Wanderfoot Part 33

As for having Haidee home, it was out of the question. She felt herself unable to go into the matter of her relation to Valdana with any one so antagonistic to her as Haidee was at present. She knew that the girl still cherished bitterness against her for poor Sacha's defection, and she could only hope that with the coming of other interests, this feeling would pa.s.s away and allow a return to the old footing of comradeship and affection. She let Haidee profit too by the necklace windfall, sending her presents of music, books, and the countless pretty trifles that girls set store on. Bran went weekly with his governess to see her, and Rupert, urged by Val, went very often too. Rupert knew all about the affair of Sacha. Not from Val, but because by a strange coincidence Sacha had opened his heart to his cousin the night before his death. The two young men had shared the same room at Shai-poo, and in the silences of the night shared many confidences also. That was how Rupert had come to know the truth, and to keep his reverence and affection for Val unshaken.

"I love the sea, I love the music of the violin, and I love you--all with the same love," he told her one day. He had found her weeping alone in her studio. The strain of Valdana's hideous suffering and Westenra's long silence sometimes racked her so that she was glad of the relief of tears. "You know what Jean Paul Richter said of music,--'Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found not--and shall not find';--that is what you and the sea and the violin say to me."

She blessed him for that, not from gratified vanity, but for comfort in the thought that others besides herself suffered from the cry of those things "that we find not nor shall find."

"Dear boy," she said, and stroked his hair as if he had been Bran while he knelt by her. "I love you too--as if you were my son, as your mother must have loved you, Rupert."

Rupert kissed her hand in a very un-sonlike fashion and looked at her lips.

"I want to comfort you," he said, "to take pain out of your life."

"You cannot do that, Rupert." She quoted gently--"'Pain is the Lord of Life--none can escape from its net.'" Something in his eyes made her go on steadily. "My pain is chiefly caused by love. I love my little Brannie's father, Rupert--there can never be any other man in my life.

He speaks to me of all those things which I have found not nor shall find!"

Rupert bowed his head again over her hand, his boyish mouth drawn in a straight line. It was unfortunate that the Comtesse, whom the _femme de menage_ had admitted to the entrance hall, should have come softly in at that moment.

"Ah, the nice Poulot!" she twittered merrily. "Taking the lessons of deportment from the _charmante_ Madame Val!" And burst into happy laughter.

But she had not called it "deportment" when she reported the episode to Haidee a few days later.

"He is gone, our Poulot," she said mournfully. "She has put into bandages his hands and foots--a slave!"

"He did not seem very bandaged last time he came out here," answered Haidee rather snappishly, not even amused any more by the Comtesse's weird English.

"Ah, but you do not see him with her, my child! It is amazing how she finds the time and energy for so much 'flirt'!--She is enormous!--and with the sick lover in the third _atelier_ all the same time!"

"The sick lover! Comtesse, what _do_ you mean?"

"Ah, of course, I did not tell you yet. The concierge it was who informed me that Madame Valdana occupies herself with a sick gentleman in the third room. The doctor every day, and always fruit and flowers arriving. Is it not romantic? But always silence and the sealed-up lip from Madame Valdana. She takes no one into her heart where the secret is, except Poulot."

Haidee was now looking frightfully miserable. These visits from Madame de Vervanne were a disturbing element in her life and almost she wished they could be dispensed with. She was working hard to try and pa.s.s her _baccalaureat_ and achieve her _diplome_, but a visit from the Comtesse always left her disinclined to grapple with school work. And this news about Rupert and Val irritated her intensely. What business had Val to let Rupert get so fond of her? It was a shame, a wrong to her--Haidee.

First Westenra, then Sacha, now Rupert--just when he was so nice to her, and she was beginning to like him so much. She ground her teeth in childish rage and jealousy. The Comtesse put an arm round her waist and they walked together down the paths of the Lycee gardens, now dank and sodden by winter rains.

"Tell me ... could not the papa of Bran make her mind her own business, which is surely to nurse the sick friend and leave poor Rupert alone? I think he will not even pa.s.s his exam, for the Colonials if he had not a mind at ease. You know he is working for that now, so that when he has done his two years' service he will be eligible if he still wishes to enter."

How his mind would be eased by a break with Val she did not specify.

