————At breakfast the next morning he announced that he was due in London in two days' time to deliver some lectures at one of the hospitals. After that he must make a visit to Ireland on a matter concerning some family property. He added vaguely that he should probably come back again to Jersey before very long, but Val took that for what it was--a bone thrown to Haidee, whose face had visibly lengthened and darkened on hearing this horrible news. Bran, smiling in his mother's arms, looked on affably--his father's comings and goings meant little to him as yet, so long as he had Val's soft cheek to rub his own against. She was very pale, but extraordinarily composed, and made no comment on his plans. She had withdrawn herself into some remote and distant land of her own--a land where no birds sang, nor flowers grew! After breakfast she left the others, and went about her household duties. A conference in the garden between Westenra and Haidee resulted in a resolution to walk down to St. Aubin's and hire bicycles for a day's outing. Haidee was strong as a Basuto pony, and Westenra loved nothing better than to be out in the open air. The bicycling is hilly in Jersey, and the two came home tired out in the evening. Haidee announced that they had done their side of the Island from Corbières to Plemmont Caves, and intended next day to visit Bouley Bay, Archirondelle, and the famous breakwater that cost half a million pounds and is of no more use than a load of rotten hay.After the usual bath parade, at which Bran presided, Val once more had the fireside and her thoughts to herself. Haidee and Westenra, tired out, were glad to seek their beds.The next day they started early. While Val was cutting sandwiches for them, Westenra half suggested that she should come too; but she smiled quite naturally, and said that even if there were any one to stay with Bran, it was so long since she had cycled she would only be a drag to them. "But I hope you will not be so tired to-night, Garrett," she finished quietly. "I want to have a little talk with you after dinner.""Very well," he answered, looking at her curiously. He could not pretend to begin to understand her, or what she meant or wanted. He only knew that he, too, had something to say before he left Jersey the next day. Though outwardly he was composed, and in the company of Haidee even gay, affecting great interest in their excursions, his heart was heavy as a stone in him, and he was brooding over his wrongs as only an Irishman can. As it happened, rain began to fall heavily after lunch, and somewhat early in the afternoon the two cyclists returned wet and cross. Westenra bathed, and immediately began to pack his things for departure by the next morning's boat. The rest of the afternoon was spent with the children.The sky had cleared by evening, and when after dinner Val and Westenra walked across the fields towards the cliff in the pale, clear, evening light, they could see the tide furling and unfurling its filmy laces of froth on St. Brelade's beach.Though she had come out with a set purpose she found it hard to begin what she had to say. For all her remote manner and outward calm, her heart, throbbing full, bounded in her breast and beat in her throat until she felt suffocating. It was Westenra who spoke at last very gently, but with something of a requiem note in his words."So you see our love was not strong enough after all to weather the storms, Val!""Mine was ... mine is," her heart cried out, but she looked at him dully. She knew the futility of such words now. It was his own dead love he was keening, not hers."Our ship of dreams has gone to pieces.""No," burst from her lips almost against her will."Yes, Val," his gentle tone became stern. "Face the facts."They had seated themselves on some rocks near the edge of the cliff. Nothing broke the peace of the evening but the swirr and swish of the gentle tide on the beach below."You promised to burn your boats ... never to go back to old habits and possessions ... I find you with your old possessions about you----""Those pictures and chintzes? I wrote and told you how they came," she interrupted. "They can be burnt for all they are to me."He moved his hand with a desperate gesture."That is nothing to the other. Can you deny that you have returned to one at least of your old habits?""Oh!" she cried, and sat up like one who has been struck. But his heart was full of fury, outraged hopes, and disappointment. He could not measure his words because she cried out."It was not your boats you burned, but my ship--my ship of dreams!"He went further, he accused her of breaking his shrine, of succumbing to a vice that he detested and despised with all his soul. He said she had betrayed his love, and destroyed that quality in it which is essential and eternal."Onemustlook up," he said, and looked down on her as she sat there, her face covered with her hands, very still under the torrent of fierce and cruel words that burst from him in the bitterness of outraged love and pride. Like all reserved people when driven into breaking silence he said too much. Afterwards there was a long silence. A curlew flying inland wailed faintly like a dying thing."I don't see what is before us," he muttered. "Everything is finished."And at last she spoke--very quietly."Yes, everything is finished of our life together. But each of us is free to begin again.""Free!" he echoed ironically, thinking of the mystical fatalistic threads that had bound and tangled them together from the first. "You and I will never be free of each other.""Oh, yes--we are already. Listen! I want to tell you something that I ought to have told you long ago, only I was afraid of ... Ah! never mind of what I was afraid. But now that it is as you have said all over and finished, now that I see very well that not only do you not love me, but that you never have loved me and want nothing so much as to be free of me, I will tell it you--" and she added fiercely, "with pleasure.""Tell ahead," he said drearily."I am not your wife, and never have been. Horace Valdana is alive--has never been dead!"In the solemn mute moments that followed the curlew wailed again."What are you saying?" muttered Westenra, hoarsely. He had risen to his feet.Then Val began to laugh, not hysterically, but just soft light-hearted laughter. She really felt light-hearted at that moment. It was as though something very, very heavy had been lifted from her shoulders, and she could stand up straight at last."It can't be true!" He was muttering like a man stunned. "How long have you known?""Oh, what does that matter!" she said. "It istrue--that is all that concerns you." She reflected a moment. "But of course my mere word is of no value to you ... I have proofs in the house ... letters from him asking me to go to Canada with him." She began to laugh again."Good God!" muttered Westenra still dazed. "And Bran?"That sobered her, drying the strange laughter on her lips and in her heart."Ah, Bran! ... Yes. My Brannie!" she said softly, her voice in those few low-spoken words expressing all that the woman voice can express of pity, sorrow, and love. It was Bran who would be the victim--Bran who would go fatherless, homeless, nameless--a vagabond like his mother with restless heart and wandering feet!"He is mine," said Westenra suddenly."No, mine," she answered swiftly. They stood staring at each other like two duellists. He lost sight of all she had been to him--of all that she must have suffered. Dazed and horror-struck he only felt that his world was moving away from under his feet, and she was trying to rob him of the last hold, the most dear thing he had ever possessed."He is mine too ... I believe by law I could get him.""Law! Have n't you found out yet that I am lawless?" She came close to him, staring into his eyes, a mocking light in her own. "You forget that I am the woman with no soul, no morals, and no roots, the careless vagabond whom you feared Haidee to come into contact with ... whom you apologised to your dead mother for having married....""Val, you are mad!" he said amazed, white to the lips. But she only laughed a little clanking laugh, and her voice that had so often sounded in his ears like the wild far music of his own land was hard now as iron on iron."Go your ways, my dear Garrett Westenra. You are free of the woman who burnt your ship!"CHAPTER XIICHILDREN OF ISHMAEL"Life tests a plough in meadows made of stones,Love takes a toll of spirit, mind, and bones."MASEFIELD.Raging he went from English shores. Raging, broken-hearted, more lonely than ever in his life before. Looking backwards to that voyage on which he and Val had first met, he realised that his loneliness then was peace and contentment compared with what he now felt. He had known what it was to share life right down to the core with another human being, and when that has once been, solitude redoubles its sting. A fantastic creature like Val, however uncomfortable she made life, could not be lost out of it without leaving a big, aching gap.Yet, there he was on his way back to America, while in far Jersey Val sat on her rabbit-hutch staring at the sea with blind eyes, Bran playing unheeded at her knees, in her ears the faint, melancholy cry of the curlew.After their wretched parting on St. Brelade's Cliffs, Westenra had paced the beach all night. When he reached the farm dawn brightened the sky, but none of the freshness of morning was in his drawn face. Haidee and Val were up, the fire made, breakfast ready. They seemed to take it for granted that he still meant to leave by that morning's boat for England, and indeed he had decided that it was the only thing to do. It would give him time to review the miserable situation and look for a way out of it. But before he went he encompassed a further interview with Val, though he got little of it but pain. She was in that subtle way of herséloignéefrom him once more, had put immeasurable distance between them."I want you to tell me more of this," he said drearily. "I must have details to go on before I can do anything to right the matter.""You cannot right it," she answered. "It must be left as it is.""What do you mean?""It must never come out that Horace Valdana is alive. One cannot so disgrace England."Briefly she related the facts as far as she knew them, and he saw that she was right. Impossible to disgrace a country to right a private affair--even if the country were one you hated. But what a situation! There seemed to him to be no way out of it. Val, for a deep reason of her own, withheld from him the fact of Valdana's broken health. She wished him to feel absolutely free of her. She kept repeating that, with sardonic inflexible eyes."You see, you are free! What more do you ask?"He asked much more, but with that mocking smile on her pale lips he would not tell her so."I want my son," he said coldly."Myson," she answered, and that found them once more at the pitch at which they had parted the night before, reason withdrawn, cold fury in its place. Only by a great effort had he controlled himself."I leave him with you, in