CHAPTER XIX

THE WAY OF NEMESIS

"Spring is dead, And summer is dead. Oh! my heart, And, oh! my head!"

It had always been understood that after the summer Haidee was to go back to Paris to finish her education at the Versailles Lycee, while Val and Bran put in another healthy, if desolate winter at Mascaret. Now the latter part of the plan was impossible. The place was haunted, for Val, by poor Sacha's ghost. She knew not where to go except it were back to Paris. Bran was older now and his health established. Perhaps if she could find a governess for him he would get along all right while she worked! The need for work was imperative. Funds were down to zero. She knew not where to turn for money, except where nothing but the prospect of starvation for Bran would let her turn—to the Credit Lyonnais where lay the accumulating quarterly sums from Westenra.

So when the time came for Haidee to make her entrance at the Lycee, Bran and Val returned to Paris as well: the latter having written and re-engaged her old studio which was to let furnished.

Haidee was a changed girl. She seemed to have grown years older and hard as a stone. She had withdrawn herself from all intimacy with Val, and was even cold and harsh in her manner to Bran, who could not understand and was always saying wistfully:

"Don't you love me any more, Haidee?"

"Of course I do," she would answer impatiently.

"Then why do you look at me as if you 'd like to spank me on my tailie?"

"Oh, don't worry me, Bran. You make me tired!"

Mascaret seemed suddenly to have grown old and grey. A great coldness had settled upon the little village. Bitter winds swept every leaf from the trees and the sun was hidden in wet mists. The Villa Shai-poo, its flagstaff bare, its windows shuttered and barred, looked like a bereaved brooding mother folding arms on her grief. The occupants of Villa Duval were the last of the visitors to leave the village. Even Sacha had gone. His people had taken him back to Paris to lie in the family vault at Pere La Chaise.

From Mascaret to Paris is an eight hours' journey on the worst line in France, and when they reached St. Lazare Station late in the afternoon they were all tired out, with hearts as heavy as lead. Val left Bran on Haidee's lap in the waiting-room while she went to unlock the trunks in the Customs' shed. There were crowds of travellers and loads of baggage to be gone through, for the boat-train from Cherbourg was just in also. Val, very weary, sat on the low table waiting, and staring about her with sad eyes full of trouble. Suddenly, standing quite near, she saw a face she knew. She could not immediately place the man in her memory but she was so sure of knowing him that she smiled and gave a little nod. Immediately he took off his hat and approached.

"I think you almost remember, Mrs. Valdana, but not quite," he said. The moment she heard his voice she placed him. It was the French Jew who had sat next her on board the Bavaric.

"How do you do, Mr. Bernstein!" she said cordially, extending her hand. It was as though she had met an old friend. A look of keen pleasure came into his shrewd face.

"Such a memory must be a treasure to you as a journalist!"

"A journalist!" The words sounded strange in her ears. How many years ago since she was a journalist! Since she first met this man! A far absorbed look came into her eyes.

"I knew you in a minute," he said. "You have not changed at all, only grown a little"—("sadder," he was going to say, but substituted)—"younger."

"Ah! you have not changed either," she said dryly.

"You have even the same beautiful chain on you! I hope you have not forgotten your promise to give me first refusal if ever you want to sell it?"

A startled look flashed across her face.

"Ah, yes! My chain! You did say that, did n't you?" She stared at him meditatively. "What do you really think it is worth?"

"It would be hard to say right here." He had grown extremely American in accent and speech. "But if you would call and see me with it. Are you staying in Paris?"

"Yes."

He got out a card.

"Well, here is my office address—Rue de Bach. Call any time you like, but soon, as I am off to England again in three days."

"I will come to-morrow," she said. "In the meantime, would n't it be a good thing for you to take the necklace with you and examine it?"

She detached it from her neck with some little difficulty, for the clasp was a firm one, and held it out. The Jew looked at her with eyes in which for a moment there hovered a shade of something like pity that quickly turned to pleasure. A faint flush came into his face, and as he took the necklace he pressed her hand warmly. In America where he had been for the past five years such a trusting spirit as Val's was not met with every day in the week, and the rencontre refreshed his jaded Hebraic heart like wine.

"You just come," he said cordially, "and I bet I 'll have something good to tell you."

Immediately afterwards she was called to open her luggage, and bade him good-bye, telling him that she had some one waiting for her.

