CHAPTER XX

THE WAYS OF LIFE AND DEATH

"Oh them who plantest in the eyes and hearts of girls The cult of wounding and the barbs of love!" Translation from BAUDELAIRE'S Litany to Satan.

"Yes; she is very droll, your _belle-maman_," said the Comtesse de Vervanne. "To live in three _ateliers_! That is _fantastique_! Three big wide _ateliers_! one for herself, one for the little Bran, and one other for--_who_? Who is it that dwells in the third _atelier_ across the landing, Haidee, my very dear?"

"Don't ask _me_," said Haidee sulkily, yet with alert eyes, for she was unable to contain her curiosity and amazement at the news. Val with three studios, who on their return to Paris had not possessed the price of a quarter's rent for one! And according to Madame de Vervanne they were big studios--no mere holes in the wall with skylights let in the ceiling. Parquet floors, beautifully shaded walls, wide galleries and French windows that led into balconies! It sounded like an Arabian tale. Haidee knew, as she knew most practical everyday things, how the rents of studios ranged, and she computed that the rent of such a one as the Comtesse described ran into not a centime less than three thousand francs a year. And Val with three! But the thing was incomprehensible, _impayable_--fantastic indeed as the Comtesse described it!

She was aware from the new address forwarded to her that Val had removed to the Lamartine Building in Boulevard Raspail, a great block of newly finished and very elaborate studios, which they in company with all the other hard-working and poor artists of the Quarter had long made a mock of, calling it the American Crystal Palace. It had lifts, a roof garden, balconies, baths, and all the luxuries that artists can never aspire to. Haidee on seeing the changed address had supposed that in the feeble condition of the family finances Val had been obliged to take one or two of the tiny rooms always to be let at the top of most big mansions, and which are usually rented out to domestics. The idea was not displeasing to Haidee. In the frame of mind she had adopted she liked to think of Val suffering discomfort and poverty. And she did not care either if Bran had to undergo the same thing, because she knew that if Bran's quarters were cramped Val would suffer far more than for herself. It will be seen that the dark caves in Haidee's soul had taken unto themselves infernal occupants, as dark caves will if the sunshine of loving-kindness is not let into them from day to day. It actually irked her to hear now from Christiane de Vervanne that Bran's room was as big as a schoolroom.

"About four times as big as this," said the Comtesse, casting an appraising eye round classroom B of the Pavilion Mauve. "With shelves all round, and an assortment of toys most wonderful. Even I could find myself very much amused with such toys. He has a _foxe_ too."

"A fox!" shrieked Haidee.

"But yes--one of the little black and white ones with the tail of him cut off."

"Oh, a fox-_terrier_." Haidee turned away impatiently, but curiosity obliged her to turn back instantly to hear the rest of the amazing tale.

"At one end of this big nursery studio two white beds, one for the _petit_ Bran and one for the American governess who is permanently installed and very devoted."

"A governess to sleep with Bran!" exclaimed Haidee. "Oh, no, that is too strong. I have never known Val let Bran sleep out of her sight!"

"But yes--it is all so _bizarre_. You must go home and see, my Haidee."

Indeed Haidee registered a resolution to write to Val that very night and ask for a _sortie_ letter to be sent for her to come home for the following Saturday night and Sunday. She was still hating Val with a fierce hatred and had no desire to see her. But this was a thing that had got to be looked into.

"And," continued Madame de Vervanne, with her amiable air of finding everything extremely amusing, "who do I find installed in the studio of Madame Valdana taking tea, indeed making tea, as much at home as if he had collected the sticks for it on the Mascaret beach, but--who do you think, my Cabbage?"

"Goodness knows!" muttered the Cabbage. "Val is mad."

"Why, who but our _cher_ Poulot, Rupert!"

"Rupert! She 's got _him_, now?" cried Haidee, and her face darkened as definitely as if some one had passed a blacking-brush over it.

