"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 baccalauréat and achieve her diplôme, 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 Lycée 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!"