All the way of the long drive across Paris, she sat cogitating the question of the necklace. Even if it turned out to be of value, ought she to part with it? Would ill luck come to her for parting with her mother's mascot? Could any worse luck than she already had, come to her, she began to ask herself in irony? Then she stopped and flung her arms round Bran. Yes; yes. 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. It chilled Val's heart to have one who had been so close turn away from her thus. Even worse it was to see Bran's dear little efforts to be kind and friendly, snubbed. Every rebuff to him was like a blow in the face to Val. But she would not blame Haidee: the child was dear to Westenra. Besides she was only a child, and had suffered through Sacha's death. The shock of it coming on top of her wounded pride and little lost love-dream was enough to embitter her, thought Val, and blamed herself for ever having interfered.

"Such things are safe in God's hands! He takes care of children and drunkards. Who am I to have arrogated His rights?"

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. It seemed to her that in everything she had put her hand to she had failed and fallen short.

At rue Campaigne premiere the concierge almost embraced them, so delighted was she to see them again.

"Many people have been looking for Madame and wishing her back," she announced. "Not only artists but persons very chic also have been to call."

"Locusts!" said Val to herself. "Locusts and devourers all!" She knew those chic ones well. People who would not work themselves and could not bear to see others achieving. All artists have this class to contend with.

"I told every one you would be back this week. I know you owe no one money, and are not afraid, like some artists, of visitors," said the concierge cheerfully, and Val gave a groan. She resolved to be up early the next day and take Haidee off to school before there was a chance of meeting any early-fliers.

Before she went to bed, however, she unpacked her papers and found a little old parchment letter which dealt with the gift to her mother of the comfort necklace. It was written in Russian and neither she nor her mother had ever had the curiosity to have it translated, but Iolita had always been careful to preserve it, and it had marvellously survived all Val's many packings and wanderings. She now sealed it up and forwarded it to Bernstein on the vague chance of its being of use in the valuation of the necklace.

At seven in the morning she received a petit bleu from him, evidently sent off the night before, but posted after tea, asking her to call without fail at three o'clock that afternoon. Immediately she sent out her femme de menage to see if Bran's old governess, the young American girl, could take charge of him for the day, giving him lunch and tea at her mother's home. That matter satisfactorily settled, she started for the Gare Montparnasse with Haidee, en route for Versailles. It took the whole morning to settle Haidee in, pay her bills, and talk over with the Directrice her future course of study. Asked to lunch with the girls at the Lycee she would not stay. It was no pleasure to be with Haidee while she preserved that sullen, resentful manner. Life was grim enough! So Val took lunch in a little cremerie in the avenue de Paris, and returned to Paris by tram to the Pont Royal, where she dismounted and took a bus to Bernstein's number in the Rue de Bach.

He received her with a manner full of some suppressed excitement which quickly communicated itself to her.

"You have something to tell me?" she said, trembling with she knew not what fear. She had almost forgotten the necklace. With her curious sense of prevision it was revealed to her in some way that for the moment the Jew was arbiter of her destiny.

"Sit down," he said, pushing a comfortable chair towards her. "I want you to tell me the history of the necklace."

"Oh, as to that, Mr. Bernstein, I know very little. My mother gave it to me when she died. She had always worn it, ever since I can remember. She loved the beautiful little pictures, and she had an idea that it was not only a mascot against extreme poverty but also that it possessed some healing power in sickness. Many times when we were very poor indeed she was asked by people who liked curious things to sell it, but she never would. She always remembered that the old Russian man who gave it to her told her that in the day of trouble it would bring comfort to her and hers. He was a strange old man who lived in exile in Spain. He had committed some political crime and had fled from Russia; was very wealthy but lived with great simplicity in quite a poor part of Seville, and it was there that he made great friends with my mother and her father, who was blind but had been a great adventurer and soldier of fortune. The old Russian grew to love my mother—every one who knew my mother loved her. And one day he gave her the necklace. She took it because it was so pretty and yet did not seem very valuable. She never took jewels from people, though of course many were offered her, as to all dancers. But this man was very old and gentle and his gift seemed simple too. Only, he strangely insisted on giving her, with it, that paper which I sent you last night. That was to show that it was a deed of gift, and no one could take it from her. But no one ever tried. He was assassinated a year or two later and all his papers and jewels mysteriously stolen, but my mother had left Spain then and was in London and no one ever claimed the necklace. She loved it and I love it. It hardly seems to me, Mr. Bernstein, after talking about it that I can part with it after all." She took it up and fingered the glowing, luminous beads tenderly.

"Not even for seventy-five thousand pounds!" he said quietly.

"What!" She stared at him. She thought he had gone mad.

"That is what I offer you," he said in a business-like tone.

"But...?"

"They are pearls of the first quality."

"Pearls!"

