Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
spruit near by--God! it was as hot as hell there all that poisonous
day--and no water! Yes, some of them thought ... but Brand, my sub, he
knew. I saw the look he gave as I crept to the door--and the
smile--half his face was shot away, but he could still smile--he knew I
did n't mean to come back----"
"Don't talk about it any more," whispered the woman by his bedside.
In a swift vision she saw the shot-away face with the brave scornful
smile on it, and longed to hold it to her breast and kiss its broken
bloody lips. Oh, if men knew how women consecrate those brave, quiet
acts done in lone places with none to pity or to praise!
"Whose face is that hanging smiling there over your writing-desk?" His
eyes were on another death-mask now, the most wonderful the world has
ever seen. Keen, salient, proud yet gentle, all the arrogance and lust
of power and good living gone--only peace, the traces of physical pain,
and a gentle irony about the lips, left only ideality and lofty hope
stamped above the brows. The world has one thing for which to thank the
Corsican doctor Antommarchi--that he took the cast of Napoleon's face
"when illness had transmuted passion into patience, and death with its
last serene touch had restored the regularity and grandeur of youth."
That was the face from which Horace Valdana could not keep his eyes.
"By Jove!" he whispered at the last. "He had the same thing as I 've
got. He must have known the same hell as I am suffering now. Who am I
that I should complain!"
The thought helped him to "overcome the sharpness of death," and die
with greater dignity than he had lived.
A few days later, Val, with Rupert Lorrain standing by her side in the
cemetery of Montparnasse, dropped a few violets, flowers of compassion
and forgiveness, into an open grave, and Rupert threw down a friendly
sod.
Already it was spring. The winter of pain and misery was past. On the
graves crocuses were thrusting out their little sheathed heads, symbolic
proof of the sweetness that comes forth from sorrow.
----
CHAPTER XXI
LONELY WAYS
"I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an
end."--A. C. SWINBURNE.
But for the time being she went no farther than to the South of France.
Not less than she, Bran, after wintering among houses, needed open
skies. They were of one blood, and the longing for blue was on them
both--the blue of space and sea and sky. And nowhere better in Europe
can that blueness be found in April and May than down along the
Mediterranean coast. At first they went to Ste. Maxime, a little
village pitched in green and golden beauty beside St. Tropez's azure
bay, and from where at dawn the sun can be seen shooting up from his
golden bath just behind Corsica. For just several seconds the little
island, cradle of the world's greatest general, shows like an inky mound
against an aureole of yellow light that swiftly turns to rose, for
another moment the sun rests on the peak of its highest mountain, then
Corsica seems to sink and disappear into the sea until the next day's
dawn.
Val did not stay long at Ste. Maxime. She wanted a villa where she
could have Bran to herself, after the long months of enforced absences
from him. If her unexpected fortune could not give her the delicious
joy of absolute companionship and intimacy with her child it was useless
indeed! Besides, in hotels children are swiftly spoilt by people who do
not afterwards have to bear the brunt of the spoiling, and Val did not
mean Garrett Westenra's boy to become weakened by the petting of
Frenchwomen who love to treat other people's children like pretty
lap-dogs--to be caressed in certain moods and thrust aside in others.
So after a week or two during which an agent busied himself on her
behalf, she moved on to Cannes, and took possession of an ideal villa he
had found for her. It lay above the road between Cannes and Cap
d'Antibes, but perched high beyond the dust and din of motors; on the
right, La Croisette winged away into the sea, on the left, a gaunt
shoulder of the Alps with a shawl of snow draped on it showed keen
against the mistral-swept skies; while about it, in all the tall beauty
and tropical splendour of Riviera foliage, clustered a garden full of
dreams. A garden of winding paths edged by ivy leaves lying flat, and
little wild strawberry plants thrusting up coral fruits; tall palms and
cacti glowing with flaming candelabra, waxen-leaved creepers, branching
giant-aloes, delicate fern-like mimosa leaning tenderly above beds of
violets, large as purple butterflies, great patches of poppies, massed
clumps of heather white as snow and bright with happy bees; and
everywhere roses, roses drowsing in the sunshine, perfuming the air!
It was a garden in which coolness could be found on the sultriest day of
summer, but for spring days the open space before the wide white steps
and pillared porch was ideal. The floor of this space was of gravel,
bleached by rain and a southern sun to snowy whiteness. A clump of tall
pines spiking against the sky afforded a webwork of flickering shadows
under which to sit as in a balcony hung over the blueness of Golfe Juan.
Always there are ships in that bay of molten turquoise; red-sailed
fishing boats; leaden-coloured warships, with their grim air of power,
lying at anchor; yachts spreading white wings for flight.
The house itself, like nearly all Riviera villas, was square built, and
standing alone would have been less beautiful than solid and
comfortable-looking. But in its jewelled setting of leaf and gold and
blazing colour, the walls of dead white gave a note of quiet beauty and
peace. A long balcony from the upper rooms dripped with clematis, and
all round the house, high on the walls, large medallions bore the names
of the days. Alternately with these were other medallions on which were
painted on a pale blue ground white and scarlet-winged storks, flying,
flying like the days.
