"Who will get dèjeuner?" inquired Val, laconically.
"I could kick that rotten Hortense!" responded Haidee savagely, and all her cowboy instincts came out and sat upon her face. "Do you believe she is really sick?" she asked, in the manner of one propounding a problem in Algebra.
"Of course not.... She's sick of doing housework, that's all.... Any one would be."
Haidee considered this awhile scowling, but her thoughts passed to pleasanter subjects, and her face presently regained its harmony. From the kitchen came a sound like the purring of a man-eater of Tsavo enjoying a full meal, but it was only the boiler, which always purred when the stove was red-hot. Haidee made haste to finish the potatoes though her eyes considered many things. She regarded a brown print of Carlyle on the wall above Val's head, and wondered as often before if he had really gone about London with a hat of that shape! And had he really heaved half bricks at the people he did not like? ... that tickled her cowboy humour and she smiled broadly. How beautifully Mr. Whistler had draped that nice gendarme's cloak over the thin legs of the Sage of Craigenputtock!
Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue, blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus plays on the floor.
At other times, when she twisted a grey scarf around her hair and ran in the wind Val could look like a Spanish dancing girl, or a mad Malay. Again an artist in the Latin Quarter had done a water-colour of her in which, with her head a little on one side and a wistful inquiring look in her smoke-blue eyes, she reminded Haidee of a baby lion cub once seen in the Bronx Park Zoo. But to-day Val looked old and sad; her yellow serpent was eating at her heart, and Haidee knew why. The American mail had reached Cherbourg the day before, but no letter had come to Villa Duval. Hardly any letters came from Westenra now, except an occasional one to Haidee and the regular money draft every three months which Val as regularly sent away to a Paris bank and never touched except for paying Haidee's school fees.
"Never mind, Val," said Haidee, half in response to her own thoughts, half in continuation of their brief conversation. "As soon as your play is finished we 'll kick Hortense out" (Haidee's mind still dealt in kicks) "and get a proper bonne. We may be able to afford old M'am Legallais, don't you think? They say she can make lovely onion soup."
"The play will never be finished," said Val darkly. "Pots and pans won't let me finish it--they spoil the scenery. I think potatoes and cabbages! You can smell garlic and stewed veal in the love scenes. Oh! How can one go on living? If it were n't for you and Bran I would cut my head off."
"Cockerels!" said Haidee, in the same way as a rude boy might say "rats!" "Cut your hair off instead," she counselled unfeelingly, "it is getting awfully thin."
Val sprang up and ran like lightning into the next room, where there was a mirror on the wall. Her hair lay in feathery clouds about her face and forehead, and there seemed to be heaps of it, but it was true that when she came to do it up one small comb at the back held all in place. Yet she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as long and thick as Haidee's own.