Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
mother's fearful hushing could not quiet it. With the howls of
blood-drunken Kaffirs in her ears, and before her eyes the five tragic,
terror-stricken faces of her other children, the distracted mother found
no other thing to do than clasp her hands about the little loved,
whimpering throat that would betray them all, and still its cries for
ever.
Long after Valdana had left her Val sat on in the Park, trying not to
think, trying to get control over herself. Her overwrought brain felt
like a struggling, tortured thing, determined to burst from her head and
run brandishing its frenzy and pain to the world; while some other part
of her strove for calm, hushing and pacifying the tortured thing as the
Dutch mother had hushed the child that would betray them all; and she
felt that if she could not still its frenzied cries she must kill it.
Better that she should die than that Westenra and little Bran should
suffer. But she did not want to die; she knew she could not be spared
at that time. The mother of a little child can never be spared.
Westenra, lying weak and ill, seemed to her no more than a little child
too, and one that she must care for and protect from trouble. Dazed and
shocked as she was, with her world in pieces about her, the mother sense
alert in her warned her to get control of her nerves; that it would be
fatal to fall ill now; that everything depended upon her deliberate
action. She had seen with Westenra what happened when the brain was
sick, and she knew she could never hope to keep the truth from him if
such an illness overtook her. She was resolute to keep it from him. He
had suffered enough. He was sick and broken with suffering, and all
through her. But his pride and joy in Bran was still left him; and of
that, if she could help it, he should not be robbed. His son! Heir to
an old and honoured name if to no great fortune. What would befall if
he found that his son was nameless--heir to nothing but shame and
sorrow. Ah! some day he might have to hear the truth and bear it--but
not now, not now. She must take herself in hand strongly, force herself
to calmness, plan how to outwit Valdana, and save her loved ones.
She looked at the card Valdana had given her with an address written on
it:
MR. JOHN SEYMOUR,
_Shrapp's Hotel,_
_West 19th Street,_
_New York._
He was there under an assumed name, skulking, as he had skulked in the
bush. His mother, the only person whom he had enlightened as to his
being alive, was secretly sending him money. She dared not let his
father, an old man dying of an incurable disease, know, for fear it
would hasten his end, and she was ashamed to tell her other sons and
daughters; they were all honourable, upright people whose heads would be
lowered to the dust under the blow. With a mother's unselfish love she
wished to spare them the truth--that the man whose gallant death all
England had mourned was alive and skulking in hiding, a coward who had
deserted his comrades! But for Val she had no such feeling, and it was
she who had given him the news of Val's sailing for America and paid his
fare to do the same, counselling him to find her out and get her help.
She said it was Val's duty to stand by him, and he, pleased with such
comfortable counsel, had been in New York six months hoping to come
across his wife. At the last moment he had chanced upon her by
accident!
He had left her in the Park; it was with the understanding that she was
to meet him in two days' time at Shrapp's Hotel. But she had no
intention of keeping the appointment. First of all it would be
extremely difficult for her to get away from home without lying, and
then there was a possibility of Westenra finding out where she had gone,
and suspecting something strange. She meant to take no risks where
Westenra was concerned. Secondly, she hated to meet Valdana. Quite
apart from the horrible turmoil his reappearance caused in her life, she
was shakingly revolted by his presence. The sight of him alive when he
should have been where the world believed him--among the heroic
dead--made her physically sick.
"_As much right to save his skin..._" she repeated blankly, and the
blood seemed to turn to water in her veins. "Oh, I might have known ...
I might have known! Mean souls do not suddenly become heroic! _To save
his skin!_"
And it was the name of such a man that she bore by law! For such a one
her little Bran must be branded illegitimate. She ground her teeth in
rage and despair, and gave out a little moan.
Around the black morass that surrounded her there showed only one small
glimmer of light--it was the remembrance of that faint gleam that kept
her from going mad. He had offered it as a sort of propitiation for the
fact of his being still alive, and she shuddered at her own heartless
catching at it. She might not have believed but for the bleak tint of
his skin.
"It won't be for long, anyway. I 'm booked, Val. I have the same
trouble as my father--cancer of the liver. Nothing can save me. It's
only a matter of a few months ... a year at the outside." She had
looked into his face keenly at that and recognised the possibility of
his words being true. That strange hue in his cheeks might easily be
the hue of death foreshadowing the atrocious malady from which his
father suffered.
He had gone on to tell her that all he asked was to be allowed to live
in peace, out of the world's sight, until his hour came. The truth must
never be known, he said. Even he was not so dead to decency that he
could not recognise that. He owed something to his family after all--to
say nothing of his country! These had a right to expect silence from
one who should have been dead. And he was willing enough to be silent.
