Part III

Produced by Al Haines.

[Illustration: Cover]

[Illustration: Cynthia Stockley]

WANDERFOOT

(THE DREAM SHIP)

BY

CYNTHIA STOCKLEY

AUTHOR OF "POPPY," "THE CLAW," ETC

TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS

NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913

BY

CYNTHIA STOCKLEY

"_Wanderfoot_" is published in England under the title of

"_The Dream Ship_"

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

TO

MY DAUGHTER

DOROTHY

"O Beauty, I have wandered far;

Peace, I have suffered seeking thee:

Life, I have sought to see thy star,

That other men might see.

And after wandering nights and days,

A gleam in a beloved soul

Shows how life's elemental blaze

Goes wandering through the whole."

CONTENTS

PART I

AMERICA

CHAPTER

I. Secret Palaces

II. Grey and Gold

III. Fate's Winding Paths

IV. A Skeleton and a Shrine

V. Squirrel in a Trap

VI. Kisses and Crosses

VII. More Winding Paths

VIII. Wounds in the Rain

PART II

JERSEY

IX. New Roads to Fortune

X. Worry-Bells

XI. A Ship on the Rocks

XII. Children of Ishmael

PART III

FRANCE

XIII. The Ways of a Lover

XIV. The Ways of Literature

XV. Ways Sacred and Secular

XVI. The Ways of Girls

XVII. The Ways of Boys

XVIII. The Way of The Sea

XIX. The Way of Nemesis

XX. The Ways of Life and Death

XXI. Lonely Ways

XXII. The Way of Love

Part I

America

CHAPTER I

SECRET PALACES

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion."

The _Bavaric_ had been four fine September days at sea, and it was time

for the vague pain and melancholy that always haunted Westenra after

leaving Ireland to pass; yet it stayed with him as never before it had

stayed. The voice of the Atlantic sang a dirge in his ears, and looking

at the long grey rollers he thought of his mother's hair which he would

never see again, of the mists that enveloped _Inishaan_ as Ireland

passed from sight, of the ghosts of Raths, and all grey things; and life

looked grey before him and dull. It was as though the mists and shadows

of his land lay upon his spirit and would not be lifted. More than ever

he was lonely, more than ever an exile, for now there was none but the

dead left to him in the land of his birth; the last root had gone, the

last frond been cut away. His mother had died on the day he sailed from

New York to pay her his annual visit, and long before he reached

Queenstown she had been laid away to rest by his father's side in the

fair valley of Glendalough.

For awhile he had roamed about Ireland with something of the aimlessness

of a wounded creature, choosing wild solitary places where the sorrowful

beauty of lake and forest and mountain, so unique, so different in its

wistful allurement to any other scenery in the world, had seemed to

brood with him in his grief and lay with mysterious hands some healing

spikenard in his heart. But the shadow of loneliness had not been

lifted from him.

He had never spent more than a few weeks of his yearly holiday with his

mother, and the rest of the two months in different parts of Europe, but

always he had felt her in his life; sitting by her fireside in her

beautiful little Carlow home she had constituted his bit of Ireland, his

share of the world. Now he was a lonely man without home or kin. The

ache of emptiness was in his heart as he stared at the few pale early

stars that had ventured forth into the evening sky.

Nothing was left in his life now except a child and a woman; but the

child was not even his own, and the woman was only a vision. For years

she had come to him in his dreams, so many years that he could not

remember the first time, but usually she appeared when he was in Ireland

or coming away from it, never in America; and because he was fresh from

Ireland, and the supernatural element that is in the Celtic nature had

been recently renewed so that supernatural things still seemed to him

the real things of life, he thought of her now as if she were a real

woman, and wondered why it was so long since he had seen her flickering

through the night in her pale grey gown with fine lace at the throat and

a chain of luminous beads swinging before her neck. He tried to recall

the strangely Oriental face, but, as always it eluded him, and he could

only remember the wistful lurking sadness that divined in her something

of the Irishry, the knowledge of sorrow and longing for far places in

her eyes; the subtle suggestion of mourning for some lost land, like an

echo of Goethe's song:

"Kennst Du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?

Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen gluehn,

Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht

Die Myrte, still und hoch der Lorbeer steht."

There were other things that troubled him too: dark shadows hovering

about her, flecks of mud and blood upon her bare feet, and the weary

look of one who has come a long way upon a bad road. But what was sweet

to his lonely heart was that she seemed so unquestionably to belong to

him, so wholly and inevitably his.

The Irish boy who never loved has never lived, and Westenra cherished

with characteristic ardour the remembrance of one or two youthful

romances, but apart from these and his great love for his mother there

had been no woman's influence in his life. He had been too busy to let

women in.

Though he was only thirty-three, America had heard of him as a surgeon,

and that is no slight triumph in a land of many clever surgeons. What

was dearer to him was the fact that in Medical Science the "other

fellows" knew of him--the big, silent men beating their way by inches

along the hampered road of Progress--they recognised him as one of

themselves, a worker not for money nor personal glory, but for humanity.

Skill with the knife, being at its best no more than a fine

collaboration of hand and eye, never yet sufficed a brilliant intellect,

and it had not sufficed Westenra. His keen mind, not content to follow

on the lines laid down by other men, craved for higher work in the

discovery and formulation of new principles of treatment in diseases

that defied the surgeon's knife; and it was in the laboratory that he

had won the triumphs he most valued. In spite of a heavy hospital and

private practice, he had found time to do some unique experimental work

in connection with the intestinal canals, while on the subject of

locomotor ataxia he was already considered something more than an

expert. But the diseases that lured him most were those in which

surgery failed to give the relief hoped for, and one such he had

specially starred out for laborious investigation. He knew when he

determined to devote himself to the subject of the metabolic disorders

underlying diabetes, that years, perhaps a lifetime, of experiment and

ardent unpaid labour lay before him, but he faced the prospect boldly,

for he doubted not that in the end he would have as great a gift to

bestow upon the world as even Lister, Metchnikoff, or Pasteur.

Not much time in such a life of planned hours, tasks, and duties to

think of women. And, indeed, except as cases, he had not definitely

thought of them. But, like all Celts, he had an inner world of his own

in which he walked sometimes, and did not walk alone. A mystical subtle

knowledge was his that somewhere in the universe a woman was waiting for

him--the woman with the pale Oriental face and the grey gown. And in

his heart he listened for the delicate approach of footsteps from out

the distance and the Future.

"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow?

One look or none did you bestow

When carelessly, as strangers go,

You passed my door?"

He understood the listener in those lines with the imagination of one

who in a city office or hospital can hear the sounds of birds and

insects, and feel the wind of the moors on his face and see the gloom of

trees. The dark waves of the Atlantic had often seemed to him symbolic

of the Irish nature; dark and sad to the outward view, but when the wind

ruffles the surface showing light and beauty beneath, secret inner

palaces of green crystal.

But to-night his loneliness oppressed him as never before. It seemed to

him he had waited too long in a land of dreams and shadows. He left the

sea and stars at last and went to his cabin.

At dinner for the first time since the boat sailed the seat next his own

was occupied, though he scarcely noticed the fact until he found himself

sitting beside a woman. A young woman he saw at once by her hands, all

that he could see of her very well, for however curious a man may be it

is difficult for him to take the bearings of a person with whom he is

seated cheek by jowl. Westenra was not at all curious, but even when he

was the dreamiest of Irishmen he was also a trained observer, and to

take notes on the people with whom he came in contact whilst apparently

absorbed in his own affairs was as natural to him as breathing. He

could almost make a diagnosis from a hand, and the next deductions he

drew from the slim ones of his neighbour were not all so pleasing as the

first. For one thing he saw that she was an intensely nervous woman,

even though she spent so much time out of doors, ungloved, that her

hands were burnt to a pale brown tint. They were more like a boy's

hands than a woman's, except that they were so nervously febrile and

covered with rings. The rings called for attention. They were odd and

barbaric, and of far greater beauty than value, for most of the stones

were semi-precious, and their charm lay in their quaint settings and

brilliant colouring. There were miniatures surrounded by amethysts,

marquise rings of blue and green enamel with devices in rose-diamonds,

olivines and sardonyx set with seed-pearls and an Angelica Kauffman

under a crystal. On the thumb of her right hand she wore a very fine

black scarab heavily set in platinum, and on the index finger of the

same hand a silver ring of rough workmanship made in the shape of a V

with a stone like an uncut ruby imbedded in the point of the letter.

Nothing so commonplace as a wedding ring was to be observed amongst this

eccentric collection. The forefingers of her left hand were faintly

tinted with the amber of nicotine.

"Smokes too much," thought Westenra, and might have supposed her

left-handed but for a worn, hard little mark on her right middle finger.

"Writes, and smokes while she 's writing," he deducted, and thought none

the better of her for that. When she ordered a brandy-and-soda to drink

with the sardine she was dissecting he liked her still less.

"She won't be in the game long at that rate," he estimated grimly.

"With _her_ nerves I 'll give her another two years at most." He hated

to see women drink. Experience had taught him that few of them can do

it long without going to pieces morally. And here was one who would

certainly go to pieces physically as well. On this conclusion he felt

no further inclination for observations. But that did not prevent him

from hearing what she had to say. She had struck up a little

conversation with the man on the other side of her, speaking in a

nervous contralto voice that, without being throaty, contained a curious

husky tremor giving almost the suggestion that she wore a veil over it.

Without the assistance of his previous deductions Westenra would have

known it at once for the voice of a temperamental woman, as well as that

of a woman of the world; and was the more astonished therefore, at her

free _bon camarade_ manner with her neighbour, a French Jew with a mean

expression on a clever face--a financier or dealer in jewels Westenra

judged, and a none too scrupulous one at that. They talked about the

ice on the table and where it had come from. The Jew was not sure

whether it was Norwegian ice or manufactured on the boat, but was full

of information about the New York supply and the great frozen lakes from

which it was cut in enormous blocks.

"I must go and see them!" said the woman eagerly, "and the far solitary

tracts of ice and snow in Alaska! I _must_ see them."

She talked like a woman who had fever in her veins.

"You like cold places?" asked the Jew curiously.

"No! No! I hate cold, but I like wide, solitary, empty lands and

countries I have never been to. I would love to wake up every morning of

my life in afresh place."

Westenra admired reserve in a woman, and was thoroughly astounded at

such a lack of it. There was worse to come. Her friendly candour

revived the French heart of the Jew to a corresponding friendliness

which by some persons might have been considered impertinent, but did

not seem in the least to offend this one.

"Excuse me, mad'moiselle, but I never saw such original bracelets.

Might one ask what they are made of?"

"Ivory," she answered pleasantly. "I got them in Central Africa. They

were cut green from an elephant's trunk."

"Elephant's trunk!" murmured the Jew, and even Westenra had to smile.

"Oh! tusk I mean, of course. And the red things imbedded in them are

garnets from De Beers's Mine in Kimberley. I think they are ever so

much nicer than diamonds, don't you?"

The Jew tried to look as if he did, and succeeded fairly well.

"Here is another in my silver ring. A Zulu made this ring for me in

Natal, out of a half-crown. I gave him the garnet to put in, and

another half-crown for making it."

If the Jew were outraged at the idea of any lady wearing such cheap

jewellery, he concealed his feelings under a silky smile.

"Then you know Africa, mad'moiselle?"

"I know every country except America," she said. "But I think Africa is

the only one in the world that I could stay in always without getting

bored."

"Ah! Is it Johannesburg you like?"

"Oh, no--Rhodesia--Zululand--the Drakenberg Mountains--the open veldt."

The Jew stared.

"For a lady you have been to very unusual places," he commented, and if

the words were ambiguous the tone was not lacking in courtesy.

"I love to travel," she said, "and it is my business to see things and

places. I am a journalist."

"Indeed!" said the Jew, and stared again, for she was quite unlike any

journalist he had ever met or heard of. But she gave him no time for

any further astonished questions.

"I must go," she said abruptly. "This saloon is too hot." Smiling

pleasantly at him she drank up her brandy-and-soda and departed, the Jew

rising up also and bowing her out of her seat in a way that Westenra

considered officious, yet could not but notice that with a courteous

smile on him the fellow was not so mean-looking after all. The Irishman

gave a glance after the figure of his late neighbour. She was tall and

slight with a firm light walk, but as she went down the aisle made by

two long dining-tables the ship rolled gently, and she put out her pale

brown hands here and there touching a chair back.

Proceeding with his dinner, which had as yet only reached the second

course, Westenra reflected that it would be difficult for any woman,

even with a bet to win, to give herself and her affairs away more

thoroughly in a short space of time than his late neighbour had done.

"With both hands she did it--and her tongue," he mused cynically. "In

no longer a time than it took to dine off a brandy-and-soda and the

outline of a sardine!"

After sitting next to her for a matter of twenty minutes he knew all

there was to be known of her tastes, her profession, her temperament,

her habits. She had travelled, she wrote for the

newspapers,--sensational stuff probably, her head was too small for a

thinker's head,--she was entirely modern, cursed with nerves,

restlessness, and dissatisfaction; she was unreserved, unreposeful,

uncontrolled, undisciplined; she drank, she smoked. He really could not

think of anything about her, except her charming voice, which of course

she could not help, that was not in violent opposition to his every idea

of what a woman should be, and the fact filled him with resentment born

of a kind of chivalrous discontent that any woman should be so far from

the ideal standard. He entirely withdrew his earlier supposition that

she was a woman of the world, in spite of the evidence of travel and

experience.

"A woman of her type could never contend with any kind of social life.

The way she let that Jew draw her was childish."

At that moment something happened that thrilled through his nerves and

veins like an electric shock, and left him mentally stunned.

The woman of whom he had been thinking was coming back down the long

saloon, her delicate hands put out to the chair backs in the same little

frond-like movement as before. For the first time he saw her face clear

and full; and he did not have to look twice to recognise it. Though it

had always eluded his memory in waking hours he knew it now that he saw

it as well as his own. _It was the face of the woman he had dreamed of

for years_. He knew her hair, her eyes, her mouth, the grey gown she

had on, the deep collar of fine lace ivoried by age that turned away

from the base of a long throat that had fine ivory tints of its own. He

even knew the necklace of luminous grey-green beads that swung to her

waist. The wistfulness of the Irishry that he remembered so well lurked

elusively about her eyes and mouth, and the touch of Orientalism was

there too, though it was hard to tell of what it came, for if her hair

was black and her skin Arab-pale, her sad eyes were not dark but of a

curious smoky blue. As she came nearer she looked straight at him, her

glance for a moment seeming to rest in his, and he saw that like the

eyes of many clever people hers possessed a slight defect; they were

different in shape and expression; one seemed to be long and sleepy and

almost cynical looking, the other, rounder, held an eager inquiring

glance that suggested great vitality and ardour. This was Westenra's

fleeting impression, there was no time for more, and he was almost too

aghast for clear thought; but a glance of his eye went a good deal

further than most people's, and in this instance his vision was

sharpened by the strange circumstances of his dream.

It appeared that she had come back to her seat to fetch a little silk

bag of the kind that women were then using to carry about their

handkerchiefs and purses. She spoke to no one, only leaned over the

back of her seat, took her bag and went away, and it was all over in two

or three seconds. But in those few seconds a man's life had been

changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra.

Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat

next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was

the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had

for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic

roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious

and irreplaceable. Something was broken and gone from his life. The

beautiful spun-glass globe of illusion he had carried so secretly was

shattered in the dust. In that moment of bitter realisation he was not

a surgeon and scientist from New York, but a primitive man from Ireland

keening in silence for a nameless sorrow. The desert grief of his race

welled up from the depths of him, and the taste of his waters was as the

taste of the waters of Marah.

----

There were few people on deck. The wind was chill, and the stars burned

with the brilliant sapphire pallor of electric light. There was a

special spot where Westenra always stood to smoke, because it gave him a

leaning place against the rail where he could command the length of the

deck, and yet get an uninterrupted view of the grey waves with their

pale sea palaces. Close beside him in a canvas-sheltered corner stood

his deck chair. He lit a cigar, but he might have been smoking seaweed

for all the aroma there was in it for him. Abstractedly he stared at

the phosphorescent waves, but his attention was on the door of the

companion-way, and presently, as he had felt sure she would, the woman

in grey came through it with her swaying movements and her hands put out

a little. She had wrapped herself in a long silky cloak that gleamed in

the starlight, and as she strayed up and down the deck like a grey

ghost, the wind took hold of it and flicked it about her making it crack

like a silken sail. It took fronds of her hair too and made them into

lashes that beat her face and blew above her head. She laughed a little

to herself as she was blown this way and that, and for the first time

that night she pleased Westenra, for he loved the wind, and it seemed to

him that she loved it too. He stood very still listening to the

tap-tapping of her heels, thinking of--

"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow...?"

and of how long he had listened in office and hospital for the sound of

a woman's feet coming towards him. He remembered the bare broken feet

of the woman in his dream, though he had always dimly recognised that

the mud and blood were symbolical of the rough paths she had walked.

These that tapped the deck near him were daintily shod in grey _suede_,

but from her own telling they had strayed in far places of the earth and

echoed in lonely spots before they came his way, as they were coming

now. Would they halt when they reached him? Resentful, antagonistic,

and disillusioned as he was, something in his fatalistic Irish nature

responded, some bird sang in a pale green palace when she stood still

beside him, and spoke:

"Do you think I might sit in this nice sheltered corner?" She looked at

the chair and then at him, with a boyish _bon camarade_ smile that

banished all the sadness and shadows from her face.

"I 'm sure you might--please do."

He moved forward swiftly and arranged the chair for her. She sat down,

and as he did not move away began to talk to him in the same friendly

easy way as she had used to the Jew, and he found himself, like the Jew,

answering her if not eagerly at least with interest. However they

touched only on generalities. She did not tell him nearly so much as

she had told the Jew and he found in that too something to resent.

Possibly she missed the French receptivity, or with the quicksilver

sensitiveness of some women divined antagonism, for something like a

little note of appeal came presently into her voice: it was as though

she were trying to soften his heart towards her. In answer to some

observation of his with regard to travelling she said rather wearily:

"Yes; one discovers these things when one has knocked about the world

long enough."

"Knocking about the world" was not a process that usually enhanced a

woman's charm, in his eyes at least; but he soon became aware that all

charm was far from being knocked out of this one. Charm came out of her

like a perfume, and stole towards him. But he steeled his heart against

it and against her, so that a glint of the steel presently came into his

eyes and seemed to ring in his voice. Certainly something in him

chilled the little tendrils of good fellowship and friendliness that she

seemed inclined to extend. At last shivering slightly and drawing her

cloak about her, she stirred in her chair, preparing to go. But he

stayed her with an odd and unexpected question.

"Do you always wear grey?"

She laughed and turned to look at him curiously.

"Now I wonder what makes you ask such a strange question?"

Enraged with himself, resentful of her, he was far from any intention of

telling her his real reason.

"It hardly seems to be your colour." He spoke abruptly and realised

immediately that he was being rude. But she was not offended at the wry

compliment. Whatever her faults might be she seemed at least to be

untroubled by that one paramount in most women--vanity.

"Are you an artist?" She leaned forward and looked at him with the free

curiosity of a child.

"No."

She waited an instant as though expecting to hear him supplement his

curt answer, but her frank impulsive methods waked no answering echoes,

and she sank back with a little sigh. He felt ashamed of his

churlishness. Never before had he been so unresponsive to friendly

advances; but apart from his instinct not to allow this woman to probe

him, it had always been a principle with him never to disclose his

profession to fellow-travellers. When he came abroad it was to rest,

and he had found that the best way of doing so was to keep his identity

dark from the world at large. However, his taciturnity if it chilled

her could not make her change her manners and customs.

"You are quite right," she said at last, speaking as though there had

been no awkward interlude. "Grey is not my colour. I always wear blues

and reds and oranges--anything bright and Oriental: not only because I

am pale but because I love vivid colours. If when I am unhappy I put on

something crimson it seems to warm and cheer my heart like a fire.

Don't you think the robin is happier for his red breast?"

Westenra said nothing. She had switched his mind off oddly to the

things he loved in his boyhood--birds hopping in the garden, the robin's

note--a rabbit flashing past through the dewy grass.

"If ever you are in deep despair and can see a field of poppies all glad

and aflare under the blaze of the sun----"

She appeared to have forgotten him and to be talking to herself. He too

was away amongst the dews and tender sunshine of Ireland. He knew no

blazing fields of poppies, but remembered them gay amongst the corn in

the long fields.

"Or sunlight on fields of glowing corn," she said softly, "green land

growing right down to the blue sea--trees turning to red and gold in the

autumn--a bank of purple irises--gilded aloes spiking against the sky."

There was a strange little dreaming silence.

"I never had a grey gown in my life until now," she said suddenly.

Westenra looked pale in the starlight; there seemed almost to be in his

skin a tinge of the colour she mentioned. Her words switched him back

too suddenly from Ireland to a remembrance of her unwarranted likeness

to his dream woman. She had even gone so far as to talk in the way that

woman might have done! To pretend that she cared for the things that

woman would care for!

"What made you get one now?" He knew not what fatalistic curiosity

prompted the question.

"I got several," she said quietly. Her manner was still friendly, but

there had come into it a certain graveness that he thought might be

intended by way of rebuke, until he heard the end of her sentence. "You

will never see me in any other colour on this ship. I am wearing grey

as a sort of mourning for my husband."

"I beg your pardon," he said slowly, startled, astounded, and puzzled.

A widow! Oh! She _could n't_ be the woman he had dreamed--the whole

thing was ridiculous! Grey for mourning? That was new to him. But

perhaps the fellow had been dead a long time, and she was just going out

of mourning? As if in answer to his thoughts she made another of her

curious statements.

"We had been such bitter enemies that I felt it would be hypocritical to

go into real mourning for him. But he died a fine death, and in honour

of that I thought I might at least absent me awhile from the felicity of

bright colour."

She rose to say good-night, and as she stood there looking at him for a

moment with her elusive Irish smile and her Oriental air, he saw that,

tell himself what he might, widow or no widow, hers was indeed the face

he knew so well. The long shadows thrown by the lights behind her fell

about her feet recalling the vulture shadows of his dream. Her cloak

flickered round her like a silken sail, and the beads about her neck

swung and softly clicked as dice might click in the hands of Fate.

CHAPTER II

GREY AND GOLD

"Two shall be born the whole wide world apart,

And speak in different tongues, and have no thought

Each of the other's being, and no heed;

And these, o'er unknown seas to unknown lands

Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;

And all unconsciously shape every act

And bend each wandering step to this one end--

That one day, out of darkness they shall meet,

And read life's meaning in each other's eyes."

There are few men who in thinking ahead, however vaguely, to the time

when they will share life with a woman do not expect to find their

ultimate kingdom in the heart of some girl with a face like the morning

and a nature fresh and unspoiled as an opening rose. With the freshness

faded from his own heart and the "songs of the morning" long forgotten,

this modest instinct to allot to himself the beautiful and the ideal

remains deeply rooted in the best and worst of men. Of Irishmen it

should be said in extenuation that they are usually greater idealists

than the generality of men, and possess the instinct of worship more

strongly. They do not always make fortunes nor gain fame; but they make

shrines. And deep in the nature of every one of them sits fast the

belief that the finest woman in the world is surely for him because he

has the finest shrine ready for her. If she does not fit, it is not the

fault of the shrine, which is composed of the very best materials--that

stuff of which dreams are made.

Garrett Westenra had all the bigoted simplicity of the man who has never

loved and been deceived. There is nothing like a wrecked shrine or two

for getting rid of unworkable notions about the uses of women as idols;

but no woman had ever deceived him, so he had kept all his faith and

bigotry and generous beliefs to bestow upon the one woman--a golden

apple with a bitter core perhaps, for it is not always fair to the woman

to have too much in this line to bestow. Being a citizen of the world

he did not of course suppose that fine qualities and a beautiful nature

are only to be found in the opening-rose type of woman, but certainly he

had unconsciously or otherwise assigned to the woman of his dreams all

the traditional virtues and graces of character and bearing. He had come

of fine simple people: one of the old Irish families who through poverty

and misfortune had lived for generations with the simplicity and

austerity of peasants, but whose men had never lost their breeding and

bearing, and whose women were strong and fearless without breaking the

laws of their religion.

One of his ancestresses had eloped with a Westenra, and pursued by her

disapproving brothers, the pair had swum a river abreast; later, when

having fought one brother after the other the bridegroom, wounded in the

legs, was unable to walk, his wife carried him on her back for miles to

a place of safety--not that he was small and weak (no Westenra was ever

that), but that she was big and strong and fine; her wedding ring, a

thin thread of gold, had come down through generations to Garrett

Westenra and fitted his third finger easily. His great-grandmother,

daughter too of an old but impoverished family, had not disdained to

rebuild with her own hands the house in which she afterwards lived and

died. These were the single-hearted, simple, faithful women,

"Strong and quiet like the hills,"

from whom Westenra had sprung. Tradition dies hard when it is rooted in

such firm ground. Small wonder that dismay blotted out delight when he

recognised at last the romantic face of the woman he had waited for,

only to find it allied to the strange, rootless, roving, almost vagrant

personality of Valentine Valdana.

Even if every one on the ship except himself had not appeared to know

that she was Mrs. Valdana _the_ journalist, he could not long have

remained in ignorance of her name for "Val Valdana" in writing so

illegible as to invoke curiosity was written on everything she

possessed, and she left her possessions everywhere. She was the most

careless woman in the world. She lost and mislaid books, cushions,

papers, and rugs; her shoes were frequently undone, and her hair almost

always on the point of coming down. Yet she never looked untidy because

her feet were pretty and her hair was of the feathery kind; and in the

matter of her lost possessions she preserved entire calmness, for some

one was always obliging enough to find them for her and bring them back.

Once she left on deck a book full of audacious sketches and notes about

the passengers, and the wind ruffling the leaves of it dispersed scraps

of paper in every direction. One of these displayed a pair of

love-birds sitting beak to beak on a branch, but the birds possessed the

life-like features of two cranky old maid passengers who were

continually squabbling in public; beneath was the scribbled legend: "_If

we comfort not each other, Who shall comfort us in the dark days to

come?_" ... Another entitled "_La planche_" was the portrait of an

enormously fat lady passenger grown extraordinarily slim and pretty. A

little pink hard-shelled woman with a habit of making up to people only

to say something extremely unpleasant to them was cartooned as a crab

reaching out and nipping everything within reach. A moony-looking

individual with a wry neck, peering eyes, and a loud brown check suit

had lent his individuality to the sketch of a tortoise pottering

curiously about the deck. A newly-married couple who were always

sipping egg-nog together had been pilloried as the Siamese twins joined

by a large egg.

Yet when the cartoonist came on deck the victims of her pencil were all

ready to smile at her, and return her property without resentment. It

was so patent somehow that malice was the one thing absent from the

mental make-up of Mrs. Valdana.

Another day soon after their first meeting, Westenra found her in her

deck chair with one slim foot twisted round to inspect what is sometimes

known as a "potato" in the heel of her stocking.

"Isn't it amazing how holes in one's stockings arrive?" she remarked to

him pleasantly. "I would n't mind only I 've got such tender heels."

