Wanderfoot Part 10

"We must get some one to take charge of the place ... Miss Holland is a splendid woman.... I know she will make a success of it ... and before I go I will find you a good housekeeper who will look after you well."

(Before she went! Oh! d.a.m.n it, why should she look at him like that, as though it were for his happiness she was arranging instead of her own?

As though planning loyalty instead of desertion--treachery! How could she smile--gladly, gratefully, when she was taking herself out of his life, robbing him of the light of his son's golden head!)

"And if you will let me have Haidee? ..." she spoke more diffidently now. "I fear she will be a care to you. I would do my best for her----"

"No!" he interrupted sharply, "if you take Bran I must console myself with Haidee. I should think you could spare me her, at least!"

She turned white as death. Haidee to take Bran's place with him! Their son--her love-baby--to be exiled from his father's heart as well as from his home! Of what use then all her plotting, her secret grief and suffering endured, that father and son might be spared.

"Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe!" was all she could say.

He stared at her incredulously. He had no idea she was so fond of Haidee. It seemed indeed as if she could be fond of any one but himself! He was thankful that Haidee herself made an end to the miserable discussion by bounding in at the moment and embracing him boisterously.

"And can I bring Bran in?" she cried, as soon as she had finished hugging him. "He 's just on the stairs. Nurse has brought him home from his walk ... he looks such a duck in his new pink pelisse."

"Yes, bring him in," said Westenra, heavily, but a moment later, when his son was sprawling on the bed thrusting fat fists into his father's eyes, exploring his father's nose and ears, moodiness departed from that father, and he began to laugh like a boy.

"Just feel that leg, Haidee ... muscle--sheer muscle. I tell you this fellow is a hot number. He 's going to make the athletes sit up and take notice; are n't you, old man? Hi! that's my nose!"

"He smells like a nice ripe peach! Oh, would n't I love to eat him!"

shrieked Haidee, and hugged him until Val had to call out a warning not to crack his ribs. She stood watching them, unshed tears scorching her eyes. They were so dear, so very dear, that man and child; and Haidee too was dear for loving them so well. It was pain even to look at them.

Their dearness burnt like flame. She felt that if she stayed in the room a moment longer she must fling herself down by them, cry out the truth to Westenra, tell him she could never leave him, nor rob him of his son. But that way madness lay. Sorrow and shame, worse things than separation for a time, must come of that. No, she must bear it alone.

Her hand was to the plough and she must not turn weakly back. Even now there was that to do that was part of the plot, and she must leave the dear ones to go and do it.

"I think they can spare me for a little while," she thought, not without a certain tender irony, for the crowd on the bed were so very wrapped up in their own performances. Unnoticed, she slipped from the room, and went to Westenra's office to typewrite a letter.

When she did not keep the appointment at Shrapp's Hotel with Valdana, he had, as she foresaw, called at No. 700 in search of Alice Brook. On hearing that she had left, he asked for an interview with Mrs. Westenra.

Fortunately, Val had not been with Garrett, but in her room resting with a bad headache, when the new maid, a Wicklow girl of good type, who had developed a great devotion for her mistress, brought in the card. By an effort Val had managed to control herself and look with calmness upon the inscribed name.

"Mr. John Seymour! Who is he? What does he want, Mary?"

"I don't know, ma'am, he did not say, but sure it's a sick man he is by the colour av him."

"Go down and find out. If he is a patient, tell him the doctor is very ill and will not be able to see patients for a month or two at least.

If he is in a hurry he had better go to Dr. Dillon, who is seeing all Dr. Westenra's patients at present."

This gave her time, and would she thought allay Valdana's suspicion, if he had one, of any connection between herself and Alice Brook. But she was sick with apprehension and lay white on her pillow when the maid reappeared; the answer was as expected: the gentleman's business was not with the doctor, but with the mistress of the house.

