Wanderfoot Part 16

In the solemn mute moments that followed the curlew wailed again.

"What are you saying?" muttered Westenra, hoa.r.s.ely. He had risen to his feet.

Then Val began to laugh, not hysterically, but just soft light-hearted laughter. She really felt light-hearted at that moment. It was as though something very, very heavy had been lifted from her shoulders, and she could stand up straight at last.

"It can't be true!" He was muttering like a man stunned. "How long have you known?"

"Oh, what does that matter!" she said. "It is _true_--that is all that concerns you." She reflected a moment. "But of course my mere word is of no value to you ... I have proofs in the house ... letters from him asking me to go to Canada with him." She began to laugh again.

"Good G.o.d!" muttered Westenra still dazed. "And Bran?"

That sobered her, drying the strange laughter on her lips and in her heart.

"Ah, Bran! ... Yes. My Brannie!" she said softly, her voice in those few low-spoken words expressing all that the woman voice can express of pity, sorrow, and love. It was Bran who would be the victim--Bran who would go fatherless, homeless, nameless--a vagabond like his mother with restless heart and wandering feet!

"He is mine," said Westenra suddenly.

"No, mine," she answered swiftly. They stood staring at each other like two duellists. He lost sight of all she had been to him--of all that she must have suffered. Dazed and horror-struck he only felt that his world was moving away from under his feet, and she was trying to rob him of the last hold, the most dear thing he had ever possessed.

"He is mine too ... I believe by law I could get him."

"Law! Have n't you found out yet that I am lawless?" She came close to him, staring into his eyes, a mocking light in her own. "You forget that I am the woman with no soul, no morals, and no roots, the careless vagabond whom you feared Haidee to come into contact with ... whom you apologised to your dead mother for having married...."

"Val, you are mad!" he said amazed, white to the lips. But she only laughed a little clanking laugh, and her voice that had so often sounded in his ears like the wild far music of his own land was hard now as iron on iron.

"Go your ways, my dear Garrett Westenra. You are free of the woman who burnt your s.h.i.+p!"

CHAPTER XII

CHILDREN OF ISHMAEL

"Life tests a plough in meadows made of stones, Love takes a toll of spirit, mind, and bones."

MASEFIELD.

Raging he went from English sh.o.r.es. Raging, broken-hearted, more lonely than ever in his life before. Looking backwards to that voyage on which he and Val had first met, he realised that his loneliness then was peace and contentment compared with what he now felt. He had known what it was to share life right down to the core with another human being, and when that has once been, solitude redoubles its sting. A fantastic creature like Val, however uncomfortable she made life, could not be lost out of it without leaving a big, aching gap.

Yet, there he was on his way back to America, while in far Jersey Val sat on her rabbit-hutch staring at the sea with blind eyes, Bran playing unheeded at her knees, in her ears the faint, melancholy cry of the curlew.

After their wretched parting on St. Brelade's Cliffs, Westenra had paced the beach all night. When he reached the farm dawn brightened the sky, but none of the freshness of morning was in his drawn face. Haidee and Val were up, the fire made, breakfast ready. They seemed to take it for granted that he still meant to leave by that morning's boat for England, and indeed he had decided that it was the only thing to do. It would give him time to review the miserable situation and look for a way out of it. But before he went he encompa.s.sed a further interview with Val, though he got little of it but pain. She was in that subtle way of hers _eloignee_ from him once more, had put immeasurable distance between them.

"I want you to tell me more of this," he said drearily. "I must have details to go on before I can do anything to right the matter."

"You cannot right it," she answered. "It must be left as it is."

"What do you mean?"

"It must never come out that Horace Valdana is alive. One cannot so disgrace England."

Briefly she related the facts as far as she knew them, and he saw that she was right. Impossible to disgrace a country to right a private affair--even if the country were one you hated. But what a situation!

There seemed to him to be no way out of it. Val, for a deep reason of her own, withheld from him the fact of Valdana's broken health. She wished him to feel absolutely free of her. She kept repeating that, with sardonic inflexible eyes.

"You see, you are free! What more do you ask?"

He asked much more, but with that mocking smile on her pale lips he would not tell her so.

"I want my son," he said coldly.