Impossible for a thoughtful man who has known poverty and carried

memories of his mother's fingers worn with darning to imagine such a

woman as a wife and mother. Plainly the shrine Westenra had built for

the woman of his dreams could never be occupied by this one. No shrine

could keep for long so restless a heart, nor fireside and cradle detain

such wandering feet! As the days went by the likeness in fact that he

had seen in her to his vision became blurred and faded. It was not

difficult at last to persuade himself that his recognition of her had

been a fantasy of his brain. Once the thought dismissed of any mystical

bond between them, he could not help liking the incompetent, careless

creature and finding pleasure in her society. She was a good companion:

not gay herself so much as the cause of gaiety in others. She rarely

said witty things, but it was surprising how witty others became in her

company. Her art was of the kind that seems to underlie rather than

break through the surface of conversation, leaving the best points for

others to make. But sometimes when things were at their dullest she

would suddenly send up a little sparkling rocket that lit the mental

horizon and thrilled the surroundings with colour.

Westenra, whose native wit and eloquence needed little sharpening, was

at his best with her, and he became his pleasant and extremely engaging

self while enjoying to the full that charm in her that from the first he

had not denied. Her ardent feeling for the ideal and the original was a

spur to his intellect, and not only re-awoke his natural gaiety, but set

stirring all his altruistic dreams. For there was greatness smouldering

in Westenra, that needed only the right woman's hand to fan it into

flame.

No one observing Mrs. Valdana listening, almost thirsting for all he had

to say, would have guessed that as far as actual experience of life

went, hers had been far wider and greater than his, for the usual

results of experience--callous indifference or a calm philosophic

outlook--were amazingly absent from her. She was vividly interested in

life, and the more she saw of it, the less _blasee_ she became; and

because ideas interested her even more than experience she was deeply

interested in Westenra.

If the latter had ever lived in England he would infallibly have

recognised the name of Valentine Valdana as being that of one of the

foremost women journalists in the world. Even had he been in the habit

of reading those American Sunday journals whose overseas cables in a

surprisingly small space manage to mention the doings of everyone of

importance, he would have realised that so far from being the

"small-headed, yellow journalist" he supposed, she occupied a unique and

enviable position in the newspaper world. But he had never concerned

himself with the doings of European journalists. America is a big

country, with big enough personalities and interests of its own to

absorb such attention as a man wrapped up in his work and the great

scientific facts of life has to give to public affairs. Thus it came to

pass that he did not know there was one thing Mrs. Valdana, with her odd

eccentric gowns and ornaments, a hole in the heel of her stocking, and

her black hair endlessly coming down, was not careless about, and that

one thing was her work--and that because of her work she was famous.

Certainly she was not the person to tell him, being as reticent about

the astonishing things she had done as she was childishly frank about

her picturesque tastes and fancies. She would show her ivory bracelets

cut green from the tusks of an elephant in Central Africa, or howl in

the moonlight like a jackal, or dance like a Somali warrior (as she did

at the concert got up for the sailors' benefit), or describe the orchids

that hang like glowing lamps from the trees in the deep steaming forests

of the Congo; but she would say nothing of her articles on sleeping

sickness and Congo atrocities, or how she had nearly lost a foot on a

terrible march in Somaliland, but turned out an amazing Odyssey on the

manners and customs of a little known people. She always forgot to

mention that it was she who had shot the elephant from whose tusks the

bracelets came, and that her knowledge of jackal music was acquired in a

lion-infested part of Bechuanaland, where she had got lost from her

party and spent a sinister night up a tree.

Next to Africa she loved India best in the world, and could discourse

alluringly on the subject of _phul-karries_, and silk embroideries from

Delhi, of sunsets seen across the plains when the buffaloes and the

goats are being herded home in a mist of golden dust; of paddy-birds

standing in shallow grey pools, and the grace of the swathed women

coming from the wells. Chanting through her nose a thin monotonous

wail, while with three fingers and her thumb she made a measured

thrumming tattoo on the table, she could conjure up the very heart-throb

of the Indian Bazaar until the never-ending rhythmic torment of the East

dragged at the heart of those who listened. She could tell too every

kind of amusing story and scandal about Anglo-Indian society; but she

would never mention that she had been sent out in '97 to get for her

paper the truth about the Tochi rising--and had got it; that she was at

Simla when the English were waiting breathlessly for news from their men

at the front, knowing that any serious reverse in the Tirah might

possibly mean an attempt at a general rising and massacre in the plains

and hill stations of the Punjab, and that she was one of those women who

had gone out as usual to balls, and laughed and jested with sickening

fear in their hearts, under the keen eyes of the native servants--and

afterwards had sat in her room hour after hour sorting and classifying

her facts, embodying them in the strong vivid articles that a few weeks

later made England "sit up" for awhile and realise that all was not

peace and fair contentment in the Indian Empire.

There were lots of other interesting things Mrs. Valdana never told.

She had been in Russia on a mission for Mr. Stead, and in Turkey to

probe out the affair of a secret concession for turquoise searching

granted by the Sultan to an English Member of Parliament. She had

interviewed De Witte, the Red Sultan, and Paul Kruger, and stayed at

Groot Schuur as Cecil Rhodes's guest. But all these things were part of

her work, and of her work (except to other journalists) she never spoke.

It spoke for itself.

Though she had done special work for many of the big London papers she

was a free lance and under bonds to no journal. No inducement that

could be held out to her was strong enough to lure her from her ways,

which were the ways of a literary vagabond who came and went at no man's

bidding, but achieved her best work by wandering only where she listed,

and writing only what her heart urged. This might have been fatal to

financial success, but that it was allied to an instinct that amounted

to genius for the big vivid things that take hold of the public

imagination. Every good journalist has a nose for news; Valentine

Valdana had the added gift of an "eye for colour"; she saw it across

continents, recognised it overseas, followed it as her star; and what

she wrote concerning it editors were pleased to scramble for. If one

disapproved of her "stuff" another was only too glad to embrace it. She

revised and blue-pencilled for no man. Her creed was Byron's when he

wrote to Murray: "Cut me up in the _Quarterly_, rend me in the Reviews,

do unto me as did the Levite unto his concubine, but do not ask me to

revise, for I cannot and I will not." She would not either, and she did

not have to. Enough that her stuff was signed with her well-known

nom-de-plume "Wanderfoot" for it to sell like hot cakes. In fact, in

her own line Valentine Valdana was famous; and Garrett Westenra did not

know it.

Nor would he have been greatly impressed if he had known. He was

entirely opposed to that kind of fame for a woman.

All Irishmen, whatever their rank or situation, are at bottom profound

lovers of nature, virtue, and simplicity; and from this great quality of

the heart springs the singular charm that makes them the most attractive

people in the world; but it has a defect in its almost peasant

standardising of women. Lack of money in Ireland has created in the

Irish an eternal oversense of the value of riches; but though there has

never been any lack of women in Ireland they are not undervalued on this

account (in fact, as has been shown, they are given shrines to occupy).

Still there is a secret and peculiar hatred in the Irishman's nature for

any change in the status of women, moral or intellectual, since the time

of Mother Eve or the beloved Madonna. The wife-and-mother is the ideal,

and very rightly so, but she is a meek and submissive and gentle

wife-and-mother, and she sits eternally by the fireside with a child on

her knee. Yes, though in his heart he will crown her with a golden

crown and burn incense before her, that is where an Irishman always sees

the ideal woman--by the fireside, with a child on her knee. No true

Irishman will ever be a suffragist.

Considering these things it was surely unwise of Garrett Westenra, very

much an Irishman, to linger day after day by the deck chair of a

vagabond woman, who, from all accounts and appearances, had never

possessed a fireside of her own, nor was ever likely to appreciate one.

Yet linger he did, and day by day her charm wrought upon him and wound

itself round him and penetrated him until it seemed to become part of

him. By no effort of hers was the thing done. She grew strangely

silent as the voyage drew towards an end, sitting in her chair with

still eyes and hands, like a woman in a dream drifting down a dream

river. Once more she began to resemble the woman Westenra knew so

well--the mystery woman with whom he had walked for many years in his

secret garden. And when he came on deck and did not find her in her

place, the deck and the ship and the world seemed to become suddenly

empty--with an appalling emptiness.

But always when alone in his cabin he made the same observation to

himself.

"This thing has got to stop. It is rank foolishness. What do I know of

her? God knows what her life has been. She is not the woman I have

dreamed of. She is not within a hundred miles of the kind of woman I

could spend my life with.... A reckless, careless vagabond!

Good-hearted, yes, full of fine impulses ... full of charm! But when

the glamour has gone ... what then?"

He had that gift and curse of his race of seeing too far--the

worthlessness of the prize at the end of the race, the rotten core

inside the rosy apple. Perhaps why Irishmen achieve so little, is that

nothing which can be got seems to them worth while getting!

So he said to himself firmly:

"This thing has got to stop."

He said it and meant it right up to the last night of the voyage--a

night when they stayed late in their deck chairs under a glorious moon

that transformed the sea into a golden harvest of promise. Many other

couples sat along the deck laughing and jesting, announcing their

intention to stay up until the Statue of Liberty hove in sight, but well

aware that the purser would be prowling along the deck at about

half-past ten with hinting scowls for all loiterers. Long before the

purser came, however, the keen air had driven most people below, and

there was no one left except Westenra and Mrs. Valdana, and a far couple

in the shadow of the bridge.

A silence had fallen upon Westenra and his companion, one of those

silences that have lips to speak and hands to caress. A little wind

blew past them carrying a snatch of her hair across his lips. He had

never before felt a woman's hair on his lips! Her pale hand nervous and

lonely lay outside the rug in which she was wrapped.

"That hand looks cold lying there," he said, and taking it drew it under

a fold of his own rug, and held it fast. It lay in his without response

like a little stone hand, but through his palm he could feel her pulse

beating wild and uncertain, and that stirred him strangely, yet awoke

the doctor in him too. He remembered the brandy-and-soda she had drunk

the first evening, and every evening since. He remembered too his own

cynical thought, and repeated it now, though his voice held little

cynicism.

"I 'll give you two years longer to live if you keep on at this rate."

"What rate?" she asked in surprise.

"Drinking, smoking, taking drugs. What drug is it you take?"

"You seem to know all my vices," she said laughing a little tremulously.

She was leaning back in her chair looking very pale. "I have to take

veronal sometimes to make me sleep."

"You would sleep naturally if you gave up smoking and drinking, and

lived a quiet natural life."

"But then I could n't write."

"Well, you must give up writing."

"But then I could n't live," she said laughing. "You don't seem to know

that I write for my living--it is my work."

"Your work is a curse to you if it makes you do these things."

"It is all I have," was her strange answer.

He turned in his chair and looked at her. In her face was none of the

bitter humiliation of the woman whose weaknesses are suddenly exposed

and condemned. She was smiling a little, a smile with a twist to it,

like the smile of a child who is determined not to weep. And her

smoke-coloured eyes, bright and sad with tears, and exile, and lost

joys, and all the sorrow of the Irishry, were the eyes of the woman who

had been given him in a dream. While he looked at her she closed them

and sat very still. At last he knew that there was no question of

fleeing from Fate. He leaned forward and laid his lips on her sad

smiling mouth, and found there the answer to many a question.

Yet when he spoke it was to ask another.

"Now will you leave writing?"

"Yes, Garrett," she said simply. "I will leave everything for you; I

think it was written so in the beginning of things."

CHAPTER III

FATE'S WINDING PATHS

"Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the weary end."

With Westenra's kiss still warm on her lips Valentine Valdana knelt in

her cabin, elbows plunged in the low plush-covered lounge, eyes closed,

lips slightly parted, her upturned face resting in the palms of her

hands as still and rapt as the face of a visionnaire, and indeed it was

in visionary scenes that her mind wandered: scenes of the past peopled

with the absent and the dead. Sometimes her lips moved and she spoke a

name--her mother's, her father's, a child's, an old woman's, that of a

man who lay by her mother's side in the Durban cemetery--one whom the

world had known as a brilliant but drunken journalist, but whom she

remembered only as a great heart and loved friend. For she had a great

capacity for loving, this woman; she did not know how to merely like

people; when she cared at all she loved and gave her best. She loved

all the people with whom she was dreaming now, and she loved them still

with a love that reached over seas and past the grave; in her radiant

new-found happiness her thoughts flew to them wishing that they too

might be glad with her.

"Dear Dick ... I am so happy," she said, visualising the drunken

journalist, not as others had seen him, a short red-faced man with

bright, haggard eyes and a sardonic mouth, but as the big-hearted man of

letters who had generously taught a young uneducated girl all he knew of

his craft.

In memory she sat again in the stuffy Johannesburg newspaper office with

the maps on the wall, tables hidden under a jumble of papers, chairs

covered with tobacco ash, books, whiskey bottles, and heard the voice of

Dick Rowan pounding "style" into her while the mine batteries drummed

outside, and the windows reddened and rattled under the assault of a

blinding Rand dust storm. Her thoughts passed to another man who had

worked with them, and who lay now in the little cemetery behind the

Primrose Deep; to another sniped in the streets of Mafeking who had

written to her by the last post that came from the beleaguered town; to

another dead in the shadow of the Himalayas of whom she could not think

without remembering the paddy-birds in the rice fields near Benares;

another sleeping on the shores of Lake Chad.

For like all women thrown early on the world to make a living she had

found her best friends among men, and the very adventurousness of her

own life had brought her into contact with adventurous men of the kind

whose lives are full and vivid and of sudden ending. Of the men who

"did things, and died in far places" she had known a-many, and been

proud of their friendship, and with all the ardour of an ardent nature

she had loved them every one in her boyish, good-comrade way. And they

had all passed on or passed away! But she wanted them to be with her in

this hour. She called on every one she had loved, or been loved by, to

rejoice with her now. She even laid in thought a flower of amnesty upon

the memory of Horace Valdana, but with him she did not linger, for in

the memory of her husband was neither beauty nor joy, and in that hour

she wished only to remember things that gave no hurt.

For she too believed that the fate which through the open and winding

passages of life had been seeking after her had found her at last; that

of all the men she had been loved by, and she had been greatly loved,

here at last was the one whom her heart and mind had awaited--a real man

with something of the lion in the hold of his head and in the quality of

his sure glance and careless smile, who "did before the sun and moon

whatsoever his heart appointed," and was no man's man but his own. She

saw that Westenra was big in mind and spirit, self-trusting,

self-reliant; and every woman's heart responds to those iron strings.

Every woman hopes to find in the man she loves something big and vast

and eternal in which she can become absorbed, and lose herself. For

every woman has the secret fear that by herself she is nothing, can be

nothing, and has no eternal life except in and through love.

She had loved Westenra from the first with all the wise and foolish

reasons a woman will find for putting her hands under the feet of the

beloved, for his boyish laugh, and the way his hair grew, his witty

tongue, the simplicity of his heart, and the subtlety of his mind; for

his big head and broad shoulders, for the grace and strength of him, for

his curious personal shyness and his wide, impersonal outlook; for the

twist his race had given to his speech, and for his handsome face which

was not handsome at all, but the face of a thinker who has been up

against the hardest problem in the world--ignorance.

These were the things she knew that she loved him for, but she was aware

without going too deeply into the matter that the other and more

important ones that she had long sought were there too. Dimly she knew

that the maternal woman in her, the subconscious mother who seeks for

greatness in the father of her children, was satisfied with Westenra and

that promise of eternity in his eyes. And because of this she was

willing to renounce all that her life had been and might be, to change

all in herself that he did not like, to become of him and for him. She

had always known that a time like this would come, when she would throw

all she had worked for and earned to the winds, for the sake of a man

who wanted her not because she was a famous journalist, but because she

was a woman and the woman for him. But the condition was that he must be

the man for her too. She had waited long for that condition to be

fulfilled, passing over many a fine heart because her own refused or was

unable to give the countersign to his challenge.

And at last the hour had come, as it always does come to those who know

how to wait. From the moment she first spoke to Westenra and looked him

in the eyes she had felt that mystic stirring of flesh and spirit that

comes only once and is so unmistakable. She had realised then that to

have this man always in her life would be to touch the highest peaks of

the far blue mountains of romance. And the moment she realised it she

felt hopeless. For never in her life had she got anything that she

ardently desired. Happiness had evaded her and joy had passed her by.

To know now at last that Westenra loved her, that the greatest desire in

her life was to be fulfilled, seemed too wonderful to be true. The

gratitude that filled her was curious in so clever a woman, and one who

had had many men at her feet; but a childlike humility concerning

herself was one of her sweetest qualities.

In the presence of those she loved she never remembered that she was

famous, gifted, travelled, and honoured, and withal young and

attractive. It always amazed her that any one should find her clever and

charming. And that Westenra, who did not even know or care what she had

done as a journalist, should find her desirable just because she was

Valentine Valdana and a woman was the most amazing and beautiful thing

in the world. It opened life out upon a boundless horizon, and flooded

the future with a love great enough to cast out all devils of the past.

She knelt long by her bed, half-praying, half-pondering on sad things

gone by and glad things to come. Out of it all came a resolve that the

next day she would tell Westenra the whole story of her life of strange

adventure and misery.

There were many things that to speak of would cause her wretchedness,

but it was not the shameful wretchedness of those who, resisting no

temptation, have taken all they wished from life, leaving nothing for

the future but regrets. Her sorrows were sweet and untainted. There

were many things of which perhaps people of hedged-in lives might think

she should be ashamed, but which seemed to her to be natural and simple

and nothing. She had gone up and down the world and seen so much in the

way of suffering, known so many complications of love and life, that

nothing astonished or even shocked her any more. She had been through

the mill and "seen life," as the phrase goes; and whether or not that is

a good thing for a woman, and whether or not the spiritual vision gets a

little dimmed in the process, and the senses a little dulled, is a

matter of opinion. The fact remains that at the age of twenty-six

Valentine Valdana still retained such freshness of heart that she could

kneel for an hour or two at her bedside in a state of contemplative

prayer, unembittered by the past and full of hope for the future.

A witty but unhappy writer whose life proved the truth of his epigram

wrote that "good resolutions are cheques which we draw on a bank where

we have no account." But at twenty-six Valentine Valdana could still,

with serene confidence in her power to honour them, draw cheques upon

this bank of the soul: so perhaps after all life had not done so ill by

her as might have been supposed.

Her life-story was a curiously unusual one. The touch of Orientalism in

her eyes and hair was a legacy from her grandmother, a beautiful

Egyptian girl born in a harem and stolen therefrom by an adventurer who

was deep in the counsels and intrigues of its lord and owner, her

father. The two fled from Egypt to Zanzibar, where, under the

protection of the Sultan, they married and lived, the Irishman making

himself as useful and necessary to the negro Sultan as he had to the

Egyptian chief. The beautiful little harem-born wife from association

with her husband and the few Europeans in the place learned to speak

English, and her only child, a girl who resembled one of the wonderful

tropical flowers she lived among, was brought up in European fashion by

an Irish nurse sent for from Ireland. In time the Egyptian mother died,

and the Irishman, fallen on evil days through Court intrigues and an

affliction of the eyes, was obliged to flee from Zanzibar and make for

the only country where he and his child could keep warm and live

cheaply--Italy. There, the girl, Iolita, learned to perfect a gift of

dancing she had always delighted in, and when later her father became

totally blind and penniless, it was she who bravely maintained the

affair of living for both of them by dancing at the theatres and the

opera until she danced her way into fame.

Child of a passionate love-marriage it was only natural that Iolita too

should follow her heart. In London, at the very zenith of her success

and just when Fate was unrolling before her a vista of luxurious years,

she proved the heritage of her blood by eloping to Africa with the

youngest son of an English peer, a being as romantic and irresponsible

as herself.

Gay Haviland had tried his hand at most things, from Shakespearean

acting in London to horse-breaking in Mexico, before he found his true

_metier_ as a transport-rider on the South African veldt. The home to

which he took his eager-hearted bride was an ox-waggon drawn by a span

of twenty magnificent red bullocks, which earned their living and his by

carrying loads of wool and grain from the Free State and the Transvaal

to the Cape. It was on a St. Valentine's Day from the tent of that

waggon as it lay under the shadow of the Catberg Range, that little Val

first saw the light, and the same tent was the only home she knew,

except for occasional sojourns in Dutch towns, for the first nine years

of her life. From a child's point of view it was an ideal existence,

full of beauty and variety as far at least as scenery was concerned,

adventures with big game, long days of camping on the banks of wild

rivers or in the shade of purple mountains, and an absolute absence of

the tasks and training common to children brought up in the ordinary

way. It is true that at camping times the dancer amused herself by

teaching little Val to read and write in Italian, while the

transport-rider successfully imparted to the child, together with his

poetical if vagabond views of life, a very real love and knowledge of

Literature. For if ever scholar turned gipsy it was Gay Haviland, and

though the book he loved best was Nature, and his library the Open Road,

his waggon-boxes were always well stocked with works of classical and

modern writers.

Val imbibed his tastes and vagabond creeds as a flower imbibes dew, but

for the rest she was as free and idle as a little wild buck prancing

across the veldt in the wake of its mother, and as unthinkingly happy.

With Haviland's tragic death from snake-bite, however, the veldt life

came to a sudden end and passed for ever into the realms of memory,

seeming to Val in the hard years that followed to have been a wonderful

dream, yet remaining always the most poignant and cherished part of her

existence.

Poverty showed its jagged teeth to the beautiful dancer, frightening her

back to Europe, where she essayed to gain her living once more with

flying seductive feet. But her dancing was not what it had been. Ten

years of idle and ideal love on the veldt had spoiled her art, or

perhaps the wife and mother had absorbed it. At any rate she was unable

to step back into the vacancy created when as Iolita Fitzpatrick she had

left the stage for love of Gay Haviland. Other stars had arisen, and

the public had forgotten her. Engagements were difficult to find, and

when found were at best of the second-rate order. Neither help nor

sympathy was forthcoming from the proud English family who, having

always detested poor Gay Haviland's _mesalliance_, absolutely repudiated

any connection with the dancer or her child.

Years of arduous struggle followed during which the two trailed from one

great continental city to another, often miserably poor and in desperate

straits, sometimes perilously near starvation, but thanks to the

generous Freemasonry of Art, and grace to their own happy charm in good

and evil times, never quite without friends, or some last resource. It

may truly be said that Val's education was received in the school of

Life, for she never attended any other; but the love of books inculcated

by her father stayed with her, and because book lovers will always,

whatever their straits, get books, Val was able to educate herself as

many another has done, and done well, by reading. Then, too, with the

open mind of the untaught she received and retained all the beauty and

colour and picturesque event of their wandering Bohemian life, finding

even in their grimmest adventure food for thought and amusement.

When she was fourteen, and Iolita still astonishingly beautiful in spite

of poverty and defeat, an engagement took them to the Argentine

Republic, but ending up disastrously left them stranded and almost

penniless at Buenos Aires. Things were at their darkest when good luck

dawned once more in the shape of Dick Rowan, an old friend of

Haviland's, and who together with the latter had adored the dancer in

the days when she was a star. Rowan was a brilliant but eccentric man of

letters, afflicted by the wanderlust. His adventurous temperament,

irked by life in cities, had driven him forth as a journalist to far

lands, where he had become as famous for his war and political

correspondence as for his dissipated ways and generous heart. He was an

expert on the political situation of various Colonies and smaller

Powers, and whenever little wars were on the carpet there also was

Rowan. In times when wars were not, he occupied himself with the

internal wranglings of Colonial governments. Wherever he could force

his way in he made himself felt. It was not for nothing he was known as

"Gadfly" Rowan. At the period of his re-meeting with Iolita he was

interesting himself in the Transvaal with the affairs of Paul Kruger and

the Uitlander, up to his eyes in political intrigue, and editing a

Johannesburg journal with Imperialistic leanings. His presence in the

Argentine on some business of his own was the veriest accident, but a

happy one for Iolita, for, faithful to his early passion, he was

overjoyed to find her again, and asked nothing better than to take her

burdens upon his shoulders and be a father to Gay Haviland's daughter.

Iolita, on her part, had always felt a great affection for the

journalist. It seemed a pleasant end of weariness to consign her fate

into his eager if improvident hands. So they were married, and the

family of three sailed for Africa, where for the next two years they

spent a busy, happy, and erratic existence together, surrounded by

journalists, politicians, and all the quick wits of the Rand. From the

first Val showed a keen liking which Rowan was swift to foster for

newspaper writing. He took her as his secretary, and taught her on

broad lines all that is most useful for a journalist to know. None knew

better than Dick Rowan how to direct a natural talent for journalism,

and in Val he recognised splendid material, a born vocabulary, a keen

sense of observation, love of phrase, and a knowledge of books and

places. Above all, she was full of ardour for the work. Nothing lacked

but training to apply her genius, and this Rowan, erratic and

irresponsible in all things but his profession, was the best person in

the world to give her.

From being his amanuensis she soon became his assistant. A great

devotion sprang up between the stepfather and daughter. Later, when

Iolita, visiting Durban, died and was buried in that beautiful seaside

town, the two drew closer in their loneliness and sorrow. Val was

eighteen then, and Rowan ageing rapidly, for he always lived every

moment of his life, and always he "poured spirits down to keep his

spirits up." Because of this his energy and brain were both beginning

to fail; and here the value of the hand and head he had trained was

proved. Work was offered to him that he would never have been able to

accept but for Val. It was she who urged him on, worked with him and

for him, repaying her own and her mother's debt by unwearying devotion.

A commission to proceed to Somaliland, a splendid opportunity for glory,

came from a great London Daily, but Rowan's initiative would never have

been equal to it without Val. She not only made him go, but went with

him, and when he fell ill there, and the newspaper correspondence

devolved upon her, as well as the nursing of her stepfather, so well did

she accomplish both, that Rowan got well and she reaped recognition.

For Rowan, rigid as all good writers about the identity of work,

insisted on the authorship of the letters being known. Shyly she

appended "Wanderfoot," the nom-de-plume she had chosen, to her first

unaided work. It looked like a special effort on the part of the god of

irony that before the end of the expedition she nearly lost her feet

through inflammation caused by overwalking.

After Somaliland, commissions came to her singly, but from a sense of

loyalty she would do nothing except in connection with Rowan; so they

worked and travelled together going to different parts of Africa from

the Cape to Egypt, until one day landing in Durban to make a flying

visit to the Transvaal, Rowan paid with dramatic suddenness the penalty

for burning up his brain and liver for years with whiskey and the best

wines.

Val found herself alone in the world, though not helpless, for her own

and Rowan's efforts had given her a weapon with which to fight for and

hold her place among the journalists of the day. But she was only

twenty, and as hopelessly impractical as the conditions of her life and

Rowan's happy-go-lucky methods could make her. He was one of those who

knew no use for money except to make it fly faster than it came, living

gaily ahead of his income to the tune of the old saw:

"Happy-go-lucky,

Penny loaf for twopence,

Got no shoes go without."

Val's journalistic intelligence had been developed at the expense of her

practicability for everyday purposes. She could already make money, but

she had no sense of the value of it. A number of things she had

gathered hi the course of her vivid life could not be tabulated, for

they were intangible, nor valued, for they were priceless; but of common

or garden prudence and horse-sense she possessed no single jot or iota.

What she did possess and wear for all the world to recognise was a

disquietingly attractive appearance, and the fascination that hangs

about the personality of one who is able to _do_ something, and that

something well. To this was now added the wistful charm that sorrow

stamps upon her elect. All those whom Val had loved had left her one by

one. She began to believe herself doomed to loneliness--that she had

but to love to suffer the bitterness of loss. The cerebral hemorrhage

with which Rowan had been smitten had left him a few merciful clear

hours before death, and during that time he had impressed upon her the

wisdom of going straight to England and making the most of his literary

connections there. But, in spite of this injunction, she had lingered

on from day to day in the expensive Durban hotel where he died. She

could not drag herself away from the two graves that lay in the heart of

the town, sheltered by palms and feathery trees, with the naked feet of

Zulus pattering past up and down the Berea hill, and ricksha bells

echoing between the marble crosses and headstones of the dead. She

shrank and faltered from turning her face towards a new life empty of

love.

