“ Marriage is full of surprises, and not always happy ones. This barrier of reserve that she soon divined in her husband was one of the things that amazed Val. Her own heart was a book ready to open at the touch of love. True, some of its pages were scrawled and scribbled, blotted too in places and stained with tears; but there it was, ready to fly open to a trusted hand. It was not her fault that Westenra had refused to turn up those pages, but rather at his wish that they had been sealed and locked away. ”

“ Indeed, the lure of the horizon is so great on that fair shore, that if she had been alone in the world nothing could have held Val from taking train to Marseilles, and from thence as fast as ship could bear her. But Bran and his well-being bound her fast like Prometheus to his rock. The rush of trains and the throb of ships' machinery are no furtherances to health in young children. It is in quiet gardens and comfortable homes that the young heart expands and the little body shoots and flourishes. ”

“ THE WAYS OF A LOVER
THE WAY OF THE SEA
"All the great things of life are simply done,
Creation, Death, and Love the Double Gate."
MASEFIELD.
One morning Harriott came into Val's room and found her writing at the table with the blue veil fallen off, lying on her shoulders.
"Why, Val!" she exclaimed in genuine astonishment. "Your hair is perfectly lovely! Never, never cover it up any more!"
"Really?" said Val shyly and flushing deep rose. "Do you think I might go without the veil now?"
"Do I think! Look at yourself!" ”

“ Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue, blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus plays on the floor. ”

“ Westenra had never seen her look so much at peace with herself and her surroundings or realised before that she possessed beauty. He did not realise indeed that never had he seen Val in beautiful clothes nor in surroundings that were full of grace and peace. Always he had the picture of her rushing about the house in 68th Street like some driven wild thing, the worried look of a hunted creature in her eyes, the grey linen overalls typical of the grey hurrying life, making her eyes grey only, without a glint of the blueness which now made them so attractive. ”

“ Oh, Harry, if Bran--if Bran--!" Her eyes darkened with tears, her lips twisted in an anguish of terror and love and foreboding.
"Never think of such a thing," cried Harriott. "It is like inviting the daughter of Zeus to come after you. You will have Bran and much more than Bran, dear. Your life is far from over. There are those whom Sorrow elects her own for many years only to bless them in the end. All will come right with you yet, Val." ”

“ Travelling had not agreed with Bran the pagan. On the ship he had been dreadfully sick and lost all his plumpness and lovely colouring, but in the mild mists of Jersey and Channel breezes, fresh and unpolluted by the microbes of cities, he began to bloom again. Haidee, too, pallid when they first arrived, changed under the spell of the country. Like all persons who had been held long in cities she felt the joy of the open, of trees, and grass, and living things, and began to blossom and smile into a different creature. ”

“ Ill luck can always come to mothers. Mothers are never safe--nor fathers! She thought of Sacha lying still on the beach, and of that stern look on his father's face!
"Oh God! What are necklaces? ... what is money? ... what is anything against that pain?" she cried in her heart, and held Bran so tightly that he gave a yelp. Haidee, as always now, sat wrapt in a sullen reserve. Neither by look nor word did she exhibit the faintest sympathy for any troubles but her own. The only thing that seemed to interest her was the prospect of getting away from Val and Bran to her new life at school. ”

“ Every woman hopes to find in the man she loves something big and vast and eternal in which she can become absorbed, and lose herself. For every woman has the secret fear that by herself she is nothing, can be nothing, and has no eternal life except in and through love.
She had loved Westenra from the first with all the wise and foolish reasons a woman will find for putting her hands under the feet of the beloved, for his boyish laugh, and the way his hair grew, his witty tongue, the simplicity of his heart, and the subtlety of his mind ”

“ However hard the day's work, she never had more than an hour or two of the dead slumber of exhaustion. Then, regular as an alarm, a little worry-bell would ring in her brain, dimly at first, then more and more insistent and clamorous. At last she would be as widely awake as if some one had taken her by the shoulders and shaken her out of sleep to hear some terrible and significant news.
"Wake up, Val Valdana, you have slept long enough! There is the little affair of Garrett Westenra's happiness to consider--and Garrett Westenra's son--and Horace Valdana's lease of life! ”

“ For a woman to stake everything on a man is to play a losing game. But another love in the soul, be it music, literature, art, mathematics, or the maternal instinct, is insurance against total beggary. If by great good chance a man's love brings happiness, then the other love is an added glory; if misery comes the other is a refuge.
Poor Val! She had not followed the creed herself, but she saw well enough the wisdom of it for Haidee, and had tried to instil into her the prudence of going nap on Art rather than on Heart. ”