trust.""Because you must," she answered, eyes flickering with bitter triumph. "But will you not take Haidee before ill comes to her?"He was helpless before the smile that writhed upon her stiff lips. What did she mean by these gibes concerning Haidee and his dead mother, which she flung at him like javelins? How had she read those secrets of his soul that he had never revealed to any one, scarcely acknowledged to himself? Had she with her queer almost clairvoyant instinct known all along and mocked and disdained him in her heart from the first? If he thought of her tenderness to Bran and to himself when he lay ill, her comradeship, her valiant gaiety, he could not believe it. When he looked at her mocking disdainful eyes he could believe anything."No; I leave Haidee in trust with you too," he said, then had been obliged to kiss the children hurriedly, and go on his way, or lose the boat.In spite of his original intention to do so he did not return to Jersey before sailing to America. After black nights of reflection he saw that there was nothing to be gained by facing Val again in the mood that possessed her. The moment they looked into each other's eyes cold reason would once more withdraw from them and the fury of wounded love take its place. It was better to let Time do its work upon their trouble. So he sailed for America without seeing her or the children again, though it hurt him deeply to do it. And his days and nights upon the ship were haunted by the face of the woman in grey. Never since the voyage on theBavarichad he dreamed that dream, but now never a night came without it. Towards the last part of the voyage, when calm had come to him, he wrote her a letter in which he hid the love that still ached in him, but tried to revive a little the old understanding comradeship they had shared.But there was too much of compassion in that letter, and Val was sick of his compassion. Womencanget sick of compassion when it leaves no room for self-respect.————She stayed on in Jersey not because he asked her but because she must. One would call it existing rather than living as far as she was concerned. She felt as though her brain were dead and she had only her body left, that body which, however glad she would be to lay it down, she must conserve and take care of for the sake of Bran. For Haidee, too, she had a kind of responsible mother-feeling, though Haidee never encouraged tenderness in any one. But the case of Bran was different; the child of two such nervous people could not be otherwise than nervously organised, though of fine build and stamina, and Val knew that under any care but hers he would probably grow up a weakling. No, she must not die! But she tried to let her mind do so for a while, so that she might suffer less. She essayed to turn herself into a kind of vegetable; read nothing, talked to no one but the children, indulged in no kind of mental occupation. Only she worked out in the open as much as possible, with her nervous incapable hands, and at least she got a beautiful flower garden together.She never saw or spoke to any one but the children. When Haidee got back from school they would all work together in the garden or clean out the stable, or make bran mashes for the pony colic, or run the dogs, and watch the chickens and rabbits in the open, though enthusiasm for this last occupation was distinctly on the wane. The only things any of them cared for now were the bees and the flowers. They did not make money out of these, but then the fowls did not make money either, only pretended to until the grain bill came in.Bran was always to be found in the vicinity of the beehives, and at first Val had been terrified, but later she came to believe him one of the "band of little brothers" whom bees do not sting. Haidee could take no liberties with the strange, wise insects, and had a holy fear of them, but they were Bran's passionate loves.As for eggs and chickens, and fat hens that would no longer lay, they were all sick of them as articles of diet. Haidee, who in New York days was used to attack with relish three city eggs of assorted flavours mixed in a tumbler, now turned away in weariness and disgust from the brown-shelled ones fresh from the nest.And the rabbits were a thorn in the flesh, and a weariness to the sole of the foot! Eternally they were killed by stoats, eaten by rats, stolen, or else dug their way out from under the runs and fled for the open. If these modes of escape all failed, Bran, in his small way, would do what he could for them. When he came toddling indoors to declare with an effulgent smile his love for Haidee she would start up snapping:"Yes, I know whatthatmeans. You've let the rabbits out. You always have when you love me. Have you, Bran?""Well, by aksdent, Haidee....""Oh, I know your aksdents...."With blank faces she and Val would rush from the house and scoot after the scurrying rabbits. The latter usually got the best of the game and achieved liberty.The truth had to be faced that there was no money to be made out of the farm. High hopes of a fortune had long since fallen to the dust. Chickens and rabbits are very charming to watch at their antics in the sunshine, but depending upon them for a living, unless you are an expert poultry farmer, is waste of time. Val realised it at last, and that other ways and means for obtaining money must be reflected upon. She had no intention of accepting another rap of Westenra's for either her own or Bran's support. So one day she sat down and wrote to Branker Preston, asking him if he could find an opening for some "Wanderfoot" articles."I cannot travel," she wrote, "but I have a good store of unused material in the cupboards of my mind, and I need money." Preston answered that he would not be long in finding a demand for anything she could supply. When, however, the demand came she found herself curiously unable to cope with it. The task of sitting down to write newspaper articles after a lapse of more than two years into domesticity was not an easy one. As love and maternity had absorbed her mother's art, so in a smaller degree the same things had encroached upon Val's gift. Added to which was a period of unbroken intercourse with chickens and rabbits, enlivened only by digging in the garden or running the pony up and down when he got colic. Such occupations are excellent for the health, and may even induce a good working philosophy, but they do not make the intellect to scintillate like the stars, nor bestow distinction upon that elusive quality in writing which is known as style. She found that when she tried to think connectedly on abstract subjects things slithered out of her mind and left a headache behind. After a few days, in which her brain seemed to act in delirium, and the written results read to her like the ravings of a suddenly liberated lunatic, she threw down her pen in despair."It is this brute of an island! I can never write here," she cried desperately. She had suffered too much there, and her instinct was always to flee from places where sorrow had smitten her, to save her soul alive before it was injured beyond aid. Such places seemed to have a power for evil over her. Moreover her feet had long ached to be gone from the small, cramped island. It had served its purpose. The children were healthy and strong, her own body recuperated. Now that she must take up her pen once more, plainly it was time to pull stakes. There was no inspiration for her in Jersey.For another thing, she began to be afraid that if she remained much longer she might become a serious criminal; that is to say, one upon whom the law would lay hands. It was Farmer Scone who helped her to this conclusion and her final decision to go.For months he had been making himself unpleasant--a long series of petty vexations and systemised annoyance--stoning her fowls, complaining to the police that her dogs worried his cows, letting his cattle break down her hedges, and encouraging his labourers to annoy Haidee by sniggering over the hedge when she was busy with the pony. Added to these things he had once more started walking through her grounds by the old disputed "right of way" past the back door.One morning she and Haidee, just going out to fire at some crows in the fruit garden, ran into him and his grinning labourer carrying their scythes to a far hayfield. Val called him back, and speaking very self-controlledly told him that it must be understood, once and for all, that she would not permit this trespassing."Great Galumps!" he responded as usual, "and what will you do to me? Is it your husband from America, who only comes to see you for one day a year, that 'll be punching my head?""No," said Val, white to the lips, and raising her rook-rifle. "It is I that will be putting a hole through your large and very unsightly paunch.""Yes, do, Val,do. Take a pot-shot at him--give him one in the tummy!" urged Haidee ecstatically. "Shall I get my revolver too?"She hopped up-stairs, and Farmer Scone moved on at the double-quick, rather alarmed, for he did not at all like the look in Val's eyes, and to be sure no one knew what such creatures might do! He half determined to go down to the court-house at once and, complaining of menaces, "have the law on them," but reflected in time that as he was not "Jersey-born" he might not get his case, while running a possible risk of being fined for trespassing. He decided that his system of petty annoyance was the best.In the meantime Val, too, was deciding something. On going into the house she met Haidee coming out, gaily priming her revolver."Put it away, Haidee," she said wearily. "Don't you understand I only said that in my rage with the insolent brute. You must never shoot at people. Awful trouble might come of it."Haidee's face darkened sulkily."One can't do anything in this rotten island," she complained."We can get out of it," said Val, and Haidee brightened."Where would we go?""Oh, I don't know ... anywhere ... anywhere where we 'll never see a rabbit or a fowl again. I think I shall go mad if I stay among them another day.""Me too--I'm sick of the beasts. Look at that cock-eyed eagle staring at us. Sh--sh, you brutes!""I wish I 'd never seen a hen in my life," said Val savagely."Let's get an axe and slay them all before we go," suggested Haidee. Suddenly her face grew long. "But where are we going to get the money from?"The financial situation was such that even the children understood its simplicity; though if it had been more complicated Val would never have dreamed of not sharing it with them. Bran was able to tell to a penny how much the family purse contained, while Haidee as a matter of fact possessed a far finer appreciation of money values than either Westenra or Val."We 've got the rent," said the latter thoughtfully, and Haidee looked up quickly. With the lawlessness of youth she immediately jumped to the conclusion that Val meant to skip with the sum that was due to the landlord on September quarter-day, now close at hand. It was only a fourth of thirty-six pounds, but still, when times are hard and a sea voyage in contemplation, nine pounds