That was a propitious moment for Horace Valdana to step upon the scene.

Handsome, with the marks of race on him, and no outward sign of his dark

heart, he was of the exact type to attract a romantic girl's interest.

Val, lonely, impulsive, but lacking in judgment, fell in love with the

man she believed him to be, and without hesitation placed her fate in

his hands. There was no one to warn her (and if there had been it is

doubtful whether she would have believed that he was a thorough-paced

blackguard, whose family, sure by bitter experience that he would some

day openly disgrace an old and honoured name, and deciding that it were

better for him to do it in the Colonies than at their door, had financed

him to go abroad and stay there. Africa is full of such--"remittance

boys," ne'er-do-wells, men who have left their country for their

country's good. Most of them, when they arrive at least, have good

manners, often the stamp of a public school on them. Nearly all possess

the charm and guile that are special attributes of the professional

black sheep.

Valdana was a perfect example of this professional black sheep--whom

novelists and playwrights have encouraged into existence--the man who

talks rather sadly about his family never having seen any good in him,

but who, by "carving out a career" for himself means to show them some

day that he is "not such a waster after all!" Any woman of the world

would have seen through him in a very short time; but poor Val was no

woman of the world, only a gifted, romantic girl, with all the worldly

stupidity and shortsightedness of her kind. It should, perhaps, be

counted to Valdana's credit that he married her instead of playing some

trick upon the innocence of which her varied life had not yet robbed

her. But trickery would have meant plotting, and Horace Valdana was too

lazy to plot. Besides, he was well informed enough to know that Val had

value as a wife who could make money. So Val got a real marriage

certificate, and became a real wife, and in a very short time knew the

meaning of real misery. Until then the hard luck and misfortunes which

Fate had dealt her had at least been shared by loyal hearts and faced

with courage and gaiety; but now it was her lot to discover how bitter

sordid poverty can be when shared with a mean and vicious nature that

exacts all and gives less than nothing in the great give-and-take game

of marriage. Valdana darkened life for her and blotted out the stars.

He walked on her illusions and hopes, and threw down her idols. She

sometimes felt as if he had wiped his boots on her soul. Wretchedness

and a child were the outcome of the ill-starred marriage. Still soft

and pliable with youth, she might have forgiven the first for the sake

of the last, but her husband, utterly bored by her innocence and

uselessness, very soon decamped leaving her to shift for herself and the

child as best she might.

It was quite true as has been told that she was utterly useless in the

ordinary way. She had received absolutely no training in the practical

things of life, except of the most rough-and-ready kind. She could

light a camp-fire with any one, and shoot something to cook on it

afterwards, but she was far from knowing as much about domestic life as

even an ordinary Boer girl, and quite unfit to be a poor man's wife in

Africa or anywhere else. The one thing she could do well was to write up

big picturesque events for the newspapers; but such things have to be

sought first and written of afterwards, and now she had a baby to bind

her hands and stay her wandering feet.

There came another dreary era of struggle. Freed of the cankering taint

of Valdana's presence, the young mother plucked up enough courage and

money to get back to England, where she judged her best chance lay of

making a living. But the connections and introductions she had counted

on using there were in the end of very little use to her, for the reason

that she could not now continue her special line of work. There were

still things happening in out-of-the-way parts of the world, but Val

could not leave her young child to go and write about them, and after

one or two offers had been made to her and declined she got no others.

As for the conditions of English life and journalism she knew nothing of

them. Besides, a place in the London journalistic world has to be

worked and waited for on the spot; outsiders are not encouraged, and

have a bad time while trying to push in. When at last she realised that

all she could hope for was an ignominious place in the queue among the

hack writers, the girl proudly buried the name made memorable by

collaboration with Dick Rowan, and disguised under that of Valdana, took

what she could get to keep the wolf from the door. For herself,

travelling on a dark road where all the stars had gone out, she would

have cared little if at this time starvation and an end had come; but

the tiger maternity was awake in her and cried out for the preservation

of little Carmen.

From the first the child had doubled her anxieties by being delicate,

and in England its health did not improve. Many a time in the weary

London months the mother tripped up the journalist just as the path

looked a little clearer or was smoothening out to a surer footing. Many

a promising opportunity of regular work had to be passed by because of

some baby illness that needed all the careful nursing Val could give.

But youth and courage were still on her side; and in her heart the

secret conviction which thrills every mother--that her child is an

important link in the chain of generations, that a woman's career and

ambitions are as nothing compared to the keeping alight of the little

flame which may some day become a beacon to humanity. What mother's

heart has not trembled to this illusion? How many babies would ever

reach maturity if this secret religion did not hold sway in women's

hearts, urging them to sacrifice, pain, drudgery, and self-abnegation?

And after all the struggle was in vain. The baby died, and Val, more

lonely and alone than ever before, wished that she too might die, for it

seemed that life was never to hold anything for her but work. And oh!

the weariness of work that has not love for its compelling force! Oh!

the longitude and lassitude of life without loved ones in it!

Fortunately, something occurred at this time which not only took her

away from the scene of her loss, but occupied her every thought for a

considerable period. The Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shook England to

the heart with various emotions, and called for a great deal of

information that could only be acquired at the scene of operations. The

Editor of the Imperialistic Daily, which had employed Dick Rowan, found

himself keenly regretting the "Gadfly" and his deep knowledge of the

internal workings of the Transvaal Government, then remembered

"Wanderfoot" and her application of a year or so back. A search was

instituted, and within a week Val was sailing for Africa full of

instructions that gave her little time in which to remember the

emptiness of her heart and the dull ache of loss, or anything but the

affair she was sent upon--to get speech of both President Kruger and the

members of the Reform Committee who lay in Pretoria Gaol.

The series of brilliant articles sent by her from Johannesburg dealing

with the reign of terror at that time exercised by Transvaal Boers over

the betrayed and despairing English population; the history, written in

terse, mordant, heart-wringing phrases of that famous trial, when four

of the Reform Committee were sentenced to death, and the rest to "two

years' rotting" in a foul prison; these constituted the first steps in

the ladder by which Valentine mounted alone and unaided, rung by rung,

to journalistic fame. After that no more need to seek work; it sought

her. There were commissions to India, Turkey, Russia, and Mexico, and

with each new adventure were fresh laurels, for her work improved as the

work of a writer can only improve when she gives it her heart and soul

and serves no other god.

Thus, after struggling and climbing practically from the age of fourteen

up the craggy hillside of Fame, she had in her twenty-sixth year reached

a point nearer the top than do most women. True, it was not universal

fame, but the fact remains, that to any one who read with understanding

the British newspapers, her name stood for work both brilliant and

sound, a fine temperament and a great future.

When success first began to come her way, Valdana cropped up again,

smiling and ready to step back into her life. But sorrow had taught Val

a few things and opened her eyes to the real worthlessness of her

husband's character. She recognised coldly and clearly at last just

what he was--a lazy, unscrupulous scoundrel. Even more unforgivable was

the fact that he had not cared a rap whether his child lived or died of

starvation: that she could never forget. Therefore, though she gave him

money, even unto the half of her income, she refused to return to him or

allow him to come back into her life. He became so troublesome,

however, that she was on the point of seeking legal protection from him,

when the Boer war broke out, and in the urgent interests of her

newspaper she was obliged to put private affairs aside, and start

immediately for Africa. After a year there of unceasing work and

travel, she succumbed to a bad illness, resulting from overtaxed energy,

and it was while she lay ill in Cape Town that Valdana made a fresh move

in the game.

It must be mentioned that before his people, realising his lack of all

moral sense, and fearful of future dishonour, had decided to despatch

him to Africa, he was intended for the army, and had been educated and

trained to that end. His parents' decision was a bitter blow to him,

for the picturesque side of army life appealed to him greatly, and he

chose to believe and to frequently air the modest opinion that in him a

very gallant soldier had been lost to England. Now, when in England's

dark hour she called for men to volunteer their services in Africa, came

his chance, and with a promptness he only exhibited in his own

interests, he applied for a commission in one of the corps raised in

London. His application was at first refused, because there were plenty

of good men of tried experience to fill such posts; but a clever use of

his wife's name and work got him into the limelight. He did not even

disdain to make use of her illness, and the fact that she had been

brought almost to death's door in the service of the public. So finally

he got his commission and sailed for the front in a glow of publicity.

Then, for a blackleg and a ne'er-do-well whom no one wanted, he did an

extraordinary and unheard of thing--he died! And not content to merely

die, he did the thing well; nobly and heroically he did it, in company

with a dozen or so men of his troop. They were isolated in a farmhouse,

surrounded by a large number of Boers, and refusing to surrender were

cut up to a last man, and the house set afire over their wounded bodies.

Some grudging curmudgeon had invented a tale to the effect that one of

the band had slunk out, and, deserting his wounded comrades, escaped.

But no one had ever been able to prove the lie, and even the Boers

themselves gave evidence of the splendid courage of the little band, and

especially of their leader, the last to die with a laugh upon his lips.

All England rang with Horace Valdana's name. Val, already bright in the

public eye, had the added lustre of her gallant husband's glory shed

upon her. Shoals of sympathetic letters and telegrams reached her in

Cape Town, and, on the occasion of her return to England, having been

rigidly forbidden by the doctors to continue her war correspondence, she

was met by crowds and cheered to the echo. But both sympathy and cheers

were wasted upon her. She received them coldly and silently, without

tears and without a widow's desolate mien. When it was presently

observed that she also dispensed with the habiliments of wo, and went

about in London as if nothing had happened, she was severely criticised,

and people began to dislike her. Moreover, a mangled history of the

unhappy marriage got out; it was soon known that there had been great

faults on one side or the other. Tales with a tang to them of

Valentine's friendships abroad with well-known men were told in the

clubs, and as the men concerned had mostly died or disappeared, there

was no one on the spot interested or well informed enough to dispute the

truth of them. What was worse, an entirely cruel and untrue version of

her relation to Dick Rowan during their travels and exploits together

was bruited about, though always so carefully that the victim of the

scandal only caught dim echoes of it, and was never able to seize and

nail the lie to the mast. In the end, needless to say, the woman paid.

"Gallant Horace Valdana" got more than the benefit of the doubt as far

as the unhappy marriage was concerned, and his widow was sent to social

Coventry.

Little she cared. The world meant nothing to her. She had wrestled too

bitterly with life to set any undue value on the approval of society,

even had she not possessed a congenital carelessness amounting to

indifference to the opinions of any except those she loved. As long as

those few knew the truth--as they could not help doing, knowing her--and

their love loyally remained unaffected, she gave little heed to calumny;

it was enough for her to realise that she was free at last of Valdana.

She tried not to rejoice too much at that, but rather to weed out from

her heart the last blade of bitterness and scorn of the dead man, so

that the rest of life might be lived unpoisoned by hateful memories.

At this period of vague mental unrest and retrospection, the offer to

her from a famous newspaper to visit America on its behalf came

pleasantly _a propos_. Sick of London and the arid memories it

contained for her, she was thankful to shake its dust from her feet for

a time at least and turn her face to a new and unknown horizon.

And now, during the process of getting into her soul once more the dew

of forgiveness and loving-kindness, Westenra had come marching into her

life, and her heart cried out as the heart of Iole cried out when they

asked her how she knew that Hercules was a god:

"Because I was content when my eyes fell upon him."

CHAPTER IV

A SKELETON AND A SHRINE

"The heart of a pure man is a deep vase."

And while Valentine stayed on her knees thanking God for the happiness

that had come to her, Garrett Westenra was pacing the darkened decks

with misgiving in his heart. The misgiving was not regret. When you

are of those who stand by your given word you do not waste time in

anything so idle as regret. Besides, what had come to pass between

Valentine Valdana and himself seemed a thing so predestined and

inevitable, so unsought by either of them, that it would have been as

vain to regret it afterwards as to have fought against it at the time.

Some one once said of the Irish that they appear to be impulsive, but

are really the most deliberate people in the world. They know long

beforehand what they are going to do, though they perform it at a given

moment with all the appearance of impulse. This was true in a way of

what had happened between Westenra and Valentine. He had known from the

first what was going to happen even when he said in his cabin, "this has

got to stop." He had really put up a hard struggle with Fate, for while

he was certain that Val was the woman originally intended for him, it

seemed that something had gone wrong with the plan. Somehow she had got

lost on her way to him, and life had changed her until she was no longer

the woman he wanted and had dreamed of, though she still resembled her.

He felt as if there was a hole in his nature, in his life, that only she

could fill, that must go unfilled for ever unless he let her in, yet he

wished to keep her out! So he had fought against the thing, but as a

man fights who knows he must be overwhelmed in the end by superior

force. It was that force, something outside himself and far bigger and

stronger, that had been at work when he turned so deliberately and

kissed Valentine's lips. The moment had possessed an extraordinary

enchantment. Never had he known such a magic, glowing sweetness as

surged through his being when she surrendered her lips to his. And a

little later she had strangely said:

"I think this was written from the beginning of things!"

It was indeed so written. None knew better than he who for years had

been haunted by her face. He told her so, or the something that was

outside himself and greater than he told her so.

"I have known you all my life, Valentine. For years I have seen your

face in my dreams. I recognised it the moment I saw you. I always knew

you were somewhere in the world, coming towards me, for me."

And yet he could not feel sure that he loved her! Every word they said

bound them closer. He was as much hers as she was his. Never again

could they be nothing to one another. And yet ... and yet ... was this

love? No answer among the stars nor in the phosphorescent water

flashing past. And if his heart knew the answer it would not speak, but

lay strangely still and sad in his breast. With a mental jerk he forced

his mind to another matter, and one that urgently called for

consideration. In those few magic moments of sweetness drawn from a

woman's lips, the whole current of his life for the next few years had

been changed. The plans he had built up were thrown down and broken.

The big thing starred out for his own special contribution to medical

science had been pushed far back into the future where he could only

reach it after years--instead of going right straight to it now, as he

had meant when he started on this voyage!

Vaguely he had known it must be so if he let Valentine into that empty

place which no woman had ever occupied. The knowledge that he must

sacrifice that ideal of his, must leave following the star to which he

had hitched his car for something else--something of which he did not

know the value, or if it had any value at all--was one of the reasons

that had urged and compelled him in his cabin to fight against that

force which was stronger than himself.

Well! It was over now. The die was cast. All that remained to do was

to rearrange certain circumstances in his life in accordance with this

new plan. The circumstances resolved themselves into the bitter

ungarnished fact that he was not rich enough to marry and still carry on

his fight for science. As a bachelor living with a simplicity that

amounted to austerity, his income, the savings of unceasing labour for

ten years, sufficed. It was not enormous, but it served to relieve him

from the wear and tear of general practice, and allowed him many hours

of leisure in his laboratory. The only hospital appointment he had

retained, on giving up his practice, was one where facilities were

afforded for studying the disease in which he was specially interested.

Thus the main part of his life was spent between the hospital and his

laboratory. He scarcely practised medicine at all in the ordinary way,

except as a consultant on the diseases in which he had specialised. But

now he must return to the old routine of visits and office hours.

Marriage demanded an income, so the laboratory must be pushed into the

background, and a scheme for money-making take the boards!

However, he had realised from the first that marriage entailed this

sacrifice, and with the sweetness of Val's lips, he accepted the

condition. It was too late now to look back to his waiting laboratory,

and unflinchingly he shut down on the thought. That phase of life was

finished with--for some years. He had no right to ask a woman to accept

life in a bachelor's quarters on a bachelor's income just because his

laboratory held for him a dream that might some day crystallise into

Fame. He told himself with gloomy stoicism that women want nearer and

dearer things than fame glimmering at the end of a long vista of years.

He must return to the arena of money-making, beat up his old practice,

get back into the harness he had thrown off little more than a year ago.

It would be difficult at first, but he was not afraid of difficulties.

He flung back his head a little at the thought. Then his mind fell

suddenly busy on a plan that had been suggested to him just before

leaving New York by a clever young physician named Godfrey, a

fellow-student at Columbia. Godfrey had a scheme for a nursing home, and

wanted Westenra to stand in with him on it. The idea was to take a

large house near Central Park, equip and furnish it as a private

hospital with plenty of bedrooms and a good operating-room. There

Westenra could perform all his operations and hand over his patients

afterwards to Godfrey's care, while Godfrey could in like manner hand

over his surgical cases to Westenra. Thus the two would work into each

other's hands in a perfectly legitimate manner, and double their

incomes. It is a favourite method of money-making with New York medical

men, but it had no appeal for Westenra, and he had smilingly told

Godfrey that he was not the man for the business.

"But you are," urged the physician. "You are 'It.' There is no other

fellow in New York to whom I would hand over my cases so fearlessly. And

then, there are very few who could return me such a _quid pro quo_ as

you can."

Which was perfectly true. Westenra's practice when he renounced it had

been very large. Few surgeons had one like it. Certainly it lay among

the working classes. But it is the people of the working classes in New

York who pay their doctors' bills more conscientiously than any other.

Godfrey's practice, on the other hand, lay among the leisured class and

was of a more precarious nature, bringing in large sums at one time and

at another very little. Combining the two practices would undoubtedly

regularise and increase the incomes of both men. Many medical men far

less successful and well-known than Godfrey and Westenra were making

fortunes by this method. However, Westenra, with ambitions very

different to Godfrey's taking shape in his mind, had not thought twice

about rejecting the offer. Now he wondered if it were still open, and

determined to go and see Godfrey instantly on his return.

It was after midnight when he finished his deck-pacing and pulled up at

the smoke-room with the idea of getting a light for a final smoke before

turning in. Being the last night of the voyage many of the men

passengers had stayed up later than usual making merry. However, all

had retired now except a party of four lingering over drinks at a table.

One still shuffled a pack of cards though the game was plainly at an

end; two others smoked idly; all were listening to the gossip of the

fourth, a certain Reeder--a narrow-nosed, cynical fellow who had

something to do with the publishing world, and whose specialty was

retailing scandal about the private lives of writers. He was pleasantly

occupied with his favourite topic when Westenra quietly entered.

"Clever woman, yes. I should say she had cracked or broken most of the

commandments except the eleventh in the course of her career.... I 'll

swear no woman could live with Dick Rowan without chipping the

seventh--even if she did call herself his stepdaughter. Certainly

Valdana was a rotten scamp ... but no doubt he had his little cross to

bear while she was gadding the earth with half a dozen other fellows....

Journalists are gay dogs! ... I remember hearing of her----"

He glanced up to find Westenra staring at him with ice-cold eyes, and

for a moment he faltered, changing colour. The other men's facial

expressions varied from apprehension to a certain degree of jeering

amusement. They were all aware of Westenra's constant companionship

with the most attractive woman on the boat. For days the matter had

been a topic for speculation among the first-class passengers. However,

Reeder was not without a dash of cur-dog pluck, and with an effort

regained his composure and essayed to continue his story, though now he

was wise enough to employ a certain amount of discretion.

"I remember hearing of the lady of whom we were speaking----"

"Be good enough to leave that lady out of your vile smoke-room

scandals," said Westenra quietly--so quietly that a pistol shot could

not have been more effective.

Reeder moistened his lips.

"Indeed! And why?"

"Because otherwise I shall be obliged to knock your lies back down your

throat."

"Lies?"

"Yes, lies!" Westenra came close and bulked over him, ready to eat him

up if he said another word. He would have liked to beat the fellow's

brains out on the spot. But Reeder like a wise man climbed down

hastily, ate up his scandal, apologised with profusion, and slunk away.

In a few moments Westenra had the smoking-room to himself. But he could

not breathe in it--even when he returned to the deck and his pacing,

with all the winds of the Atlantic at his disposal, there did not seem

sufficient air for him to breathe with ease. His tongue was dry and the

taste of life was bitter in his mouth.

Now he knew why his heart lay still in his breast and gave no answer

when he had asked if this were love! The empty place in his nature, in

his life, in his heart, was a shrine--and Valentine Valdana could never

fill a shrine. She was charming and delightful, she called for pity and

for chivalry, she might be a bright comrade on a weary way, there was a

magic sweetness in her lips ... but she would never fill a man's shrine!

----

A few hours later the big ship slid peacefully into home waters, the

pale gold sunlight of a September morning flickering delicately on the

waves, piercing the lavender-tinted land mists and gilding the torch in

Liberty's upraised hand.

Westenra, somewhat haggard-eyed, paced the deck once more, but he was

not alone. Mrs. Valdana, fresh as the morning itself, looking rather

like a wild violet in a swathed purple cloak and velvet hat of the same

colour crushed down on her hair, took the deck with long gliding steps

beside him.

With the exception of an old lady sitting huddled in rugs by the

companion-way, and a stony-eyed New Yorker gazing fixedly over the

taffrail at the approaching shores of "God's own country," they were

alone. Every one else seemed to be hustling luggage or busy downstairs

with the port officers.

In her hand Mrs. Valdana swung her rope of luminous beads. They were

queer pale green things almost as large as the ordinary "white alley"

marble; too delicate and light to be of stone, there was yet something

so natural about them it was impossible to suppose them a composition.

They reminded Westenra a little of his pale sea-palaces, seeming to be

lighted from within by some pearly luminous light, soft yet strong. Each

bead had on it a perfect little picture painted with the minute and

exquisite art of the Chinese. On one a flight of tiny blue birds, on

another a delicate spray of mimosa, a branch of peach blossom, a

snow-peaked mountain, a scarlet-legged flamingo, a still blue lake, a

volcano, a tree bursting into bud, a line of sapphire hills. One could

spend a day examining them, for there were a hundred and fifty, each

more wonderful than the others. Westenra, who had never seen her without

them round her neck, asked her now why she was not wearing them.

"I hope never to wear them again," she said. "They are my comfort beads,

and only to be worn in time of unhappiness. An old exiled Russian gave

them to my mother in Spain saying, 'If ever you or your children are in

great misery these beads will help you.' And it was quite true. She

always wore them when she was in deep trouble and they gave her comfort.

Mr. Bernstein, that nice French Jew who sits the other side of me at

table asked me the other day to let him know if I ever want to sell

them. But I shall never want to--they are so beautiful, aren't they?"

She drew them rippling through her fingers. She said "aren't" like the

people of his country, an inheritance from her Irish grandfather

perhaps, together with the superstition that assigns to inanimate things

the power to do good or ill!

"I should n't be too certain of not wearing them again," said Westenra,

smiling a little grimly, for vaguely he knew that the woman who married

him might very well at times have need for comfort.

"I know," she said gravely. "It is only when one loves that one

realises how one may fall upon misery at any moment. The world seems

suddenly to turn into a place of pits and precipices. Oh, Garrett! oh,

Garrett! If ever I were to lose you now I have got you--!" She turned

burning eyes to him and in them a glance that held little of the

conventional and much of some primeval element. It warmed Westenra

through to his heart and loosened the grip of an icy hand that had held

him all night. After all there was something of greatness in this

woman's love!

Suddenly the brightness slipped out of her face. She touched his hand a

little tremulously, and her eyes took on the vague far-seeing look of

the Celt. She hated to open up those sad graves of the past on this

sunny morning--the happiest of her life. But she must carry out her

resolution made the night before. Afterwards the bright breeze would

blow her words away and drown them far behind in the deep Atlantic,

where they would be forgotten for ever.

"Garrett."

He put his hand on hers.

"You must call me Joe. It was always my home name."

Curiously enough, it was a name very dear to her. One of the few women

she had loved, Lily Hill, had been by her nicknamed "Joe" and always so

called.

"I am so glad. I love that name. And you must call me Val, Joe."

"Val," he said gently.

"I want to speak to you, Joe--to tell you things about myself. You know

so little of me--it is good of you to take me on trust like this--but I

must tell you all about my wandering, vagabond life, my wretched

marriage."

His arm stiffened under her hand. They had reached the stern-end of the

deck, and instead of turning again he drew her to the taffrail; they

stood facing the vast waste of heaving violet waters that lay in their

awake.

"Leave it all behind you, as we are leaving that troubled sea," he said

quietly. He seemed to have grown paler, and his mouth looked hard for

all his gentle words.

"If you wish it?" she faltered.

"I do wish it."

"Oh, how glad I should be! There has been much in my life that I loved,

Joe--my work has been dear to me and my wanderings. But there have been

bitter things--and my sorrows--they hurt, they hurt--it makes me sick to

drag them up from their graves, like sad little corpses into the

sunlight of our happiness."

It made him sick too. It was bitterer to him than death that in the

life of this woman of his dreams there should be such graves that feared

the light. He too feared the miserable process of exhumation. God knew

what ghastly unforgettable bones might be turned up! He did not realise

that through this very cowardly fear he was building up a skeleton to

stand between them, clanking its bones in their dearest moments.

"Leave them all, Val," he spoke violently. "God knows I want to know

nothing--only to make the condition with you that you forget all your

life until we met--that you pull up every old root--burn every boat?"

"Yes, yes, I will, Joe--and leave the ruins of them behind us in that

troubled sea, while you and I sail on in this ship with our love and our

dreams bound for the Islands of the Blest."

Her eyes full of hope glimmered up into his.

"You must never give a backward glance," he said harshly. "Never want

to return to journalism or meet again the people who have been in your

old life. That is my condition. _You must leave all for me_. Is it

too much to ask?"

"No! No!"

Perhaps he forgot Who it was that first made that command to men and

women alike, and Who with eternity to offer found few to accept.

The "all" life has meant to a woman of twenty-six is not so easy to

leave behind, however much she may wish to desert and forget it. You

cannot leave experience behind nor fill the holes it has made in your

heart. You cannot desert the scars life has given you, nor divest

yourself of her compensating gifts. Moreover, Valentine was a woman who

had triumphs to brandish as well as sorrows; laurels and hard-wrung

victories to flag over the graves of defeat. Yet none more ready than

she to believe that it could be done, that love could wipe out suffering

and scars and make the face of life to shine anew like the face of a

little child. For love she was ready to forswear Art, her profession,

her friends, her past, and forget that she ever had a career. Westenra

could not ask too much of her. Gladly she turned her back upon the

past, and her face to the future, and gladly she embraced the conditions

Westenra attached. As she walked the decks of her dream ship America

seemed to her to beckon with the fair alluring hand of the unknown. The

grim, undecorative buildings on the Hudson's banks were faintly veiled

in a delicate haze composed of lilac smoke and autumn sunshine, and for

the moment New York's lack of resemblance to an Island of the Blest was

not too pronouncedly marked.

----

Westenra's plan was that she should marry him at once. He would not

even discuss the idea of her going back to London to arrange her affairs

and collect her possessions. She must have no affairs from thenceforth

but his, no possessions except those he bestowed. He was afraid of any

trace or shadow of that past life of hers on their future

together--afraid (though he hardly acknowledged it in thought) of the

mud from the old paths, the vulture-like shadows that had hovered about

the woman of his dream. In the magic discovery of their mutual

attraction he had forgotten these things for a while, but too long had

he lived with them for them not to recur and haunt his memory. Already

the skeleton, whose sketchy outline had appeared to him in the

smoke-room of the _Bavaric_, and been filled in later on the decks of

the same ship, was beginning to clank its bones! But Val had no

suspicion of its existence. She only thought Westenra jealous with the

natural jealousy of a man for the life he has not shared with the

beloved. She could love with fierce jealousy herself, and so

understood. Entering into the spirit of the thing, she cast from her

with all the ardour of the unpractical every possession of the past,

every memory sweet or bitter he had not shared. She made, by letter,

all arrangements for the letting of her London flat, until such time as

her lease would have run out and her property could be sold. But apart

from some good curios and beautiful things she had picked up in her

travels, she owned very little. As always, she was living up to every

penny of her income, and her assets were practically nil. Her name was

her chief asset, and she could never use that more.

