CHAPTER III

FATE'S WINDING PATHS

"Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the weary end."

With Westenra's kiss still warm on her lips Valentine Valdana knelt in

her cabin, elbows plunged in the low plush-covered lounge, eyes closed,

lips slightly parted, her upturned face resting in the palms of her

hands as still and rapt as the face of a visionnaire, and indeed it was

in visionary scenes that her mind wandered: scenes of the past peopled

with the absent and the dead. Sometimes her lips moved and she spoke a

name--her mother's, her father's, a child's, an old woman's, that of a

man who lay by her mother's side in the Durban cemetery--one whom the

world had known as a brilliant but drunken journalist, but whom she

remembered only as a great heart and loved friend. For she had a great

capacity for loving, this woman; she did not know how to merely like

people; when she cared at all she loved and gave her best. She loved

all the people with whom she was dreaming now, and she loved them still

with a love that reached over seas and past the grave; in her radiant

new-found happiness her thoughts flew to them wishing that they too

might be glad with her.

"Dear Dick ... I am so happy," she said, visualising the drunken

journalist, not as others had seen him, a short red-faced man with

bright, haggard eyes and a sardonic mouth, but as the big-hearted man of

letters who had generously taught a young uneducated girl all he knew of

his craft.

In memory she sat again in the stuffy Johannesburg newspaper office with

the maps on the wall, tables hidden under a jumble of papers, chairs

covered with tobacco ash, books, whiskey bottles, and heard the voice of

Dick Rowan pounding "style" into her while the mine batteries drummed

outside, and the windows reddened and rattled under the assault of a

blinding Rand dust storm. Her thoughts passed to another man who had

worked with them, and who lay now in the little cemetery behind the

Primrose Deep; to another sniped in the streets of Mafeking who had

written to her by the last post that came from the beleaguered town; to

another dead in the shadow of the Himalayas of whom she could not think

without remembering the paddy-birds in the rice fields near Benares;

another sleeping on the shores of Lake Chad.

For like all women thrown early on the world to make a living she had

found her best friends among men, and the very adventurousness of her

own life had brought her into contact with adventurous men of the kind

whose lives are full and vivid and of sudden ending. Of the men who

"did things, and died in far places" she had known a-many, and been

proud of their friendship, and with all the ardour of an ardent nature

she had loved them every one in her boyish, good-comrade way. And they

had all passed on or passed away! But she wanted them to be with her in

this hour. She called on every one she had loved, or been loved by, to

rejoice with her now. She even laid in thought a flower of amnesty upon

the memory of Horace Valdana, but with him she did not linger, for in

the memory of her husband was neither beauty nor joy, and in that hour

she wished only to remember things that gave no hurt.

For she too believed that the fate which through the open and winding

passages of life had been seeking after her had found her at last; that

of all the men she had been loved by, and she had been greatly loved,

here at last was the one whom her heart and mind had awaited--a real man

with something of the lion in the hold of his head and in the quality of

his sure glance and careless smile, who "did before the sun and moon

whatsoever his heart appointed," and was no man's man but his own. She

saw that Westenra was big in mind and spirit, self-trusting,

self-reliant; and every woman's heart responds to those iron strings.

Every woman hopes to find in the man she loves something big and vast

and eternal in which she can become absorbed, and lose herself. For

every woman has the secret fear that by herself she is nothing, can be

nothing, and has no eternal life except in and through love.

She had loved Westenra from the first with all the wise and foolish

reasons a woman will find for putting her hands under the feet of the

beloved, for his boyish laugh, and the way his hair grew, his witty

tongue, the simplicity of his heart, and the subtlety of his mind; for

his big head and broad shoulders, for the grace and strength of him, for

his curious personal shyness and his wide, impersonal outlook; for the

twist his race had given to his speech, and for his handsome face which

was not handsome at all, but the face of a thinker who has been up

against the hardest problem in the world--ignorance.

