Wanderfoot Part 18

And the "Insane ones" never knew a thing about it. On this mild March morning they were variously engaged in simple and peaceful occupations not unsuitable to those of feeble mind. Upstairs, one of them, a girl of sixteen with bare feet and hair swinging in long brown braids, was swishing the sheets from the beds and flicking all stray garments into corners. She considered that she was being certainly very n.o.ble and useful. Her face bore the expression of complacent beneficence a.s.sumed by those who are aware that they are doing the work of another person, and doing it ten times better than that other person. She wore a bathing dress that was slightly small for her, made combination-fashion, of twill whose pristine scarlet had long since been bleached by sea salt to a faint sh.e.l.l-pink. It was embroidered by black and white darns of a primitive, not to say aboriginal description. Her bare arms were decorated with some beaten copper bracelets of the New Art school, but her slim legs, brown and very long from the knee down, were innocent of stockings. She was tanned all over with the faint, transparent, sherry-coloured tan of a woodland nymph, and her delicately curved cheek wore the tint of woodland berries, wine-brown eyes full of sunshine and shadows, long, flickering, silky hair, a red, sulky mouth.

Haidee had grown into a beauty.

She swished the sheets of heavy linen from the beds and cast them in rumpled heaps upon the floor, taking many a glance out at the sea, whistling a tune at one moment, in another echoing with her high-pitched rather husky treble the lay of _pere_ Duval.

"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eau Va sans peur mon pet.i.t bateau."

In the room below, listening to Haidee's rustling feet and the song of the sea, was Val Valdana. Two sheets of the _Paris Daily Mail_ were spread upon the table to protect the cloth, while in wistful and desultory fashion she prepared the vegetables for lunch. Her thin brown fingers decked in their strange stones and old enamels were stained with potato juice, and a number of small new potatoes lay dimpling pink at the bottom of an earthenware bowl glazed brown without and pale yellow within. But Val's thoughts were not with the potatoes. She often let her hands fall among the curly peel sc.r.a.pings on the table, and gazed sombrely, almost sightlessly before her. Shipwreck was in her eyes, and exile, and all the bitterness of bright hopes broken, and talent lying fallow and useless. Her lips looked as if the laughter had been bitten out of them in an attempt to keep within the desperate cry of her heart.

It was as well perhaps that overhead Haidee suddenly decided that helping to get lunch would be more amusing than making beds. Hasty and conclusive sounds denoted that she was "finishing up," directing by means of a few masterly flicks with a bath towel, all sc.r.a.ps of paper, stockings, stray shoes, letters, etc., into a proper and decent seclusion under the beds. Then her feet rustled on the stairs and through the kitchen, stayed for a moment at the front door from whence she threw a laugh and a call to Bran playing in the old boat across the road. A moment later the sh.e.l.l-pink bathing costume became part of the dining-room decoration, and its wearer, seated before the _Daily Mail_, attacked the potatoes with the same n.o.bility of purpose she had used for the bedrooms. Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at Bran's head bobbing up and down in the old _Jules Duval_. When her eyes strayed to the blue moving surface beyond she gave a sigh.

"What a day for a sail, Val!"

Val waked from her sombre dream, and looking for the first time with some shade of recognition at her, became aware of the bathing costume.

"I think you want to die of pneumonia, Haidee!"

"Oh, I 'm not cold, and it's so jolly and loose. It makes me feel as though summer is here already. Don't I wish it were June instead of rotten old March!"

She plumped a potato into the bowl and dexterously used the handle of the knife to flick a long streak of hair over her left shoulder.

"I do believe it's warm enough for a second swim to-day, Val ... let's hurry up and go down to the beach, shall we? ... Yes, do, let's."

"Who will get _dejeuner_?" inquired Val, laconically.

"I could kick that rotten Hortense!" responded Haidee savagely, and all her cowboy instincts came out and sat upon her face. "Do you believe she is really sick?" she asked, in the manner of one propounding a problem in Algebra.