She was obliged to wring from Westenra permission to write to Branker

Preston, her agent through whom she conducted all business affairs and

signed her contracts. Consent was only gained by the fact that if

Preston were not communicated with in order that he might propitiate the

London Daily, in whose interests she had come to America, something very

unpleasant and public might happen in the way of a lawsuit for a broken

contract. As such an affair would have been highly obnoxious to

Westenra, he gave in, but his dogged and bitter opposition revealed to

Val how deeply he felt on the subject of her past life, and stayed her

from making a further request that was very urgent in her heart.

She had a woman friend, Harriott Kesteven, who was very dear and near to

her, and she felt a great longing to let Harriott know of her changed

life. She possessed a keen appreciation of the claims and rights of

friendship, and it hurt her deeply to think how Harriott would suffer

over her mysterious disappearance from the known paths of her old life.

It was very feminine, too, that longing to share the secret of her

happiness with another woman, though it was only with Harriott that she

wished to do it. To let any one else into the wonder and beauty of it

all would have meant to spoil what was only for Westenra and herself.

However, she resisted the longing to communicate to Harriott even

indirectly what had happened. After all, that Westenra wished for

secrecy was reason enough to pit against a whole world of anxious and

loving friends!

And so they were married in a passionate hurry, and went away to spend a

few days together before starting the affair of house-hunting. Westenra,

whose vacation was already over, could not afford the time for a

honeymoon in the Adirondacks which he would have loved Val to see in all

the glory of autumn. They went no farther afield than a little house on

the edge of Bronx Park, whence, favoured by mild and lovely weather,

they adventured forth daily into the beautiful natural woods that skirt

this northern point of New York.

To Val at least those were flawless days. For once in her life she had

got what she wanted, and the gift had not turned to dust and ashes in

her hand. Happiness and gaiety radiated from her, and Westenra, caught

in the rays, reflected them back, so that no one would have guessed that

he was not so happy as she. Though, indeed, for a man who has the

perilous gift of seeing through life's red and golden apples to the

little spot of decay at the core, he was extraordinarily content. And at

last now that she was his wife he took her into his confidence about his

life and profession. Only to a certain extent, however, for he was a

deeply reserved man, and constitutionally unable to lay his heart and

inner thoughts bare (allowing that such a thing were desirable) to even

the best beloved of eyes. That he hid this intense reserve behind frank

manners and a witty tongue was a characteristic of his race. The Irish

are the jesters of the world, but their laughter is a screen for their

hopeless hearts and the deep melancholy of their souls.

Marriage is full of surprises, and not always happy ones. This barrier

of reserve that she soon divined in her husband was one of the things

that amazed Val. Her own heart was a book ready to open at the touch of

love. True, some of its pages were scrawled and scribbled, blotted too

in places and stained with tears; but there it was, ready to fly open to

a trusted hand. It was not her fault that Westenra had refused to turn

up those pages, but rather at his wish that they had been sealed and

locked away. Well! that was the book of yesterday. She had begun

another since they met, and there, at least, he might turn the pages

when he listed and read without misgiving.

But she longed and wished that he would trust her wholly too. Would let

her, if not into the secret chambers of his heart, then at least past

its outer portals. Spite of his frank, gay ways with her she knew well

by the subtle and winding paths in which the minds of women travel, that

behind his deep grey-green eyes there was another Garrett Westenra whom

she had not yet reached. The knowledge amazed her but did not daunt

her. Neither did it spoil her honeymoon. Her faith in love was of the

quality that moves mountains. In the meantime life was passing dear and

sweet.

But it was characteristic of each of them that until the first days in

New York Val did not even know that Westenra was a surgeon. It sounds

absurd and improbable and everything that is unpractical; but Val was

all of these things, and the fact is she had never given the matter five

minutes' thought. She knew he could do something and do it well: that

was written all over the man, and that was the only thing of importance.

Once or twice, struck by his logic and extraordinary faculty for stating

cases briefly and clearly, she had vaguely wondered if he were a lawyer.

It might perhaps be supposed that after her unhappy experience with

Valdana she would have exercised a certain caution in the choice of a

second husband. Not so--Valentine's was a nature that could never learn

caution. What she had learned, however, was a better judgment of men,

and she could not have been imposed upon twice by a man of Valdana's

stamp. Years of intimate friendship with men who "did and dared" had

taught her to know unerringly a "good" man when she met him, meaning by

"good," a man who worked with his brain and heart at some business, or

even game, in which his principles and honour were involved. In Westenra

she recognised the type instantly. This was no man shirking the battle

of life and seeking a woman to support him!

Therefore, if Westenra had announced his profession as that of a

travelling tinker, she would have been quite undismayed. Indeed, life

as the wife of a travelling tinker whom she happened to love would have

suited her very pleasantly.

As for Westenra, it has been stated that one of his principles was never

to give to fellow-travellers information about himself that did not

concern them; and on the ship, right up to the last night, he had

essayed to look upon Val as nothing more than a fellow-traveller;

therefore, his profession was no concern of hers. Afterwards, when it

was so swiftly settled that she was to become his wife, the information

did concern her, he made her free of it. She accepted it as she

accepted all things concerning him, with ardour and pride. It seemed to

her that she could not have chosen any more desirable profession in the

world for her man. She had known several doctors abroad, clever and

delightful men, but none of them had happened to be married, so she had

no idea as to what the special functions and duties of a doctor's wife

might be. Whatever they were she was quite ready to tackle them with a

stout heart for the sake of Garrett Westenra.

He had taken her to see his bachelor quarters in the deeps of the city

where for years he had lived and worked. They were simple almost to

bareness, but Val liked them well. They reminded her of her own

quarters in London, and she foresaw that with one good maid she would be

able to run her little home without the risk of Westenra's ever finding

out what a bad housekeeper he had married. It came as a shock to hear

that he was considering the matter of leaving these rooms to take a

house somewhere else, near Central Park for choice, where he could have

a fine operating-room and good accommodation for cases after operation.

It must of necessity be a very large house, with an efficient staff of

servants and nurses attached. The idea of collaboration with Godfrey had

been rejected. He had decided to stand or fall on his own merits.

"Would you mind very much, dearest?" he asked, somewhat diffidently. "I

know it is too bad to ask you to make your home in a sort of hospital,

but it is for both our sakes. The only way surgeons can really make

good on the money side is by having their own place for operations."

Something in her dismayed glance made him add slowly:

"But if you dislike the thought, we can have a home apart from it...."

"No, no," she said quickly. "Of course I don't dislike it. I want to

be right in your life, Joe, whatever you undertake."

Nevertheless her heart sank into her boots. Not for lack of courage,

but from a thorough knowledge of her own inefficiency for so responsible

a position as she might presently find herself occupying.

It was their last day in the woods. The late afternoon sunlight

flickered on them through the half-stripped trees, and leaves fluttered

and rustled all about the open glade where they sat. Val, with her

camping instinct, had lighted a little fire of twigs, just for the

pleasure of the sweet pungent odour of green burning and the sight of

smoke curling blue against the silver sky. This sudden news of

Westenra's sounded in her ears like the knell of all camp-fires, and

sunshine in woods and wild places. Panic seized her vagabond soul.

"Does the money side matter so much, Joe?" she faltered.

He smiled a little grimly. It had never mattered much to him, but she

could not know that.

"It has to matter in New York. The man who does n't rustle for the

dollars, and rustle successfully, gets left."

She looked at him wistfully. It seemed to her that she did not know

this rustler for dollars very well. It must be part of his hidden self

that he would not let her reach.

"I am not a rich man, Val. I told you that from the first, did n't I?"

He spoke coldly. "I cannot afford to disdain the opportunity that my

reputation affords for money-making,"--he had almost added "now," but

bit back the word in time. He was far from intending her to realise

what a change his marriage involved, what a sacrifice of plans and

principles it meant for him to be emerging once more from the laboratory

to take part in the scramble for dollars.

CHAPTER V

SQUIRREL IN A TRAP

"Do not thou make answer to an angry master."

"O speak that which is soft while he is uttering that which

is of wrath."

_Maxims of Art_.

The first thing, then, after leaving their honeymoon woods, was to find

a suitable house for the new venture. In the press of work that greeted

him on his return, Westenra found it impossible to give much time to

house-hunting, so this business practically devolved upon Val. Behold

her, then, utterly inexperienced in the conditions of American life, and

without a glimmering of intuition as to the requirements of an

up-to-date nursing home--whose ideal was a life in the wilds, sharing

the sunshine or the shade of a tree with her beloved, whose domestic

requirements vaguely included a pot and a blanket, who would have been

more at home on the veldt tracking a buck for dinner--rushing from one

end to the other of the most neoteric city in the world, inspecting

houses with "every modern improvement," weighing the advantages of

furnace-heating as compared to steam-heating, examining "open-work

plumbing" and "bathroom extensions," peering into kitchen ranges and

domestic offices, interesting herself in the things from which all her

life instinct had bade her fly, and from which she had fled!

But love was hers and a whole-hearted devotion to Westenra's interests

that even he could not quench, though he did his best. Nowhere could

she discover a house that pleased him. Every time she found something

she thought ideal, he would emerge for a few hours from his office and

completely demolish her hopes. Picking her find to pieces point by

point, he would thereafter retire and leave her to commence the search

anew.

Few things are more wearing to body and soul than a prolonged course of

house-hunting in a large city. There is nothing in the process to feed

the soul and everything to tire the body. At the end of a month Val's

spirits were several degrees below zero, and though her smile was

undaunted, there were signs of physical fatigue on her that did not

escape her husband's practised eye. He rarely saw her now except in the

evenings, for always with the resolution to shut down firmly on his old

life and its (for the moment) vain aspirations, he decided against going

back, even temporarily, to his bachelor quarters and letting her share

them, and had instead taken quiet rooms uptown, near the locality in

which he hoped to find a house. Here he sought her whenever he could

escape from the practice which he was now nursing with assiduity, but it

was nearly always late at night, and at such times she was nearly half

dead with fatigue, although she tried to disguise the fact under a gay

air. Westenra's heart was sore for her, but he could not quite

understand the position. He had realised that, in spite of her nerves,

she was anything but a delicate woman, and it puzzled and vaguely

disappointed him that she should knock under so soon. He knew nothing

of the wandering dryad in her nature with whom she struggled in the

house-hunt, trying to school it to the prospect of life in a nursing

home; how the clang and clamour of New York's street cars, railways, and

fire-bells dazzled and wearied her; how the actual effort to bear with

these things and keep her trouble to herself wore her down. In a very

few weeks more, however, a reason that sufficed him for her fatigue was

made clear. She told him one night as they drove home from the

Metropolitan Opera House. They had locked up the house-hunting problem

for a few hours and forgotten it in the enchantment of a Beethoven

concert. With the glamour of the 17th Sonata still on them, making

stormy echoes in their hearts, she leaned her face to his in the

darkness, and gave him the dear and wonderful news.

"Since when?" he asked, thrilling into tenderness and some other

poignant sense he had never known in all his life.

"Since the first moment, I think," she whispered laughingly--"an

impetuous Irishman anxious to get into the thick of the fight!"

"How can you be sure it is n't an Irish girl?"

"Oh, I know--I know. God will give me a son, Joe."

After that, however important the matter of his private hospital, it was

far more important that the arduous house-hunt should come to an end.

Besides, they were both sick to death of the whole thing. So, in a kind

of despair at last they decided on a house which, though it had a very

charming exterior, was inferior in many ways and less suitable to their

purpose than some of those rejected earlier in the search. A five-story

residence, it stood towards the Broadway end of 68th Street, and had a

beautiful flight of marble steps leading up to its front door--which was

something to the good; but there was a great deal in the way of

alteration to be done before it was suitable for a hospital, and the

cost of this had to come from Westenra's private purse. However, Val

seemed to be drawn to it for some vague, mystic reason. Fortunately,

Westenra could not look into her mind, or he would have discovered that

she was congratulating herself on the bird songs they would hear in the

early mornings from Central Park close by. That might have irritated

Westenra, for, though he loved birds as much as any one, he did not

allow them to sway his destiny.

Of course, being two thoroughly unpractical and inexperienced people,

they were entirely at the mercy of that most astute person in the world,

the American Real Estate Agent, and got the worst possible terms. The

arrangement about reparations was unsatisfactory, the lease too long,

the rent higher than any one else would have paid. Dimly they knew

this, and dimly they knew it would always be so, and that it was a pity

that one or other of them was not practical and clever in a worldly

sense. Brilliant people often feel this helpless sense of foolishness,

and it irritates them so much that they long to stab somebody for it

(and they usually stab the person they love best, with the cruel little

knives lovers keep specially for each other!). Val remembered that

Westenra in the early days on the ship had told her that the happiest

marriages he had known of in America were between Irish and Germans, the

Teuton common sense and equability acting as ballast to Celtic

flightiness. And the remembrance vexed her. She saw that as ballast

she was of no more use than a red robin. She wondered if Westenra

realised it, and one day when the painful affair of furnishing was going

forward she could not help saying:

"Oh, Joe; if I were only a nice, stolid, lumpy German, I should know by

instinct what to buy for the dining-room and kitchen."

Joe froze slightly. Prescribing wives for your compatriots is one

thing; taking the same prescription is another, and as it happened he

was antipathetic to Germans. Nevertheless, since Val had put the idea

in his head, he did think that a little _hausfrau_ knowledge of what was

fitting furniture for a doctor's dining-room and kitchen would not have

been out of place in a doctor's wife, and he said somewhat dryly:

"Could n't we try and strike a note somewhere between stolid and

fantastic?"

He was thinking of the furniture, but Val received the impression that

her taste was being indicted. She took the little dagger to her breast

with a quivering smile, and it hurt her deeply because she knew that her

ideas on furnishing were indeed fantastic, though beautiful.

Unfortunately they were all she had, and she was obliged to use them,

for Westenra had none at all. He only knew there was something wrong

with the furnishing of the living rooms in his private sanatorium. Had

he ever lived in the Bohemia of big cities he might have recognised that

his drawing, dining, and reception rooms looked like a series of

charmingly arranged _ateliers_. But, fortunately, he did not know it.

He only saw that the bills were amazing, and that was bad enough, for

the fact that nothing but the most modern and expensive appliances and

fittings would satisfy him for his operating-room had already accounted

for a large outlay of money. The house needed a good deal of renovating

before it could be used, and by the time they were settled in their new

home there was a hole in his capital large enough to sail a ship

through, and several rents and tears in the magic veil of comradeship

with which the two had hoped to wrap themselves from the world.

Then began a weary search through guilds and registries and bureaus, for

a staff of capable servants. This, of course, was Val's exclusive

affair. Westenra neither could nor would be beguiled into it, so alone

she wrestled with the problem, and made acquaintance with false

references and all the guile and tricks of the servant class. For the

American domestic, who is not American at all, but of every other

nationality under the sun, is truly the worst in the world. When she is

honest she is a fool; when she is competent she is a knave. The mistress

takes not her choice but her chance of one or the other; and in either

case she pays.

After a long series of "weekly trials" which usually ended in a day or

two with a demand for unearned wages, impudence, and vulgar insults from

the "weighed and found wanting," a _menage_ was eventually established,

comprising a red-haired cook, who, under a bland and benevolent

exterior, was a calculating robber of the most cold-blooded description,

and who, while despising her mistress for a "soft fool of a greenhorn,"

congratulated herself on the circumstance and resolved to take full

advantage of it; a couple of housemaids one of whom was raw from minding

goats on the Kerry hills, and the other recommended herself by a modest

demand to be allowed to go to confession every Friday night. (The last

had subsequently to be dismissed in spite of her holiness because,

according to her story, she had been "ordered by her dochtor" to take an

egg in brandy for her breakfast every morning and several times during

the day, and faithfully followed the prescription except that she

omitted the egg.) There was also a furnace and general utility man who

fought with both cook and maids, and in the end stole Westenra's bicycle

from the cellar; and a laundry woman who by arrangement "took two

dollars a day," and appeared to spend most of her time seated at the

kitchen table taking heavy meals as well.

Fortunately event and sequence rarely occur together, so that Val was

not flooded out all at once by these disquieting things; they fell upon

her from day to day like the gentle drips of water that wear away the

stone. But life began to press and gibber in a strangely nightmare

fashion round the vagabond journalist, and sometimes there would creep

into the smoke-coloured eyes that loved so much to look upon colour and

wide spaces, and "watch the silences," an expression slightly

reminiscent of a wild thing caught in a trap--a trap full of pots and

pans and daily menus, and weekly bills, and fighting cooks and shirking

housemaids, and domestic problems,--such a trap as almost every woman

finds herself caught in when she engages upon the career of wife to a

professional man, and one in which few find success unless specially

endowed with an ability for management, economy, and order. Poor Val's

endowments were not of this kind. Well she knew it, but would not admit

the fact even to herself.

She had dreamed of a little space of time between the date of their

settling in with their servants about them and the opening of the

hospital--a little space like the clearing in the midst of a tangled

forest, where she could pitch a tent and rest for awhile with the

thought of her wonderful happiness that Westenra's child was to be hers.

She meant to recapture into their lives the magic air of that happy week

in the Bronx woods. Once more they would adjust and gather about them

the fabric of comradeship and love that was to be the veil between

themselves and the world, and that somehow in the last few weeks of

rushing turmoil had been mishandled and torn.

But the dream was vain. No sooner did the domestic mechanism of the

house begin to work, creaking and straining like an old ship with an

amateur hand at the wheel, when cases for operation were hurried in, the

place was filled with nurses, other doctors and students bustled up and

down the stairs, and there were endless comings and goings of patients'

friends. The strangely disquieting scent of ether came stealing down

like a living presence from the upper floor into the atmosphere of home

Val was trying to establish in the rooms she and her husband occupied in

the big house. It seemed to her, too, that other shadows came in and

lingered around; that when operations were in progress pain-troubled

spirits wandered through the house, hiding in corners, waiting

fearfully. In the fight against these illusions, as well as with the

complicated problems of housekeeping and management, life began to

resolve itself into something very like Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens."

The burden of fifty-dollar-a-week nurses, rude and arrogant and of a

self-reverence amazing, who fought like cannibals with the servants, and

made turmoil all round them except in the splendid silence of the sick

room. The burden of telephone bells that sounded from morning till

night with the injurious sayings of waiting patients. The burden of

bitter cold, as the winter came on, and Val suffered as only a tropical

bird or flower can suffer in a bleak climate--the grim December dawns

when the quiet of three feet of snow lay on the city, unbroken save by

the jingle of the bells on the milkman's sleigh, or the shriek of the

first car upon the frozen metals! The burden of the elevated railway in

the avenue close by; the hideous rush of it through the night, like some

monstrous winged beast on a ceaseless quest for its prey--the ferocity

of its approach, the sinister melancholy of its receding cry! The

burden of "bathroom extensions" where the water-pipes burst every night,

dislocating the business of the house for hours--of frozen cisterns, and

New York plumbers! Of a cellar furnace that would not heat the house,

or, acting on some aesthetic principle of its own turned the bathrooms

into ovens, while the patients were in cold-storage and in the

operating-room the sponges froze to the tables! The burden of snow on

the sidewalk, and policemen knocking at the front door to say it must be

cleared, or that some one had fallen down and broken something, and

compensation would have to be paid later by the householder!

The burden of a beloved man who, when things went wrong in office or

operating-room, came roaring like a tiger in pain to his mate. For

alas! Garrett Westenra was no Angel in the House! That was one of the

strangest of all burdens to be borne, for Val always wanted to laugh at

it, and yet she knew it was no laughing matter. Westenra at work and

Westenra at play were two very different persons.

Val had been aware from the moment of their return to New York of a

great nervous change in her husband's mentality. It seemed to her that

as soon as they got into their new home he became all nerves and

torment, and difficult and exigeant as a child. It had not taken her

long to find that he possessed all the easily roused devils of the

easy-going Irishman. At first she was amazed by this discovery, then

confused, but in the end she loved him the better for it. Only it

always seemed to her madly funny that a man with such width and height

of mind should be no better than a cross-grained baby about some of the

ordinary vexing trifles of everyday life. It was hard to believe that a

medical scientist of the first water could fall into a state of fury

over a wrongly entered telephone message, a mislaid stethoscope, or

because a careless housemaid had misplaced something in his office; that

a man who had nothing small or mean about him should swear vividly over

the fact that some one had put a used tampon into his waste-paper basket

instead of burning it or thrown a burnt-out match into his fireplace.

There was a dumb-waiter that travelled on a rope up and down between

Val's sitting-room on the first floor and a little surgery at the back

of Westenra's consulting-room, and never a day passed but that rope was

rattled violently for Val to come to her little opening and receive some

furious complaint concerning a negligent maid or a stupid nurse. Many a

time and oft Westenra's special swear--a peculiar combination of his

own--rang up the shaft.

"Hell's blood and blazes! What has that girl from the Kerry hills done

with my stethoscope? How dare she touch it? She must have touched

it--it's not on my desk.--Where are those No. 1 bandages?--Who has moved

my note-book?--Will you find out from Nurse Soames why there are no

tampons made?--Hell's bells!--Is this a doctor's house?--What kind of a

doctor's house?"

The dumb-waiter travelled no farther than Val's room, and she issued

orders that no one was to answer the rattle of the rope but herself.

She realised that it was Westenra's safety-valve in moments of intense

irritation. It gave her a spasm of painful merriment, even in the midst

of her greatest weariness and worries, to hear her signal to come to the

shaft and receive the storm. Later, when the stress of the day was over,

she might laugh at him, and he, first furious, then ashamed, would

finally laugh himself and beg her pardon like a generous and

hot-tempered boy. But at the time she always gravely listened, and

without comment put the trouble right as swiftly as she could. She

realised only too clearly that the hospital was on his nerves as well as

her own, and that his irritation came from a multiplicity of cares

pressing on him, rather than from the one small incident that caused the

explosion. Indeed, life was pressing hard on Westenra. He was working

like a dog, and the dollars were rustling in, but the sound of their

rustling gave him no great joy. His heart was elsewhere, in other work

which must stand still, or perhaps, which was worse, be done by some one

else. The hospital hemmed him in it too. He, quite as much as Val,

felt caged. His work, his private life, all his interests for the

moment seemed narrowly centralised into one street, one house, an affair

of grubbing within four walls. Something in him rebelled at that, and

not less because he himself had so arranged it. It irked him terribly

to be mixed up with the machinery of this hospital, and his reserved

nature chafed under the lack of privacy in the place that should have

been his home. There were nurses everywhere. Val and he were never

together for five minutes without being intruded upon by some one

wanting something. Val had no control over the nurses; they did and

said what they chose, having fear of no one but the doctor. He knew she

had trouble with them every day, but he would not go into the matter.

It was not his province to wrangle with women; he had told her so from

the first when she came to him for advice. She must manage that part of

the scheme by herself, he said; he had his own share of trouble and

could not undertake hers as well. She had recoiled wonderingly before

his unsympathetic attitude, but never again worried him about anything

in the house. But he was aware that she was having a stiff time, and

from his heart he pitied her. But what was to be done? They were in it

now for loss or gain. His fortune was pledged to this thing and they

had got to do or die by it. And he did not mean it to be die! Westenra

was no quitter. It hurt Val to see the way he worked. She had never

realised before what a dog's life is a doctor's. Her husband was at

every one's beck and call but her own, and never could be sure of a

peaceful hour to himself.

In her own way she worked even harder than he, and it was a

heart-breaking thought that with it all she was not making a success of

the place. Though money was coming in fast, it flowed out still faster

through her incompetent fingers. The problem of how to make things pay

was a black beast which she fought by day and wrestled with in nightly

dreams, and the more she fought and wrestled the more it grinned and dug

its malignant claws into her heart. Even courage and ardour cannot

overcome inexperience and triumph over disability. Despair came often

to sit with her and whispered that this was not her place, and _here_

would never be laurels for her. But she did not want laurels for

herself--only for Westenra; and the more despair filled her the more she

loved her big difficult Irishman, whose nerves and torment and prevision

for the rottenness of life's rewards nearly drove her crazy.

Bills were another burden heavy in the bearing. Like all good men,

Westenra was "tight with money." He never said a word when Val with

heaving heart produced her weekly pile, large as a roll of drugget, but

what he left unsaid during the short interval between sighting the sum

total and producing his cheque-book would have filled a library.

They were always double what they should have been, those bills, and

triple what they would have been with an experienced woman at the head

of things: he knew it and she knew it; and they thought of the stolid,

lumpy German, and sometimes they spoke of her and of red robins that

were no good as ballast! And she felt as if she were drawing his

heart's blood, and so did he. Not that he was mean--far from it; only

he realised that his was not the money-making head, and he suffered from

the fear all brain-workers know--that their money-making capacity may

give out at any time.

"Simple people like you and me can never make fortunes, Val," he would

say sadly, "the only thing for us is to hang on tight to what we have

come by so hardly." But when he adjured her earnestly to "try and

economise," her face became as haggard as if he had thrust a dagger into

her, so that he made haste to add:

"I know you do, darling. It is only that I 've got into the habit of

saying it--forgive me!"

She forgave him gladly, and lay awake more than ever thinking out

impractical plans for economising. She hated to take the dollars that

he had sweated for as only doctors and treadmill prisoners can sweat, to

bestow them on insolent cooks who stole, housemaids who drank and

shirked their duties, tradesmen who took advantage of her "English

accent" to charge her twice as much as they would charge other people.

When she found that almost every good American housekeeper defeats the

dishonesty of servants by doing her own marketing, she shouldered the

business too, and made acquaintance with Baumgarten's Market, a huge

place where everything save groceries could be obtained for household

consumption. Some of the darkest hours of her life were spent at

Baumgarten's. It was there, sitting upon a high chair before the meat

and poultry counter awaiting her turn to be served, that she most keenly

realised her defeat. All around her, good American wives were examining

the grain of beef and the breasts of chickens. Poor Val could never

understand how they extracted information from the process. She herself

always got the toughest meat and the oldest birds for the highest

prices. She knew nothing of the breasts of chickens and never would

know anything. She, who could write a mile long passage from the

classics and never forget a poet's inspired word, found it impossible to

remember from day to day the price of sugar, and how much she ought to

pay for butter. Information like that simply passed through her head

like an express train through a tunnel. She never got the bargains

other women got. She was the victim of every sharper, and was "done" on

every side. On a desert island she would have been a treasure. In a

civilised city, battling with extraordinary conditions on a professional

man's income, she was a failure, and the knowledge deepened day by day

and was bitter as gall. She fought on with the courage of the desperate

and the doomed, but despair was in her heart and her eyes, and sometimes

Westenra saw it there, and thought she hated this life to which he had

brought her. He saw that she was a round peg in a square hole, and the

last woman in the world for the practical life she pursued with the

ardour of a doomed squirrel. The knowledge never interfered with his

affection for her, but it sometimes interfered with his nerves. It was

a bad dream from which they only woke up at night, for then together for

a few hours a natural reaction from the strain of the day took place,

and they would laugh like two children over the cares and problems of

the day. The night nurses, passing up- and down-stairs, often wondered

what it was the doctor and his wife found so amusing when they were shut

up in their rooms together. The fact was that in the practical affairs

of life they were no more than children, either of them, for all their

brains and experience. It is often so with gifted people. Of course,

Westenra knew his business as a doctor--none better, but the business of

being a practical and responsible husband and head of a household was a

sealed book to him, just as the problem of how to become the successful

manageress of a private nursing home was one that Val would never solve.