are not to be despised. Val quickly dispelled this bright notion."I 'm not going to rob the landlord. All he will have to do is sell the farm-stock and my pretty London things, which of course we 'll leave. They will more than pay the rent for the rest of the lease, and enough left over to pay the bills we owe. We won't take anything but our clothes and a few books.""What about Joy? Let's sell him. You know that old Farmer Le Seur offered fifteen pounds for him. I 'll go and tell him this morning, shall I?"Val reflected a moment, and came to the conclusion that it would be juster to Westenra to sell the pony at that price than leave him to be sold for the small sum they owed, so she gave Haidee the desired permission."Oh, hurray! ... Oh, Val, what a lark!" Haidee pranced and capered like a Bashi-bazouk. "Let's go and pack."They flew up-stairs and woke Bran to the news."We 're going away, Brannie Bran ... in a ship!"Bran, sitting up in bed like a squdgy Japanese idol, took hold of his toes as though they were a bunch of rosebuds."Are we going to daddy?" he asked solemnly, and Val hid her face in his flannel nightgown."No, my Wing." She added on the spur of the moment, "We 're going to France."He reflected awhile."Oh, dear buck!" he sighed at last (only he said jeer for dear). It was one of his expressions signifying disappointment, and Val felt a pang. But she would not be saddened, and soon had the children as wild as herself, dashing about the house and packing up, so glad was she to be setting out from the place where she had been a vegetable so long, and yet known such keen unhappiness.Having got together all their trunks, the band of Ishmaelites boarded a cab for St. Helier. No one would have dreamed for a moment that they were setting out for another land. They drove down and spent the night opposite the quay, and sailed the next morning for Granville. Just at the last Val thought of sending Haidee to see if there were any letters at the post-office. As it happened, one had been forwarded by Branker Preston, but she did not read it till they were on board ship.It was from Valdana, to say that, as she would not come, he was setting forth alone in excellent health to start life anew in Canada.Part IIIFranceCHAPTER XIIITHE WAYS OF A LOVER"For life is not the thing we thought, and not the thing we plan."--ROBERT SERVICE.March was in like a lamb, and on a fair morning all the windows of Villa Duval stood open, letting in floods of sunlight, gusts of warm sea-scented wind, and the sound of waves crushing and swinging up and down the sandy beaches of Normandy. Perhaps it was becausepèreDuval who built it was an old sailor and lighthouse-keeper that the rooms of the Villa were curiously like ship-cabins with their wooden walls and bare deck-like floors. Looking out through the porthole windows at the view of blue waves rippling from the bay up the river it would not have seemed unnatural to find the Villa gently rocking with the incoming tide. Down in the gardenpèreDuval hoeing weeds fostered the illusion by croaking the ghost of an old sea song that he had lilted bravely enough forty years before from his fishing boat or when he kept the lighthouse at Les Sept Isles. He had built the Villa with his own hands after the sea and he had done with each other; but not for his own habitation. With its pink and blue tables and chairs made and lovingly painted by himself, beds from the Paris Bon Marché, stout bed-linen that had been part ofmèreDuval's marriage portion, marvellous mirrors and decorated crockery bought with trading coupons that represented many pounds of coffee from the Café Debray Company, it was considered far too wonderful and shining to be the habitation of a mere Normandy peasant. So the old man and his granddaughter Hortense lived in a couple of rooms beneath the wonder house, which was perched high and reached only by a flight of steps to the front door. The Villa lay nearer to the beach than any other in Mascaret, and for this reason was always one of the first to be taken by summer visitors. But at the end of the previous summerpèreDuval had achieved an extraordinary piece of luck in letting it for the whole autumn and winter to some mad Americans, who were now fixtures for the coming summer also.The mad Americans had received this title by reason of their eccentric habits and customs, to say nothing of their clothes. They never wore anything, week-day or Sunday, but red woollen sweaters and short skirts, and the girl most shamelessly showed her legs bare to the knee. Also the whole band of three bathed in the sea on the coldest of winter days. Evidently their mental condition was known elsewhere than in Mascaret, for more than once when they were staying at Les Fusains, the villa they had first taken, letters came from America addressed to Les Insains, and the occupants of Les Fusains had received these bland and unblinking from the hands of Jean Baptiste the postman. The postmaster, who understood a little English, had explained the jest to his village cronies, adding that the writing of the eldest mad one so much resembled the writing of a hen, that it was small wonder that mistakes were made over her address. That they were Americans was certain, for every three months American Express money orders came for them, and the eldest Insain promptly changed these for French moneymandatsand forwarded them to the Credit Lyonnais in Paris. Thesefantastiquesdoings deeply impressed the villagers, and had provided them with many an interesting hour of gossip over their black coffee and cider.And the "Insane ones" never knew a thing about it. On this mild March morning they were variously engaged in simple and peaceful occupations not unsuitable to those of feeble mind. Upstairs, one of them, a girl of sixteen with bare feet and hair swinging in long brown braids, was swishing the sheets from the beds and flicking all stray garments into corners. She considered that she was being certainly very noble and useful. Her face bore the expression of complacent beneficence assumed by those who are aware that they are doing the work of another person, and doing it ten times better than that other person. She wore a bathing dress that was slightly small for her, made combination-fashion, of twill whose pristine scarlet had long since been bleached by sea salt to a faint shell-pink. It was embroidered by black and white darns of a primitive, not to say aboriginal description. Her bare arms were decorated with some beaten copper bracelets of the New Art school, but her slim legs, brown and very long from the knee down, were innocent of stockings. She was tanned all over with the faint, transparent, sherry-coloured tan of a woodland nymph, and her delicately curved cheek wore the tint of woodland berries, wine-brown eyes full of sunshine and shadows, long, flickering, silky hair, a red, sulky mouth.Haidee had grown into a beauty.She swished the sheets of heavy linen from the beds and cast them in rumpled heaps upon the floor, taking many a glance out at the sea, whistling a tune at one moment, in another echoing with her high-pitched rather husky treble the lay ofpèreDuval."Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eauVa sans peur mon petit bateau."In the room below, listening to Haidee's rustling feet and the song of the sea, was Val Valdana. Two sheets of theParis Daily Mailwere spread upon the table to protect the cloth, while in wistful and desultory fashion she prepared the vegetables for lunch. Her thin brown fingers decked in their strange stones and old enamels were stained with potato juice, and a number of small new potatoes lay dimpling pink at the bottom of an earthenware bowl glazed brown without and pale yellow within. But Val's thoughts were not with the potatoes. She often let her hands fall among the curly peel scrapings on the table, and gazed sombrely, almost sightlessly before her. Shipwreck was in her eyes, and exile, and all the bitterness of bright hopes broken, and talent lying fallow and useless. Her lips looked as if the laughter had been bitten out of them in an attempt to keep within the desperate cry of her heart.It was as well perhaps that overhead Haidee suddenly decided that helping to get lunch would be more amusing than making beds. Hasty and conclusive sounds denoted that she was "finishing up," directing by means of a few masterly flicks with a bath towel, all scraps of paper, stockings, stray shoes, letters, etc., into a proper and decent seclusion under the beds. Then her feet rustled on the stairs and through the kitchen, stayed for a moment at the front door from whence she threw a laugh and a call to Bran playing in the old boat across the road. A moment later the shell-pink bathing costume became part of the dining-room decoration, and its wearer, seated before theDaily Mail, attacked the potatoes with the same nobility of purpose she had used for the bedrooms. Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at Bran's head bobbing up and down in the oldJules Duval. When her eyes strayed to the blue moving surface beyond she gave a sigh."What a day for a sail, Val!"Val waked from her sombre dream, and looking for the first time with some shade of recognition at her, became aware of the bathing costume."I think you want to die of pneumonia, Haidee!""Oh, I 'm not cold, and it's so jolly and loose. It makes me feel as though summer is here already. Don't I wish it were June instead of rotten old March!"She plumped a potato into the bowl and dexterously used the handle of the knife to flick a long streak of hair over her left shoulder."I do believe it's warm enough for a second swim to-day, Val ... let's hurry up and go down to the beach, shall we? ... Yes, do, let's.""Who will getdèjeuner?" inquired Val, laconically."I could kick that rotten Hortense!" responded Haidee savagely, and all her cowboy instincts came out and sat upon her face. "Do you believe she is really sick?" she asked, in the manner of one propounding a problem in Algebra."Of course not.... She's sick of doing housework, that's all.... Any one would be."Haidee considered this awhile scowling, but her thoughts passed to pleasanter subjects, and her face presently regained its harmony. From the kitchen came a sound like the purring of a man-eater of Tsavo enjoying a full meal, but it was only the boiler, which always purred when the stove was red-hot. Haidee made haste to finish the potatoes though her eyes considered many things. She regarded a brown print of Carlyle on the wall above Val's head, and wondered as often before if he had really gone about London with a hat of that shape! And had he really heaved half bricks at the people he did not like? ... that tickled her cowboy humour and she smiled broadly. How beautifully Mr. Whistler had draped that nice gendarme's cloak over the thin legs of the Sage of Craigenputtock!Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue, blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus plays on the floor.At other times, when she twisted a grey scarf around her hair and ran in the wind Val could look like a Spanish dancing girl, or a mad Malay. Again an artist in the Latin Quarter had done a water-colour of her in which, with her head a little on one side and a wistful inquiring look in her smoke-blue eyes, she reminded Haidee of a baby lion cub once seen in the Bronx Park Zoo. But to-day Val looked old and sad; her yellow serpent was eating at her heart, and Haidee knew why. The American mail had reached Cherbourg the day before, but no letter had come to Villa Duval. Hardly any letters came from Westenra now, except an occasional one to Haidee and the regular money draft every three months which Val as regularly sent away to a Paris bank and never touched except for paying Haidee's school fees."Never mind, Val," said Haidee, half in response to her own thoughts, half in continuation of their brief conversation. "As soon as your play is finished we 'll kick Hortense out" (Haidee's mind still dealt in kicks) "and get a properbonne. We may be able to afford old M'am Legallais, don't you think? They say she can make lovely onion soup.""The play will never be finished," said Val darkly. "Pots and pans won't let me finish it--they spoil the scenery. Ithinkpotatoes and cabbages! You can smell garlic and stewed veal in the love scenes. Oh! How can one go on living? If it were n't for you and Bran I would cut my head off.""Cockerels!" said Haidee, in the same way as a rude boy might say "rats!" "Cut your hair off instead," she counselled unfeelingly, "it is getting awfully thin."Val sprang up and ran like lightning into the next room, where there was a mirror on the wall. Her hair lay in feathery clouds about her face and forehead, and there seemed to be heaps of it, but it was true that when she came to do it up one small comb at the back held all in place. Yet she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as long and thick as Haidee's own."It is this confounded writing plays--and stewing veal!" she murmured, and stared at herself desperately. She had the eyes of the exile who never for one moment forgets his exile; only, it was not one country she mourned but many. Poor Val! she was too, that rare unhappy thing, a born lover. Never for one moment was the man she loved out of her mind; always, always he was there, haunting the rooms of her memory and thechapelle ardenteof her heart, perfuming every thought, influencing every action. Because of him she cried aloud now:"Iwillhave it cut off, Haidee. Go and tell the barber to come this afternoon. I 'll have it cut close--shaved--so that itmustgrow thick again. I won't be an old woman without hair! Oh, Haidee--an old bald hag whom no one loves!" Desolation crept into her voice, it had long dwelt in her eyes."Don't be a silly, Val," said matter-of-fact Haidee. "I love you and Bran loves you and Garry loves you.""No, no--Garry hates me--he never writes!" She flung herself into a chair, and two of the salt bitter tears that were always lurking in the background, but which she seldom shed, oozed out of her eyes as if they had come from a long distance and gave her great pain. Haidee made no attempt to comfort her, but presently went out of the house to where Bran was just casting off anchor from theJulesin view of a voyage to New York."Val 's crying," she said briefly."What for?" asked Bran, but immediately letting go anchor and beginning to climb in a business-like way over the side of the boat. The eye that he cocked at Haidee was of the same smoke-blue as his mother's, and held the same wistful lion-cub glance."Just the old yellow snake," said Haidee, already on her way back to put on the potatoes, for well she knew that if she did not there would be none for lunch that day.Bran found Val swiftly, and climbing upon her knees began to kiss her wet eyes. She kissed him back passionately, holding him with such convulsive tightness that he was at last obliged to give a small howl."O--h! you're hurting me, Mammie--just alittlebit."She kissed him again then, comforting him, reproaching herself, and drying away her tears in his bright hair."You know I would n't hurt my little cubby-cub for a million pounds.""Would you for a million millions?""Never!""For a ship as big as theTu-te-onic?" Bran adored ships, and could imagine most crimes being committed to acquire one."Never, never,jamais!""Not if some one came and asked you to give me just ateeny weenyhurt?""If some one came to me and said, 'I 'll give you the whole sea full of ships with all the beautiful things in the world in them, if you just crush your little Bran's finger till he howls,' I would say, 'You get out of here, Beel, or I keel you.'"Bran gave a joyful prance at the familiar quotation from Stephen Crane's story of Mexico Bill, long since transformed by Val into an exciting game, in which he performed the rô1e of Bill, and she and Haidee were two Mexican braves in sombreros and draped blankets. He was just about to propose a full-dress rehearsal of this drama when Val, reading the inspiration in his eye and feeling quite unfit for any such diversion, headed his mind off in another direction."If any one came and offeredyoua million pounds to hurt your mammie, would you do it?""No," said Bran, adding darkly, "but I'd ask him where he lived.""And then?" Val smiled into his hair. There was a pause; at last in a soft whisper spoke Bran the brigand:"I 'd take a sword and go and pierce him in the night and get his million pounds for you." He embraced her ardently. It was characteristic of her that she did not rebuke him for the lawlessness of his plan. She thoroughly understood the spirit that could rob, pillage, and even do murder for the sake of a loved one.They began to laugh and play. Val suddenly fell in love with her plan to have her hair cut off. She arranged a red handkerchief on her head, turban-fashion, to see how she would look. Eventually she decided to wear a fez and return to her habit of cigarette smoking to match her new appearance. Haidee declared that she too would love a fez, so Val sat down and wrote to the Army and Navy Stores for two, on the condition that Haidee went to the village at once to tell the barber to come immediately after lunch. Now that she had decided to have her hair cut the thing could not be done soon enough to please her.Regretfully Haidee changed her bathing-dress for her navy-blue skirt and scarlet sweater, also a floppy hat of brownsuèdefor which Val had paid a pound in Jersey at a time when they were very hard up indeed, just because it suited Haidee's peculiar style of cowboy beauty. Looking like a handsome conspirator, she sallied forth down the road that led to the village, for Villa Duval lay a good half-mile from Mascaret, with nothing between but the blacksmith's shop, a hotel, and a couple of fishermen's cottages.The blacksmith's wife's brother, known to all the world, including Haidee and Bran, as "mon oncle" was whitewashing the outside of the blacksmith's cottage against the day when the rose-tree trained over the door would burst into leaf and large pink roses. A little farther on, in front of the hotel, two men were scattering red brick dust over the long flower beds on the sloping lawns, preparatory to planting out the letters "Grand Hotel de la Mer" in blue and white lobelias, thus combining patriotism with an excellent advertisement of the hotel. When the May excursion boat moored alongside thedigue, the first thing to greet the eyes of the passengers would be the blue and white lettering on the brick-red beds.These signs and symbols of approaching summer cheered the heart of Haidee, and she hummed a little song to herself, as she went light-foot along the curving picturesque terrace that led to the village.Already she seemed to smell upon the air the luscious heavy scent of travellers' joy that would presently hang in waxen bunches from the high walls of La Terrasse and Villa Albert. These were the only two villas on the Terrace, and they pertained variously to a Paris specialist in madness, and the controller-general of a great French bank. Between the two villas lay a large and valuable plot of ground, overgrown and tangled up with creepers, brambles, cabbage stalks, rose bushes, and seeding onions, set in the midst of which was a dilapidated one-room hut. The hut was the fly in the ointment of the specialist in lunacy and the controller-general. They could do nothing to remove this picturesque slum from their gates, for oldveuveMichel, who lived there and drank two bottles of cognac a day and sang gay ribald songs by night, owned the land by right of some old French statute, and no one could turn her out for as long as she lived. Haidee and Bran consideredveuveMichel a very charming person indeed. She was fat and merry and gentle, called them her nice little hens and gave them apples and pears (for she also owned an orchard up the cliff) all through the winter when there was no fruit to be got any nearer than Cherbourg. Naturally they liked and appreciated the old woman. Haidee had a good mind to go in and pay her a visit, but she decided it was better not, as oldveuvewould just be sleeping off her morning bottle of cognac preparatory to starting on the afternoon one; also Haidee remembered that she was hungry, and had better hurry back and help get lunch. Still she could not help stopping once or twice to examine for signs of little pink tips the lower branches of the tamarisk-trees which grew on one side of the Terrace--on the other side was the grey stone river wall with the tide lapping blue against it.Haidee loved tamarisks with a joy that she was sure was unholy because they looked so wicked and painted somehow when they were all dressed out in their pink feathers. She fancied that Jezebel must have had a bunch of them stuck like an aigrette in her beautifullycoifféehair, and the same pink tint on her cheeks when she looked out of the window for the last time. Anyway why were tamarisks the only trees to be found growing in the ruins of Babylon? And why had she read somewhere, that in the days of ancient Rome tamarisks were bound around the heads of criminals? It was a nuisance to have to forsake these interesting meditations to enter the little soap-scented shop of the village barber, but she stayed no longer than to bid him come to the Villa at three o'clock to cut off Madame's hair. Next she called at Lemonier's to command a sack of coal, and noted that Lemonier had evidently been drunk again, for Madame had a black eye. It was funny to think that such a jolly big red man should be so cruel! Haidee meditated on this subject on the return journey, also on the horrible price of coal--sixty-five francs a ton and it disappeared like lightning. No one seemed to know why "Carr-diff," as they called it, should be so dear. Hortense, closely questioned on the subject by Val anxious for information, said that it must be because the people in England hated the French and were still angry that Normandy did not belong to them."Well, have n't you got any coal mines in your own blessed country?" asked Haidee."Certainement!" Hortense had replied indignantly. "We have Newcas-sel!"
