She swished the sheets of heavy linen from the beds and cast them in rumpled heaps upon the floor, taking many a glance out at the sea, whistling a tune at one moment, in another echoing with her high-pitched rather husky treble the lay of père Duval.
"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eau
Va sans peur mon petit bateau."
In the room below, listening to Haidee's rustling feet and the song of the sea, was Val Valdana. Two sheets of the Paris Daily Mail were spread upon the table to protect the cloth, while in wistful and desultory fashion she prepared the vegetables for lunch. Her thin brown fingers decked in their strange stones and old enamels were stained with potato juice, and a number of small new potatoes lay dimpling pink at the bottom of an earthenware bowl glazed brown without and pale yellow within. But Val's thoughts were not with the potatoes. She often let her hands fall among the curly peel scrapings on the table, and gazed sombrely, almost sightlessly before her. Shipwreck was in her eyes, and exile, and all the bitterness of bright hopes broken, and talent lying fallow and useless. Her lips looked as if the laughter had been bitten out of them in an attempt to keep within the desperate cry of her heart.
It was as well perhaps that overhead Haidee suddenly decided that helping to get lunch would be more amusing than making beds. Hasty and conclusive sounds denoted that she was "finishing up," directing by means of a few masterly flicks with a bath towel, all scraps of paper, stockings, stray shoes, letters, etc., into a proper and decent seclusion under the beds. Then her feet rustled on the stairs and through the kitchen, stayed for a moment at the front door from whence she threw a laugh and a call to Bran playing in the old boat across the road. A moment later the shell-pink bathing costume became part of the dining-room decoration, and its wearer, seated before the Daily Mail, attacked the potatoes with the same nobility of purpose she had used for the bedrooms. Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at Bran's head bobbing up and down in the old Jules Duval. When her eyes strayed to the blue moving surface beyond she gave a sigh.
"What a day for a sail, Val!"
Val waked from her sombre dream, and looking for the first time with some shade of recognition at her, became aware of the bathing costume.
"I think you want to die of pneumonia, Haidee!"
"Oh, I 'm not cold, and it's so jolly and loose. It makes me feel as though summer is here already. Don't I wish it were June instead of rotten old March!"
She plumped a potato into the bowl and dexterously used the handle of the knife to flick a long streak of hair over her left shoulder.
"I do believe it's warm enough for a second swim to-day, Val ... let's hurry up and go down to the beach, shall we? ... Yes, do, let's."