————During the bad time of worriment and weariness with Valdana, Rupert was indeed a great stay to Val. Being stationed so close to Paris he was able to come often to the Lamartine Studios, and she was always glad to see the blue friendly eyes that had in them some of the space and compassion of sea and sky. There was something so loyal and reliable about him that she had actually told him the truth about Valdana, and been definitely aided by his sympathy and understanding. His influence was good, too, for Bran, who was beginning to reach that stage when the society and point of view of men means a great deal in a boy's life. And Bran had always had a specialpenchantfor boys and men. It gave Val many a sharp pang, not of resentment but of sorrow, to observe in him a yearning for his father, for she knew that whatever she was able to do for her son, she could never assuage that longing, never give him the masculine companionship and influence of which he had been robbed. It grieved her terribly to think that in her son's life those lovely pliable years, when bonds between father and son are so simply but strongly fashioned from the one's weakness and the other's strength, were passing week by week, month by month. Glad enough then was she that he had at least the friendly brotherly affection and influence of so clear-hearted a boy as Rupert.With Valdana she never allowed Bran to come into contact. Indeed, Valdana from the first was practically oblivious to those about him. His race was very nearly run. He had come to Val in the last lap of it, upheld by God knew what strange resolution to make her share to the bitter end their disastrous partnership. Having found her he seemed content to let life wreak her pitiless worst on him before he was allowed to depart to that death which he had once ignobly shirked, but whose embrace he now longed for with the ardour of a lover. His sufferings, indeed, were terrible. In the centre of the great lofty room he lay and wrestled with an agony that was almost unceasing. But he was well aware of being surrounded and enfolded by every comfort. Softened light, flowers, music, good nursing, everything that money and kindness could supply to alleviate pain was at hand, and he knew he had Val to thank, and vaguely wondered how she achieved it, but did not care much as long as she was by his bedside, in the pale blue linen overall she always assumed as soon as she entered. Cancer may or may not be infectious--that is one of the problems science has not yet solved--but with Bran so near she took no risks, changing even her clothes on entering and leaving the sick-room, which was an entirely self-containedappartementandatelier. She had been so fortunate as to obtain in the newly-finished building the whole of the immense floor of three studios. It rejoiced her to be able to give her Brannie one entirely to himself and his governess. That was one of the joys the seventy-five thousand pounds had brought her. She had already spent some hundreds of it on furnishing and the heavy expenses entailed by Valdana's needs. But the rest she had been wise enough to allow the kindly Bernstein to invest for her, and her mind was at rest at last and for the first time in her life from the gnawing tooth of poverty. She was doing no writing. Not only was her life, divided between Bran and the sick man, too full for such a thing, but at last she could permit herself the luxury of refraining from writing when she had nothing to say. That forced work in Mascaret had sickened her soul. Now she could let her creative faculty rest for a while at least and give undivided attention to this duty of hers to Valdana.As for having Haidee home, it was out of the question. She felt herself unable to go into the matter of her relation to Valdana with any one so antagonistic to her as Haidee was at present. She knew that the girl still cherished bitterness against her for poor Sacha's defection, and she could only hope that with the coming of other interests, this feeling would pass away and allow a return to the old footing of comradeship and affection. She let Haidee profit too by the necklace windfall, sending her presents of music, books, and the countless pretty trifles that girls set store on. Bran went weekly with his governess to see her, and Rupert, urged by Val, went very often too. Rupert knew all about the affair of Sacha. Not from Val, but because by a strange coincidence Sacha had opened his heart to his cousin the night before his death. The two young men had shared the same room at Shai-poo, and in the silences of the night shared many confidences also. That was how Rupert had come to know the truth, and to keep his reverence and affection for Val unshaken."I love the sea, I love the music of the violin, and I love you--all with the same love," he told her one day. He had found her weeping alone in her studio. The strain of Valdana's hideous suffering and Westenra's long silence sometimes racked her so that she was glad of the relief of tears. "You know what Jean Paul Richter said of music,--'Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found not--and shall not find';--that is what you and the sea and the violin say to me."She blessed him for that, not from gratified vanity, but for comfort in the thought that others besides herself suffered from the cry of those things "that we find not nor shall find.""Dear boy," she said, and stroked his hair as if he had been Bran while he knelt by her. "I love you too--as if you were my son, as your mother must have loved you, Rupert."Rupert kissed her hand in a very un-sonlike fashion and looked at her lips."I want to comfort you," he said, "to take pain out of your life.""You cannot do that, Rupert." She quoted gently--"'Pain is the Lord of Life--none can escape from its net.'" Something in his eyes made her go on steadily. "My pain is chiefly caused by love. I love my little Brannie's father, Rupert--there can never be any other man in my life. He speaks to me of all those things which I have found not nor shall find!"Rupert bowed his head again over her hand, his boyish mouth drawn in a straight line. It was unfortunate that the Comtesse, whom thefemme de ménagehad admitted to the entrance hall, should have come softly in at that moment."Ah, the nice Poulot!" she twittered merrily. "Taking the lessons of deportment from thecharmanteMadame Val!" And burst into happy laughter.But she had not called it "deportment" when she reported the episode to Haidee a few days later."He is gone, our Poulot," she said mournfully. "She has put into bandages his hands and foots--a slave!""He did not seem very bandaged last time he came out here," answered Haidee rather snappishly, not even amused any more by the Comtesse's weird English."Ah, but you do not see him with her, my child! It is amazing how she finds the time and energy for so much 'flirt'!--She is enormous!--and with the sick lover in the thirdatelierall the same time!""The sick lover! Comtesse, whatdoyou mean?""Ah, of course, I did not tell you yet. The concierge it was who informed me that Madame Valdana occupies herself with a sick gentleman in the third room. The doctor every day, and always fruit and flowers arriving. Is it not romantic? But always silence and the sealed-up lip from Madame Valdana. She takes no one into her heart where the secret is, except Poulot."Haidee was now looking frightfully miserable. These visits from Madame de Vervanne were a disturbing element in her life and almost she wished they could be dispensed with. She was working hard to try and pass herbaccalauréatand achieve herdiplôme, but a visit from the Comtesse always left her disinclined to grapple with school work. And this news about Rupert and Val irritated her intensely. What business had Val to let Rupert get so fond of her? It was a shame, a wrong to her--Haidee. First Westenra, then Sacha, now Rupert--just when he was so nice to her, and she was beginning to like him so much. She ground her teeth in childish rage and jealousy. The Comtesse put an arm round her waist and they walked together down the paths of the Lycée gardens, now dank and sodden by winter rains."Tell me ... could not the papa of Bran make her mind her own business, which is surely to nurse the sick friend and leave poor Rupert alone? I think he will not even pass his exam, for the Colonials if he had not a mind at ease. You know he is working for that now, so that when he has done his two years' service he will be eligible if he still wishes to enter."How his mind would be eased by a break with Val she did not specify. Nor why she had developed such fervour for the hitherto detested Colonial infantry scheme. But Haidee was in no state of mind to thrash out these intricacies. Worked up by the subtle Frenchwoman's malice into a state of teeming anger against Val, and blind to the fact that she was being used as a catspaw, she allowed herself to consider the Comtesse's suggestion, and in the end wrote Westenra a letter which contained many bitter and cruel things about Val, and gave him fuller information concerning the three studios than even the story of the Comtesse justified. That she was ashamed of herself for her action, and that it was only a passing spirit of vindictiveness which impelled it, did not make the letter as a document any the less poignantly indicting.