WANDERFOOT (continued 6)

Well! it must be confessed that Sacha had emerged but poorly from her process of assessment. She had turned her ear and inclined her eye for many a long day for grace in him--and both had gone unrequited.

If Sacha's worldly possessions were small, they still predominated over his jewels of the heart, while in mind he possessed much the same qualities as Christiane de Vervanne--gaiety, egotism, the hard, cold brilliance of a diamond, a straining ambition for all the worldly "good things of life." In their alikeness these two might have been brother and sister, while Celine and Rupert, though only cousins, much more closely resembled each other in nature and bearing.

It seemed the usual irony of circumstance that had ordained for Sacha, who loved the good things of the world, comparative poverty, while to Rupert, the John o' Dreams and lover of seas and skies, was given wealth! The latter's father (the general's brother), with a head for finance, had gone into banking instead of the army, and thereafter married a banker's daughter with a fortune, which he had trebled and quadrupled to leave to their only son.

However, Sacha, with a small income squeezed out of his father's pension, gave himself a very good time, and had every intention and likelihood of making a rich marriage. In the meantime he was open to any love experiences that came to hand. Like all young Frenchmen, he preferred women older than himself, and went in fear of the young girl--when she was French. But this summer no flirtations with women older than himself had offered; Mrs. Kesteven treated him like a grandson, Val was secret behind her veil, while the Comtesse's beguilements were not for him--he and she understood each other too well. Remained Haidee, who was jeune fille indeed, without being French.

Her daring boyish ways and fresh beauty attracted him immensely, and though he was an honourable fellow, according to his lights, the lights of a young French officer make no very great illumination, and apparently he had not been able to resist the temptation of making her fall in love with him.

Val, reviewing the position, knew that it would be fatal to let Haidee lose her head over this young worldling. He was only amusing himself. No Frenchman who is poor ever contemplates marriage with a girl unless she happens to have a dot worthy of consideration, in which case the affair becomes a ceremonious one in which parents and relations take an even more important part than the young people themselves. Val knew all this well, and that there was not the faintest idea of anything serious in Sacha Lorrain's mind. But, no doubt, it was very amusing to make a little American girl fall in love--and to him appeared harmless enough. Only, it would have to be put a stop to at once, though at first Val did not quite see how. Impossible to break off friendly relations all at once with the occupants of Shai-poo. They had all become too intimate for that. Besides, such an act would not serve its purpose. Haidee was too wilful and lawless not to find means of being with the Lorrains whatever Val did, and opposition would simply have the effect of making her keener. The only course open to Val was one that Sacha himself had suggested by his manner since she came out from behind her blue veil. Whether it was that he was piqued by her preference for his cousin, or whether he thought a little jealousy might be good for Haidee, it would be hard to say, but at any rate he had shown distinct signs and symbols of being attracted to Val. So far she had disregarded, while being greatly amused by his not very subtle efforts to flirt with her, but she now resolved to make a change in her tactics. If Sacha wanted a flirtation with a woman older than himself he should have it.

She gave him an opening the very next day on one of their long excursions, and he grabbed it with a fervour that astonished her. She kept him at her side all the afternoon. Rupert took her defection good-naturedly, and devoted himself to Haidee, who rebuffed him and sulked. The next day, on the beach, Val did the same thing. Sacha became more fervent. Rupert began to look wounded. Haidee glared, and would not speak when they reached home.

After all, it was an easy matter. What inexperienced girl, however pretty, can hold her own against a woman of the world, determined on capture--especially when the prey is only a youth? Sacha, his vanity flattered by Val's sudden interest in him, paid little attention to Haidee's scowls and sulks. And when Val realised how serious it was, saw how Haidee paled and flushed and lost her appetite, she lured the mothlike Sacha all the more within the radius of the flame which attracted him. She did not mean to burn him, only to dazzle him a little; but if his wings were slightly scorched, that was his affair. Haidee had got to be saved from unhappiness even at that cost.

The thing was made easier by the departure of the Comtesse and Celine to pay a week's visit to some army friends stationed at Cherbourg. With no one left but the two boys, it was simple for Val to take entire possession of Sacha. Haidee was left to the share of Rupert. She liked Rupert well enough--no one could help it. But she was in love with Sacha. Before long the look of an assassin came into her eyes when she turned them upon Val. But Val did not falter in her purpose. Not even when Rupert withdrew from the quartette and let Sacha come alone to the villa. On such occasions they all went out together as usual, but Val kept Sacha by her side. She was the soul of gaiety, she flirted and spun fine threads. Haidee gloomed and grew paler. Val's heart ached for the girl, and she was sick of the business herself, but Sacha's leave was almost up. It was only a matter of days. She determined to stick at the wicket.

On Sacha's last evening the whole party from Shai-poo came to Villa Duval with the suggestion of a moonlight walk to the cliff point near the lighthouse. The Comtesse and Celine had returned from Cherbourg bringing in tow a young cavalry lieutenant, a friend of Sacha's, and plainly a satellite of Christiane de Vervanne. The object of the walk was to re-cement a wooden cross upon the ruined walls of the old church of Mascaret. The village in some by-gone age had been situated on the North Foreland, but the gales and storms that besieged it there had driven the villagers inland, and no trace remained of habitation except the four walls of a primitive church, battered and time-stained, pitched perilously on the side of the cliff, like wreckage flung there by some wild storm from the sea below. The little wooden cross that leaned crazily on the east wall had been put there many years past by Rupert and Sacha, and it was a sort of religious rite with them to re-cement it upright in its place every year.

It was a glorious night for a walk, and when they came to claim her, Val could make no excuse for not going, though all that day a wave of dreariness had possessed and submerged her, making her long to be alone. She could not plead that Bran would be lonely, for, tired out from an afternoon's net-fishing in the shallows of the river, he was deep asleep, and Hortense by some unwonted chance was available to watch over him. Besides, Haidee looked so wretched and wistful that compassion overcame reason in Val. She began to half doubt her right of interference. Because of this she allowed herself to be taken possession of by Rupert and Celine, while the Comtesse and her lieutenant went on ahead, so that nothing was left for Sacha to do but walk with Haidee. He did it with so bad a grace that the latter was even more unhappy than if she had been left to herself. The two walked in silence and when they were winding in single file round the face of the cliff Sacha made a determined effort to regain Val, but she cold-bloodedly hedged him off. She saw now very plainly that her labour was at an end. He and Haidee were so thoroughly estranged that all danger was past, and her task over. Subtly her manner changed then to one of half quizzing gaiety extremely disconcerting to the amorous Sacha, and yet with which he could find no fault, for her flirtation with him had been so delicately done that it could hardly bear that name. Puzzled and savage at the change in her he turned back to Haidee, but Haidee had her pride that wrestled with her poor little crushed love and for the time at least conquered it. She would not be left and again taken at will. She retired behind a sullen scowl. Sacha, for once, was at a loose end and did not like it a bit.

Arrived at the vieille église, the two cousins climbed cautiously up the crumbling walls, Rupert with the string handle of the cement pot between his teeth. The rest of the party, scattered on the sloping cliff-side in the mother-of-pearl moonlight, sat watching them. Below, the sea, a star-spangled mirror, stretched from France to where Alderney humped against the sky-line. On the Jersey coast a powerful light winked spasmodically. The sky, clear in the east, was flecked overhead and in the west with tiny snatches of snowy cloud, regular as knitted stitches, or the scales on a mackerel's back.

Softly the Comtesse began to sing to them:

I

"Au clair de la lune,

Mon ami Pierrot,

Prête-moi ta plume

Pour écrire un mot.

Ma chandelle est morte,

Je n' ai plus de feu.

Ouvre-moi ta porte

Pour 1' amour de Dieu!

II

"Au clair de la lune

Pierrot répondit:

'Je n'ai pas de plume,

Je suis dans mon lit!

Va chez la voisine,

Je crois qu' elle y est,

Car dans sa cuisine

On bat le briquet.'

III

"Au clair de la lune

L'aimable Lubin

Frappe chez la Brune,

Elle repond soudain:

'Qui frappe de la sorte?'

Il dit à son tour:

'Ouvrez votre porte

Pour le dieu d'amour!'

IV

"Au clair de la lune

On n' y voit qu' un peu,

On cherche la plume

On cherche du feu.

En cherchant de la sorte

Je ne sais ce qu' on trouva,

Mais je sais que la porte

Sur eux se ferma!"

"Ah!" she sighed softly in the silence that followed her song. "And now we all go back to Paris! That dear Paris! C'est comme un amant qu'il faut quitter pour un revoir plus chaud, et comme tout neuf! If you do not budge from it, it becomes like a husband, fatiguing and exigeant, who makes you work too much and never gives you room to breathe. But----" she gazed ecstatically towards Alderney in which direction the lieutenant and Rupert happened to be sitting. "Go away for a little while and you find yourself dreaming of the sweet suffocating embrace that exalts the veins----"

"How white the sea looks!" suddenly broke in Val. It troubled her to see how Haidee hung upon the pretty immodest phrases that slipped so easily from Christiane de Vervanne's lips. "What were those lines of yours, Sacha, about when the sea is milk-white and Jersey black as ink and a storm coming to-morrow?"