"Yes," said the Comtesse softly, reflectively. "It is as you say. First poor dear Sacha, now the innocent Poulot. Who next?" She sighed.

There was a little silence. Then Haidee said:

"Rupert has been twice to see me, once on Sunday and once on Thursday."

"Ah! and did he tell you how many times he went to see Madame Valentine?"

"No, indeed, and I don't care anyhow," was the retort given with perhaps unnecessary fierceness.

"But," cooed Madame soothingly, "one should care a little, _chere_ Haidee, for the sake of the poor good Poulot. She is no doubt a very fine lady, the charming Mistress Valentine, but we do not wish to see Rupert suffer as Sacha did."

The subtle words bit into Haidee's heart like acid on an old wound. She had been very much touched at the Comtesse's act in writing to the Directrice for permission to call at the Lycee. And it was very gratifying that Madame de Vervanne should have arrived in a motor which also contained a young lieutenant of Dragons in uniform, and which stood growling and puffing at the Lycee gates, filling all the girls with excitement and envy. Haidee's vanity too was greatly flattered by the tender and confidential manner of the older woman, who never forgot also to tell her how pretty and clever she was and to give recognition to the fact that she was now seventeen. So different to Val's manner of treating her as though she were still a child and quite unable to arrange her own destiny. A curious, fresh access of fury was aroused in Haidee's breast by the Comtesse's tale of Rupert's devotion to Val. Rupert had been to see Haidee twice. He was stationed at Fontainebleau, doing his second year of military service, and when he came to the Lycee accompanied by his sister Celine he was wearing the ordinary private soldier's uniform, and looking very handsome in the gay red and blue. All the girls had admired him immensely, and Haidee herself liked him extraordinarily better than in Mascaret. While Celine talked with some of the girls she knew, Rupert and Haidee had wandered about the gardens, talking about Sacha and little incidents of their happy time together that now, looked at from a little distance of time, seemed wonderfully perfumed and beautified. The remembrance of these two walks with him made Haidee burn with sudden indignation against Val.

The Comtesse had begun to talk about other things, made Haidee show her all round Pavilion Mauve and the big roomy schoolhouse, then take her out into the grounds, along the paths that wound amongst other Pavilions, the Red, the Blue, the Rose--and over broad lawns that in the soft mild air of Versailles were green, even in winter. In the middle of one of the lawns was a little lake bordered by strange-leaved dwarf-like bushes that in summer were thick with crimson flowers, but which now stretched out frail black branches to the silent fountain. Dead leaves rustled and cracked under the Comtesse's high-heeled shoes as they walked. She waved her hand at the well-kept tennis courts.

"But you are charmingly well here!" she cried, in her gay little soprano. "Oh, to be young again and lovely like you, my child! Not all the Mistress Valdanas could take away from me what I wanted!"

She returned meditatively to the former subject.

"But who is it that resides in the third _atelier_ think you, Haidee? Curiosity consumes and burns me. There is a door leading into it from Madame's _atelier_. Twice she left us to go swiftly and return. Once when the door opened I heard a man cough. Tell me?--it could not be the mysterious papa returned, could it?"

Haidee gazed at her blankly.

"There _is_ a mysterious papa, is it not?" If the curiosity of the Comtesse had not always been pleasantly glossed by pretty childish gestures and rippling laughter, it might have seemed vulgar. Haidee was not clever enough to realise this, and she was staggered by the whole strange story, which sounded unlike Val in every detail, but even in her amazement she was not going to confide to a comparative stranger the tangled domestic history of the family. If she had no feeling but one of resentment for Val, she could still be loyal to Westenra.

"Oh yes, there is a papa--Bran's papa of course, and my guardian; but it would n't be him."

"That makes even more _bizarre_ the affair," said the Comtesse lightly. Then, knowing that she had said enough for the time being, she dismissed the subject and shortly afterwards departed with her Dragon.