————And that same evening Val was watching the final effort of Valdana's troubled spirit to break from the bonds of the body and go forth upon its way. Ate Dea had run him to earth. The Hand whose fingers he had slipped through on the veldt was closing in on him inexorably, but with a worse thing in it now than a soldier's short sharp doom. It was only a matter of hours when he must join those others from whom he had fled--but with a difference! The difference between the lonely, painful death from an atrocious malady, and an end worthy of a man, face to the enemy, his comrades about him--"Fighting hard and dying grimly,Silent lips and striking hand.""It seems hardly worth while now to have shirked!" he said quietly. "Just for a few more years crawling up and down the earth! I wonder why we dread old Death so, Val? After all he 's the best pal we have--always waiting so patiently and faithfully; whatever we do, nothing estranges him from his purpose. He never gets mad and takes our gift and gives it to some other fellow--the gift of rest, darkness, sleep!"Like many a blackguard Valdana cherished in the deeps of him odds and ends of noble thought and chivalrous intention garnered from the lines of some man-poet. Lindsay Gordon always was the waster's poet, and always will be. He helped Horace Valdana to die now with gratitude instead of curses in his mouth."Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses,Yet abides the gift of the Darkness,Sleep!"His mind had grown strangely clear. He lay upon the wide divan in the centre of the room, and his eye roving from object to object, unusual recognition in its glance. A Godin stove glowed in one corner of the great room; the fire in it had never been allowed to die out since the first occupation of the studio. It filled the room with a summery warmth that drew out to the last drop the fragrance of a jar of Sicilian lilac that stood in the open window; and brought lovely memories of the veldt from an enormous bunch of mimosa stuck in a blue pot on the piano. So warm was the climate of the room that a balcony door stood perpetually open, even on a night such as this, when the outside air sliced against the warmth of the body with the keenness of a scimitar. Shaded lights threw faintly-tinted shadows in far corners. The only objects that showed clear in the dimness of the big shadowy room were the busts and figures of dead white clay--a gigantic head of Tolstoi, bearded, rugged; a perfect reproduction of Houdon's bust of Napoleon as First Consul; some little Donatello angels."It 'll be cold lying here in a Paris cemetery, Val!" said Valdana musingly.His eye rested reflectively on the face ofL'Inconnue, hung on a nail against a pale green-and-rose Persian rug--that lovely mask taken from the dead face of a young unknown girl, fished out one morning from the river's muddy waters. She had cast her secret into the bosom of the Seine, and that kind, wicked, cruel, voluptuous, motherly old river had kept it for ever, so that to this day the world still wonders and longs to know who the girl was, and why with youth and beauty and all the gifts of life stamped upon her she chose to go out into the dark with that little radiant smile on her lips, as if in the last instant she had thought on some wondrous hour into which all the beauty of life had been compressed--and was glad to die because that hour could never come again.Val, who had often studied the quietly smiling tragic face, said once:"It was some man's eyes she was thinking of just before she sprang! That little smile was meant for just one man in the world.""Yes: it'll be cold lying here in Paris," repeated Valdana thoughtfully. "I wish now I 'd stayed with those fellows at Platkop. They have the sunshine, and they 're all together."Val smoothed the bright rug that lay over him with her thin nervous hands."Don't bother now, Dan."It was many a long year since she had called him by that name which pity now wrung from her."I wonder why I should have been the only one not wounded?" He looked at her critically. "All the others had got it somewhere, but I had n't a thing, not a spot! And there was n't a bullet left among those blasted Boers: it was easy enough to slink off as the evening came on ... but some of the fellows looked at me as I undid that door. No one said anything, but theylookedat me, Val."Val hid her eyes."One or two of them thought I was going to try for some water from the spruit near by--God! it was as hot as hell there all that poisonous day--and no water! Yes, some of them thought ... but Brand, my sub, he knew. I saw the look he gave as I crept to the door--and the smile--half his face was shot away, but he could still smile--he knew I did n't mean to come back----""Don't talk about it any more," whispered the woman by his bedside.In a swift vision she saw the shot-away face with the brave scornful smile on it, and longed to hold it to her breast and kiss its broken bloody lips. Oh, if men knew how women consecrate those brave, quiet acts done in lone places with none to pity or to praise!"Whose face is that hanging smiling there over your writing-desk?" His eyes were on another death-mask now, the most wonderful the world has ever seen. Keen, salient, proud yet gentle, all the arrogance and lust of power and good living gone--only peace, the traces of physical pain, and a gentle irony about the lips, left only ideality and lofty hope stamped above the brows. The world has one thing for which to thank the Corsican doctor Antommarchi--that he took the cast of Napoleon's face "when illness had transmuted passion into patience, and death with its last serene touch had restored the regularity and grandeur of youth." That was the face from which Horace Valdana could not keep his eyes."By Jove!" he whispered at the last. "He had the same thing as I 've got. He must have known the same hell as I am suffering now. Who am I that I should complain!"The thought helped him to "overcome the sharpness of death," and die with greater dignity than he had lived.A few days later, Val, with Rupert Lorrain standing by her side in the cemetery of Montparnasse, dropped a few violets, flowers of compassion and forgiveness, into an open grave, and Rupert threw down a friendly sod.Already it was spring. The winter of pain and misery was past. On the graves crocuses were thrusting out their little sheathed heads, symbolic proof of the sweetness that comes forth from sorrow.————CHAPTER XXILONELY WAYS"I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end."--A. C. SWINBURNE.But for the time being she went no farther than to the South of France. Not less than she, Bran, after wintering among houses, needed open skies. They were of one blood, and the longing for blue was on them both--the blue of space and sea and sky. And nowhere better in Europe can that blueness be found in April and May than down along the Mediterranean coast. At first they went to Ste. Maxime, a little village pitched in green and golden beauty beside St. Tropez's azure bay, and from where at dawn the sun can be seen shooting up from his golden bath just behind Corsica. For just several seconds the little island, cradle of the world's greatest general, shows like an inky mound against an aureole of yellow light that swiftly turns to rose, for another moment the sun rests on the peak of its highest mountain, then Corsica seems to sink and disappear into the sea until the next day's dawn.Val did not stay long at Ste. Maxime. She wanted a villa where she could have Bran to herself, after the long months of enforced absences from him. If her unexpected fortune could not give her the delicious joy of absolute companionship and intimacy with her child it was useless indeed! Besides, in hotels children are swiftly spoilt by people who do not afterwards have to bear the brunt of the spoiling, and Val did not mean Garrett Westenra's boy to become weakened by the petting of Frenchwomen who love to treat other people's children like pretty lap-dogs--to be caressed in certain moods and thrust aside in others.So after a week or two during which an agent busied himself on her behalf, she moved on to Cannes, and took possession of an ideal villa he had found for her. It lay above the road between Cannes and Cap d'Antibes, but perched high beyond the dust and din of motors; on the right, La Croisette winged away into the sea, on the left, a gaunt shoulder of the Alps with a shawl of snow draped on it showed keen