Wanderfoot Part 8

As she hurried down the front-door steps, a man walking up the street looked at her curiously, and something in her peculiar walk brought a flash of amazement to his eyes and quickened his steps. He was tall and well-dressed, with traces of breeding, and a certain dashing handsomeness about him, but there was a green tint in his ravaged cheeks, and the straight figure under the well-cut coat was gaunt and shrunk. His eyes lacked l.u.s.tre, and one of them jerked and winked mechanically at irregular intervals. The man was a nervous and physical wreck. As he pa.s.sed the house from which Val had come, he looked up and noticed its number and the name on the door-plate. A moment later he caught up with the slight, hurrying figure, gave a swift glance at her profile and the shabby hat above it, then, in the quiet drawling tones of the man about town, he said politely:

"How do, Val?"

She swung round with the wild jerk of a la.s.soed creature and faced him.

Then he was not so sure after all that it was Val. The grey-faced woman, with all the life gone out of her eyes, sunken cheeks and blanched lips, was certainly not the Valentine Valdana of other days.

The figure, the walk was hers; but the face was the face of some strange woman--some woman in trouble, too, and that was a bore. He was a man who always avoided women in trouble. On the point of lifting his hat, with a slight apology and walking away, her words detained him.

"_You!_" Her voice was the voice of Valentine Valdana with all the music gone from it: harsh and grinding as stone on stone.

"Yea, verily," said he, and stared sardonically into her fearful eyes.

They stood so for a moment staring at each other. Then the man laughed; but it was not a pleasant laugh.

"You don't seem as pleased to see me as you ought to be!"

"You!" she stammered again. It seemed all she was able to say.

"Yes, _me_, my very dear Val," he repeated with something like a snarl.

"Time appears to have dimmed your excellent eyesight, as well as robbed you of your gift of repartee!"

She answered strangely, speaking vaguely like a woman in a nightmare, but her words struck home like little, sharp knives, and the blood mounted high in his dark cheeks.

"So _you_ were the slinker in the bush!--the skulker!--the deserter of comrades and men!--_I might have known_!"

Rage flashed out of his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment he looked as if he could strike her. Then he laughed again the jeering sardonic laugh of the cynic, whose bones hard words have no power to break, the coward who fears nothing but death.

"Be d.a.m.ned to you!" he said pleasantly. "I had as much right to save my skin as any one else."

"_No one else saved his skin_."

"That was their lookout," he remarked with grim facetiousness, but her silent, terrible stare, so full of indictment, disconcerted him horribly. He essayed to change the unpleasant subject.

"So you are in New York! No one could make out where the deuce you had got to."

That detached her from the sinister question of his conduct on the South African veldt. But still she stared deep into him as if seeking in his soul the key to some problem she could not solve; and he was embarra.s.sed, for he wished no one to search in his dark soul--there were things hidden there that even he was afraid to look upon. As for the situation, surely it was clear enough. He that should have been dead was alive, and that was all there was to it. He had been looking for her to let her know, and that he had found her by accident was so much to the good. It had a better appearance than if he had hunted her down (as he would have done if he had possessed any clue to work on). After all, he argued to himself, he had a right to her sympathy. Also he needed help in the shape of money pretty badly. He was sick of hiding in America, and longed to get away to the cheap comfort of Europe.

Unfortunately, she did not look as if she could help his financial situation very much. He had, in fact, never seen her look so shabby since she ceased to occupy the proud position of wife and slave to Horace Valdana, Esq. The thought that he might not be able to levy a loan from her after all moved him to venom.

"I fear you have come down in the world, my poor Val! If I did not know what a brilliant woman of letters you are, I might almost think you had turned into a housemaid. What were you doing at Number 700?"

Then she realised he had seen her come out of the house. That was the key she had sought. Now she knew just where she stood, and what she must do.

"Yes," she said slowly, "you are quite right, I have come down in the world, and I am a housemaid--at that house I have just come from."

He burst out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest news he had heard for a long time.

"Indeed! Perhaps you will invite me to call and have some supper with you and the cook some evening?"

"We are not allowed to have callers. I don't get on with the cook. I am under notice to quit." She made her statements quite gravely.

"But this is great!" He began to laugh again uproariously. "So you have got the sack! And now you will have to go back to the career of famous journalist. But why have left it, my dear girl? Is it a joke, or some new craze for getting copy?"

Steadily, calmly, with pale lips and toneless voice, she lied on--for Bran's sake, for Garrett's sake, for the sake of all she held dear.

What better reason can a woman have for lying her soul away!

"No, no joke, no craze: stern necessity. I can't write any more, that is all. I had brain fever, and when it was all over I found that I could n't put another sentence together. I am done for as a writer. So I just dropped out of the old life and disappeared. The only thing I can do now is work with my hands."

"But"--he stammered. "But it will come back--all you want is time, rest--"

"Never," she said firmly. "Never. It is finished. My brain is gone.

I am Alice Brook now--Alice Brook, housemaid. I shall never be anything else."

"Good G.o.d!" He gazed at her aghast. There was no glimmering of doubt in his mind as to the truth of her story. It seemed almost too extraordinary to be true, but he had never known Val to lie. He was aware, in fact, from painful experience that she despised liars, and held a creed that nothing worth a lie was to be found in the world. It was not for him to know that she had at last found something she considered worth lying for. Besides, she so thoroughly looked the part.

