Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
stars for awhile and perform no serious operations, but he felt quite
equal to taking up the ordinary threads of his practice again. His main
worry was Val. Her resolution to go to Europe meant not only the
_bouleversement_ of home and hospital, but of their whole future life.
He was far from wishing to keep a woman who did not care for him tied to
his side. But he retained a kind of ungrounded hope that after she
rested awhile from the heavy strain his illness had entailed, she would
gradually return to her old, ardent generous self and give up the
fantastic plan for leaving America. He saw very well that she must go
somewhere. Her physique was in rags. She had grown so fragile that her
bones almost pierced her skin, and her face was the face of a ghost.
His heart was wrung with pity for her. None more anxious than he that
she should go away and rest, and to use his last cent for the purpose if
need be. What hurt was that she should want to go so far and for so
long; that she should have planned it all so eagerly while he lay sick,
and hold fast to it so resolutely now that he was well. Once so pliant
to all his wishes she was firm as a rock in this, and he had no will to
oppose her. His heart was always tender for the sick, and it was plain
to the dullest eye that she was a sick woman. He schooled himself to
believe at last that her strange coldness was a result of this sickness.
He had half-killed her with overwork and worry, small wonder that she
hated him! It was not treachery, not the quitting spirit, but the whim
of a sick and weary child. The generous thing was to bear with her
unreproaching, and at whatever cost to himself, humour her wish. It was
in this spirit that he told her to pack up, and he would, when she gave
the word, take steamer tickets for her and the children. He arranged
for Mary, the Wicklow maid, to accompany her too. He would have offered
to go himself, though he knew the hospital needed him, but that he could
feel her projecting a very stone wall of opposition to such a purpose.
He had almost to insist on her taking Haidee at the last, for she seemed
now to hang back from the idea, looking at him with strange eyes when he
said that Haidee would be better in her care than any one else's. How
could he know that his delirium had betrayed to her old doubts of his,
which in sane moments he would himself have been ashamed of harbouring,
and which had long since been banished from his mind by her bright
gallantry. He had come to believe, indeed, that Haidee was better with
Val than with any one. Further, he did not in the least want Haidee
with him. She would not for one moment comfort him for the loss of Bran
and his wife. He had only said the thing in that first bitterness of
heart. Rather he looked upon Haidee's going as a safeguard to his own
happiness, for if Val's illness grew worse, the child would be able to
give him the news at once. Mary was going only for the voyage, and on
arriving at Southampton would go straight on to Ireland where her mother
needed her.
When he found at last that Val's reason for lingering in New York was
that she was not satisfied with the people she was leaving behind to
take charge of the house and his comfort, he summarily, even savagely,
turned on her and told her he was well able to take care of himself.
Indeed, he considered this anxiety for his welfare somewhat forced and
unnecessary. Well she knew what he needed for his welfare--that it was
neither a good cook, nor a housekeeper, nor a matron for his
hospital--and, knowing it, she still went from him, betook herself out
of his life, put the ocean between them!
And so at the last, on one grey day late in the year, it was almost in
bitterness they parted, haggard and broken, hiding their hearts from
each other.
As the White Star liner steamed down the river he stood on the dock and
waved farewell to the little group that now made up his dear portion of
life; Haidee, all long tags of hair, yelling boisterously; Mary holding
up Bran pink and shining; Val, wraith-like in her long grey silk cloak,
seeming among her veils to be floating rather than leaning from the side
of the ship, her hands put out at the last in an involuntary gesture as
of entreaty--for what? Forbearance, forgiveness, understanding?
"God knows what is in her strange heart!" thought Westenra.
A gleam of light struck on something bright she wore--he recognised the
beads of her weird necklace. The comfort necklace! He had never seen
her wear it since the day she had swung it in her hand as they walked
the deck of the _Bavaric_.
Poor Val! was she too in need of comfort then?
Was she thinking of the dream ship on which she had sailed so
confidently into this very port not two years gone?
He turned heavily away.
Part II
Jersey
CHAPTER IX
NEW ROADS TO FORTUNE
"God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the
future."--EMERSON.
Jersey, a small and smiling island set amidst the boisterous seas of the
English Channel, is reputed to enjoy more winter sunshine than any
seaside place in Great Britain. Be that as it may, for the first few
months of Val's residence there, it wrapped itself so perpetually in
soft warm shawls of mist, that she sometimes thought of writing to
Rudyard Kipling and calling his attention to a place where the sun never
so much as rose on the English flag. However, it is one of the cheapest
spots in the world, and that is why Val chose it for her six months of
waiting before she could tell Westenra the truth. The six months might
possibly resolve themselves into twelve, one never knew! She was not
hard-hearted enough to wish that Valdana would hurry his departure from
the world, she only wished not to think about it at all. Jersey seemed
to promise both peace and solitude in which to pull herself together
after the strain of the last few months in New York.