These were the things she knew that she loved him for, but she was aware

without going too deeply into the matter that the other and more

important ones that she had long sought were there too. Dimly she knew

that the maternal woman in her, the subconscious mother who seeks for

greatness in the father of her children, was satisfied with Westenra and

that promise of eternity in his eyes. And because of this she was

willing to renounce all that her life had been and might be, to change

all in herself that he did not like, to become of him and for him. She

had always known that a time like this would come, when she would throw

all she had worked for and earned to the winds, for the sake of a man

who wanted her not because she was a famous journalist, but because she

was a woman and the woman for him. But the condition was that he must be

the man for her too. She had waited long for that condition to be

fulfilled, passing over many a fine heart because her own refused or was

unable to give the countersign to his challenge.

And at last the hour had come, as it always does come to those who know

how to wait. From the moment she first spoke to Westenra and looked him

in the eyes she had felt that mystic stirring of flesh and spirit that

comes only once and is so unmistakable. She had realised then that to

have this man always in her life would be to touch the highest peaks of

the far blue mountains of romance. And the moment she realised it she

felt hopeless. For never in her life had she got anything that she

ardently desired. Happiness had evaded her and joy had passed her by.

To know now at last that Westenra loved her, that the greatest desire in

her life was to be fulfilled, seemed too wonderful to be true. The

gratitude that filled her was curious in so clever a woman, and one who

had had many men at her feet; but a childlike humility concerning

herself was one of her sweetest qualities.

In the presence of those she loved she never remembered that she was

famous, gifted, travelled, and honoured, and withal young and

attractive. It always amazed her that any one should find her clever and

charming. And that Westenra, who did not even know or care what she had

done as a journalist, should find her desirable just because she was

Valentine Valdana and a woman was the most amazing and beautiful thing

in the world. It opened life out upon a boundless horizon, and flooded

the future with a love great enough to cast out all devils of the past.

She knelt long by her bed, half-praying, half-pondering on sad things

gone by and glad things to come. Out of it all came a resolve that the

next day she would tell Westenra the whole story of her life of strange

adventure and misery.

There were many things that to speak of would cause her wretchedness,

but it was not the shameful wretchedness of those who, resisting no

temptation, have taken all they wished from life, leaving nothing for

the future but regrets. Her sorrows were sweet and untainted. There

were many things of which perhaps people of hedged-in lives might think

she should be ashamed, but which seemed to her to be natural and simple

and nothing. She had gone up and down the world and seen so much in the

way of suffering, known so many complications of love and life, that

nothing astonished or even shocked her any more. She had been through

the mill and "seen life," as the phrase goes; and whether or not that is

a good thing for a woman, and whether or not the spiritual vision gets a

little dimmed in the process, and the senses a little dulled, is a

matter of opinion. The fact remains that at the age of twenty-six

Valentine Valdana still retained such freshness of heart that she could

kneel for an hour or two at her bedside in a state of contemplative

prayer, unembittered by the past and full of hope for the future.

A witty but unhappy writer whose life proved the truth of his epigram

wrote that "good resolutions are cheques which we draw on a bank where

we have no account." But at twenty-six Valentine Valdana could still,

with serene confidence in her power to honour them, draw cheques upon

this bank of the soul: so perhaps after all life had not done so ill by

her as might have been supposed.

Her life-story was a curiously unusual one. The touch of Orientalism in

her eyes and hair was a legacy from her grandmother, a beautiful

Egyptian girl born in a harem and stolen therefrom by an adventurer who

was deep in the counsels and intrigues of its lord and owner, her

father. The two fled from Egypt to Zanzibar, where, under the

protection of the Sultan, they married and lived, the Irishman making

himself as useful and necessary to the negro Sultan as he had to the

Egyptian chief. The beautiful little harem-born wife from association

with her husband and the few Europeans in the place learned to speak

English, and her only child, a girl who resembled one of the wonderful

tropical flowers she lived among, was brought up in European fashion by

an Irish nurse sent for from Ireland. In time the Egyptian mother died,

and the Irishman, fallen on evil days through Court intrigues and an

affliction of the eyes, was obliged to flee from Zanzibar and make for

the only country where he and his child could keep warm and live

cheaply--Italy. There, the girl, Iolita, learned to perfect a gift of

dancing she had always delighted in, and when later her father became

totally blind and penniless, it was she who bravely maintained the

affair of living for both of them by dancing at the theatres and the

opera until she danced her way into fame.