The gnawing at his vitals had killed in him, he said, all taste for
gaming and dissipation. He only wanted peace in some quiet country
place, anywhere but America, which he hated with the fierce hatred of
the waster surrounded by active energetic men. He had, it appeared,
sought Val in the pretty certain belief that she could and would assist
him to the quiet life he longed for, and when he found she could not he
was more inclined to curse than to sympathise because her brain had
"given out." She smiled a tortured smile at that. Her brain had indeed
given out. That part at least of the story was true; and that she would
never be able to write again as in the old days she knew was true too.
There is nothing like a year's tussling with domestic problems for
dulling the wits. She felt that to earn a sure million she could not
have produced the energy or material for one of her old gay vivid
articles salted with wit and scented with the breeze. The power had
gone from her. Wifehood had absorbed it. Maternity had eaten and drunk
it up! Like Alice Brook, she could only work with her hands now; and,
like Alice Brook, she was sadly incompetent even with these. For there
really was a housemaid called Alice Brook at No. 700; an inefficient
English girl who could not get on with the cook, and was without the
faintest notion of her duties. As Val had no time to train her she was
obliged to give her notice, and the girl was in fact leaving the house
that night. This was why Val had felt so safe in her story.
When Valdana found out that she did not mean to meet him again, he would
probably, as discreetly as he dared, make inquiries at No. 700 for Alice
Brook. But Val would be prepared for him.
She sat still on that bench in Central Park until she had formed her
plan. She would write to him within the next two days saying that
nothing was to be gained by their meeting; that she had left 68th
Street, and that if he did not worry her and try to find her, she would
help him all she could with money, and from time to time send him,
through his mother, such sums as she could earn. There was no question,
of course, of her earning at present, but she possessed jewellery upon
which she could raise certain sums. She would pawn some at once and
send him fifty pounds for his passage to England, thus ridding herself
of his vicinity at least, and gaining untainted breathing space in which
to decide upon the next move. There must, she knew, be a terrible
reconstruction of her life with Westenra, but as yet she was too weary
and shocked to see far ahead. She only knew that she must go warily,
like
"Ate Dea, treading so soft----"
Full of schemes that it revolted her to formulate, feeling a conspirator
and traitor to all she loved, she at last retraced her steps homeward.
CHAPTER VIII
WOUNDS IN THE RAIN
"What will you do, love?
When I am going
With white sail flowing,
The seas beyond?
What will you do, love?
When waves divide us
And friends may chide us,
For being fond?"
SAMUEL LOVER.
Recuperation set in at last with Westenra, and he began to return to
health almost as swiftly as he had departed from it, and with health
came a full tide of love and gratitude to the woman who had so devotedly
nursed him back to life. But in the wraith at his bedside he hardly
recognised Val. She had strangely changed, yet poignantly recalled to
him that grey lady of long ago, whom in the past months of pain and
fevered rush he had almost forgotten. Shadows seem to hang about her as
in his dream. Almost it seemed as if she, instead of he, were returning
from the Valley of the Shadow. He was struck to the heart by her worn
and weary look. But when he put out hands of gratitude and compassion
to her, she seemed like the dream woman to elude them without moving. A
long, long distance came between them. The old sad ache of lost lands
was in her eyes and lingered about her lips. Consciousness came upon
him suddenly that he loved this woman deeply, that she was the very
heart of his heart ... then why should he have that sense of fear that
she was escaping from him?
She smiled at him with exile in her eyes when he took her hand, and
kissing it, thanked her for all her goodness to him.
"Bless you, dearest and best ... I am ashamed of myself for getting sick
like this ... to have had you half-killing yourself nursing me ... what
should I have done without you? What would I ever do without you ...
Brannie's mother?"
Was it his fancy that her hand seemed to grow a little rigid in his?
That a shadow passed over her face? He had called her the sweetest
thing he could think of, one that meant so much to him, the symbol of
their love, the treasure saved from the rocks that had broken and
wrecked them--the treasure with which they would build a new ship in
which to sail the stormy seas. He could not know that ever since the
days of delirium she had been yearning for some little word of
_personal_ love, some little name that was all for her as lover, not
mother only. Once more the sense of distance between them came to him.
She seemed suddenly to be a long way off. In effect, he had loosed her
hand and she had moved away to the window. He did not see the heavy
tears that scorched her eyes, but he noticed the droop of her shoulders
and reproached himself.
"I 'm killing her," he thought sombrely, "and she is sick of it! Sick
of nursing me, and of her life here! How can one blame her! I only
wonder it did n't come sooner. How could I ever have hoped to keep a
woman like her ... to make a slave of ... in a doctor's commonplace
home!"
He closed his eyes again and the swift despondency of the invalid welled
up in him. When she came back to his sofa the old moody shadow was on
his face, the look of strain back about his brows. Timidly, and with her
face turned from the light, so that he might not see the trace of her