"Quand la mer est comme le lait, et Jersey tout noir

On peut attendre un orage avant demain soir,"

quoted Sacha sulkily.

The Comtesse shot an icy glance at Val. She did not like her rhapsodies interrupted.

"Épatant, that woman!" she murmured to her cavalry-man.

On the walk home Sacha tried once more to re-arrange the order of the party and get Val to himself, but pitilessly she left him to the mercy of Haidee, furious and vengeful as a Gorgon. When they reached home it would have been hard to say whose was the crossest-looking of their two faces. Trinkling back farewells, the Shai-poo party continued on its way down the Terrasse, but Sacha stayed. He had gripped Val's hand over the little fence that enclosed the yard and would not let it go.

"I must speak to you," he said urgently, fiercely, and did not care that Haidee lingered within earshot, and when she heard his words started, then tore up the flight of steps into the villa.

"What is it, Sacha?" said Val, gently.

"You have been playing with me!" He was white-lipped and furious. She felt ashamed though her intention had been good.

"Oh, Sacha!--do not be angry! Surely you too were playing?--I----"

"No!" he shot out at her. "It was not play for me--I----"

But she would have no declarations.

"Well--I am truly sorry--you must forgive me--I, am very fond of you, Sacha--both you and Rupert--but you must not think--Why, I am a very serious woman. Think, I have a son, and am almost old enough to be your mother!"

"Why did you not say that to me before? Why have you been to me these last weeks so full of allure, so attirant?" he asked savagely. "Sapristi! you have been fooling me. It has pleased you to play with my heart!"

She thought it the wisest thing then to tell him the flat ungentle truth.

"As it pleased you to play with Haidee's."

He glared at her, and she stood staring steadily back, the light of battle in her eye.

"Haidee is only a child--her heart is very tender and romantic. I could not have its first bloom rubbed off by you, Sacha--a sophisticated Frenchman who would laugh and go on your way. She is too good for that."

He breathed hard.

"So!" He muttered at last, "That is it?"

"Yes, that is it." There was a silence. Then she said gently:

"And in your heart you do not blame me, Sacha. Think if it had been your little sister, and you had seen her trying to waste her heart's first freshness foolishly, uselessly. What would you have done? I know well enough what you would have done."

"You had no right to play----" he began, but he was softened.

"Oh yes, every right. Haidee is like my little sister."

She put her left hand over the gate and laid it on the one which gripped her right.

"Come! There are no bones broken, Sacha. You know very well that you do not really care about me. This was just one of the little experiences of which you will have scores in your life; the remembrance of it may help you in others. But I have not found it uninteresting. You are a charming and attractive fellow--if I did not happen to be immune--(this was sheer guile on her part, but honey has a great healing quality in such cases). I assure you that I have found it anything but an uninteresting experience. Will you not pay me the same compliment and shake hands on it?"

After a little pause he let go his grip of her right hand and took the other into a more gentle grasp. The scowl passed from his face. He was not a bad-hearted fellow--only one of his kind! A smile came into his hard blue eyes.

"B'en! All rite," he accepted, and kissed her hand, not without a show of grace.

Val sighed as she went softly indoors, and a pain shot through her breast as she came upon Haidee in the sitting-room, head on the table, hair spread in every direction, absolute abandonment in her pose. A longing seized Val to sit down and put her arm round the girl's waist, but she knew Haidee too well to succumb to it. Instead, she pretended to notice nothing unusual.

"A headache, chicken?" she asked casually, and went to hang her hat behind the door. At the sound of her voice Haidee sprang up and stood facing her.

"I hate you--I hate you--" she cried passionately. "You always take away the people I love from me!"

"Oh, Haidee!" cried Val, sorrowfully, suddenly remembering the night she had found the child on Westenra's bed.

"I hate you!" she screamed in concentrated rage, her face dark with passion. "I will hurt you some day. You'll see!"

She flung out of the room.

"So that is my reward for putting up with that silly ass for three weeks!" said Val to herself, and sighed once more. Wearily she lighted her candle and went to warm her heart with a glimpse of her son. He lay flung on the pillow like a warm pink rose. She burrowed her nose gently into his soft neck, scenting the lovely puppy dog scent that all young things have round their throats, scenting, too, the little stinky hands that in his yearning for bed he had only half-washed. With a wet sponge and some drops of eau-de-cologne she gently removed from them the mingled odour of shell-fish, bread and jam, and night dews. Then she made the sign of the Cross over him, and went to bed.

――――

The mackerel sky had not lied! The next morning was all glittering with sunlight under a steel blue sky swept clear by a September wind that tore up the sea and sent it pounding in great grey-green walls with spittering spraying tops to crash upon the shore. They were delicious to jump in, those great tawny breakers, and carried the jumper fifteen or twenty feet high before they hurled themselves with a roaring swish to cream along the beach. It was not a day to venture out far. Even good swimmers in such a sea contented themselves with going in only up to the armpits, waiting for the breaker to gather them up, then pass and leave them in flat, clear water ready for the next.

The Comtesse and Celine, tired from their journey the day before, sat and looked on, but Rupert, Val, Haidee, and Sacha, with half a dozen others, were in the water jumping like maniacs, diving through sheer solid green walls, disappearing under avalanches of foam, gasping, laughing, panting. Sometimes short, wild screams, almost as of terror, were jerked out of them as the breaker moved on them like some monster determined on destruction.

"Quelle courage!" said Christiane de Vervanne wonderingly. "And did you ever see anything like Madame Valdana screaming and jumping like a mad thing! She behaves with a great curiousness at times, that lady!"

"She is an original!" said Celine, who was fond of Val, and felt for her none of the antagonism which the generality of Frenchwomen, in spite of the entente cordiale and Edward the Peacemaker, always will feel for Englishwomen. True, Val was not English, but Celine was unaware of the fact.

In time Val gave Haidee the signal to come out. They had been in quite half an hour, the breakers appeared to be getting worse, and the wind had turned bitterly cold. Every one but the members of their party had already left the water. The Frenchmen, however, Sacha, Rupert, and the young officer, were disinclined to come out. Instead it seemed as though with the departure of the ladies they felt free to go farther in. Val stood in the creaming froth watching them for a moment before she raced Haidee to the cabins.

"I wish they would n't," she said uneasily, and suddenly threw out her voice in a coo-ee.

"Venez! Venez, you boys! You've been in long enough!"

The laugh and shout in Sacha's voice that came blowing back seemed to be snatched by the waves and torn to ribbons by the wind before it reached the beach. Val found herself shivering, and ran for the cabins. Just as she was dressed she heard a scream, and looking through the diamond-shaped hole in the door, saw Celine standing up stripping off her clothes to her knickerbockers, while the Comtesse stood by screaming and wringing her hands. A moment later every one was pouring out of the cabins, and Val and Haidee back in their wet bathing suits were running down to the water's edge. Only two heads were bobbing in the waves--the third had disappeared!

――――

It was nearly half an hour later when they brought Sacha Lorrain's body to the beach. The delay came of no one knowing where he went down. Only Celine had seen the wave hit him full in the face and knock him backwards stunned, but when, followed by Val and Haidee, she swam out to the spot she had marked with her mind's eye, he was not there. They dived and swam under water all round the place. In that rough sea, with the waves growing every moment more violent and blinding, and churning up the sands, they could scarcely see a yard before them under water. And of course every moment was of value. Some one had run to the digue to get the lifeboat manned; some one else to Villa Duval for hot bottles. Azalie, her harsh face grown amazingly soft, stood laden with blankets. Fishermen joined the searchers in the water. Fishwives walked up and down the beach wringing their hands.

"The General's son! The Admiral's grandson! Monsieur Sacha!"

"Only the other day he was a petit gars in his sailor's suit. It was my man who taught him to swim."

"He made his first communion the same day as my Jean!"

"Ah! The gay eyes he had!"

Before they found him every one from the village was grouped on the beach. Sacha's father--General Lorrain--the curé, the doctor, the mayor. All stood waiting with strained, fearful faces, while the boat pulled up and down, battered by the waves. The swimmers exhausted would come up to rest in the surf, then enter again. The sunshine had gone, and the storm Sacha had prophesied the night before was creeping like a black beast across the horizon. It was a sailor in the lifeboat who spied the body at last, and diving down into the water heaved it over the side. Then they pushed the boat in through the surf, and poor Sacha was taken out and laid on the sands he had trodden so blithely an hour before.

After the first half an hour every one knew there was no hope, though none voiced the knowledge. People just stood in silent groups a little way off from the central group that knelt, and swayed, and jerked and moved unceasingly. Rupert, white and exhausted, wrapped in his bathing toga, walked up and down the beach, stopping every now and then to try and get Celine away, but Celine would not come. She was rubbing Sacha's feet, and staring, staring at his cold, calm face. Every now and then she would say imploringly:

"Listen, Sacha! Sacha, my brother! Veux tu écoute?"

