Wanderfoot Part 26

Val, who always rose at seven to make tea on her spirit lamp, took the usual cup to Harriott's bedside, and found Kitty there by special command. She was vehemently denying that she had a cold.

"I hawed G.o.d wud, buther, I ted you."

"Kitty, how can you say so? You can't speak properly. All traffic in your nose is absolutely suspended."

"It tiddent, buther!"

"You are snorting and snuffling like the bull of Bashan."

"I 'b _dot_, buther."

"I 'm sure it's no good for her to go out in that state," sighed Harriott afterwards. "But what would you? She 'd have broken a blood vessel if I 'd stopped her."

Val looked out of the window and reported gleefully:

"They are prowling up and down the _digue_ like two hungry tigers. If they could only pull the tide in with ropes they would set to work at once."

At last there was water enough to float a boat, and the Lorrains' little craft was seen winging down the river from the _pet.i.t port_. The girls came racing back to get their warm coats. A moment later Bran's voice was heard from the front steps:

"I want to go too--I want to go too!" He had smelt what was in the wind, and hastily shuffling on his little garments was following the girls. With the cold brutality of an elder sister Haidee rebuffed him.

"No; you can't come. We don't want any kids."

"Besides, you can't swim," said Kitty more kindly.

"I can swim--I can swim!" averred Bran, and ran after them wailing pa.s.sionately. "I can swim--I _can_ swim!"

Val had to fly out and bring him home weeping on her shoulder.

"You shall have a beautiful boat all your own some day, my Wing, and we 'll sail away in it together."

She comforted him, drying his tears on her blue veil.

"Oh, jeer buck!" sniffled Bran, trying to cheer up, "and will daddy come too?"

Val thought of a lost ship in which she had thought to sail with all she loved to the islands of the blest, and her breath caught in her throat.

"Yes, darling, let us pray so," she said, though she had no hope.

From that day forward the Shai-pooites and the Duvalites were constantly together. The two parties joined forces and were as one man in all things that pertained to amus.e.m.e.nts and making the sunny days fly by.

There was always the daily excursion to the beach. Kitty and Haidee were as much at home in the water as two seals, and Val too was a good swimmer. Harriott always turned blue when she had been in two or three minutes, so her lot in life was to stay on the beach and rub Bran down when he came from floundering like a little scarlet tadpole in the surf.

The Insanes wore red twill costumes, and resembled nothing so much as a band of Indians on the warpath when they came prancing from the cabins across the flat beach, with the Shai-pooites in dark blue _maillots_ at their heels. A strange note of colour was a scarf of deep orange, which Val wore round her head, dock fashion. She never let her cropped head be seen by any one, though it was well covered now with little sprouting fluffy curls. Only Bran was allowed to see it in the nights, and loved to nestle against it, as a bird nestles against the downy breast of its mother. From the rest of the world she kept her distance, even in the sea, for she hated any one to see the curiousness of her face without its frame of hair.

The Comtesse was learning to "make the plank"--otherwise float, and on calm days incessant laughter came streaming over the smooth, silky waves, as her plump little person was held up by a ring of instructors.

When all seemed well they let go, and immediately a shrill cry would ring out:

"_Ah, mon Dieu! Je coule.... Je coule dans le milieu_. I am sinking in ze middle!" And down she would drop and come up spluttering: "Ah!

_Quelle abomination de la desolation!_"

But she never went in deep enough to damage the wild-rose flush in her cheeks and the blue mountain shadows round her eyes. The two English girls and Celine Lorrain came out always sleek as seals, their hair dripping and dank about them, but when Madame de Vervanne's cerise head-wrap was unbound, never a hair was out of place. She thoroughly understood the art of bathing beautifully. Later, arrayed in a wondrous kimono, she would take a sun bath on the beach, scuffling her bare feet daintily in the sand.

"_Imaginez-vous!_" she told Mrs. Kesteven. "I never knew until this year that I had Greek feet. _Le vrai grec_, with the arch and perfect toes--see?" She stuck out her short white foot. "An artist revealed it to me this year. Figure it to yourself! I have had them all these years and did not know."

She flung her little laugh to heaven, and the other women could not but join in it at this frank exhibition of vanity. Never was a little lady more thoroughly pleased with herself than Christiane de Vervanne, and, indeed, she was of those who add to the gaiety of nations. Without her cold, brilliant wit and Harriott Kesteven's gentle humour the party might easily have been heavy. Val, shrouding a brooding heart as well as a cropped head behind her blue veil, came forth little except when alone with Harriott or the children, whilst Kitty and Haidee, alternately weighed down by the new-born consciousness of their wonderful beauty and absolute desirability, were not amusing except unintentionally, and often indeed when their plans went wrong were sulky and quarrelsome. At other times they would be buoyed up to a pitch of perky inanity most provoking. But on the whole the two girls improved noticeably under the influence of their first flirtation. Haidee's cowboy habits dropped from her one by one never to return, and untidiness was no longer a habit. Kitty became gentler, too, and less inclined to treat her mother as a slave sent unto the world for her special benefit. Respect for their elders is one of the most attractive traits in the character of young French people, and the girls were quick to note the astonishment and disapproval of the Lorrains at any discourtesy shown by them to Val and Harriott. An actual demonstration of how parents should be treated could not be given by Sacha and Celine unfortunately, for (for reasons of his own at which Mrs. Kesteven and Val could make a good guess), General Lorrain, their only surviving parent, never called with his family at Villa Duval, nor even materialised when the English party took tea at Shai-poo. Val and Harriott often wondered whether he had taken the Comtesse into his confidence over the little _contretemps_ on the _digue_ when Mrs. Kesteven's ankle had been mistaken for that of Madame de Vervanne's. Certainly the latter gave no sign.