“ Even good swimmers in such a sea contented themselves with going in only up to the armpits, waiting for the breaker to gather them up, then pass and leave them in flat, clear water ready for the next.
The Comtesse and Celine, tired from their journey the day before, sat and looked on, but Rupert, Val, Haidee, and Sacha, with half a dozen others, were in the water jumping like maniacs, diving through sheer solid green walls, disappearing under avalanches of foam, gasping, laughing, panting. ”

“ You cannot desert the scars life has given you, nor divest yourself of her compensating gifts. Moreover, Valentine was a woman who had triumphs to brandish as well as sorrows; laurels and hard-wrung victories to flag over the graves of defeat. Yet none more ready than she to believe that it could be done, that love could wipe out suffering and scars and make the face of life to shine anew like the face of a little child. For love she was ready to forswear Art, her profession, her friends, her past, and forget that she ever had a career. Westenra could not ask too much of her. ”

“ He had known what it was to share life right down to the core with another human being, and when that has once been, solitude redoubles its sting. A fantastic creature like Val, however uncomfortable she made life, could not be lost out of it without leaving a big, aching gap.
Yet, there he was on his way back to America, while in far Jersey Val sat on her rabbit-hutch staring at the sea with blind eyes, Bran playing unheeded at her knees, in her ears the faint, melancholy cry of the curlew. ”

“ She swung round with the wild jerk of a lassoed 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. ”

“ And Val, though she knew her friend had two thousand a year, and was used to every comfort of modern civilisation, felt no hesitation about bidding her welcome. Harriott Kesteven was a woman after her own heart; one who could make herself just as much at home in the little wooden cabins of Villa Duval as in her luxurious London flat; who would rather tramp the desert with the friend of her heart than be borne in the silken litters of a stranger's caravan. ”

“ To Val at least those were flawless days. For once in her life she had got what she wanted, and the gift had not turned to dust and ashes in her hand. Happiness and gaiety radiated from her, and Westenra, caught in the rays, reflected them back, so that no one would have guessed that he was not so happy as she. Though, indeed, for a man who has the perilous gift of seeing through life's red and golden apples to the little spot of decay at the core, he was extraordinarily content. ”

“ To herself Val could not disguise what a joy it would be to see Harriott again; to show her Bran--the one tangible treasure snatched from the grudging hand of Fate; to open her heart a little to eyes that were lovingly tolerant, and would smile rather than condemn. Friendship should be always such a joy: clear water in sight of a thirsty soul--a tree under which to rest after long travel!
Harriott having speedily wired back that she and her girl were starting at once, via Southampton and Jersey, preparations for their advent set in at Villa Duval. ”

“ Impossible to disgrace a country to right a private affair--even if the country were one you hated. But what a situation! There seemed to him to be no way out of it. Val, for a deep reason of her own, withheld from him the fact of Valdana's broken health. She wished him to feel absolutely free of her. She kept repeating that, with sardonic inflexible eyes.
"You see, you are free! What more do you ask?"
He asked much more, but with that mocking smile on her pale lips he would not tell her so. ”

“ But there was little time for dreaming at Cliff Farm. Val, with a resolution to cost Westenra as little as possible, did nearly all the work of the place herself, only employing a woman two or three times a week to do rough cleaning. But not content to economise only, she thrilled with a scheme to augment their slight income. A yearning to found a successful poultry and rabbit farm seized her soul. Haidee, bitten by the same mania, fostered the ambition, and with heads together over a poultry journal they read rapturously of fortunes to be made in this direction. ”

“ Westenra, too, was aware of a sensation that surprised him, at the sight of this woman who had once been so much to his life and now was nothing, standing there with frank outstretched hands smiling a welcome from under her cool flowery hat. The fact was that she did not sufficiently look the part of a shrine-smasher. If he had not happened to know her guilty it might have been quite difficult for him to believe that this was the woman who had destroyed his life-dreams--and ruined his home. ”

“ She flung out of the room.
"So that is my reward for putting up with that silly ass for three weeks!" said Val to herself, and sighed once more. Wearily she lighted her candle and went to warm her heart with a glimpse of her son. He lay flung on the pillow like a warm pink rose. She burrowed her nose gently into his soft neck, scenting the lovely puppy dog scent that all young things have round their throats, scenting, too, the little stinky hands that in his yearning for bed he had only half-washed. ”

