Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
colour and form, but of no great value, and her "comfort necklace,"
which she now wore continually under her dress. The best she could do
was to write asking Branker Preston to take her furniture and
possessions out of storage and put them up to auction. But she directed
him to first ask her great friend, Harriott Kesteven to go through all
trunks and drawers on a destructive expedition, burning all old letters,
photographs, etc. Mrs. Kesteven complied with this request but not
literally. Instead of burning them she had all papers and photographs,
together with many personal things, precious though not intrinsic,
packed up and sent to Val. There were sketches of places she had
visited, a few ivories, books, draperies, curios, and some specially
charming Japanese chintzes. When Val opened packages, her eyes darkened
with tears. It seemed so long since she had lived with these things
about her, and a heart comparatively care-free. A moment later she
caught Bran to her breast.
"You are worth it all. You are my ivory, my roses, my fine gold, the
best article I ever wrote. I have made my travels and my troubles into a
vase of living porphyry."
Haidee took the things and arranged them about the farm sitting-room,
transforming it. But Val could not rest until she had sat down and
written to Westenra, telling him how the thing had occurred.
----
When, as the summer crept on, Westenra in his letters began to make
tentative remarks about his coming vacation, Val's yellow viper was
roused to high effort.
There are certain dark days on the calendar of every life; days when
everything goes wrong, when things are lost and broken, mistaken words
said, fatal promises made. One such day dawned for Val. She arose
haggard from a sleepless night to attend to her household duties. It
was a servantless interval, and there was the fire to make and breakfast
to prepare. After waking Haidee, she put on an old dressing-gown, more
notable for its warm lining than for its youth and beauty, and hurried
down-stairs to feed the fowls who, "carking" bitterly at the back-door,
were liable to wake Bran before his time. It affronted her furiously to
open the door upon Farmer Scone and one of his labourers passing down
her yard. He knew that it annoyed her to have him make this short cut
across her grounds to reach one of his pasture fields, but he had done
it repeatedly since she discovered his dishonesty in the marketing of
her eggs, and discontinued dealing with him. If there had been a man at
Cliff Farm he would never have dreamed of thus invading private
property. But Val being alone he felt safe, and his mean nature rejoiced
in taking advantage of a woman, whom he had discovered did not like to
be rude to any one.
On this particular morning, however, neighbourly courtesy could no
longer keep down just wrath. What infuriated Val was that she should be
seen in her disreputable old gown. It always seemed like an affront put
upon Garrett if she allowed any one to see her looking unkempt and
untidy. A still greater offence was that these common oafs, who saw and
judged only surface things, should so discover her.
"Good marning!" said Farmer Scone, affably familiar, but without raising
his hand to his cap. The dislike and contempt she had long felt for the
man rose in Val like a wave, and would no longer be contained. She drew
herself up and, looking at him, as a queen might look at an insolent
groom, said cuttingly:
"Please understand, Scone, that I do not care to have my yard used as a
pathway. You must in the future go round by the road."
Scone's little pig-eyes regarded her with venom, then he laughed
impudently.
"Great Galumps!" Not quick-witted, he was obliged to grope in the
depths of his mind for a moment or two to see what he could produce to
hurt the pale, proud woman, who looked at him as if he were less than
dust. The best he could drag up from those dim depths was a sneer at
her looks--she looked old that morning, poor Val, after her vigil with
the _serpent jaune_, and there are some mean natures that love to taunt
a woman with age. He turned to his labourer.
"By Jarge, Tom! The old woman got out of her bed wrong side this
marning," said he, and the two burst into senseless guffaws, and marched
on down the path. A further delicate witticism connecting the "old
woman's" temper with the absence of "an old man" added to a
grossly-expressed doubt as to whether she owned an "old man" at all,
came back across the field. Val heard it and turned white.
"This is what I have come to!" she cried to herself in wrath and
unhappiness. "A lonely, wretched woman whom pigs may insult! the victim
of every base-tongued wretch----!"
She turned back into the house, and sat down in utter dejection by the
kitchen table.
"They insult me because they see I have no husband to protect me," she
mused bitterly. "I who have two!"
The sound of Bran crowing his little morning crow up-stairs helped her
to recover, and she made the fire and put the kettle on for breakfast.
A few moments later the postwoman knocked at the door, and handed in two
letters. By the delicate irony of the god of black days the letters
were from her two husbands! She sat down and began to laugh.
Far from being lonely and undesirable she was, it seemed, highly desired
by each. Westenra's letter was somewhat cold, it is true, but the
burden of it was quite clear: he intended sailing from New York within
six weeks, and wished her to make preparations to return with him.
