Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)

places--everything but the small and wonderful white teeth in his sunken gentle mouth. His stole was beautifully painted with lilies, and his mitre of shining white and gold most splendid, but sometimes during the long service his head drooped a little under it and rested on his breast. There was such a weariness about him that Val was glad when she heard a few months later that he had laid aside his heavy and elaborate gold and white panoply of office and gone to rest. He had about twelve priests with him, keen, able-looking men, of a very different type to the simple cures who were herding their flocks from the surrounding villages, and they clustered about him as though to keep the eyes of the world from resting too long upon this venerable representative of the Pope. The _Vicaire-General_, a splendid looking man with an eagle eye and a strong beaked nose, surveyed the church as a general might the field of battle, while the congregation chanted the Benedictus Dominus. It seemed to Val that when his eye rested on her he saw deep down into her heart and had no pity for her failures, being of the Napoleonic brand of man who has no use for any but the strong ones of earth. After the Archbishop with crumpled crooked fingers had given his solemn benediction to the people, singing in a trembling yet wonderfully thrilling old voice, "Sit nomen benedictum ... Adjutorium Domini ... Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus," he sat down just inside the chancel rails, and talkingly questioned the children on their catechism. Most of them were too shy to distinguish themselves much, though the son of the village milkman, an ugly cross-eyed boy, acquitted himself manfully. Later the Archbishop rested in his chair, his chin on his breast, seeming to sleep, while priests prowled and hovered round him. The Mascaret cure darted about the church giving instructions, and presently the children broke shrilly into the popular hymn: "Je suis chretien, voila ma gloire, Mon esperance et mon soutien, Mon chant d'amour et de victoire, Je suis chretien! Je suis chretien!" The village boys loved this hymn. It lent itself to much lusty shouting in the last two lines of the chorus, and they delighted in it, passing winks to each other as they hurled it from their lungs with something of the same ardour as had served for the "_mujik de churie_." But later when they filed in long lines to where the old Archbishop sat waiting for them, their mien changed. No one could be vicious or violent before that beautiful tired presence waiting with white trembling hands to bless them. They came quietly, one by one, and knelt on the velvet cushion at his feet, the boys bashful and cloddish in their best smocks, the girls wearing the elaborate and top-heavy mob cap of silk and muslins and ribbons that it is the Normandy peasant woman's pride to perch above her harsh features. Haidee, in a white hemstitched muslin frock with a flounce of delicate lace round its edge, walked among them like some woodland sylph escaped from a Corot picture. Her long legs clad in white silk stockings and sandals created something of a scandal amongst the peasant mothers, whose ideas of decency bid them cover up the legs of their girls with the longest and heaviest skirts they can afford. Her headgear, too, was considered characteristic of the madness with which God had afflicted the occupants of Villa Duval, for it was a tulle veil bound about her brow by a wreath of real daisies, gathered and twined by Val and Bran. Each child carried a tiny slip of paper on which was written the new name which must be assumed at confirmation as in baptism. This paper was handed to a priest who stood on the left of the Archbishop and who, glancing swiftly at it, transposed it into Latin and murmured it into the great prelate's ear. Haidee, who had chosen Joan, was astonished to hear the Archbishop thus address her: "Joanna! I mark thee with the sign of the Cross, and I confirm thee _par le chreme du salut_, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Then he gave her a little tap on the left cheek and held out his ring to her; she kissed it fervently and went away uplifted. In passing back a priest on the right stopped her and wiped away the holy chrism (composed of balm and oil) with a piece of cotton wool, which he let fall into a basket held by a choir boy whose blue eyes vaguely disturbed Haidee's saintly dream. A little farther on another priest intercepted her and wiped her forehead once more, none too gently she thought, with a rather dissipated-looking napkin. The cowboy look came over her face at that, and Val reflected that it was just as well there were no more priests to waylay her before she reached her seat, for that Wild-West scowl was often followed by acts which made up in vigour for what they lacked in dignity. Val was not able to see the end of the ceremony, for just as the priests closed in on the Archbishop, one with a gilt bowl, another with soap and broidered towel, another to take his ring, Bran whispered to her in a panting whisper: "Mammie! I 've got the gasps!" There was nothing for it but retreat to the churchyard, for when Bran got "the gasps" the only cure for them was air and solitude. It was a nervous affliction which often seized him when he was deeply bored or, curiously enough, when he was intensely excited, making him gasp like a chicken with the pip, and Val would feel her heart come into her throat with every opening of his little beak. While he regained his breathing powers in the churchyard, she sat on a stone watching him, thinking how she would have liked the hands of the Archbishop on his precious head too. There was surely some special benediction in