Child of a passionate love-marriage it was only natural that Iolita too

should follow her heart. In London, at the very zenith of her success

and just when Fate was unrolling before her a vista of luxurious years,

she proved the heritage of her blood by eloping to Africa with the

youngest son of an English peer, a being as romantic and irresponsible

as herself.

Gay Haviland had tried his hand at most things, from Shakespearean

acting in London to horse-breaking in Mexico, before he found his true

_metier_ as a transport-rider on the South African veldt. The home to

which he took his eager-hearted bride was an ox-waggon drawn by a span

of twenty magnificent red bullocks, which earned their living and his by

carrying loads of wool and grain from the Free State and the Transvaal

to the Cape. It was on a St. Valentine's Day from the tent of that

waggon as it lay under the shadow of the Catberg Range, that little Val

first saw the light, and the same tent was the only home she knew,

except for occasional sojourns in Dutch towns, for the first nine years

of her life. From a child's point of view it was an ideal existence,

full of beauty and variety as far at least as scenery was concerned,

adventures with big game, long days of camping on the banks of wild

rivers or in the shade of purple mountains, and an absolute absence of

the tasks and training common to children brought up in the ordinary

way. It is true that at camping times the dancer amused herself by

teaching little Val to read and write in Italian, while the

transport-rider successfully imparted to the child, together with his

poetical if vagabond views of life, a very real love and knowledge of

Literature. For if ever scholar turned gipsy it was Gay Haviland, and

though the book he loved best was Nature, and his library the Open Road,

his waggon-boxes were always well stocked with works of classical and

modern writers.

Val imbibed his tastes and vagabond creeds as a flower imbibes dew, but

for the rest she was as free and idle as a little wild buck prancing

across the veldt in the wake of its mother, and as unthinkingly happy.

With Haviland's tragic death from snake-bite, however, the veldt life

came to a sudden end and passed for ever into the realms of memory,

seeming to Val in the hard years that followed to have been a wonderful

dream, yet remaining always the most poignant and cherished part of her

existence.

Poverty showed its jagged teeth to the beautiful dancer, frightening her

back to Europe, where she essayed to gain her living once more with

flying seductive feet. But her dancing was not what it had been. Ten

years of idle and ideal love on the veldt had spoiled her art, or

perhaps the wife and mother had absorbed it. At any rate she was unable

to step back into the vacancy created when as Iolita Fitzpatrick she had

left the stage for love of Gay Haviland. Other stars had arisen, and

the public had forgotten her. Engagements were difficult to find, and

when found were at best of the second-rate order. Neither help nor

sympathy was forthcoming from the proud English family who, having

always detested poor Gay Haviland's _mesalliance_, absolutely repudiated

any connection with the dancer or her child.

Years of arduous struggle followed during which the two trailed from one

great continental city to another, often miserably poor and in desperate

straits, sometimes perilously near starvation, but thanks to the

generous Freemasonry of Art, and grace to their own happy charm in good

and evil times, never quite without friends, or some last resource. It

may truly be said that Val's education was received in the school of

Life, for she never attended any other; but the love of books inculcated

by her father stayed with her, and because book lovers will always,

whatever their straits, get books, Val was able to educate herself as

many another has done, and done well, by reading. Then, too, with the

open mind of the untaught she received and retained all the beauty and

colour and picturesque event of their wandering Bohemian life, finding

even in their grimmest adventure food for thought and amusement.

