Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
"No, Garrett. I can faithfully and truthfully say that I am not a
drunkard."
Then she was a child. It was a child that he----!
"Let me tell you about it," she was saying. "About eleven months ago
something that might be regarded in the light of a family legacy came to
me. The necklace my mother gave me turned out to be of extremely
valuable pearls. I sold it for seventy-five thousand pounds--it has
since realised one hundred and twenty thousand. That is the secret of
such comfort and ease as you now see us enjoying."
The story was amazing, but Westenra instinctively knew it to be true.
He had often been struck by the wonderful pearly beauty of the Comfort
necklace.
"I am glad for your sake," he said at last; "it must simplify the future
a great deal. I beg your pardon for what I said a moment ago. It is
bad enough that I should have been denied the right to support my own
son--but I could not bear that that other fellow should have done it.
It even sticks in my gorge that you should have allowed Bran to come
into contact with him."
"Whom are you speaking of, Garrett?"
"Why do you ask that? Surely you do not think me unaware of the fact of
your return to Valdana?"
"Ah!" she said softly, and drew in her breath. "You know that?"
"Of course I know. It was that knowledge which brought me to France. I
could not allow Bran or even Haidee, to be anywhere within the radius of
that--" He bit off "scoundrel."
"Neither of them has ever seen him----"
"I thank you for that at least."
"Nor would ever have seen him."
"Oh, as to----"
"Is that the reason you would not enter my house nor accept my
hospitality?"
He did not answer, but his neck stiffened, and he gave her the direct
look which she well knew meant assent. And she thought to herself:
"There is not anything base and odious of which he does not think me
capable. It is well that he and I should part for ever. The soul
constantly suspected of baseness and cruelty must become degraded in
time and shrink away to nothing. I will go away from here to places
where my soul can grow and not shrink." These thoughts passed swiftly
through her mind. All she said aloud was:
"You need not have feared. Horace Valdana has never come here, nor ever
will. He and I will not meet again."
They had come out of the shadowy whispering paths and reached the open
gravelled terrace, with the still waters of the Mediterranean lying
below, silent under the stars, sombre as a pool of blue ink. The little
group of chairs stood inviting. By mutual consent they sat down.
Inside the Villa Haidee was at the piano playing wide, gallant chords,
to which Rupert, in a rather strong tenor, sang snatches of the
_Paimpolaise_.
"Et le pauvre gars ... fredonne tout has:
* * * * *
'J'aime Paimpol et sa falaise,
Son cloche et son grand Pardon.
J'aime encore mieux, la Paimpolaise
Qui m'attend au pays breton.'"
"Of course," said Westenra slowly, "if you are alone, and are going to
be alone ... I have no right to take Bran."
"There is no question of right--" She put her hand over her heart--she
could not speak calmly of this last savage blow fate was dealing her by
the hand of her loved son. "He wants to go. That is enough."
"You know I will mind him well," he said gently.
"No one can mind him as I do," was her inward cry, but she said nothing,
only pressed her hand harder to her side.
"----and that he will come back to you. It is only fair that I should
have him for a little while, but naturally I do not want to keep him
from you, and I am very sure he would not stay."
She was still silent. He looked at her keenly. Each knew what the other
suffered, for at the heart of each the parent hunger gnawed with cruel
teeth.
"You will not beguile him from his wish to come with me?--I am very sure
you could. It would be natural for him to stick to you after all you
've done for him--but you won't?" Almost he was pleading with her.
"Did I to-day?" Her face was bleak.
"No, God knows--and it would have been easy enough!"
"I know he needs you. A boy begins to need a father's influence, and
Bran has always had a hunger for men and their ways ... but, oh! mind
him well, Garrett Westenra ... mind him well ... give him back to me as
sweet and whole in soul and body as I lend him to you--" Her voice
broke. She could bear no more. Swiftly she rose, and with a little
gesture full of despair and abnegation and farewell, left him.
----
The next day Westenra was gone, presumably to Paris to give his
lectures. Rupert, who had walked home with him the night before,
brought a brief message of farewell to the Villa of Little Days, and the
news that they might expect him back in anything under ten days.
As for Val, she went to bed for a week. At least she retired to her
room, declaring a fear that a slight cold she had might develop into
_grippe_, and that summer _grippe_ was the most boring of all illnesses,
and that she was not going to risk becoming the greatest of bores. So
she lay down a good deal in a darkened room. When she was not resting
she wrote many letters, and in the cool of the evening she would sit on
her clematis-wreathed balcony with Bran in her arms, her lips on his
hair, listening to his account of the day's doings. For Rupert's car
was perpetually at the gate, and never a day passed but he and Haidee
and Bran set off on some long excursion into the surrounding country.
Haidee came up to Val's room sometimes to make perfunctory inquiries.
She would stare hard at the latter lying so lazily amongst her cushions,
and narrowly search the smiling face. But, except that colour had fled
from cheek and lip, Val showed no signs of trouble, only a vivid
interest in all they had been doing.
"You do take it easy, I must say," Haidee remarked half grudgingly the
fourth evening after Westenra's departure. "Lying here in the cool
while we have to scoot about in the heat and dust."