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At breakfast the next morning he announced that he was due in London in two days' time to deliver some lectures at one of the hospitals. After that he must make a visit to Ireland on a matter concerning some family property. He added vaguely that he should probably come back again to Jersey before very long, but Val took that for what it was--a bone thrown to Haidee, whose face had visibly lengthened and darkened on hearing this horrible news. Bran, smiling in his mother's arms, looked on affably--his father's comings and goings meant little to him as yet, so long as he had Val's soft cheek to rub his own against. She was very pale, but extraordinarily composed, and made no comment on his plans. She had withdrawn herself into some remote and distant land of her own--a land where no birds sang, nor flowers grew! After breakfast she left the others, and went about her household duties. A conference in the garden between Westenra and Haidee resulted in a resolution to walk down to St. Aubin's and hire bicycles for a day's outing. Haidee was strong as a Basuto pony, and Westenra loved nothing better than to be out in the open air. The bicycling is hilly in Jersey, and the two came home tired out in the evening. Haidee announced that they had done their side of the Island from Corbières to Plemmont Caves, and intended next day to visit Bouley Bay, Archirondelle, and the famous breakwater that cost half a million pounds and is of no more use than a load of rotten hay.
After the usual bath parade, at which Bran presided, Val once more had the fireside and her thoughts to herself. Haidee and Westenra, tired out, were glad to seek their beds.
The next day they started early. While Val was cutting sandwiches for them, Westenra half suggested that she should come too; but she smiled quite naturally, and said that even if there were any one to stay with Bran, it was so long since she had cycled she would only be a drag to them. "But I hope you will not be so tired to-night, Garrett," she finished quietly. "I want to have a little talk with you after dinner."
"Very well," he answered, looking at her curiously. He could not pretend to begin to understand her, or what she meant or wanted. He only knew that he, too, had something to say before he left Jersey the next day. Though outwardly he was composed, and in the company of Haidee even gay, affecting great interest in their excursions, his heart was heavy as a stone in him, and he was brooding over his wrongs as only an Irishman can. As it happened, rain began to fall heavily after lunch, and somewhat early in the afternoon the two cyclists returned wet and cross. Westenra bathed, and immediately began to pack his things for departure by the next morning's boat. The rest of the afternoon was spent with the children.
The sky had cleared by evening, and when after dinner Val and Westenra walked across the fields towards the cliff in the pale, clear, evening light, they could see the tide furling and unfurling its filmy laces of froth on St. Brelade's beach.
Though she had come out with a set purpose she found it hard to begin what she had to say. For all her remote manner and outward calm, her heart, throbbing full, bounded in her breast and beat in her throat until she felt suffocating. It was Westenra who spoke at last very gently, but with something of a requiem note in his words.
"So you see our love was not strong enough after all to weather the storms, Val!"
"Mine was ... mine is," her heart cried out, but she looked at him dully. She knew the futility of such words now. It was his own dead love he was keening, not hers.
"Our ship of dreams has gone to pieces."
"No," burst from her lips almost against her will.
"Yes, Val," his gentle tone became stern. "Face the facts."
They had seated themselves on some rocks near the edge of the cliff. Nothing broke the peace of the evening but the swirr and swish of the gentle tide on the beach below.
"You promised to burn your boats ... never to go back to old habits and possessions ... I find you with your old possessions about you----"
"Those pictures and chintzes? I wrote and told you how they came," she interrupted. "They can be burnt for all they are to me."
He moved his hand with a desperate gesture.
"That is nothing to the other. Can you deny that you have returned to one at least of your old habits?"
"Oh!" she cried, and sat up like one who has been struck. But his heart was full of fury, outraged hopes, and disappointment. He could not measure his words because she cried out.
"It was not your boats you burned, but my ship--my ship of dreams!"
He went further, he accused her of breaking his shrine, of succumbing to a vice that he detested and despised with all his soul. He said she had betrayed his love, and destroyed that quality in it which is essential and eternal.
"Onemustlook up," he said, and looked down on her as she sat there, her face covered with her hands, very still under the torrent of fierce and cruel words that burst from him in the bitterness of outraged love and pride. Like all reserved people when driven into breaking silence he said too much. Afterwards there was a long silence. A curlew flying inland wailed faintly like a dying thing.
"I don't see what is before us," he muttered. "Everything is finished."
And at last she spoke--very quietly.
"Yes, everything is finished of our life together. But each of us is free to begin again."
"Free!" he echoed ironically, thinking of the mystical fatalistic threads that had bound and tangled them together from the first. "You and I will never be free of each other."
"Oh, yes--we are already. Listen! I want to tell you something that I ought to have told you long ago, only I was afraid of ... Ah! never mind of what I was afraid. But now that it is as you have said all over and finished, now that I see very well that not only do you not love me, but that you never have loved me and want nothing so much as to be free of me, I will tell it you--" and she added fiercely, "with pleasure."
"Tell ahead," he said drearily.
"I am not your wife, and never have been. Horace Valdana is alive--has never been dead!"
In the solemn mute moments that followed the curlew wailed again.
"What are you saying?" muttered Westenra, hoarsely. He had risen to his feet.
Then Val began to laugh, not hysterically, but just soft light-hearted laughter. She really felt light-hearted at that moment. It was as though something very, very heavy had been lifted from her shoulders, and she could stand up straight at last.
"It can't be true!" He was muttering like a man stunned. "How long have you known?"
"Oh, what does that matter!" she said. "It istrue--that is all that concerns you." She reflected a moment. "But of course my mere word is of no value to you ... I have proofs in the house ... letters from him asking me to go to Canada with him." She began to laugh again.
"Good God!" muttered Westenra still dazed. "And Bran?"
That sobered her, drying the strange laughter on her lips and in her heart.
"Ah, Bran! ... Yes. My Brannie!" she said softly, her voice in those few low-spoken words expressing all that the woman voice can express of pity, sorrow, and love. It was Bran who would be the victim--Bran who would go fatherless, homeless, nameless--a vagabond like his mother with restless heart and wandering feet!
"He is mine," said Westenra suddenly.
"No, mine," she answered swiftly. They stood staring at each other like two duellists. He lost sight of all she had been to him--of all that she must have suffered. Dazed and horror-struck he only felt that his world was moving away from under his feet, and she was trying to rob him of the last hold, the most dear thing he had ever possessed.
"He is mine too ... I believe by law I could get him."
"Law! Have n't you found out yet that I am lawless?" She came close to him, staring into his eyes, a mocking light in her own. "You forget that I am the woman with no soul, no morals, and no roots, the careless vagabond whom you feared Haidee to come into contact with ... whom you apologised to your dead mother for having married...."
"Val, you are mad!" he said amazed, white to the lips. But she only laughed a little clanking laugh, and her voice that had so often sounded in his ears like the wild far music of his own land was hard now as iron on iron.
"Go your ways, my dear Garrett Westenra. You are free of the woman who burnt your ship!"
CHAPTER XII
CHILDREN OF ISHMAEL
"Life tests a plough in meadows made of stones,Love takes a toll of spirit, mind, and bones."MASEFIELD.
"Life tests a plough in meadows made of stones,Love takes a toll of spirit, mind, and bones."MASEFIELD.
"Life tests a plough in meadows made of stones,
Love takes a toll of spirit, mind, and bones."
MASEFIELD.
MASEFIELD.
Raging he went from English shores. Raging, broken-hearted, more lonely than ever in his life before. Looking backwards to that voyage on which he and Val had first met, he realised that his loneliness then was peace and contentment compared with what he now felt. He had known what it was to share life right down to the core with another human being, and when that has once been, solitude redoubles its sting. A fantastic creature like Val, however uncomfortable she made life, could not be lost out of it without leaving a big, aching gap.
Yet, there he was on his way back to America, while in far Jersey Val sat on her rabbit-hutch staring at the sea with blind eyes, Bran playing unheeded at her knees, in her ears the faint, melancholy cry of the curlew.
After their wretched parting on St. Brelade's Cliffs, Westenra had paced the beach all night. When he reached the farm dawn brightened the sky, but none of the freshness of morning was in his drawn face. Haidee and Val were up, the fire made, breakfast ready. They seemed to take it for granted that he still meant to leave by that morning's boat for England, and indeed he had decided that it was the only thing to do. It would give him time to review the miserable situation and look for a way out of it. But before he went he encompassed a further interview with Val, though he got little of it but pain. She was in that subtle way of herséloignéefrom him once more, had put immeasurable distance between them.
"I want you to tell me more of this," he said drearily. "I must have details to go on before I can do anything to right the matter."
"You cannot right it," she answered. "It must be left as it is."
"What do you mean?"
"It must never come out that Horace Valdana is alive. One cannot so disgrace England."
Briefly she related the facts as far as she knew them, and he saw that she was right. Impossible to disgrace a country to right a private affair--even if the country were one you hated. But what a situation! There seemed to him to be no way out of it. Val, for a deep reason of her own, withheld from him the fact of Valdana's broken health. She wished him to feel absolutely free of her. She kept repeating that, with sardonic inflexible eyes.
"You see, you are free! What more do you ask?"
He asked much more, but with that mocking smile on her pale lips he would not tell her so.
"I want my son," he said coldly.
"Myson," she answered, and that found them once more at the pitch at which they had parted the night before, reason withdrawn, cold fury in its place. Only by a great effort had he controlled himself.
"I leave him with you, in trust."
"Because you must," she answered, eyes flickering with bitter triumph. "But will you not take Haidee before ill comes to her?"