As soon as she was gone Haidee, who was nothing if not prompt, sat down and wrote to Val for a _sortie_ letter for the coming Sunday. She intended to investigate this mystery of the three studios for herself--likewise the story of Rupert's entanglement.

But to her acute annoyance the opportunity was not afforded her. A letter from Val came by return to the effect that she was too busy and worried to be able to receive Haidee that term. As a palliative she sent a parcel of books, an enormous box of exquisite chocolates from Boissier's, and a dozen tennis balls. Haidee was a devotee of tennis and always complained bitterly of the lack of balls, for tennis balls are outrageously expensive in France. These Val sent were of the best quality and must have cost at least three francs each. The mystery deepened.

----

During the bad time of worriment and weariness with Valdana, Rupert was indeed a great stay to Val. Being stationed so close to Paris he was able to come often to the Lamartine Studios, and she was always glad to see the blue friendly eyes that had in them some of the space and compassion of sea and sky. There was something so loyal and reliable about him that she had actually told him the truth about Valdana, and been definitely aided by his sympathy and understanding. His influence was good, too, for Bran, who was beginning to reach that stage when the society and point of view of men means a great deal in a boy's life. And Bran had always had a special _penchant_ for boys and men. It gave Val many a sharp pang, not of resentment but of sorrow, to observe in him a yearning for his father, for she knew that whatever she was able to do for her son, she could never assuage that longing, never give him the masculine companionship and influence of which he had been robbed. It grieved her terribly to think that in her son's life those lovely pliable years, when bonds between father and son are so simply but strongly fashioned from the one's weakness and the other's strength, were passing week by week, month by month. Glad enough then was she that he had at least the friendly brotherly affection and influence of so clear-hearted a boy as Rupert.

With Valdana she never allowed Bran to come into contact. Indeed, Valdana from the first was practically oblivious to those about him. His race was very nearly run. He had come to Val in the last lap of it, upheld by God knew what strange resolution to make her share to the bitter end their disastrous partnership. Having found her he seemed content to let life wreak her pitiless worst on him before he was allowed to depart to that death which he had once ignobly shirked, but whose embrace he now longed for with the ardour of a lover. His sufferings, indeed, were terrible. In the centre of the great lofty room he lay and wrestled with an agony that was almost unceasing. But he was well aware of being surrounded and enfolded by every comfort. Softened light, flowers, music, good nursing, everything that money and kindness could supply to alleviate pain was at hand, and he knew he had Val to thank, and vaguely wondered how she achieved it, but did not care much as long as she was by his bedside, in the pale blue linen overall she always assumed as soon as she entered. Cancer may or may not be infectious--that is one of the problems science has not yet solved--but with Bran so near she took no risks, changing even her clothes on entering and leaving the sick-room, which was an entirely self-contained _appartement_ and _atelier_. She had been so fortunate as to obtain in the newly-finished building the whole of the immense floor of three studios. It rejoiced her to be able to give her Brannie one entirely to himself and his governess. That was one of the joys the seventy-five thousand pounds had brought her. She had already spent some hundreds of it on furnishing and the heavy expenses entailed by Valdana's needs. But the rest she had been wise enough to allow the kindly Bernstein to invest for her, and her mind was at rest at last and for the first time in her life from the gnawing tooth of poverty. She was doing no writing. Not only was her life, divided between Bran and the sick man, too full for such a thing, but at last she could permit herself the luxury of refraining from writing when she had nothing to say. That forced work in Mascaret had sickened her soul. Now she could let her creative faculty rest for a while at least and give undivided attention to this duty of hers to Valdana.

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 pass 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 pass 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 pass 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 passing spirit of vindictiveness which impelled it, did not make the letter as a document 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 noble 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 gratitude 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 Godin 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--God! it was as hot as hell 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 bloody 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 lust 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 transmuted passion 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 hell 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 Montparnasse, dropped a few violets, flowers of compassion 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.

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