They had sailed there straight from Southampton, and after a week's
hunt, found a little furnished house out in the country, pitched high
above St. Brelade's Bay. It was isolated and lonely, standing in the
midst of its own wide fields and garden. The owners, army people who
had used it for a sort of pleasure farm or summer residence, were now in
India, and the property having remained unlet for some time was in a
neglected condition. The house was scantily furnished, but against this
fact the low rent was an offset.
Jersey is considered extraordinarily picturesque, but Val, spoilt by the
wild scenery of Africa, majestic even in its barest, bleakest places,
found the scenery pigmy though pretty. However, there was always the
grandeur of the sea, beating in fury against the rugged, red coast, and
the gracious misty emptiness of sky-line and horizon. She loved, too, to
stand in the garden, dreaming of the lost land that lies sleeping under
the water between Jersey and Brittany--that land of past centuries,
which, before the sea in some strange empyrean convulsion swept over it,
included forests in which were hordes of wolves, the "city of a hundred
churches," and that wonderful cathedral in which, according to an old
Breton manuscript the scarlet mantles of forty Lords of the Church could
be counted at Mass every Sunday. At the great neap tides Jersey
fishermen, far out, looking down from their boats into the clear depths,
say they can still detect foliage that is not sea-weed swaying amid the
branches of mighty forest oaks; and from the Brittany side, on still
days keen eyes have detected, far down on the sea floor, the walls and
ruined towers of the city of St. Ys.
But there was little time for dreaming at Cliff Farm. Val, with a
resolution to cost Westenra as little as possible, did nearly all the
work of the place herself, only employing a woman two or three times a
week to do rough cleaning. But not content to economise only, she
thrilled with a scheme to augment their slight income. A yearning to
found a successful poultry and rabbit farm seized her soul. Haidee,
bitten by the same mania, fostered the ambition, and with heads together
over a poultry journal they read rapturously of fortunes to be made in
this direction.
The first and vital thing, however, was to regain health and get the
children well. Travelling had not agreed with Bran the pagan. On the
ship he had been dreadfully sick and lost all his plumpness and lovely
colouring, but in the mild mists of Jersey and Channel breezes, fresh
and unpolluted by the microbes of cities, he began to bloom again.
Haidee, too, pallid when they first arrived, changed under the spell of
the country. Like all persons who had been held long in cities she felt
the joy of the open, of trees, and grass, and living things, and began
to blossom and smile into a different creature. The old savage Haidee
was still there under the skin, ready to come forth if scratched; but
reasons for kicking physically and jibbing mentally were wonderfully
absent in the simple farm life. Her only grievance was that she had to
go in daily to school at a convent in St. Helier, from whence she
invariably returned ornamented with scowls. But these passed as soon as
she got back to the work of digging and delving in the garden. It was
the out-of-door work that put Val right, too, painting a faint colour in
her thin cheeks, and laying dew on her jaded nerves. The kitchen garden,
practically a field, was heavily infested with couch grass, but by noble
efforts they cleared it and began in time to have their own vegetables
for the table.
Val had told Westenra that she did not know how much life would cost
her, and indeed with her vague ideas about money, she could not tell
until she had tried. He had given her five hundred dollars, and the
arrangement was that she would make that last as long as she could, and
then write for more. Alas! it did not last very long. By the time
travelling expenses were cleared, the hotel bill paid for their week's
stay in St. Helier while they were seeking a house, Haidee's school fees
advanced, and the little farm stocked with necessaries, there was not
much of the five hundred dollars in sight.
Some of it, too, had been used in erecting houses and runs for the hens
and rabbits that were to bring in a fortune! Val, with the amateur's
delusion that after the initial expense all is profit, rushed into the
usual mistake of overstocking.
"Every fowl is an asset," she told herself, and bought fowls by the
dozen, regardless of age, pedigree, or laying qualifications, until
pulled up at the round turn by an article in the poultry journal on the
importance of good breeding stock. Thereafter, she and Haidee decided
to keep all the early purchases for "laying purposes only," and buy a
special pen of thoroughbreds for breeding chickens. Earnestly they
studied the advertisement columns of the poultry journal. Prices for
breeding pens were high.
"We can't afford to pay such sums, Haidee--but there is the exchange
column! What about that?"
The exchange column was rich in proposals from philanthropists who
apparently desired nothing better than to stock the British Isles with
the best breeds of poultry at a dead loss to themselves. Pens of five,
seven, and nine fowls of the purest pedigree were proffered for things
patently not half the value of the poultry. Nothing but the most
profound altruism, for instance, could have prompted the offer from an
English rectory of "A magnificent prize-pen of Black Langshans for
breeding purposes (four hens and a cock) in exchange for clothing,
provisions, or _anything useful_." If a sinister significance lurked in