He was helpless before the smile that writhed upon her stiff lips. What did she mean by these gibes concerning Haidee and his dead mother, which she flung at him like javelins? How had she read those secrets of his soul that he had never revealed to any one, scarcely acknowledged to himself? Had she with her queer almost clairvoyant instinct known all along and mocked and disdained him in her heart from the first? If he thought of her tenderness to Bran and to himself when he lay ill, her comradeship, her valiant gaiety, he could not believe it. When he looked at her mocking disdainful eyes he could believe anything.
"No; I leave Haidee in trust with you too," he said, then had been obliged to kiss the children hurriedly, and go on his way, or lose the boat.
In spite of his original intention to do so he did not return to Jersey before sailing to America. After black nights of reflection he saw that there was nothing to be gained by facing Val again in the mood that possessed her. The moment they looked into each other's eyes cold reason would once more withdraw from them and the fury of wounded love take its place. It was better to let Time do its work upon their trouble. So he sailed for America without seeing her or the children again, though it hurt him deeply to do it. And his days and nights upon the ship were haunted by the face of the woman in grey. Never since the voyage on theBavarichad he dreamed that dream, but now never a night came without it. Towards the last part of the voyage, when calm had come to him, he wrote her a letter in which he hid the love that still ached in him, but tried to revive a little the old understanding comradeship they had shared.
But there was too much of compassion in that letter, and Val was sick of his compassion. Womencanget sick of compassion when it leaves no room for self-respect.
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She stayed on in Jersey not because he asked her but because she must. One would call it existing rather than living as far as she was concerned. She felt as though her brain were dead and she had only her body left, that body which, however glad she would be to lay it down, she must conserve and take care of for the sake of Bran. For Haidee, too, she had a kind of responsible mother-feeling, though Haidee never encouraged tenderness in any one. But the case of Bran was different; the child of two such nervous people could not be otherwise than nervously organised, though of fine build and stamina, and Val knew that under any care but hers he would probably grow up a weakling. No, she must not die! But she tried to let her mind do so for a while, so that she might suffer less. She essayed to turn herself into a kind of vegetable; read nothing, talked to no one but the children, indulged in no kind of mental occupation. Only she worked out in the open as much as possible, with her nervous incapable hands, and at least she got a beautiful flower garden together.
She never saw or spoke to any one but the children. When Haidee got back from school they would all work together in the garden or clean out the stable, or make bran mashes for the pony colic, or run the dogs, and watch the chickens and rabbits in the open, though enthusiasm for this last occupation was distinctly on the wane. The only things any of them cared for now were the bees and the flowers. They did not make money out of these, but then the fowls did not make money either, only pretended to until the grain bill came in.
Bran was always to be found in the vicinity of the beehives, and at first Val had been terrified, but later she came to believe him one of the "band of little brothers" whom bees do not sting. Haidee could take no liberties with the strange, wise insects, and had a holy fear of them, but they were Bran's passionate loves.
As for eggs and chickens, and fat hens that would no longer lay, they were all sick of them as articles of diet. Haidee, who in New York days was used to attack with relish three city eggs of assorted flavours mixed in a tumbler, now turned away in weariness and disgust from the brown-shelled ones fresh from the nest.
And the rabbits were a thorn in the flesh, and a weariness to the sole of the foot! Eternally they were killed by stoats, eaten by rats, stolen, or else dug their way out from under the runs and fled for the open. If these modes of escape all failed, Bran, in his small way, would do what he could for them. When he came toddling indoors to declare with an effulgent smile his love for Haidee she would start up snapping:
"Yes, I know whatthatmeans. You've let the rabbits out. You always have when you love me. Have you, Bran?"
"Well, by aksdent, Haidee...."
"Oh, I know your aksdents...."
With blank faces she and Val would rush from the house and scoot after the scurrying rabbits. The latter usually got the best of the game and achieved liberty.
The truth had to be faced that there was no money to be made out of the farm. High hopes of a fortune had long since fallen to the dust. Chickens and rabbits are very charming to watch at their antics in the sunshine, but depending upon them for a living, unless you are an expert poultry farmer, is waste of time. Val realised it at last, and that other ways and means for obtaining money must be reflected upon. She had no intention of accepting another rap of Westenra's for either her own or Bran's support. So one day she sat down and wrote to Branker Preston, asking him if he could find an opening for some "Wanderfoot" articles.
"I cannot travel," she wrote, "but I have a good store of unused material in the cupboards of my mind, and I need money." Preston answered that he would not be long in finding a demand for anything she could supply. When, however, the demand came she found herself curiously unable to cope with it. The task of sitting down to write newspaper articles after a lapse of more than two years into domesticity was not an easy one. As love and maternity had absorbed her mother's art, so in a smaller degree the same things had encroached upon Val's gift. Added to which was a period of unbroken intercourse with chickens and rabbits, enlivened only by digging in the garden or running the pony up and down when he got colic. Such occupations are excellent for the health, and may even induce a good working philosophy, but they do not make the intellect to scintillate like the stars, nor bestow distinction upon that elusive quality in writing which is known as style. She found that when she tried to think connectedly on abstract subjects things slithered out of her mind and left a headache behind. After a few days, in which her brain seemed to act in delirium, and the written results read to her like the ravings of a suddenly liberated lunatic, she threw down her pen in despair.
"It is this brute of an island! I can never write here," she cried desperately. She had suffered too much there, and her instinct was always to flee from places where sorrow had smitten her, to save her soul alive before it was injured beyond aid. Such places seemed to have a power for evil over her. Moreover her feet had long ached to be gone from the small, cramped island. It had served its purpose. The children were healthy and strong, her own body recuperated. Now that she must take up her pen once more, plainly it was time to pull stakes. There was no inspiration for her in Jersey.
For another thing, she began to be afraid that if she remained much longer she might become a serious criminal; that is to say, one upon whom the law would lay hands. It was Farmer Scone who helped her to this conclusion and her final decision to go.
For months he had been making himself unpleasant--a long series of petty vexations and systemised annoyance--stoning her fowls, complaining to the police that her dogs worried his cows, letting his cattle break down her hedges, and encouraging his labourers to annoy Haidee by sniggering over the hedge when she was busy with the pony. Added to these things he had once more started walking through her grounds by the old disputed "right of way" past the back door.
One morning she and Haidee, just going out to fire at some crows in the fruit garden, ran into him and his grinning labourer carrying their scythes to a far hayfield. Val called him back, and speaking very self-controlledly told him that it must be understood, once and for all, that she would not permit this trespassing.
"Great Galumps!" he responded as usual, "and what will you do to me? Is it your husband from America, who only comes to see you for one day a year, that 'll be punching my head?"
"No," said Val, white to the lips, and raising her rook-rifle. "It is I that will be putting a hole through your large and very unsightly paunch."
"Yes, do, Val,do. Take a pot-shot at him--give him one in the tummy!" urged Haidee ecstatically. "Shall I get my revolver too?"
She hopped up-stairs, and Farmer Scone moved on at the double-quick, rather alarmed, for he did not at all like the look in Val's eyes, and to be sure no one knew what such creatures might do! He half determined to go down to the court-house at once and, complaining of menaces, "have the law on them," but reflected in time that as he was not "Jersey-born" he might not get his case, while running a possible risk of being fined for trespassing. He decided that his system of petty annoyance was the best.
In the meantime Val, too, was deciding something. On going into the house she met Haidee coming out, gaily priming her revolver.
"Put it away, Haidee," she said wearily. "Don't you understand I only said that in my rage with the insolent brute. You must never shoot at people. Awful trouble might come of it."
Haidee's face darkened sulkily.
"One can't do anything in this rotten island," she complained.
"We can get out of it," said Val, and Haidee brightened.
"Where would we go?"
"Oh, I don't know ... anywhere ... anywhere where we 'll never see a rabbit or a fowl again. I think I shall go mad if I stay among them another day."
"Me too--I'm sick of the beasts. Look at that cock-eyed eagle staring at us. Sh--sh, you brutes!"
"I wish I 'd never seen a hen in my life," said Val savagely.
"Let's get an axe and slay them all before we go," suggested Haidee. Suddenly her face grew long. "But where are we going to get the money from?"
The financial situation was such that even the children understood its simplicity; though if it had been more complicated Val would never have dreamed of not sharing it with them. Bran was able to tell to a penny how much the family purse contained, while Haidee as a matter of fact possessed a far finer appreciation of money values than either Westenra or Val.
"We 've got the rent," said the latter thoughtfully, and Haidee looked up quickly. With the lawlessness of youth she immediately jumped to the conclusion that Val meant to skip with the sum that was due to the landlord on September quarter-day, now close at hand. It was only a fourth of thirty-six pounds, but still, when times are hard and a sea voyage in contemplation, nine pounds are not to be despised. Val quickly dispelled this bright notion.
"I 'm not going to rob the landlord. All he will have to do is sell the farm-stock and my pretty London things, which of course we 'll leave. They will more than pay the rent for the rest of the lease, and enough left over to pay the bills we owe. We won't take anything but our clothes and a few books."
"What about Joy? Let's sell him. You know that old Farmer Le Seur offered fifteen pounds for him. I 'll go and tell him this morning, shall I?"
