lot to discover how bitter sordid poverty can be when shared with a mean and vicious nature that exacts all and gives less than nothing in the great give-and-take game of marriage. Valdana darkened life for her and blotted out the stars. He walked on her illusions and hopes, and threw down her idols. She sometimes felt as if he had wiped his boots on her soul. Wretchedness and a child were the outcome of the ill-starred marriage. Still soft and pliable with youth, she might have forgiven the first for the sake of the last, but her husband, utterly bored by her innocence and uselessness, very soon decamped leaving her to shift for herself and the child as best she might.
It was quite true as has been told that she was utterly useless in the ordinary way. She had received absolutely no training in the practical things of life, except of the most rough-and-ready kind. She could light a camp-fire with any one, and shoot something to cook on it afterwards, but she was far from knowing as much about domestic life as even an ordinary Boer girl, and quite unfit to be a poor man's wife in Africa or anywhere else. The one thing she could do well was to write up big picturesque events for the newspapers; but such things have to be sought first and written of afterwards, and now she had a baby to bind her hands and stay her wandering feet.
There came another dreary era of struggle. Freed of the cankering taint of Valdana's presence, the young mother plucked up enough courage and money to get back to England, where she judged her best chance lay of making a living. But the connections and introductions she had counted on using there were in the end of very little use to her, for the reason that she could not now continue her special line of work. There were still things happening in out-of-the-way parts of the world, but Val could not leave her young child to go and write about them, and after one or two offers had been made to her and declined she got no others. As for the conditions of English life and journalism she knew nothing of them. Besides, a place in the London journalistic world has to be worked and waited for on the spot; outsiders are not encouraged, and have a bad time while trying to push in. When at last she realised that all she could hope for was an ignominious place in the queue among the hack writers, the girl proudly buried the name made memorable by collaboration with Dick Rowan, and disguised under that of Valdana, took what she could get to keep the wolf from the door. For herself, travelling on a dark road where all the stars had gone out, she would have cared little if at this time starvation and an end had come; but the tiger maternity was awake in her and cried out for the preservation of little Carmen.
From the first the child had doubled her anxieties by being delicate, and in England its health did not improve. Many a time in the weary London months the mother tripped up the journalist just as the path looked a little clearer or was smoothening out to a surer footing. Many a promising opportunity of regular work had to be passed by because of some baby illness that needed all the careful nursing Val could give. But youth and courage were still on her side; and in her heart the secret conviction which thrills every mother--that her child is an important link in the chain of generations, that a woman's career and ambitions are as nothing compared to the keeping alight of the little flame which may some day become a beacon to humanity. What mother's heart has not trembled to this illusion? How many babies would ever reach maturity if this secret religion did not hold sway in women's hearts, urging them to sacrifice, pain, drudgery, and self-abnegation?
And after all the struggle was in vain. The baby died, and Val, more lonely and alone than ever before, wished that she too might die, for it seemed that life was never to hold anything for her but work. And oh! the weariness of work that has not love for its compelling force! Oh! the longitude and lassitude of life without loved ones in it!
Fortunately, something occurred at this time which not only took her away from the scene of her loss, but occupied her every thought for a considerable period. The Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shook England to the heart with various emotions, and called for a great deal of information that could only be acquired at the scene of operations. The Editor of the Imperialistic Daily, which had employed Dick Rowan, found himself keenly regretting the "Gadfly" and his deep knowledge of the internal workings of the Transvaal Government, then remembered "Wanderfoot" and her application of a year or so back. A search was instituted, and within a week Val was sailing for Africa full of instructions that gave her little time in which to remember the emptiness of her heart and the dull ache of loss, or anything but the affair she was sent upon--to get speech of both President Kruger and the members of the Reform Committee who lay in Pretoria Gaol.
The series of brilliant articles sent by her from Johannesburg dealing with the reign of terror at that time exercised by Transvaal Boers over the betrayed and despairing English population; the history, written in terse, mordant, heart-wringing phrases of that famous trial, when four of the Reform Committee were sentenced to death, and the rest to "two years' rotting" in a foul prison; these constituted the first steps in the ladder by which Valentine mounted alone and unaided, rung by rung, to journalistic fame. After that no more need to seek work; it sought her. There were commissions to India, Turkey, Russia, and Mexico, and with each new adventure were fresh laurels, for her work improved as the work of a writer can only improve when she gives it her heart and soul and serves no other god.
Thus, after struggling and climbing practically from the age of fourteen up the craggy hillside of Fame, she had in her twenty-sixth year reached a point nearer the top than do most women. True, it was not universal fame, but the fact remains, that to any one who read with understanding the British newspapers, her name stood for work both brilliant and sound, a fine temperament and a great future.
