Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 7 – Stockley · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 7Part I · More Winding Paths
18
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 7
Part I · More Winding Paths
StockleyEnglish
"There is a crack in everything God has made."
EMERSON.
There is a saying that during the hot weather every one in New York, except doctors and cats, leave the city. Westenra, with his yearly habit of pulling stakes and heading for Europe at the first hint of heat, had always been an exception to this rule, and he invariably advised other men that his was the only possible way to keep fit after nine months' hard work. But now, though the brazen heat beat down on to the city and burnt up through the pavements as if Pluto had lighted a special furnace under New York, Westenra laughed at his own advice and made no move to get away. Val knew why, and the knowledge etched new shadows under her salient cheek-bones. In spite of his working like a bee from morning till night, the Sanatorium being constantly full, and operations always in progress, Westenra was harassed for money. The venture did not pay. An experienced woman at the head of things could have made it pay. The stolid, lumpy German with a good hospital training grafted on to a knowledge of household affairs would have made a roaring success of it, and coined money for all concerned. Even an ordinarily good manager with free hands and no nerves might have achieved a margin of profit. The vagabond journalist not only could not make it pay, she was turning it into a dead loss. Every day good money went cantering after bad.
What Westenra should have done, even at that eleventh hour, was to engage a capable, working matron to manage the place, while Val devoted her loving fervour to the baby and himself. But he felt doubtful as to the success of such an arrangement, first because Val would probably not like to live elsewhere; secondly, because he had managed hospitals before, and knew all about trouble with matrons. Experience had taught him that in America women rarely work well except in the interests of some one with whom they are in love. This rule applies very pertinently to American nurses, who are usually middle-aged Germans intent on marrying a doctor; but it may very well be applied to women all the world over, though Westenra was not aware of the fact. What he did know was that a managing matron would probably work for her own hand and not for his. Even if she made a roaring success of the place, later there would surely come the subtle introduction of other methods and other interests than his, into his own hospital. Worst of all would be the fact of strangers within his gates spying out the secrets of his reserved nature, bearing witness to his moods and nerves, all the irk of daily contact with people who were making a business out of his brains. This idea of outsiders being "let in on him," of alien eyes coming close enough to look over the wall behind which he kept his conflicting tempers and emotions from the world, was peculiarly irritating to him. Only Val, privileged by love, must have the gift of a share in his torment, the right to hear his swears. With all others he smiled and smiled and hid his heart, and put distance between himself and them. And Val, because she was a true lover, understood and faithfully gave of her body and soul to pad the bumps of life for him. Whatever else she failed in, she failed not in playing the buffer between him and the strangers who went to and fro in his house. He little knew what it cost her in peace of mind and serenity of spirit, this jarring with natures so unlike her own, and jangling with those who were making a business of life. He only knew that in spite of her impracticability and extravagance there was no one like her, and that the place in her incompetent hands was dearer by far than it could ever be in surer hands that were strange. It was beginning to dawn in his heart, with the exquisite promise of the skies, all that she was to him, this woman who walked by his side never faltering, smiling gallantly in defeat. It was beginning to whisper through his senses like the haunting echo of bells whose cadence he had known all his life that defeat after all did not matter so much since he shared it with her--that it might in fact become a form of victory. In any case he meant to struggle on with things as they were, hoping and working for the best.
Unfortunately, his nerves after the year of extraordinary strain were in rags. He really needed the rest and change that was due to him. His body and brain clamoured for it, and his fine athlete's skin took into itself a putty tint that was neither healthy nor becoming. In vain did Val implore him to take ship for his native land. He laughed and refused to go unless she and the children went too. But she knew what the cost of such an exodus would mean, and sat tight as an eagle in her eyrie; and her little brood pecked at her heart as though determined to get at her life-blood. Haidee grew wickeder every hour, and Bran was the naughtiest baby in the world, sleeping all day and howling all night, withal drinking away his mother's strength and blooming on it like a pink rose.
Valentine grew pale as a wraith and Westenra's old, haunting fear that his brain would give out ate him by night and day; but neither of them was a quitter. Both possessed that stupid and over-estimated kind of courage that does not know when it is beaten. At last Fate, like an overtried mother who is sick of giving gentle hints to unheeding children, brought down her hand heavily upon them. First she smote the man. In the blasting heat of late August, Westenra went down as only the big and the strong can go down--like a felled oak. The brilliant colleague whom Val hastily and fearfully summoned to her husband's bedside expressed his diagnosis in the argot of the day.