"_My_ son," she answered, and that found them once more at the pitch at which they had parted the night before, reason withdrawn, cold fury in its place. Only by a great effort had he controlled himself.

"I leave him with you, in trust."

"Because you must," she answered, eyes flickering with bitter triumph.

"But will you not take Haidee before ill comes to her?"

He was helpless before the smile that writhed upon her stiff lips. What did she mean by these gibes concerning Haidee and his dead mother, which she flung at him like javelins? How had she read those secrets of his soul that he had never revealed to any one, scarcely acknowledged to himself? Had she with her queer almost clairvoyant instinct known all along and mocked and disdained him in her heart from the first? If he thought of her tenderness to Bran and to himself when he lay ill, her comrades.h.i.+p, her valiant gaiety, he could not believe it. When he looked at her mocking disdainful eyes he could believe anything.

"No; I leave Haidee in trust with you too," he said, then had been obliged to kiss the children hurriedly, and go on his way, or lose the boat.

In spite of his original intention to do so he did not return to Jersey before sailing to America. After black nights of reflection he saw that there was nothing to be gained by facing Val again in the mood that possessed her. The moment they looked into each other's eyes cold reason would once more withdraw from them and the fury of wounded love take its place. It was better to let Time do its work upon their trouble. So he sailed for America without seeing her or the children again, though it hurt him deeply to do it. And his days and nights upon the s.h.i.+p were haunted by the face of the woman in grey. Never since the voyage on the _Bavaric_ had he dreamed that dream, but now never a night came without it. Towards the last part of the voyage, when calm had come to him, he wrote her a letter in which he hid the love that still ached in him, but tried to revive a little the old understanding comrades.h.i.+p they had shared.

But there was too much of compa.s.sion in that letter, and Val was sick of his compa.s.sion. Women _can_ get sick of compa.s.sion when it leaves no room for self-respect.

She stayed on in Jersey not because he asked her but because she must.

One would call it existing rather than living as far as she was concerned. She felt as though her brain were dead and she had only her body left, that body which, however glad she would be to lay it down, she must conserve and take care of for the sake of Bran. For Haidee, too, she had a kind of responsible mother-feeling, though Haidee never encouraged tenderness in any one. But the case of Bran was different; the child of two such nervous people could not be otherwise than nervously organised, though of fine build and stamina, and Val knew that under any care but hers he would probably grow up a weakling. No, she must not die! But she tried to let her mind do so for a while, so that she might suffer less. She essayed to turn herself into a kind of vegetable; read nothing, talked to no one but the children, indulged in no kind of mental occupation. Only she worked out in the open as much as possible, with her nervous incapable hands, and at least she got a beautiful flower garden together.

She never saw or spoke to any one but the children. When Haidee got back from school they would all work together in the garden or clean out the stable, or make bran mashes for the pony colic, or run the dogs, and watch the chickens and rabbits in the open, though enthusiasm for this last occupation was distinctly on the wane. The only things any of them cared for now were the bees and the flowers. They did not make money out of these, but then the fowls did not make money either, only pretended to until the grain bill came in.

Bran was always to be found in the vicinity of the beehives, and at first Val had been terrified, but later she came to believe him one of the "band of little brothers" whom bees do not sting. Haidee could take no liberties with the strange, wise insects, and had a holy fear of them, but they were Bran's pa.s.sionate loves.

As for eggs and chickens, and fat hens that would no longer lay, they were all sick of them as articles of diet. Haidee, who in New York days was used to attack with relish three city eggs of a.s.sorted flavours mixed in a tumbler, now turned away in weariness and disgust from the brown-sh.e.l.led ones fresh from the nest.

And the rabbits were a thorn in the flesh, and a weariness to the sole of the foot! Eternally they were killed by stoats, eaten by rats, stolen, or else dug their way out from under the runs and fled for the open. If these modes of escape all failed, Bran, in his small way, would do what he could for them. When he came toddling indoors to declare with an effulgent smile his love for Haidee she would start up snapping:

"Yes, I know what _that_ means. You've let the rabbits out. You always have when you love me. Have you, Bran?"

"Well, by aksdent, Haidee...."

"Oh, I know your aksdents...."

With blank faces she and Val would rush from the house and scoot after the scurrying rabbits. The latter usually got the best of the game and achieved liberty.