But there was little time for dreaming at Cliff Farm. Val, with a resolution to cost Westenra as little as possible, did nearly all the work of the place herself, only employing a woman two or three times a week to do rough cleaning. But not content to economise only, she thrilled with a scheme to augment their slight income. A yearning to found a successful poultry and rabbit farm seized her soul. Haidee, bitten by the same mania, fostered the ambition, and with heads together over a poultry journal they read rapturously of fortunes to be made in this direction.
The first and vital thing, however, was to regain health and get the children well. Travelling had not agreed with Bran the pagan. On the ship he had been dreadfully sick and lost all his plumpness and lovely colouring, but in the mild mists of Jersey and Channel breezes, fresh and unpolluted by the microbes of cities, he began to bloom again. Haidee, too, pallid when they first arrived, changed under the spell of the country. Like all persons who had been held long in cities she felt the joy of the open, of trees, and grass, and living things, and began to blossom and smile into a different creature. The old savage Haidee was still there under the skin, ready to come forth if scratched; but reasons for kicking physically and jibbing mentally were wonderfully absent in the simple farm life. Her only grievance was that she had to go in daily to school at a convent in St. Helier, from whence she invariably returned ornamented with scowls. But these passed as soon as she got back to the work of digging and delving in the garden. It was the out-of-door work that put Val right, too, painting a faint colour in her thin cheeks, and laying dew on her jaded nerves. The kitchen garden, practically a field, was heavily infested with couch grass, but by noble efforts they cleared it and began in time to have their own vegetables for the table.
Val had told Westenra that she did not know how much life would cost her, and indeed with her vague ideas about money, she could not tell until she had tried. He had given her five hundred dollars, and the arrangement was that she would make that last as long as she could, and then write for more. Alas! it did not last very long. By the time travelling expenses were cleared, the hotel bill paid for their week's stay in St. Helier while they were seeking a house, Haidee's school fees advanced, and the little farm stocked with necessaries, there was not much of the five hundred dollars in sight.
Some of it, too, had been used in erecting houses and runs for the hens and rabbits that were to bring in a fortune! Val, with the amateur's delusion that after the initial expense all is profit, rushed into the usual mistake of overstocking.
"Every fowl is an asset," she told herself, and bought fowls by the dozen, regardless of age, pedigree, or laying qualifications, until pulled up at the round turn by an article in the poultry journal on the importance of good breeding stock. Thereafter, she and Haidee decided to keep all the early purchases for "laying purposes only," and buy a special pen of thoroughbreds for breeding chickens. Earnestly they studied the advertisement columns of the poultry journal. Prices for breeding pens were high.
"We can't afford to pay such sums, Haidee--but there is the exchange column! What about that?"
The exchange column was rich in proposals from philanthropists who apparently desired nothing better than to stock the British Isles with the best breeds of poultry at a dead loss to themselves. Pens of five, seven, and nine fowls of the purest pedigree were proffered for things patently not half the value of the poultry. Nothing but the most profound altruism, for instance, could have prompted the offer from an English rectory of "A magnificent prize-pen of Black Langshans for breeding purposes (four hens and a cock) in exchange for clothing, provisions, or anything useful." If a sinister significance lurked in the last sentence the Cliff Farm enthusiasts possessed not the ungenerosity of soul to suspect it. Portraits of Black Langshans in the poultry book discovered them to be birds of a grace and elegance astonishing and the text declared them splendid layers of lovely pink eggs.
The pink eggs decided the matter. Val flew to make out a list of all she would give in exchange. Provisions they had none, but she possessed clothes to spare in so good a cause.
- A Liberty ball gown of old-gold satin.
(2) A motor coat made by Paquin, with a great hood of orange velvet.