When she was fourteen, and Iolita still astonishingly beautiful in spite

of poverty and defeat, an engagement took them to the Argentine

Republic, but ending up disastrously left them stranded and almost

penniless at Buenos Aires. Things were at their darkest when good luck

dawned once more in the shape of Dick Rowan, an old friend of

Haviland's, and who together with the latter had adored the dancer in

the days when she was a star. Rowan was a brilliant but eccentric man of

letters, afflicted by the wanderlust. His adventurous temperament,

irked by life in cities, had driven him forth as a journalist to far

lands, where he had become as famous for his war and political

correspondence as for his dissipated ways and generous heart. He was an

expert on the political situation of various Colonies and smaller

Powers, and whenever little wars were on the carpet there also was

Rowan. In times when wars were not, he occupied himself with the

internal wranglings of Colonial governments. Wherever he could force

his way in he made himself felt. It was not for nothing he was known as

"Gadfly" Rowan. At the period of his re-meeting with Iolita he was

interesting himself in the Transvaal with the affairs of Paul Kruger and

the Uitlander, up to his eyes in political intrigue, and editing a

Johannesburg journal with Imperialistic leanings. His presence in the

Argentine on some business of his own was the veriest accident, but a

happy one for Iolita, for, faithful to his early passion, he was

overjoyed to find her again, and asked nothing better than to take her

burdens upon his shoulders and be a father to Gay Haviland's daughter.

Iolita, on her part, had always felt a great affection for the

journalist. It seemed a pleasant end of weariness to consign her fate

into his eager if improvident hands. So they were married, and the

family of three sailed for Africa, where for the next two years they

spent a busy, happy, and erratic existence together, surrounded by

journalists, politicians, and all the quick wits of the Rand. From the

first Val showed a keen liking which Rowan was swift to foster for

newspaper writing. He took her as his secretary, and taught her on

broad lines all that is most useful for a journalist to know. None knew

better than Dick Rowan how to direct a natural talent for journalism,

and in Val he recognised splendid material, a born vocabulary, a keen

sense of observation, love of phrase, and a knowledge of books and

places. Above all, she was full of ardour for the work. Nothing lacked

but training to apply her genius, and this Rowan, erratic and

irresponsible in all things but his profession, was the best person in

the world to give her.

From being his amanuensis she soon became his assistant. A great

devotion sprang up between the stepfather and daughter. Later, when

Iolita, visiting Durban, died and was buried in that beautiful seaside

town, the two drew closer in their loneliness and sorrow. Val was

eighteen then, and Rowan ageing rapidly, for he always lived every

moment of his life, and always he "poured spirits down to keep his

spirits up." Because of this his energy and brain were both beginning

to fail; and here the value of the hand and head he had trained was

proved. Work was offered to him that he would never have been able to

accept but for Val. It was she who urged him on, worked with him and

for him, repaying her own and her mother's debt by unwearying devotion.

A commission to proceed to Somaliland, a splendid opportunity for glory,

came from a great London Daily, but Rowan's initiative would never have

been equal to it without Val. She not only made him go, but went with

him, and when he fell ill there, and the newspaper correspondence

devolved upon her, as well as the nursing of her stepfather, so well did

she accomplish both, that Rowan got well and she reaped recognition.

For Rowan, rigid as all good writers about the identity of work,

insisted on the authorship of the letters being known. Shyly she

appended "Wanderfoot," the nom-de-plume she had chosen, to her first

unaided work. It looked like a special effort on the part of the god of

irony that before the end of the expedition she nearly lost her feet

through inflammation caused by overwalking.

After Somaliland, commissions came to her singly, but from a sense of

loyalty she would do nothing except in connection with Rowan; so they

worked and travelled together going to different parts of Africa from

the Cape to Egypt, until one day landing in Durban to make a flying

visit to the Transvaal, Rowan paid with dramatic suddenness the penalty

for burning up his brain and liver for years with whiskey and the best

wines.

Val found herself alone in the world, though not helpless, for her own

and Rowan's efforts had given her a weapon with which to fight for and

hold her place among the journalists of the day. But she was only

twenty, and as hopelessly impractical as the conditions of her life and

Rowan's happy-go-lucky methods could make her. He was one of those who

knew no use for money except to make it fly faster than it came, living

gaily ahead of his income to the tune of the old saw:

"Happy-go-lucky,

Penny loaf for twopence,

Got no shoes go without."

Val's journalistic intelligence had been developed at the expense of her

practicability for everyday purposes. She could already make money, but

she had no sense of the value of it. A number of things she had

gathered hi the course of her vivid life could not be tabulated, for

they were intangible, nor valued, for they were priceless; but of common

or garden prudence and horse-sense she possessed no single jot or iota.

