Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
instinct to hide it, something of the way he had struggled with himself
to evade her coming into his life, of his mental resistance until the
last, of the pity which rather than love had moved him to ask her to
marry him, of his dread of her past, and fear for their future. Oh!
bitter and bleak were the things that came to her ears in scraps and
broken whispers and heavy sighs, and that pieced together by her weary
yet quickened brain made a clear writing on the wall. All was plain to
her at last: all that he had succeeded in keeping dark from her, the
secret of his torment and his pain in the struggle. To her the
upholding joy in the darkest hour had always been that the man was worth
it, she loved him and considered him worthy of every sacrifice she could
make. She saw now that he had had no such thought to uphold him.
Though he had been too loyal to acknowledge the fact even to himself,
the bitter drop in his cup must have been his belief that the woman was
not worth the sacrifices marriage had entailed!
Sighs and dark mutterings told her why he had shrunk at first from
Haidee's coming to 68th Street--some duty he had to Halston, to keep his
child only among those whose lives had been pure and unspotted by the
world. The meaning of his fury at Val's suggestion for his son's naming
came whispering forth from fever-broken lips.
"Dick! ... How _could_ she? A dissipated brute .... no woman safe from
... and she ... my woman, alone with him for months ... wild places ...
lonely places."
She could not know where he had heard that scandalous tale. She could
only bow her head and take the sword to her heart.
When she heard him muttering to his mother, explaining that she was his
dream woman, that it had to be.... 'She is not like you, mother, but
she came to me in dreams ... _it had to be_ ... and now she is Bran's
mother ... you must love my Bran's mother," she thought her heart would
break for bitter aching. It seemed to her in that dark hour that
nothing could ever hurt her any more. She defied Fate to do her any
worse hurt. An unwise thing to do. Fate was in fact sitting in wait
with a worse clout in her hand.
There came an afternoon when Westenra was so much better that he could
talk a little, softly, if a trifle vaguely to Haidee who had crept in to
hold his hand. His eyes, seeming to have grown lighter in his thin,
strongly-featured face, travelled incessantly round the room, resting
here and there as though they recognised landmarks in some country he
had not visited for years. They rested on Val writing at a table near
by, and noted the wraithlike face, pale as a bone, the weary lean of her
against her own supporting arm, the droop of her lips and her shoulders.
When she came over with the medicine, he said quietly:
"You should go out for a little while, dearest. Haidee will take care of
me."
She had indeed a longing that was almost active pain for air and the
sight of sky and green things, and needed little persuasion, seeing that
he was really better. She did not even stop to change her frock, which
was old and unfashionable, and in her haste caught up an ancient
school-hat of Haidee's, trimmed with a shabby bow of silk ribbon, and
more than slightly bent out of shape about the brim. She felt it
mattered little how she looked, so long as she could escape into the
outer air. Her head ached violently.
As she hurried down the front-door steps, a man walking up the street
looked at her curiously, and something in her peculiar walk brought a
flash of amazement to his eyes and quickened his steps. He was tall and
well-dressed, with traces of breeding, and a certain dashing
handsomeness about him, but there was a green tint in his ravaged
cheeks, and the straight figure under the well-cut coat was gaunt and
shrunk. His eyes lacked lustre, and one of them jerked and winked
mechanically at irregular intervals. The man was a nervous and physical
wreck. As he passed the house from which Val had come, he looked up and
noticed its number and the name on the door-plate. A moment later he
caught up with the slight, hurrying figure, gave a swift glance at her
profile and the shabby hat above it, then, in the quiet drawling tones
of the man about town, he said politely:
"How do, Val?"
She swung round with the wild jerk of a lassoed creature and faced him.
Then he was not so sure after all that it was Val. The grey-faced
woman, with all the life gone out of her eyes, sunken cheeks and
blanched lips, was certainly not the Valentine Valdana of other days.
The figure, the walk was hers; but the face was the face of some strange
woman--some woman in trouble, too, and that was a bore. He was a man
who always avoided women in trouble. On the point of lifting his hat,
with a slight apology and walking away, her words detained him.
"_You!_" Her voice was the voice of Valentine Valdana with all the
music gone from it: harsh and grinding as stone on stone.
"Yea, verily," said he, and stared sardonically into her fearful eyes.
They stood so for a moment staring at each other. Then the man laughed;
but it was not a pleasant laugh.
"You don't seem as pleased to see me as you ought to be!"
"You!" she stammered again. It seemed all she was able to say.
"Yes, _me_, my very dear Val," he repeated with something like a snarl.
"Time appears to have dimmed your excellent eyesight, as well as robbed
you of your gift of repartee!"
She answered strangely, speaking vaguely like a woman in a nightmare,
but her words struck home like little, sharp knives, and the blood
mounted high in his dark cheeks.
"So _you_ were the slinker in the bush!--the skulker!--the deserter of
comrades and men!--_I might have known_!"
