Wanderfoot Part 7

"Well, I 'm not, you see," was the surly response.

"But, dear chicken, what are you doing here?"

"I 'm waiting for Garry."

"Oh, Haidee, how silly! When Garry comes home he 'll be dead tired and not want to be bothered. You really must have a little consideration for him, dear--besides, you ought to be in bed and asleep by now."

The child suddenly burst out at her like a tornado:

"Why aren't _you_ in bed and asleep, I 'd like to know ... why can _you_ wait up for him and not me? ... I know ... you think he belongs to you ... and that you can have him all the time. You are a greedy guts. You have him every night ... why should n't I have him sometimes? You are trying to take him right away from me. Who asked you to come from your rotten old England and take my Garry away from me? Before you came he was all mine ... when I was little he used to let me sleep with my arms round his neck. But now, whenever I ask if I can come and sleep in his bed he laughs and says I have grown too big and active with my hoofs.

But your hoofs are not too big, I suppose! Oh, no! ... and he 's not too tired, however late he comes in for _you_ to come to his room and talk to him.... Mean pig that you are ... greedy guts! I hate you ...

and I _will_ sleep with Garry ... I will, I will!"

She burst into a torrent of tears, and Val stood staring at her in amazement that swiftly softened to pity. The trouble with Val was that she could always feel sympathy for another person's point of view, and that frame of mind is very disarming to anger. Immediately she threw her arms round the sobbing creature and began to comfort her.

"Dear old thing, you mustn't feel like that about me. I don't want to take him away from you. I know he is all you have. I only want you to help me as much as you can to make things easier for him. Think how he works ... for both of us--you and me! And how tired he is at nights....

As for my coming to his room ... dear chick, don't you understand that I am his wife? When you are grown up you 'll marry some nice man ... and you 'll want to be greedy over him too a little bit."

"I 'll never marry anybody. I always meant to marry Garry ... and now _you_--" Vindictiveness came into her voice again, and Val's heart gave a little weary sigh, for she was dead beat, and this was her legitimate time of rest, hard wrung from the day. To have to face this exhausting scene late at night seemed very much like the last straw that was one too many for the camel.

However, it was urgent to get it over and done with before Westenra came in, so she stayed on talking to the unhappy child, trying to beguile her from her misery and once and for all place their relationship on a footing of sympathy and affection. It seemed almost a hopeless task, but in the end the effective thing was that she told Haidee of what so far she had spoken to no one but Westenra--her deep, sweet, secret joy in the thought of the child that was coming. It was Haidee's first glimpse into the workings of nature, and she sat wide-eyed and dumb, searching Val from top to toe for circ.u.mstantial evidence, while Val, with a faint flush in her pale face, but serene-eyed and in simple words, following on Carpenter's advice in _Love's Coming of Age_, made all clear to the child. She even, with a touch of guile, let Haidee into the secret of suffering to be endured before the baby could come into the world, believing that to touch the heart of the child to a little sympathy might not be an unwise thing. And she was right: from sympathy to compa.s.sion is a natural step, and Haidee went to bed in a glow of good resolution to be as helpful and considerate as possible in the days to come. Indeed, without turning into an angel, or even a moderately good child, she did improve greatly in behaviour during the next few months, while waiting with burning impatience for what was to come when the bleak spring days were over.

June came at last, and brought its gift to Valentine and Westenra--a son. Like an impetuous Irishman, as Val had declared, anxious to get into the thick of the fight, he had practically started their married life with them, and arrived as soon as compatibility with schedule permitted. That was a great day in the Westenra household when the golden head of a baby lit up like a star the gloom of dark and difficult ways. Instead of one baby, indeed, there were three. Two of them haggard and thin, but content and care-free as the third in that glad hour of love made incarnate. Even Haidee softened and turned into a real child as she hung with perpetual curiosity over the cot of the new-comer.

"It's got blue eyes, just like the lion cubs in the Zoo.... Oh, look at it clutching on to me! You are lucky, Val.... I wish I could get one, too. Oh, _could n't_ I have it to sleep with me?"

She sulked bitterly when she was not permitted to take charge of it to play with like a doll, and thereafter constantly complained to Westenra of Val's greediness.

"You 'd think it was all hers--and how can it be if it is half yours?

And if it is yours it belongs to me too," was the burden of her complaint.

When Val got up and resumed life again, the question of a name for the baby arose. Val was all for Patrick.

"Patrick seems to stand for Ireland, and he is our link with Ireland, Joe."

"It is an unlucky name with us," Westenra objected. "My father was crazy for sons, but three he called Patrick died one after the other.

When I came they took no more risks, and gave me an old family name.

Choose another, Val."

"Well," she said shyly, after a little thought, "would you mind Richard?"