What she did possess and wear for all the world to recognise was a

disquietingly attractive appearance, and the fascination that hangs

about the personality of one who is able to _do_ something, and that

something well. To this was now added the wistful charm that sorrow

stamps upon her elect. All those whom Val had loved had left her one by

one. She began to believe herself doomed to loneliness--that she had

but to love to suffer the bitterness of loss. The cerebral hemorrhage

with which Rowan had been smitten had left him a few merciful clear

hours before death, and during that time he had impressed upon her the

wisdom of going straight to England and making the most of his literary

connections there. But, in spite of this injunction, she had lingered

on from day to day in the expensive Durban hotel where he died. She

could not drag herself away from the two graves that lay in the heart of

the town, sheltered by palms and feathery trees, with the naked feet of

Zulus pattering past up and down the Berea hill, and ricksha bells

echoing between the marble crosses and headstones of the dead. She

shrank and faltered from turning her face towards a new life empty of

love.

That was a propitious moment for Horace Valdana to step upon the scene.

Handsome, with the marks of race on him, and no outward sign of his dark

heart, he was of the exact type to attract a romantic girl's interest.

Val, lonely, impulsive, but lacking in judgment, fell in love with the

man she believed him to be, and without hesitation placed her fate in

his hands. There was no one to warn her (and if there had been it is

doubtful whether she would have believed that he was a thorough-paced

blackguard, whose family, sure by bitter experience that he would some

day openly disgrace an old and honoured name, and deciding that it were

better for him to do it in the Colonies than at their door, had financed

him to go abroad and stay there. Africa is full of such--"remittance

boys," ne'er-do-wells, men who have left their country for their

country's good. Most of them, when they arrive at least, have good

manners, often the stamp of a public school on them. Nearly all possess

the charm and guile that are special attributes of the professional

black sheep.

Valdana was a perfect example of this professional black sheep--whom

novelists and playwrights have encouraged into existence--the man who

talks rather sadly about his family never having seen any good in him,

but who, by "carving out a career" for himself means to show them some

day that he is "not such a waster after all!" Any woman of the world

would have seen through him in a very short time; but poor Val was no

woman of the world, only a gifted, romantic girl, with all the worldly

stupidity and shortsightedness of her kind. It should, perhaps, be

counted to Valdana's credit that he married her instead of playing some

trick upon the innocence of which her varied life had not yet robbed

her. But trickery would have meant plotting, and Horace Valdana was too

lazy to plot. Besides, he was well informed enough to know that Val had

value as a wife who could make money. So Val got a real marriage

certificate, and became a real wife, and in a very short time knew the

meaning of real misery. Until then the hard luck and misfortunes which

Fate had dealt her had at least been shared by loyal hearts and faced

with courage and gaiety; but now it was her lot to discover how bitter

sordid poverty can be when shared with a mean and vicious nature that

exacts all and gives less than nothing in the great give-and-take game

of marriage. Valdana darkened life for her and blotted out the stars.

He walked on her illusions and hopes, and threw down her idols. She

sometimes felt as if he had wiped his boots on her soul. Wretchedness

and a child were the outcome of the ill-starred marriage. Still soft

and pliable with youth, she might have forgiven the first for the sake

of the last, but her husband, utterly bored by her innocence and

uselessness, very soon decamped leaving her to shift for herself and the

child as best she might.

It was quite true as has been told that she was utterly useless in the

ordinary way. She had received absolutely no training in the practical

things of life, except of the most rough-and-ready kind. She could

light a camp-fire with any one, and shoot something to cook on it

afterwards, but she was far from knowing as much about domestic life as

even an ordinary Boer girl, and quite unfit to be a poor man's wife in

Africa or anywhere else. The one thing she could do well was to write up

big picturesque events for the newspapers; but such things have to be

sought first and written of afterwards, and now she had a baby to bind

her hands and stay her wandering feet.

There came another dreary era of struggle. Freed of the cankering taint

of Valdana's presence, the young mother plucked up enough courage and

money to get back to England, where she judged her best chance lay of

making a living. But the connections and introductions she had counted

on using there were in the end of very little use to her, for the reason

that she could not now continue her special line of work. There were

still things happening in out-of-the-way parts of the world, but Val

could not leave her young child to go and write about them, and after

one or two offers had been made to her and declined she got no others.