The General, very calm and stern-faced, stood at the head of the group. But sometimes he would go away suddenly and walk swiftly up and down with Rupert, for a moment or two, his head high, the little ribbon of honour a red dot on his upright breast, then return to look down again at the still, still face of his only son. He could do nothing. The operations were in the hands of competent men. The doctor from Barleville had come rushing in his motor to reinforce the Mascaret doctor. Val, when she was dressed, sat on a rock with her arms round Bran, and could not bear to see the General's eyes. Haidee and Christiane de Vervanne were crouched close by.

All the sailors and lifeboatmen were acquainted with the business of resuscitation, and there was no lack of relays. When one batch of men wearied another took its place. But all was in vain. The body of Sacha Lorrain lay there, very gallant in its youth and beauty, but his soul was gone beyond recall, and

"...might not come again

Homeward to any shore on any tide."

CHAPTER XIX

THE WAY OF NEMESIS

"Spring is dead,

And summer is dead.

Oh! my heart,

And, oh! my head!"

It had always been understood that after the summer Haidee was to go back to Paris to finish her education at the Versailles Lycée, while Val and Bran put in another healthy, if desolate winter at Mascaret. Now the latter part of the plan was impossible. The place was haunted, for Val, by poor Sacha's ghost. She knew not where to go except it were back to Paris. Bran was older now and his health established. Perhaps if she could find a governess for him he would get along all right while she worked! The need for work was imperative. Funds were down to zero. She knew not where to turn for money, except where nothing but the prospect of starvation for Bran would let her turn--to the Credit Lyonnais where lay the accumulating quarterly sums from Westenra.

So when the time came for Haidee to make her entrance at the Lycée, Bran and Val returned to Paris as well: the latter having written and re-engaged her old studio which was to let furnished.

Haidee was a changed girl. She seemed to have grown years older and hard as a stone. She had withdrawn herself from all intimacy with Val, and was even cold and harsh in her manner to Bran, who could not understand and was always saying wistfully:

"Don't you love me any more, Haidee?"

"Of course I do," she would answer impatiently.

"Then why do you look at me as if you 'd like to spank me on my tailie?"

"Oh, don't worry me, Bran. You make me tired!"

Mascaret seemed suddenly to have grown old and grey. A great coldness had settled upon the little village. Bitter winds swept every leaf from the trees and the sun was hidden in wet mists. The Villa Shai-poo, its flagstaff bare, its windows shuttered and barred, looked like a bereaved brooding mother folding arms on her grief. The occupants of Villa Duval were the last of the visitors to leave the village. Even Sacha had gone. His people had taken him back to Paris to lie in the family vault at Père La Chaise.

From Mascaret to Paris is an eight hours' journey on the worst line in France, and when they reached St. Lazare Station late in the afternoon they were all tired out, with hearts as heavy as lead. Val left Bran on Haidee's lap in the waiting-room while she went to unlock the trunks in the Customs' shed. There were crowds of travellers and loads of baggage to be gone through, for the boat-train from Cherbourg was just in also. Val, very weary, sat on the low table waiting, and staring about her with sad eyes full of trouble. Suddenly, standing quite near, she saw a face she knew. She could not immediately place the man in her memory but she was so sure of knowing him that she smiled and gave a little nod. Immediately he took off his hat and approached.

"I think you almost remember, Mrs. Valdana, but not quite," he said. The moment she heard his voice she placed him. It was the French Jew who had sat next her on board the Bavaric.

"How do you do, Mr. Bernstein!" she said cordially, extending her hand. It was as though she had met an old friend. A look of keen pleasure came into his shrewd face.

"Such a memory must be a treasure to you as a journalist!"

"A journalist!" The words sounded strange in her ears. How many years ago since she was a journalist! Since she first met this man! A far absorbed look came into her eyes.

"I knew you in a minute," he said. "You have not changed at all, only grown a little"--("sadder," he was going to say, but substituted)--"younger."

"Ah! you have not changed either," she said dryly.

"You have even the same beautiful chain on you! I hope you have not forgotten your promise to give me first refusal if ever you want to sell it?"

A startled look flashed across her face.

"Ah, yes! My chain! You did say that, did n't you?" She stared at him meditatively. "What do you really think it is worth?"

"It would be hard to say right here." He had grown extremely American in accent and speech. "But if you would call and see me with it. Are you staying in Paris?"

"Yes."

He got out a card.

"Well, here is my office address--Rue de Bach. Call any time you like, but soon, as I am off to England again in three days."

"I will come to-morrow," she said. "In the meantime, would n't it be a good thing for you to take the necklace with you and examine it?"

She detached it from her neck with some little difficulty, for the clasp was a firm one, and held it out. The Jew looked at her with eyes in which for a moment there hovered a shade of something like pity that quickly turned to pleasure. A faint flush came into his face, and as he took the necklace he pressed her hand warmly. In America where he had been for the past five years such a trusting spirit as Val's was not met with every day in the week, and the rencontre refreshed his jaded Hebraic heart like wine.

"You just come," he said cordially, "and I bet I 'll have something good to tell you."

Immediately afterwards she was called to open her luggage, and bade him good-bye, telling him that she had some one waiting for her.

All the way of the long drive across Paris, she sat cogitating the question of the necklace. Even if it turned out to be of value, ought she to part with it? Would ill luck come to her for parting with her mother's mascot? Could any worse luck than she already had, come to her, she began to ask herself in irony? Then she stopped and flung her arms round Bran. Yes; yes. Ill luck can always come to mothers. Mothers are never safe--nor fathers! She thought of Sacha lying still on the beach, and of that stern look on his father's face!

"Oh God! What are necklaces? ... what is money? ... what is anything against that pain?" she cried in her heart, and held Bran so tightly that he gave a yelp. Haidee, as always now, sat wrapt in a sullen reserve. Neither by look nor word did she exhibit the faintest sympathy for any troubles but her own. The only thing that seemed to interest her was the prospect of getting away from Val and Bran to her new life at school. It chilled Val's heart to have one who had been so close turn away from her thus. Even worse it was to see Bran's dear little efforts to be kind and friendly, snubbed. Every rebuff to him was like a blow in the face to Val. But she would not blame Haidee: the child was dear to Westenra. Besides she was only a child, and had suffered through Sacha's death. The shock of it coming on top of her wounded pride and little lost love-dream was enough to embitter her, thought Val, and blamed herself for ever having interfered.

"Such things are safe in God's hands! He takes care of children and drunkards. Who am I to have arrogated His rights?"

But Haidee's attitude acutely added to the misery and uncertainty of life at this time, and in the dusky shadows of the cab as it rumbled over to the Latin Quarter, Val held her boy's head against her breast and slow tears stole down her face and were drawn in between her lips, drying her throat with their salty flavour. Life too tasted salt and acrid. It seemed to her that in everything she had put her hand to she had failed and fallen short.

At rue Campaigne première the concierge almost embraced them, so delighted was she to see them again.

"Many people have been looking for Madame and wishing her back," she announced. "Not only artists but persons very chic also have been to call."

"Locusts!" said Val to herself. "Locusts and devourers all!" She knew those chic ones well. People who would not work themselves and could not bear to see others achieving. All artists have this class to contend with.

"I told every one you would be back this week. I know you owe no one money, and are not afraid, like some artists, of visitors," said the concierge cheerfully, and Val gave a groan. She resolved to be up early the next day and take Haidee off to school before there was a chance of meeting any early-fliers.

Before she went to bed, however, she unpacked her papers and found a little old parchment letter which dealt with the gift to her mother of the comfort necklace. It was written in Russian and neither she nor her mother had ever had the curiosity to have it translated, but Iolita had always been careful to preserve it, and it had marvellously survived all Val's many packings and wanderings. She now sealed it up and forwarded it to Bernstein on the vague chance of its being of use in the valuation of the necklace.

At seven in the morning she received a petit bleu from him, evidently sent off the night before, but posted after tea, asking her to call without fail at three o'clock that afternoon. Immediately she sent out her femme de ménage to see if Bran's old governess, the young American girl, could take charge of him for the day, giving him lunch and tea at her mother's home. That matter satisfactorily settled, she started for the Gare Montparnasse with Haidee, en route for Versailles. It took the whole morning to settle Haidee in, pay her bills, and talk over with the Directrice her future course of study. Asked to lunch with the girls at the Lycée she would not stay. It was no pleasure to be with Haidee while she preserved that sullen, resentful manner. Life was grim enough! So Val took lunch in a little crémerie in the avenue de Paris, and returned to Paris by tram to the Pont Royal, where she dismounted and took a bus to Bernstein's number in the Rue de Bach.

He received her with a manner full of some suppressed excitement which quickly communicated itself to her.

"You have something to tell me?" she said, trembling with she knew not what fear. She had almost forgotten the necklace. With her curious sense of prevision it was revealed to her in some way that for the moment the Jew was arbiter of her destiny.

