"Bobyian went to church But he had no money So he took two sous out of the plate."

They all applauded and hugged him.

"Sapristi! You have the voice of an angel, _mon ami_," said Sacha.

"I know it well," answered Bran modestly in his pretty French.

"Ah! He is enormous, this Bran! He knows all things well," cried the Comtesse. "And can you tell me now, _mon pet.i.t ange_, where can I get such another little boy as you for myself?"

For the first time Bran's noted phrase faltered on his lips. He considered the point for a moment, but swiftly came to the conclusion that no little angel would care to leave his wings under a cloud in heaven, as he had done, to come down and seek the Comtesse for his mother, so he presently announced to a breathless audience:

"_Je ne sais pas!_"

"Ah, ha!" twittered the Comtesse. "I like better to hear you say so, my little hen, than to hear you answer that you know well."

CHAPTER XVIII

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!" She gave Val a gentle push towards her mirror, where the pale oval face was reflected, a very girlish face still in spite of sorrows, and framed now in a nebulous, wavering frame of feathery, fluttering curls.

"I never saw anything so dear," said Harriott, dipping her hand into the airy softness. "It is ten times prettier than it was before. How on earth did you manage it?"

"It must be the salad oil," said Val laughing. "I 've rubbed in a whole quart bottle during the winter. Poor Bran! Many is the morning he has come sniffing to my pillow with the question, 'Did you have potato salad for supper last night, Mammie?' Is n't it extraordinary what we women will do for vanity's sake, Harry. You 'd think I ought to know better at thirty-two, wouldn't you?"

"Thirty-two, what's _that_? Women are only just beginning to find themselves at thirty. You 're an infant still, my dear, and fortunately you look it." She added inconsequently, "I think that man of yours must be a pig."

A grave sadness came back into Val's face.

"Never say anything like that, Harry. Those are the kind of words that separate friends."

For a moment Mrs. Kesteven regarded her reproachfully, but her soul was too loyal a one to misunderstand Val's feelings. There was a great soul-likeness between the two women. Only that Val would be always more or less primitive, while Harriott Kesteven had come of a long line of cultivated ancestors, and was more highly civilised. But in the simple elementary things the two felt and saw alike.

"Forgive me, dearest," she said gently. "It is only that I hate to see you so alone--and lonely. You were not meant for such a life."

"I must be unworthy of companionship, for it is always taken from me,"

said Val, as if to herself, staring at her image in the gla.s.s. "I sometimes tremble because of Bran. 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."

"Bless you, Harry! What would one do without friendship?"

"Well, you'll never have to do without me wherever you are, darling.

Mine is one of the hands stretched across seas and hills to you. But I fear that my material body must leave you this day week; all sorts of things call me back to London."

"So soon?"

"My dear, do you realise that the summer is nearly over? While we have sat in the sunshine talking of old days, and watching the children grow their wings, two of our precious months are gone. Two of the hundred and twenty, Val!"

"Never mind, they 've left us something," said Val, kissing her.

From that day forward she discarded the blue veil. The French friends were amazed when they saw her without her shroudings. It had a curiously different effect upon them all. Something discontented and critical came into the still-lake eyes of Madame de Vervanne, but Celine used to like to come close and brush her cheek against Val's head as if she or Val were a kitten. The two boys seemed suddenly to wake up and realise that Val was still a factor in the game, at least Sacha did, and the look half gallant, half appraising, which he had so far kept only for Kitty and Haidee or any other pretty girl who happened along, began to lurk in his eye for Val also. With Rupert it was a little different.

He had from the first recognised something vital and alluring behind the blue veil, and had never shown himself averse to leaving the girls to walk with Val, carrying her things, or holding one of Bran's hands while she held the other. There had come to exist between them one of those wordless sympathies that make for friendship. They spoke the same language, for there was one great bond between them--the wanderl.u.s.t.

Rupert, strange and rare thing in a Frenchman, had "the love for other lands!" Hoping to a.s.suage his thirst for travel in a legitimate way, and one traditional in his family, he had entered for the Navy and had worked hard to get in from the Lycee St. Louis. But though his physical qualifications for that profession were perfect, he was no student and the exams. had been too much for him. Three times he had gone up, and failed, and the third time was the last. He was over nineteen, and the age limit for men entering the Navy was pa.s.sed.

At odds and ends of times he told Val these things, and her heart went out to him while her mind greatly wondered at the stupidity of the French Government. Here was an ideal sailor lost to his country because he could not pa.s.s a difficult exam., that dealt largely with languages and mathematics, though you had only to watch him with his inferiors, the villagers and fishermen, to know that he possessed all the qualities characteristic of the good sailor and commander of men. Above all he was a lover of the sea. As an Englishman or American other gates to that "lover and mother of men" would have been open to him. But as a French gentleman having failed to get into the Navy, he was obliged to renounce the love of his life, for there was no other way, compatible with honour, of wooing her.