against the mistral-swept skies; while about it, in all the tall beauty and tropical splendour of Riviera foliage, clustered a garden full of dreams. A garden of winding paths edged by ivy leaves lying flat, and little wild strawberry plants thrusting up coral fruits; tall palms and cacti glowing with flaming candelabra, waxen-leaved creepers, branching giant-aloes, delicate fern-like mimosa leaning tenderly above beds of violets, large as purple butterflies, great patches of poppies, massed clumps of heather white as snow and bright with happy bees; and everywhere roses, roses drowsing in the sunshine, perfuming the air!It was a garden in which coolness could be found on the sultriest day of summer, but for spring days the open space before the wide white steps and pillared porch was ideal. The floor of this space was of gravel, bleached by rain and a southern sun to snowy whiteness. A clump of tall pines spiking against the sky afforded a webwork of flickering shadows under which to sit as in a balcony hung over the blueness of Golfe Juan. Always there are ships in that bay of molten turquoise; red-sailed fishing boats; leaden-coloured warships, with their grim air of power, lying at anchor; yachts spreading white wings for flight.The house itself, like nearly all Riviera villas, was square built, and standing alone would have been less beautiful than solid and comfortable-looking. But in its jewelled setting of leaf and gold and blazing colour, the walls of dead white gave a note of quiet beauty and peace. A long balcony from the upper rooms dripped with clematis, and all round the house, high on the walls, large medallions bore the names of the days. Alternately with these were other medallions on which were painted on a pale blue ground white and scarlet-winged storks, flying, flying like the days.The Villa of Little Days, a poetess who had lived and dreamed there named it. She was a famous woman, a friend of Gambetta, who in his lifetime came often to visit her. It was she who had planned the wild and tender beauty of the garden. Val blessed her often in the spring months she and Bran passed there.The domestic arrangements were, from her point of view, ideal. A garage across the road pertained to the villa, and had attached to it a cottage which was occupied by a man and his wife whose services were at the disposal of those who rented the villa. The man minded the great garden all through the sultry summer, dug, gathered, transplanted, and cut firewood from the pines for the log fires of winter; also he could drive a car, and did not disdain to clean a window. His wife Marietta, a big-boned gay-faced Marseillaise, with the bloom of a peach on her cheeks, and rings of garnets in her ears, made short work of such cleaning as a villa bathed in perpetual sunshine and purified by sea-breezes needed. Incidentally, she could serve up a tureen ofbouillabaisseof a flavour and fragrance to seduce the heart of a king and convert a vegetarian from his amazing ways.Bran, happy as always within sight of the sea, raced the garden with his "fox," or sat under the pines with his mother, listening to the pine needles growing, or hearing stories of the Greek heroes who, on the shores of the Mediterranean, seem to be more real and comprehensible than in any other part of the world. Perhaps because old Greece and the Ionian Isles are so near at hand! Indeed, the lure of the horizon is so great on that fair shore, that if she had been alone in the world nothing could have held Val from taking train to Marseilles, and from thence as fast as ship could bear her. But Bran and his well-being bound her fast like Prometheus to his rock. The rush of trains and the throb of ships' machinery are no furtherances to health in young children. It is in quiet gardens and comfortable homes that the young heart expands and the little body shoots and flourishes. The garden of the veldt was what she could most have wished for him--that wild garden where her own heart had grown its dreams. But it was far, far, and only to be reached by such long journeying as the child was not yet fit for. So she stayed with him in the southern garden, and if her own heart sailed away sometimes in the ships that slid over the horizon down the side of the world, her body remained to guard Westenra's son and to give him what she "possessed of soul."Her only regret was that Haidee too could not be revelling in the golden southern sunshine. But Haidee was studying at Versailles with quite extraordinary energy. The exams. were close upon her, and Val was far from wishing to divert her attention from the goal. She had never failed to impress upon the child the importance of mental equipment that is grounded on solid instruction. She could see for Haidee too, where she had never seen for herself, that to leave the mind and heart and soul open and waiting for some man to walk in and fill them is to court disaster. There is no man in the world big enough to fill the heart and mind and soul of a woman worth considering. The thing is to fill them first with beauty and learning and wisdom, and let the man come in after, if there be room. For a woman to stake everything on a man is to play a losing game. But another love in the soul, be it music, literature, art, mathematics, or the maternal instinct, is insurance against total beggary. If by great good chance a man's love brings happiness, then the other love is an added glory; if misery comes the other is a refuge.Poor Val! She had not followed the creed herself, but she saw well enough the wisdom of it for Haidee, and had tried to instil into her the prudence of going nap on Art rather than on Heart. She wanted Haidee to benefit by her own failures, and never ceased from urging and encouraging her on towards a goal. A further instigation she used freely was the mention of the great pride and pleasure Westenra would feel in her successful passing of the "Bacho" and gaining of thediplôme.But Haidee, in response to all letters, kept on saying nothing. Even to Val's promise of a trip to the South as soon as the exams, were over, she made no more than a sullen acknowledgment. But Val knew from the reports of the professors that she was working hard.Most people flee from the Riviera during the summer months. Of course it is hot, but that is not the reason. With the advent of the hot weather the Riviera becomes very quiet. The "season" is over, and the fashionable birds fly away. But as a matter of fact the charm of the place is only ripening. The blaze and beauty of the scene become riper and more gorgeous. The white villas disappear into their gardens, submerged by a flood of green leaves that hide and protect them from the blaze and dust, though of the last there is less than in the season, for the motors cease from troubling and the siren is at rest. The sweet silence of the night is unbroken by blood-curdling shrieks or jerked-out hoots from the cars of those rushing to, or returning furiously from, Monte Carlo. Of course in the bungalow type of villa built to catch the spring sunshine, and with no well-treed garden in which to shelter from fierce heat, it would be unwise and uncomfortable to stay through the summer; but in the Villa of Little Days there was every comfort within and without, and nothing to irk except the occasional bite of a mosquito that had intrigued its way through wired windows and mosquito netting. The days passed in a great idle peace. For Val was frankly idle--with her hands. With her mind she was always working and giving forth to Bran. But with her hands, for the first time in her life since she had sat idle under the shadow of a buck-sail imbibing her father's vagabond creeds, she did nothing. And, even as in those days Gay Haviland had handed on to his child what was his of greatness of heart and soul, so in the southern garden during long torrid days of tropical peace, when under the tingling ether thought seemed to detach itself in bright fountains from the sluggish mass of lesser things, Val gave of all that was best in her to Westenra's son. The pity of it is that all mothers cannot have this unlimited leisure to give to their children in the days when character is forming for life.In a sense, too, Val was at peace for the first time since her early marriage. The menace and terror of Valdana's existence, the load she had carried on her conscience for years with regard to her position in Westenra's life, all had been swept away by the hand of Death, the greatest friend! And she was free of Westenra too. Whether it were true or not that he intended to marry Miss Holland she would never lay claim to his life or name again, never return to that life in New York that crippled her soul, robbed her of her individuality, and turned her into a useless, incapable creature whom she herself despised.The decision was not even hers to make--at least so it seemed to her. He had made it for her in Jersey. And it was all old grief and pain! She had learned during those terrible months of nursing Horace Valdana to hush her heart to rest. She had had her chance with Garrett and his love, and failed, it seemed. Even in spite of Valdana's resurrection she would surely, had she been worthy, have kept Westenra's love? As it was, love had done with her, she would never feel passion again."All her red roses had fallen asleep,All her white roses were sleeping!"The brave thing was to face the fact and abide by it. Besides, she had Bran. A woman who is a mother can never be quite lonely and unhappy. One little chapel of the heart may remain empty and dismantled but all other spaces in it are filled to overflowing. And ... away at the back of Val's mind a dream had begun to simmer and waver and take form--a dream of a waggon on the veldt, with Bran. Some day she would return to work and wandering--she knew that now.