"Richard?" he mused.

Val had long yearned to talk to Westenra of d.i.c.k Rowan, only the ban he had placed on all past things had so far prevented her. But that the day must come when no subject would be taboo between them, she felt confident.

"We could call him d.i.c.k," she said. "I once cared very much----"

Westenra turned on her like a flash, white to the lips.

"Is that the way you burn your boats?" he said, in a low, hard voice, and looked at her with furious eyes she did not know. While she stared at him in pain and amazement he rose abruptly and left the room. Slowly her eyes filled with tears. She made no further reference to the matter.

She did not know what to say. It seemed she could not refer to that time and tell him who d.i.c.k was, and how good he had been to her without giving pain. Therefore it was better to be silent. On the day of the christening itself he said:

"We 'll call him Bran if you like, Val--one of Ireland's old savage kings. I think that son of yours will be some one fine some day," he added with a boyish, lovable smile, that had something of pride in it, and something of humility too, and for those words Val forgave him and was happy again. And the baby was baptised into the Holy Catholic Church under the pagan and kingly name of Bran.

CHAPTER VII

MORE WINDING PATHS

"There is a crack in everything G.o.d has made."

EMERSON.

There is a saying that during the hot weather every one in New York, except doctors and cats, leave the city. Westenra, with his yearly habit of pulling stakes and heading for Europe at the first hint of heat, had always been an exception to this rule, and he invariably advised other men that his was the only possible way to keep fit after nine months' hard work. But now, though the brazen heat beat down on to the city and burnt up through the pavements as if Pluto had lighted a special furnace under New York, Westenra laughed at his own advice and made no move to get away. Val knew why, and the knowledge etched new shadows under her salient cheek-bones. In spite of his working like a bee from morning till night, the Sanatorium being constantly full, and operations always in progress, Westenra was hara.s.sed for money. The venture did not pay. An experienced woman at the head of things could have made it pay. The stolid, lumpy German with a good hospital training grafted on to a knowledge of household affairs would have made a roaring success of it, and coined money for all concerned. Even an ordinarily good manager with free hands and no nerves might have achieved a margin of profit. The vagabond journalist not only could not make it pay, she was turning it into a dead loss. Every day good money went cantering after bad.

What Westenra should have done, even at that eleventh hour, was to engage a capable, working matron to manage the place, while Val devoted her loving fervour to the baby and himself. But he felt doubtful as to the success of such an arrangement, first because Val would probably not like to live elsewhere; secondly, because he had managed hospitals before, and knew all about trouble with matrons. Experience had taught him that in America women rarely work well except in the interests of some one with whom they are in love. This rule applies very pertinently to American nurses, who are usually middle-aged Germans intent on marrying a doctor; but it may very well be applied to women all the world over, though Westenra was not aware of the fact. What he did know was that a managing matron would probably work for her own hand and not for his. Even if she made a roaring success of the place, later there would surely come the subtle introduction of other methods and other interests than his, into his own hospital. Worst of all would be the fact of strangers within his gates spying out the secrets of his reserved nature, bearing witness to his moods and nerves, all the irk of daily contact with people who were making a business out of his brains.

This idea of outsiders being "let in on him," of alien eyes coming close enough to look over the wall behind which he kept his conflicting tempers and emotions from the world, was peculiarly irritating to him.

Only Val, privileged by love, must have the gift of a share in his torment, the right to hear his swears. With all others he smiled and smiled and hid his heart, and put distance between himself and them.

And Val, because she was a true lover, understood and faithfully gave of her body and soul to pad the b.u.mps of life for him. Whatever else she failed in, she failed not in playing the buffer between him and the strangers who went to and fro in his house. He little knew what it cost her in peace of mind and serenity of spirit, this jarring with natures so unlike her own, and jangling with those who were making a business of life. He only knew that in spite of her impracticability and extravagance there was no one like her, and that the place in her incompetent hands was dearer by far than it could ever be in surer hands that were strange. It was beginning to dawn in his heart, with the exquisite promise of the skies, all that she was to him, this woman who walked by his side never faltering, smiling gallantly in defeat. It was beginning to whisper through his senses like the haunting echo of bells whose cadence he had known all his life that defeat after all did not matter so much since he shared it with her--that it might in fact become a form of victory. In any case he meant to struggle on with things as they were, hoping and working for the best.

Unfortunately, his nerves after the year of extraordinary strain were in rags. He really needed the rest and change that was due to him. His body and brain clamoured for it, and his fine athlete's skin took into itself a putty tint that was neither healthy nor becoming. In vain did Val implore him to take ship for his native land. He laughed and refused to go unless she and the children went too. But she knew what the cost of such an exodus would mean, and sat tight as an eagle in her eyrie; and her little brood pecked at her heart as though determined to get at her life-blood. Haidee grew wickeder every hour, and Bran was the naughtiest baby in the world, sleeping all day and howling all night, withal drinking away his mother's strength and blooming on it like a pink rose.