"Yes, the pale green colour is only a clever coating of paint that can be removed easily by the use of a certain spirit. Look here where I have worked at this one a little—I had to, you know, in order to be certain. I have n't harmed the painting."

He showed her a bead that had a picture of a desert on it, with tiny palms waving, and a primitive well. From the back of this he had removed the pale green colouring and there instead glowed the rich ivory-grey thick yet luminous substance of the pearl.

"I was pretty certain of it from the first, that is why I was so keen. It is one of the most wonderful necklaces the world has ever seen. It once belonged to the Russian royal family—as your old man in Seville did. He knew what he was doing when he gave it to your mother, and when he wrote out that paper, which was a deed of gift, witnessed by his old Chinese servant and the Russian consul. I had it translated first thing this morning. It will hold good in a court of law. It was the Chinese servant who painted the pictures on the pearls to hide and disguise them, and by Gee! he was an artist, that fellow. Only a trained eye like mine would have suspected the truth. And let me tell you, Mrs. Valdana, with any one but you I should have made use of my knowledge to my own advantage. It is my business to do so. Every business man is entitled to make use of the ignorance of those he deals with. That is business training, we have learned it and paid for it, the other party has n't. It is like a doctor's fees. You pay him because he knows better than you. He has been in training for years, and paid with his mind and his soul for that training, while you have been busy with other things—training in another direction perhaps. Well, the time comes when you need his training and you pay for it."

"I understand," said Val quietly.

He laughed.

"No, you don't understand at all. You could never understand such a method. You have never got the best of any one in your life. That is why I am not going to use my method in your case. But I can tell you," he added with a grim smile, "it is a unique case. I never did such a thing before in my life and never will again. It is a good thing after all that there are not many people like you in the world, Mrs. Valdana. Jewellers with hearts might be ruined."

"It is very kind of you, but I can't accept this sacrifice of your interests," said Val, stammering a little, very embarrassed and uncomfortable. "I couldn't dream of accepting it," she added firmly.

"Don't worry—skip," said he laughing. "My sacrifice is only comparative. At the worst I stand to make anything between five to twenty-five thousand pounds out of the deal."

"Are you sure?"

"Dead sure—seventy-five thousand pounds sure," he said dryly. "My philanthropy does n't run to such risks as that. It only means that if you had n't happened to be you, it would have been I who took seventy-five and the rest and you who got the speculative twenty-five."

"I think you are too kind," she said. "I don't know how to thank you."

"Don't try," he said blithely. "It will be a good deal all round, and everybody happy. That old Russian knew something when he told your mother to put it by for a day of need. Now I am going to fix the matter instantly and give you a cheque for half the amount on the Bank of France. The rest you shall have to-morrow. Sit down while I get busy."

She asked him to make out a clear statement of the sale, price, etc., and to give it to her. She had a special purpose in this. In the act of writing he looked up suddenly.

"By the way, talking of doctors, do you remember a man called Westenra who was on board the Bavaric?" He looked at her keenly, for he remembered very well the talk of her interest in that same man. But of the truth he had no inkling.

"Yes," she said slowly.

"Well, what do you think? I got appendicitis in New York last May, and my partner, who is an American, said to me, 'There is only one man for you, and he is the best man in New York; come along to his nursing home.' And when I got there who was his famous guy but our man from the Bavaric! What do you think of that?"

"I knew he was a surgeon," said Val evenly.

"Well, I tell you, I was surprised. He did me up bully. He 's got a fine place there in 68th Street. A tip-top show; everything running on wheels. And a corking, handsome girl that he 's going to marry, at the head of things."

He applied himself to his writing.

"Is he not married already?" said Mrs. Valdana, and he thought, as he had often thought before, what a strange melancholy cadence her voice possessed.

"A widower, I believe. The nurses told me so at any rate. You know what jolly gossips they are. But Miss Holland is a cut above the ordinary American nurse, that's why they 're so jealous of her, I guess, and ready to say that she 's been after the doctor for years, and only made a success of the place because of that. And why not, I say? That's what most women make a success of things for, isn't it, Mrs. Valdana—some fellow?"

"Or a failure of things!" said Mrs. Valdana, following some train of thought of her own. There was a deeper melancholy in her voice, and he thought how tired and ill she looked.

"You ought to get away for a change, Mrs. Valdana," he said, when he handed her the cheque and shook hands in farewell. "You look like a woman who 's come to the end of her tether."

She felt like it too. She went home like a woman who has heard the sentence of death pronounced upon her. In the Metro she lay back in her corner with closed eyes and whispered to herself.

