WANDERFOOT (continued 3)

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 bêtise, 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.

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.

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

Installé comme sur un trône,

Qui, s'il dit: 'Je veux!' répond: '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.