But if she could not defeat the cares that the day brought, she could at

least be extremely humorous over her mistakes and failures, and the

valiant spirit of her that was ready to get up from one day's knock-out

blows and face the same round next morning, could not but appeal to the

chivalry in Westenra, as well as awaken his own sense of humour.

CHAPTER VI

KISSES AND CROSSES

"For 'Im and 'E and 'It

(An' Two an' One makes Three)."

KIPLING.

Acquaintance with a further element in her husband's life to which she

had so far been a stranger was reserved for Val when at Easter his

adopted child, Haidee Halston, came home to 68th Street. Westenra, it

is true, had told her all the circumstances, and no one was better

qualified than Val to appreciate that sense of responsibility towards

the helpless and unprotected which had prompted him to take upon himself

the entire support and education of a friend's child. Westenra and Pat

Halston had been friends from boyhood. The same county in Ireland had

been their birthplace, they were at Carlow College together, and,

sailing for America within a year of each other, met again in New York,

and graduated together from Columbia University, where they obtained

their medical degree. Later, launched upon the same profession but

inspired by very different ambitions, the paths of the two friends had

diverged somewhat. Halston, greatly gifted and of a magnetic

personality, aimed for a fashionable practice that would bring him

social success as well as a fortune with which to pursue further

aims--in fact, like many another he meant medicine to serve him only as

a step to the more lucrative and exciting profession of politics,

wherefore he followed it only when it led him into the highways of the

rich and influential. Westenra, on the other hand, inspired by a racial

thirst for knowledge, as well as for eminence in his profession, did not

disdain the by-ways, even when they led him into the lowest slums of New

York. It was natural, in the circumstances, that the two men should see

little of each other, but the bond of boyhood held good, and when "Death

and Dismay" all too swiftly and unforeseen came to Halston, it was to

Westenra that he turned at the last. Poor Halston had, unfortunately,

put a spoke into his own wheel of ambition by marrying a lovely, but

very flighty English girl, who came to America as a governess in the

family of one of his fashionable patients. Halston adored his pretty

wife, but she made ducks and drakes with his money and brought him to

the verge of bankruptcy through her extravagance. When death by septic

poisoning swooped suddenly down on him, she was within a short period of

giving birth to their only child, and the thought of this darkened the

dying man's vision until Westenra, with a firm hand on his friend's,

gave his promise that the welfare of Mrs. Halston and her child would be

his most sacred task. Within a few weeks Mrs. Halston joined her

husband in the great beyond, and Westenra found himself the sole

guardian of the little baby girl fancifully called by its dying

mother--Haidee. That was ten years before, and now Haidee was a

beautiful, arrogant slip of a girl with deep dark eyes, a deep dark cave

or two in her soul, and the manners of a cowboy. The school at which

she had been educated for several years, to the extreme detriment of

Westenra's banking account, was one of those highly modern institutions

where at the most expensive rates girls are encouraged to "develop their

individuality," and Haidee, a hoyden by nature, had developed hers along

the cowboy-brigand line. Her idea of argument with servants or other

children was to push them down-stairs or administer a hack on the shins

with one of her extremely useful-looking feet.

These unsatisfactory reports had for a long time troubled the peace of

Westenra, whose sense of responsibility to Pat Halston's child was

perhaps a slightly exaggerated one. A vague idea had occurred to him of

sending her to a convent to see what the gentle influence of nuns could

do for her, but Haidee jibbed like a mule at the mention of nuns, and

declared darkly that if he sent her to a convent _he would see_.

When he spoke to Val of his worries on the subject she said, ready at

once to embrace any project or protege of his without thought of the

fresh tasks entailed:

"Oh, why not have her here for awhile, Joe? A little home life will tame

her down, I expect. Look how it has tamed even such a wild ass of the

desert as I," she added, with a gay smile in which there was more than a

touch of wistfulness. But Westenra said a trifle abruptly that he did

not fancy somehow it would be a good plan.

"You have enough worries already," he added, but not quite quickly

enough to prevent Val from perceiving that there was some other reason,

though she was far from guessing what that reason might be.

In the end, however, by the gift of circumstance, Haidee came to 68th

Street after all. For at the expiration of the Easter term the school

authorities wrote a brief but eloquent letter to the effect that they

wished to be relieved of the care of Westenra's ward. If it did not

exactly amount to an expulsion, it certainly could not be looked upon as

a certificate of good conduct for presentation at her next school, and

for the moment all thought of the convent had to be dismissed. So

Haidee came home from New Jersey, bag and baggage, and utterly unashamed

of her peccadilloes. Val, with a heart open for anything or any one

loved by Westenra, was eager to mother the motherless creature of whom

she had heard so much. But Haidee was apparently not in search of a

mother, and received her advances coldly and in a keep-off-the-grass

manner that only an American-bred child would have the _sang-froid_ to

use. More than a hint of hostility, too, was to be found in the

deep-set eyes, when they watched Val and Westenra together. The fact

was that to find her guardian installed in a house with "a strange

woman" had given the girl a great shock. Westenra, following his usual

habit of reserve, had prepared her for nothing of the kind when he said,

on his return journey from New Jersey:

"I am married now, Haidee."

She never dreamed that such a thing would make any difference to her

absolute monopoly of her beloved guardian, and indeed, because Val was

generous and he was kind, it would have made but little, if she had not

instantly determined to be as obnoxious and tiresome as she could be, in

the hope that Val would get tired of her and go away.

From the first she nobly contributed her share towards the business of

making life at No. 700 more unlivable than it was already. She fought

with the servants, got into the way of the nurses, and disturbed the

patients with her noise. A day-school was found for her near at hand,

and that kept her energies employed for a certain number of hours, but

her new teachers were soon on the war-path after her, and she arrived

home daily, flustered with combat, and bringing long accounts of their

tyranny and brutality! When it was time for her to go to school in the

mornings the house had to be hunted for her from top to bottom by Val or

a housemaid. She hated to go to bed, and there was a scene every night

before she could be induced to do so; then, on being left alone, she

would invariably hop out again, turn up the lights, and amuse herself in

some illicit fashion, such as hanging out of the window and dropping

things on the heads of patients coming up the front-door steps. Yet in

the mornings it almost needed a charge of dynamite to dislocate her from

her blankets. She had a rooted aversion to taking baths, and would

never brush her teeth unless some one stood over her and saw it done. In

fact, she had all the faults and naughtinesses of an ordinary child

strongly accentuated, and a sense of perversity extraordinarily

developed. Withal she was as clever as paint, and grew prettier every

day. What vexed Val most was that everlastingly she broke in upon

Westenra, claiming his attention for her troubles, her lessons, her

amusements, unless Val were on the alert to prevent it. She would wait

outside his office door and slip in "between patients" to relate some

woe, and Westenra would listen patiently and in the end the trouble

evaporated into smiles and laughter. But this wasted his time and told

upon his temper in some later affair of the day, or brought him up to

bed a little more tired than usual.

Presently, too, Haidee's jealousy of Val's place in Westenra's life

began to take a more active form, and if it had not been for her

disarming innocence of mind where worldly matters were concerned, Val

would have almost come to dislike her. Instead of which she felt pity

for the child who, in her adoration for Westenra, resented being ousted

from the central position in his life. Haidee could not or would not

understand why a mere wife should have first claim. She considered that

she herself possessed it, because she had been first in Westenra's life.

One night Val, going to her husband's room to see that everything was

prepared for him to go straight to rest as soon as he got in from a late

consultation, found Haidee in her nightgown, curled up and scowling, on

Westenra's bed.

"Haidee! What on earth--? I thought you were in bed and asleep long

ago."

"Well, I 'm not, you see," was the surly response.

"But, dear chicken, what are you doing here?"

"I 'm waiting for Garry."

"Oh, Haidee, how silly! When Garry comes home he 'll be dead tired and

not want to be bothered. You really must have a little consideration

for him, dear--besides, you ought to be in bed and asleep by now."

The child suddenly burst out at her like a tornado:

"Why aren't _you_ in bed and asleep, I 'd like to know ... why can _you_

wait up for him and not me? ... I know ... you think he belongs to you

... and that you can have him all the time. You are a greedy guts. You

have him every night ... why should n't I have him sometimes? You are

trying to take him right away from me. Who asked you to come from your

rotten old England and take my Garry away from me? Before you came he

was all mine ... when I was little he used to let me sleep with my arms

round his neck. But now, whenever I ask if I can come and sleep in his

bed he laughs and says I have grown too big and active with my hoofs.

But your hoofs are not too big, I suppose! Oh, no! ... and he 's not

too tired, however late he comes in for _you_ to come to his room and

talk to him.... Mean pig that you are ... greedy guts! I hate you ...

and I _will_ sleep with Garry ... I will, I will!"

She burst into a torrent of tears, and Val stood staring at her in

amazement that swiftly softened to pity. The trouble with Val was that

she could always feel sympathy for another person's point of view, and

that frame of mind is very disarming to anger. Immediately she threw

her arms round the sobbing creature and began to comfort her.

"Dear old thing, you mustn't feel like that about me. I don't want to

take him away from you. I know he is all you have. I only want you to

help me as much as you can to make things easier for him. Think how he

works ... for both of us--you and me! And how tired he is at nights....

As for my coming to his room ... dear chick, don't you understand that I

am his wife? When you are grown up you 'll marry some nice man ... and

you 'll want to be greedy over him too a little bit."

"I 'll never marry anybody. I always meant to marry Garry ... and now

_you_--" Vindictiveness came into her voice again, and Val's heart gave

a little weary sigh, for she was dead beat, and this was her legitimate

time of rest, hard wrung from the day. To have to face this exhausting

scene late at night seemed very much like the last straw that was one

too many for the camel.

However, it was urgent to get it over and done with before Westenra came

in, so she stayed on talking to the unhappy child, trying to beguile her

from her misery and once and for all place their relationship on a

footing of sympathy and affection. It seemed almost a hopeless task,

but in the end the effective thing was that she told Haidee of what so

far she had spoken to no one but Westenra--her deep, sweet, secret joy

in the thought of the child that was coming. It was Haidee's first

glimpse into the workings of nature, and she sat wide-eyed and dumb,

searching Val from top to toe for circumstantial evidence, while Val,

with a faint flush in her pale face, but serene-eyed and in simple

words, following on Carpenter's advice in _Love's Coming of Age_, made

all clear to the child. She even, with a touch of guile, let Haidee

into the secret of suffering to be endured before the baby could come

into the world, believing that to touch the heart of the child to a

little sympathy might not be an unwise thing. And she was right: from

sympathy to compassion is a natural step, and Haidee went to bed in a

glow of good resolution to be as helpful and considerate as possible in

the days to come. Indeed, without turning into an angel, or even a

moderately good child, she did improve greatly in behaviour during the

next few months, while waiting with burning impatience for what was to

come when the bleak spring days were over.

June came at last, and brought its gift to Valentine and Westenra--a

son. Like an impetuous Irishman, as Val had declared, anxious to get

into the thick of the fight, he had practically started their married

life with them, and arrived as soon as compatibility with schedule

permitted. That was a great day in the Westenra household when the

golden head of a baby lit up like a star the gloom of dark and difficult

ways. Instead of one baby, indeed, there were three. Two of them

haggard and thin, but content and care-free as the third in that glad

hour of love made incarnate. Even Haidee softened and turned into a real

child as she hung with perpetual curiosity over the cot of the

new-comer.

"It's got blue eyes, just like the lion cubs in the Zoo.... Oh, look at

it clutching on to me! You are lucky, Val.... I wish I could get one,

too. Oh, _could n't_ I have it to sleep with me?"

She sulked bitterly when she was not permitted to take charge of it to

play with like a doll, and thereafter constantly complained to Westenra

of Val's greediness.

"You 'd think it was all hers--and how can it be if it is half yours?

And if it is yours it belongs to me too," was the burden of her

complaint.

When Val got up and resumed life again, the question of a name for the

baby arose. Val was all for Patrick.

"Patrick seems to stand for Ireland, and he is our link with Ireland,

Joe."

"It is an unlucky name with us," Westenra objected. "My father was

crazy for sons, but three he called Patrick died one after the other.

When I came they took no more risks, and gave me an old family name.

Choose another, Val."

"Well," she said shyly, after a little thought, "would you mind

Richard?"

"Richard?" he mused.

Val had long yearned to talk to Westenra of Dick Rowan, only the ban he

had placed on all past things had so far prevented her. But that the

day must come when no subject would be taboo between them, she felt

confident.

"We could call him Dick," she said. "I once cared very much----"

Westenra turned on her like a flash, white to the lips.

"Is that the way you burn your boats?" he said, in a low, hard voice,

and looked at her with furious eyes she did not know. While she stared

at him in pain and amazement he rose abruptly and left the room. Slowly

her eyes filled with tears. She made no further reference to the matter.

She did not know what to say. It seemed she could not refer to that

time and tell him who Dick was, and how good he had been to her without

giving pain. Therefore it was better to be silent. On the day of the

christening itself he said:

"We 'll call him Bran if you like, Val--one of Ireland's old savage

kings. I think that son of yours will be some one fine some day," he

added with a boyish, lovable smile, that had something of pride in it,

and something of humility too, and for those words Val forgave him and

was happy again. And the baby was baptised into the Holy Catholic

Church under the pagan and kingly name of Bran.

CHAPTER VII

MORE WINDING PATHS

"There is a crack in everything God has made."

EMERSON.

There is a saying that during the hot weather every one in New York,

except doctors and cats, leave the city. Westenra, with his yearly

habit of pulling stakes and heading for Europe at the first hint of

heat, had always been an exception to this rule, and he invariably

advised other men that his was the only possible way to keep fit after

nine months' hard work. But now, though the brazen heat beat down on to

the city and burnt up through the pavements as if Pluto had lighted a

special furnace under New York, Westenra laughed at his own advice and

made no move to get away. Val knew why, and the knowledge etched new

shadows under her salient cheek-bones. In spite of his working like a

bee from morning till night, the Sanatorium being constantly full, and

operations always in progress, Westenra was harassed for money. The

venture did not pay. An experienced woman at the head of things could

have made it pay. The stolid, lumpy German with a good hospital

training grafted on to a knowledge of household affairs would have made

a roaring success of it, and coined money for all concerned. Even an

ordinarily good manager with free hands and no nerves might have

achieved a margin of profit. The vagabond journalist not only could not

make it pay, she was turning it into a dead loss. Every day good money

went cantering after bad.

What Westenra should have done, even at that eleventh hour, was to

engage a capable, working matron to manage the place, while Val devoted

her loving fervour to the baby and himself. But he felt doubtful as to

the success of such an arrangement, first because Val would probably not

like to live elsewhere; secondly, because he had managed hospitals

before, and knew all about trouble with matrons. Experience had taught

him that in America women rarely work well except in the interests of

some one with whom they are in love. This rule applies very pertinently

to American nurses, who are usually middle-aged Germans intent on

marrying a doctor; but it may very well be applied to women all the

world over, though Westenra was not aware of the fact. What he did know

was that a managing matron would probably work for her own hand and not

for his. Even if she made a roaring success of the place, later there

would surely come the subtle introduction of other methods and other

interests than his, into his own hospital. Worst of all would be the

fact of strangers within his gates spying out the secrets of his

reserved nature, bearing witness to his moods and nerves, all the irk of

daily contact with people who were making a business out of his brains.

This idea of outsiders being "let in on him," of alien eyes coming close

enough to look over the wall behind which he kept his conflicting

tempers and emotions from the world, was peculiarly irritating to him.

Only Val, privileged by love, must have the gift of a share in his

torment, the right to hear his swears. With all others he smiled and

smiled and hid his heart, and put distance between himself and them.

And Val, because she was a true lover, understood and faithfully gave of

her body and soul to pad the bumps of life for him. Whatever else she

failed in, she failed not in playing the buffer between him and the

strangers who went to and fro in his house. He little knew what it cost

her in peace of mind and serenity of spirit, this jarring with natures

so unlike her own, and jangling with those who were making a business of

life. He only knew that in spite of her impracticability and

extravagance there was no one like her, and that the place in her

incompetent hands was dearer by far than it could ever be in surer hands

that were strange. It was beginning to dawn in his heart, with the

exquisite promise of the skies, all that she was to him, this woman who

walked by his side never faltering, smiling gallantly in defeat. It was

beginning to whisper through his senses like the haunting echo of bells

whose cadence he had known all his life that defeat after all did not

matter so much since he shared it with her--that it might in fact become

a form of victory. In any case he meant to struggle on with things as

they were, hoping and working for the best.

Unfortunately, his nerves after the year of extraordinary strain were in

rags. He really needed the rest and change that was due to him. His

body and brain clamoured for it, and his fine athlete's skin took into

itself a putty tint that was neither healthy nor becoming. In vain did

Val implore him to take ship for his native land. He laughed and refused

to go unless she and the children went too. But she knew what the cost

of such an exodus would mean, and sat tight as an eagle in her eyrie;

and her little brood pecked at her heart as though determined to get at

her life-blood. Haidee grew wickeder every hour, and Bran was the

naughtiest baby in the world, sleeping all day and howling all night,

withal drinking away his mother's strength and blooming on it like a

pink rose.

Valentine grew pale as a wraith and Westenra's old, haunting fear that

his brain would give out ate him by night and day; but neither of them

was a quitter. Both possessed that stupid and over-estimated kind of

courage that does not know when it is beaten. At last Fate, like an

overtried mother who is sick of giving gentle hints to unheeding

children, brought down her hand heavily upon them. First she smote the

man. In the blasting heat of late August, Westenra went down as only the

big and the strong can go down--like a felled oak. The brilliant

colleague whom Val hastily and fearfully summoned to her husband's

bedside expressed his diagnosis in the argot of the day.

"His nerves have run out and his stomach has gone back on him. If he

does n't slip up on us it will be a near thing, Mrs. Westenra."

And it was a near thing. If it had not been for Val, Westenra would

have found eternity sooner than he expected. But it was a bad time for

her. In addition to nursing her husband, she had to manage the

rampageous Bran, a domestic crisis brought about by a servant strike,

and an ice famine. Fortunately, there were no patients but one in the

house at the time, and the nurse in attendance happened to be an

exceptionally good one, who did all she could to relieve the strain. She

was an English woman, a Miss Holland, with an able brain behind a

pretty, calm face. She would willingly have undertaken the nursing of

Westenra besides her own patient, but he was so frequently delirious

that Val was afraid to let any one share in the nursing of him. She

knew how he would hate any stranger to hear his tormented ramblings, but

she did not realise for a long time that it would perhaps have been

better at any cost that another than she should have heard them. For all

that he had hidden from her came out now in broken snatches and groans,

half dream, half delirium. She learned of his longing for his

laboratory, of the sacrifice it had cost him to abandon it, of his

despair about the Sanatorium, money worries, all the irk domestic life

held for him. What was more terrible, she gleaned in broken fragments,

halting and disjointed, as though even in his delirium he had an

instinct to hide it, something of the way he had struggled with himself

to evade her coming into his life, of his mental resistance until the

last, of the pity which rather than love had moved him to ask her to

marry him, of his dread of her past, and fear for their future. Oh!

bitter and bleak were the things that came to her ears in scraps and

broken whispers and heavy sighs, and that pieced together by her weary

yet quickened brain made a clear writing on the wall. All was plain to

her at last: all that he had succeeded in keeping dark from her, the

secret of his torment and his pain in the struggle. To her the

upholding joy in the darkest hour had always been that the man was worth

it, she loved him and considered him worthy of every sacrifice she could

make. She saw now that he had had no such thought to uphold him.

Though he had been too loyal to acknowledge the fact even to himself,

the bitter drop in his cup must have been his belief that the woman was

not worth the sacrifices marriage had entailed!

Sighs and dark mutterings told her why he had shrunk at first from

Haidee's coming to 68th Street--some duty he had to Halston, to keep his

child only among those whose lives had been pure and unspotted by the

world. The meaning of his fury at Val's suggestion for his son's naming

came whispering forth from fever-broken lips.

"Dick! ... How _could_ she? A dissipated brute .... no woman safe from

... and she ... my woman, alone with him for months ... wild places ...

lonely places."

She could not know where he had heard that scandalous tale. She could

only bow her head and take the sword to her heart.

When she heard him muttering to his mother, explaining that she was his

dream woman, that it had to be.... 'She is not like you, mother, but

she came to me in dreams ... _it had to be_ ... and now she is Bran's

mother ... you must love my Bran's mother," she thought her heart would

break for bitter aching. It seemed to her in that dark hour that

nothing could ever hurt her any more. She defied Fate to do her any

worse hurt. An unwise thing to do. Fate was in fact sitting in wait

with a worse clout in her hand.

There came an afternoon when Westenra was so much better that he could

talk a little, softly, if a trifle vaguely to Haidee who had crept in to

hold his hand. His eyes, seeming to have grown lighter in his thin,

strongly-featured face, travelled incessantly round the room, resting

here and there as though they recognised landmarks in some country he

had not visited for years. They rested on Val writing at a table near

by, and noted the wraithlike face, pale as a bone, the weary lean of her

against her own supporting arm, the droop of her lips and her shoulders.

When she came over with the medicine, he said quietly:

"You should go out for a little while, dearest. Haidee will take care of

me."

She had indeed a longing that was almost active pain for air and the

sight of sky and green things, and needed little persuasion, seeing that

he was really better. She did not even stop to change her frock, which

was old and unfashionable, and in her haste caught up an ancient

school-hat of Haidee's, trimmed with a shabby bow of silk ribbon, and

more than slightly bent out of shape about the brim. She felt it

mattered little how she looked, so long as she could escape into the

outer air. Her head ached violently.

As she hurried down the front-door steps, a man walking up the street

looked at her curiously, and something in her peculiar walk brought a

flash of amazement to his eyes and quickened his steps. He was tall and

well-dressed, with traces of breeding, and a certain dashing

handsomeness about him, but there was a green tint in his ravaged

cheeks, and the straight figure under the well-cut coat was gaunt and

shrunk. His eyes lacked lustre, and one of them jerked and winked

mechanically at irregular intervals. The man was a nervous and physical

wreck. As he passed the house from which Val had come, he looked up and

noticed its number and the name on the door-plate. A moment later he

caught up with the slight, hurrying figure, gave a swift glance at her

profile and the shabby hat above it, then, in the quiet drawling tones

of the man about town, he said politely:

"How do, Val?"

She swung round with the wild jerk of a lassoed creature and faced him.

Then he was not so sure after all that it was Val. The grey-faced

woman, with all the life gone out of her eyes, sunken cheeks and

blanched lips, was certainly not the Valentine Valdana of other days.

The figure, the walk was hers; but the face was the face of some strange

woman--some woman in trouble, too, and that was a bore. He was a man

who always avoided women in trouble. On the point of lifting his hat,

with a slight apology and walking away, her words detained him.

"_You!_" Her voice was the voice of Valentine Valdana with all the

music gone from it: harsh and grinding as stone on stone.

"Yea, verily," said he, and stared sardonically into her fearful eyes.

They stood so for a moment staring at each other. Then the man laughed;

but it was not a pleasant laugh.

"You don't seem as pleased to see me as you ought to be!"

"You!" she stammered again. It seemed all she was able to say.

"Yes, _me_, my very dear Val," he repeated with something like a snarl.

"Time appears to have dimmed your excellent eyesight, as well as robbed

you of your gift of repartee!"

She answered strangely, speaking vaguely like a woman in a nightmare,

but her words struck home like little, sharp knives, and the blood

mounted high in his dark cheeks.

"So _you_ were the slinker in the bush!--the skulker!--the deserter of

comrades and men!--_I might have known_!"

Rage flashed out of his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment he looked as if

he could strike her. Then he laughed again the jeering sardonic laugh of

the cynic, whose bones hard words have no power to break, the coward who

fears nothing but death.

"Be damned to you!" he said pleasantly. "I had as much right to save my

skin as any one else."

"_No one else saved his skin_."

"That was their lookout," he remarked with grim facetiousness, but her

silent, terrible stare, so full of indictment, disconcerted him

horribly. He essayed to change the unpleasant subject.

"So you are in New York! No one could make out where the deuce you had

got to."

That detached her from the sinister question of his conduct on the South

African veldt. But still she stared deep into him as if seeking in his

soul the key to some problem she could not solve; and he was

embarrassed, for he wished no one to search in his dark soul--there were

things hidden there that even he was afraid to look upon. As for the

situation, surely it was clear enough. He that should have been dead

was alive, and that was all there was to it. He had been looking for

her to let her know, and that he had found her by accident was so much

to the good. It had a better appearance than if he had hunted her down

(as he would have done if he had possessed any clue to work on). After

all, he argued to himself, he had a right to her sympathy. Also he

needed help in the shape of money pretty badly. He was sick of hiding

in America, and longed to get away to the cheap comfort of Europe.

Unfortunately, she did not look as if she could help his financial

situation very much. He had, in fact, never seen her look so shabby

since she ceased to occupy the proud position of wife and slave to

Horace Valdana, Esq. The thought that he might not be able to levy a

loan from her after all moved him to venom.

"I fear you have come down in the world, my poor Val! If I did not know

what a brilliant woman of letters you are, I might almost think you had

turned into a housemaid. What were you doing at Number 700?"

Then she realised he had seen her come out of the house. That was the

key she had sought. Now she knew just where she stood, and what she must

do.

"Yes," she said slowly, "you are quite right, I have come down in the

world, and I am a housemaid--at that house I have just come from."

He burst out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest news he had heard

for a long time.

"Indeed! Perhaps you will invite me to call and have some supper with

you and the cook some evening?"

"We are not allowed to have callers. I don't get on with the cook. I

am under notice to quit." She made her statements quite gravely.

"But this is great!" He began to laugh again uproariously. "So you

have got the sack! And now you will have to go back to the career of

famous journalist. But why have left it, my dear girl? Is it a joke, or

some new craze for getting copy?"

Steadily, calmly, with pale lips and toneless voice, she lied on--for

Bran's sake, for Garrett's sake, for the sake of all she held dear.

What better reason can a woman have for lying her soul away!

"No, no joke, no craze: stern necessity. I can't write any more, that

is all. I had brain fever, and when it was all over I found that I

could n't put another sentence together. I am done for as a writer. So

I just dropped out of the old life and disappeared. The only thing I

can do now is work with my hands."

"But"--he stammered. "But it will come back--all you want is time,

rest--"

"Never," she said firmly. "Never. It is finished. My brain is gone.

I am Alice Brook now--Alice Brook, housemaid. I shall never be anything

else."

"Good God!" He gazed at her aghast. There was no glimmering of doubt

in his mind as to the truth of her story. It seemed almost too

extraordinary to be true, but he had never known Val to lie. He was

aware, in fact, from painful experience that she despised liars, and

held a creed that nothing worth a lie was to be found in the world. It

was not for him to know that she had at last found something she

considered worth lying for. Besides, she so thoroughly looked the part.

Thin, hollow-eyed, and badly dressed, with the hopeless lines

unhappiness had sketched about her lips, she was the picture of an

overworked slave who worked too much by day, and got too little rest at

night.

"Good God!" he repeated blankly. "And I was going to touch you for my

fare home."

It was her turn to laugh now, and she did it silently, rocking from side

to side, holding one hand over her heart as if afraid it might burst

from her body in its wild mirth. Valdana considered her with shrewd,

savage eyes. He had never known her guilty of such a thing as a fit of

hysterics, but it looked uncommonly as if she meant to indulge in one

now, and he was not anxious to assist in anything of the kind.

"Don't be a fool, Val," he said sharply. "Pull yourself together. Come

along into the Park and we 'll discuss things."