"His nerves have run out and his stomach has gone back on him. If he does n't slip up on us it will be a near thing, Mrs. Westenra."
And it was a near thing. If it had not been for Val, Westenra would have found eternity sooner than he expected. But it was a bad time for her. In addition to nursing her husband, she had to manage the rampageous Bran, a domestic crisis brought about by a servant strike, and an ice famine. Fortunately, there were no patients but one in the house at the time, and the nurse in attendance happened to be an exceptionally good one, who did all she could to relieve the strain. She was an English woman, a Miss Holland, with an able brain behind a pretty, calm face. She would willingly have undertaken the nursing of Westenra besides her own patient, but he was so frequently delirious that Val was afraid to let any one share in the nursing of him. She knew how he would hate any stranger to hear his tormented ramblings, but she did not realise for a long time that it would perhaps have been better at any cost that another than she should have heard them. For all that he had hidden from her came out now in broken snatches and groans, half dream, half delirium. She learned of his longing for his laboratory, of the sacrifice it had cost him to abandon it, of his despair about the Sanatorium, money worries, all the irk domestic life held for him. What was more terrible, she gleaned in broken fragments, halting and disjointed, as though even in his delirium he had an instinct to hide it, something of the way he had struggled with himself to evade her coming into his life, of his mental resistance until the last, of the pity which rather than love had moved him to ask her to marry him, of his dread of her past, and fear for their future. Oh! bitter and bleak were the things that came to her ears in scraps and broken whispers and heavy sighs, and that pieced together by her weary yet quickened brain made a clear writing on the wall. All was plain to her at last: all that he had succeeded in keeping dark from her, the secret of his torment and his pain in the struggle. To her the upholding joy in the darkest hour had always been that the man was worth it, she loved him and considered him worthy of every sacrifice she could make. She saw now that he had had no such thought to uphold him. Though he had been too loyal to acknowledge the fact even to himself, the bitter drop in his cup must have been his belief that the woman was not worth the sacrifices marriage had entailed!
Sighs and dark mutterings told her why he had shrunk at first from Haidee's coming to 68th Street--some duty he had to Halston, to keep his child only among those whose lives had been pure and unspotted by the world. The meaning of his fury at Val's suggestion for his son's naming came whispering forth from fever-broken lips.
"Dick! ... How could she? A dissipated brute .... no woman safe from ... and she ... my woman, alone with him for months ... wild places ... lonely places."
She could not know where he had heard that scandalous tale. She could only bow her head and take the sword to her heart.
When she heard him muttering to his mother, explaining that she was his dream woman, that it had to be.... 'She is not like you, mother, but she came to me in dreams ... it had to be ... and now she is Bran's mother ... you must love my Bran's mother," she thought her heart would break for bitter aching. It seemed to her in that dark hour that nothing could ever hurt her any more. She defied Fate to do her any worse hurt. An unwise thing to do. Fate was in fact sitting in wait with a worse clout in her hand.
There came an afternoon when Westenra was so much better that he could talk a little, softly, if a trifle vaguely to Haidee who had crept in to hold his hand. His eyes, seeming to have grown lighter in his thin, strongly-featured face, travelled incessantly round the room, resting here and there as though they recognised landmarks in some country he had not visited for years. They rested on Val writing at a table near by, and noted the wraithlike face, pale as a bone, the weary lean of her against her own supporting arm, the droop of her lips and her shoulders. When she came over with the medicine, he said quietly:
"You should go out for a little while, dearest. Haidee will take care of me."
She had indeed a longing that was almost active pain for air and the sight of sky and green things, and needed little persuasion, seeing that he was really better. She did not even stop to change her frock, which was old and unfashionable, and in her haste caught up an ancient school-hat of Haidee's, trimmed with a shabby bow of silk ribbon, and more than slightly bent out of shape about the brim. She felt it mattered little how she looked, so long as she could escape into the outer air. Her head ached violently.