————In the autumn Haidee passed her exams, brilliantly, getting honours with her "Bacho" and a first-classdiplôme. It was a great achievement, and Val was deeply pleased, knowing how the news would gratify Westenra. She wrote at once sending Haidee a beautiful gift in celebration of the success, and asking when she should come to Paris and fetch her South. For by this time she had discovered that she could trust Marietta with Bran, and had no fear of leaving him for a few days.But Haidee wrote back coldly, barely acknowledging the gift, and stating that she wished to stay on at the Lycée working at her music and painting until December, when Celine Lorrain and her father were coming down to Marseilles to see the last of Rupert, who, having finished his two years' military service, was going out to Morocco. Val made no objection to this plan, but her heart was chilled at this open preference for strangers. The Lorrains were good friends, of course, but after all she and Haidee had been through poverty and sorrow and sickness together. She looked upon the girl, if not as her child, at least as her younger sister. Was it possible that she still cherished resentment about Sacha? At any rate Val was too proud to make any further advances. She knew Haidee to be one of those natures that are not softened by kindly advances, but rather inclined to hold the advancers in contempt for their pains--a fault of youth that passes with a wider knowledge and experience of humanity.When she had gone to say good-bye to Haidee before leaving Paris, it was with the intention of telling her the wonderful news about the necklace, and also as much as was necessary of the return and death of Valdana without exactly revealing the identity of the latter and his relationship to herself. However, Haidee's bleak manner had nipped untimely in the bud the good intention. Val could not afford to take into her confidence any one who was not entirely sympathetic, and though she did not believe that Haidee would be capable of deliberate disloyalty, yet she realised that the latter, in spite of the grown-up airs, was only a child, and as such liable to be swayed by moods in which she might fling a confidence to the four winds, and repent her action when it was too late. And the secret of Horace Valdana's resurrection had not been kept these many years for it to be lightly betrayed by a child. As for the matter of the fortune gained by the sale of the Comfort necklace, Val had been obliged to strangle her longing to tell Haidee all about it, for how could she suppose that any one who showed such an almost offensive indifference to her affairs was really burning with curiosity to know the meaning of her suddenly changed circumstances? Haidee hid her feelings well. Thus it came to pass that a secret which Val would gladly have shared and felt redoubled pleasure in the sharing, had been kept of necessity to herself. She had not even told Rupert, for she felt that apart from the children no one else before Westenra had a right to know. And since Westenra showed no further interest in her--well, it was no one's affair.When the week came for the expected arrival of Haidee, what was Val's intense surprise to receive a letter from her saying that she should not be coming down with the Lorrains. For one thing, she wrote, General Lorrain was ill and Celine could not leave him, so that Rupert would be travelling alone. For another, she added casually, as if prompted by an afterthought, "Garry is in Paris and we are going about a great deal together. It is possible that he may come down South--to see Branbefore he returns to New York. But this is not quite certain. I will let you know later."Westenra in Europe for the first time for four years, and this was the way he notified her! Val was stricken to the soul. Never had she so acutely realised the position to which he had relegated her. A mere minder of his child, and in some respects not so good as that, for a nurse or governess would at least have received kindly and courteous letters from her employer. This casual second-hand message seemed to be the cruellest of any of the blows her heart had suffered since first she threw in her lot with Garrett Westenra. And at first she sank under it. It was the little more that is too much. But presently with some of her old courage she braced herself to the new situation. If she had got to meet Westenra she would be ready for it. She had not trained her soul for years to no avail. She had not lived with austerity, stood apart from temptation, fought spiritual battles, for nothing. A strong rock was at her back for the hour of need, a rock she had been forming for herself in all the years since she last saw Westenra. She would be ready when he came to receive him with dignity and strength untainted by resentment or any petty feeling.But before that time Rupert the blue-eyed and ardent, in whom she recognised so much of her own nature, came bursting into the Calendar of Little Days. She welcomed him with all the pleasure a woman feels in seeing those whose affection for her is sure and unquestioning, who doubt not her loyalty and pure intention.His light-heartedness seemed to have waned a little, and his pleasure at having attained his majority and freedom to depart where he listed was not so great as Val had expected. He explained the reason succinctly."It is all very well to be rich and free, Val, but I am very alone in the world." His eyes resting in hers took an expression of intense melancholy."That is the curse the gods lay upon us wanderers, Rupert," she said sadly."'Lover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you!'"Yet it is that loneliness we are always trying by our own efforts to alleviate.""There is only one person in the world who can alleviate it for me.""And you have not found her yet," interrupted Val promptly, and before he could say what she read in his eyes, continued swiftly: "I want you to tell me all about Haidee. You saw her recently, didn't you? How is she looking?""Very pretty," said Rupert gloomily. "She is a great beauty, that Haidee, and looks no longer like a brown pony.""Brown pony?""Ah, I should not have said that! It was one of poor Sacha'sblaguesthat she always looked like a wild pony with her brown mane flying ... but she is very different now and quite cured of Sacha, with her hair put up and long frocks and the self-possessed manner of twenty.""Has she really got her hair up?""Yes, indeed. I saw her with the guardian. He is a fine fellow, is n't he? She is much in love with him. I think they will marry.""Marry!" Val started as if a missile had struck her. A moment later she controlled herself and laughed--an odd, nervous laugh. "Why, Rupert, how silly you are! She is practically Dr. Westenra's child. He has brought her up from a baby.""That makes nothing. She is not a baby any more, and she does n't look at him like a father. I prophesy to you that Haidee marries him."He was arrested by Val's expression."You do not care for such a marriage?""It is out of the question to discuss such a thing," she said firmly, but her face was ashen.Rupert examined her acutely. He did not know of course that he was speaking of Bran's father.CHAPTER XXIITHE WAY OF LOVE"The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul."--EMERSON.The Lemprière 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 haircoifféand 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 areyougoing?""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,dolet me marry you, Garry. I do love you so.""Dear Silly Billy, I couldn't possibly.""Why not? Whynot? How can I come back to America with you and Bran unless Iammarried 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 hemustbe 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?""IloveBran, though I 've often been a pig to him--butthat'sVal'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 forétiquette, 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.