As for the conditions of English life and journalism she knew nothing of

them. Besides, a place in the London journalistic world has to be

worked and waited for on the spot; outsiders are not encouraged, and

have a bad time while trying to push in. When at last she realised that

all she could hope for was an ignominious place in the queue among the

hack writers, the girl proudly buried the name made memorable by

collaboration with Dick Rowan, and disguised under that of Valdana, took

what she could get to keep the wolf from the door. For herself,

travelling on a dark road where all the stars had gone out, she would

have cared little if at this time starvation and an end had come; but

the tiger maternity was awake in her and cried out for the preservation

of little Carmen.

From the first the child had doubled her anxieties by being delicate,

and in England its health did not improve. Many a time in the weary

London months the mother tripped up the journalist just as the path

looked a little clearer or was smoothening out to a surer footing. Many

a promising opportunity of regular work had to be passed by because of

some baby illness that needed all the careful nursing Val could give.

But youth and courage were still on her side; and in her heart the

secret conviction which thrills every mother--that her child is an

important link in the chain of generations, that a woman's career and

ambitions are as nothing compared to the keeping alight of the little

flame which may some day become a beacon to humanity. What mother's

heart has not trembled to this illusion? How many babies would ever

reach maturity if this secret religion did not hold sway in women's

hearts, urging them to sacrifice, pain, drudgery, and self-abnegation?

And after all the struggle was in vain. The baby died, and Val, more

lonely and alone than ever before, wished that she too might die, for it

seemed that life was never to hold anything for her but work. And oh!

the weariness of work that has not love for its compelling force! Oh!

the longitude and lassitude of life without loved ones in it!

Fortunately, something occurred at this time which not only took her

away from the scene of her loss, but occupied her every thought for a

considerable period. The Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shook England to

the heart with various emotions, and called for a great deal of

information that could only be acquired at the scene of operations. The

Editor of the Imperialistic Daily, which had employed Dick Rowan, found

himself keenly regretting the "Gadfly" and his deep knowledge of the

internal workings of the Transvaal Government, then remembered

"Wanderfoot" and her application of a year or so back. A search was

instituted, and within a week Val was sailing for Africa full of

instructions that gave her little time in which to remember the

emptiness of her heart and the dull ache of loss, or anything but the

affair she was sent upon--to get speech of both President Kruger and the

members of the Reform Committee who lay in Pretoria Gaol.

The series of brilliant articles sent by her from Johannesburg dealing

with the reign of terror at that time exercised by Transvaal Boers over

the betrayed and despairing English population; the history, written in

terse, mordant, heart-wringing phrases of that famous trial, when four

of the Reform Committee were sentenced to death, and the rest to "two

years' rotting" in a foul prison; these constituted the first steps in

the ladder by which Valentine mounted alone and unaided, rung by rung,

to journalistic fame. After that no more need to seek work; it sought

her. There were commissions to India, Turkey, Russia, and Mexico, and

with each new adventure were fresh laurels, for her work improved as the

work of a writer can only improve when she gives it her heart and soul

and serves no other god.

Thus, after struggling and climbing practically from the age of fourteen

up the craggy hillside of Fame, she had in her twenty-sixth year reached

a point nearer the top than do most women. True, it was not universal

fame, but the fact remains, that to any one who read with understanding

the British newspapers, her name stood for work both brilliant and

sound, a fine temperament and a great future.

When success first began to come her way, Valdana cropped up again,

smiling and ready to step back into her life. But sorrow had taught Val

a few things and opened her eyes to the real worthlessness of her

husband's character. She recognised coldly and clearly at last just

what he was--a lazy, unscrupulous scoundrel. Even more unforgivable was

the fact that he had not cared a rap whether his child lived or died of

starvation: that she could never forget. Therefore, though she gave him

money, even unto the half of her income, she refused to return to him or

allow him to come back into her life. He became so troublesome,

however, that she was on the point of seeking legal protection from him,

when the Boer war broke out, and in the urgent interests of her

newspaper she was obliged to put private affairs aside, and start

immediately for Africa. After a year there of unceasing work and

travel, she succumbed to a bad illness, resulting from overtaxed energy,

and it was while she lay ill in Cape Town that Valdana made a fresh move

in the game.

