Wanderfoot Part 38

He had often been struck by the wonderful pearly beauty of the Comfort necklace.

"I am glad for your sake," he said at last; "it must simplify the future a great deal. I beg your pardon for what I said a moment ago. It is bad enough that I should have been denied the right to support my own son--but I could not bear that that other fellow should have done it.

It even sticks in my gorge that you should have allowed Bran to come into contact with him."

"Whom are you speaking of, Garrett?"

"Why do you ask that? Surely you do not think me unaware of the fact of your return to Valdana?"

"Ah!" she said softly, and drew in her breath. "You know that?"

"Of course I know. It was that knowledge which brought me to France. I could not allow Bran or even Haidee, to be anywhere within the radius of that--" He bit off "scoundrel."

"Neither of them has ever seen him----"

"I thank you for that at least."

"Nor would ever have seen him."

"Oh, as to----"

"Is that the reason you would not enter my house nor accept my hospitality?"

He did not answer, but his neck stiffened, and he gave her the direct look which she well knew meant a.s.sent. And she thought to herself:

"There is not anything base and odious of which he does not think me capable. It is well that he and I should part for ever. The soul constantly suspected of baseness and cruelty must become degraded in time and shrink away to nothing. I will go away from here to places where my soul can grow and not shrink." These thoughts pa.s.sed swiftly through her mind. All she said aloud was:

"You need not have feared. Horace Valdana has never come here, nor ever will. He and I will not meet again."

They had come out of the shadowy whispering paths and reached the open gravelled terrace, with the still waters of the Mediterranean lying below, silent under the stars, sombre as a pool of blue ink. The little group of chairs stood inviting. By mutual consent they sat down.

Inside the Villa Haidee was at the piano playing wide, gallant chords, to which Rupert, in a rather strong tenor, sang s.n.a.t.c.hes of the _Paimpolaise_.

"Et le pauvre gars ... fredonne tout has: * * * * *

'J'aime Paimpol et sa falaise, Son cloche et son grand Pardon.

J'aime encore mieux, la Paimpolaise Qui m'attend au pays breton.'"

"Of course," said Westenra slowly, "if you are alone, and are going to be alone ... I have no right to take Bran."

"There is no question of right--" She put her hand over her heart--she could not speak calmly of this last savage blow fate was dealing her by the hand of her loved son. "He wants to go. That is enough."

"You know I will mind him well," he said gently.

"No one can mind him as I do," was her inward cry, but she said nothing, only pressed her hand harder to her side.

"----and that he will come back to you. It is only fair that I should have him for a little while, but naturally I do not want to keep him from you, and I am very sure he would not stay."

She was still silent. He looked at her keenly. Each knew what the other suffered, for at the heart of each the parent hunger gnawed with cruel teeth.

"You will not beguile him from his wish to come with me?--I am very sure you could. It would be natural for him to stick to you after all you 've done for him--but you won't?" Almost he was pleading with her.

"Did I to-day?" Her face was bleak.

"No, G.o.d knows--and it would have been easy enough!"

"I know he needs you. A boy begins to need a father's influence, and Bran has always had a hunger for men and their ways ... but, oh! mind him well, Garrett Westenra ... mind him well ... give him back to me as sweet and whole in soul and body as I lend him to you--" Her voice broke. She could bear no more. Swiftly she rose, and with a little gesture full of despair and abnegation and farewell, left him.

The next day Westenra was gone, presumably to Paris to give his lectures. Rupert, who had walked home with him the night before, brought a brief message of farewell to the Villa of Little Days, and the news that they might expect him back in anything under ten days.

As for Val, she went to bed for a week. At least she retired to her room, declaring a fear that a slight cold she had might develop into _grippe_, and that summer _grippe_ was the most boring of all illnesses, and that she was not going to risk becoming the greatest of bores. So she lay down a good deal in a darkened room. When she was not resting she wrote many letters, and in the cool of the evening she would sit on her clematis-wreathed balcony with Bran in her arms, her lips on his hair, listening to his account of the day's doings. For Rupert's car was perpetually at the gate, and never a day pa.s.sed but he and Haidee and Bran set off on some long excursion into the surrounding country.

Haidee came up to Val's room sometimes to make perfunctory inquiries.

She would stare hard at the latter lying so lazily amongst her cus.h.i.+ons, and narrowly search the smiling face. But, except that colour had fled from cheek and lip, Val showed no signs of trouble, only a vivid interest in all they had been doing.

"You do take it easy, I must say," Haidee remarked half grudgingly the fourth evening after Westenra's departure. "Lying here in the cool while we have to scoot about in the heat and dust."

Val laughed.

"You don't _have_ to, chicken. And scooting in a motor is not so very disagreeable after all. You look as if it agreed with you, anyway."

Indeed the girl was radiant, and her half-hearted grumblings were entirely contradicted by her eager air of enjoying life. She need not have resented that Val smiled so brightly from her bed, and perhaps she would not have done so if she could have seen that when the door closed on her the light went out of the smoke-coloured eyes, and the smile withered, leaving only weariness upon Val's lips.

But on the day Westenra's return was notified by telegram Val came down very bright and gay and presided over the tea-table under the pines.

Rupert had just brought the others back from Gra.s.se in a condition of physical flop, and all three were distributed upon chairs in att.i.tudes of utter abandon. Val, with all the colour back again in her pale dark face, looked fresher than any of them. Westenra's wire was a subject of great intrigue. It had come not from Paris, but from a little out-of-the-way place called Baurem les Mimosas, which lay about two hours from Cannes and not even on the main line! No one knew by which train he was coming, or where to go and meet him.

"I don't believe he has been in Paris at all," said Haidee discontentedly, and certainly the man who at that moment appeared at the top of one of the winding paths and came strolling towards them bore no stamp of Paris on himself or his raiment. His face, in spite of the protecting brim of a cow-puncher's hat which had clearly seen life and experience in other climes, was badly sunburnt, and he wore a truly disreputable grey flannel suit of the reach-me-down cla.s.s, and evidently made for the French figure rather than for an Irishman of large and athletic build. The waist and hip measurements were of such amplitude as to give a slightly _bouffant_ effect, but the calf accommodation was limited to bursting point; the rest of the trouser-leg would have hung in frills round the ankles had they not been secured tightly by large white safety-pins. A pair of "Weary Willie" canvas shoes completed Westenra's outfit.

"_Garry!_" gasped Haidee, shocked beyond words. But Bran leaped upon his father and embraced him joyously.

"Where you been, Daddy?"

"I been bicycling," responded daddy affably and saluted every one, beginning with Val and ending with Rupert. "That's where I been!"

"Bicycling! What a thing!" cried Haidee, while Val made him fresh tea.

"How _could_ you come through Cannes such a sight, Garry?"

"What's the matter with me? I feel good in these togs. In future I shall always dress like this."

Haidee shuddered.

"You did n't go to Paris after all?"

"No, Haidee, I did not go to Paris. I hired a bicycle, bought this bicycling suit you don't admire, and took to the open road. There isn't any village between here and Toulon that I haven't explored inside out, nor any 'cafe debitant' where I have n't sampled the chianti or the astispumanti or anything else that was _tanti_."

"But what for, Garry? Why?"

"I had some thinking to do," said Garry, "and I thought I could do it better on a bicycle than in Paris."