Acquaintance with a further element in her husband's life to which she had so far been a stranger was reserved for Val when at Easter his adopted child, Haidee Halston, came home to 68th Street. Westenra, it is true, had told her all the circumstances, and no one was better qualified than Val to appreciate that sense of responsibility towards the helpless and unprotected which had prompted him to take upon himself the entire support and education of a friend's child. Westenra and Pat Halston had been friends from boyhood. The same county in Ireland had been their birthplace, they were at Carlow College together, and, sailing for America within a year of each other, met again in New York, and graduated together from Columbia University, where they obtained their medical degree. Later, launched upon the same profession but inspired by very different ambitions, the paths of the two friends had diverged somewhat. Halston, greatly gifted and of a magnetic personality, aimed for a fashionable practice that would bring him social success as well as a fortune with which to pursue further aims--in fact, like many another he meant medicine to serve him only as a step to the more lucrative and exciting profession of politics, wherefore he followed it only when it led him into the highways of the rich and influential. Westenra, on the other hand, inspired by a racial thirst for knowledge, as well as for eminence in his profession, did not disdain the by-ways, even when they led him into the lowest slums of New York. It was natural, in the circumstances, that the two men should see little of each other, but the bond of boyhood held good, and when "Death and Dismay" all too swiftly and unforeseen came to Halston, it was to Westenra that he turned at the last. Poor Halston had, unfortunately, put a spoke into his own wheel of ambition by marrying a lovely, but very flighty English girl, who came to America as a governess in the family of one of his fashionable patients. Halston adored his pretty wife, but she made ducks and drakes with his money and brought him to the verge of bankruptcy through her extravagance. When death by septic poisoning swooped suddenly down on him, she was within a short period of giving birth to their only child, and the thought of this darkened the dying man's vision until Westenra, with a firm hand on his friend's, gave his promise that the welfare of Mrs. Halston and her child would be his most sacred task. Within a few weeks Mrs. Halston joined her husband in the great beyond, and Westenra found himself the sole guardian of the little baby girl fancifully called by its dying mother--Haidee. That was ten years before, and now Haidee was a beautiful, arrogant slip of a girl with deep dark eyes, a deep dark cave or two in her soul, and the manners of a cowboy. The school at which she had been educated for several years, to the extreme detriment of Westenra's banking account, was one of those highly modern institutions where at the most expensive rates girls are encouraged to "develop their individuality," and Haidee, a hoyden by nature, had developed hers along the cowboy-brigand line. Her idea of argument with servants or other children was to push them down-stairs or administer a hack on the shins with one of her extremely useful-looking feet.
These unsatisfactory reports had for a long time troubled the peace of Westenra, whose sense of responsibility to Pat Halston's child was perhaps a slightly exaggerated one. A vague idea had occurred to him of sending her to a convent to see what the gentle influence of nuns could do for her, but Haidee jibbed like a mule at the mention of nuns, and declared darkly that if he sent her to a convent he would see.
When he spoke to Val of his worries on the subject she said, ready at once to embrace any project or protégé of his without thought of the fresh tasks entailed:
"Oh, why not have her here for awhile, Joe? A little home life will tame her down, I expect. Look how it has tamed even such a wild ass of the desert as I," she added, with a gay smile in which there was more than a touch of wistfulness. But Westenra said a trifle abruptly that he did not fancy somehow it would be a good plan.
"You have enough worries already," he added, but not quite quickly enough to prevent Val from perceiving that there was some other reason, though she was far from guessing what that reason might be.
In the end, however, by the gift of circumstance, Haidee came to 68th Street after all. For at the expiration of the Easter term the school authorities wrote a brief but eloquent letter to the effect that they wished to be relieved of the care of Westenra's ward. If it did not exactly amount to an expulsion, it certainly could not be looked upon as a certificate of good conduct for presentation at her next school, and for the moment all thought of the convent had to be dismissed. So Haidee came home from New Jersey, bag and baggage, and utterly unashamed of her peccadilloes. Val, with a heart open for anything or any one loved by Westenra, was eager to mother the motherless creature of whom she had heard so much. But Haidee was apparently not in search of a mother, and received her advances coldly and in a keep-off-the-grass manner that only an American-bred child would have the sang-froid to use. More than a hint of hostility, too, was to be found in the deep-set eyes, when they watched Val and Westenra together. The fact was that to find her guardian installed in a house with "a strange woman" had given the girl a great shock. Westenra, following his usual habit of reserve, had prepared her for nothing of the kind when he said, on his return journey from New Jersey:
"I am married now, Haidee."
She never dreamed that such a thing would make any difference to her absolute monopoly of her beloved guardian, and indeed, because Val was generous and he was kind, it would have made but little, if she had not instantly determined to be as obnoxious and tiresome as she could be, in the hope that Val would get tired of her and go away.
From the first she nobly contributed her share towards the business of making life at No. 700 more unlivable than it was already. She fought with the servants, got into the way of the nurses, and disturbed the patients with her noise. A day-school was found for her near at hand, and that kept her energies employed for a certain number of hours, but her new teachers were soon on the war-path after her, and she arrived home daily, flustered with combat, and bringing long accounts of their tyranny and brutality! When it was time for her to go to school in the mornings the house had to be hunted for her from top to bottom by Val or a housemaid. She hated to go to bed, and there was a scene every night before she could be induced to do so; then, on being left alone, she would invariably hop out again, turn up the lights, and amuse herself in some illicit fashion, such as hanging out of the window and dropping things on the heads of patients coming up the front-door steps. Yet in the mornings it almost needed a charge of dynamite to dislocate her from her blankets. She had a rooted aversion to taking baths, and would never brush her teeth unless some one stood over her and saw it done. In fact, she had all the faults and naughtinesses of an ordinary child strongly accentuated, and a sense of perversity extraordinarily developed. Withal she was as clever as paint, and grew prettier every day. What vexed Val most was that everlastingly she broke in upon Westenra, claiming his attention for her troubles, her lessons, her amusements, unless Val were on the alert to prevent it. She would wait outside his office door and slip in "between patients" to relate some woe, and Westenra would listen patiently and in the end the trouble evaporated into smiles and laughter. But this wasted his time and told upon his temper in some later affair of the day, or brought him up to bed a little more tired than usual.
Presently, too, Haidee's jealousy of Val's place in Westenra's life began to take a more active form, and if it had not been for her disarming innocence of mind where worldly matters were concerned, Val would have almost come to dislike her. Instead of which she felt pity for the child who, in her adoration for Westenra, resented being ousted from the central position in his life. Haidee could not or would not understand why a mere wife should have first claim. She considered that she herself possessed it, because she had been first in Westenra's life.