Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
"You promised to burn your boats ... never to go back to old habits and
possessions ... I find you with your old possessions about you----"
"Those pictures and chintzes? I wrote and told you how they came," she
interrupted. "They can be burnt for all they are to me."
He moved his hand with a desperate gesture.
"That is nothing to the other. Can you deny that you have returned to
one at least of your old habits?"
"Oh!" she cried, and sat up like one who has been struck. But his heart
was full of fury, outraged hopes, and disappointment. He could not
measure his words because she cried out.
"It was not your boats you burned, but my ship--my ship of dreams!"
He went further, he accused her of breaking his shrine, of succumbing to
a vice that he detested and despised with all his soul. He said she had
betrayed his love, and destroyed that quality in it which is essential
and eternal.
"One _must_ look up," he said, and looked down on her as she sat there,
her face covered with her hands, very still under the torrent of fierce
and cruel words that burst from him in the bitterness of outraged love
and pride. Like all reserved people when driven into breaking silence
he said too much. Afterwards there was a long silence. A curlew flying
inland wailed faintly like a dying thing.
"I don't see what is before us," he muttered. "Everything is finished."
And at last she spoke--very quietly.
"Yes, everything is finished of our life together. But each of us is
free to begin again."
"Free!" he echoed ironically, thinking of the mystical fatalistic
threads that had bound and tangled them together from the first. "You
and I will never be free of each other."
"Oh, yes--we are already. Listen! I want to tell you something that I
ought to have told you long ago, only I was afraid of ... Ah! never mind
of what I was afraid. But now that it is as you have said all over and
finished, now that I see very well that not only do you not love me, but
that you never have loved me and want nothing so much as to be free of
me, I will tell it you--" and she added fiercely, "with pleasure."
"Tell ahead," he said drearily.
"I am not your wife, and never have been. Horace Valdana is alive--has
never been dead!"
In the solemn mute moments that followed the curlew wailed again.
"What are you saying?" muttered Westenra, hoarsely. 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 God!" 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 ship!"
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 shores. 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 encompassed 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
comradeship, 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 ship 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
comradeship they had shared.
But there was too much of compassion in that letter, and Val was sick of
his compassion. Women _can_ get sick of compassion 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 passionate 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 assorted flavours
mixed in a tumbler, now turned away in weariness and disgust from the