After Somaliland, commissions came to her singly, but from a sense of loyalty she would do nothing except in connection with Rowan; so they worked and travelled together going to different parts of Africa from the Cape to Egypt, until one day landing in Durban to make a flying visit to the Transvaal, Rowan paid with dramatic suddenness the penalty for burning up his brain and liver for years with whiskey and the best wines.
Val found herself alone in the world, though not helpless, for her own and Rowan's efforts had given her a weapon with which to fight for and hold her place among the journalists of the day. But she was only twenty, and as hopelessly impractical as the conditions of her life and Rowan's happy-go-lucky methods could make her. He was one of those who knew no use for money except to make it fly faster than it came, living gaily ahead of his income to the tune of the old saw:
"Happy-go-lucky,
Penny loaf for twopence,
Got no shoes go without."
Val's journalistic intelligence had been developed at the expense of her practicability for everyday purposes. She could already make money, but she had no sense of the value of it. A number of things she had gathered hi the course of her vivid life could not be tabulated, for they were intangible, nor valued, for they were priceless; but of common or garden prudence and horse-sense she possessed no single jot or iota.
What she did possess and wear for all the world to recognise was a disquietingly attractive appearance, and the fascination that hangs about the personality of one who is able to do something, and that something well. To this was now added the wistful charm that sorrow stamps upon her elect. All those whom Val had loved had left her one by one. She began to believe herself doomed to loneliness--that she had but to love to suffer the bitterness of loss. The cerebral hemorrhage with which Rowan had been smitten had left him a few merciful clear hours before death, and during that time he had impressed upon her the wisdom of going straight to England and making the most of his literary connections there. But, in spite of this injunction, she had lingered on from day to day in the expensive Durban hotel where he died. She could not drag herself away from the two graves that lay in the heart of the town, sheltered by palms and feathery trees, with the naked feet of Zulus pattering past up and down the Berea hill, and ricksha bells echoing between the marble crosses and headstones of the dead. She shrank and faltered from turning her face towards a new life empty of love.
That was a propitious moment for Horace Valdana to step upon the scene.
Handsome, with the marks of race on him, and no outward sign of his dark heart, he was of the exact type to attract a romantic girl's interest. Val, lonely, impulsive, but lacking in judgment, fell in love with the man she believed him to be, and without hesitation placed her fate in his hands. There was no one to warn her (and if there had been it is doubtful whether she would have believed that he was a thorough-paced blackguard, whose family, sure by bitter experience that he would some day openly disgrace an old and honoured name, and deciding that it were better for him to do it in the Colonies than at their door, had financed him to go abroad and stay there. Africa is full of such--"remittance boys," ne'er-do-wells, men who have left their country for their country's good. Most of them, when they arrive at least, have good manners, often the stamp of a public school on them. Nearly all possess the charm and guile that are special attributes of the professional black sheep.
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. It should, perhaps, be counted to Valdana's credit that he married her instead of playing some trick upon the innocence of which her varied life had not yet robbed her. But trickery would have meant plotting, and Horace Valdana was too lazy to plot. Besides, he was well informed enough to know that Val had value as a wife who could make money. So Val got a real marriage certificate, and became a real wife, and in a very short time knew the meaning of real misery. Until then the hard luck and misfortunes which Fate had dealt her had at least been shared by loyal hearts and faced with courage and gaiety; but now it was her lot to discover how bitter sordid poverty can be when shared with a mean and vicious nature that exacts all and gives less than nothing in the great give-and-take game of marriage. Valdana darkened life for her and blotted out the stars. He walked on her illusions and hopes, and threw down her idols. She sometimes felt as if he had wiped his boots on her soul. Wretchedness and a child were the outcome of the ill-starred marriage. Still soft and pliable with youth, she might have forgiven the first for the sake of the last, but her husband, utterly bored by her innocence and uselessness, very soon decamped leaving her to shift for herself and the child as best she might.
It was quite true as has been told that she was utterly useless in the ordinary way. She had received absolutely no training in the practical things of life, except of the most rough-and-ready kind. She could light a camp-fire with any one, and shoot something to cook on it afterwards, but she was far from knowing as much about domestic life as even an ordinary Boer girl, and quite unfit to be a poor man's wife in Africa or anywhere else. The one thing she could do well was to write up big picturesque events for the newspapers; but such things have to be sought first and written of afterwards, and now she had a baby to bind her hands and stay her wandering feet.
There came another dreary era of struggle. Freed of the cankering taint of Valdana's presence, the young mother plucked up enough courage and money to get back to England, where she judged her best chance lay of making a living. But the connections and introductions she had counted on using there were in the end of very little use to her, for the reason that she could not now continue her special line of work. There were still things happening in out-of-the-way parts of the world, but Val could not leave her young child to go and write about them, and after one or two offers had been made to her and declined she got no others. As for the conditions of English life and journalism she knew nothing of them. Besides, a place in the London journalistic world has to be worked and waited for on the spot; outsiders are not encouraged, and have a bad time while trying to push in. When at last she realised that all she could hope for was an ignominious place in the queue among the hack writers, the girl proudly buried the name made memorable by collaboration with Dick Rowan, and disguised under that of Valdana, took what she could get to keep the wolf from the door. For herself, travelling on a dark road where all the stars had gone out, she would have cared little if at this time starvation and an end had come; but the tiger maternity was awake in her and cried out for the preservation of little Carmen.