"No, mine," she answered swiftly. They stood staring at each other like two duellists. He lost sight of all she had been to him--of all that she must have suffered. Dazed and horror-struck he only felt that his world was moving away from under his feet, and she was trying to rob him of the last hold, the most dear thing he had ever possessed.
"He is mine too ... I believe by law I could get him."
"Law! Have n't you found out yet that I am lawless?" She came close to him, staring into his eyes, a mocking light in her own. "You forget that I am the woman with no soul, no morals, and no roots, the careless vagabond whom you feared Haidee to come into contact with ... whom you apologised to your dead mother for having married...."
"Val, you are mad!" he said amazed, white to the lips. But she only laughed a little clanking laugh, and her voice that had so often sounded in his ears like the wild far music of his own land was hard now as iron on iron.
"Go your ways, my dear Garrett Westenra. You are free of the woman who burnt your ship!"
CHAPTER XII
CHILDREN OF ISHMAEL
"Life tests a plough in meadows made of stones,
Love takes a toll of spirit, mind, and bones."
MASEFIELD.
Raging he went from English shores. Raging, broken-hearted, more lonely than ever in his life before. Looking backwards to that voyage on which he and Val had first met, he realised that his loneliness then was peace and contentment compared with what he now felt. He had known what it was to share life right down to the core with another human being, and when that has once been, solitude redoubles its sting. A fantastic creature like Val, however uncomfortable she made life, could not be lost out of it without leaving a big, aching gap.
Yet, there he was on his way back to America, while in far Jersey Val sat on her rabbit-hutch staring at the sea with blind eyes, Bran playing unheeded at her knees, in her ears the faint, melancholy cry of the curlew.