When success first began to come her way, Valdana cropped up again, smiling and ready to step back into her life. But sorrow had taught Val a few things and opened her eyes to the real worthlessness of her husband's character. She recognised coldly and clearly at last just what he was--a lazy, unscrupulous scoundrel. Even more unforgivable was the fact that he had not cared a rap whether his child lived or died of starvation: that she could never forget. Therefore, though she gave him money, even unto the half of her income, she refused to return to him or allow him to come back into her life. He became so troublesome, however, that she was on the point of seeking legal protection from him, when the Boer war broke out, and in the urgent interests of her newspaper she was obliged to put private affairs aside, and start immediately for Africa. After a year there of unceasing work and travel, she succumbed to a bad illness, resulting from overtaxed energy, and it was while she lay ill in Cape Town that Valdana made a fresh move in the game.
It must be mentioned that before his people, realising his lack of all moral sense, and fearful of future dishonour, had decided to despatch him to Africa, he was intended for the army, and had been educated and trained to that end. His parents' decision was a bitter blow to him, for the picturesque side of army life appealed to him greatly, and he chose to believe and to frequently air the modest opinion that in him a very gallant soldier had been lost to England. Now, when in England's dark hour she called for men to volunteer their services in Africa, came his chance, and with a promptness he only exhibited in his own interests, he applied for a commission in one of the corps raised in London. His application was at first refused, because there were plenty of good men of tried experience to fill such posts; but a clever use of his wife's name and work got him into the limelight. He did not even disdain to make use of her illness, and the fact that she had been brought almost to death's door in the service of the public. So finally he got his commission and sailed for the front in a glow of publicity.
Then, for a blackleg and a ne'er-do-well whom no one wanted, he did an extraordinary and unheard of thing--he died! And not content to merely die, he did the thing well; nobly and heroically he did it, in company with a dozen or so men of his troop. They were isolated in a farmhouse, surrounded by a large number of Boers, and refusing to surrender were cut up to a last man, and the house set afire over their wounded bodies. Some grudging curmudgeon had invented a tale to the effect that one of the band had slunk out, and, deserting his wounded comrades, escaped. But no one had ever been able to prove the lie, and even the Boers themselves gave evidence of the splendid courage of the little band, and especially of their leader, the last to die with a laugh upon his lips. All England rang with Horace Valdana's name. Val, already bright in the public eye, had the added lustre of her gallant husband's glory shed upon her. Shoals of sympathetic letters and telegrams reached her in Cape Town, and, on the occasion of her return to England, having been rigidly forbidden by the doctors to continue her war correspondence, she was met by crowds and cheered to the echo. But both sympathy and cheers were wasted upon her. She received them coldly and silently, without tears and without a widow's desolate mien. When it was presently observed that she also dispensed with the habiliments of wo, and went about in London as if nothing had happened, she was severely criticised, and people began to dislike her. Moreover, a mangled history of the unhappy marriage got out; it was soon known that there had been great faults on one side or the other. Tales with a tang to them of Valentine's friendships abroad with well-known men were told in the clubs, and as the men concerned had mostly died or disappeared, there was no one on the spot interested or well informed enough to dispute the truth of them. What was worse, an entirely cruel and untrue version of her relation to Dick Rowan during their travels and exploits together was bruited about, though always so carefully that the victim of the scandal only caught dim echoes of it, and was never able to seize and nail the lie to the mast. In the end, needless to say, the woman paid. "Gallant Horace Valdana" got more than the benefit of the doubt as far as the unhappy marriage was concerned, and his widow was sent to social Coventry.
Little she cared. The world meant nothing to her. She had wrestled too bitterly with life to set any undue value on the approval of society, even had she not possessed a congenital carelessness amounting to indifference to the opinions of any except those she loved. As long as those few knew the truth--as they could not help doing, knowing her--and their love loyally remained unaffected, she gave little heed to calumny; it was enough for her to realise that she was free at last of Valdana. She tried not to rejoice too much at that, but rather to weed out from her heart the last blade of bitterness and scorn of the dead man, so that the rest of life might be lived unpoisoned by hateful memories.
At this period of vague mental unrest and retrospection, the offer to her from a famous newspaper to visit America on its behalf came pleasantly a propos. Sick of London and the arid memories it contained for her, she was thankful to shake its dust from her feet for a time at least and turn her face to a new and unknown horizon.
And now, during the process of getting into her soul once more the dew of forgiveness and loving-kindness, Westenra had come marching into her life, and her heart cried out as the heart of Iole cried out when they asked her how she knew that Hercules was a god:
"Because I was content when my eyes fell upon him."