It transpired that she was in the position so unfortunate in France of having been obliged to divorce her husband. She was most frank about the details of her conjugal unhappiness, and the fact that she had been thrust a little way out of her own world since the divorce, did not seem to weigh her down very much. The Lorrains were among the few of her liberal and broad-minded friends to whom her position had made no difference. Her husband had been an officer in General Lorrain's regiment, and she married him when she was eighteen and he thirty and _tres connaisseur_.

"Like most young girls I thought it was a very wonderful thing for him that I was conferring my innocence upon him--that he too shared my state of ecstatic bliss, and that it would last for ever. _Quelle betise_!

Naturally for him it was nothing--he was soon _ennuyee_ with my bliss.

That is a mistake young girls make--they soon bore a sophisticated man with their simplicity."

"A sophisticated Frenchman, I dare say," said Harriott dryly.

"Ah! There you hit the affair on the back, Mistress Kesteven," agreed the Comtesse affably. "I do not spik of your Englishmen with the big hearts and the big feets."

She proceeded to describe the lady who stole her husband.

"She was my best friend, and I was very proud to know her--very _chic_, very Parisienne, and with the cleverness of forty. Ah! she was as subtle as an Egyptian! What chance had I against her when she began to put her cobra spells on de Vervanne? I could only look on like a fascinated rabbit." She burst into a peal of laughter. Val looked at her thoughtfully, wondering if she were the result of her ill luck or the cause of it. Certainly she had arrived at being much more like the cobra than the rabbit.

"Did you ever hear of the little baker's girl, who had to carry round the tarts and cakes to her master's customers? Some one said to her, 'Do you never take any of the nice tarts, my child?' 'Oh, no,' said she, 'that would be stealing. I only lick them, and that does no one any harm.'"

Harriott threw an apprehensive glance ahead. They were taking one of their long country walks, the younger folk marching in front, with Bran and a tea-basket to leaven their exuberance. It was a relief to see that they were out of ear-shot, for the Comtesse's baker-girl stories were apt to be very spiced bread indeed, and less likely to point a moral than to adorn some one without morals.

"If my friend had only been like the little _boulangere_," continued the Comtesse mournfully, "I would have said nothing. But no, she was greedy and wicked, and could not content herself except by stealing my nice cake." She trilled and bubbled with laughter. The other woman's thought, if interpreted, might have read much the same as Wolfe Tone's brief reflections on the subject of Madame de Vervanne's countrywomen:

"A fine morality, split me!"

At the same time it was impossible not to feel a touch of admiration for a woman who could turn her tragedy into laughter. Val was wistfully inclined to wish that she could achieve the same state of philosophy herself.

Meanwhile the Comtesse, very pleased with her little tale, and the thought that she had shocked the "women made of wood," as she secretly described all Englishwomen, walked ahead, for the path had narrowed, her skirt held high to avoid the brambles, revealing the famous Greek feet encased in high-heeled _suede_ shoes, with a pair of boy's socks falling round her ankles. She affected these at the seaside, under the impression that she was being truly Arcadian. Suddenly she burst into a little song. Her voice was dainty and pretty, her specialty innocent nursery rhymes with a tang to the tail of them. She never sang anything that was not of eighteenth-century origin. All of her songs were about shepherdesses and _boulangeres_--sometimes a cure would be introduced into the last verse, but his presence there rarely imported holiness.

When the kettle was singing over the fire of wood branches, and the band sat scattered at ease among golden clumps of gorse and purple heather, she trilled them one of the least frisky in her vocabulary:

"Philis plus avare que tendre, Ne gagnant rien a refuser, Un jour exigea de Sylvandre Trente moutons pour un baiser!

"Le lendemain nouvelle affaire!

Pour le berger, le troc fut bon Car il obtint de la bergere, Trente baisers pour un mouton!

"Le lendemain Philis plus tendre, Craignant de deplaire au berger, Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre Trente moutons pour un baiser!

"Le lendemain Philis peu sage Aurait donne moutons et chien Pour un baiser que le volage A Lisette donnait pour rien."

After this contribution to the general well-being the Comtesse embraced Bran, who wriggled desperately to get away, for as he had secretly confided to his mother, he did not care for her smell. She said she would let him go if he would sing them a song, so Bran, in spite of his shyness, paid the price with two of his little impromptu anthems, chanting and rolling his eyes at them like a Zulu:

"Mary, Queen of Scots, Went to sea In a soft boat, A boat as soft as cream."