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During the bad time of worriment and weariness with Valdana, Rupert was indeed a great stay to Val. Being stationed so close to Paris he was able to come often to the Lamartine Studios, and she was always glad to see the blue friendly eyes that had in them some of the space and compassion of sea and sky. There was something so loyal and reliable about him that she had actually told him the truth about Valdana, and been definitely aided by his sympathy and understanding. His influence was good, too, for Bran, who was beginning to reach that stage when the society and point of view of men means a great deal in a boy's life. And Bran had always had a specialpenchantfor boys and men. It gave Val many a sharp pang, not of resentment but of sorrow, to observe in him a yearning for his father, for she knew that whatever she was able to do for her son, she could never assuage that longing, never give him the masculine companionship and influence of which he had been robbed. It grieved her terribly to think that in her son's life those lovely pliable years, when bonds between father and son are so simply but strongly fashioned from the one's weakness and the other's strength, were passing week by week, month by month. Glad enough then was she that he had at least the friendly brotherly affection and influence of so clear-hearted a boy as Rupert.
With Valdana she never allowed Bran to come into contact. Indeed, Valdana from the first was practically oblivious to those about him. His race was very nearly run. He had come to Val in the last lap of it, upheld by God knew what strange resolution to make her share to the bitter end their disastrous partnership. Having found her he seemed content to let life wreak her pitiless worst on him before he was allowed to depart to that death which he had once ignobly shirked, but whose embrace he now longed for with the ardour of a lover. His sufferings, indeed, were terrible. In the centre of the great lofty room he lay and wrestled with an agony that was almost unceasing. But he was well aware of being surrounded and enfolded by every comfort. Softened light, flowers, music, good nursing, everything that money and kindness could supply to alleviate pain was at hand, and he knew he had Val to thank, and vaguely wondered how she achieved it, but did not care much as long as she was by his bedside, in the pale blue linen overall she always assumed as soon as she entered. Cancer may or may not be infectious--that is one of the problems science has not yet solved--but with Bran so near she took no risks, changing even her clothes on entering and leaving the sick-room, which was an entirely self-containedappartementandatelier. She had been so fortunate as to obtain in the newly-finished building the whole of the immense floor of three studios. It rejoiced her to be able to give her Brannie one entirely to himself and his governess. That was one of the joys the seventy-five thousand pounds had brought her. She had already spent some hundreds of it on furnishing and the heavy expenses entailed by Valdana's needs. But the rest she had been wise enough to allow the kindly Bernstein to invest for her, and her mind was at rest at last and for the first time in her life from the gnawing tooth of poverty. She was doing no writing. Not only was her life, divided between Bran and the sick man, too full for such a thing, but at last she could permit herself the luxury of refraining from writing when she had nothing to say. That forced work in Mascaret had sickened her soul. Now she could let her creative faculty rest for a while at least and give undivided attention to this duty of hers to Valdana.
As for having Haidee home, it was out of the question. She felt herself unable to go into the matter of her relation to Valdana with any one so antagonistic to her as Haidee was at present. She knew that the girl still cherished bitterness against her for poor Sacha's defection, and she could only hope that with the coming of other interests, this feeling would pass away and allow a return to the old footing of comradeship and affection. She let Haidee profit too by the necklace windfall, sending her presents of music, books, and the countless pretty trifles that girls set store on. Bran went weekly with his governess to see her, and Rupert, urged by Val, went very often too. Rupert knew all about the affair of Sacha. Not from Val, but because by a strange coincidence Sacha had opened his heart to his cousin the night before his death. The two young men had shared the same room at Shai-poo, and in the silences of the night shared many confidences also. That was how Rupert had come to know the truth, and to keep his reverence and affection for Val unshaken.
"I love the sea, I love the music of the violin, and I love you--all with the same love," he told her one day. He had found her weeping alone in her studio. The strain of Valdana's hideous suffering and Westenra's long silence sometimes racked her so that she was glad of the relief of tears. "You know what Jean Paul Richter said of music,--'Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found not--and shall not find';--that is what you and the sea and the violin say to me."
She blessed him for that, not from gratified vanity, but for comfort in the thought that others besides herself suffered from the cry of those things "that we find not nor shall find."
"Dear boy," she said, and stroked his hair as if he had been Bran while he knelt by her. "I love you too--as if you were my son, as your mother must have loved you, Rupert."
Rupert kissed her hand in a very un-sonlike fashion and looked at her lips.
"I want to comfort you," he said, "to take pain out of your life."
"You cannot do that, Rupert." She quoted gently--"'Pain is the Lord of Life--none can escape from its net.'" Something in his eyes made her go on steadily. "My pain is chiefly caused by love. I love my little Brannie's father, Rupert--there can never be any other man in my life. He speaks to me of all those things which I have found not nor shall find!"
Rupert bowed his head again over her hand, his boyish mouth drawn in a straight line. It was unfortunate that the Comtesse, whom thefemme de ménagehad admitted to the entrance hall, should have come softly in at that moment.
"Ah, the nice Poulot!" she twittered merrily. "Taking the lessons of deportment from thecharmanteMadame Val!" And burst into happy laughter.
But she had not called it "deportment" when she reported the episode to Haidee a few days later.
"He is gone, our Poulot," she said mournfully. "She has put into bandages his hands and foots--a slave!"
"He did not seem very bandaged last time he came out here," answered Haidee rather snappishly, not even amused any more by the Comtesse's weird English.
"Ah, but you do not see him with her, my child! It is amazing how she finds the time and energy for so much 'flirt'!--She is enormous!--and with the sick lover in the thirdatelierall the same time!"
"The sick lover! Comtesse, whatdoyou mean?"
"Ah, of course, I did not tell you yet. The concierge it was who informed me that Madame Valdana occupies herself with a sick gentleman in the third room. The doctor every day, and always fruit and flowers arriving. Is it not romantic? But always silence and the sealed-up lip from Madame Valdana. She takes no one into her heart where the secret is, except Poulot."
Haidee was now looking frightfully miserable. These visits from Madame de Vervanne were a disturbing element in her life and almost she wished they could be dispensed with. She was working hard to try and pass herbaccalauréatand achieve herdiplôme, but a visit from the Comtesse always left her disinclined to grapple with school work. And this news about Rupert and Val irritated her intensely. What business had Val to let Rupert get so fond of her? It was a shame, a wrong to her--Haidee. First Westenra, then Sacha, now Rupert--just when he was so nice to her, and she was beginning to like him so much. She ground her teeth in childish rage and jealousy. The Comtesse put an arm round her waist and they walked together down the paths of the Lycée gardens, now dank and sodden by winter rains.
"Tell me ... could not the papa of Bran make her mind her own business, which is surely to nurse the sick friend and leave poor Rupert alone? I think he will not even pass his exam, for the Colonials if he had not a mind at ease. You know he is working for that now, so that when he has done his two years' service he will be eligible if he still wishes to enter."
How his mind would be eased by a break with Val she did not specify. Nor why she had developed such fervour for the hitherto detested Colonial infantry scheme. But Haidee was in no state of mind to thrash out these intricacies. Worked up by the subtle Frenchwoman's malice into a state of teeming anger against Val, and blind to the fact that she was being used as a catspaw, she allowed herself to consider the Comtesse's suggestion, and in the end wrote Westenra a letter which contained many bitter and cruel things about Val, and gave him fuller information concerning the three studios than even the story of the Comtesse justified. That she was ashamed of herself for her action, and that it was only a passing spirit of vindictiveness which impelled it, did not make the letter as a document any the less poignantly indicting.