Rage flashed out of his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment he looked as if
he could strike her. Then he laughed again the jeering sardonic laugh of
the cynic, whose bones hard words have no power to break, the coward who
fears nothing but death.
"Be damned to you!" he said pleasantly. "I had as much right to save my
skin as any one else."
"_No one else saved his skin_."
"That was their lookout," he remarked with grim facetiousness, but her
silent, terrible stare, so full of indictment, disconcerted him
horribly. He essayed to change the unpleasant subject.
"So you are in New York! No one could make out where the deuce you had
got to."
That detached her from the sinister question of his conduct on the South
African veldt. But still she stared deep into him as if seeking in his
soul the key to some problem she could not solve; and he was
embarrassed, for he wished no one to search in his dark soul--there were
things hidden there that even he was afraid to look upon. As for the
situation, surely it was clear enough. He that should have been dead
was alive, and that was all there was to it. He had been looking for
her to let her know, and that he had found her by accident was so much
to the good. It had a better appearance than if he had hunted her down
(as he would have done if he had possessed any clue to work on). After
all, he argued to himself, he had a right to her sympathy. Also he
needed help in the shape of money pretty badly. He was sick of hiding
in America, and longed to get away to the cheap comfort of Europe.
Unfortunately, she did not look as if she could help his financial
situation very much. He had, in fact, never seen her look so shabby
since she ceased to occupy the proud position of wife and slave to
Horace Valdana, Esq. The thought that he might not be able to levy a
loan from her after all moved him to venom.
"I fear you have come down in the world, my poor Val! If I did not know
what a brilliant woman of letters you are, I might almost think you had
turned into a housemaid. What were you doing at Number 700?"
Then she realised he had seen her come out of the house. That was the
key she had sought. Now she knew just where she stood, and what she must
do.
"Yes," she said slowly, "you are quite right, I have come down in the
world, and I am a housemaid--at that house I have just come from."
He burst out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest news he had heard
for a long time.
"Indeed! Perhaps you will invite me to call and have some supper with
you and the cook some evening?"
"We are not allowed to have callers. I don't get on with the cook. I
am under notice to quit." She made her statements quite gravely.
"But this is great!" He began to laugh again uproariously. "So you
have got the sack! And now you will have to go back to the career of
famous journalist. But why have left it, my dear girl? Is it a joke, or
some new craze for getting copy?"
Steadily, calmly, with pale lips and toneless voice, she lied on--for
Bran's sake, for Garrett's sake, for the sake of all she held dear.
What better reason can a woman have for lying her soul away!
"No, no joke, no craze: stern necessity. I can't write any more, that
is all. I had brain fever, and when it was all over I found that I
could n't put another sentence together. I am done for as a writer. So
I just dropped out of the old life and disappeared. The only thing I
can do now is work with my hands."
"But"--he stammered. "But it will come back--all you want is time,
rest--"
"Never," she said firmly. "Never. It is finished. My brain is gone.
I am Alice Brook now--Alice Brook, housemaid. I shall never be anything
else."
"Good God!" He gazed at her aghast. There was no glimmering of doubt
in his mind as to the truth of her story. It seemed almost too
extraordinary to be true, but he had never known Val to lie. He was
aware, in fact, from painful experience that she despised liars, and
held a creed that nothing worth a lie was to be found in the world. It
was not for him to know that she had at last found something she
considered worth lying for. Besides, she so thoroughly looked the part.
Thin, hollow-eyed, and badly dressed, with the hopeless lines
unhappiness had sketched about her lips, she was the picture of an
overworked slave who worked too much by day, and got too little rest at
night.
"Good God!" he repeated blankly. "And I was going to touch you for my
fare home."
It was her turn to laugh now, and she did it silently, rocking from side
to side, holding one hand over her heart as if afraid it might burst
from her body in its wild mirth. Valdana considered her with shrewd,
savage eyes. He had never known her guilty of such a thing as a fit of
hysterics, but it looked uncommonly as if she meant to indulge in one
now, and he was not anxious to assist in anything of the kind.
"Don't be a fool, Val," he said sharply. "Pull yourself together. Come
along into the Park and we 'll discuss things."
Val's laughter was over except for a strange little sobbing sound that
escaped from her lips from time to time, as she walked slowly by his
side towards the Park. Sometimes she swayed a little and put out her
hands as if to keep herself from falling--as though the earth were
rocking under her feet.
----
There is a story told in Africa of a Dutch woman, who, during one of the
early Kaffir wars, escaped from an attacked township, and with her
family of six little children hid in the bush. They concealed
themselves in a deep swamp overhung with bushes and seething with
poisonous gnats; and there, while all round them human beasts beat the
bush seeking for prey, the little band crouched low, nothing but their
heads protruding from the filthy ooze, fearful almost to breathe lest
they should be heard and dragged forth to torture and death.
Unfortunately, the baby, sick and too young to understand the terrible
situation, whimpered endlessly at the bites of the insects, and all its