As she hurried down the front-door steps, a man walking up the street looked at her curiously, and something in her peculiar walk brought a flash of amazement to his eyes and quickened his steps. He was tall and well-dressed, with traces of breeding, and a certain dashing handsomeness about him, but there was a green tint in his ravaged cheeks, and the straight figure under the well-cut coat was gaunt and shrunk. His eyes lacked lustre, and one of them jerked and winked mechanically at irregular intervals. The man was a nervous and physical wreck. As he passed the house from which Val had come, he looked up and noticed its number and the name on the door-plate. A moment later he caught up with the slight, hurrying figure, gave a swift glance at her profile and the shabby hat above it, then, in the quiet drawling tones of the man about town, he said politely:
"How do, Val?"
She swung round with the wild jerk of a lassoed creature and faced him. Then he was not so sure after all that it was Val. The grey-faced woman, with all the life gone out of her eyes, sunken cheeks and blanched lips, was certainly not the Valentine Valdana of other days. The figure, the walk was hers; but the face was the face of some strange woman--some woman in trouble, too, and that was a bore. He was a man who always avoided women in trouble. On the point of lifting his hat, with a slight apology and walking away, her words detained him.
"You!" Her voice was the voice of Valentine Valdana with all the music gone from it: harsh and grinding as stone on stone.
"Yea, verily," said he, and stared sardonically into her fearful eyes. They stood so for a moment staring at each other. Then the man laughed; but it was not a pleasant laugh.
"You don't seem as pleased to see me as you ought to be!"
"You!" she stammered again. It seemed all she was able to say.
"Yes, me, my very dear Val," he repeated with something like a snarl. "Time appears to have dimmed your excellent eyesight, as well as robbed you of your gift of repartee!"
She answered strangely, speaking vaguely like a woman in a nightmare, but her words struck home like little, sharp knives, and the blood mounted high in his dark cheeks.
"So you were the slinker in the bush!--the skulker!--the deserter of comrades and men!--I might have known!"
Rage flashed out of his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment he looked as if he could strike her. Then he laughed again the jeering sardonic laugh of the cynic, whose bones hard words have no power to break, the coward who fears nothing but death.
"Be damned to you!" he said pleasantly. "I had as much right to save my skin as any one else."
"No one else saved his skin."
"That was their lookout," he remarked with grim facetiousness, but her silent, terrible stare, so full of indictment, disconcerted him horribly. He essayed to change the unpleasant subject.
"So you are in New York! No one could make out where the deuce you had got to."
That detached her from the sinister question of his conduct on the South African veldt. But still she stared deep into him as if seeking in his soul the key to some problem she could not solve; and he was embarrassed, for he wished no one to search in his dark soul--there were things hidden there that even he was afraid to look upon. As for the situation, surely it was clear enough. He that should have been dead was alive, and that was all there was to it. He had been looking for her to let her know, and that he had found her by accident was so much to the good. It had a better appearance than if he had hunted her down (as he would have done if he had possessed any clue to work on). After all, he argued to himself, he had a right to her sympathy. Also he needed help in the shape of money pretty badly. He was sick of hiding in America, and longed to get away to the cheap comfort of Europe. Unfortunately, she did not look as if she could help his financial situation very much. He had, in fact, never seen her look so shabby since she ceased to occupy the proud position of wife and slave to Horace Valdana, Esq. The thought that he might not be able to levy a loan from her after all moved him to venom.
"I fear you have come down in the world, my poor Val! If I did not know what a brilliant woman of letters you are, I might almost think you had turned into a housemaid. What were you doing at Number 700?"
Then she realised he had seen her come out of the house. That was the key she had sought. Now she knew just where she stood, and what she must do.
"Yes," she said slowly, "you are quite right, I have come down in the world, and I am a housemaid--at that house I have just come from."
He burst out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest news he had heard for a long time.
"Indeed! Perhaps you will invite me to call and have some supper with you and the cook some evening?"
"We are not allowed to have callers. I don't get on with the cook. I am under notice to quit." She made her statements quite gravely.
"But this is great!" He began to laugh again uproariously. "So you have got the sack! And now you will have to go back to the career of famous journalist. But why have left it, my dear girl? Is it a joke, or some new craze for getting copy?"
Steadily, calmly, with pale lips and toneless voice, she lied on--for Bran's sake, for Garrett's sake, for the sake of all she held dear. What better reason can a woman have for lying her soul away!
"No, no joke, no craze: stern necessity. I can't write any more, that is all. I had brain fever, and when it was all over I found that I could n't put another sentence together. I am done for as a writer. So I just dropped out of the old life and disappeared. The only thing I can do now is work with my hands."