Val's laughter was over except for a strange little sobbing sound that

escaped from her lips from time to time, as she walked slowly by his

side towards the Park. Sometimes she swayed a little and put out her

hands as if to keep herself from falling--as though the earth were

rocking under her feet.

----

There is a story told in Africa of a Dutch woman, who, during one of the

early Kaffir wars, escaped from an attacked township, and with her

family of six little children hid in the bush. They concealed

themselves in a deep swamp overhung with bushes and seething with

poisonous gnats; and there, while all round them human beasts beat the

bush seeking for prey, the little band crouched low, nothing but their

heads protruding from the filthy ooze, fearful almost to breathe lest

they should be heard and dragged forth to torture and death.

Unfortunately, the baby, sick and too young to understand the terrible

situation, whimpered endlessly at the bites of the insects, and all its

mother's fearful hushing could not quiet it. With the howls of

blood-drunken Kaffirs in her ears, and before her eyes the five tragic,

terror-stricken faces of her other children, the distracted mother found

no other thing to do than clasp her hands about the little loved,

whimpering throat that would betray them all, and still its cries for

ever.

Long after Valdana had left her Val sat on in the Park, trying not to

think, trying to get control over herself. Her overwrought brain felt

like a struggling, tortured thing, determined to burst from her head and

run brandishing its frenzy and pain to the world; while some other part

of her strove for calm, hushing and pacifying the tortured thing as the

Dutch mother had hushed the child that would betray them all; and she

felt that if she could not still its frenzied cries she must kill it.

Better that she should die than that Westenra and little Bran should

suffer. But she did not want to die; she knew she could not be spared

at that time. The mother of a little child can never be spared.

Westenra, lying weak and ill, seemed to her no more than a little child

too, and one that she must care for and protect from trouble. Dazed and

shocked as she was, with her world in pieces about her, the mother sense

alert in her warned her to get control of her nerves; that it would be

fatal to fall ill now; that everything depended upon her deliberate

action. She had seen with Westenra what happened when the brain was

sick, and she knew she could never hope to keep the truth from him if

such an illness overtook her. She was resolute to keep it from him. He

had suffered enough. He was sick and broken with suffering, and all

through her. But his pride and joy in Bran was still left him; and of

that, if she could help it, he should not be robbed. His son! Heir to

an old and honoured name if to no great fortune. What would befall if

he found that his son was nameless--heir to nothing but shame and

sorrow. Ah! some day he might have to hear the truth and bear it--but

not now, not now. She must take herself in hand strongly, force herself

to calmness, plan how to outwit Valdana, and save her loved ones.

She looked at the card Valdana had given her with an address written on

it:

MR. JOHN SEYMOUR,

_Shrapp's Hotel,_

_West 19th Street,_

_New York._

He was there under an assumed name, skulking, as he had skulked in the

bush. His mother, the only person whom he had enlightened as to his

being alive, was secretly sending him money. She dared not let his

father, an old man dying of an incurable disease, know, for fear it

would hasten his end, and she was ashamed to tell her other sons and

daughters; they were all honourable, upright people whose heads would be

lowered to the dust under the blow. With a mother's unselfish love she

wished to spare them the truth--that the man whose gallant death all

England had mourned was alive and skulking in hiding, a coward who had

deserted his comrades! But for Val she had no such feeling, and it was

she who had given him the news of Val's sailing for America and paid his

fare to do the same, counselling him to find her out and get her help.

She said it was Val's duty to stand by him, and he, pleased with such

comfortable counsel, had been in New York six months hoping to come

across his wife. At the last moment he had chanced upon her by

accident!

He had left her in the Park; it was with the understanding that she was

to meet him in two days' time at Shrapp's Hotel. But she had no

intention of keeping the appointment. First of all it would be

extremely difficult for her to get away from home without lying, and

then there was a possibility of Westenra finding out where she had gone,

and suspecting something strange. She meant to take no risks where

Westenra was concerned. Secondly, she hated to meet Valdana. Quite

apart from the horrible turmoil his reappearance caused in her life, she

was shakingly revolted by his presence. The sight of him alive when he

should have been where the world believed him--among the heroic

dead--made her physically sick.

"_As much right to save his skin..._" she repeated blankly, and the

blood seemed to turn to water in her veins. "Oh, I might have known ...

I might have known! Mean souls do not suddenly become heroic! _To save

his skin!_"

And it was the name of such a man that she bore by law! For such a one

her little Bran must be branded illegitimate. She ground her teeth in

rage and despair, and gave out a little moan.

Around the black morass that surrounded her there showed only one small

glimmer of light--it was the remembrance of that faint gleam that kept

her from going mad. He had offered it as a sort of propitiation for the

fact of his being still alive, and she shuddered at her own heartless

catching at it. She might not have believed but for the bleak tint of

his skin.

"It won't be for long, anyway. I 'm booked, Val. I have the same

trouble as my father--cancer of the liver. Nothing can save me. It's

only a matter of a few months ... a year at the outside." She had

looked into his face keenly at that and recognised the possibility of

his words being true. That strange hue in his cheeks might easily be

the hue of death foreshadowing the atrocious malady from which his

father suffered.

He had gone on to tell her that all he asked was to be allowed to live

in peace, out of the world's sight, until his hour came. The truth must

never be known, he said. Even he was not so dead to decency that he

could not recognise that. He owed something to his family after all--to

say nothing of his country! These had a right to expect silence from

one who should have been dead. And he was willing enough to be silent.

The gnawing at his vitals had killed in him, he said, all taste for

gaming and dissipation. He only wanted peace in some quiet country

place, anywhere but America, which he hated with the fierce hatred of

the waster surrounded by active energetic men. He had, it appeared,

sought Val in the pretty certain belief that she could and would assist

him to the quiet life he longed for, and when he found she could not he

was more inclined to curse than to sympathise because her brain had

"given out." She smiled a tortured smile at that. Her brain had indeed

given out. That part at least of the story was true; and that she would

never be able to write again as in the old days she knew was true too.

There is nothing like a year's tussling with domestic problems for

dulling the wits. She felt that to earn a sure million she could not

have produced the energy or material for one of her old gay vivid

articles salted with wit and scented with the breeze. The power had

gone from her. Wifehood had absorbed it. Maternity had eaten and drunk

it up! Like Alice Brook, she could only work with her hands now; and,

like Alice Brook, she was sadly incompetent even with these. For there

really was a housemaid called Alice Brook at No. 700; an inefficient

English girl who could not get on with the cook, and was without the

faintest notion of her duties. As Val had no time to train her she was

obliged to give her notice, and the girl was in fact leaving the house

that night. This was why Val had felt so safe in her story.

When Valdana found out that she did not mean to meet him again, he would

probably, as discreetly as he dared, make inquiries at No. 700 for Alice

Brook. But Val would be prepared for him.

She sat still on that bench in Central Park until she had formed her

plan. She would write to him within the next two days saying that

nothing was to be gained by their meeting; that she had left 68th

Street, and that if he did not worry her and try to find her, she would

help him all she could with money, and from time to time send him,

through his mother, such sums as she could earn. There was no question,

of course, of her earning at present, but she possessed jewellery upon

which she could raise certain sums. She would pawn some at once and

send him fifty pounds for his passage to England, thus ridding herself

of his vicinity at least, and gaining untainted breathing space in which

to decide upon the next move. There must, she knew, be a terrible

reconstruction of her life with Westenra, but as yet she was too weary

and shocked to see far ahead. She only knew that she must go warily,

like

"Ate Dea, treading so soft----"

Full of schemes that it revolted her to formulate, feeling a conspirator

and traitor to all she loved, she at last retraced her steps homeward.

CHAPTER VIII

WOUNDS IN THE RAIN

"What will you do, love?

When I am going

With white sail flowing,

The seas beyond?

What will you do, love?

When waves divide us

And friends may chide us,

For being fond?"

SAMUEL LOVER.

Recuperation set in at last with Westenra, and he began to return to

health almost as swiftly as he had departed from it, and with health

came a full tide of love and gratitude to the woman who had so devotedly

nursed him back to life. But in the wraith at his bedside he hardly

recognised Val. She had strangely changed, yet poignantly recalled to

him that grey lady of long ago, whom in the past months of pain and

fevered rush he had almost forgotten. Shadows seem to hang about her as

in his dream. Almost it seemed as if she, instead of he, were returning

from the Valley of the Shadow. He was struck to the heart by her worn

and weary look. But when he put out hands of gratitude and compassion

to her, she seemed like the dream woman to elude them without moving. A

long, long distance came between them. The old sad ache of lost lands

was in her eyes and lingered about her lips. Consciousness came upon

him suddenly that he loved this woman deeply, that she was the very

heart of his heart ... then why should he have that sense of fear that

she was escaping from him?

She smiled at him with exile in her eyes when he took her hand, and

kissing it, thanked her for all her goodness to him.

"Bless you, dearest and best ... I am ashamed of myself for getting sick

like this ... to have had you half-killing yourself nursing me ... what

should I have done without you? What would I ever do without you ...

Brannie's mother?"

Was it his fancy that her hand seemed to grow a little rigid in his?

That a shadow passed over her face? He had called her the sweetest

thing he could think of, one that meant so much to him, the symbol of

their love, the treasure saved from the rocks that had broken and

wrecked them--the treasure with which they would build a new ship in

which to sail the stormy seas. He could not know that ever since the

days of delirium she had been yearning for some little word of

_personal_ love, some little name that was all for her as lover, not

mother only. Once more the sense of distance between them came to him.

She seemed suddenly to be a long way off. In effect, he had loosed her

hand and she had moved away to the window. He did not see the heavy

tears that scorched her eyes, but he noticed the droop of her shoulders

and reproached himself.

"I 'm killing her," he thought sombrely, "and she is sick of it! Sick

of nursing me, and of her life here! How can one blame her! I only

wonder it did n't come sooner. How could I ever have hoped to keep a

woman like her ... to make a slave of ... in a doctor's commonplace

home!"

He closed his eyes again and the swift despondency of the invalid welled

up in him. When she came back to his sofa the old moody shadow was on

his face, the look of strain back about his brows. Timidly, and with her

face turned from the light, so that he might not see the trace of her

tears, she said:

"Is there anything you would like, Joe?"

"No, thank you, dear ... I have you!" He spoke gently, and put out his

hand to her without opening his eyes. A moment later his sombre thought

escaped from him almost involuntarily.

"I have you--though God knows for how long!" Then he waited for the

touch of her lips on his, the rush of tender reproach for his unfaith.

He did not indeed know how passionately hungry he was for those

words--until they did not come! Nor how his lips ached for the touch of

hers--until that long, still moment of waiting! Nothing happened;

nothing came. No kiss, no word of protest. He could scarcely believe it

at first. If he had not still been holding her hand, he might have

supposed that she had risen and gone away. For he had not opened his

eyes, but lay waiting as sometimes one waits with eyes closed for the

coming of a beautiful thing. The knowledge flashed upon him suddenly

that it was a long while since Val had kissed him. So long, that he

could scarcely remember when. Was it before his illness? No: looking

back down the vista of burning days of fever and discomfort, he could

remember that before unconsciousness came upon him her fresh mouth was

often laid like a rose upon his dry one and at the memory he longed

again for its fragrance as a thirsty man in the desert longs for a cup

of cold water. He was aware that when at last she did bend over him he

would bind his arms round her, and holding her fast to his heart devour

and consume her, and never let her go from him again. But in the same

moment he was seized with the torment all true lovers know, the

agonising knowledge that however much the lips may devour and the arms

bind, and the heart strain to hold there is a limit to the reach of

human love, a door to which the key will never be found, a barrier

beyond which the aloof and lonely soul of the beloved sits stern and

contemplative, for ever lonely in its secret place. This is the torment

of all earthly love. No true lovers but have sought in each other's

eyes the key of that implacable door, striven to drag the secret from

each other's lips, known the darkness and desolation of that outer

place! Lying there, waiting for his wife's kiss, Garrett Westenra

suffered this torment for the first time.

It was characteristic of him that when at last he understood that she

meant to make no response either by word or deed to the cry of his heart

so thinly veiled beneath the sadness of his words, he did not question

or upbraid her. He only lay very still, turning over and over in his

mind the cruel fact that she was weary of him and of their life

together. Between his half-closed lids he observed her, silent and

white, looking down at the hand which, tightly held by his, lay on her

knee. He realised then how fierce his grip had been, and relaxing it

gently drew away his hand. What good to grip the casket so close when

the jewel it had held for him was gone!

"What do you think we had better do, Val?" he said at last, speaking out

of his pain, and meaning "with the rest of life." He did not expect so

quick and definite a response as she made.

"I think that as soon as you feel well enough to travel you should go

out West, and stay until you are quite strong again."

"You and the children too?"

"Oh! no, no!" she cried hastily--too hastily with so keen a listener

intent on her. She saw her mistake and tried to cover it with calm

reasoning words. "What change would it be for you with us everlastingly

at your heels? Bran rampaging, Haidee worrying--and I--oh, of course,

it would not do at all. You must see that." Her arguments might have

sounded silly but for their urgency to convince, and her pleading eyes.

He stared straight before him, but missed no single shade of her face or

voice.

"We will stay at home and mind things," she continued, "and be quite all

right, until----"

"Until?"

"Until you come back...."

"And then?"

She knew she ought not to let him draw her on, that it would be better

to wait until he returned, but she was an honest creature by nature, and

though circumstances were plunging her deep in duplicity, she had not

yet learned to conceal and wait. Besides, she wanted to get the pain

over, the thing settled and done with, past recanting. If he were cold

and angry so much the better for her. It would be easier to bear than

if he tried to detain her with kind words.

"Then," she stammered, "Garrett, I think, we--the children and I--ought

to go away for awhile ... to England, or France perhaps--some place

where living is more reasonable than here, and I can get strong again,

and be of some use to you...."

No word from him. He did not even raise his eyes. So she stumbled on

hopelessly, embittered by his silence and misunderstanding, longing to

have him see how much she cared, how it broke her heart to make such a

suggestion, yet fearing that he would combat it.

"You know, Garrett, that I am no good in this place ... never have been.

Later perhaps when I am strong again I may be of some use ... when Bran

is older.... You must see for yourself ... I cannot manage the house at

present--(I have always mismanaged it)--with Bran wanting so much

attention. It would be best to get one of your good nurses to take

charge ... anybody could do it better than I...."

So she had it all planned out! She had arranged for "the rest of life"

without consulting him! All the time he lay sick she had been plotting

to escape. Small wonder he felt the return of her old elusiveness, had

become aware of distance between them.

Separation! That was to be the end of the voyage in the dream ship--of

his life with the dream woman. Had it all been a dream perhaps? ... a

dream full of dark places, with thorns for the flesh and pits for the

feet ... but always--that was good to remember in this dark hour--always

stars overhead. The stars had never before failed though they were

dying out now. So she was a quitter after all! A deserter! Unfaithful

to the post she had chosen. Somehow he could never have believed it

except from her lips. It was hard to believe, looking at that face

softly hollowed by weariness and worry, the faithful deep eyes, the

tender lips, the hands grown diaphanous in his service. Nothing had

been too hard or base in his household for those hands to strive with,

he knew that. And how she had nursed him! That he owed his life to her

was certain. And now, so soon, so soon, she nullified all, her

tenderness and devotion, the precious unhappiness, the sacred

sacrifices--the wonderful bonds that trouble shared can make, everything

was broken and rendered void by this act of desertion!

It must be remembered that he came of a race of women who had, so to

speak, habitually lived heroic lives. The men of his family, never able

to offer ease to their women folk, expected heroism and self-sacrifice

of them, and no Westenra woman had ever failed the expectation--_until

now_! Yes, that was a thought that hurt. That ate like acid in an open

wound. Val was not one of _them_! His wife, the woman on whom he had

staked his honour and belief, was not of the stuff of which Westenra

wives were made! Until that hour, spite of failure, trouble, and

disappointment, he could have sworn away his soul on her loyalty--what

did the mere failure of plans, or lack of money matter, when they had

each other, were content to tread the same road together, the same

ideals in their hearts, their eyes fixed on the same stars! And by God

he could have sworn ... but what was the use! She had proved his

judgment wrong, that was all. She was just the ordinary woman, sick of

her job, anxious to get away from it. "Lots of women like her in

America," he reflected sardonically. No one who knew the circumstance

could blame her. He least of all would blame her. Only--his soul was

sick within him! But, as always, he hid his wound from her. Not a sign

of what he felt when at last he spoke, quietly, reflectively, almost it

sounded to her, approvingly.

"No doubt it would be a very wise arrangement."

She had been twisting her hands in nervous agitation, her beautiful,

strange eyes full of the ardour that had always been like wine to him,

though he had never told her so. Now a rush of words came from her

lips, she was almost incoherent in her gratitude.

"Oh, Joe! ... if you think so ... if you won't mind ... it will not be

for long ... only six months or so--a year perhaps."

He stared at her in bitter astonishment. (Only a year perhaps! Why not

ten years--twenty years--the rest of life?)

"I will take such care of your Brannie for you.... I 'll never let him

forget you for a moment ... and I 'll come back so different ... ready

to tackle any problem ... you 'll see what a clever housewife I will

be."

(He did n't want a clever housewife. He had believed he did, but now he

knew that all he wanted was Val. He had arrived at desiring nothing

better than her fantastic housekeeping and gipsy camping-out methods.

She had spoilt him for comfort and set rule.)

"We must get some one to take charge of the place ... Miss Holland is a

splendid woman.... I know she will make a success of it ... and before I

go I will find you a good housekeeper who will look after you well."

(Before she went! Oh! damn it, why should she look at him like that, as

though it were for his happiness she was arranging instead of her own?

As though planning loyalty instead of desertion--treachery! How could

she smile--gladly, gratefully, when she was taking herself out of his

life, robbing him of the light of his son's golden head!)

"And if you will let me have Haidee? ..." she spoke more diffidently

now. "I fear she will be a care to you. I would do my best for

her----"

"No!" he interrupted sharply, "if you take Bran I must console myself

with Haidee. I should think you could spare me her, at least!"

She turned white as death. Haidee to take Bran's place with him! Their

son--her love-baby--to be exiled from his father's heart as well as from

his home! Of what use then all her plotting, her secret grief and

suffering endured, that father and son might be spared.

"Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe!" was all she could say.

He stared at her incredulously. He had no idea she was so fond of

Haidee. It seemed indeed as if she could be fond of any one but

himself! He was thankful that Haidee herself made an end to the

miserable discussion by bounding in at the moment and embracing him

boisterously.

"And can I bring Bran in?" she cried, as soon as she had finished

hugging him. "He 's just on the stairs. Nurse has brought him home

from his walk ... he looks such a duck in his new pink pelisse."

"Yes, bring him in," said Westenra, heavily, but a moment later, when

his son was sprawling on the bed thrusting fat fists into his father's

eyes, exploring his father's nose and ears, moodiness departed from that

father, and he began to laugh like a boy.

"Just feel that leg, Haidee ... muscle--sheer muscle. I tell you this

fellow is a hot number. He 's going to make the athletes sit up and take

notice; are n't you, old man? Hi! that's my nose!"

"He smells like a nice ripe peach! Oh, would n't I love to eat him!"

shrieked Haidee, and hugged him until Val had to call out a warning not

to crack his ribs. She stood watching them, unshed tears scorching her

eyes. They were so dear, so very dear, that man and child; and Haidee

too was dear for loving them so well. It was pain even to look at them.

Their dearness burnt like flame. She felt that if she stayed in the

room a moment longer she must fling herself down by them, cry out the

truth to Westenra, tell him she could never leave him, nor rob him of

his son. But that way madness lay. Sorrow and shame, worse things than

separation for a time, must come of that. No, she must bear it alone.

Her hand was to the plough and she must not turn weakly back. Even now

there was that to do that was part of the plot, and she must leave the

dear ones to go and do it.

"I think they can spare me for a little while," she thought, not without

a certain tender irony, for the crowd on the bed were so very wrapped up

in their own performances. Unnoticed, she slipped from the room, and

went to Westenra's office to typewrite a letter.

When she did not keep the appointment at Shrapp's Hotel with Valdana, he

had, as she foresaw, called at No. 700 in search of Alice Brook. On

hearing that she had left, he asked for an interview with Mrs. Westenra.

Fortunately, Val had not been with Garrett, but in her room resting with

a bad headache, when the new maid, a Wicklow girl of good type, who had

developed a great devotion for her mistress, brought in the card. By an

effort Val had managed to control herself and look with calmness upon

the inscribed name.

"Mr. John Seymour! Who is he? What does he want, Mary?"

"I don't know, ma'am, he did not say, but sure it's a sick man he is by

the colour av him."

"Go down and find out. If he is a patient, tell him the doctor is very

ill and will not be able to see patients for a month or two at least.

If he is in a hurry he had better go to Dr. Dillon, who is seeing all

Dr. Westenra's patients at present."

This gave her time, and would she thought allay Valdana's suspicion, if

he had one, of any connection between herself and Alice Brook. But she

was sick with apprehension and lay white on her pillow when the maid

reappeared; the answer was as expected: the gentleman's business was not

with the doctor, but with the mistress of the house.

"Sure, it's the character of the last housemaid he wants, ma'am. He 's

afther engaging her," Mary announced and Val's heart gave a great jump

of fright. The next moment she realised that this was most likely a

ruse, a mere excuse for finding out what he wanted to know of her

whereabouts.

"The character of Alice Brook?" she said mechanically.

"Yes, ma'am. And I took the liberty of telling him, ma'am, that you

could not be plagued with such affairs now, and you destroyed nursing

the doctor and all, and he 'd better be afther writing for what he

wants."

Val could have embraced the kindly creature, but she gave no sign, only

said quietly:

"You did quite right, Mary. But to save time you may tell this

gentleman, Mr.--," she looked at the card--"Mr. Seymour, that as far as

character goes Alice Brook was quite a good girl--honest, sober, an

early riser, diligent (she could not forbear a wry smile to think that

in the last three points at least the formula applied equally to

herself); her chief defect was that she was quite ignorant as to the

duties of a housemaid, and I had no time to train her. I cannot think

of anything further that it is necessary for him to know, but if there

should be he can write."

As the maid was leaving the room, she added thoughtfully:

"Don't let him linger asking questions, Mary. It seems a curious thing

for a gentleman to be occupying himself with a housemaid's references.

He may not be what he professes at all, but some scamp----"

She knew that upon that hint Mary would polish him off without ceremony,

and she felt no compunction in giving it. Could any one indeed be a

worse scamp? What was he there for but to spy out and blackmail, and

cause ruin and dismay to her and her loved ones? She trembled with rage

and terror when she thought of him being in the same house with Garrett

and Bran. But for an accident she might have been seen by him, or his

card brought up to her at Westenra's bedside! There was no reason for

him to have come to the house at all. True, she had not kept the

appointment, but she had kept faith with him in the matter of money, had

sold a greater part of her jewels, and sent him the proceeds by

registered post. At the same time she had written him a letter telling

him firmly that there was nothing to be gained by their meeting. She

reminded him that all question of their being anything to each other was

over many years past, and that certainly the circumstances of his

reappearance did not incline her to renew any kind of intimacy with him.

In consideration of his health she promised she would do her best for

him, and spare him any money she could.

"But it is no use hounding me," she wrote, full of the cold fury of a

mother robbing her loved ones to give to a wolf, for the money gained on

her jewels would have paid many a bill hanging over the household at the

moment. "You must not forget that I too need to live. And you are not

to torment me. If ever I make money again I will let you have all I

can, but I do not hold out any great hope. In the meantime take this,

and leave America with it. If I have anything to send you I will do so

through your mother. But leave me alone--surely you have caused me

enough sorrow! All I ask is to be left alone."

Thus she had written in her agony and desperation, and sent with the

letter the sum of one hundred and ten pounds. Yet a week later he was

on the doorstep intent on tracking her down! Well, she had cut the

ground from under his feet by her message through Mary. With the

information he had asked for concerning Alice Brook he had no further

pretext for calling at the house, or even writing. Not that she relied

on that. Horace Valdana had failed in all honourable things, but never

in lies, pretexts, and inventions. She could hardly suppose he would do

so now. As the event proved, she was right. For two weeks there was

silence. Almost she had begun to hope when there came a letter, polite

but formal, asking if Mrs. Westenra would have the kindness to oblige

the writer with the home address of her late housemaid, Alice Brook.

"She had been in my service for ten days or so" (ran the letter), "but

went out one day and never returned. I am much troubled, and should

like to communicate with her friends. I feel sure that you will give me

such assistance as you can in the matter. If you do not know her home

address, perhaps you can tell me from what agency you originally engaged

her? I may in that way be able to trace her.

"With apologies for troubling you,

"Believe me,

"Very truly yours,

"JANE SEYMOUR."

"_Jane Seymour!_" She could imagine with what a cynical smile he

produced that tag of history from the rag-bag of his memory, and made it

serve his purpose as a nom-de-plume. For though the name of good King

Hal's third queen might or might not have been borne by one of America's

fair daughters, the writing was the writing of Horace Valdana! It was

one more attempt to get on to the trail of his victim.

The address at the top of the letter was Number 439 West 19th

Street--the same number in fact as Shrapp's Hotel; but of course Mrs.

Westenra would not know this. She was to suppose it the number of the

private house occupied by Mrs. Jane Seymour! No doubt Mr. John Seymour

would be on the lookout for Mrs. Jane's correspondence!

This was the letter to which she now typed the following answer on her

husband's typewriter:

"MADAME,--I beg to state that I can give you no information concerning

the whereabouts of my late housemaid, Alice Brook. When I have once

supplied a discharged servant with a formal reference, I feel that my

responsibility to her is at an end. I must, therefore, request you to

relieve me of all further inquiries upon a subject in which I have

neither the time nor inclination to interest myself."

This missive, designedly as rude and arrogant as she knew how to make

it, she signed with a hieroglyphic signature in which might be

discovered after careful study some resemblance to "Anne Westenra" (her

second name was Anne), but that was quite unlike any signature ever put

on paper by Valentine Valdana.

In the end she almost spoiled all by one of those absent-minded mistakes

that sometimes betray the best laid plots and plans. She addressed the

envelope in her natural handwriting. She had stamped and closed it and

risen to ring for Mary to take it to the letter-box at the end of the

street (for since her _rencontre_ with Valdana she had not dared go

out), when, with her hand on the electric button, some bell in her brain

rang a warning that something was wrong. She stared at the letter in

her hand for a full minute before she recognised her _betise_, then the

shock sent her back to her seat half fainting, pale as a witch.

"What an escape! What an escape!" she muttered with dry lips. "I must

be going mad! My brain is giving way! Oh, if I had posted it!"

Valdana would have been quick to recognise her writing and see through

the whole thing--_that she was Mrs. Westenra_. All would have been

lost!

"But I would have torn down the letter-box--set fire to it--blown it

up--rather than he should have got the letter," she muttered fiercely.

In that moment she knew herself one of those who in the cause of love

are capable of crime; that there was not anything she would not do to

save her son from being branded illegitimate and Westenra from shame.

But she was shaken to the depths by her narrow escape, and the thought

that any moment her overtried brain might betray her. It was clear that

she must depart as soon as possible from New York. Her presence there

was a danger. The moment she reached England she could communicate with

Valdana's mother, and once he found she had gone from America, he too

would make for Europe.

From that day forward a gulf yawned between Westenra and his wife--a

gulf into whose depths every sweet memory they had ever shared seemed to

have disappeared. The only things that could have bridged it over were

confidence and love, but he no longer believed in her love, and she

could not give him her confidence. Desperate and dismayed, she saw the

chasm widening day by day between them, but though her spirit held out

arms to him imploring his love and belief in her loyalty, and in her

eyes she could not quench the light of tenderness, she stayed firm to

her purpose.