"Sit down," he said, pushing a comfortable chair towards her. "I want you to tell me the history of the necklace."

"Oh, as to that, Mr. Bernstein, I know very little. My mother gave it to me when she died. She had always worn it, ever since I can remember. She loved the beautiful little pictures, and she had an idea that it was not only a mascot against extreme poverty but also that it possessed some healing power in sickness. Many times when we were very poor indeed she was asked by people who liked curious things to sell it, but she never would. She always remembered that the old Russian man who gave it to her told her that in the day of trouble it would bring comfort to her and hers. He was a strange old man who lived in exile in Spain. He had committed some political crime and had fled from Russia; was very wealthy but lived with great simplicity in quite a poor part of Seville, and it was there that he made great friends with my mother and her father, who was blind but had been a great adventurer and soldier of fortune. The old Russian grew to love my mother--every one who knew my mother loved her. And one day he gave her the necklace. She took it because it was so pretty and yet did not seem very valuable. She never took jewels from people, though of course many were offered her, as to all dancers. But this man was very old and gentle and his gift seemed simple too. Only, he strangely insisted on giving her, with it, that paper which I sent you last night. That was to show that it was a deed of gift, and no one could take it from her. But no one ever tried. He was assassinated a year or two later and all his papers and jewels mysteriously stolen, but my mother had left Spain then and was in London and no one ever claimed the necklace. She loved it and I love it. It hardly seems to me, Mr. Bernstein, after talking about it that I can part with it after all." She took it up and fingered the glowing, luminous beads tenderly.

"Not even for seventy-five thousand pounds!" he said quietly.

"What!" She stared at him. She thought he had gone mad.

"That is what I offer you," he said in a business-like tone.

"But...?"

"They are pearls of the first quality."

"Pearls!"

"Yes, the pale green colour is only a clever coating of paint that can be removed easily by the use of a certain spirit. Look here where I have worked at this one a little--I had to, you know, in order to be certain. I have n't harmed the painting."

He showed her a bead that had a picture of a desert on it, with tiny palms waving, and a primitive well. From the back of this he had removed the pale green colouring and there instead glowed the rich ivory-grey thick yet luminous substance of the pearl.

"I was pretty certain of it from the first, that is why I was so keen. It is one of the most wonderful necklaces the world has ever seen. It once belonged to the Russian royal family--as your old man in Seville did. He knew what he was doing when he gave it to your mother, and when he wrote out that paper, which was a deed of gift, witnessed by his old Chinese servant and the Russian consul. I had it translated first thing this morning. It will hold good in a court of law. It was the Chinese servant who painted the pictures on the pearls to hide and disguise them, and by Gee! he was an artist, that fellow. Only a trained eye like mine would have suspected the truth. And let me tell you, Mrs. Valdana, with any one but you I should have made use of my knowledge to my own advantage. It is my business to do so. Every business man is entitled to make use of the ignorance of those he deals with. That is business training, we have learned it and paid for it, the other party has n't. It is like a doctor's fees. You pay him because he knows better than you. He has been in training for years, and paid with his mind and his soul for that training, while you have been busy with other things--training in another direction perhaps. Well, the time comes when you need his training and you pay for it."

"I understand," said Val quietly.

He laughed.

"No, you don't understand at all. You could never understand such a method. You have never got the best of any one in your life. That is why I am not going to use my method in your case. But I can tell you," he added with a grim smile, "it is a unique case. I never did such a thing before in my life and never will again. It is a good thing after all that there are not many people like you in the world, Mrs. Valdana. Jewellers with hearts might be ruined."

"It is very kind of you, but I can't accept this sacrifice of your interests," said Val, stammering a little, very embarrassed and uncomfortable. "I couldn't dream of accepting it," she added firmly.

"Don't worry--skip," said he laughing. "My sacrifice is only comparative. At the worst I stand to make anything between five to twenty-five thousand pounds out of the deal."

"Are you sure?"

"Dead sure--seventy-five thousand pounds sure," he said dryly. "My philanthropy does n't run to such risks as that. It only means that if you had n't happened to be you, it would have been I who took seventy-five and the rest and you who got the speculative twenty-five."

"I think you are too kind," she said. "I don't know how to thank you."

"Don't try," he said blithely. "It will be a good deal all round, and everybody happy. That old Russian knew something when he told your mother to put it by for a day of need. Now I am going to fix the matter instantly and give you a cheque for half the amount on the Bank of France. The rest you shall have to-morrow. Sit down while I get busy."

She asked him to make out a clear statement of the sale, price, etc., and to give it to her. She had a special purpose in this. In the act of writing he looked up suddenly.

"By the way, talking of doctors, do you remember a man called Westenra who was on board the Bavaric?" He looked at her keenly, for he remembered very well the talk of her interest in that same man. But of the truth he had no inkling.

"Yes," she said slowly.

"Well, what do you think? I got appendicitis in New York last May, and my partner, who is an American, said to me, 'There is only one man for you, and he is the best man in New York; come along to his nursing home.' And when I got there who was his famous guy but our man from the Bavaric! What do you think of that?"

"I knew he was a surgeon," said Val evenly.

"Well, I tell you, I was surprised. He did me up bully. He 's got a fine place there in 68th Street. A tip-top show; everything running on wheels. And a corking, handsome girl that he 's going to marry, at the head of things."

He applied himself to his writing.

"Is he not married already?" said Mrs. Valdana, and he thought, as he had often thought before, what a strange melancholy cadence her voice possessed.

"A widower, I believe. The nurses told me so at any rate. You know what jolly gossips they are. But Miss Holland is a cut above the ordinary American nurse, that's why they 're so jealous of her, I guess, and ready to say that she 's been after the doctor for years, and only made a success of the place because of that. And why not, I say? That's what most women make a success of things for, isn't it, Mrs. Valdana--some fellow?"

"Or a failure of things!" said Mrs. Valdana, following some train of thought of her own. There was a deeper melancholy in her voice, and he thought how tired and ill she looked.

"You ought to get away for a change, Mrs. Valdana," he said, when he handed her the cheque and shook hands in farewell. "You look like a woman who 's come to the end of her tether."

She felt like it too. She went home like a woman who has heard the sentence of death pronounced upon her. In the Metro she lay back in her corner with closed eyes and whispered to herself.

"What is the good? What is the good? Oh, that one might let go--lay it all down and go to rest!"

But she knew she could not. There are always ropes to bind the hopeless ones fast to life--to pull them forth from the shadows back to the bleak grey road of life. Bran was her rope.

At the concierge's lodge she was informed that several visitors had called and gone, but one, more persistent, waited for her on her landing.

"He has been many times, poor soul," said she, "and one has not the heart to refuse him entrance. I think he is one of those whom Art has been too much for."

Val hardly heard her. A sort of numb dulness that had taken possession of her prevented her from feeling anything but a passing vexation that she might not be alone; heavily she climbed the stair and came at last to the door. A tall loose figure in grey tweeds rose up at her from the doorstep.

"Val! Will you forgive me for dogging you like this?" said a humble trembling voice she did not know. She had to peer into his face and examine him before it dawned upon her that it was Horace Valdana.

――――

"How did you find me?" she said dully. He was sitting doubled up in the most comfortable chair in the studio. But there was no comfort in his face or attitude. His arms, pressed in a curious way against his stomach, seemed holding something there that hurt him.

"Bribed one of Branker Preston's office boys."

This simple statement was in keeping with all the rest he had uttered within the last hour. The man was changed. He was finished with lying and subterfuge because life had finished with him--or was finishing rapidly. The hand of death was on him at last, there could be no mistake about it this time. His doom was dight. He had lied and lied, but nothing he could now say availed, for his face told the truth. He was doomed, and by some strange act of justice the fell disease that had him in its grip was the very one he had only pretended to have years before when playing for her sympathy and money.

And Val, during that hour in which she sat listening to him not so much pleading his cause as merely stating his case in all its hideous pitifulness, came to the decision that she had no longer right nor reason for withholding such help as he begged. It had been a black, terrible hour.

Not less so because she was really touched by the look of suffering on his face, by those spasmodic jerks of his arms, and that habit of holding fast to something within that ate like a rat at his vitals, while sweat broke out on his forehead and a grey agony passed ghostlike across his face. Her heart could never harden itself against suffering, and she came nearer in those moments to forgetting the wrongs Valdana had worked upon her than ever before.

And it looked uncommonly like her duty to forgive this man and take care of him now that he so urgently needed it. There was no one else in the world to do it. For his mother was dead, and his secret buried with her. She had died very suddenly, the end doubtless brought on by the dreadful anxiety of having to carry that same secret unshared. Such provision as she could secretly make for him she had made, but it was only a slight one, and Valdana had long been at the end of his resources.

"And if you turn me down, Val, and you have every right to, I shan't blame you a bit. I shall see what the Seine can do for me--though I 'd rather it had been the old Thames."

A better man would have given the river first refusal perhaps, but Valdana had never set up for a hero, and was not going to begin now.

