Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
sometimes tremble because of Bran. Oh, Harry, if Bran--if Bran--!" Her
eyes darkened with tears, her lips twisted in an anguish of terror and
love and foreboding.
"Never think of such a thing," cried Harriott. "It is like inviting the
daughter of Zeus to come after you. You will have Bran and much more
than Bran, dear. Your life is far from over. There are those whom
Sorrow elects her own for many years only to bless them in the end. All
will come right with you yet, Val."
"Bless you, Harry! What would one do without friendship?"
"Well, you'll never have to do without me wherever you are, darling.
Mine is one of the hands stretched across seas and hills to you. But I
fear that my material body must leave you this day week; all sorts of
things call me back to London."
"So soon?"
"My dear, do you realise that the summer is nearly over? While we have
sat in the sunshine talking of old days, and watching the children grow
their wings, two of our precious months are gone. Two of the hundred
and twenty, Val!"
"Never mind, they 've left us something," said Val, kissing her.
From that day forward she discarded the blue veil. The French friends
were amazed when they saw her without her shroudings. It had a
curiously different effect upon them all. Something discontented and
critical came into the still-lake eyes of Madame de Vervanne, but Celine
used to like to come close and brush her cheek against Val's head as if
she or Val were a kitten. The two boys seemed suddenly to wake up and
realise that Val was still a factor in the game, at least Sacha did, and
the look half gallant, half appraising, which he had so far kept only
for Kitty and Haidee or any other pretty girl who happened along, began
to lurk in his eye for Val also. With Rupert it was a little different.
He had from the first recognised something vital and alluring behind the
blue veil, and had never shown himself averse to leaving the girls to
walk with Val, carrying her things, or holding one of Bran's hands while
she held the other. There had come to exist between them one of those
wordless sympathies that make for friendship. They spoke the same
language, for there was one great bond between them--the wanderlust.
Rupert, strange and rare thing in a Frenchman, had "the love for other
lands!" Hoping to assuage his thirst for travel in a legitimate way,
and one traditional in his family, he had entered for the Navy and had
worked hard to get in from the Lycee St. Louis. But though his physical
qualifications for that profession were perfect, he was no student and
the exams. had been too much for him. Three times he had gone up, and
failed, and the third time was the last. He was over nineteen, and the
age limit for men entering the Navy was passed.
At odds and ends of times he told Val these things, and her heart went
out to him while her mind greatly wondered at the stupidity of the
French Government. Here was an ideal sailor lost to his country because
he could not pass a difficult exam., that dealt largely with languages
and mathematics, though you had only to watch him with his inferiors,
the villagers and fishermen, to know that he possessed all the qualities
characteristic of the good sailor and commander of men. Above all he
was a lover of the sea. As an Englishman or American other gates to
that "lover and mother of men" would have been open to him. But as a
French gentleman having failed to get into the Navy, he was obliged to
renounce the love of his life, for there was no other way, compatible
with honour, of wooing her.
The next best thing then he declared was to join the Colonial Infantry,
and achieve travel and adventure in foreign service. But such a
decision thoroughly scandalised his family, for the Colonial Infantry is
looked upon as the last resort of the destitute. Only men who have n't
a penny of private income go to the Colonies, and it was considered a
most unfitting fate for a man of such brilliant fortune as Rupert would
be master of in a year or so. Even Sacha, who had no more than two
hundred and twenty francs a year, disdained the Colonial Infantry and
was in the "Dragons," preferring a cavalry regiment likely to be
stationed within reach of Paris, living a life of gaiety on credit,
always in debt, but always with an open chance of catching an heiress
whose fortune would regulate his affairs and settle him in life.
The Colonial Infantry very often means quick promotion, but it also
means travel and rough life in far places, and these things do not
appeal to the ordinary young Frenchman, who is out for "life" of a very
different kind. That they appealed to Rupert showed that he was far
from being an ordinary Frenchman. In his family everything was still
being done to try and dissuade him. But he showed no signs of budging
from his purpose--for him the Colonial Infantry or nothing, he said, and
had already accomplished the one year's military service essential to a
candidate for St. Cyr. He told Val of his intentions, and she secretly
upheld them and encouraged him to go his own way. For to her Rupert
looked like one of those whom Nature chooses to track her across deserts
and mountains and seas. He had the vague yet ardent eyes of the
follower of the Lone Trail. Val recognised in him, boy as he was, a
wanderer like herself, and it seemed to her that it would be a tragic
thing to confine such a boy to the smug and conventional paths of life
in France.