And Westenra felt the spirit arms entwining him, and saw the beacon in

her eyes, and cursed her for a false trifler, a juggler with the arts

and tricks of women. For when he approached her, lured by the beacon,

she retreated, subtly intervening between them that sense of distance.

And she was cold as death to his touch. Her hand, if he took it, lay

like a stone in his, her lips eluded him. They were to all intents and

purposes strangers to each other. She had never kissed him since he

came back to the world of consciousness! What could he suppose but that

her love for him was worn out.

All her kisses were for Bran it seemed. She would at times almost

violently snatch the child from his arms, and kiss it feverishly,

hungrily, just where he had kissed it, as if to drag the flavour of his

lips--or as Westenra bitterly thought, remove all trace of them--from

the little face.

He was a proud man, and his pride sustained him in this dark and

incomprehensible crisis of their life together. With extraordinary

self-control, born of his pity for her, he refrained from reproach or

any violent sign of his inward rage and pain; but often a sort of

primitive savagery in him ached to smite the eyes that mocked him with

their false tenderness, and there were moments when he longed to take

her by the throat and kill her, while he kissed the lips she withheld

from him.

Life was in fact an active wearing misery to them both.

He was once more sound in health. His plan was to go softly under the

stars for awhile and perform no serious operations, but he felt quite

equal to taking up the ordinary threads of his practice again. His main

worry was Val. Her resolution to go to Europe meant not only the

_bouleversement_ of home and hospital, but of their whole future life.

He was far from wishing to keep a woman who did not care for him tied to

his side. But he retained a kind of ungrounded hope that after she

rested awhile from the heavy strain his illness had entailed, she would

gradually return to her old, ardent generous self and give up the

fantastic plan for leaving America. He saw very well that she must go

somewhere. Her physique was in rags. She had grown so fragile that her

bones almost pierced her skin, and her face was the face of a ghost.

His heart was wrung with pity for her. None more anxious than he that

she should go away and rest, and to use his last cent for the purpose if

need be. What hurt was that she should want to go so far and for so

long; that she should have planned it all so eagerly while he lay sick,

and hold fast to it so resolutely now that he was well. Once so pliant

to all his wishes she was firm as a rock in this, and he had no will to

oppose her. His heart was always tender for the sick, and it was plain

to the dullest eye that she was a sick woman. He schooled himself to

believe at last that her strange coldness was a result of this sickness.

He had half-killed her with overwork and worry, small wonder that she

hated him! It was not treachery, not the quitting spirit, but the whim

of a sick and weary child. The generous thing was to bear with her

unreproaching, and at whatever cost to himself, humour her wish. It was

in this spirit that he told her to pack up, and he would, when she gave

the word, take steamer tickets for her and the children. He arranged

for Mary, the Wicklow maid, to accompany her too. He would have offered

to go himself, though he knew the hospital needed him, but that he could

feel her projecting a very stone wall of opposition to such a purpose.

He had almost to insist on her taking Haidee at the last, for she seemed

now to hang back from the idea, looking at him with strange eyes when he

said that Haidee would be better in her care than any one else's. How

could he know that his delirium had betrayed to her old doubts of his,

which in sane moments he would himself have been ashamed of harbouring,

and which had long since been banished from his mind by her bright

gallantry. He had come to believe, indeed, that Haidee was better with

Val than with any one. Further, he did not in the least want Haidee

with him. She would not for one moment comfort him for the loss of Bran

and his wife. He had only said the thing in that first bitterness of

heart. Rather he looked upon Haidee's going as a safeguard to his own

happiness, for if Val's illness grew worse, the child would be able to

give him the news at once. Mary was going only for the voyage, and on

arriving at Southampton would go straight on to Ireland where her mother

needed her.

When he found at last that Val's reason for lingering in New York was

that she was not satisfied with the people she was leaving behind to

take charge of the house and his comfort, he summarily, even savagely,

turned on her and told her he was well able to take care of himself.

Indeed, he considered this anxiety for his welfare somewhat forced and

unnecessary. Well she knew what he needed for his welfare--that it was

neither a good cook, nor a housekeeper, nor a matron for his

hospital--and, knowing it, she still went from him, betook herself out

of his life, put the ocean between them!

And so at the last, on one grey day late in the year, it was almost in

bitterness they parted, haggard and broken, hiding their hearts from

each other.

As the White Star liner steamed down the river he stood on the dock and

waved farewell to the little group that now made up his dear portion of

life; Haidee, all long tags of hair, yelling boisterously; Mary holding

up Bran pink and shining; Val, wraith-like in her long grey silk cloak,

seeming among her veils to be floating rather than leaning from the side

of the ship, her hands put out at the last in an involuntary gesture as

of entreaty--for what? Forbearance, forgiveness, understanding?

"God knows what is in her strange heart!" thought Westenra.

A gleam of light struck on something bright she wore--he recognised the

beads of her weird necklace. The comfort necklace! He had never seen

her wear it since the day she had swung it in her hand as they walked

the deck of the _Bavaric_.

Poor Val! was she too in need of comfort then?

Was she thinking of the dream ship on which she had sailed so

confidently into this very port not two years gone?

He turned heavily away.

Part II

Jersey

CHAPTER IX

NEW ROADS TO FORTUNE

"God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the

future."--EMERSON.

Jersey, a small and smiling island set amidst the boisterous seas of the

English Channel, is reputed to enjoy more winter sunshine than any

seaside place in Great Britain. Be that as it may, for the first few

months of Val's residence there, it wrapped itself so perpetually in

soft warm shawls of mist, that she sometimes thought of writing to

Rudyard Kipling and calling his attention to a place where the sun never

so much as rose on the English flag. However, it is one of the cheapest

spots in the world, and that is why Val chose it for her six months of

waiting before she could tell Westenra the truth. The six months might

possibly resolve themselves into twelve, one never knew! She was not

hard-hearted enough to wish that Valdana would hurry his departure from

the world, she only wished not to think about it at all. Jersey seemed

to promise both peace and solitude in which to pull herself together

after the strain of the last few months in New York.

They had sailed there straight from Southampton, and after a week's

hunt, found a little furnished house out in the country, pitched high

above St. Brelade's Bay. It was isolated and lonely, standing in the

midst of its own wide fields and garden. The owners, army people who

had used it for a sort of pleasure farm or summer residence, were now in

India, and the property having remained unlet for some time was in a

neglected condition. The house was scantily furnished, but against this

fact the low rent was an offset.

Jersey is considered extraordinarily picturesque, but Val, spoilt by the

wild scenery of Africa, majestic even in its barest, bleakest places,

found the scenery pigmy though pretty. However, there was always the

grandeur of the sea, beating in fury against the rugged, red coast, and

the gracious misty emptiness of sky-line and horizon. She loved, too, to

stand in the garden, dreaming of the lost land that lies sleeping under

the water between Jersey and Brittany--that land of past centuries,

which, before the sea in some strange empyrean convulsion swept over it,

included forests in which were hordes of wolves, the "city of a hundred

churches," and that wonderful cathedral in which, according to an old

Breton manuscript the scarlet mantles of forty Lords of the Church could

be counted at Mass every Sunday. At the great neap tides Jersey

fishermen, far out, looking down from their boats into the clear depths,

say they can still detect foliage that is not sea-weed swaying amid the

branches of mighty forest oaks; and from the Brittany side, on still

days keen eyes have detected, far down on the sea floor, the walls and

ruined towers of the city of St. Ys.

But there was little time for dreaming at Cliff Farm. Val, with a

resolution to cost Westenra as little as possible, did nearly all the

work of the place herself, only employing a woman two or three times a

week to do rough cleaning. But not content to economise only, she

thrilled with a scheme to augment their slight income. A yearning to

found a successful poultry and rabbit farm seized her soul. Haidee,

bitten by the same mania, fostered the ambition, and with heads together

over a poultry journal they read rapturously of fortunes to be made in

this direction.

The first and vital thing, however, was to regain health and get the

children well. Travelling had not agreed with Bran the pagan. On the

ship he had been dreadfully sick and lost all his plumpness and lovely

colouring, but in the mild mists of Jersey and Channel breezes, fresh

and unpolluted by the microbes of cities, he began to bloom again.

Haidee, too, pallid when they first arrived, changed under the spell of

the country. Like all persons who had been held long in cities she felt

the joy of the open, of trees, and grass, and living things, and began

to blossom and smile into a different creature. The old savage Haidee

was still there under the skin, ready to come forth if scratched; but

reasons for kicking physically and jibbing mentally were wonderfully

absent in the simple farm life. Her only grievance was that she had to

go in daily to school at a convent in St. Helier, from whence she

invariably returned ornamented with scowls. But these passed as soon as

she got back to the work of digging and delving in the garden. It was

the out-of-door work that put Val right, too, painting a faint colour in

her thin cheeks, and laying dew on her jaded nerves. The kitchen garden,

practically a field, was heavily infested with couch grass, but by noble

efforts they cleared it and began in time to have their own vegetables

for the table.

Val had told Westenra that she did not know how much life would cost

her, and indeed with her vague ideas about money, she could not tell

until she had tried. He had given her five hundred dollars, and the

arrangement was that she would make that last as long as she could, and

then write for more. Alas! it did not last very long. By the time

travelling expenses were cleared, the hotel bill paid for their week's

stay in St. Helier while they were seeking a house, Haidee's school fees

advanced, and the little farm stocked with necessaries, there was not

much of the five hundred dollars in sight.

Some of it, too, had been used in erecting houses and runs for the hens

and rabbits that were to bring in a fortune! Val, with the amateur's

delusion that after the initial expense all is profit, rushed into the

usual mistake of overstocking.

"Every fowl is an asset," she told herself, and bought fowls by the

dozen, regardless of age, pedigree, or laying qualifications, until

pulled up at the round turn by an article in the poultry journal on the

importance of good breeding stock. Thereafter, she and Haidee decided

to keep all the early purchases for "laying purposes only," and buy a

special pen of thoroughbreds for breeding chickens. Earnestly they

studied the advertisement columns of the poultry journal. Prices for

breeding pens were high.

"We can't afford to pay such sums, Haidee--but there is the exchange

column! What about that?"

The exchange column was rich in proposals from philanthropists who

apparently desired nothing better than to stock the British Isles with

the best breeds of poultry at a dead loss to themselves. Pens of five,

seven, and nine fowls of the purest pedigree were proffered for things

patently not half the value of the poultry. Nothing but the most

profound altruism, for instance, could have prompted the offer from an

English rectory of "A magnificent prize-pen of Black Langshans for

breeding purposes (four hens and a cock) in exchange for clothing,

provisions, or _anything useful_." If a sinister significance lurked in

the last sentence the Cliff Farm enthusiasts possessed not the

ungenerosity of soul to suspect it. Portraits of Black Langshans in the

poultry book discovered them to be birds of a grace and elegance

astonishing and the text declared them splendid layers of lovely pink

eggs.

The pink eggs decided the matter. Val flew to make out a list of all

she would give in exchange. Provisions they had none, but she possessed

clothes to spare in so good a cause.

(1) A Liberty ball gown of old-gold satin.

(2) A motor coat made by Paquin, with a great hood of orange velvet.

(3) A pair of bronze evening shoes, embroidered with emerald

butterflies.

(4) A pair of old-paste buckles set in silver.

"It seems a shame to send them," said Haidee, stroking the orange velvet

hood, the dawn of femininity in her eye. "They 're so awfully nice. I

'm sure they 're worth more than a pen of Langshans, Val."

"Yes, I know," said Val, gazing at the ball gown wistfully. "But where

could I sell them, Haidee? One can't go hawking clothes for sale round

Jersey. And we _must_ have the fowls and we _must n't_ spend Garry's

money on experiments. Besides it is better to get rid of things like

these, they only make one think of balls and motors and frivolous things

that don't matter a bit."

Haidee looked at her curiously.

"Just fancy _you_ ever having gone to balls, Val--and ridden in motors!

I would never have believed it! I can't think of you in anything else

but your big grey overall aprons."

Val flushed painfully. The grey overalls were a concomitant feature of

life in New York only, but Haidee was not to know that.

"At any rate we 'll send the things. Now let us see what we can dig out

in exchange for this pair of Belgian hares--they say they are the best

kind for increasing and marketing. Oh, Haidee! perhaps we shall be able

to make quite a lot of money!"

If they did not it would not be the fault of either of them, for they

threw themselves heart and soul into the affairs of the farm. Val fed

the fowls at early dawn, made hot mashes for them on cold mornings,

cleaned out nests perpetually, ground up old china to make grit, and set

broody hens on several dozen eggs, so as to have chickens ready for the

spring markets. There was nothing she and Haidee disdained to do.

On cold winter nights when Bran was asleep they would sit curled over

the fire calculating the fortunes they were going to make out of their

chickens and computing the large sums that would presently come rolling

in when the breeding pen was in full swing, the spring chickens hatched,

and all the hens laying simultaneously. To make money at poultry

farming seemed as easy as rolling off a log.

"It will be almost a shame to give it up," said Val, with brooding eyes.

"A paying concern like this! When the time comes for us to go back to

America we shall have to instal some one to take charge. We may even

some day be able to buy the farm out of our profits, Haidee! If we do,

it shall be yours and Bran's, because you work like a little brick at

it."

"I shall then buy up Scone's field and go in for Plymouth Rocks and

Faverolles only," announced Haidee.

(Scone was their nearest neighbour, a farmer whose land adjoined their

own.)

This was their method of calculation.

"We have fifty hens now: six broody hens are sitting on twelve eggs, and

when they hatch out we shall have seventy-two chickens; fifty of those

we will fatten and send to market at half-a-crown each (that will bring

us in six pounds). The other twenty-two we will keep for laying

purposes next year; added to the fifty hens we now have that will make

seventy-two hens laying eggs, which we will sell for at least a shilling

per dozen."

It seemed a shame to take the people's money!

The spell of hens was on them. When at last a few chickens of

shamefully mongrel breed were hatched out, they might have been

offspring of the dodo from the way the family crooned and gloated over

them, warming them at the fireside, feeding them with wonderful

concoctions, sitting in the open yard for hours to watch their antics.

The ways of the elder hens also enchanted them, and each of the fifty

had a Christian name bestowed by reason of some peculiar charm or

quality. There were: Grey Lady, Eagle, Crooktail, Favvy, Blind Eye,

Johannesburg Moll, Flirt, Long Tom, Felix, and The Lady with the Fan,

etc.

The rabbits too were spell-binders. Two respective litters were

heartlessly gobbled and mutilated by does driven off their mental

reservation by the sight of human beings fondling their new-born

offspring. After the occurrence of these horrible tragedies, a book on

rabbit-rearing was bought, and the knowledge acquired that rabbit babies

should not be touched or even looked at until they creep from the hutch

and show themselves. As a result of this information later litters were

successful, and during the winter there were wonderful wet nights when

dozens of tiny rabbits were brought for the sake of warmth and dryness

into the kitchen, and the furry things with their bright wild ways

popped and gambolled to the sheer delight of every one--until the

morning came with the business of cleaning up after the circus!

The first disappointment came with the arrival of the prize-pen of Black

Langshans. Their rectory home was in Hampshire, so the railway journey

had not been long, but the sea-voyage appeared to have affected their

health. They staggered forth from the battered poultry basket--four old

black hags of hens, bulky and bleary as washerwomen, hoary of ear and

scaly of leg, followed by a tall slender cock more like a phantom

ostrich than a fancier's bird. He had a wild, red eye, and appeared to

be suffering from a mysterious affliction in the legs, which caused him

to fall fainting at every few steps he made. Haidee cheerfully dosed

him with the peppercorns which were left over from the time when the

chickens had pip. But nothing could rouse him from his Hamlet-like

melancholy.

The hens must have been at least five years old, but happily, neither

Val nor Haidee knew enough about the outward signs and symbols of fowl

age to realise the trick that had been played upon them. Only, it

dawned upon them slowly in the long months to come that they need never

expect pink eggs from the grandmotherly old washer-women with good

appetites. As for the young cock who was to have been the ancestor of

many wonderful chickens for market and prize-pen, for reasons of either

ill-health or chivalry, he was celibate from birth, and could never be

beguiled into taking any interest in his wives. He spent most of his

life in having fainting fits, or fleeing on staggering legs from younger

and lustier birds. At other times he dreamed on one leg, his melancholy

head plunged into his bosom.

----

Haidee got on well at school. Far from being troubled by lack of

intelligence she was an exceedingly clever girl; but she hated study,

and much preferred cleaning out rabbit-hutches or putting fresh straw in

the hens' nests. Her passion was for a pony. There was a little

governess-car in the Stable-house, and permission with the tenants to

use it. Only there was nothing to pull it. But three months after

their arrival Haidee looked up from a letter from Westenra, and

announced the receipt of twenty pounds for the purchase of a pony. Val

stared.

"You did n't ask for it, did you, Haidee?"

"Oh, no; I just mentioned that there was a cart, and how nice it would

be if there was a horse, and how I would do all the looking after it

myself, and we need n't have to pay a man at all," said Haidee airy and

unblushing.

Val did not reproach her, but she felt vexed that Westenra should be

asked to hand out money when she, though hard-pressed, abstained to ask

for anything but the price of everyday necessities. However, the pony

was a great joy to Haidee, and she had an excuse at last for the

stable-boy airs she loved to assume. Nothing pleased her better than to

take off her skirts, and donning knickers and long boots, clean out the

stable. She would swagger and swing her shovel and shout "Gittap!" and

"Hey thar!" as though she had been brought up in a farmyard. Val's

unconventional soul was hard to shock, but even she sometimes wondered

what Westenra, who admired Vere-de-Vere repose in a woman, would say if

he could hear his adopted child at her labour of love in Joy's stable.

A compensating feature was that the girl was in superb health, and

fortunately, there were no prim people at hand to be shocked. Indeed,

as far as society was concerned Cliff Farm might have been situated at

the Antipodes. No one came to call, and not a soul in the island

suspected that the well-known writer, "Wanderfoot," was living

peacefully among them, feeding bran mashes to a pony and setting broody

hens.

The only people who interested themselves in the occupants of Cliff Farm

were the louts from the neighbouring farm, and their interest could very

well have been dispensed with. When they looked over the hedge, and

found Haidee in long boots and knickers, whistling as she cleaned out

the stable, they stood sniggering; and when Val took pot shots with her

rook rifle at the crows that picked the buds from the fruit-trees, they

made it their business to find out if she had a gun licence. The genus

lout is of much the same kidney all the world over. In Jersey the

farmers have a great objection to "gentlemen farmers," and as Val seemed

to come under that heading, they disliked her accordingly. Little she

recked as long as they did not openly interfere. But she and Haidee

were sometimes nervous in their lonely house, and Val would often get up

in the night and fire a shot out the window, just to let stray loafers

know that they were not afraid. Eventually they got a couple of dogs,

and were more at ease.

Their nearest neighbour, Scone, was a gross-looking man, with coarse

ears and little pig-eyes; yet apparently he had the best kind of heart

inside his ungainly body, for he was all good advice and helpful words

to the occupants of Cliff Farm. He advised Val to keep a pig to eat her

"waste," and incidentally volunteered to supply her with one from a

litter of his own. Later he offered to take her chickens and eggs to

market on condition that she bought her butter and milk from him.

It was not until long afterwards that she discovered what mean advantage

had been taken of her trusting belief in the inherent decency of man.

These farming people disliked her. She was not one of them, and that

was enough to call forth all their malice and ill-will. Scone had

charged double what a pig would have cost at the market, and jested with

his cronies on the subject. Also through his kind ministrations she was

paying a penny more per quart for milk than any one in the island and

receiving twopence less per dozen for her eggs.

However, this knowledge came later. For the time Farmer Scone was all

unction and good advice, and Mrs. Scone came often to the house to give

Val the benefit of her knowledge of chickens. She was a common little

woman, with a mouth full of decayed teeth, and a purple nose, but Val

looked upon her as a type, and she never disdained to know types.

Besides, Mrs. Scone was an oracle on chickens, or so she professed.

Certainly most of her statements as to food, etc., were at variance with

the poultry journals, but she sounded very practical and convincing, and

Val had never had experience of people who from sheer malice give wrong

advice, and was far from suspecting the depths of meanness that can lie

in an ignorant mind.

It was Mrs. Scone who advised her to rear capons for the market. Said

she:

"_That's_ the thing to do with your cockerels. I have no time to try it

myself, but you are so clever, Mrs. Westenra, and would be sure to make

it pay. Turn your cockerels into capons. It is the most profitable

business going."

"Capons?" said Val, vague-eyed. "I always thought capons were fish, and

that monks ate them for Friday's dinner."

"Oh, dear me, no, they are not fish, though monks will eat them fast

enough if they get the chance--any one will, they 're delicious. You

'll get from seven shillings and sixpence to ten shillings for them any

day in the week," averred Mrs. Scone, and proceeded to explain to the

open-mouthed Val and Haidee the process of caponising.

"So simple. Just cut a small slit above the wing of each bird with a

pair of special scissors which you buy; then you hook up and remove the

two little glands that lie along the backbone, and there you have your

capon!--instead of a young cockerel that is always tearing about the run

fighting and eating his head off without putting on any fat."

Val was deeply intrigued. Cockerels had become one of her problems.

More than half the chickens upon which she had counted for spring eggs

had either succumbed to the pip, or never hatched out at all; of the

remainder the larger proportion had turned out to be of male sex.

Rose-coloured dreams of getting into touch with the Jesuit College on

the hill above St. Helier and doing a flourishing business with the

monks now floated through her mind. But she shivered at the thought of

the caponising operation. She was physically incapable of cutting

anything, even the head off a dead fish.

"Oh, I couldn't," she said, "at least I don't think I could."

"A pity!" said Mrs. Scone. "There's a fortune in it for them as will do

it--a mint of money."

This gave Val pause. Had she, just because she was a coward about

cutting things, any right to reject a scheme that had a mint of money in

it? Was it fair to Westenra? After profound consideration, and much

guileful persuasion by Haidee, always eager for experiments, she decided

to at least give the idea a fair trial. So, on an afternoon, twelve of

the finest cockerels were enthusiastically chased and captured by

Haidee, aided by one of Farmer Scone's farm boys kindly lent for the

occasion, and put under a rabbit-hutch to await their fate. A packing

case constituted the operating table and the instruments of torture lay

beside it--Val had sent for a little case from London (price thirty

shillings). Mrs. Scone and Haidee held the first bird on the table, and

Val under the direction of the former, with white face and trembling

lips, made the first slit. The cockerel at the prick of the instrument

screamed like a banshee, and Val's unnerved hand fell to her side.

"Oh! how brutal it seems!" she faltered.

On the urgent advice of the others she attempted to finish the operation

(with her eyes closed), but the cockerel objected strenuously, blood

flew in every direction and heart-rending shrieks tore the air. White

as ashes the operator let the scissors fall and staggered to the door.

Mrs. Scone, purring solicitously, supported her into the open air.

"Dear me, dear me! What a good heart you have, to be sure, Mrs.

Westenra!"

Later, leaving Val sitting outside very sick, she returned to the

operating theatre, and she, and Haidee and the farm hand between them

performed on the rest of the cockerels with such vigour that three of

them died the same night, and two more a few days later; four, after a

long convalescence, recovered, but stayed languid and appetiteless for

the remainder of their existence; while the rest, after a week or two

recovering their usual sprightly temperament, fought, pursued each

other, and ate up all the food as gaily as before.

That was the end of the caponising business. The great scheme for

supplying fat capons to the Jesuit College (not for Friday's dinner, of

course, but as an article of nourishment proper to monasteries) never

materialised.

----

Westenra in the meantime was writing grimly, and not often. From his

letters Val gathered something of the strain of life at No. 700 West 68.

The place was paying better now under Miss Holland's management, but, as

she had foreseen, he hated to live in such close communion with people

who were nothing to him. After the first few weeks he had gone into

bachelor quarters once more, not his old ones in the city, but rooms

near the sanatorium. Operations were coming in well, but there were big

gaps in his banking account made by the fateful year of experiment. A

note of weariness often crept into his letters--and when he wrote:

"So glad you are happy--_at last_--with your fowls and rabbits. Do not

let them absorb you altogether," it sounded to her very like a reproach.

Often he said, "I envy you--with the children about you." But for the

most part he rejoiced that the conditions of her life should be so ideal

for health and happiness. Sometimes to Haidee he would cry out

boyishly:

"How I would like to be with you and Bran in the windy fields, running

after the rabbits."

Like every man whose boyhood has been spent in the country, he loved

fields, and rabbits, and birds--all wood and hedge creatures; could

describe the eggs and whistle the note of every bird in the British

Isles. Haidee wrote him long accounts of the life at Cliff Farm, and

when she began to make a collection of eggs by very carefully taking

only one from a nest of four or five, if ever she had any doubt on the

subject of parentage Westenra was never too busy to clear up the matter

by return mail.

He was obliged to economise narrowly, and the consciousness of this

drove Val into a state of frenzy if obliged to spend an unexpected sou.

But never having been trained in economy she had not the faintest notion

of how to practise it, except by doing without personal things herself.

No gowns; no new hats; no clothes at all, for herself. Yet somehow that

did not make any difference to the bills. There was always the awful

food problem, and the boot problem, and the problem of how to make hens

lay without paying large grain bills, and a dozen other incidental

problems!

Like a good many people, Val had supposed that fowls fed themselves.

Her brain had pictured them actively pursuing worms, and insects, and

wild seeds during the intervals of laying. She found instead that they

were like children in the matter of meals, always there on time. At

dawn and eve, to say nothing of mid-day, she would find them standing

dolorously at the back door with eyes cocked expectantly at whoever came

out. Only after a good meal did they go forth to promenade, and then it

was to lay their eggs in some distant hedge where nobody could find

them.

When the grain bills began to come in she realised that in the poultry

business there was an output, as well as an intake, and that all her

small profits were eaten up by the fowls.

CHAPTER X

WORRY-BELLS

"Tout homme digne de ce nom

A dans le coeur un Serpent jaune

Installe comme sur un trone,

Qui, s'il dit: 'Je veux!' repond: 'Non!'"

BAUDELAIRE.

As the months went by and the first exhaustion of body and spirit in

which she had left New York passed, Val's imagination once more woke up,

and began to torment her nights, undoing the good effect of days spent

in healthy occupation. In the soft, kind climate of Jersey her body

must soon have regained all its old nervous strength if the spirit had

not begun once more to chafe and wear its scabbard. Had she been a

woman merely separated for a while from the man she loved with the

certain hope of swift reunion, how happy she could have been in the

thought of his joy in finding Bran so lovely and sturdy, Haidee strong

and handsome, herself recovered! If only all had been well! But all

was not well, and the realisation of this fact began to push serenity

from her mind, waking up old aches and hungers she had believed long

since extinguished--the longing to pack a knapsack and depart for the

horizon, to bathe her soul in the Lethe of a distant sunset, and arise

renewed and free of the cares and conventions of life. Her feet tingled

to travel. The sky-line began to pull at, and "play" her as if it had a

hook in her very vitals. With every ship that disappeared over the brim

of the world went some shade of her inmost being. The song of the

rolling stone sang in her veins:

"I have a love for other lands,

Which thro' my home life dogs my way.

My very soul scarce understands

The love I have for other lands."

