"And then?" Val smiled into his hair. There was a pause; at last in a soft whisper spoke Bran the brigand:
"I 'd take a sword and go and pierce him in the night and get his million pounds for you." He embraced her ardently. It was characteristic of her that she did not rebuke him for the lawlessness of his plan. She thoroughly understood the spirit that could rob, pillage, and even do murder for the sake of a loved one.
They began to laugh and play. Val suddenly fell in love with her plan to have her hair cut off. She arranged a red handkerchief on her head, turban-fashion, to see how she would look. Eventually she decided to wear a fez and return to her habit of cigarette smoking to match her new appearance. Haidee declared that she too would love a fez, so Val sat down and wrote to the Army and Navy Stores for two, on the condition that Haidee went to the village at once to tell the barber to come immediately after lunch. Now that she had decided to have her hair cut the thing could not be done soon enough to please her.
Regretfully Haidee changed her bathing-dress for her navy-blue skirt and scarlet sweater, also a floppy hat of brown suède for which Val had paid a pound in Jersey at a time when they were very hard up indeed, just because it suited Haidee's peculiar style of cowboy beauty. Looking like a handsome conspirator, she sallied forth down the road that led to the village, for Villa Duval lay a good half-mile from Mascaret, with nothing between but the blacksmith's shop, a hotel, and a couple of fishermen's cottages.
The blacksmith's wife's brother, known to all the world, including Haidee and Bran, as "mon oncle" was whitewashing the outside of the blacksmith's cottage against the day when the rose-tree trained over the door would burst into leaf and large pink roses. A little farther on, in front of the hotel, two men were scattering red brick dust over the long flower beds on the sloping lawns, preparatory to planting out the letters "Grand Hotel de la Mer" in blue and white lobelias, thus combining patriotism with an excellent advertisement of the hotel. When the May excursion boat moored alongside the digue, the first thing to greet the eyes of the passengers would be the blue and white lettering on the brick-red beds.
These signs and symbols of approaching summer cheered the heart of Haidee, and she hummed a little song to herself, as she went light-foot along the curving picturesque terrace that led to the village.
Already she seemed to smell upon the air the luscious heavy scent of travellers' joy that would presently hang in waxen bunches from the high walls of La Terrasse and Villa Albert. These were the only two villas on the Terrace, and they pertained variously to a Paris specialist in madness, and the controller-general of a great French bank. Between the two villas lay a large and valuable plot of ground, overgrown and tangled up with creepers, brambles, cabbage stalks, rose bushes, and seeding onions, set in the midst of which was a dilapidated one-room hut. The hut was the fly in the ointment of the specialist in lunacy and the controller-general. They could do nothing to remove this picturesque slum from their gates, for old veuve Michel, who lived there and drank two bottles of cognac a day and sang gay ribald songs by night, owned the land by right of some old French statute, and no one could turn her out for as long as she lived. Haidee and Bran considered veuve Michel a very charming person indeed. She was fat and merry and gentle, called them her nice little hens and gave them apples and pears (for she also owned an orchard up the cliff) all through the winter when there was no fruit to be got any nearer than Cherbourg. Naturally they liked and appreciated the old woman. Haidee had a good mind to go in and pay her a visit, but she decided it was better not, as old veuve would just be sleeping off her morning bottle of cognac preparatory to starting on the afternoon one; also Haidee remembered that she was hungry, and had better hurry back and help get lunch. Still she could not help stopping once or twice to examine for signs of little pink tips the lower branches of the tamarisk-trees which grew on one side of the Terrace--on the other side was the grey stone river wall with the tide lapping blue against it.
Haidee loved tamarisks with a joy that she was sure was unholy because they looked so wicked and painted somehow when they were all dressed out in their pink feathers. She fancied that Jezebel must have had a bunch of them stuck like an aigrette in her beautifully coiffée hair, and the same pink tint on her cheeks when she looked out of the window for the last time. Anyway why were tamarisks the only trees to be found growing in the ruins of Babylon? And why had she read somewhere, that in the days of ancient Rome tamarisks were bound around the heads of criminals? It was a nuisance to have to forsake these interesting meditations to enter the little soap-scented shop of the village barber, but she stayed no longer than to bid him come to the Villa at three o'clock to cut off Madame's hair. Next she called at Lemonier's to command a sack of coal, and noted that Lemonier had evidently been drunk again, for Madame had a black eye. It was funny to think that such a jolly big red man should be so cruel! Haidee meditated on this subject on the return journey, also on the horrible price of coal--sixty-five francs a ton and it disappeared like lightning. No one seemed to know why "Carr-diff," as they called it, should be so dear. Hortense, closely questioned on the subject by Val anxious for information, said that it must be because the people in England hated the French and were still angry that Normandy did not belong to them.
"Well, have n't you got any coal mines in your own blessed country?" asked Haidee.
"Certainement!" Hortense had replied indignantly. "We have Newcas-sel!"