"But"--he stammered. "But it will come back--all you want is time, rest--"
"Never," she said firmly. "Never. It is finished. My brain is gone. I am Alice Brook now--Alice Brook, housemaid. I shall never be anything else."
"Good God!" He gazed at her aghast. There was no glimmering of doubt in his mind as to the truth of her story. It seemed almost too extraordinary to be true, but he had never known Val to lie. He was aware, in fact, from painful experience that she despised liars, and held a creed that nothing worth a lie was to be found in the world. It was not for him to know that she had at last found something she considered worth lying for. Besides, she so thoroughly looked the part. Thin, hollow-eyed, and badly dressed, with the hopeless lines unhappiness had sketched about her lips, she was the picture of an overworked slave who worked too much by day, and got too little rest at night.
"Good God!" he repeated blankly. "And I was going to touch you for my fare home."
It was her turn to laugh now, and she did it silently, rocking from side to side, holding one hand over her heart as if afraid it might burst from her body in its wild mirth. Valdana considered her with shrewd, savage eyes. He had never known her guilty of such a thing as a fit of hysterics, but it looked uncommonly as if she meant to indulge in one now, and he was not anxious to assist in anything of the kind.
"Don't be a fool, Val," he said sharply. "Pull yourself together. Come along into the Park and we 'll discuss things."
Val's laughter was over except for a strange little sobbing sound that escaped from her lips from time to time, as she walked slowly by his side towards the Park. Sometimes she swayed a little and put out her hands as if to keep herself from falling--as though the earth were rocking under her feet.
There is a story told in Africa of a Dutch woman, who, during one of the early Kaffir wars, escaped from an attacked township, and with her family of six little children hid in the bush. They concealed themselves in a deep swamp overhung with bushes and seething with poisonous gnats; and there, while all round them human beasts beat the bush seeking for prey, the little band crouched low, nothing but their heads protruding from the filthy ooze, fearful almost to breathe lest they should be heard and dragged forth to torture and death. Unfortunately, the baby, sick and too young to understand the terrible situation, whimpered endlessly at the bites of the insects, and all its mother's fearful hushing could not quiet it. With the howls of blood-drunken Kaffirs in her ears, and before her eyes the five tragic, terror-stricken faces of her other children, the distracted mother found no other thing to do than clasp her hands about the little loved, whimpering throat that would betray them all, and still its cries for ever.
Long after Valdana had left her Val sat on in the Park, trying not to think, trying to get control over herself. Her overwrought brain felt like a struggling, tortured thing, determined to burst from her head and run brandishing its frenzy and pain to the world; while some other part of her strove for calm, hushing and pacifying the tortured thing as the Dutch mother had hushed the child that would betray them all; and she felt that if she could not still its frenzied cries she must kill it. Better that she should die than that Westenra and little Bran should suffer. But she did not want to die; she knew she could not be spared at that time. The mother of a little child can never be spared. Westenra, lying weak and ill, seemed to her no more than a little child too, and one that she must care for and protect from trouble. Dazed and shocked as she was, with her world in pieces about her, the mother sense alert in her warned her to get control of her nerves; that it would be fatal to fall ill now; that everything depended upon her deliberate action. She had seen with Westenra what happened when the brain was sick, and she knew she could never hope to keep the truth from him if such an illness overtook her. She was resolute to keep it from him. He had suffered enough. He was sick and broken with suffering, and all through her. But his pride and joy in Bran was still left him; and of that, if she could help it, he should not be robbed. His son! Heir to an old and honoured name if to no great fortune. What would befall if he found that his son was nameless--heir to nothing but shame and sorrow. Ah! some day he might have to hear the truth and bear it--but not now, not now. She must take herself in hand strongly, force herself to calmness, plan how to outwit Valdana, and save her loved ones.
She looked at the card Valdana had given her with an address written on it:
MR. JOHN SEYMOUR,
Shrapp's Hotel,
West 19th Street,
New York.
He was there under an assumed name, skulking, as he had skulked in the bush. His mother, the only person whom he had enlightened as to his being alive, was secretly sending him money. She dared not let his father, an old man dying of an incurable disease, know, for fear it would hasten his end, and she was ashamed to tell her other sons and daughters; they were all honourable, upright people whose heads would be lowered to the dust under the blow. With a mother's unselfish love she wished to spare them the truth--that the man whose gallant death all England had mourned was alive and skulking in hiding, a coward who had deserted his comrades! But for Val she had no such feeling, and it was she who had given him the news of Val's sailing for America and paid his fare to do the same, counselling him to find her out and get her help. She said it was Val's duty to stand by him, and he, pleased with such comfortable counsel, had been in New York six months hoping to come across his wife. At the last moment he had chanced upon her by accident!