In the end her decision was clinched as often happens by something outside herself. A terrible spasm seized him, doubling him up right there before her, turning him grey, and jerking a groan of agony from the very depths of him. A fit of shivering succeeded, and it was plain that the man was not fit to be up and about. His place was in bed, under medical supervision.

With decision came energy, and in a few moments she had him lying on the large divan in which she and Bran were used to sleep, covered up, and a steaming cup of tea inside him. Then she ran downstairs to the concierge's lodge and telephoned for a doctor. Afterwards she sent round to Bran's governess to ask them to keep him for the night. They were good responsible people, and she knew that she could trust them with her child--for a night at least, until she knew what further was to be done.

The doctor suggested a hospital; such a case, he said, needed constant nursing and care.

"Unless you are well enough off to have a nurse to help you," and he tried not to look doubtfully around him at the big bare studio, "I should think you had better try and get rid of the responsibility of this hopeless case by putting him into one of the English or American hospitals here. You are American, are n't you?"

"I have plenty of money," said Val, leaving his question unanswered, "and am quite able to have help in nursing him here. Please give me full instructions and information."

The doctor looked surprised, and more so when, after he had examined Valdana, she paid him his fee and took down the address of the best cancer specialist in Paris.

"Not that he can do any good. The case is too far advanced for operation--even I can tell you that. But he will be able to give the best treatment for alleviation until the end comes--that won't be long, I expect."

And the great specialist could do no more (as is more often the case than people guess) than confirm the verdict of the ordinary practitioner.

"A matter of months!" he said. "And they will be bad months--for others beside the patient. You had better send him to a hospital."

But Val shook her head. She had determined to accept this duty that was so clear to her; and there was money now to ease the way. Seventy-five thousand pounds! How neatly that sum had been inserted into the gap of circumstance by the clever hand of Fate!

CHAPTER XX

THE WAYS OF LIFE AND DEATH

"Oh them who plantest in the eyes and hearts of girls

The cult of wounding and the barbs of love!"

Translation from BAUDELAIRE'S Litany to Satan.

"Yes; she is very droll, your belle-maman," said the Comtesse de Vervanne. "To live in three ateliers! That is fantastique! Three big wide ateliers! one for herself, one for the little Bran, and one other for--who? Who is it that dwells in the third atelier across the landing, Haidee, my very dear?"

"Don't ask me," said Haidee sulkily, yet with alert eyes, for she was unable to contain her curiosity and amazement at the news. Val with three studios, who on their return to Paris had not possessed the price of a quarter's rent for one! And according to Madame de Vervanne they were big studios--no mere holes in the wall with skylights let in the ceiling. Parquet floors, beautifully shaded walls, wide galleries and French windows that led into balconies! It sounded like an Arabian tale. Haidee knew, as she knew most practical everyday things, how the rents of studios ranged, and she computed that the rent of such a one as the Comtesse described ran into not a centime less than three thousand francs a year. And Val with three! But the thing was incomprehensible, impayable--fantastic indeed as the Comtesse described it!

She was aware from the new address forwarded to her that Val had removed to the Lamartine Building in Boulevard Raspail, a great block of newly finished and very elaborate studios, which they in company with all the other hard-working and poor artists of the Quarter had long made a mock of, calling it the American Crystal Palace. It had lifts, a roof garden, balconies, baths, and all the luxuries that artists can never aspire to. Haidee on seeing the changed address had supposed that in the feeble condition of the family finances Val had been obliged to take one or two of the tiny rooms always to be let at the top of most big mansions, and which are usually rented out to domestics. The idea was not displeasing to Haidee. In the frame of mind she had adopted she liked to think of Val suffering discomfort and poverty. And she did not care either if Bran had to undergo the same thing, because she knew that if Bran's quarters were cramped Val would suffer far more than for herself. It will be seen that the dark caves in Haidee's soul had taken unto themselves infernal occupants, as dark caves will if the sunshine of loving-kindness is not let into them from day to day. It actually irked her to hear now from Christiane de Vervanne that Bran's room was as big as a schoolroom.

"About four times as big as this," said the Comtesse, casting an appraising eye round classroom B of the Pavilion Mauve. "With shelves all round, and an assortment of toys most wonderful. Even I could find myself very much amused with such toys. He has a foxe too."

"A fox!" shrieked Haidee.

"But yes--one of the little black and white ones with the tail of him cut off."

"Oh, a fox-terrier." Haidee turned away impatiently, but curiosity obliged her to turn back instantly to hear the rest of the amazing tale.

"At one end of this big nursery studio two white beds, one for the petit Bran and one for the American governess who is permanently installed and very devoted."

"A governess to sleep with Bran!" exclaimed Haidee. "Oh, no, that is too strong. I have never known Val let Bran sleep out of her sight!"

"But yes--it is all so bizarre. You must go home and see, my Haidee."

Indeed Haidee registered a resolution to write to Val that very night and ask for a sortie letter to be sent for her to come home for the following Saturday night and Sunday. She was still hating Val with a fierce hatred and had no desire to see her. But this was a thing that had got to be looked into.

"And," continued Madame de Vervanne, with her amiable air of finding everything extremely amusing, "who do I find installed in the studio of Madame Valdana taking tea, indeed making tea, as much at home as if he had collected the sticks for it on the Mascaret beach, but--who do you think, my Cabbage?"

"Goodness knows!" muttered the Cabbage. "Val is mad."

"Why, who but our cher Poulot, Rupert!"

"Rupert! She 's got him, now?" cried Haidee, and her face darkened as definitely as if some one had passed a blacking-brush over it.

"Yes," said the Comtesse softly, reflectively. "It is as you say. First poor dear Sacha, now the innocent Poulot. Who next?" She sighed.

There was a little silence. Then Haidee said:

"Rupert has been twice to see me, once on Sunday and once on Thursday."

"Ah! and did he tell you how many times he went to see Madame Valentine?"

"No, indeed, and I don't care anyhow," was the retort given with perhaps unnecessary fierceness.

"But," cooed Madame soothingly, "one should care a little, chère Haidee, for the sake of the poor good Poulot. She is no doubt a very fine lady, the charming Mistress Valentine, but we do not wish to see Rupert suffer as Sacha did."

The subtle words bit into Haidee's heart like acid on an old wound. She had been very much touched at the Comtesse's act in writing to the Directrice for permission to call at the Lycée. And it was very gratifying that Madame de Vervanne should have arrived in a motor which also contained a young lieutenant of Dragons in uniform, and which stood growling and puffing at the Lycée gates, filling all the girls with excitement and envy. Haidee's vanity too was greatly flattered by the tender and confidential manner of the older woman, who never forgot also to tell her how pretty and clever she was and to give recognition to the fact that she was now seventeen. So different to Val's manner of treating her as though she were still a child and quite unable to arrange her own destiny. A curious, fresh access of fury was aroused in Haidee's breast by the Comtesse's tale of Rupert's devotion to Val. Rupert had been to see Haidee twice. He was stationed at Fontainebleau, doing his second year of military service, and when he came to the Lycée accompanied by his sister Celine he was wearing the ordinary private soldier's uniform, and looking very handsome in the gay red and blue. All the girls had admired him immensely, and Haidee herself liked him extraordinarily better than in Mascaret. While Celine talked with some of the girls she knew, Rupert and Haidee had wandered about the gardens, talking about Sacha and little incidents of their happy time together that now, looked at from a little distance of time, seemed wonderfully perfumed and beautified. The remembrance of these two walks with him made Haidee burn with sudden indignation against Val.

The Comtesse had begun to talk about other things, made Haidee show her all round Pavilion Mauve and the big roomy schoolhouse, then take her out into the grounds, along the paths that wound amongst other Pavilions, the Red, the Blue, the Rose--and over broad lawns that in the soft mild air of Versailles were green, even in winter. In the middle of one of the lawns was a little lake bordered by strange-leaved dwarf-like bushes that in summer were thick with crimson flowers, but which now stretched out frail black branches to the silent fountain. Dead leaves rustled and cracked under the Comtesse's high-heeled shoes as they walked. She waved her hand at the well-kept tennis courts.

"But you are charmingly well here!" she cried, in her gay little soprano. "Oh, to be young again and lovely like you, my child! Not all the Mistress Valdanas could take away from me what I wanted!"

She returned meditatively to the former subject.

"But who is it that resides in the third atelier think you, Haidee? Curiosity consumes and burns me. There is a door leading into it from Madame's atelier. Twice she left us to go swiftly and return. Once when the door opened I heard a man cough. Tell me?--it could not be the mysterious papa returned, could it?"

Haidee gazed at her blankly.

"There is a mysterious papa, is it not?" If the curiosity of the Comtesse had not always been pleasantly glossed by pretty childish gestures and rippling laughter, it might have seemed vulgar. Haidee was not clever enough to realise this, and she was staggered by the whole strange story, which sounded unlike Val in every detail, but even in her amazement she was not going to confide to a comparative stranger the tangled domestic history of the family. If she had no feeling but one of resentment for Val, she could still be loyal to Westenra.