such delicate old hands; and though she asked no blessings for herself, she wanted them all for Garrett Westenra's son. And while she sat there musing, out of the sacristy door came the Archbishop himself. He, too, seemed afflicted with gasps, for his mouth opened and closed and his breath came in little pants. None of his priests were with him, only the village cure escorting him to the presbytery, and he seemed somewhat like a child escaped for a moment from his nurses. When he saw Bran's smiling face his own lit up and its weariness was for an instant wiped away. "A little American Catholic," said the cure, but the old prelate had not waited for an introduction before making the sign of the Cross over Bran's bright head. Val knelt in the dust while the faltering feet passed by. She felt as though a star had fallen from heaven for her. CHAPTER XVI THE WAYS OF GIRLS "Il n'est pas de rose assez tendre Sur la palette du printemps, Madame, pour oser pretendre Lutter contre vos dix-sept ans." GAUTIER. "Did you see the people from Villa Shai-poo?" asked Haidee, as they walked home. "No, which were they?" Val was away in a land of her own peopling and her eyes were vague. "An awfully distinguished old man, with a little white goatee and nice American-looking boots; and two boys...." She stopped abruptly. Val's attention was attracted. "What kind of boys?" "Oh, well! I didn't notice them much. You know all French boys look as if they wear stays. I dare say these are n't so bad though. Hortense says the eldest is in a regiment _tres chic_. The other one failed for the navy last year." Her manner was meant to suggest pointed indifference. "They must be more than boys." "The one with the greeny-blue eyes is twenty-four and the one with dark blue ones is nineteen and a half," responded Haidee. Val smiled at this artless testimony of her "indifference." They were passing Shai-poo at the moment; a big, square, roomy-looking house, with those solid grey walls that stand for centuries and are so typical of Normandy, surrounded by a spacious garden full of the charm of careless grace--groups of trees, flowering grasses, little forests of tall bamboos, beds of brilliant flowers that looked as if they had sprung up by happy accident, winding paths, and a tea-house in the form of a Chinese pagoda. A great mainmast rooted from the bowels of a French war-ship of old type was erected in a clear open space that lay almost like a deck around it. From its top lazily floated a silk flag embroidered with the Chinese Royal arms. "Their grandfather the Admiral must have arrived," said Haidee excitedly. "They only put up that flag for him--it is the one he took in the battle of Shai-poo. That is the mast of his old ship." "Goodness, Haidee! what a lot you know about them! Who is the man with the goatee and the American boots then?" "Oh, that's the father of Sacha, the one in the army. The other boy, Rupert, is a cousin and an orphan." "Oh!" Val pondered these things in her heart. It was plain that Haidee was growing up, and beginning to take an interest in other things than hens and rabbits! Evidently too she had been listening to Hortense's gossip. Val felt guilty somehow, and wished wistfully that poor Haidee could have the society and companionship of a girl of her own age and world. When they got home they found that John the Baptist had left some letters. One of them was from Harriott Kesteven, asking if Val would mind very much if she came to Mascaret for the summer months, bringing her girl Kitty. It seemed almost like an answer to Val's wish for society for Haidee. Her only doubt was as to Westenra. Would this, even though he never knew or cared, be treachery to him--a last fire made of the blackened embers of a burnt boat? It could scarcely be that after all! He had been at great pains these last few years to show her by his silence and coldness how little her doings mattered to him. Apparently on his return to America after the fatal visit to Jersey he had flung himself into work with the result that sometimes occurs in the lives of men; a temple of public success had begun to raise its walls above the grave of his private sorrows. International journals frequently mentioned his name in connection with some wonderful operation performed at his now famous nursing home. Under the aegis of the skilful Miss Holland the house in 68th Street had become something very like a gold mine, as the size of the quarterly cheques (which Val never used) gave proof. Of more importance was the fact that he had advanced with great strides in his scientific work, and the results of his experimental investigations in diabetes were the talk of medical Europe. There were rumours of his nomination for the next Nobel. Small wonder if in this furious concentration on work and the fame it brought him, personal emotion as far as Val was concerned should be crushed out of his life like a useless, hurtful thing. That at last was the impression she gained from his letters to Haidee, conned and brooded over in the silence of the night when the children slept. True, love for Haidee and his son breathed from every line, but there was never a word in the cold courteous messages to Val that she could lay upon her heart to heal its aching wound. Time and distance had widened the breach between them until now it was a gaping ravine over which the correspondence with Haidee formed the last frail bridge. He had never put foot in Europe since the visit to Jersey, but taken all his vacations in different parts of America. Sometimes he wrote vaguely of coming over to see them all, but Val felt herself left outside his world now, and doubted that he seriously considered making a movement that would bring him back into hers. It seemed almost ironical to be