The next best thing then he declared was to join the Colonial Infantry, and achieve travel and adventure in foreign service. But such a decision thoroughly scandalised his family, for the Colonial Infantry is looked upon as the last resort of the dest.i.tute. Only men who have n't a penny of private income go to the Colonies, and it was considered a most unfitting fate for a man of such brilliant fortune as Rupert would be master of in a year or so. Even Sacha, who had no more than two hundred and twenty francs a year, disdained the Colonial Infantry and was in the "Dragons," preferring a cavalry regiment likely to be stationed within reach of Paris, living a life of gaiety on credit, always in debt, but always with an open chance of catching an heiress whose fortune would regulate his affairs and settle him in life.

The Colonial Infantry very often means quick promotion, but it also means travel and rough life in far places, and these things do not appeal to the ordinary young Frenchman, who is out for "life" of a very different kind. That they appealed to Rupert showed that he was far from being an ordinary Frenchman. In his family everything was still being done to try and dissuade him. But he showed no signs of budging from his purpose--for him the Colonial Infantry or nothing, he said, and had already accomplished the one year's military service essential to a candidate for St. Cyr. He told Val of his intentions, and she secretly upheld them and encouraged him to go his own way. For to her Rupert looked like one of those whom Nature chooses to track her across deserts and mountains and seas. He had the vague yet ardent eyes of the follower of the Lone Trail. Val recognised in him, boy as he was, a wanderer like herself, and it seemed to her that it would be a tragic thing to confine such a boy to the smug and conventional paths of life in France.

While the Kestevens were still in Mascaret, Rupert was looked upon as being more or less property at the disposal of Kitty, and Val had only an occasional opportunity for the long rambling talks she liked with him. But after the Kestevens had gone, and Val made her _debut_, veilless, indeed hatless, with shining fluffy hair curling in the sun, her eyes containing a secret, and about her that certain flower-like grace which is the peculiar attribute of those who keep always a little dew in the heart, Rupert came hovering continually about her and she grew fonder than ever of him. A reef was taken in their friendship, and no one seemed to mind very much except Christiane de Vervanne. The little Comtesse took rather more than an ordinary interest in Rupert, and when she was about, Val with her seventh sense often felt in the air the presence of the little silken cobwebs that some women, spiderlike, spin out and weave about all young male things. However, Rupert so far appeared to be immune to any spells except those of the sea, and other lands. And because Val too felt these spells he loved to be with her.

The Comtesse, on the other hand, looked upon such talk as the ravings of madness. She strongly opposed the Colonial Infantry scheme, and declared it a shame to think of one of La France's sons departing to other stupid countries. It was plain that she meant to do all she could to prevent such a catastrophe.

It was lovely autumn weather, and in the cool of every afternoon the party went forth on blackberrying expeditions, gathering the fruit which the peasants despise and leave to rot upon the hedges. Every morning Villa Duval was fragrant with the fresh scent of blackberries stewing in their own juice, to be eaten at tea time the same day. The flies and the wasps swarmed in, and at intervals all doors and windows would be closed and the family, a.s.sisted by the granite-eyed Azalie and armed with bath towels, would engage in a _grande battue_, and the wooden walls of the villa resounded with slaps and bangs. Only Bran would take no part in these ma.s.sacres. He had a funny little objection to killing anything, and strongly disapproved of Azalie's methods.

"She is very unkind," he complained. "She just _kills_ the flies. She does n't look into their eyes first to see whether they are poor or good or naughty."

"How do they look when they 're good, a.s.sie?" jeered Haidee.

Bran strangely but immediately glazed his eyes, and with some odd movement of his hands acutely suggested the att.i.tude of a sick fly suffering with cold.

"And a naughty one?"

His eyes rolled, and he lifted a paw to his nose. A sprightly fly!

The days were slipping along very peacefully when suddenly Val's eyes were opened to the fact that Haidee was in danger. Her little girlish flirtation with Sacha Lorrain was growing into something more serious.

One afternoon, as Val was sitting in the _Jules_, with Bran at the imaginary wheel, a puff of wind blew a sheet of paper up into the air and over the side of the boat. Carelessly she took it up, but her idle glance crystallised into consternation when she found that it was a rough draft of what was evidently meant to be a poem, in Haidee's writing.

That an out-of-door, tomboy creature like Haidee should take to writing poems was strange enough, but what startled Val still more was its open dedication to Sacha. It ran into several verses: