Was she thinking of the dream ship on which she had sailed so confidently into this very port not two years gone?
He turned heavily away.
Part II
Jersey
CHAPTER IX
NEW ROADS TO FORTUNE
"God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future."--EMERSON.
Jersey, a small and smiling island set amidst the boisterous seas of the English Channel, is reputed to enjoy more winter sunshine than any seaside place in Great Britain. Be that as it may, for the first few months of Val's residence there, it wrapped itself so perpetually in soft warm shawls of mist, that she sometimes thought of writing to Rudyard Kipling and calling his attention to a place where the sun never so much as rose on the English flag. However, it is one of the cheapest spots in the world, and that is why Val chose it for her six months of waiting before she could tell Westenra the truth. The six months might possibly resolve themselves into twelve, one never knew! She was not hard-hearted enough to wish that Valdana would hurry his departure from the world, she only wished not to think about it at all. Jersey seemed to promise both peace and solitude in which to pull herself together after the strain of the last few months in New York.
They had sailed there straight from Southampton, and after a week's hunt, found a little furnished house out in the country, pitched high above St. Brelade's Bay. It was isolated and lonely, standing in the midst of its own wide fields and garden. The owners, army people who had used it for a sort of pleasure farm or summer residence, were now in India, and the property having remained unlet for some time was in a neglected condition. The house was scantily furnished, but against this fact the low rent was an offset.
Jersey is considered extraordinarily picturesque, but Val, spoilt by the wild scenery of Africa, majestic even in its barest, bleakest places, found the scenery pigmy though pretty. However, there was always the grandeur of the sea, beating in fury against the rugged, red coast, and the gracious misty emptiness of sky-line and horizon. She loved, too, to stand in the garden, dreaming of the lost land that lies sleeping under the water between Jersey and Brittany--that land of past centuries, which, before the sea in some strange empyrean convulsion swept over it, included forests in which were hordes of wolves, the "city of a hundred churches," and that wonderful cathedral in which, according to an old Breton manuscript the scarlet mantles of forty Lords of the Church could be counted at Mass every Sunday. At the great neap tides Jersey fishermen, far out, looking down from their boats into the clear depths, say they can still detect foliage that is not sea-weed swaying amid the branches of mighty forest oaks; and from the Brittany side, on still days keen eyes have detected, far down on the sea floor, the walls and ruined towers of the city of St. Ys.