“ Recuperation set in at last with Westenra, and he began to return to health almost as swiftly as he had departed from it, and with health came a full tide of love and gratitude to the woman who had so devotedly nursed him back to life. But in the wraith at his bedside he hardly recognised Val. She had strangely changed, yet poignantly recalled to him that grey lady of long ago, whom in the past months of pain and fevered rush he had almost forgotten. Shadows seem to hang about her as in his dream. ”

“ Impossible for a thoughtful man who has known poverty and carried memories of his mother's fingers worn with darning to imagine such a woman as a wife and mother. Plainly the shrine Westenra had built for the woman of his dreams could never be occupied by this one. No shrine could keep for long so restless a heart, nor fireside and cradle detain such wandering feet! ”

“ 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. ”

“ If when I am unhappy I put on something crimson it seems to warm and cheer my heart like a fire. Don't you think the robin is happier for his red breast?"
Westenra said nothing. She had switched his mind off oddly to the things he loved in his boyhood--birds hopping in the garden, the robin's note--a rabbit flashing past through the dewy grass.
"If ever you are in deep despair and can see a field of poppies all glad and aflare under the blaze of the sun----"
She appeared to have forgotten him and to be talking to herself. He too was away amongst the dews and tender sunshine of Ireland. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Haidee's attitude acutely added to the misery and uncertainty of life at this time, and in the dusky shadows of the cab as it rumbled over to the Latin Quarter, Val held her boy's head against her breast and slow tears stole down her face and were drawn in between her lips, drying her throat with their salty flavour. Life too tasted salt and acrid. ”

“ But in those few seconds a man's life had been changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra. Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious and irreplaceable. ”

“ Valdana was a perfect example of this professional black sheep--whom novelists and playwrights have encouraged into existence--the man who talks rather sadly about his family never having seen any good in him, but who, by "carving out a career" for himself means to show them some day that he is "not such a waster after all!" Any woman of the world would have seen through him in a very short time; but poor Val was no woman of the world, only a gifted, romantic girl, with all the worldly stupidity and shortsightedness of her kind. ”

“ Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at Bran's head bobbing up and down in the old Jules Duval. ”

“ The two French boys were always hovering in the vicinity, whether on the beach when the party went to bathe, on the digue to watch the Jersey boat arrive--now one of the daily interests--or out walking on the cliff. Often, as they sauntered in the lanes, the girls ahead, Harry and Val loitering and gossiping behind, the sound of bicycles would be heard and the two boys would whirr past, sending swift, hardy glances at the girls, making the occasion an excuse for apologetically lifting their caps. ”

“ A SKELETON AND A SHRINE
"The heart of a pure man is a deep vase."
And while Valentine stayed on her knees thanking God for the happiness that had come to her, Garrett Westenra was pacing the darkened decks with misgiving in his heart. The misgiving was not regret. When you are of those who stand by your given word you do not waste time in anything so idle as regret. ”

“ Though Westenra might be a devoted father Bran would never, without a mother, grow up to be the man she hoped. No little child can spare its mother,--though many, alas! by the hard decree of death, and oftener the cruel decisions of life, have to do so. There is something a mother gives a child which no one else in the whole wide world can give. Val had a curious belief too that just as no woman possessed a soul except through the man she loved and the child she passed on, so no son ever came to the full possession of his soul except through the love of a mother. ”

“ He had never spent more than a few weeks of his yearly holiday with his mother, and the rest of the two months in different parts of Europe, but always he had felt her in his life; sitting by her fireside in her beautiful little Carlow home she had constituted his bit of Ireland, his share of the world. Now he was a lonely man without home or kin. The ache of emptiness was in his heart as he stared at the few pale early stars that had ventured forth into the evening sky.
Nothing was left in his life now except a child and a woman ”

“ She felt as though her brain were dead and she had only her body left, that body which, however glad she would be to lay it down, she must conserve and take care of for the sake of Bran. For Haidee, too, she had a kind of responsible mother-feeling, though Haidee never encouraged tenderness in any one. But the case of Bran was different; the child of two such nervous people could not be otherwise than nervously organised, though of fine build and stamina, and Val knew that under any care but hers he would probably grow up a weakling. No, she must not die! ”

“ Yet she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as long and thick as Haidee's own.
"It is this confounded writing plays--and stewing veal!" she murmured, and stared at herself desperately. She had the eyes of the exile who never for one moment forgets his exile; only, it was not one country she mourned but many. Poor Val! she was too, that rare unhappy thing, a born lover. Never for one moment was the man she loved out of her mind ”