"Sure, it's the character of the last housemaid he wants, ma'am. He 's afther engaging her," Mary announced and Val's heart gave a great jump of fright. The next moment she realised that this was most likely a ruse, a mere excuse for finding out what he wanted to know of her whereabouts.

"The character of Alice Brook?" she said mechanically.

"Yes, ma'am. And I took the liberty of telling him, ma'am, that you could not be plagued with such affairs now, and you destroyed nursing the doctor and all, and he 'd better be afther writing for what he wants."

Val could have embraced the kindly creature, but she gave no sign, only said quietly:

"You did quite right, Mary. But to save time you may tell this gentleman, Mr.--," she looked at the card--"Mr. Seymour, that as far as character goes Alice Brook was quite a good girl--honest, sober, an early riser, diligent (she could not forbear a wry smile to think that in the last three points at least the formula applied equally to herself); her chief defect was that she was quite ignorant as to the duties of a housemaid, and I had no time to train her. I cannot think of anything further that it is necessary for him to know, but if there should be he can write."

As the maid was leaving the room, she added thoughtfully:

"Don't let him linger asking questions, Mary. It seems a curious thing for a gentleman to be occupying himself with a housemaid's references.

He may not be what he professes at all, but some scamp----"

She knew that upon that hint Mary would polish him off without ceremony, and she felt no compunction in giving it. Could any one indeed be a worse scamp? What was he there for but to spy out and blackmail, and cause ruin and dismay to her and her loved ones? She trembled with rage and terror when she thought of him being in the same house with Garrett and Bran. But for an accident she might have been seen by him, or his card brought up to her at Westenra's bedside! There was no reason for him to have come to the house at all. True, she had not kept the appointment, but she had kept faith with him in the matter of money, had sold a greater part of her jewels, and sent him the proceeds by registered post. At the same time she had written him a letter telling him firmly that there was nothing to be gained by their meeting. She reminded him that all question of their being anything to each other was over many years past, and that certainly the circ.u.mstances of his reappearance did not incline her to renew any kind of intimacy with him.

In consideration of his health she promised she would do her best for him, and spare him any money she could.

"But it is no use hounding me," she wrote, full of the cold fury of a mother robbing her loved ones to give to a wolf, for the money gained on her jewels would have paid many a bill hanging over the household at the moment. "You must not forget that I too need to live. And you are not to torment me. If ever I make money again I will let you have all I can, but I do not hold out any great hope. In the meantime take this, and leave America with it. If I have anything to send you I will do so through your mother. But leave me alone--surely you have caused me enough sorrow! All I ask is to be left alone."

Thus she had written in her agony and desperation, and sent with the letter the sum of one hundred and ten pounds. Yet a week later he was on the doorstep intent on tracking her down! Well, she had cut the ground from under his feet by her message through Mary. With the information he had asked for concerning Alice Brook he had no further pretext for calling at the house, or even writing. Not that she relied on that. Horace Valdana had failed in all honourable things, but never in lies, pretexts, and inventions. She could hardly suppose he would do so now. As the event proved, she was right. For two weeks there was silence. Almost she had begun to hope when there came a letter, polite but formal, asking if Mrs. Westenra would have the kindness to oblige the writer with the home address of her late housemaid, Alice Brook.

"She had been in my service for ten days or so" (ran the letter), "but went out one day and never returned. I am much troubled, and should like to communicate with her friends. I feel sure that you will give me such a.s.sistance as you can in the matter. If you do not know her home address, perhaps you can tell me from what agency you originally engaged her? I may in that way be able to trace her.

"With apologies for troubling you, "Believe me, "Very truly yours, "JANE SEYMOUR."

"_Jane Seymour!_" She could imagine with what a cynical smile he produced that tag of history from the rag-bag of his memory, and made it serve his purpose as a nom-de-plume. For though the name of good King Hal's third queen might or might not have been borne by one of America's fair daughters, the writing was the writing of Horace Valdana! It was one more attempt to get on to the trail of his victim.

