Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
much as long as she was by his bedside, in the pale blue linen overall
she always assumed as soon as she entered. Cancer may or may not be
infectious--that is one of the problems science has not yet solved--but
with Bran so near she took no risks, changing even her clothes on
entering and leaving the sick-room, which was an entirely self-contained
_appartement_ and _atelier_. She had been so fortunate as to obtain in
the newly-finished building the whole of the immense floor of three
studios. It rejoiced her to be able to give her Brannie one entirely to
himself and his governess. That was one of the joys the seventy-five
thousand pounds had brought her. She had already spent some hundreds of
it on furnishing and the heavy expenses entailed by Valdana's needs.
But the rest she had been wise enough to allow the kindly Bernstein to
invest for her, and her mind was at rest at last and for the first time
in her life from the gnawing tooth of poverty. She was doing no writing.
Not only was her life, divided between Bran and the sick man, too full
for such a thing, but at last she could permit herself the luxury of
refraining from writing when she had nothing to say. That forced work
in Mascaret had sickened her soul. Now she could let her creative
faculty rest for a while at least and give undivided attention to this
duty of hers to Valdana.
As for having Haidee home, it was out of the question. She felt herself
unable to go into the matter of her relation to Valdana with any one so
antagonistic to her as Haidee was at present. She knew that the girl
still cherished bitterness against her for poor Sacha's defection, and
she could only hope that with the coming of other interests, this
feeling would pass away and allow a return to the old footing of
comradeship and affection. She let Haidee profit too by the necklace
windfall, sending her presents of music, books, and the countless pretty
trifles that girls set store on. Bran went weekly with his governess to
see her, and Rupert, urged by Val, went very often too. Rupert knew all
about the affair of Sacha. Not from Val, but because by a strange
coincidence Sacha had opened his heart to his cousin the night before
his death. The two young men had shared the same room at Shai-poo, and
in the silences of the night shared many confidences also. That was how
Rupert had come to know the truth, and to keep his reverence and
affection for Val unshaken.
"I love the sea, I love the music of the violin, and I love you--all
with the same love," he told her one day. He had found her weeping
alone in her studio. The strain of Valdana's hideous suffering and
Westenra's long silence sometimes racked her so that she was glad of the
relief of tears. "You know what Jean Paul Richter said of music,--'Thou
speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found
not--and shall not find';--that is what you and the sea and the violin
say to me."
She blessed him for that, not from gratified vanity, but for comfort in
the thought that others besides herself suffered from the cry of those
things "that we find not nor shall find."
"Dear boy," she said, and stroked his hair as if he had been Bran while
he knelt by her. "I love you too--as if you were my son, as your mother
must have loved you, Rupert."
Rupert kissed her hand in a very un-sonlike fashion and looked at her
lips.
"I want to comfort you," he said, "to take pain out of your life."
"You cannot do that, Rupert." She quoted gently--"'Pain is the Lord of
Life--none can escape from its net.'" Something in his eyes made her go
on steadily. "My pain is chiefly caused by love. I love my little
Brannie's father, Rupert--there can never be any other man in my life.
He speaks to me of all those things which I have found not nor shall
find!"
Rupert bowed his head again over her hand, his boyish mouth drawn in a
straight line. It was unfortunate that the Comtesse, whom the _femme de
menage_ had admitted to the entrance hall, should have come softly in at
that moment.
"Ah, the nice Poulot!" she twittered merrily. "Taking the lessons of
deportment from the _charmante_ Madame Val!" And burst into happy
laughter.
But she had not called it "deportment" when she reported the episode to
Haidee a few days later.
"He is gone, our Poulot," she said mournfully. "She has put into
bandages his hands and foots--a slave!"
"He did not seem very bandaged last time he came out here," answered
Haidee rather snappishly, not even amused any more by the Comtesse's
weird English.
"Ah, but you do not see him with her, my child! It is amazing how she
finds the time and energy for so much 'flirt'!--She is enormous!--and
with the sick lover in the third _atelier_ all the same time!"
"The sick lover! Comtesse, what _do_ you mean?"
"Ah, of course, I did not tell you yet. The concierge it was who
informed me that Madame Valdana occupies herself with a sick gentleman
in the third room. The doctor every day, and always fruit and flowers
arriving. Is it not romantic? But always silence and the sealed-up lip
from Madame Valdana. She takes no one into her heart where the secret
is, except Poulot."
Haidee was now looking frightfully miserable. These visits from Madame
de Vervanne were a disturbing element in her life and almost she wished
they could be dispensed with. She was working hard to try and pass her
_baccalaureat_ and achieve her _diplome_, but a visit from the Comtesse
always left her disinclined to grapple with school work. And this news
about Rupert and Val irritated her intensely. What business had Val to
let Rupert get so fond of her? It was a shame, a wrong to her--Haidee.
First Westenra, then Sacha, now Rupert--just when he was so nice to her,
and she was beginning to like him so much. She ground her teeth in
childish rage and jealousy. The Comtesse put an arm round her waist and
they walked together down the paths of the Lycee gardens, now dank and
sodden by winter rains.