Val reflected a moment, and came to the conclusion that it would be juster to Westenra to sell the pony at that price than leave him to be sold for the small sum they owed, so she gave Haidee the desired permission.
"Oh, hurray! ... Oh, Val, what a lark!" Haidee pranced and capered like a Bashi-bazouk. "Let's go and pack."
They flew up-stairs and woke Bran to the news.
"We 're going away, Brannie Bran ... in a ship!"
Bran, sitting up in bed like a squdgy Japanese idol, took hold of his toes as though they were a bunch of rosebuds.
"Are we going to daddy?" he asked solemnly, and Val hid her face in his flannel nightgown.
"No, my Wing." She added on the spur of the moment, "We 're going to France."
He reflected awhile.
"Oh, dear buck!" he sighed at last (only he said jeer for dear). It was one of his expressions signifying disappointment, and Val felt a pang. But she would not be saddened, and soon had the children as wild as herself, dashing about the house and packing up, so glad was she to be setting out from the place where she had been a vegetable so long, and yet known such keen unhappiness.
Having got together all their trunks, the band of Ishmaelites boarded a cab for St. Helier. No one would have dreamed for a moment that they were setting out for another land. They drove down and spent the night opposite the quay, and sailed the next morning for Granville. Just at the last Val thought of sending Haidee to see if there were any letters at the post-office. As it happened, one had been forwarded by Branker Preston, but she did not read it till they were on board ship.
It was from Valdana, to say that, as she would not come, he was setting forth alone in excellent health to start life anew in Canada.
Part III
France
CHAPTER XIII
THE WAYS OF A LOVER
"For life is not the thing we thought, and not the thing we plan."--ROBERT SERVICE.
March was in like a lamb, and on a fair morning all the windows of Villa Duval stood open, letting in floods of sunlight, gusts of warm sea-scented wind, and the sound of waves crushing and swinging up and down the sandy beaches of Normandy. Perhaps it was becausepèreDuval who built it was an old sailor and lighthouse-keeper that the rooms of the Villa were curiously like ship-cabins with their wooden walls and bare deck-like floors. Looking out through the porthole windows at the view of blue waves rippling from the bay up the river it would not have seemed unnatural to find the Villa gently rocking with the incoming tide. Down in the gardenpèreDuval hoeing weeds fostered the illusion by croaking the ghost of an old sea song that he had lilted bravely enough forty years before from his fishing boat or when he kept the lighthouse at Les Sept Isles. He had built the Villa with his own hands after the sea and he had done with each other; but not for his own habitation. With its pink and blue tables and chairs made and lovingly painted by himself, beds from the Paris Bon Marché, stout bed-linen that had been part ofmèreDuval's marriage portion, marvellous mirrors and decorated crockery bought with trading coupons that represented many pounds of coffee from the Café Debray Company, it was considered far too wonderful and shining to be the habitation of a mere Normandy peasant. So the old man and his granddaughter Hortense lived in a couple of rooms beneath the wonder house, which was perched high and reached only by a flight of steps to the front door. The Villa lay nearer to the beach than any other in Mascaret, and for this reason was always one of the first to be taken by summer visitors. But at the end of the previous summerpèreDuval had achieved an extraordinary piece of luck in letting it for the whole autumn and winter to some mad Americans, who were now fixtures for the coming summer also.
The mad Americans had received this title by reason of their eccentric habits and customs, to say nothing of their clothes. They never wore anything, week-day or Sunday, but red woollen sweaters and short skirts, and the girl most shamelessly showed her legs bare to the knee. Also the whole band of three bathed in the sea on the coldest of winter days. Evidently their mental condition was known elsewhere than in Mascaret, for more than once when they were staying at Les Fusains, the villa they had first taken, letters came from America addressed to Les Insains, and the occupants of Les Fusains had received these bland and unblinking from the hands of Jean Baptiste the postman. The postmaster, who understood a little English, had explained the jest to his village cronies, adding that the writing of the eldest mad one so much resembled the writing of a hen, that it was small wonder that mistakes were made over her address. That they were Americans was certain, for every three months American Express money orders came for them, and the eldest Insain promptly changed these for French moneymandatsand forwarded them to the Credit Lyonnais in Paris. Thesefantastiquesdoings deeply impressed the villagers, and had provided them with many an interesting hour of gossip over their black coffee and cider.
And the "Insane ones" never knew a thing about it. On this mild March morning they were variously engaged in simple and peaceful occupations not unsuitable to those of feeble mind. Upstairs, one of them, a girl of sixteen with bare feet and hair swinging in long brown braids, was swishing the sheets from the beds and flicking all stray garments into corners. She considered that she was being certainly very noble and useful. Her face bore the expression of complacent beneficence assumed by those who are aware that they are doing the work of another person, and doing it ten times better than that other person. She wore a bathing dress that was slightly small for her, made combination-fashion, of twill whose pristine scarlet had long since been bleached by sea salt to a faint shell-pink. It was embroidered by black and white darns of a primitive, not to say aboriginal description. Her bare arms were decorated with some beaten copper bracelets of the New Art school, but her slim legs, brown and very long from the knee down, were innocent of stockings. She was tanned all over with the faint, transparent, sherry-coloured tan of a woodland nymph, and her delicately curved cheek wore the tint of woodland berries, wine-brown eyes full of sunshine and shadows, long, flickering, silky hair, a red, sulky mouth.
Haidee had grown into a beauty.
She swished the sheets of heavy linen from the beds and cast them in rumpled heaps upon the floor, taking many a glance out at the sea, whistling a tune at one moment, in another echoing with her high-pitched rather husky treble the lay ofpèreDuval.
"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eauVa sans peur mon petit bateau."
"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eauVa sans peur mon petit bateau."
"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eau
Va sans peur mon petit bateau."
In the room below, listening to Haidee's rustling feet and the song of the sea, was Val Valdana. Two sheets of theParis Daily Mailwere spread upon the table to protect the cloth, while in wistful and desultory fashion she prepared the vegetables for lunch. Her thin brown fingers decked in their strange stones and old enamels were stained with potato juice, and a number of small new potatoes lay dimpling pink at the bottom of an earthenware bowl glazed brown without and pale yellow within. But Val's thoughts were not with the potatoes. She often let her hands fall among the curly peel scrapings on the table, and gazed sombrely, almost sightlessly before her. Shipwreck was in her eyes, and exile, and all the bitterness of bright hopes broken, and talent lying fallow and useless. Her lips looked as if the laughter had been bitten out of them in an attempt to keep within the desperate cry of her heart.
It was as well perhaps that overhead Haidee suddenly decided that helping to get lunch would be more amusing than making beds. Hasty and conclusive sounds denoted that she was "finishing up," directing by means of a few masterly flicks with a bath towel, all scraps of paper, stockings, stray shoes, letters, etc., into a proper and decent seclusion under the beds. Then her feet rustled on the stairs and through the kitchen, stayed for a moment at the front door from whence she threw a laugh and a call to Bran playing in the old boat across the road. A moment later the shell-pink bathing costume became part of the dining-room decoration, and its wearer, seated before theDaily Mail, attacked the potatoes with the same nobility of purpose she had used for the bedrooms. Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at Bran's head bobbing up and down in the oldJules Duval. When her eyes strayed to the blue moving surface beyond she gave a sigh.
"What a day for a sail, Val!"
Val waked from her sombre dream, and looking for the first time with some shade of recognition at her, became aware of the bathing costume.
"I think you want to die of pneumonia, Haidee!"
"Oh, I 'm not cold, and it's so jolly and loose. It makes me feel as though summer is here already. Don't I wish it were June instead of rotten old March!"
She plumped a potato into the bowl and dexterously used the handle of the knife to flick a long streak of hair over her left shoulder.
"I do believe it's warm enough for a second swim to-day, Val ... let's hurry up and go down to the beach, shall we? ... Yes, do, let's."
"Who will getdèjeuner?" inquired Val, laconically.
"I could kick that rotten Hortense!" responded Haidee savagely, and all her cowboy instincts came out and sat upon her face. "Do you believe she is really sick?" she asked, in the manner of one propounding a problem in Algebra.
"Of course not.... She's sick of doing housework, that's all.... Any one would be."
Haidee considered this awhile scowling, but her thoughts passed to pleasanter subjects, and her face presently regained its harmony. From the kitchen came a sound like the purring of a man-eater of Tsavo enjoying a full meal, but it was only the boiler, which always purred when the stove was red-hot. Haidee made haste to finish the potatoes though her eyes considered many things. She regarded a brown print of Carlyle on the wall above Val's head, and wondered as often before if he had really gone about London with a hat of that shape! And had he really heaved half bricks at the people he did not like? ... that tickled her cowboy humour and she smiled broadly. How beautifully Mr. Whistler had draped that nice gendarme's cloak over the thin legs of the Sage of Craigenputtock!
Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue, blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus plays on the floor.
At other times, when she twisted a grey scarf around her hair and ran in the wind Val could look like a Spanish dancing girl, or a mad Malay. Again an artist in the Latin Quarter had done a water-colour of her in which, with her head a little on one side and a wistful inquiring look in her smoke-blue eyes, she reminded Haidee of a baby lion cub once seen in the Bronx Park Zoo. But to-day Val looked old and sad; her yellow serpent was eating at her heart, and Haidee knew why. The American mail had reached Cherbourg the day before, but no letter had come to Villa Duval. Hardly any letters came from Westenra now, except an occasional one to Haidee and the regular money draft every three months which Val as regularly sent away to a Paris bank and never touched except for paying Haidee's school fees.
