West 19th Street,
New York.
He was there under an assumed name, skulking, as he had skulked in the bush. His mother, the only person whom he had enlightened as to his being alive, was secretly sending him money. She dared not let his father, an old man dying of an incurable disease, know, for fear it would hasten his end, and she was ashamed to tell her other sons and daughters; they were all honourable, upright people whose heads would be lowered to the dust under the blow. With a mother's unselfish love she wished to spare them the truth--that the man whose gallant death all England had mourned was alive and skulking in hiding, a coward who had deserted his comrades! But for Val she had no such feeling, and it was she who had given him the news of Val's sailing for America and paid his fare to do the same, counselling him to find her out and get her help. She said it was Val's duty to stand by him, and he, pleased with such comfortable counsel, had been in New York six months hoping to come across his wife. At the last moment he had chanced upon her by accident!
He had left her in the Park; it was with the understanding that she was to meet him in two days' time at Shrapp's Hotel. But she had no intention of keeping the appointment. First of all it would be extremely difficult for her to get away from home without lying, and then there was a possibility of Westenra finding out where she had gone, and suspecting something strange. She meant to take no risks where Westenra was concerned. Secondly, she hated to meet Valdana. Quite apart from the horrible turmoil his reappearance caused in her life, she was shakingly revolted by his presence. The sight of him alive when he should have been where the world believed him--among the heroic dead--made her physically sick.
"As much right to save his skin..." she repeated blankly, and the blood seemed to turn to water in her veins. "Oh, I might have known ... I might have known! Mean souls do not suddenly become heroic! To save his skin!"
And it was the name of such a man that she bore by law! For such a one her little Bran must be branded illegitimate. She ground her teeth in rage and despair, and gave out a little moan.
Around the black morass that surrounded her there showed only one small glimmer of light--it was the remembrance of that faint gleam that kept her from going mad. He had offered it as a sort of propitiation for the fact of his being still alive, and she shuddered at her own heartless catching at it. She might not have believed but for the bleak tint of his skin.
"It won't be for long, anyway. I 'm booked, Val. I have the same trouble as my father--cancer of the liver. Nothing can save me. It's only a matter of a few months ... a year at the outside." She had looked into his face keenly at that and recognised the possibility of his words being true. That strange hue in his cheeks might easily be the hue of death foreshadowing the atrocious malady from which his father suffered.
He had gone on to tell her that all he asked was to be allowed to live in peace, out of the world's sight, until his hour came. The truth must never be known, he said. Even he was not so dead to decency that he could not recognise that. He owed something to his family after all--to say nothing of his country! These had a right to expect silence from one who should have been dead. And he was willing enough to be silent. The gnawing at his vitals had killed in him, he said, all taste for gaming and dissipation. He only wanted peace in some quiet country place, anywhere but America, which he hated with the fierce hatred of the waster surrounded by active energetic men. He had, it appeared, sought Val in the pretty certain belief that she could and would assist him to the quiet life he longed for, and when he found she could not he was more inclined to curse than to sympathise because her brain had "given out." She smiled a tortured smile at that. Her brain had indeed given out. That part at least of the story was true; and that she would never be able to write again as in the old days she knew was true too. There is nothing like a year's tussling with domestic problems for dulling the wits. She felt that to earn a sure million she could not have produced the energy or material for one of her old gay vivid articles salted with wit and scented with the breeze. The power had gone from her. Wifehood had absorbed it. Maternity had eaten and drunk it up! Like Alice Brook, she could only work with her hands now; and, like Alice Brook, she was sadly incompetent even with these. For there really was a housemaid called Alice Brook at No. 700; an inefficient English girl who could not get on with the cook, and was without the faintest notion of her duties. As Val had no time to train her she was obliged to give her notice, and the girl was in fact leaving the house that night. This was why Val had felt so safe in her story.
When Valdana found out that she did not mean to meet him again, he would probably, as discreetly as he dared, make inquiries at No. 700 for Alice Brook. But Val would be prepared for him.