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And that same evening Val was watching the final effort of Valdana's troubled spirit to break from the bonds of the body and go forth upon its way. Ate Dea had run him to earth. The Hand whose fingers he had slipped through on the veldt was closing in on him inexorably, but with a worse thing in it now than a soldier's short sharp doom. It was only a matter of hours when he must join those others from whom he had fled--but with a difference! The difference between the lonely, painful death from an atrocious malady, and an end worthy of a man, face to the enemy, his comrades about him--
"Fighting hard and dying grimly,Silent lips and striking hand."
"Fighting hard and dying grimly,Silent lips and striking hand."
"Fighting hard and dying grimly,
Silent lips and striking hand."
"It seems hardly worth while now to have shirked!" he said quietly. "Just for a few more years crawling up and down the earth! I wonder why we dread old Death so, Val? After all he 's the best pal we have--always waiting so patiently and faithfully; whatever we do, nothing estranges him from his purpose. He never gets mad and takes our gift and gives it to some other fellow--the gift of rest, darkness, sleep!"
Like many a blackguard Valdana cherished in the deeps of him odds and ends of noble thought and chivalrous intention garnered from the lines of some man-poet. Lindsay Gordon always was the waster's poet, and always will be. He helped Horace Valdana to die now with gratitude instead of curses in his mouth.
"Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses,Yet abides the gift of the Darkness,Sleep!"
"Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses,Yet abides the gift of the Darkness,Sleep!"
"Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses,
Yet abides the gift of the Darkness,
Sleep!"
Sleep!"
His mind had grown strangely clear. He lay upon the wide divan in the centre of the room, and his eye roving from object to object, unusual recognition in its glance. A Godin stove glowed in one corner of the great room; the fire in it had never been allowed to die out since the first occupation of the studio. It filled the room with a summery warmth that drew out to the last drop the fragrance of a jar of Sicilian lilac that stood in the open window; and brought lovely memories of the veldt from an enormous bunch of mimosa stuck in a blue pot on the piano. So warm was the climate of the room that a balcony door stood perpetually open, even on a night such as this, when the outside air sliced against the warmth of the body with the keenness of a scimitar. Shaded lights threw faintly-tinted shadows in far corners. The only objects that showed clear in the dimness of the big shadowy room were the busts and figures of dead white clay--a gigantic head of Tolstoi, bearded, rugged; a perfect reproduction of Houdon's bust of Napoleon as First Consul; some little Donatello angels.
"It 'll be cold lying here in a Paris cemetery, Val!" said Valdana musingly.
His eye rested reflectively on the face ofL'Inconnue, hung on a nail against a pale green-and-rose Persian rug--that lovely mask taken from the dead face of a young unknown girl, fished out one morning from the river's muddy waters. She had cast her secret into the bosom of the Seine, and that kind, wicked, cruel, voluptuous, motherly old river had kept it for ever, so that to this day the world still wonders and longs to know who the girl was, and why with youth and beauty and all the gifts of life stamped upon her she chose to go out into the dark with that little radiant smile on her lips, as if in the last instant she had thought on some wondrous hour into which all the beauty of life had been compressed--and was glad to die because that hour could never come again.
Val, who had often studied the quietly smiling tragic face, said once:
"It was some man's eyes she was thinking of just before she sprang! That little smile was meant for just one man in the world."
"Yes: it'll be cold lying here in Paris," repeated Valdana thoughtfully. "I wish now I 'd stayed with those fellows at Platkop. They have the sunshine, and they 're all together."
Val smoothed the bright rug that lay over him with her thin nervous hands.
"Don't bother now, Dan."
It was many a long year since she had called him by that name which pity now wrung from her.
"I wonder why I should have been the only one not wounded?" He looked at her critically. "All the others had got it somewhere, but I had n't a thing, not a spot! And there was n't a bullet left among those blasted Boers: it was easy enough to slink off as the evening came on ... but some of the fellows looked at me as I undid that door. No one said anything, but theylookedat me, Val."
Val hid her eyes.
"One or two of them thought I was going to try for some water from the spruit near by--God! it was as hot as hell there all that poisonous day--and no water! Yes, some of them thought ... but Brand, my sub, he knew. I saw the look he gave as I crept to the door--and the smile--half his face was shot away, but he could still smile--he knew I did n't mean to come back----"
"Don't talk about it any more," whispered the woman by his bedside.
In a swift vision she saw the shot-away face with the brave scornful smile on it, and longed to hold it to her breast and kiss its broken bloody lips. Oh, if men knew how women consecrate those brave, quiet acts done in lone places with none to pity or to praise!
"Whose face is that hanging smiling there over your writing-desk?" His eyes were on another death-mask now, the most wonderful the world has ever seen. Keen, salient, proud yet gentle, all the arrogance and lust of power and good living gone--only peace, the traces of physical pain, and a gentle irony about the lips, left only ideality and lofty hope stamped above the brows. The world has one thing for which to thank the Corsican doctor Antommarchi--that he took the cast of Napoleon's face "when illness had transmuted passion into patience, and death with its last serene touch had restored the regularity and grandeur of youth." That was the face from which Horace Valdana could not keep his eyes.
"By Jove!" he whispered at the last. "He had the same thing as I 've got. He must have known the same hell as I am suffering now. Who am I that I should complain!"
The thought helped him to "overcome the sharpness of death," and die with greater dignity than he had lived.
A few days later, Val, with Rupert Lorrain standing by her side in the cemetery of Montparnasse, dropped a few violets, flowers of compassion and forgiveness, into an open grave, and Rupert threw down a friendly sod.
Already it was spring. The winter of pain and misery was past. On the graves crocuses were thrusting out their little sheathed heads, symbolic proof of the sweetness that comes forth from sorrow.
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CHAPTER XXI
LONELY WAYS
"I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end."--A. C. SWINBURNE.
But for the time being she went no farther than to the South of France. Not less than she, Bran, after wintering among houses, needed open skies. They were of one blood, and the longing for blue was on them both--the blue of space and sea and sky. And nowhere better in Europe can that blueness be found in April and May than down along the Mediterranean coast. At first they went to Ste. Maxime, a little village pitched in green and golden beauty beside St. Tropez's azure bay, and from where at dawn the sun can be seen shooting up from his golden bath just behind Corsica. For just several seconds the little island, cradle of the world's greatest general, shows like an inky mound against an aureole of yellow light that swiftly turns to rose, for another moment the sun rests on the peak of its highest mountain, then Corsica seems to sink and disappear into the sea until the next day's dawn.
Val did not stay long at Ste. Maxime. She wanted a villa where she could have Bran to herself, after the long months of enforced absences from him. If her unexpected fortune could not give her the delicious joy of absolute companionship and intimacy with her child it was useless indeed! Besides, in hotels children are swiftly spoilt by people who do not afterwards have to bear the brunt of the spoiling, and Val did not mean Garrett Westenra's boy to become weakened by the petting of Frenchwomen who love to treat other people's children like pretty lap-dogs--to be caressed in certain moods and thrust aside in others.