Thin, hollow-eyed, and badly dressed, with the hopeless lines unhappiness had sketched about her lips, she was the picture of an overworked slave who worked too much by day, and got too little rest at night.

"Good G.o.d!" he repeated blankly. "And I was going to touch you for my fare home."

It was her turn to laugh now, and she did it silently, rocking from side to side, holding one hand over her heart as if afraid it might burst from her body in its wild mirth. Valdana considered her with shrewd, savage eyes. He had never known her guilty of such a thing as a fit of hysterics, but it looked uncommonly as if she meant to indulge in one now, and he was not anxious to a.s.sist in anything of the kind.

"Don't be a fool, Val," he said sharply. "Pull yourself together. Come along into the Park and we 'll discuss things."

Val's laughter was over except for a strange little sobbing sound that escaped from her lips from time to time, as she walked slowly by his side towards the Park. Sometimes she swayed a little and put out her hands as if to keep herself from falling--as though the earth were rocking under her feet.

There is a story told in Africa of a Dutch woman, who, during one of the early Kaffir wars, escaped from an attacked township, and with her family of six little children hid in the bush. They concealed themselves in a deep swamp overhung with bushes and seething with poisonous gnats; and there, while all round them human beasts beat the bush seeking for prey, the little band crouched low, nothing but their heads protruding from the filthy ooze, fearful almost to breathe lest they should be heard and dragged forth to torture and death.

Unfortunately, the baby, sick and too young to understand the terrible situation, whimpered endlessly at the bites of the insects, and all its mother's fearful hushing could not quiet it. With the howls of blood-drunken Kaffirs in her ears, and before her eyes the five tragic, terror-stricken faces of her other children, the distracted mother found no other thing to do than clasp her hands about the little loved, whimpering throat that would betray them all, and still its cries for ever.

Long after Valdana had left her Val sat on in the Park, trying not to think, trying to get control over herself. Her overwrought brain felt like a struggling, tortured thing, determined to burst from her head and run brandishing its frenzy and pain to the world; while some other part of her strove for calm, hushing and pacifying the tortured thing as the Dutch mother had hushed the child that would betray them all; and she felt that if she could not still its frenzied cries she must kill it.

Better that she should die than that Westenra and little Bran should suffer. But she did not want to die; she knew she could not be spared at that time. The mother of a little child can never be spared.

Westenra, lying weak and ill, seemed to her no more than a little child too, and one that she must care for and protect from trouble. Dazed and shocked as she was, with her world in pieces about her, the mother sense alert in her warned her to get control of her nerves; that it would be fatal to fall ill now; that everything depended upon her deliberate action. She had seen with Westenra what happened when the brain was sick, and she knew she could never hope to keep the truth from him if such an illness overtook her. She was resolute to keep it from him. He had suffered enough. He was sick and broken with suffering, and all through her. But his pride and joy in Bran was still left him; and of that, if she could help it, he should not be robbed. His son! Heir to an old and honoured name if to no great fortune. What would befall if he found that his son was nameless--heir to nothing but shame and sorrow. Ah! some day he might have to hear the truth and bear it--but not now, not now. She must take herself in hand strongly, force herself to calmness, plan how to outwit Valdana, and save her loved ones.

She looked at the card Valdana had given her with an address written on it:

MR. JOHN SEYMOUR,

_Shrapp's Hotel,_ _West 19th Street,_ _New York._

He was there under an a.s.sumed name, skulking, as he had skulked in the bush. His mother, the only person whom he had enlightened as to his being alive, was secretly sending him money. She dared not let his father, an old man dying of an incurable disease, know, for fear it would hasten his end, and she was ashamed to tell her other sons and daughters; they were all honourable, upright people whose heads would be lowered to the dust under the blow. With a mother's unselfish love she wished to spare them the truth--that the man whose gallant death all England had mourned was alive and skulking in hiding, a coward who had deserted his comrades! But for Val she had no such feeling, and it was she who had given him the news of Val's sailing for America and paid his fare to do the same, counselling him to find her out and get her help.

She said it was Val's duty to stand by him, and he, pleased with such comfortable counsel, had been in New York six months hoping to come across his wife. At the last moment he had chanced upon her by accident!

He had left her in the Park; it was with the understanding that she was to meet him in two days' time at Shrapp's Hotel. But she had no intention of keeping the appointment. First of all it would be extremely difficult for her to get away from home without lying, and then there was a possibility of Westenra finding out where she had gone, and suspecting something strange. She meant to take no risks where Westenra was concerned. Secondly, she hated to meet Valdana. Quite apart from the horrible turmoil his reappearance caused in her life, she was shakingly revolted by his presence. The sight of him alive when he should have been where the world believed him--among the heroic dead--made her physically sick.

"_As much right to save his skin..._" she repeated blankly, and the blood seemed to turn to water in her veins. "Oh, I might have known ...

I might have known! Mean souls do not suddenly become heroic! _To save his skin!_"

And it was the name of such a man that she bore by law! For such a one her little Bran must be branded illegitimate. She ground her teeth in rage and despair, and gave out a little moan.

Around the black mora.s.s that surrounded her there showed only one small glimmer of light--it was the remembrance of that faint gleam that kept her from going mad. He had offered it as a sort of propitiation for the fact of his being still alive, and she shuddered at her own heartless catching at it. She might not have believed but for the bleak tint of his skin.