She got into the way of sitting on a rabbit-hutch staring before her at

the empty sea until she saw it no longer, nor the sea-gulls that wheeled

in circles, but only the wide veldt empty of all but a line of kops and

a great berg to be passed on the morrow--changing pictures round an

out-spanned waggon--oxen with heads bent, moving gradually onwards, the

tinkling of a cattle-bell, evening fires lighted--Haidee and Bran

bounding about examining new flowers, strange insects, the spoor of wild

creatures--Westenra with a gun--problems gone out of his eye, the rustle

of dollars forgotten--just a simple, primitive vagabond like herself.

Ah! Vain day dreams! Even while she dreamed she could feel the

wretched truth stirring at the back of her mind, waiting like some

horrible yellow viper with head reared ready to strike.

Sleep became rare with her. However hard the day's work, she never had

more than an hour or two of the dead slumber of exhaustion. Then,

regular as an alarm, a little worry-bell would ring in her brain, dimly

at first, then more and more insistent and clamorous. At last she would

be as widely awake as if some one had taken her by the shoulders and

shaken her out of sleep to hear some terrible and significant news.

"Wake up, Val Valdana, you have slept long enough! There is the little

affair of Garrett Westenra's happiness to consider--and Garrett

Westenra's son--and Horace Valdana's lease of life! There are several

other affairs also, which in the daytime you are apt to consider of

minor importance, but which you can see clearly in these small still

hours are very important and pressing indeed--the affair of that grain

bill for which you have not the ready money!--those new shoes Haidee

requires!--the young cockerels eating off their heads--and how are you

going to raise more money for Valdana?"

Ah! that yellow viper that sits in the human heart and haunts the human

brain, crying _yes_ when we cry _no_, and _pleasure_ when we cry _duty_,

and _duty_ when we cry _pleasure_, and _wake_ when we cry _sleep_--Val

lay with it through the hours of many a weary night!

Only once had definite news come to her of Valdana, and that was about

two months after she had settled in Jersey: a letter from his mother in

answer to one Val had written telling of the _rencontre_ in New York

came through the medium of Val's agent in London. Old Mrs. Valdana's

letter was dismal in tone and matter.

"Yes, Horace is indeed with us still, but not for long. Can you not be

kind to him, Val?" was the cry from her mother-heart; but the same

instinct in Val hardened her to the cry. She, too, was a mother, and in

most women the mother-love comes before wife-love and friend-love, and

even lover-love. Nature thus decrees it, that life may go unfalteringly

on. So Val could not be kind to Valdana because it meant being hurtful

to her son. Besides, what was the kindness asked? Of any affection for

her he was utterly devoid, he desired nothing but money, which she did

not possess. Her jewels were exhausted save a few rings, beautiful in

colour and form, but of no great value, and her "comfort necklace,"

which she now wore continually under her dress. The best she could do

was to write asking Branker Preston to take her furniture and

possessions out of storage and put them up to auction. But she directed

him to first ask her great friend, Harriott Kesteven to go through all

trunks and drawers on a destructive expedition, burning all old letters,

photographs, etc. Mrs. Kesteven complied with this request but not

literally. Instead of burning them she had all papers and photographs,

together with many personal things, precious though not intrinsic,

packed up and sent to Val. There were sketches of places she had

visited, a few ivories, books, draperies, curios, and some specially

charming Japanese chintzes. When Val opened packages, her eyes darkened

with tears. It seemed so long since she had lived with these things

about her, and a heart comparatively care-free. A moment later she

caught Bran to her breast.

"You are worth it all. You are my ivory, my roses, my fine gold, the

best article I ever wrote. I have made my travels and my troubles into a

vase of living porphyry."

Haidee took the things and arranged them about the farm sitting-room,

transforming it. But Val could not rest until she had sat down and

written to Westenra, telling him how the thing had occurred.

----

When, as the summer crept on, Westenra in his letters began to make

tentative remarks about his coming vacation, Val's yellow viper was

roused to high effort.

There are certain dark days on the calendar of every life; days when

everything goes wrong, when things are lost and broken, mistaken words

said, fatal promises made. One such day dawned for Val. She arose

haggard from a sleepless night to attend to her household duties. It

was a servantless interval, and there was the fire to make and breakfast

to prepare. After waking Haidee, she put on an old dressing-gown, more

notable for its warm lining than for its youth and beauty, and hurried

down-stairs to feed the fowls who, "carking" bitterly at the back-door,

were liable to wake Bran before his time. It affronted her furiously to

open the door upon Farmer Scone and one of his labourers passing down

her yard. He knew that it annoyed her to have him make this short cut

across her grounds to reach one of his pasture fields, but he had done

it repeatedly since she discovered his dishonesty in the marketing of

her eggs, and discontinued dealing with him. If there had been a man at

Cliff Farm he would never have dreamed of thus invading private

property. But Val being alone he felt safe, and his mean nature rejoiced

in taking advantage of a woman, whom he had discovered did not like to

be rude to any one.

On this particular morning, however, neighbourly courtesy could no

longer keep down just wrath. What infuriated Val was that she should be

seen in her disreputable old gown. It always seemed like an affront put

upon Garrett if she allowed any one to see her looking unkempt and

untidy. A still greater offence was that these common oafs, who saw and

judged only surface things, should so discover her.

"Good marning!" said Farmer Scone, affably familiar, but without raising

his hand to his cap. The dislike and contempt she had long felt for the

man rose in Val like a wave, and would no longer be contained. She drew

herself up and, looking at him, as a queen might look at an insolent

groom, said cuttingly:

"Please understand, Scone, that I do not care to have my yard used as a

pathway. You must in the future go round by the road."

Scone's little pig-eyes regarded her with venom, then he laughed

impudently.

"Great Galumps!" Not quick-witted, he was obliged to grope in the

depths of his mind for a moment or two to see what he could produce to

hurt the pale, proud woman, who looked at him as if he were less than

dust. The best he could drag up from those dim depths was a sneer at

her looks--she looked old that morning, poor Val, after her vigil with

the _serpent jaune_, and there are some mean natures that love to taunt

a woman with age. He turned to his labourer.

"By Jarge, Tom! The old woman got out of her bed wrong side this

marning," said he, and the two burst into senseless guffaws, and marched

on down the path. A further delicate witticism connecting the "old

woman's" temper with the absence of "an old man" added to a

grossly-expressed doubt as to whether she owned an "old man" at all,

came back across the field. Val heard it and turned white.

"This is what I have come to!" she cried to herself in wrath and

unhappiness. "A lonely, wretched woman whom pigs may insult! the victim

of every base-tongued wretch----!"

She turned back into the house, and sat down in utter dejection by the

kitchen table.

"They insult me because they see I have no husband to protect me," she

mused bitterly. "I who have two!"

The sound of Bran crowing his little morning crow up-stairs helped her

to recover, and she made the fire and put the kettle on for breakfast.

A few moments later the postwoman knocked at the door, and handed in two

letters. By the delicate irony of the god of black days the letters

were from her two husbands! She sat down and began to laugh.

Far from being lonely and undesirable she was, it seemed, highly desired

by each. Westenra's letter was somewhat cold, it is true, but the

burden of it was quite clear: he intended sailing from New York within

six weeks, and wished her to make preparations to return with him.

Valdana, writing from Berlin, via his mother and Val's agent, sent news

that was plainly meant to be inspiriting. After a consultation held on

his case by German specialists he was able to announce that his

complaint was not cancer at all, but merely liver trouble induced by the

South African climate, and over-exertion (the last was his own invention

and took the place of the words "alcoholic excess" in the doctors'

diagnosis). Moreover the specialists had given him every hope of a long

life if he would set out for a country with a bracing climate, and he

cheerfully handed on the hope to Val, as though it were some golden

gift. The ultimate burden of his letter came to much the same thing as

Westenra's. He wanted her with him. His mother was prepared to make a

special sacrifice of certain securities to give him a fresh start in

Canada. Would Val give him a fresh start too, and come with him?

And this was the woman whom pigs insulted because she had no husband to

protect her! She laughed convulsively, as one might laugh who felt the

first twinge of the rack, and when she had finished laughing she sat on

reading and dully re-reading, her hands pressed to her temples. Suddenly

a vibrating spasm of agony shot through her teeth and flew up like veins

of red-hot fluid into her cheeks and eyes. Neuralgia, that torment of

the troubled, had for weeks been lurking behind its friend and ally the

yellow viper, and now chose this propitious moment to lay its scorpion

claws upon her. All that day, and for many days after, she almost

forgot the terrible problem of her marriage in the agony of her nerves.

----

Val had never professed a religion or belonged to any faith. She had

just been taught to say her prayers and put her trust in God; no forms;

no church. She supposed she must have been baptised as a child, but

could not be sure. Her mother was a Catholic who loved the smell of

incense, but never went to confession.

Thus she had grown up with an open mind for all faiths and no faith of

her own. Yet, though she was not pious, religion had always attracted

her, and sometimes at rare moments she had seen the vision of a Light

beyond the world. At other times all forms of religion she knew of

seemed a mere wearisome routine of duty and custom. But when in New York

she had come into touch with practised Catholicism she felt the strong

appeal of its Eternal beauty and the power of that wonderful faith to

direct and hold emotional impulsive natures like her own from casting

the soul after the heart. And she recognised at once that it was the

only religion for her and for any child of hers who inherited her

nature. So, at odd intervals in the rush and tear of the early days at

No. 700 she had been preparing herself for baptism by trying to get a

hold with her mind on the dogmas for which she cared nothing, but of

which a knowledge is essential to any one wishing to enter the Catholic

Church.

When her child was born there was an altar in her room with flowers on

it and a _veilleuse_ burning before the Sacred Heart, for it was the

month of June. When Bran was baptised she desired greatly to enter the

church with him, but her instruction was not complete, and her reception

had been put off from day to day. Then came Westenra's sickness and

Valdana's resurrection, putting an end to all thoughts of the kind. She

had something to hide, and those who have such things to hide cannot

enter the Catholic Church. Westenra supposed she had changed her mind,

and thought none the better of her for it.

As a matter of fact she had at that juncture felt more need than ever

for the help of religion in her life. She longed for the advice of

grave good men.

And now again she felt that longing. Her own _will_ to do right did not

seem enough; and indeed reflect and analyse as she would she could not

decide what was the right thing to do. What was it? Her sick brain put

the question over and over again. Was it right to go back to Valdana?

If so, _why_ was it right when her heart and soul and every instinct in

her fought against such a verdict? It could not be right to return.

Valdana deserved nothing of her, had deserted her and her child, had

done without her for years, had exploited her for the money she made,

was a coward and a brute with whom association could only bring

degradation. To go back to him would be to desert her child, for she

could never let Bran come within his radius.

Ought she then to desert her child--her contribution to the world, her

link in the golden chain of generations, her one word in the great

eternal Sonnet?

Never! Though Westenra might be a devoted father Bran would never,

without a mother, grow up to be the man she hoped. No little child can

spare its mother,--though many, alas! by the hard decree of death, and

oftener the cruel decisions of life, have to do so. There is something

a mother gives a child which no one else in the whole wide world can

give. Val had a curious belief too that just as no woman possessed a

soul except through the man she loved and the child she passed on, so no

son ever came to the full possession of his soul except through the love

of a mother. From what strange fields of mental and physical suffering

she had garnered those beliefs it would be difficult to determine, but

they sat fast in her heart and she lived and breathed by them. Emerson

seemed to her to share something of the belief when he wrote: "In my

dealing with my child my Latin and Greek accomplishments and my money

stand me nothing; but as much as I have of soul avails."

Apart from that she was sure that no boy ever yet came to the physical

perfection his babyhood promised without a mother to brood and guard

over his growing years. Who else but a mother will compute the effect

of an extra blanket on a little sweating body, or the lack of one in

winter? Will study the heart and mind and nerves and stomach of a child

all through that period when each year of full content and harmony and

health assures five years of strength and well-being later on?

Never, never could she leave Bran. Ought she then to tell Westenra?

What a relief it would be to share the dreadful truth, have his support

to face it. Half the terror of the situation was in the attitude she

was obliged to assume towards him. Yet a kind of mother-love for him

too--that crooning, protective mother-love that every woman feels for a

beloved man cried out against this solution. She did not want him to

suffer. She did not want to wound and shame him as he would be wounded

and shamed if he found himself not married to her, and his son

illegitimate. She longed to save him from that pain. But now she saw

plainly that if Valdana were recovering Westenra would have to know. He

could not be kept for ever in the dark, suffering through her enigmatic

coldness. Ah! What misery was before them all; for Garrett wifeless

and childless; for Bran fatherless; for herself lonely and separated

from the man she loved.

For Valdana she felt no pity, for she knew that if he suffered it would

be only through his external senses, never through his heart. There was

no susceptivity, in that callous heart for any but himself.

It came into her head once or twice that she would throw morality to the

winds, conceal the truth from Westenra for ever, or at least until she

was found out, and returning to America get all the joy she could out of

life with him and her son. How desirable _now_ looked the vision of life

at 700 West 68!---beautiful as some far coral island with waving palms

and blue lagoons to the eyes of a drowning sailor! Yes, almost she

could make her mind up to do this thing; to accept the remote chance of

being found out, to embrace love and life with both arms; to "take the

Cash and let the Credit go."

But--_she could not_. Morality sprang up where she denied it. Not the

morality of family training nor church teaching, but of years of

instinctive choice between right and wrong, and attention to that still,

small voice whose judgment is so unfailingly sure. It had nothing to do

with convention, this decision. She had no sense at all of the power of

infallibility of social laws. It was just the law of the soul that

forbade it. Even had she not possessed this morality of the soul, there

was one other thing that would have held her back. Ever since Bran came

to her she had hugged to her heart a little phrase that cut into her

while she pressed it there.

"No man can be truly great who had not a great mother."

And great mothers are made by great sacrifice. Not that she aspired to

be anything within a hundred miles of greatness. How unlucky Bran had

been in his choice of a mother only she, conscious of her defects and

failings, could know. But from the first she had sworn to give him every

chance that sacrifice of herself could bestow. And here was the time for

her to make good the resolution.

CHAPTER XI

A SHIP ON THE ROCKS

"Love is not always two Souls picking flowers."--MASEFIELD.

These decisions did not prevent her from spending days and nights in an

agony of mental and physical pain. Neuralgia racked her until she

thought she must go mad. She became weak and haggard from want of

sleep. A longing for veronal seized her. Only, she was afraid of

veronal. In the past it had got a hold on her that nothing but

Westenra's influence could have broken, and vaguely she knew that one

cannot break twice from the same enemy. Westenra's power might not be

so overwhelming next time, the hold of the drug would be stronger.

Veronal, then, was forbidden; but she had no such feeling about alcohol.

She had given up drinking spirits and wine, not because it had any

temptation for her, but because Westenra hated women to drink. She was

not afraid of the power of brandy over her. And so one day, in a

delirium of pain and misery, she sent out the little servant for a

bottle of brandy.

Ah! what rapturous repose for a few hours! ... what glorious oblivion

from pain ... what a lifting of leaden clouds and rose-tinting of the

horizon with hope! When she felt the effect of a strong dose of brandy

going off and the scorpion claws beginning to tear at her eyes and

temples once more she took another dose. As soon as one bottle of brandy

was finished she sent for another. For weeks she forgot in this way

both mental and physical trouble, drowning her pain by day and sleeping

heavily by night. Then one morning in a blinding flash she realised what

she was doing. Going into the pantry she saw four empty bottles

standing there. She had seen them before, but now she _recognised_

them, and it was she who in one week had emptied them!

"I am taking to drink!" she cried, and the phrase heard so often in jest

amongst journalists took unto itself a new and awful significance that

made her recoil horror-stricken before the damning evidence. Two full

bottles stood by the empty ones. She had blindly ordered several

bottles at once in a panic of fear that pain might come upon her

sometime and find her unprepared. Even now the thirsty beast in her was

raising its head and crying out for what was at once tonic and narcotic.

And she was at one with the beast in its desire. She wanted the brandy,

madly desired it for its own sake, longed to feel it warm in her body

sending up a glow of comfort and well-being, soothing her pains with

velvety hands, dimming her vision of the truth with rosy-pink veils of

hope, filling her heart with the careless philosophy of the

drinker--that everything turns out well in the end, and "all is for the

best in the best of all possible worlds." Away with dull care and pain!

Her hand was already on the bottle, when in her mind, like a little

bright sword with which to fight an enemy, a thought beautifully clothed

in words presented itself:

"No man can be great who has not a great mother."

It is such phrases as these that help make the world's history. It is

thus that beautiful thoughts which have been treasured and loved reward

and befriend in times of stress. Val killed her desire for drink with

the weapon a writer had forged for her many years before, and that she

herself had brightened ready for use.

In a moment she had gathered up all the bottles, empty and full, thrust

them into a bag, and was carrying them out of the house. There was no

one about. Haidee was at school; the little maid had carried Bran down

the fields. She hurried with her burden to a deep dell that lay in the

farm grounds--a dell with trees growing round it, and grassy slopes full

of primroses and early violets. At the bottom grew a mass of nettles and

long rank grass, and into this she flung the bottles in a heap, and

hurried away from the sound of the liquid bubbling over the broken glass

and the strong spirity scent that rose amongst the weeds.

That was over; a leaf turned; a battle won!

Some terrible days came later. No vice puts in its insidious roots more

deeply than the drink vice, or more strongly resents being torn from its

chosen place. It clings and burns and aches, leaving scars, as ivy

leaves scars on the tree from which it is dragged away. But it was no

old deep-seated vice with Val, and victory was to her, though when the

battle was over she looked less like victory than defeat. In the end

she determined to see a doctor in St. Helier and get a tonic that would

pull her together before Westenra came home--an event that might occur

any time within the next six weeks.

One afternoon, then, on a day that Haidee had a holiday and could keep

an eye on Bran and the little maid, Val walked down to the station and

took a train for town. The way was long, and she in no great trim for

walking. Added to this unusual effort was a train journey and a weary

hunt for the house of the doctor whose address she had forgotten to

bring with her. All these things were responsible for the exhaustion

which caused her, after the doctor had examined and prescribed for her,

to faint quietly in her chair. When she regained consciousness she was

lying down in a shaded room, with the burning taste of brandy in her

mouth and the odour of it all about her--they had spilt it on her gown

whilst forcing it between her lips.

"What is it? Where am I?" she cried.

"All right; there's nothing very wrong ... you are only a little run

down," the doctor soothed her, and the doctor's wife, standing by with

sympathetic eyes, said gently: "You must rest a little while, and then

have a cab to go home. You are thoroughly overtired."

They insisted on her taking a cab, but she dismissed it at the station,

and, after the railway journey, once more made the long walk across the

fields. When she reached home at last, very faint and weary, the night

had fallen, but the little house lighted up, and as she came up the path

she could hear Haidee's laugh ringing out, and Bran's merry crow. How

happy they were, bless them!

As she reached the door something new and unaccustomed came out to meet

her, some subtle difference in the atmosphere, the tone of the

children's voices, and in a flash she knew the truth. Westenra had

arrived during her absence!

He was sitting in the big double easy-chair, with Haidee squeezed beside

him and Bran in his arms. The room was full of a kind of warm happiness.

"Oh, Joe!" she cried, and running forward, forgot Valdana, forgot

everything but her joy in seeing him again, threw herself upon the

little group and kissed them all alternately, wildly, like a mad

creature.

"Yes, here I am," said Westenra, laughing, and the moment she heard his

voice she knew there was something wrong. She had no idea of the strong

odour of brandy she had brought into the little room with her, and she

did not know until later what had happened during the afternoon. She

only realised, with her quick and sure intuition, that Westenra was even

more estranged from her than when they had parted in New York. There

was a distance in his manner for which his last letter had hardly

prepared her.

After the ice-cold misery of the first few moments she was dully

thankful for his attitude. It was for the best. If he had ceased to

care for her, so much the better for him: so much the less pain to be

suffered in separation. She sat down and began to talk mechanically,

eliciting details of his journey. It appeared he had arrived in the

Island that morning. The steamer docked very late on account of fog.

He had just missed a train, and had been obliged to wait for an hour at

the station, and then it had taken him a considerable time to find the

farm. He had lost his way and come round by an old unused route, which

accounted for the fact of his missing Val, for he had arrived only a few

moments after her departure. Haidee had shown him everything. They had

been over the poultry houses, fed the rabbits, ridden the pony, and let

the dogs loose to hunt the rats----

At this juncture of the narrative Haidee turned red, and gave a swift

embarrassed glance at Westenra. He, however, stared steadily before

him, a peculiar steely quality in his stare. Val saw Haidee's glance,

and his strange look, but knew the meaning of neither, and was too

unhappy to speculate on the subject.

"He 's had a tub, and I 've fixed up his things in the spare room," said

Haidee presently.

"You seem to have got along very well without me," was all Val could

say, with a pale smile. "I suppose I had better see about dinner now."

A strange evening was passed. Westenra could not conceal his joy at

being with the children once more, but if he felt any at seeing Val he

concealed it well under a gay cold manner. She on her side felt all her

happiness swallowed up in dismay. Love was frozen in her heart.

After supper Bran was bathed before the bedroom fire and put to bed. He

had to be admired first, and parade naked across the hearth-rug to show

all his little muscles. He was able to walk well now, and was as

perfect as only baby children can be before all their soft puppy-dog

roundness turns to length. His parents devoured him with their eyes,

forgetting their miserable problems for awhile in the joy of so

beautiful a possession.

"I tell you this fellow is out to make new figures at the Olympics,"

said Westenra, who had all an Irishman's madness for athletics. "This

is a champion!"

At last the children were in bed, the house silent. Garry and Val sat

alone by the sitting-room fire, constrained and far apart.

"They look blooming," he said. "This place suits them better than New

York apparently."

(Ah! in his joy at seeing the children blooming he had not noticed her

haggard face! Symptoms that in others would have aroused his

professional interest in her went unnoticed, or so it seemed. She

remembered that she had once heard a doctor's wife quote rather

bitterly:

"Shoemakers' children have broken boots; doctors' wives never get

treatment.")

"Then you will not mind our going on living here, Joe--for awhile?" she

said a little wearily.

"Do you wish it?" She did not answer at once. He looked at her gravely

with something pitiful in his glance.

"The children are in great trim ... but you? I don't think it is any

good to you to live like this."

(He _had_ noticed, then! It had not escaped his keen eye that she was

grown old and lined! Should she tell him about her neuralgia and the

terrible time she had gone through with her nerves? But how sick he must

be of women with nerves.... New York was full of them .... he had just

come on holiday--better wait!)

"Oh, I am all right, Garrett," she said hastily. "A little neuralgic at

times----"

"Ah!"

"But it is nothing ... nothing."

"I don't think you should go on living here. The idea was for you to

get strong ... instead you have--" he hesitated, and looked at her

gravely with indictment in his glance--"given way to nerves."

She glanced at him guiltily. It almost seemed to her that he had been

going to say "given way to drink!" That he knew something of her

struggle with the brandy--yet how could he?

"Oh, _nerves_!" she said, and laughed nervously.

"I think the only thing to be done," he continued steadily, "is for you

to come back with me to New York."

"Oh, Garrett! ... I don't think.... I can't do that," she stammered

desperately.

"You mean you don't want to?"

"It is not a matter of wanting."

He stood up then, stern-faced.

"Don't beat about the bush. This thing has got to be settled once and

for all. Will or will you not?"

"I can't, Joe." She looked at him with haunted eyes.

"You can't break loose?"

"Break loose? What do you mean?"

"Never mind ... never mind ... poor Val!" Sternness had gone from him.

"Well, that is settled, then--I go back without you." He got up heavily

and turned away from the fire.

"I 'm dead-beat and must get rest, Val. Haidee has fixed me up very

well in her nice little room; she told me you always meant me to have

it."

He turned and looked at her, in his eyes a sudden bitterness and anger

born of his longing to take into his arms and crush to him this woman

who exiled him from her heart.

"Do you think it is quite fair, Val? Do you think you are playing the

game?"

She looked at him with wistful, harried eyes.

"I am trying to, Joe--I----"

What could she say? Was this the moment to stab him with the truth?

While she hesitated wretchedly, he turned away again, walking round the

room, looking fiercely at the pictures and chintzes he knew had belonged

to her past life.

"Haidee is growing into a nice girl," he said abruptly, switching his

mind from a subject that maddened him.

Val, by the fire struggling with her misery and half-formed resolution,

looked at him vaguely for a moment. Ah! he was speaking of

Haidee--while she was torturing herself with the thought that he wanted

her as she wanted him!

"Good-night!" he said harshly, and went his way up-stairs, without

attempting to kiss her. She crouched down by the dying fire, and

covered her face with her hands. Her heart was in great pain: the great

pain of a little child. Footsteps overhead told her that he went first

to her bedroom to take a last glimpse of Bran, and low murmurs betrayed

the fact that Haidee was not yet asleep. At last his light, firm tread

crossed the floor once more, then came the sound of his closing door.

Another hour must have passed when Val, still sitting by the fire, was

startled to hear the patter of feet on the bare oak stairs, then to find

a slim night-gowned figure beside her.

"Haidee!"

"I wanted to tell you something, Val, and was afraid I 'd be asleep

before you came up."

"What is it?"

"Garry found all your empty brandy bottles in the dell; we were hunting

the rats there with Billy and King." Her big brown eyes rested

commiseratingly on Val. It was evident she felt guilty for having led

Westenra to the dell, her very look of guilt had in it something damning

to the poor pale culprit sitting there with a sick heart, no trace on

her of the victory she had achieved two weeks ago. She had believed her

sin as secret as her victory over it. Yet here it rose up against her

in Haidee's eyes. The child knew nothing of the victory--only of the

vice, though Val had never felt herself observed. And now Garry knew!

That was the reason then of their embarrassed looks and averted eyes!

"Of course he didn't say anything. He pretended he did n't notice even.

But you should have seen his face." She gazed dismally at Val. It was

as though they had offended God. "And you smelt awfully of brandy when

you came in--you do still."

"Go to bed, Haidee," said Val at last, sick with humiliation. She had

meant to tell of the brandy episode some day, in some dear moment when

all was clear between them once more. Now, through being accidentally

betrayed, the incident had assumed a horrible aspect. She was afraid to

think of what his thoughts on the subject must be. She longed to tell

him all. To run up-stairs and cry at his door: "I didn't drink it all,

Garry; two of the bottles were full when I threw them away." How silly

and puerile that would sound. He would, perhaps, see nothing in her

action but the terror of a confirmed drinker found out, might imagine

that he had married a secret drunkard! She sat twisting her hands in an

agony of misery. How could she tell him? What was the good? How dared

she even kiss him as she had done when she came in? Valdana was

alive--she was not even Joe's wife--what to do--what to do? ... How

brutal life was!

Suddenly she fell to communing with her dead--those who had loved and

believed in her and knew that however much she had failed in the heavy

trials and afflictions of the last year, at least she had not been

actuated by meanness or mere self-indulgence. _They_ knew her as she

used to be--fearless and sure of her actions--before love had laid bonds

on her spirit, and sorrow and failure crushed her down. They

understood, and would not altogether condemn. At last, curiously

strengthened, she rose and went up-stairs, the firm purpose in her heart

of going to Westenra to tell him everything.

She paused for a moment at his door--doubtless he was sleeping,

dead-beat as he said. But that could not be helped. It was more

important even than his sleep that all should be put right between them.

She owed it to herself as well as to him. Softly she turned the handle

of the door, but it did not open to her touch. Westenra had guarded

himself against invasion. It was locked.

----

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 Corbieres 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.

"One _must_ look 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 is _true_--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.

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 hers

_eloignee_ from 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.

"_My_ son," 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 the _Bavaric_ had 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. Women _can_ get 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 what _that_ means. 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