Val laughed.
"You don't _have_ to, chicken. And scooting in a motor is not so very
disagreeable after all. You look as if it agreed with you, anyway."
Indeed the girl was radiant, and her half-hearted grumblings were
entirely contradicted by her eager air of enjoying life. She need not
have resented that Val smiled so brightly from her bed, and perhaps she
would not have done so if she could have seen that when the door closed
on her the light went out of the smoke-coloured eyes, and the smile
withered, leaving only weariness upon Val's lips.
But on the day Westenra's return was notified by telegram Val came down
very bright and gay and presided over the tea-table under the pines.
Rupert had just brought the others back from Grasse in a condition of
physical flop, and all three were distributed upon chairs in attitudes
of utter abandon. Val, with all the colour back again in her pale dark
face, looked fresher than any of them. Westenra's wire was a subject of
great intrigue. It had come not from Paris, but from a little
out-of-the-way place called Baurem les Mimosas, which lay about two
hours from Cannes and not even on the main line! No one knew by which
train he was coming, or where to go and meet him.
"I don't believe he has been in Paris at all," said Haidee
discontentedly, and certainly the man who at that moment appeared at the
top of one of the winding paths and came strolling towards them bore no
stamp of Paris on himself or his raiment. His face, in spite of the
protecting brim of a cow-puncher's hat which had clearly seen life and
experience in other climes, was badly sunburnt, and he wore a truly
disreputable grey flannel suit of the reach-me-down class, and evidently
made for the French figure rather than for an Irishman of large and
athletic build. The waist and hip measurements were of such amplitude
as to give a slightly _bouffant_ effect, but the calf accommodation was
limited to bursting point; the rest of the trouser-leg would have hung
in frills round the ankles had they not been secured tightly by large
white safety-pins. A pair of "Weary Willie" canvas shoes completed
Westenra's outfit.
"_Garry!_" gasped Haidee, shocked beyond words. But Bran leaped upon his
father and embraced him joyously.
"Where you been, Daddy?"
"I been bicycling," responded daddy affably and saluted every one,
beginning with Val and ending with Rupert. "That's where I been!"
"Bicycling! What a thing!" cried Haidee, while Val made him fresh tea.
"How _could_ you come through Cannes such a sight, Garry?"
"What's the matter with me? I feel good in these togs. In future I
shall always dress like this."
Haidee shuddered.
"You did n't go to Paris after all?"
"No, Haidee, I did not go to Paris. I hired a bicycle, bought this
bicycling suit you don't admire, and took to the open road. There isn't
any village between here and Toulon that I haven't explored inside out,
nor any 'cafe debitant' where I have n't sampled the chianti or the
astispumanti or anything else that was _tanti_."
"But what for, Garry? Why?"
"I had some thinking to do," said Garry, "and I thought I could do it
better on a bicycle than in Paris."
"Have you thought about when you're going to take me in a ship, Daddy?"
Bran had climbed on his knee.
"Yes; I 've been thinking about that, my son."
Haidee said abruptly:
"Did n't you say we would take one of those tramp steamers that go from
Marseilles, and touch at all sorts of ports?"
"That was the idea." Westenra held up a cigar to Val, and she nodded
permission to smoke. "Why?"
"Well, as Rupert is going to Morocco next week I thought we might as
well take the same ship." Haidee sounded rather breathless.
"Ah!" remarked Westenra thoughtfully and lay back in his chair, his face
between the knees of Bran, who had climbed up into his favourite
position.
Rupert murmured something about that being "an idea _bien gentille_" and
hunted nervously for a cigarette.
"In that case," announced Val quietly, "we shall all be sailing from
Marseilles at much the same time."
"All?" Every eye was immediately focused upon her.
"You----?"
"But you 're not coming--" Haidee broke off confusedly.
"No; but I am leaving France."
"Leaving France?" ejaculated Rupert.
"Yes, leaving France, and all cities, to go back to the life I lived as
a child and which has been pulling and calling me ever since."
"What, that life in a waggon?" Haidee had heard of it so often it was
strange she should become so excited about it now.
"Yes; a waggon that starts every late afternoon, and treks throughout
the night; and brings you to a fresh place every morning." Her face
suddenly lost the veil of shadows that had hung over it so long. Space,
and joy and distance, and a fierce wistfulness came into her gaze. "One
goes on and on to places one has never seen before, sometimes to places
_no one_ has ever seen before--that is best, that is wonderful----"
Strangely the veil that had passed from her face seemed to fall upon the
faces of her listeners. Not one among them but looked curiously
disturbed.
"I shall see the wildebeeste grazing on the horizon once more--and hear
the guinea-fowl in the bush crying 'come back! come back!"
Westenra stared at her. Was this the woman who had run his nursing
home!
"Everything in nature, if you leave it alone, will come back--to the
ways of its early life."
"If you leave it alone?" Westenra spoke almost involuntarily. She
laughed.
"Am not I going to be left alone?"
There was a silence. Every one sat staring at her.
"Who but I would care for such a foolish life!" she said more sombrely.
"But wouldn't I?" burst out Rupert. "It is what I have always longed