Nor why she had developed such fervour for the hitherto detested Colonial infantry scheme. But Haidee was in no state of mind to thrash out these intricacies. Worked up by the subtle Frenchwoman's malice into a state of teeming anger against Val, and blind to the fact that she was being used as a catspaw, she allowed herself to consider the Comtesse's suggestion, and in the end wrote Westenra a letter which contained many bitter and cruel things about Val, and gave him fuller information concerning the three studios than even the story of the Comtesse justified. That she was ashamed of herself for her action, and that it was only a pa.s.sing spirit of vindictiveness which impelled it, did not make the letter as a doc.u.ment any the less poignantly indicting.

And that same evening Val was watching the final effort of Valdana's troubled spirit to break from the bonds of the body and go forth upon its way. Ate Dea had run him to earth. The Hand whose fingers he had slipped through on the veldt was closing in on him inexorably, but with a worse thing in it now than a soldier's short sharp doom. It was only a matter of hours when he must join those others from whom he had fled--but with a difference! The difference between the lonely, painful death from an atrocious malady, and an end worthy of a man, face to the enemy, his comrades about him--

"Fighting hard and dying grimly, Silent lips and striking hand."

"It seems hardly worth while now to have shirked!" he said quietly.

"Just for a few more years crawling up and down the earth! I wonder why we dread old Death so, Val? After all he 's the best pal we have--always waiting so patiently and faithfully; whatever we do, nothing estranges him from his purpose. He never gets mad and takes our gift and gives it to some other fellow--the gift of rest, darkness, sleep!"

Like many a blackguard Valdana cherished in the deeps of him odds and ends of n.o.ble thought and chivalrous intention garnered from the lines of some man-poet. Lindsay Gordon always was the waster's poet, and always will be. He helped Horace Valdana to die now with grat.i.tude instead of curses in his mouth.

"Tho' the gifts of the Light in the end prove curses, Yet abides the gift of the Darkness, Sleep!"

His mind had grown strangely clear. He lay upon the wide divan in the centre of the room, and his eye roving from object to object, unusual recognition in its glance. A G.o.din stove glowed in one corner of the great room; the fire in it had never been allowed to die out since the first occupation of the studio. It filled the room with a summery warmth that drew out to the last drop the fragrance of a jar of Sicilian lilac that stood in the open window; and brought lovely memories of the veldt from an enormous bunch of mimosa stuck in a blue pot on the piano.

So warm was the climate of the room that a balcony door stood perpetually open, even on a night such as this, when the outside air sliced against the warmth of the body with the keenness of a scimitar.

Shaded lights threw faintly-tinted shadows in far corners. The only objects that showed clear in the dimness of the big shadowy room were the busts and figures of dead white clay--a gigantic head of Tolstoi, bearded, rugged; a perfect reproduction of Houdon's bust of Napoleon as First Consul; some little Donatello angels.

"It 'll be cold lying here in a Paris cemetery, Val!" said Valdana musingly.

His eye rested reflectively on the face of _L'Inconnue_, hung on a nail against a pale green-and-rose Persian rug--that lovely mask taken from the dead face of a young unknown girl, fished out one morning from the river's muddy waters. She had cast her secret into the bosom of the Seine, and that kind, wicked, cruel, voluptuous, motherly old river had kept it for ever, so that to this day the world still wonders and longs to know who the girl was, and why with youth and beauty and all the gifts of life stamped upon her she chose to go out into the dark with that little radiant smile on her lips, as if in the last instant she had thought on some wondrous hour into which all the beauty of life had been compressed--and was glad to die because that hour could never come again.

Val, who had often studied the quietly smiling tragic face, said once:

"It was some man's eyes she was thinking of just before she sprang!

That little smile was meant for just one man in the world."

"Yes: it'll be cold lying here in Paris," repeated Valdana thoughtfully.

"I wish now I 'd stayed with those fellows at Platkop. They have the sunshine, and they 're all together."

Val smoothed the bright rug that lay over him with her thin nervous hands.

"Don't bother now, Dan."

It was many a long year since she had called him by that name which pity now wrung from her.

"I wonder why I should have been the only one not wounded?" He looked at her critically. "All the others had got it somewhere, but I had n't a thing, not a spot! And there was n't a bullet left among those blasted Boers: it was easy enough to slink off as the evening came on ... but some of the fellows looked at me as I undid that door. No one said anything, but they _looked_ at me, Val."

Val hid her eyes.

"One or two of them thought I was going to try for some water from the spruit near by--G.o.d! it was as hot as h.e.l.l 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 l.u.s.t 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 trans.m.u.ted pa.s.sion 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 h.e.l.l 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 Montparna.s.se, dropped a few violets, flowers of compa.s.sion 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.