"Oh yes, there is a papa--Bran's papa of course, and my guardian; but it would n't be him."

"That makes even more bizarre the affair," said the Comtesse lightly. Then, knowing that she had said enough for the time being, she dismissed the subject and shortly afterwards departed with her Dragon.

As soon as she was gone Haidee, who was nothing if not prompt, sat down and wrote to Val for a sortie letter for the coming Sunday. She intended to investigate this mystery of the three studios for herself--likewise the story of Rupert's entanglement.

But to her acute annoyance the opportunity was not afforded her. A letter from Val came by return to the effect that she was too busy and worried to be able to receive Haidee that term. As a palliative she sent a parcel of books, an enormous box of exquisite chocolates from Boissier's, and a dozen tennis balls. Haidee was a devotee of tennis and always complained bitterly of the lack of balls, for tennis balls are outrageously expensive in France. These Val sent were of the best quality and must have cost at least three francs each. The mystery deepened.

――――

During the bad time of worriment and weariness with Valdana, Rupert was indeed a great stay to Val. Being stationed so close to Paris he was able to come often to the Lamartine Studios, and she was always glad to see the blue friendly eyes that had in them some of the space and compassion of sea and sky. There was something so loyal and reliable about him that she had actually told him the truth about Valdana, and been definitely aided by his sympathy and understanding. His influence was good, too, for Bran, who was beginning to reach that stage when the society and point of view of men means a great deal in a boy's life. And Bran had always had a special penchant for boys and men. It gave Val many a sharp pang, not of resentment but of sorrow, to observe in him a yearning for his father, for she knew that whatever she was able to do for her son, she could never assuage that longing, never give him the masculine companionship and influence of which he had been robbed. It grieved her terribly to think that in her son's life those lovely pliable years, when bonds between father and son are so simply but strongly fashioned from the one's weakness and the other's strength, were passing week by week, month by month. Glad enough then was she that he had at least the friendly brotherly affection and influence of so clear-hearted a boy as Rupert.

With Valdana she never allowed Bran to come into contact. Indeed, Valdana from the first was practically oblivious to those about him. His race was very nearly run. He had come to Val in the last lap of it, upheld by God knew what strange resolution to make her share to the bitter end their disastrous partnership. Having found her he seemed content to let life wreak her pitiless worst on him before he was allowed to depart to that death which he had once ignobly shirked, but whose embrace he now longed for with the ardour of a lover. His sufferings, indeed, were terrible. In the centre of the great lofty room he lay and wrestled with an agony that was almost unceasing. But he was well aware of being surrounded and enfolded by every comfort. Softened light, flowers, music, good nursing, everything that money and kindness could supply to alleviate pain was at hand, and he knew he had Val to thank, and vaguely wondered how she achieved it, but did not care much as long as she was by his bedside, in the pale blue linen overall she always assumed as soon as she entered. Cancer may or may not be infectious--that is one of the problems science has not yet solved--but with Bran so near she took no risks, changing even her clothes on entering and leaving the sick-room, which was an entirely self-contained appartement and atelier. She had been so fortunate as to obtain in the newly-finished building the whole of the immense floor of three studios. It rejoiced her to be able to give her Brannie one entirely to himself and his governess. That was one of the joys the seventy-five thousand pounds had brought her. She had already spent some hundreds of it on furnishing and the heavy expenses entailed by Valdana's needs. But the rest she had been wise enough to allow the kindly Bernstein to invest for her, and her mind was at rest at last and for the first time in her life from the gnawing tooth of poverty. She was doing no writing. Not only was her life, divided between Bran and the sick man, too full for such a thing, but at last she could permit herself the luxury of refraining from writing when she had nothing to say. That forced work in Mascaret had sickened her soul. Now she could let her creative faculty rest for a while at least and give undivided attention to this duty of hers to Valdana.

As for having Haidee home, it was out of the question. She felt herself unable to go into the matter of her relation to Valdana with any one so antagonistic to her as Haidee was at present. She knew that the girl still cherished bitterness against her for poor Sacha's defection, and she could only hope that with the coming of other interests, this feeling would pass away and allow a return to the old footing of comradeship and affection. She let Haidee profit too by the necklace windfall, sending her presents of music, books, and the countless pretty trifles that girls set store on. Bran went weekly with his governess to see her, and Rupert, urged by Val, went very often too. Rupert knew all about the affair of Sacha. Not from Val, but because by a strange coincidence Sacha had opened his heart to his cousin the night before his death. The two young men had shared the same room at Shai-poo, and in the silences of the night shared many confidences also. That was how Rupert had come to know the truth, and to keep his reverence and affection for Val unshaken.

"I love the sea, I love the music of the violin, and I love you--all with the same love," he told her one day. He had found her weeping alone in her studio. The strain of Valdana's hideous suffering and Westenra's long silence sometimes racked her so that she was glad of the relief of tears. "You know what Jean Paul Richter said of music,--'Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found not--and shall not find';--that is what you and the sea and the violin say to me."

She blessed him for that, not from gratified vanity, but for comfort in the thought that others besides herself suffered from the cry of those things "that we find not nor shall find."

"Dear boy," she said, and stroked his hair as if he had been Bran while he knelt by her. "I love you too--as if you were my son, as your mother must have loved you, Rupert."

Rupert kissed her hand in a very un-sonlike fashion and looked at her lips.

"I want to comfort you," he said, "to take pain out of your life."

"You cannot do that, Rupert." She quoted gently--"'Pain is the Lord of Life--none can escape from its net.'" Something in his eyes made her go on steadily. "My pain is chiefly caused by love. I love my little Brannie's father, Rupert--there can never be any other man in my life. He speaks to me of all those things which I have found not nor shall find!"

Rupert bowed his head again over her hand, his boyish mouth drawn in a straight line. It was unfortunate that the Comtesse, whom the femme de ménage had admitted to the entrance hall, should have come softly in at that moment.

"Ah, the nice Poulot!" she twittered merrily. "Taking the lessons of deportment from the charmante Madame Val!" And burst into happy laughter.

But she had not called it "deportment" when she reported the episode to Haidee a few days later.

"He is gone, our Poulot," she said mournfully. "She has put into bandages his hands and foots--a slave!"

"He did not seem very bandaged last time he came out here," answered Haidee rather snappishly, not even amused any more by the Comtesse's weird English.

"Ah, but you do not see him with her, my child! It is amazing how she finds the time and energy for so much 'flirt'!--She is enormous!--and with the sick lover in the third atelier all the same time!"

"The sick lover! Comtesse, what do you mean?"

"Ah, of course, I did not tell you yet. The concierge it was who informed me that Madame Valdana occupies herself with a sick gentleman in the third room. The doctor every day, and always fruit and flowers arriving. Is it not romantic? But always silence and the sealed-up lip from Madame Valdana. She takes no one into her heart where the secret is, except Poulot."

Haidee was now looking frightfully miserable. These visits from Madame de Vervanne were a disturbing element in her life and almost she wished they could be dispensed with. She was working hard to try and pass her baccalauréat and achieve her diplôme, but a visit from the Comtesse always left her disinclined to grapple with school work. And this news about Rupert and Val irritated her intensely. What business had Val to let Rupert get so fond of her? It was a shame, a wrong to her--Haidee. First Westenra, then Sacha, now Rupert--just when he was so nice to her, and she was beginning to like him so much. She ground her teeth in childish rage and jealousy. The Comtesse put an arm round her waist and they walked together down the paths of the Lycée gardens, now dank and sodden by winter rains.

"Tell me ... could not the papa of Bran make her mind her own business, which is surely to nurse the sick friend and leave poor Rupert alone? I think he will not even pass his exam, for the Colonials if he had not a mind at ease. You know he is working for that now, so that when he has done his two years' service he will be eligible if he still wishes to enter."

How his mind would be eased by a break with Val she did not specify. Nor why she had developed such fervour for the hitherto detested Colonial infantry scheme. But Haidee was in no state of mind to thrash out these intricacies. Worked up by the subtle Frenchwoman's malice into a state of teeming anger against Val, and blind to the fact that she was being used as a catspaw, she allowed herself to consider the Comtesse's suggestion, and in the end wrote Westenra a letter which contained many bitter and cruel things about Val, and gave him fuller information concerning the three studios than even the story of the Comtesse justified. That she was ashamed of herself for her action, and that it was only a passing spirit of vindictiveness which impelled it, did not make the letter as a document any the less poignantly indicting.

――――

And that same evening Val was watching the final effort of Valdana's troubled spirit to break from the bonds of the body and go forth upon its way. Ate Dea had run him to earth. The Hand whose fingers he had slipped through on the veldt was closing in on him inexorably, but with a worse thing in it now than a soldier's short sharp doom. It was only a matter of hours when he must join those others from whom he had fled--but with a difference! The difference between the lonely, painful death from an atrocious malady, and an end worthy of a man, face to the enemy, his comrades about him--

"Fighting hard and dying grimly,

Silent lips and striking hand."