The address at the top of the letter was Number 439 West 19th Street--the same number in fact as Shrapp's Hotel; but of course Mrs.

Westenra would not know this. She was to suppose it the number of the private house occupied by Mrs. Jane Seymour! No doubt Mr. John Seymour would be on the lookout for Mrs. Jane's correspondence!

This was the letter to which she now typed the following answer on her husband's typewriter:

"MADAME,--I beg to state that I can give you no information concerning the whereabouts of my late housemaid, Alice Brook. When I have once supplied a discharged servant with a formal reference, I feel that my responsibility to her is at an end. I must, therefore, request you to relieve me of all further inquiries upon a subject in which I have neither the time nor inclination to interest myself."

This missive, designedly as rude and arrogant as she knew how to make it, she signed with a hieroglyphic signature in which might be discovered after careful study some resemblance to "Anne Westenra" (her second name was Anne), but that was quite unlike any signature ever put on paper by Valentine Valdana.

In the end she almost spoiled all by one of those absent-minded mistakes that sometimes betray the best laid plots and plans. She addressed the envelope in her natural handwriting. She had stamped and closed it and risen to ring for Mary to take it to the letter-box at the end of the street (for since her _rencontre_ with Valdana she had not dared go out), when, with her hand on the electric b.u.t.ton, some bell in her brain rang a warning that something was wrong. She stared at the letter in her hand for a full minute before she recognised her _betise_, then the shock sent her back to her seat half fainting, pale as a witch.

"What an escape! What an escape!" she muttered with dry lips. "I must be going mad! My brain is giving way! Oh, if I had posted it!"

Valdana would have been quick to recognise her writing and see through the whole thing--_that she was Mrs. Westenra_. All would have been lost!

"But I would have torn down the letter-box--set fire to it--blown it up--rather than he should have got the letter," she muttered fiercely.

In that moment she knew herself one of those who in the cause of love are capable of crime; that there was not anything she would not do to save her son from being branded illegitimate and Westenra from shame.

But she was shaken to the depths by her narrow escape, and the thought that any moment her overtried brain might betray her. It was clear that she must depart as soon as possible from New York. Her presence there was a danger. The moment she reached England she could communicate with Valdana's mother, and once he found she had gone from America, he too would make for Europe.

From that day forward a gulf yawned between Westenra and his wife--a gulf into whose depths every sweet memory they had ever shared seemed to have disappeared. The only things that could have bridged it over were confidence and love, but he no longer believed in her love, and she could not give him her confidence. Desperate and dismayed, she saw the chasm widening day by day between them, but though her spirit held out arms to him imploring his love and belief in her loyalty, and in her eyes she could not quench the light of tenderness, she stayed firm to her purpose.

And Westenra felt the spirit arms entwining him, and saw the beacon in her eyes, and cursed her for a false trifler, a juggler with the arts and tricks of women. For when he approached her, lured by the beacon, she retreated, subtly intervening between them that sense of distance.

And she was cold as death to his touch. Her hand, if he took it, lay like a stone in his, her lips eluded him. They were to all intents and purposes strangers to each other. She had never kissed him since he came back to the world of consciousness! What could he suppose but that her love for him was worn out.

All her kisses were for Bran it seemed. She would at times almost violently s.n.a.t.c.h the child from his arms, and kiss it feverishly, hungrily, just where he had kissed it, as if to drag the flavour of his lips--or as Westenra bitterly thought, remove all trace of them--from the little face.

He was a proud man, and his pride sustained him in this dark and incomprehensible crisis of their life together. With extraordinary self-control, born of his pity for her, he refrained from reproach or any violent sign of his inward rage and pain; but often a sort of primitive savagery in him ached to smite the eyes that mocked him with their false tenderness, and there were moments when he longed to take her by the throat and kill her, while he kissed the lips she withheld from him.