The Villa of Little Days, a poetess who had lived and dreamed there
named it. She was a famous woman, a friend of Gambetta, who in his
lifetime came often to visit her. It was she who had planned the wild
and tender beauty of the garden. Val blessed her often in the spring
months she and Bran passed there.
The domestic arrangements were, from her point of view, ideal. A garage
across the road pertained to the villa, and had attached to it a cottage
which was occupied by a man and his wife whose services were at the
disposal of those who rented the villa. The man minded the great garden
all through the sultry summer, dug, gathered, transplanted, and cut
firewood from the pines for the log fires of winter; also he could drive
a car, and did not disdain to clean a window. His wife Marietta, a
big-boned gay-faced Marseillaise, with the bloom of a peach on her
cheeks, and rings of garnets in her ears, made short work of such
cleaning as a villa bathed in perpetual sunshine and purified by
sea-breezes needed. Incidentally, she could serve up a tureen of
_bouillabaisse_ of a flavour and fragrance to seduce the heart of a king
and convert a vegetarian from his amazing ways.
Bran, happy as always within sight of the sea, raced the garden with his
"fox," or sat under the pines with his mother, listening to the pine
needles growing, or hearing stories of the Greek heroes who, on the
shores of the Mediterranean, seem to be more real and comprehensible
than in any other part of the world. Perhaps because old Greece and the
Ionian Isles are so near at hand! Indeed, the lure of the horizon is so
great on that fair shore, that if she had been alone in the world
nothing could have held Val from taking train to Marseilles, and from
thence as fast as ship could bear her. But Bran and his well-being
bound her fast like Prometheus to his rock. The rush of trains and the
throb of ships' machinery are no furtherances to health in young
children. It is in quiet gardens and comfortable homes that the young
heart expands and the little body shoots and flourishes. The garden of
the veldt was what she could most have wished for him--that wild garden
where her own heart had grown its dreams. But it was far, far, and only
to be reached by such long journeying as the child was not yet fit for.
So she stayed with him in the southern garden, and if her own heart
sailed away sometimes in the ships that slid over the horizon down the
side of the world, her body remained to guard Westenra's son and to give
him what she "possessed of soul."
Her only regret was that Haidee too could not be revelling in the golden
southern sunshine. But Haidee was studying at Versailles with quite
extraordinary energy. The exams. were close upon her, and Val was far
from wishing to divert her attention from the goal. She had never
failed to impress upon the child the importance of mental equipment that
is grounded on solid instruction. She could see for Haidee too, where
she had never seen for herself, that to leave the mind and heart and
soul open and waiting for some man to walk in and fill them is to court
disaster. There is no man in the world big enough to fill the heart and
mind and soul of a woman worth considering. The thing is to fill them
first with beauty and learning and wisdom, and let the man come in
after, if there be room. For a woman to stake everything on a man is to
play a losing game. But another love in the soul, be it music,
literature, art, mathematics, or the maternal instinct, is insurance
against total beggary. If by great good chance a man's love brings
happiness, then the other love is an added glory; if misery comes the
other is a refuge.
Poor Val! She had not followed the creed herself, but she saw well
enough the wisdom of it for Haidee, and had tried to instil into her the
prudence of going nap on Art rather than on Heart. She wanted Haidee to
benefit by her own failures, and never ceased from urging and
encouraging her on towards a goal. A further instigation she used
freely was the mention of the great pride and pleasure Westenra would
feel in her successful passing of the "_Bacho_" and gaining of the
_diplome_.
But Haidee, in response to all letters, kept on saying nothing. Even to
Val's promise of a trip to the South as soon as the exams, were over,
she made no more than a sullen acknowledgment. But Val knew from the
reports of the professors that she was working hard.
Most people flee from the Riviera during the summer months. Of course
it is hot, but that is not the reason. With the advent of the hot
weather the Riviera becomes very quiet. The "season" is over, and the
fashionable birds fly away. But as a matter of fact the charm of the
place is only ripening. The blaze and beauty of the scene become riper
and more gorgeous. The white villas disappear into their gardens,
submerged by a flood of green leaves that hide and protect them from the
blaze and dust, though of the last there is less than in the season, for
the motors cease from troubling and the siren is at rest. The sweet
silence of the night is unbroken by blood-curdling shrieks or jerked-out
hoots from the cars of those rushing to, or returning furiously from,
Monte Carlo. Of course in the bungalow type of villa built to catch the
spring sunshine, and with no well-treed garden in which to shelter from
fierce heat, it would be unwise and uncomfortable to stay through the
summer; but in the Villa of Little Days there was every comfort within
and without, and nothing to irk except the occasional bite of a mosquito
that had intrigued its way through wired windows and mosquito netting.
The days passed in a great idle peace. For Val was frankly idle--with