When the grain bills began to come in she realised that in the poultry business there was an output, as well as an intake, and that all her small profits were eaten up by the fowls.
CHAPTER X
WORRY-BELLS
"Tout homme digne de ce nom
A dans le coeur un Serpent jaune
Installé comme sur un trône,
Qui, s'il dit: 'Je veux!' répond: 'Non!'"
BAUDELAIRE.
As the months went by and the first exhaustion of body and spirit in which she had left New York passed, Val's imagination once more woke up, and began to torment her nights, undoing the good effect of days spent in healthy occupation. In the soft, kind climate of Jersey her body must soon have regained all its old nervous strength if the spirit had not begun once more to chafe and wear its scabbard. Had she been a woman merely separated for a while from the man she loved with the certain hope of swift reunion, how happy she could have been in the thought of his joy in finding Bran so lovely and sturdy, Haidee strong and handsome, herself recovered! If only all had been well! But all was not well, and the realisation of this fact began to push serenity from her mind, waking up old aches and hungers she had believed long since extinguished--the longing to pack a knapsack and depart for the horizon, to bathe her soul in the Lethe of a distant sunset, and arise renewed and free of the cares and conventions of life. Her feet tingled to travel. The sky-line began to pull at, and "play" her as if it had a hook in her very vitals. With every ship that disappeared over the brim of the world went some shade of her inmost being. The song of the rolling stone sang in her veins:
"I have a love for other lands,
Which thro' my home life dogs my way.
My very soul scarce understands
The love I have for other lands."
She got into the way of sitting on a rabbit-hutch staring before her at the empty sea until she saw it no longer, nor the sea-gulls that wheeled in circles, but only the wide veldt empty of all but a line of kops and a great berg to be passed on the morrow--changing pictures round an out-spanned waggon--oxen with heads bent, moving gradually onwards, the tinkling of a cattle-bell, evening fires lighted--Haidee and Bran bounding about examining new flowers, strange insects, the spoor of wild creatures--Westenra with a gun--problems gone out of his eye, the rustle of dollars forgotten--just a simple, primitive vagabond like herself. Ah! Vain day dreams! Even while she dreamed she could feel the wretched truth stirring at the back of her mind, waiting like some horrible yellow viper with head reared ready to strike.
Sleep became rare with her. However hard the day's work, she never had more than an hour or two of the dead slumber of exhaustion. Then, regular as an alarm, a little worry-bell would ring in her brain, dimly at first, then more and more insistent and clamorous. At last she would be as widely awake as if some one had taken her by the shoulders and shaken her out of sleep to hear some terrible and significant news.
"Wake up, Val Valdana, you have slept long enough! There is the little affair of Garrett Westenra's happiness to consider--and Garrett Westenra's son--and Horace Valdana's lease of life! There are several other affairs also, which in the daytime you are apt to consider of minor importance, but which you can see clearly in these small still hours are very important and pressing indeed--the affair of that grain bill for which you have not the ready money!--those new shoes Haidee requires!--the young cockerels eating off their heads--and how are you going to raise more money for Valdana?"
Ah! that yellow viper that sits in the human heart and haunts the human brain, crying yes when we cry no, and pleasure when we cry duty, and duty when we cry pleasure, and wake when we cry sleep--Val lay with it through the hours of many a weary night!