"Of course not.... She's sick of doing housework, that's all.... Any one would be."

Haidee considered this awhile scowling, but her thoughts pa.s.sed to pleasanter subjects, and her face presently regained its harmony. From the kitchen came a sound like the purring of a man-eater of Tsavo enjoying a full meal, but it was only the boiler, which always purred when the stove was red-hot. Haidee made haste to finish the potatoes though her eyes considered many things. She regarded a brown print of Carlyle on the wall above Val's head, and wondered as often before if he had really gone about London with a hat of that shape! And had he really heaved half bricks at the people he did not like? ... that tickled her cowboy humour and she smiled broadly. How beautifully Mr.

Whistler had draped that nice gendarme's cloak over the thin legs of the Sage of Craigenputtock!

Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue, blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus plays on the floor.

At other times, when she twisted a grey scarf around her hair and ran in the wind Val could look like a Spanish dancing girl, or a mad Malay.

Again an artist in the Latin Quarter had done a water-colour of her in which, with her head a little on one side and a wistful inquiring look in her smoke-blue eyes, she reminded Haidee of a baby lion cub once seen in the Bronx Park Zoo. But to-day Val looked old and sad; her yellow serpent was eating at her heart, and Haidee knew why. The American mail had reached Cherbourg the day before, but no letter had come to Villa Duval. Hardly any letters came from Westenra now, except an occasional one to Haidee and the regular money draft every three months which Val as regularly sent away to a Paris bank and never touched except for paying Haidee's school fees.

"Never mind, Val," said Haidee, half in response to her own thoughts, half in continuation of their brief conversation. "As soon as your play is finished we 'll kick Hortense out" (Haidee's mind still dealt in kicks) "and get a proper _bonne_. We may be able to afford old M'am Legallais, don't you think? They say she can make lovely onion soup."

"The play will never be finished," said Val darkly. "Pots and pans won't let me finish it--they spoil the scenery. I _think_ potatoes and cabbages! You can smell garlic and stewed veal in the love scenes. Oh!

How can one go on living? If it were n't for you and Bran I would cut my head off."

"c.o.c.kerels!" said Haidee, in the same way as a rude boy might say "rats!" "Cut your hair off instead," she counselled unfeelingly, "it is getting awfully thin."

Val sprang up and ran like lightning into the next room, where there was a mirror on the wall. Her hair lay in feathery clouds about her face and forehead, and there seemed to be heaps of it, but it was true that when she came to do it up one small comb at the back held all in place. Yet she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as long and thick as Haidee's own.

"It is this confounded writing plays--and stewing veal!" she murmured, and stared at herself desperately. She had the eyes of the exile who never for one moment forgets his exile; only, it was not one country she mourned but many. Poor Val! she was too, that rare unhappy thing, a born lover. Never for one moment was the man she loved out of her mind; always, always he was there, haunting the rooms of her memory and the _chapelle ardente_ of her heart, perfuming every thought, influencing every action. Because of him she cried aloud now:

"I _will_ have it cut off, Haidee. Go and tell the barber to come this afternoon. I 'll have it cut close--shaved--so that it _must_ grow thick again. I won't be an old woman without hair! Oh, Haidee--an old bald hag whom no one loves!" Desolation crept into her voice, it had long dwelt in her eyes.

"Don't be a silly, Val," said matter-of-fact Haidee. "I love you and Bran loves you and Garry loves you."

"No, no--Garry hates me--he never writes!" She flung herself into a chair, and two of the salt bitter tears that were always lurking in the background, but which she seldom shed, oozed out of her eyes as if they had come from a long distance and gave her great pain. Haidee made no attempt to comfort her, but presently went out of the house to where Bran was just casting off anchor from the _Jules_ in view of a voyage to New York.

"Val 's crying," she said briefly.