He had left her in the Park; it was with the understanding that she was to meet him in two days' time at Shrapp's Hotel. But she had no intention of keeping the appointment. First of all it would be extremely difficult for her to get away from home without lying, and then there was a possibility of Westenra finding out where she had gone, and suspecting something strange. She meant to take no risks where Westenra was concerned. Secondly, she hated to meet Valdana. Quite apart from the horrible turmoil his reappearance caused in her life, she was shakingly revolted by his presence. The sight of him alive when he should have been where the world believed him--among the heroic dead--made her physically sick.
"As much right to save his skin..." she repeated blankly, and the blood seemed to turn to water in her veins. "Oh, I might have known ... I might have known! Mean souls do not suddenly become heroic! To save his skin!"
And it was the name of such a man that she bore by law! For such a one her little Bran must be branded illegitimate. She ground her teeth in rage and despair, and gave out a little moan.
Around the black morass that surrounded her there showed only one small glimmer of light--it was the remembrance of that faint gleam that kept her from going mad. He had offered it as a sort of propitiation for the fact of his being still alive, and she shuddered at her own heartless catching at it. She might not have believed but for the bleak tint of his skin.
"It won't be for long, anyway. I 'm booked, Val. I have the same trouble as my father--cancer of the liver. Nothing can save me. It's only a matter of a few months ... a year at the outside." She had looked into his face keenly at that and recognised the possibility of his words being true. That strange hue in his cheeks might easily be the hue of death foreshadowing the atrocious malady from which his father suffered.
He had gone on to tell her that all he asked was to be allowed to live in peace, out of the world's sight, until his hour came. The truth must never be known, he said. Even he was not so dead to decency that he could not recognise that. He owed something to his family after all--to say nothing of his country! These had a right to expect silence from one who should have been dead. And he was willing enough to be silent. The gnawing at his vitals had killed in him, he said, all taste for gaming and dissipation. He only wanted peace in some quiet country place, anywhere but America, which he hated with the fierce hatred of the waster surrounded by active energetic men. He had, it appeared, sought Val in the pretty certain belief that she could and would assist him to the quiet life he longed for, and when he found she could not he was more inclined to curse than to sympathise because her brain had "given out." She smiled a tortured smile at that. Her brain had indeed given out. That part at least of the story was true; and that she would never be able to write again as in the old days she knew was true too. There is nothing like a year's tussling with domestic problems for dulling the wits. She felt that to earn a sure million she could not have produced the energy or material for one of her old gay vivid articles salted with wit and scented with the breeze. The power had gone from her. Wifehood had absorbed it. Maternity had eaten and drunk it up! Like Alice Brook, she could only work with her hands now; and, like Alice Brook, she was sadly incompetent even with these. For there really was a housemaid called Alice Brook at No. 700; an inefficient English girl who could not get on with the cook, and was without the faintest notion of her duties. As Val had no time to train her she was obliged to give her notice, and the girl was in fact leaving the house that night. This was why Val had felt so safe in her story.
When Valdana found out that she did not mean to meet him again, he would probably, as discreetly as he dared, make inquiries at No. 700 for Alice Brook. But Val would be prepared for him.
She sat still on that bench in Central Park until she had formed her plan. She would write to him within the next two days saying that nothing was to be gained by their meeting; that she had left 68th Street, and that if he did not worry her and try to find her, she would help him all she could with money, and from time to time send him, through his mother, such sums as she could earn. There was no question, of course, of her earning at present, but she possessed jewellery upon which she could raise certain sums. She would pawn some at once and send him fifty pounds for his passage to England, thus ridding herself of his vicinity at least, and gaining untainted breathing space in which to decide upon the next move. There must, she knew, be a terrible reconstruction of her life with Westenra, but as yet she was too weary and shocked to see far ahead. She only knew that she must go warily, like
"Ate Dea, treading so soft----"
Full of schemes that it revolted her to formulate, feeling a conspirator and traitor to all she loved, she at last retraced her steps homeward.