While the Kestevens were still in Mascaret, Rupert was looked upon as
being more or less property at the disposal of Kitty, and Val had only
an occasional opportunity for the long rambling talks she liked with
him. But after the Kestevens had gone, and Val made her _debut_,
veilless, indeed hatless, with shining fluffy hair curling in the sun,
her eyes containing a secret, and about her that certain flower-like
grace which is the peculiar attribute of those who keep always a little
dew in the heart, Rupert came hovering continually about her and she
grew fonder than ever of him. A reef was taken in their friendship, and
no one seemed to mind very much except Christiane de Vervanne. The
little Comtesse took rather more than an ordinary interest in Rupert,
and when she was about, Val with her seventh sense often felt in the air
the presence of the little silken cobwebs that some women, spiderlike,
spin out and weave about all young male things. However, Rupert so far
appeared to be immune to any spells except those of the sea, and other
lands. And because Val too felt these spells he loved to be with her.
The Comtesse, on the other hand, looked upon such talk as the ravings of
madness. She strongly opposed the Colonial Infantry scheme, and
declared it a shame to think of one of La France's sons departing to
other stupid countries. It was plain that she meant to do all she could
to prevent such a catastrophe.
It was lovely autumn weather, and in the cool of every afternoon the
party went forth on blackberrying expeditions, gathering the fruit which
the peasants despise and leave to rot upon the hedges. Every morning
Villa Duval was fragrant with the fresh scent of blackberries stewing in
their own juice, to be eaten at tea time the same day. The flies and
the wasps swarmed in, and at intervals all doors and windows would be
closed and the family, assisted by the granite-eyed Azalie and armed
with bath towels, would engage in a _grande battue_, and the wooden
walls of the villa resounded with slaps and bangs. Only Bran would take
no part in these massacres. He had a funny little objection to killing
anything, and strongly disapproved of Azalie's methods.
"She is very unkind," he complained. "She just _kills_ the flies. She
does n't look into their eyes first to see whether they are poor or good
or naughty."
"How do they look when they 're good, assie?" jeered Haidee.
Bran strangely but immediately glazed his eyes, and with some odd
movement of his hands acutely suggested the attitude of a sick fly
suffering with cold.
"And a naughty one?"
His eyes rolled, and he lifted a paw to his nose. A sprightly fly!
The days were slipping along very peacefully when suddenly Val's eyes
were opened to the fact that Haidee was in danger. Her little girlish
flirtation with Sacha Lorrain was growing into something more serious.
One afternoon, as Val was sitting in the _Jules_, with Bran at the
imaginary wheel, a puff of wind blew a sheet of paper up into the air
and over the side of the boat. Carelessly she took it up, but her idle
glance crystallised into consternation when she found that it was a
rough draft of what was evidently meant to be a poem, in Haidee's
writing.
That an out-of-door, tomboy creature like Haidee should take to writing
poems was strange enough, but what startled Val still more was its open
dedication to Sacha. It ran into several verses:
"You are more beautiful than the rising sun,
And I love you more,
And I wish to steal you and keep you
As in the old, old law.
"For you are mine, you were born for me:
It is written in the book of Fate
That thou should 'st love me, and I love thee--
Do now, 'fore it is too late.
"Come to me now, to my ever open arms,
And make me glad,
And I will mark our meeting with an everlasting kiss
To make us sad."
Poor Haidee!
When Val had finished reading it her eyes were full of tears, though her
lips smiled. It was not poetry, but in its broken, ill-balanced phrases
it revealed what poetry does not always do--the heart of the writer and
the big things in the writer's nature struggling to get out. The old
cowboy rudeness and lawlessness were there, but Val was so thankful to
God to see the sign of big things--of generosity, of the courage that
dares, of soul. Yes, there under the beat of young passion's wing was
another still small sweet sound--the voice of soul. What else did those
two last lines reveal?
"...an everlasting kiss
To make us sad."
Only the soul knows the secret of that great sadness lurking under
passion's wing!
Poor Haidee! So her feet, too, were touching the outer waves of that
stormy sea where women sink or swim, and few reach the happy shore! Yet
Val was proud to recognise that she was not afraid to put forth. This
was no suppliant cry of one afraid to drown! Here was not one of the
world's little clinging creatures that grip round a man's neck and pull
him under. She, too, had the strong arm and the stout heart. She would
give help, not only seek to take it. Yes, that was what Haidee's poor
little poem revealed more than anything to Val--that she was one of
life's givers.
"Thank God for it," said Val, "and let her give." After long thought,
doubled up in Bran's boat and staring at the sea as was her way, she
added: "but not to Sacha Lorrain."
It is not to be supposed that she had spent a whole summer of intimacy
with the Lorrain family without drawing up some kind of a moral estimate
of each member of it. They were not very harsh affairs, these little
estimates. For it was ever Val's way to "heave her log" into the heart
rather than the mind, and to what was in the pocket she never gave a
thought. Like many of the cleverest women, she had no judgment, no gift
of looking past the hardy eye and the smooth smile into the mind to see
what was brewing there. But she had instincts, and sometimes
inspirations, and a highly tuned ear for sincerity. Also, no act or
look or word containing beauty was ever lost on her.
Well! it must be confessed that Sacha had emerged but poorly from her
process of assessment. She had turned her ear and inclined her eye for
many a long day for grace in him--and both had gone unrequited.