"Never mind, Val," said Haidee, half in response to her own thoughts, half in continuation of their brief conversation. "As soon as your play is finished we 'll kick Hortense out" (Haidee's mind still dealt in kicks) "and get a properbonne. We may be able to afford old M'am Legallais, don't you think? They say she can make lovely onion soup."
"The play will never be finished," said Val darkly. "Pots and pans won't let me finish it--they spoil the scenery. Ithinkpotatoes and cabbages! You can smell garlic and stewed veal in the love scenes. Oh! How can one go on living? If it were n't for you and Bran I would cut my head off."
"Cockerels!" said Haidee, in the same way as a rude boy might say "rats!" "Cut your hair off instead," she counselled unfeelingly, "it is getting awfully thin."
Val sprang up and ran like lightning into the next room, where there was a mirror on the wall. Her hair lay in feathery clouds about her face and forehead, and there seemed to be heaps of it, but it was true that when she came to do it up one small comb at the back held all in place. Yet she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as long and thick as Haidee's own.
"It is this confounded writing plays--and stewing veal!" she murmured, and stared at herself desperately. She had the eyes of the exile who never for one moment forgets his exile; only, it was not one country she mourned but many. Poor Val! she was too, that rare unhappy thing, a born lover. Never for one moment was the man she loved out of her mind; always, always he was there, haunting the rooms of her memory and thechapelle ardenteof her heart, perfuming every thought, influencing every action. Because of him she cried aloud now:
"Iwillhave it cut off, Haidee. Go and tell the barber to come this afternoon. I 'll have it cut close--shaved--so that itmustgrow thick again. I won't be an old woman without hair! Oh, Haidee--an old bald hag whom no one loves!" Desolation crept into her voice, it had long dwelt in her eyes.
"Don't be a silly, Val," said matter-of-fact Haidee. "I love you and Bran loves you and Garry loves you."
"No, no--Garry hates me--he never writes!" She flung herself into a chair, and two of the salt bitter tears that were always lurking in the background, but which she seldom shed, oozed out of her eyes as if they had come from a long distance and gave her great pain. Haidee made no attempt to comfort her, but presently went out of the house to where Bran was just casting off anchor from theJulesin view of a voyage to New York.
"Val 's crying," she said briefly.
"What for?" asked Bran, but immediately letting go anchor and beginning to climb in a business-like way over the side of the boat. The eye that he cocked at Haidee was of the same smoke-blue as his mother's, and held the same wistful lion-cub glance.
"Just the old yellow snake," said Haidee, already on her way back to put on the potatoes, for well she knew that if she did not there would be none for lunch that day.
Bran found Val swiftly, and climbing upon her knees began to kiss her wet eyes. She kissed him back passionately, holding him with such convulsive tightness that he was at last obliged to give a small howl.
"O--h! you're hurting me, Mammie--just alittlebit."
She kissed him again then, comforting him, reproaching herself, and drying away her tears in his bright hair.
"You know I would n't hurt my little cubby-cub for a million pounds."
"Would you for a million millions?"
"Never!"
"For a ship as big as theTu-te-onic?" Bran adored ships, and could imagine most crimes being committed to acquire one.
"Never, never,jamais!"
"Not if some one came and asked you to give me just ateeny weenyhurt?"
"If some one came to me and said, 'I 'll give you the whole sea full of ships with all the beautiful things in the world in them, if you just crush your little Bran's finger till he howls,' I would say, 'You get out of here, Beel, or I keel you.'"
Bran gave a joyful prance at the familiar quotation from Stephen Crane's story of Mexico Bill, long since transformed by Val into an exciting game, in which he performed the rô1e of Bill, and she and Haidee were two Mexican braves in sombreros and draped blankets. He was just about to propose a full-dress rehearsal of this drama when Val, reading the inspiration in his eye and feeling quite unfit for any such diversion, headed his mind off in another direction.
"If any one came and offeredyoua million pounds to hurt your mammie, would you do it?"
"No," said Bran, adding darkly, "but I'd ask him where he lived."
"And then?" Val smiled into his hair. There was a pause; at last in a soft whisper spoke Bran the brigand:
"I 'd take a sword and go and pierce him in the night and get his million pounds for you." He embraced her ardently. It was characteristic of her that she did not rebuke him for the lawlessness of his plan. She thoroughly understood the spirit that could rob, pillage, and even do murder for the sake of a loved one.
They began to laugh and play. Val suddenly fell in love with her plan to have her hair cut off. She arranged a red handkerchief on her head, turban-fashion, to see how she would look. Eventually she decided to wear a fez and return to her habit of cigarette smoking to match her new appearance. Haidee declared that she too would love a fez, so Val sat down and wrote to the Army and Navy Stores for two, on the condition that Haidee went to the village at once to tell the barber to come immediately after lunch. Now that she had decided to have her hair cut the thing could not be done soon enough to please her.
Regretfully Haidee changed her bathing-dress for her navy-blue skirt and scarlet sweater, also a floppy hat of brownsuèdefor which Val had paid a pound in Jersey at a time when they were very hard up indeed, just because it suited Haidee's peculiar style of cowboy beauty. Looking like a handsome conspirator, she sallied forth down the road that led to the village, for Villa Duval lay a good half-mile from Mascaret, with nothing between but the blacksmith's shop, a hotel, and a couple of fishermen's cottages.
The blacksmith's wife's brother, known to all the world, including Haidee and Bran, as "mon oncle" was whitewashing the outside of the blacksmith's cottage against the day when the rose-tree trained over the door would burst into leaf and large pink roses. A little farther on, in front of the hotel, two men were scattering red brick dust over the long flower beds on the sloping lawns, preparatory to planting out the letters "Grand Hotel de la Mer" in blue and white lobelias, thus combining patriotism with an excellent advertisement of the hotel. When the May excursion boat moored alongside thedigue, the first thing to greet the eyes of the passengers would be the blue and white lettering on the brick-red beds.
These signs and symbols of approaching summer cheered the heart of Haidee, and she hummed a little song to herself, as she went light-foot along the curving picturesque terrace that led to the village.
Already she seemed to smell upon the air the luscious heavy scent of travellers' joy that would presently hang in waxen bunches from the high walls of La Terrasse and Villa Albert. These were the only two villas on the Terrace, and they pertained variously to a Paris specialist in madness, and the controller-general of a great French bank. Between the two villas lay a large and valuable plot of ground, overgrown and tangled up with creepers, brambles, cabbage stalks, rose bushes, and seeding onions, set in the midst of which was a dilapidated one-room hut. The hut was the fly in the ointment of the specialist in lunacy and the controller-general. They could do nothing to remove this picturesque slum from their gates, for oldveuveMichel, who lived there and drank two bottles of cognac a day and sang gay ribald songs by night, owned the land by right of some old French statute, and no one could turn her out for as long as she lived. Haidee and Bran consideredveuveMichel a very charming person indeed. She was fat and merry and gentle, called them her nice little hens and gave them apples and pears (for she also owned an orchard up the cliff) all through the winter when there was no fruit to be got any nearer than Cherbourg. Naturally they liked and appreciated the old woman. Haidee had a good mind to go in and pay her a visit, but she decided it was better not, as oldveuvewould just be sleeping off her morning bottle of cognac preparatory to starting on the afternoon one; also Haidee remembered that she was hungry, and had better hurry back and help get lunch. Still she could not help stopping once or twice to examine for signs of little pink tips the lower branches of the tamarisk-trees which grew on one side of the Terrace--on the other side was the grey stone river wall with the tide lapping blue against it.
Haidee loved tamarisks with a joy that she was sure was unholy because they looked so wicked and painted somehow when they were all dressed out in their pink feathers. She fancied that Jezebel must have had a bunch of them stuck like an aigrette in her beautifullycoifféehair, and the same pink tint on her cheeks when she looked out of the window for the last time. Anyway why were tamarisks the only trees to be found growing in the ruins of Babylon? And why had she read somewhere, that in the days of ancient Rome tamarisks were bound around the heads of criminals? It was a nuisance to have to forsake these interesting meditations to enter the little soap-scented shop of the village barber, but she stayed no longer than to bid him come to the Villa at three o'clock to cut off Madame's hair. Next she called at Lemonier's to command a sack of coal, and noted that Lemonier had evidently been drunk again, for Madame had a black eye. It was funny to think that such a jolly big red man should be so cruel! Haidee meditated on this subject on the return journey, also on the horrible price of coal--sixty-five francs a ton and it disappeared like lightning. No one seemed to know why "Carr-diff," as they called it, should be so dear. Hortense, closely questioned on the subject by Val anxious for information, said that it must be because the people in England hated the French and were still angry that Normandy did not belong to them.
"Well, have n't you got any coal mines in your own blessed country?" asked Haidee.
"Certainement!" Hortense had replied indignantly. "We have Newcas-sel!"