"What for?" asked Bran, but immediately letting go anchor and beginning to climb in a business-like way over the side of the boat. The eye that he c.o.c.ked at Haidee was of the same smoke-blue as his mother's, and held the same wistful lion-cub glance.

"Just the old yellow snake," said Haidee, already on her way back to put on the potatoes, for well she knew that if she did not there would be none for lunch that day.

Bran found Val swiftly, and climbing upon her knees began to kiss her wet eyes. She kissed him back pa.s.sionately, holding him with such convulsive tightness that he was at last obliged to give a small howl.

"O--h! you're hurting me, Mammie--just a _little_ bit."

She kissed him again then, comforting him, reproaching herself, and drying away her tears in his bright hair.

"You know I would n't hurt my little cubby-cub for a million pounds."

"Would you for a million millions?"

"Never!"

"For a ship as big as the _Tu-te-onic_?" Bran adored ships, and could imagine most crimes being committed to acquire one.

"Never, never, _jamais_!"

"Not if some one came and asked you to give me just a _teeny weeny_ hurt?"

"If some one came to me and said, 'I 'll give you the whole sea full of ships with all the beautiful things in the world in them, if you just crush your little Bran's finger till he howls,' I would say, 'You get out of here, Beel, or I keel you.'"

Bran gave a joyful prance at the familiar quotation from Stephen Crane's story of Mexico Bill, long since transformed by Val into an exciting game, in which he performed the ro1e of Bill, and she and Haidee were two Mexican braves in sombreros and draped blankets. He was just about to propose a full-dress rehearsal of this drama when Val, reading the inspiration in his eye and feeling quite unfit for any such diversion, headed his mind off in another direction.

"If any one came and offered _you_ a million pounds to hurt your mammie, would you do it?"

"No," said Bran, adding darkly, "_but I'd ask him where he lived._"

"And then?" Val smiled into his hair. There was a pause; at last in a soft whisper spoke Bran the brigand:

"I 'd take a sword and go and pierce him in the night and get his million pounds for you." He embraced her ardently. It was characteristic of her that she did not rebuke him for the lawlessness of his plan. She thoroughly understood the spirit that could rob, pillage, and even do murder for the sake of a loved one.

They began to laugh and play. Val suddenly fell in love with her plan to have her hair cut off. She arranged a red handkerchief on her head, turban-fashion, to see how she would look. Eventually she decided to wear a fez and return to her habit of cigarette smoking to match her new appearance. Haidee declared that she too would love a fez, so Val sat down and wrote to the Army and Navy Stores for two, on the condition that Haidee went to the village at once to tell the barber to come immediately after lunch. Now that she had decided to have her hair cut the thing could not be done soon enough to please her.

Regretfully Haidee changed her bathing-dress for her navy-blue skirt and scarlet sweater, also a floppy hat of brown _suede_ for which Val had paid a pound in Jersey at a time when they were very hard up indeed, just because it suited Haidee's peculiar style of cowboy beauty.

Looking like a handsome conspirator, she sallied forth down the road that led to the village, for Villa Duval lay a good half-mile from Mascaret, with nothing between but the blacksmith's shop, a hotel, and a couple of fishermen's cottages.

The blacksmith's wife's brother, known to all the world, including Haidee and Bran, as "_mon oncle_" was whitewashing the outside of the blacksmith's cottage against the day when the rose-tree trained over the door would burst into leaf and large pink roses. A little farther on, in front of the hotel, two men were scattering red brick dust over the long flower beds on the sloping lawns, preparatory to planting out the letters "Grand Hotel de la Mer" in blue and white lobelias, thus combining patriotism with an excellent advertis.e.m.e.nt of the hotel. When the May excursion boat moored alongside the _digue_, the first thing to greet the eyes of the pa.s.sengers would be the blue and white lettering on the brick-red beds.

These signs and symbols of approaching summer cheered the heart of Haidee, and she hummed a little song to herself, as she went light-foot along the curving picturesque terrace that led to the village.