Valdana, writing from Berlin, via his mother and Val's agent, sent news
that was plainly meant to be inspiriting. After a consultation held on
his case by German specialists he was able to announce that his
complaint was not cancer at all, but merely liver trouble induced by the
South African climate, and over-exertion (the last was his own invention
and took the place of the words "alcoholic excess" in the doctors'
diagnosis). Moreover the specialists had given him every hope of a long
life if he would set out for a country with a bracing climate, and he
cheerfully handed on the hope to Val, as though it were some golden
gift. The ultimate burden of his letter came to much the same thing as
Westenra's. He wanted her with him. His mother was prepared to make a
special sacrifice of certain securities to give him a fresh start in
Canada. Would Val give him a fresh start too, and come with him?
And this was the woman whom pigs insulted because she had no husband to
protect her! She laughed convulsively, as one might laugh who felt the
first twinge of the rack, and when she had finished laughing she sat on
reading and dully re-reading, her hands pressed to her temples. Suddenly
a vibrating spasm of agony shot through her teeth and flew up like veins
of red-hot fluid into her cheeks and eyes. Neuralgia, that torment of
the troubled, had for weeks been lurking behind its friend and ally the
yellow viper, and now chose this propitious moment to lay its scorpion
claws upon her. All that day, and for many days after, she almost
forgot the terrible problem of her marriage in the agony of her nerves.
----
Val had never professed a religion or belonged to any faith. She had
just been taught to say her prayers and put her trust in God; no forms;
no church. She supposed she must have been baptised as a child, but
could not be sure. Her mother was a Catholic who loved the smell of
incense, but never went to confession.
Thus she had grown up with an open mind for all faiths and no faith of
her own. Yet, though she was not pious, religion had always attracted
her, and sometimes at rare moments she had seen the vision of a Light
beyond the world. At other times all forms of religion she knew of
seemed a mere wearisome routine of duty and custom. But when in New York
she had come into touch with practised Catholicism she felt the strong
appeal of its Eternal beauty and the power of that wonderful faith to
direct and hold emotional impulsive natures like her own from casting
the soul after the heart. And she recognised at once that it was the
only religion for her and for any child of hers who inherited her
nature. So, at odd intervals in the rush and tear of the early days at
No. 700 she had been preparing herself for baptism by trying to get a
hold with her mind on the dogmas for which she cared nothing, but of
which a knowledge is essential to any one wishing to enter the Catholic
Church.
When her child was born there was an altar in her room with flowers on
it and a _veilleuse_ burning before the Sacred Heart, for it was the
month of June. When Bran was baptised she desired greatly to enter the
church with him, but her instruction was not complete, and her reception
had been put off from day to day. Then came Westenra's sickness and
Valdana's resurrection, putting an end to all thoughts of the kind. She
had something to hide, and those who have such things to hide cannot
enter the Catholic Church. Westenra supposed she had changed her mind,
and thought none the better of her for it.
As a matter of fact she had at that juncture felt more need than ever
for the help of religion in her life. She longed for the advice of
grave good men.
And now again she felt that longing. Her own _will_ to do right did not
seem enough; and indeed reflect and analyse as she would she could not
decide what was the right thing to do. What was it? Her sick brain put
the question over and over again. Was it right to go back to Valdana?
If so, _why_ was it right when her heart and soul and every instinct in
her fought against such a verdict? It could not be right to return.
Valdana deserved nothing of her, had deserted her and her child, had
done without her for years, had exploited her for the money she made,
was a coward and a brute with whom association could only bring
degradation. To go back to him would be to desert her child, for she
could never let Bran come within his radius.
Ought she then to desert her child--her contribution to the world, her
link in the golden chain of generations, her one word in the great
eternal Sonnet?
Never! Though Westenra might be a devoted father Bran would never,
without a mother, grow up to be the man she hoped. No little child can
spare its mother,--though many, alas! by the hard decree of death, and
oftener the cruel decisions of life, have to do so. There is something
a mother gives a child which no one else in the whole wide world can
give. Val had a curious belief too that just as no woman possessed a
soul except through the man she loved and the child she passed on, so no
son ever came to the full possession of his soul except through the love
of a mother. From what strange fields of mental and physical suffering
she had garnered those beliefs it would be difficult to determine, but
they sat fast in her heart and she lived and breathed by them. Emerson
seemed to her to share something of the belief when he wrote: "In my
dealing with my child my Latin and Greek accomplishments and my money
stand me nothing; but as much as I have of soul avails."
Apart from that she was sure that no boy ever yet came to the physical
perfection his babyhood promised without a mother to brood and guard
over his growing years. Who else but a mother will compute the effect
of an extra blanket on a little sweating body, or the lack of one in
winter? Will study the heart and mind and nerves and stomach of a child
all through that period when each year of full content and harmony and
health assures five years of strength and well-being later on?
Never, never could she leave Bran. Ought she then to tell Westenra?