"It seems hardly worth while now to have shirked!" he said quietly. "Just for a few more years crawling up and down the earth! I wonder why we dread old Death so, Val? After all he 's the best pal we have--always waiting so patiently and faithfully; whatever we do, nothing estranges him from his purpose. He never gets mad and takes our gift and gives it to some other fellow--the gift of rest, darkness, sleep!"

Like many a blackguard Valdana cherished in the deeps of him odds and ends of noble thought and chivalrous intention garnered from the lines of some man-poet. Lindsay Gordon always was the waster's poet, and always will be. He helped Horace Valdana to die now with gratitude instead of curses in his mouth.

"Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses,

Yet abides the gift of the Darkness,

Sleep!"

His mind had grown strangely clear. He lay upon the wide divan in the centre of the room, and his eye roving from object to object, unusual recognition in its glance. A Godin stove glowed in one corner of the great room; the fire in it had never been allowed to die out since the first occupation of the studio. It filled the room with a summery warmth that drew out to the last drop the fragrance of a jar of Sicilian lilac that stood in the open window; and brought lovely memories of the veldt from an enormous bunch of mimosa stuck in a blue pot on the piano. So warm was the climate of the room that a balcony door stood perpetually open, even on a night such as this, when the outside air sliced against the warmth of the body with the keenness of a scimitar. Shaded lights threw faintly-tinted shadows in far corners. The only objects that showed clear in the dimness of the big shadowy room were the busts and figures of dead white clay--a gigantic head of Tolstoi, bearded, rugged; a perfect reproduction of Houdon's bust of Napoleon as First Consul; some little Donatello angels.

"It 'll be cold lying here in a Paris cemetery, Val!" said Valdana musingly.

His eye rested reflectively on the face of L'Inconnue, hung on a nail against a pale green-and-rose Persian rug--that lovely mask taken from the dead face of a young unknown girl, fished out one morning from the river's muddy waters. She had cast her secret into the bosom of the Seine, and that kind, wicked, cruel, voluptuous, motherly old river had kept it for ever, so that to this day the world still wonders and longs to know who the girl was, and why with youth and beauty and all the gifts of life stamped upon her she chose to go out into the dark with that little radiant smile on her lips, as if in the last instant she had thought on some wondrous hour into which all the beauty of life had been compressed--and was glad to die because that hour could never come again.

Val, who had often studied the quietly smiling tragic face, said once:

"It was some man's eyes she was thinking of just before she sprang! That little smile was meant for just one man in the world."

"Yes: it'll be cold lying here in Paris," repeated Valdana thoughtfully. "I wish now I 'd stayed with those fellows at Platkop. They have the sunshine, and they 're all together."

Val smoothed the bright rug that lay over him with her thin nervous hands.

"Don't bother now, Dan."

It was many a long year since she had called him by that name which pity now wrung from her.

"I wonder why I should have been the only one not wounded?" He looked at her critically. "All the others had got it somewhere, but I had n't a thing, not a spot! And there was n't a bullet left among those blasted Boers: it was easy enough to slink off as the evening came on ... but some of the fellows looked at me as I undid that door. No one said anything, but they looked at me, Val."

Val hid her eyes.

"One or two of them thought I was going to try for some water from the spruit near by--God! it was as hot as hell there all that poisonous day--and no water! Yes, some of them thought ... but Brand, my sub, he knew. I saw the look he gave as I crept to the door--and the smile--half his face was shot away, but he could still smile--he knew I did n't mean to come back----"

"Don't talk about it any more," whispered the woman by his bedside.

In a swift vision she saw the shot-away face with the brave scornful smile on it, and longed to hold it to her breast and kiss its broken bloody lips. Oh, if men knew how women consecrate those brave, quiet acts done in lone places with none to pity or to praise!

"Whose face is that hanging smiling there over your writing-desk?" His eyes were on another death-mask now, the most wonderful the world has ever seen. Keen, salient, proud yet gentle, all the arrogance and lust of power and good living gone--only peace, the traces of physical pain, and a gentle irony about the lips, left only ideality and lofty hope stamped above the brows. The world has one thing for which to thank the Corsican doctor Antommarchi--that he took the cast of Napoleon's face "when illness had transmuted passion into patience, and death with its last serene touch had restored the regularity and grandeur of youth." That was the face from which Horace Valdana could not keep his eyes.

"By Jove!" he whispered at the last. "He had the same thing as I 've got. He must have known the same hell as I am suffering now. Who am I that I should complain!"

The thought helped him to "overcome the sharpness of death," and die with greater dignity than he had lived.

A few days later, Val, with Rupert Lorrain standing by her side in the cemetery of Montparnasse, dropped a few violets, flowers of compassion and forgiveness, into an open grave, and Rupert threw down a friendly sod.

Already it was spring. The winter of pain and misery was past. On the graves crocuses were thrusting out their little sheathed heads, symbolic proof of the sweetness that comes forth from sorrow.

――――

CHAPTER XXI

LONELY WAYS

"I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end."--A. C. SWINBURNE.

But for the time being she went no farther than to the South of France. Not less than she, Bran, after wintering among houses, needed open skies. They were of one blood, and the longing for blue was on them both--the blue of space and sea and sky. And nowhere better in Europe can that blueness be found in April and May than down along the Mediterranean coast. At first they went to Ste. Maxime, a little village pitched in green and golden beauty beside St. Tropez's azure bay, and from where at dawn the sun can be seen shooting up from his golden bath just behind Corsica. For just several seconds the little island, cradle of the world's greatest general, shows like an inky mound against an aureole of yellow light that swiftly turns to rose, for another moment the sun rests on the peak of its highest mountain, then Corsica seems to sink and disappear into the sea until the next day's dawn.

Val did not stay long at Ste. Maxime. She wanted a villa where she could have Bran to herself, after the long months of enforced absences from him. If her unexpected fortune could not give her the delicious joy of absolute companionship and intimacy with her child it was useless indeed! Besides, in hotels children are swiftly spoilt by people who do not afterwards have to bear the brunt of the spoiling, and Val did not mean Garrett Westenra's boy to become weakened by the petting of Frenchwomen who love to treat other people's children like pretty lap-dogs--to be caressed in certain moods and thrust aside in others.

So after a week or two during which an agent busied himself on her behalf, she moved on to Cannes, and took possession of an ideal villa he had found for her. It lay above the road between Cannes and Cap d'Antibes, but perched high beyond the dust and din of motors; on the right, La Croisette winged away into the sea, on the left, a gaunt shoulder of the Alps with a shawl of snow draped on it showed keen against the mistral-swept skies; while about it, in all the tall beauty and tropical splendour of Riviera foliage, clustered a garden full of dreams. A garden of winding paths edged by ivy leaves lying flat, and little wild strawberry plants thrusting up coral fruits; tall palms and cacti glowing with flaming candelabra, waxen-leaved creepers, branching giant-aloes, delicate fern-like mimosa leaning tenderly above beds of violets, large as purple butterflies, great patches of poppies, massed clumps of heather white as snow and bright with happy bees; and everywhere roses, roses drowsing in the sunshine, perfuming the air!

It was a garden in which coolness could be found on the sultriest day of summer, but for spring days the open space before the wide white steps and pillared porch was ideal. The floor of this space was of gravel, bleached by rain and a southern sun to snowy whiteness. A clump of tall pines spiking against the sky afforded a webwork of flickering shadows under which to sit as in a balcony hung over the blueness of Golfe Juan. Always there are ships in that bay of molten turquoise; red-sailed fishing boats; leaden-coloured warships, with their grim air of power, lying at anchor; yachts spreading white wings for flight.

The house itself, like nearly all Riviera villas, was square built, and standing alone would have been less beautiful than solid and comfortable-looking. But in its jewelled setting of leaf and gold and blazing colour, the walls of dead white gave a note of quiet beauty and peace. A long balcony from the upper rooms dripped with clematis, and all round the house, high on the walls, large medallions bore the names of the days. Alternately with these were other medallions on which were painted on a pale blue ground white and scarlet-winged storks, flying, flying like the days.

The Villa of Little Days, a poetess who had lived and dreamed there named it. She was a famous woman, a friend of Gambetta, who in his lifetime came often to visit her. It was she who had planned the wild and tender beauty of the garden. Val blessed her often in the spring months she and Bran passed there.

The domestic arrangements were, from her point of view, ideal. A garage across the road pertained to the villa, and had attached to it a cottage which was occupied by a man and his wife whose services were at the disposal of those who rented the villa. The man minded the great garden all through the sultry summer, dug, gathered, transplanted, and cut firewood from the pines for the log fires of winter; also he could drive a car, and did not disdain to clean a window. His wife Marietta, a big-boned gay-faced Marseillaise, with the bloom of a peach on her cheeks, and rings of garnets in her ears, made short work of such cleaning as a villa bathed in perpetual sunshine and purified by sea-breezes needed. Incidentally, she could serve up a tureen of bouillabaisse of a flavour and fragrance to seduce the heart of a king and convert a vegetarian from his amazing ways.