So after a week or two during which an agent busied himself on her behalf, she moved on to Cannes, and took possession of an ideal villa he had found for her. It lay above the road between Cannes and Cap d'Antibes, but perched high beyond the dust and din of motors; on the right, La Croisette winged away into the sea, on the left, a gaunt shoulder of the Alps with a shawl of snow draped on it showed keen against the mistral-swept skies; while about it, in all the tall beauty and tropical splendour of Riviera foliage, clustered a garden full of dreams. A garden of winding paths edged by ivy leaves lying flat, and little wild strawberry plants thrusting up coral fruits; tall palms and cacti glowing with flaming candelabra, waxen-leaved creepers, branching giant-aloes, delicate fern-like mimosa leaning tenderly above beds of violets, large as purple butterflies, great patches of poppies, massed clumps of heather white as snow and bright with happy bees; and everywhere roses, roses drowsing in the sunshine, perfuming the air!
It was a garden in which coolness could be found on the sultriest day of summer, but for spring days the open space before the wide white steps and pillared porch was ideal. The floor of this space was of gravel, bleached by rain and a southern sun to snowy whiteness. A clump of tall pines spiking against the sky afforded a webwork of flickering shadows under which to sit as in a balcony hung over the blueness of Golfe Juan. Always there are ships in that bay of molten turquoise; red-sailed fishing boats; leaden-coloured warships, with their grim air of power, lying at anchor; yachts spreading white wings for flight.
The house itself, like nearly all Riviera villas, was square built, and standing alone would have been less beautiful than solid and comfortable-looking. But in its jewelled setting of leaf and gold and blazing colour, the walls of dead white gave a note of quiet beauty and peace. A long balcony from the upper rooms dripped with clematis, and all round the house, high on the walls, large medallions bore the names of the days. Alternately with these were other medallions on which were painted on a pale blue ground white and scarlet-winged storks, flying, flying like the days.
The Villa of Little Days, a poetess who had lived and dreamed there named it. She was a famous woman, a friend of Gambetta, who in his lifetime came often to visit her. It was she who had planned the wild and tender beauty of the garden. Val blessed her often in the spring months she and Bran passed there.
The domestic arrangements were, from her point of view, ideal. A garage across the road pertained to the villa, and had attached to it a cottage which was occupied by a man and his wife whose services were at the disposal of those who rented the villa. The man minded the great garden all through the sultry summer, dug, gathered, transplanted, and cut firewood from the pines for the log fires of winter; also he could drive a car, and did not disdain to clean a window. His wife Marietta, a big-boned gay-faced Marseillaise, with the bloom of a peach on her cheeks, and rings of garnets in her ears, made short work of such cleaning as a villa bathed in perpetual sunshine and purified by sea-breezes needed. Incidentally, she could serve up a tureen ofbouillabaisseof a flavour and fragrance to seduce the heart of a king and convert a vegetarian from his amazing ways.
Bran, happy as always within sight of the sea, raced the garden with his "fox," or sat under the pines with his mother, listening to the pine needles growing, or hearing stories of the Greek heroes who, on the shores of the Mediterranean, seem to be more real and comprehensible than in any other part of the world. Perhaps because old Greece and the Ionian Isles are so near at hand! Indeed, the lure of the horizon is so great on that fair shore, that if she had been alone in the world nothing could have held Val from taking train to Marseilles, and from thence as fast as ship could bear her. But Bran and his well-being bound her fast like Prometheus to his rock. The rush of trains and the throb of ships' machinery are no furtherances to health in young children. It is in quiet gardens and comfortable homes that the young heart expands and the little body shoots and flourishes. The garden of the veldt was what she could most have wished for him--that wild garden where her own heart had grown its dreams. But it was far, far, and only to be reached by such long journeying as the child was not yet fit for. So she stayed with him in the southern garden, and if her own heart sailed away sometimes in the ships that slid over the horizon down the side of the world, her body remained to guard Westenra's son and to give him what she "possessed of soul."
Her only regret was that Haidee too could not be revelling in the golden southern sunshine. But Haidee was studying at Versailles with quite extraordinary energy. The exams. were close upon her, and Val was far from wishing to divert her attention from the goal. She had never failed to impress upon the child the importance of mental equipment that is grounded on solid instruction. She could see for Haidee too, where she had never seen for herself, that to leave the mind and heart and soul open and waiting for some man to walk in and fill them is to court disaster. There is no man in the world big enough to fill the heart and mind and soul of a woman worth considering. The thing is to fill them first with beauty and learning and wisdom, and let the man come in after, if there be room. For a woman to stake everything on a man is to play a losing game. But another love in the soul, be it music, literature, art, mathematics, or the maternal instinct, is insurance against total beggary. If by great good chance a man's love brings happiness, then the other love is an added glory; if misery comes the other is a refuge.
Poor Val! She had not followed the creed herself, but she saw well enough the wisdom of it for Haidee, and had tried to instil into her the prudence of going nap on Art rather than on Heart. She wanted Haidee to benefit by her own failures, and never ceased from urging and encouraging her on towards a goal. A further instigation she used freely was the mention of the great pride and pleasure Westenra would feel in her successful passing of the "Bacho" and gaining of thediplôme.
But Haidee, in response to all letters, kept on saying nothing. Even to Val's promise of a trip to the South as soon as the exams, were over, she made no more than a sullen acknowledgment. But Val knew from the reports of the professors that she was working hard.
Most people flee from the Riviera during the summer months. Of course it is hot, but that is not the reason. With the advent of the hot weather the Riviera becomes very quiet. The "season" is over, and the fashionable birds fly away. But as a matter of fact the charm of the place is only ripening. The blaze and beauty of the scene become riper and more gorgeous. The white villas disappear into their gardens, submerged by a flood of green leaves that hide and protect them from the blaze and dust, though of the last there is less than in the season, for the motors cease from troubling and the siren is at rest. The sweet silence of the night is unbroken by blood-curdling shrieks or jerked-out hoots from the cars of those rushing to, or returning furiously from, Monte Carlo. Of course in the bungalow type of villa built to catch the spring sunshine, and with no well-treed garden in which to shelter from fierce heat, it would be unwise and uncomfortable to stay through the summer; but in the Villa of Little Days there was every comfort within and without, and nothing to irk except the occasional bite of a mosquito that had intrigued its way through wired windows and mosquito netting. The days passed in a great idle peace. For Val was frankly idle--with her hands. With her mind she was always working and giving forth to Bran. But with her hands, for the first time in her life since she had sat idle under the shadow of a buck-sail imbibing her father's vagabond creeds, she did nothing. And, even as in those days Gay Haviland had handed on to his child what was his of greatness of heart and soul, so in the southern garden during long torrid days of tropical peace, when under the tingling ether thought seemed to detach itself in bright fountains from the sluggish mass of lesser things, Val gave of all that was best in her to Westenra's son. The pity of it is that all mothers cannot have this unlimited leisure to give to their children in the days when character is forming for life.
In a sense, too, Val was at peace for the first time since her early marriage. The menace and terror of Valdana's existence, the load she had carried on her conscience for years with regard to her position in Westenra's life, all had been swept away by the hand of Death, the greatest friend! And she was free of Westenra too. Whether it were true or not that he intended to marry Miss Holland she would never lay claim to his life or name again, never return to that life in New York that crippled her soul, robbed her of her individuality, and turned her into a useless, incapable creature whom she herself despised.