"Tell me ... could not the papa of Bran make her mind her own business,
which is surely to nurse the sick friend and leave poor Rupert alone? I
think he will not even pass his exam, for the Colonials if he had not a
mind at ease. You know he is working for that now, so that when he has
done his two years' service he will be eligible if he still wishes to
enter."
How his mind would be eased by a break with Val she did not specify.
Nor why she had developed such fervour for the hitherto detested
Colonial infantry scheme. But Haidee was in no state of mind to thrash
out these intricacies. Worked up by the subtle Frenchwoman's malice into
a state of teeming anger against Val, and blind to the fact that she was
being used as a catspaw, she allowed herself to consider the Comtesse's
suggestion, and in the end wrote Westenra a letter which contained many
bitter and cruel things about Val, and gave him fuller information
concerning the three studios than even the story of the Comtesse
justified. That she was ashamed of herself for her action, and that it
was only a passing spirit of vindictiveness which impelled it, did not
make the letter as a document any the less poignantly indicting.
----
And that same evening Val was watching the final effort of Valdana's
troubled spirit to break from the bonds of the body and go forth upon
its way. Ate Dea had run him to earth. The Hand whose fingers he had
slipped through on the veldt was closing in on him inexorably, but with
a worse thing in it now than a soldier's short sharp doom. It was only
a matter of hours when he must join those others from whom he had
fled--but with a difference! The difference between the lonely, painful
death from an atrocious malady, and an end worthy of a man, face to the
enemy, his comrades about him--
"Fighting hard and dying grimly,
Silent lips and striking hand."
"It seems hardly worth while now to have shirked!" he said quietly.
"Just for a few more years crawling up and down the earth! I wonder why
we dread old Death so, Val? After all he 's the best pal we
have--always waiting so patiently and faithfully; whatever we do,
nothing estranges him from his purpose. He never gets mad and takes our
gift and gives it to some other fellow--the gift of rest, darkness,
sleep!"
Like many a blackguard Valdana cherished in the deeps of him odds and
ends of noble thought and chivalrous intention garnered from the lines
of some man-poet. Lindsay Gordon always was the waster's poet, and
always will be. He helped Horace Valdana to die now with gratitude
instead of curses in his mouth.
"Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses,
Yet abides the gift of the Darkness,
Sleep!"
His mind had grown strangely clear. He lay upon the wide divan in the
centre of the room, and his eye roving from object to object, unusual
recognition in its glance. A Godin stove glowed in one corner of the
great room; the fire in it had never been allowed to die out since the
first occupation of the studio. It filled the room with a summery
warmth that drew out to the last drop the fragrance of a jar of Sicilian
lilac that stood in the open window; and brought lovely memories of the
veldt from an enormous bunch of mimosa stuck in a blue pot on the piano.
So warm was the climate of the room that a balcony door stood
perpetually open, even on a night such as this, when the outside air
sliced against the warmth of the body with the keenness of a scimitar.
Shaded lights threw faintly-tinted shadows in far corners. The only
objects that showed clear in the dimness of the big shadowy room were
the busts and figures of dead white clay--a gigantic head of Tolstoi,
bearded, rugged; a perfect reproduction of Houdon's bust of Napoleon as
First Consul; some little Donatello angels.
"It 'll be cold lying here in a Paris cemetery, Val!" said Valdana
musingly.
His eye rested reflectively on the face of _L'Inconnue_, hung on a nail
against a pale green-and-rose Persian rug--that lovely mask taken from
the dead face of a young unknown girl, fished out one morning from the
river's muddy waters. She had cast her secret into the bosom of the
Seine, and that kind, wicked, cruel, voluptuous, motherly old river had
kept it for ever, so that to this day the world still wonders and longs
to know who the girl was, and why with youth and beauty and all the
gifts of life stamped upon her she chose to go out into the dark with
that little radiant smile on her lips, as if in the last instant she had
thought on some wondrous hour into which all the beauty of life had been
compressed--and was glad to die because that hour could never come
again.
Val, who had often studied the quietly smiling tragic face, said once:
"It was some man's eyes she was thinking of just before she sprang!
That little smile was meant for just one man in the world."
"Yes: it'll be cold lying here in Paris," repeated Valdana thoughtfully.
"I wish now I 'd stayed with those fellows at Platkop. They have the
sunshine, and they 're all together."
Val smoothed the bright rug that lay over him with her thin nervous
hands.
"Don't bother now, Dan."
It was many a long year since she had called him by that name which pity
now wrung from her.
"I wonder why I should have been the only one not wounded?" He looked
at her critically. "All the others had got it somewhere, but I had n't a
thing, not a spot! And there was n't a bullet left among those blasted
Boers: it was easy enough to slink off as the evening came on ... but
some of the fellows looked at me as I undid that door. No one said
anything, but they _looked_ at me, Val."
Val hid her eyes.
"One or two of them thought I was going to try for some water from the