Bran, happy as always within sight of the sea, raced the garden with his "fox," or sat under the pines with his mother, listening to the pine needles growing, or hearing stories of the Greek heroes who, on the shores of the Mediterranean, seem to be more real and comprehensible than in any other part of the world. Perhaps because old Greece and the Ionian Isles are so near at hand! Indeed, the lure of the horizon is so great on that fair shore, that if she had been alone in the world nothing could have held Val from taking train to Marseilles, and from thence as fast as ship could bear her. But Bran and his well-being bound her fast like Prometheus to his rock. The rush of trains and the throb of ships' machinery are no furtherances to health in young children. It is in quiet gardens and comfortable homes that the young heart expands and the little body shoots and flourishes. The garden of the veldt was what she could most have wished for him--that wild garden where her own heart had grown its dreams. But it was far, far, and only to be reached by such long journeying as the child was not yet fit for. So she stayed with him in the southern garden, and if her own heart sailed away sometimes in the ships that slid over the horizon down the side of the world, her body remained to guard Westenra's son and to give him what she "possessed of soul."

Her only regret was that Haidee too could not be revelling in the golden southern sunshine. But Haidee was studying at Versailles with quite extraordinary energy. The exams. were close upon her, and Val was far from wishing to divert her attention from the goal. She had never failed to impress upon the child the importance of mental equipment that is grounded on solid instruction. She could see for Haidee too, where she had never seen for herself, that to leave the mind and heart and soul open and waiting for some man to walk in and fill them is to court disaster. There is no man in the world big enough to fill the heart and mind and soul of a woman worth considering. The thing is to fill them first with beauty and learning and wisdom, and let the man come in after, if there be room. For a woman to stake everything on a man is to play a losing game. But another love in the soul, be it music, literature, art, mathematics, or the maternal instinct, is insurance against total beggary. If by great good chance a man's love brings happiness, then the other love is an added glory; if misery comes the other is a refuge.

Poor Val! She had not followed the creed herself, but she saw well enough the wisdom of it for Haidee, and had tried to instil into her the prudence of going nap on Art rather than on Heart. She wanted Haidee to benefit by her own failures, and never ceased from urging and encouraging her on towards a goal. A further instigation she used freely was the mention of the great pride and pleasure Westenra would feel in her successful passing of the "Bacho" and gaining of the diplôme.

But Haidee, in response to all letters, kept on saying nothing. Even to Val's promise of a trip to the South as soon as the exams, were over, she made no more than a sullen acknowledgment. But Val knew from the reports of the professors that she was working hard.

Most people flee from the Riviera during the summer months. Of course it is hot, but that is not the reason. With the advent of the hot weather the Riviera becomes very quiet. The "season" is over, and the fashionable birds fly away. But as a matter of fact the charm of the place is only ripening. The blaze and beauty of the scene become riper and more gorgeous. The white villas disappear into their gardens, submerged by a flood of green leaves that hide and protect them from the blaze and dust, though of the last there is less than in the season, for the motors cease from troubling and the siren is at rest. The sweet silence of the night is unbroken by blood-curdling shrieks or jerked-out hoots from the cars of those rushing to, or returning furiously from, Monte Carlo. Of course in the bungalow type of villa built to catch the spring sunshine, and with no well-treed garden in which to shelter from fierce heat, it would be unwise and uncomfortable to stay through the summer; but in the Villa of Little Days there was every comfort within and without, and nothing to irk except the occasional bite of a mosquito that had intrigued its way through wired windows and mosquito netting. The days passed in a great idle peace. For Val was frankly idle--with her hands. With her mind she was always working and giving forth to Bran. But with her hands, for the first time in her life since she had sat idle under the shadow of a buck-sail imbibing her father's vagabond creeds, she did nothing. And, even as in those days Gay Haviland had handed on to his child what was his of greatness of heart and soul, so in the southern garden during long torrid days of tropical peace, when under the tingling ether thought seemed to detach itself in bright fountains from the sluggish mass of lesser things, Val gave of all that was best in her to Westenra's son. The pity of it is that all mothers cannot have this unlimited leisure to give to their children in the days when character is forming for life.

In a sense, too, Val was at peace for the first time since her early marriage. The menace and terror of Valdana's existence, the load she had carried on her conscience for years with regard to her position in Westenra's life, all had been swept away by the hand of Death, the greatest friend! And she was free of Westenra too. Whether it were true or not that he intended to marry Miss Holland she would never lay claim to his life or name again, never return to that life in New York that crippled her soul, robbed her of her individuality, and turned her into a useless, incapable creature whom she herself despised.

The decision was not even hers to make--at least so it seemed to her. He had made it for her in Jersey. And it was all old grief and pain! She had learned during those terrible months of nursing Horace Valdana to hush her heart to rest. She had had her chance with Garrett and his love, and failed, it seemed. Even in spite of Valdana's resurrection she would surely, had she been worthy, have kept Westenra's love? As it was, love had done with her, she would never feel passion again.

"All her red roses had fallen asleep,

All her white roses were sleeping!"

The brave thing was to face the fact and abide by it. Besides, she had Bran. A woman who is a mother can never be quite lonely and unhappy. One little chapel of the heart may remain empty and dismantled but all other spaces in it are filled to overflowing. And ... away at the back of Val's mind a dream had begun to simmer and waver and take form--a dream of a waggon on the veldt, with Bran. Some day she would return to work and wandering--she knew that now.

――――

In the autumn Haidee passed her exams, brilliantly, getting honours with her "Bacho" and a first-class diplôme. It was a great achievement, and Val was deeply pleased, knowing how the news would gratify Westenra. She wrote at once sending Haidee a beautiful gift in celebration of the success, and asking when she should come to Paris and fetch her South. For by this time she had discovered that she could trust Marietta with Bran, and had no fear of leaving him for a few days.

But Haidee wrote back coldly, barely acknowledging the gift, and stating that she wished to stay on at the Lycée working at her music and painting until December, when Celine Lorrain and her father were coming down to Marseilles to see the last of Rupert, who, having finished his two years' military service, was going out to Morocco. Val made no objection to this plan, but her heart was chilled at this open preference for strangers. The Lorrains were good friends, of course, but after all she and Haidee had been through poverty and sorrow and sickness together. She looked upon the girl, if not as her child, at least as her younger sister. Was it possible that she still cherished resentment about Sacha? At any rate Val was too proud to make any further advances. She knew Haidee to be one of those natures that are not softened by kindly advances, but rather inclined to hold the advancers in contempt for their pains--a fault of youth that passes with a wider knowledge and experience of humanity.

When she had gone to say good-bye to Haidee before leaving Paris, it was with the intention of telling her the wonderful news about the necklace, and also as much as was necessary of the return and death of Valdana without exactly revealing the identity of the latter and his relationship to herself. However, Haidee's bleak manner had nipped untimely in the bud the good intention. Val could not afford to take into her confidence any one who was not entirely sympathetic, and though she did not believe that Haidee would be capable of deliberate disloyalty, yet she realised that the latter, in spite of the grown-up airs, was only a child, and as such liable to be swayed by moods in which she might fling a confidence to the four winds, and repent her action when it was too late. And the secret of Horace Valdana's resurrection had not been kept these many years for it to be lightly betrayed by a child. As for the matter of the fortune gained by the sale of the Comfort necklace, Val had been obliged to strangle her longing to tell Haidee all about it, for how could she suppose that any one who showed such an almost offensive indifference to her affairs was really burning with curiosity to know the meaning of her suddenly changed circumstances? Haidee hid her feelings well. Thus it came to pass that a secret which Val would gladly have shared and felt redoubled pleasure in the sharing, had been kept of necessity to herself. She had not even told Rupert, for she felt that apart from the children no one else before Westenra had a right to know. And since Westenra showed no further interest in her--well, it was no one's affair.

When the week came for the expected arrival of Haidee, what was Val's intense surprise to receive a letter from her saying that she should not be coming down with the Lorrains. For one thing, she wrote, General Lorrain was ill and Celine could not leave him, so that Rupert would be travelling alone. For another, she added casually, as if prompted by an afterthought, "Garry is in Paris and we are going about a great deal together. It is possible that he may come down South--to see Bran before he returns to New York. But this is not quite certain. I will let you know later."

Westenra in Europe for the first time for four years, and this was the way he notified her! Val was stricken to the soul. Never had she so acutely realised the position to which he had relegated her. A mere minder of his child, and in some respects not so good as that, for a nurse or governess would at least have received kindly and courteous letters from her employer. This casual second-hand message seemed to be the cruellest of any of the blows her heart had suffered since first she threw in her lot with Garrett Westenra. And at first she sank under it. It was the little more that is too much. But presently with some of her old courage she braced herself to the new situation. If she had got to meet Westenra she would be ready for it. She had not trained her soul for years to no avail. She had not lived with austerity, stood apart from temptation, fought spiritual battles, for nothing. A strong rock was at her back for the hour of need, a rock she had been forming for herself in all the years since she last saw Westenra. She would be ready when he came to receive him with dignity and strength untainted by resentment or any petty feeling.