Valentine grew pale as a wraith and Westenra's old, haunting fear that his brain would give out ate him by night and day; but neither of them was a quitter. Both possessed that stupid and over-estimated kind of courage that does not know when it is beaten. At last Fate, like an overtried mother who is sick of giving gentle hints to unheeding children, brought down her hand heavily upon them. First she smote the man. In the blasting heat of late August, Westenra went down as only the big and the strong can go down--like a felled oak. The brilliant colleague whom Val hastily and fearfully summoned to her husband's bedside expressed his diagnosis in the argot of the day.

"His nerves have run out and his stomach has gone back on him. If he does n't slip up on us it will be a near thing, Mrs. Westenra."

And it was a near thing. If it had not been for Val, Westenra would have found eternity sooner than he expected. But it was a bad time for her. In addition to nursing her husband, she had to manage the rampageous Bran, a domestic crisis brought about by a servant strike, and an ice famine. Fortunately, there were no patients but one in the house at the time, and the nurse in attendance happened to be an exceptionally good one, who did all she could to relieve the strain. She was an English woman, a Miss Holland, with an able brain behind a pretty, calm face. She would willingly have undertaken the nursing of Westenra besides her own patient, but he was so frequently delirious that Val was afraid to let any one share in the nursing of him. She knew how he would hate any stranger to hear his tormented ramblings, but she did not realise for a long time that it would perhaps have been better at any cost that another than she should have heard them. For all that he had hidden from her came out now in broken s.n.a.t.c.hes and groans, half dream, half delirium. She learned of his longing for his laboratory, of the sacrifice it had cost him to abandon it, of his despair about the Sanatorium, money worries, all the irk domestic life held for him. What was more terrible, she gleaned in broken fragments, halting and disjointed, as though even in his delirium he had an instinct to hide it, something of the way he had struggled with himself to evade her coming into his life, of his mental resistance until the last, of the pity which rather than love had moved him to ask her to marry him, of his dread of her past, and fear for their future. Oh!

bitter and bleak were the things that came to her ears in sc.r.a.ps and broken whispers and heavy sighs, and that pieced together by her weary yet quickened brain made a clear writing on the wall. All was plain to her at last: all that he had succeeded in keeping dark from her, the secret of his torment and his pain in the struggle. To her the upholding joy in the darkest hour had always been that the man was worth it, she loved him and considered him worthy of every sacrifice she could make. She saw now that he had had no such thought to uphold him.

Though he had been too loyal to acknowledge the fact even to himself, the bitter drop in his cup must have been his belief that the woman was not worth the sacrifices marriage had entailed!

Sighs and dark mutterings told her why he had shrunk at first from Haidee's coming to 68th Street--some duty he had to Halston, to keep his child only among those whose lives had been pure and unspotted by the world. The meaning of his fury at Val's suggestion for his son's naming came whispering forth from fever-broken lips.

"d.i.c.k! ... How _could_ she? A dissipated brute .... no woman safe from ... and she ... my woman, alone with him for months ... wild places ...

lonely places."

She could not know where he had heard that scandalous tale. She could only bow her head and take the sword to her heart.

When she heard him muttering to his mother, explaining that she was his dream woman, that it had to be.... 'She is not like you, mother, but she came to me in dreams ... _it had to be_ ... and now she is Bran's mother ... you must love my Bran's mother," she thought her heart would break for bitter aching. It seemed to her in that dark hour that nothing could ever hurt her any more. She defied Fate to do her any worse hurt. An unwise thing to do. Fate was in fact sitting in wait with a worse clout in her hand.

There came an afternoon when Westenra was so much better that he could talk a little, softly, if a trifle vaguely to Haidee who had crept in to hold his hand. His eyes, seeming to have grown lighter in his thin, strongly-featured face, travelled incessantly round the room, resting here and there as though they recognised landmarks in some country he had not visited for years. They rested on Val writing at a table near by, and noted the wraithlike face, pale as a bone, the weary lean of her against her own supporting arm, the droop of her lips and her shoulders.

When she came over with the medicine, he said quietly:

"You should go out for a little while, dearest. Haidee will take care of me."

She had indeed a longing that was almost active pain for air and the sight of sky and green things, and needed little persuasion, seeing that he was really better. She did not even stop to change her frock, which was old and unfashionable, and in her haste caught up an ancient school-hat of Haidee's, trimmed with a shabby bow of silk ribbon, and more than slightly bent out of shape about the brim. She felt it mattered little how she looked, so long as she could escape into the outer air. Her head ached violently.