The decision was not even hers to make--at least so it seemed to her. He had made it for her in Jersey. And it was all old grief and pain! She had learned during those terrible months of nursing Horace Valdana to hush her heart to rest. She had had her chance with Garrett and his love, and failed, it seemed. Even in spite of Valdana's resurrection she would surely, had she been worthy, have kept Westenra's love? As it was, love had done with her, she would never feel passion again.
"All her red roses had fallen asleep,All her white roses were sleeping!"
"All her red roses had fallen asleep,All her white roses were sleeping!"
"All her red roses had fallen asleep,
All her white roses were sleeping!"
The brave thing was to face the fact and abide by it. Besides, she had Bran. A woman who is a mother can never be quite lonely and unhappy. One little chapel of the heart may remain empty and dismantled but all other spaces in it are filled to overflowing. And ... away at the back of Val's mind a dream had begun to simmer and waver and take form--a dream of a waggon on the veldt, with Bran. Some day she would return to work and wandering--she knew that now.
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In the autumn Haidee passed her exams, brilliantly, getting honours with her "Bacho" and a first-classdiplôme. It was a great achievement, and Val was deeply pleased, knowing how the news would gratify Westenra. She wrote at once sending Haidee a beautiful gift in celebration of the success, and asking when she should come to Paris and fetch her South. For by this time she had discovered that she could trust Marietta with Bran, and had no fear of leaving him for a few days.
But Haidee wrote back coldly, barely acknowledging the gift, and stating that she wished to stay on at the Lycée working at her music and painting until December, when Celine Lorrain and her father were coming down to Marseilles to see the last of Rupert, who, having finished his two years' military service, was going out to Morocco. Val made no objection to this plan, but her heart was chilled at this open preference for strangers. The Lorrains were good friends, of course, but after all she and Haidee had been through poverty and sorrow and sickness together. She looked upon the girl, if not as her child, at least as her younger sister. Was it possible that she still cherished resentment about Sacha? At any rate Val was too proud to make any further advances. She knew Haidee to be one of those natures that are not softened by kindly advances, but rather inclined to hold the advancers in contempt for their pains--a fault of youth that passes with a wider knowledge and experience of humanity.
When she had gone to say good-bye to Haidee before leaving Paris, it was with the intention of telling her the wonderful news about the necklace, and also as much as was necessary of the return and death of Valdana without exactly revealing the identity of the latter and his relationship to herself. However, Haidee's bleak manner had nipped untimely in the bud the good intention. Val could not afford to take into her confidence any one who was not entirely sympathetic, and though she did not believe that Haidee would be capable of deliberate disloyalty, yet she realised that the latter, in spite of the grown-up airs, was only a child, and as such liable to be swayed by moods in which she might fling a confidence to the four winds, and repent her action when it was too late. And the secret of Horace Valdana's resurrection had not been kept these many years for it to be lightly betrayed by a child. As for the matter of the fortune gained by the sale of the Comfort necklace, Val had been obliged to strangle her longing to tell Haidee all about it, for how could she suppose that any one who showed such an almost offensive indifference to her affairs was really burning with curiosity to know the meaning of her suddenly changed circumstances? Haidee hid her feelings well. Thus it came to pass that a secret which Val would gladly have shared and felt redoubled pleasure in the sharing, had been kept of necessity to herself. She had not even told Rupert, for she felt that apart from the children no one else before Westenra had a right to know. And since Westenra showed no further interest in her--well, it was no one's affair.
When the week came for the expected arrival of Haidee, what was Val's intense surprise to receive a letter from her saying that she should not be coming down with the Lorrains. For one thing, she wrote, General Lorrain was ill and Celine could not leave him, so that Rupert would be travelling alone. For another, she added casually, as if prompted by an afterthought, "Garry is in Paris and we are going about a great deal together. It is possible that he may come down South--to see Branbefore he returns to New York. But this is not quite certain. I will let you know later."
Westenra in Europe for the first time for four years, and this was the way he notified her! Val was stricken to the soul. Never had she so acutely realised the position to which he had relegated her. A mere minder of his child, and in some respects not so good as that, for a nurse or governess would at least have received kindly and courteous letters from her employer. This casual second-hand message seemed to be the cruellest of any of the blows her heart had suffered since first she threw in her lot with Garrett Westenra. And at first she sank under it. It was the little more that is too much. But presently with some of her old courage she braced herself to the new situation. If she had got to meet Westenra she would be ready for it. She had not trained her soul for years to no avail. She had not lived with austerity, stood apart from temptation, fought spiritual battles, for nothing. A strong rock was at her back for the hour of need, a rock she had been forming for herself in all the years since she last saw Westenra. She would be ready when he came to receive him with dignity and strength untainted by resentment or any petty feeling.
But before that time Rupert the blue-eyed and ardent, in whom she recognised so much of her own nature, came bursting into the Calendar of Little Days. She welcomed him with all the pleasure a woman feels in seeing those whose affection for her is sure and unquestioning, who doubt not her loyalty and pure intention.
His light-heartedness seemed to have waned a little, and his pleasure at having attained his majority and freedom to depart where he listed was not so great as Val had expected. He explained the reason succinctly.
"It is all very well to be rich and free, Val, but I am very alone in the world." His eyes resting in hers took an expression of intense melancholy.
"That is the curse the gods lay upon us wanderers, Rupert," she said sadly.
"'Lover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you!'
"'Lover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you!'
"'Lover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you!'
"Yet it is that loneliness we are always trying by our own efforts to alleviate."
"There is only one person in the world who can alleviate it for me."
"And you have not found her yet," interrupted Val promptly, and before he could say what she read in his eyes, continued swiftly: "I want you to tell me all about Haidee. You saw her recently, didn't you? How is she looking?"
"Very pretty," said Rupert gloomily. "She is a great beauty, that Haidee, and looks no longer like a brown pony."
"Brown pony?"
"Ah, I should not have said that! It was one of poor Sacha'sblaguesthat she always looked like a wild pony with her brown mane flying ... but she is very different now and quite cured of Sacha, with her hair put up and long frocks and the self-possessed manner of twenty."
"Has she really got her hair up?"
"Yes, indeed. I saw her with the guardian. He is a fine fellow, is n't he? She is much in love with him. I think they will marry."
"Marry!" Val started as if a missile had struck her. A moment later she controlled herself and laughed--an odd, nervous laugh. "Why, Rupert, how silly you are! She is practically Dr. Westenra's child. He has brought her up from a baby."
"That makes nothing. She is not a baby any more, and she does n't look at him like a father. I prophesy to you that Haidee marries him."
He was arrested by Val's expression.
"You do not care for such a marriage?"
"It is out of the question to discuss such a thing," she said firmly, but her face was ashen.
Rupert examined her acutely. He did not know of course that he was speaking of Bran's father.
CHAPTER XXII
THE WAY OF LOVE
"The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul."--EMERSON.
The Lemprière 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 haircoifféand 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 areyougoing?"
"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,dolet me marry you, Garry. I do love you so."
"Dear Silly Billy, I couldn't possibly."
"Why not? Whynot? How can I come back to America with you and Bran unless Iammarried 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 hemustbe 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?"
"IloveBran, though I 've often been a pig to him--butthat'sVal'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 forétiquette, 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.