"What is the good? What is the good? Oh, that one might let go—lay it all down and go to rest!"

But she knew she could not. There are always ropes to bind the hopeless ones fast to life—to pull them forth from the shadows back to the bleak grey road of life. Bran was her rope.

At the concierge's lodge she was informed that several visitors had called and gone, but one, more persistent, waited for her on her landing.

"He has been many times, poor soul," said she, "and one has not the heart to refuse him entrance. I think he is one of those whom Art has been too much for."

Val hardly heard her. A sort of numb dulness that had taken possession of her prevented her from feeling anything but a passing vexation that she might not be alone; heavily she climbed the stair and came at last to the door. A tall loose figure in grey tweeds rose up at her from the doorstep.

"Val! Will you forgive me for dogging you like this?" said a humble trembling voice she did not know. She had to peer into his face and examine him before it dawned upon her that it was Horace Valdana.

"How did you find me?" she said dully. He was sitting doubled up in the most comfortable chair in the studio. But there was no comfort in his face or attitude. His arms, pressed in a curious way against his stomach, seemed holding something there that hurt him.

"Bribed one of Branker Preston's office boys."

This simple statement was in keeping with all the rest he had uttered within the last hour. The man was changed. He was finished with lying and subterfuge because life had finished with him—or was finishing rapidly. The hand of death was on him at last, there could be no mistake about it this time. His doom was dight. He had lied and lied, but nothing he could now say availed, for his face told the truth. He was doomed, and by some strange act of justice the fell disease that had him in its grip was the very one he had only pretended to have years before when playing for her sympathy and money.

And Val, during that hour in which she sat listening to him not so much pleading his cause as merely stating his case in all its hideous pitifulness, came to the decision that she had no longer right nor reason for withholding such help as he begged. It had been a black, terrible hour.

Not less so because she was really touched by the look of suffering on his face, by those spasmodic jerks of his arms, and that habit of holding fast to something within that ate like a rat at his vitals, while sweat broke out on his forehead and a grey agony passed ghostlike across his face. Her heart could never harden itself against suffering, and she came nearer in those moments to forgetting the wrongs Valdana had worked upon her than ever before.

And it looked uncommonly like her duty to forgive this man and take care of him now that he so urgently needed it. There was no one else in the world to do it. For his mother was dead, and his secret buried with her. She had died very suddenly, the end doubtless brought on by the dreadful anxiety of having to carry that same secret unshared. Such provision as she could secretly make for him she had made, but it was only a slight one, and Valdana had long been at the end of his resources.

"And if you turn me down, Val, and you have every right to, I shan't blame you a bit. I shall see what the Seine can do for me—though I 'd rather it had been the old Thames."

A better man would have given the river first refusal perhaps, but Valdana had never set up for a hero, and was not going to begin now.

In the end her decision was clinched as often happens by something outside herself. A terrible spasm seized him, doubling him up right there before her, turning him grey, and jerking a groan of agony from the very depths of him. A fit of shivering succeeded, and it was plain that the man was not fit to be up and about. His place was in bed, under medical supervision.

With decision came energy, and in a few moments she had him lying on the large divan in which she and Bran were used to sleep, covered up, and a steaming cup of tea inside him. Then she ran downstairs to the concierge's lodge and telephoned for a doctor. Afterwards she sent round to Bran's governess to ask them to keep him for the night. They were good responsible people, and she knew that she could trust them with her child—for a night at least, until she knew what further was to be done.

The doctor suggested a hospital; such a case, he said, needed constant nursing and care.

"Unless you are well enough off to have a nurse to help you," and he tried not to look doubtfully around him at the big bare studio, "I should think you had better try and get rid of the responsibility of this hopeless case by putting him into one of the English or American hospitals here. You are American, are n't you?"

"I have plenty of money," said Val, leaving his question unanswered, "and am quite able to have help in nursing him here. Please give me full instructions and information."

The doctor looked surprised, and more so when, after he had examined Valdana, she paid him his fee and took down the address of the best cancer specialist in Paris.

"Not that he can do any good. The case is too far advanced for operation—even I can tell you that. But he will be able to give the best treatment for alleviation until the end comes—that won't be long, I expect."

And the great specialist could do no more (as is more often the case than people guess) than confirm the verdict of the ordinary practitioner.

"A matter of months!" he said. "And they will be bad months—for others beside the patient. You had better send him to a hospital."

But Val shook her head. She had determined to accept this duty that was so clear to her; and there was money now to ease the way. Seventy-five thousand pounds! How neatly that sum had been inserted into the gap of circumstance by the clever hand of Fate!