It must be mentioned that before his people, realising his lack of all

moral sense, and fearful of future dishonour, had decided to despatch

him to Africa, he was intended for the army, and had been educated and

trained to that end. His parents' decision was a bitter blow to him,

for the picturesque side of army life appealed to him greatly, and he

chose to believe and to frequently air the modest opinion that in him a

very gallant soldier had been lost to England. Now, when in England's

dark hour she called for men to volunteer their services in Africa, came

his chance, and with a promptness he only exhibited in his own

interests, he applied for a commission in one of the corps raised in

London. His application was at first refused, because there were plenty

of good men of tried experience to fill such posts; but a clever use of

his wife's name and work got him into the limelight. He did not even

disdain to make use of her illness, and the fact that she had been

brought almost to death's door in the service of the public. So finally

he got his commission and sailed for the front in a glow of publicity.

Then, for a blackleg and a ne'er-do-well whom no one wanted, he did an

extraordinary and unheard of thing--he died! And not content to merely

die, he did the thing well; nobly and heroically he did it, in company

with a dozen or so men of his troop. They were isolated in a farmhouse,

surrounded by a large number of Boers, and refusing to surrender were

cut up to a last man, and the house set afire over their wounded bodies.

Some grudging curmudgeon had invented a tale to the effect that one of

the band had slunk out, and, deserting his wounded comrades, escaped.

But no one had ever been able to prove the lie, and even the Boers

themselves gave evidence of the splendid courage of the little band, and

especially of their leader, the last to die with a laugh upon his lips.

All England rang with Horace Valdana's name. Val, already bright in the

public eye, had the added lustre of her gallant husband's glory shed

upon her. Shoals of sympathetic letters and telegrams reached her in

Cape Town, and, on the occasion of her return to England, having been

rigidly forbidden by the doctors to continue her war correspondence, she

was met by crowds and cheered to the echo. But both sympathy and cheers

were wasted upon her. She received them coldly and silently, without

tears and without a widow's desolate mien. When it was presently

observed that she also dispensed with the habiliments of wo, and went

about in London as if nothing had happened, she was severely criticised,

and people began to dislike her. Moreover, a mangled history of the

unhappy marriage got out; it was soon known that there had been great

faults on one side or the other. Tales with a tang to them of

Valentine's friendships abroad with well-known men were told in the

clubs, and as the men concerned had mostly died or disappeared, there

was no one on the spot interested or well informed enough to dispute the

truth of them. What was worse, an entirely cruel and untrue version of

her relation to Dick Rowan during their travels and exploits together

was bruited about, though always so carefully that the victim of the

scandal only caught dim echoes of it, and was never able to seize and

nail the lie to the mast. In the end, needless to say, the woman paid.

"Gallant Horace Valdana" got more than the benefit of the doubt as far

as the unhappy marriage was concerned, and his widow was sent to social

Coventry.

Little she cared. The world meant nothing to her. She had wrestled too

bitterly with life to set any undue value on the approval of society,

even had she not possessed a congenital carelessness amounting to

indifference to the opinions of any except those she loved. As long as

those few knew the truth--as they could not help doing, knowing her--and

their love loyally remained unaffected, she gave little heed to calumny;

it was enough for her to realise that she was free at last of Valdana.

She tried not to rejoice too much at that, but rather to weed out from

her heart the last blade of bitterness and scorn of the dead man, so

that the rest of life might be lived unpoisoned by hateful memories.

At this period of vague mental unrest and retrospection, the offer to

her from a famous newspaper to visit America on its behalf came

pleasantly _a propos_. Sick of London and the arid memories it

contained for her, she was thankful to shake its dust from her feet for

a time at least and turn her face to a new and unknown horizon.

And now, during the process of getting into her soul once more the dew

of forgiveness and loving-kindness, Westenra had come marching into her

life, and her heart cried out as the heart of Iole cried out when they

asked her how she knew that Hercules was a god:

"Because I was content when my eyes fell upon him."