Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
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Title: Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
Creator: Cynthia Stockley
Release date: June 22, 2012 [eBook #40059]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40059
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
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[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: Cynthia Stockley]
WANDERFOOT
(THE DREAM SHIP)
BY
CYNTHIA STOCKLEY
AUTHOR OF "POPPY," "THE CLAW," ETC
TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY
CYNTHIA STOCKLEY
"_Wanderfoot_" is published in England under the title of
"_The Dream Ship_"
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO
MY DAUGHTER
DOROTHY
"O Beauty, I have wandered far;
Peace, I have suffered seeking thee:
Life, I have sought to see thy star,
That other men might see.
And after wandering nights and days,
A gleam in a beloved soul
Shows how life's elemental blaze
Goes wandering through the whole."
CONTENTS
PART I
AMERICA
CHAPTER
I. Secret Palaces
II. Grey and Gold
III. Fate's Winding Paths
IV. A Skeleton and a Shrine
V. Squirrel in a Trap
VI. Kisses and Crosses
VII. More Winding Paths
VIII. Wounds in the Rain
PART II
JERSEY
IX. New Roads to Fortune
X. Worry-Bells
XI. A Ship on the Rocks
XII. Children of Ishmael
PART III
FRANCE
XIII. The Ways of a Lover
XIV. The Ways of Literature
XV. Ways Sacred and Secular
XVI. The Ways of Girls
XVII. The Ways of Boys
XVIII. The Way of The Sea
XIX. The Way of Nemesis
XX. The Ways of Life and Death
XXI. Lonely Ways
XXII. The Way of Love
Part I
America
CHAPTER I
SECRET PALACES
"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion."
The _Bavaric_ had been four fine September days at sea, and it was time
for the vague pain and melancholy that always haunted Westenra after
leaving Ireland to pass; yet it stayed with him as never before it had
stayed. The voice of the Atlantic sang a dirge in his ears, and looking
at the long grey rollers he thought of his mother's hair which he would
never see again, of the mists that enveloped _Inishaan_ as Ireland
passed from sight, of the ghosts of Raths, and all grey things; and life
looked grey before him and dull. It was as though the mists and shadows
of his land lay upon his spirit and would not be lifted. More than ever
he was lonely, more than ever an exile, for now there was none but the
dead left to him in the land of his birth; the last root had gone, the
last frond been cut away. His mother had died on the day he sailed from
New York to pay her his annual visit, and long before he reached
Queenstown she had been laid away to rest by his father's side in the
fair valley of Glendalough.
For awhile he had roamed about Ireland with something of the aimlessness
of a wounded creature, choosing wild solitary places where the sorrowful
beauty of lake and forest and mountain, so unique, so different in its
wistful allurement to any other scenery in the world, had seemed to
brood with him in his grief and lay with mysterious hands some healing
spikenard in his heart. But the shadow of loneliness had not been
lifted from him.
He had never spent more than a few weeks of his yearly holiday with his
mother, and the rest of the two months in different parts of Europe, but
always he had felt her in his life; sitting by her fireside in her
beautiful little Carlow home she had constituted his bit of Ireland, his
share of the world. Now he was a lonely man without home or kin. The
ache of emptiness was in his heart as he stared at the few pale early
stars that had ventured forth into the evening sky.
Nothing was left in his life now except a child and a woman; but the
child was not even his own, and the woman was only a vision. For years
she had come to him in his dreams, so many years that he could not
remember the first time, but usually she appeared when he was in Ireland
or coming away from it, never in America; and because he was fresh from
Ireland, and the supernatural element that is in the Celtic nature had
been recently renewed so that supernatural things still seemed to him
the real things of life, he thought of her now as if she were a real
woman, and wondered why it was so long since he had seen her flickering
through the night in her pale grey gown with fine lace at the throat and
a chain of luminous beads swinging before her neck. He tried to recall
the strangely Oriental face, but, as always it eluded him, and he could
only remember the wistful lurking sadness that divined in her something
of the Irishry, the knowledge of sorrow and longing for far places in
her eyes; the subtle suggestion of mourning for some lost land, like an
echo of Goethe's song:
"Kennst Du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?
Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen gluehn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht
Die Myrte, still und hoch der Lorbeer steht."
There were other things that troubled him too: dark shadows hovering
about her, flecks of mud and blood upon her bare feet, and the weary
look of one who has come a long way upon a bad road. But what was sweet
to his lonely heart was that she seemed so unquestionably to belong to
him, so wholly and inevitably his.
The Irish boy who never loved has never lived, and Westenra cherished
with characteristic ardour the remembrance of one or two youthful
romances, but apart from these and his great love for his mother there
had been no woman's influence in his life. He had been too busy to let
women in.
Though he was only thirty-three, America had heard of him as a surgeon,
and that is no slight triumph in a land of many clever surgeons. What
was dearer to him was the fact that in Medical Science the "other
fellows" knew of him--the big, silent men beating their way by inches
along the hampered road of Progress--they recognised him as one of
themselves, a worker not for money nor personal glory, but for humanity.
Skill with the knife, being at its best no more than a fine
collaboration of hand and eye, never yet sufficed a brilliant intellect,
and it had not sufficed Westenra. His keen mind, not content to follow
on the lines laid down by other men, craved for higher work in the
discovery and formulation of new principles of treatment in diseases
that defied the surgeon's knife; and it was in the laboratory that he
had won the triumphs he most valued. In spite of a heavy hospital and
private practice, he had found time to do some unique experimental work
in connection with the intestinal canals, while on the subject of
locomotor ataxia he was already considered something more than an
expert. But the diseases that lured him most were those in which
surgery failed to give the relief hoped for, and one such he had
specially starred out for laborious investigation. He knew when he
determined to devote himself to the subject of the metabolic disorders
underlying diabetes, that years, perhaps a lifetime, of experiment and
ardent unpaid labour lay before him, but he faced the prospect boldly,
for he doubted not that in the end he would have as great a gift to
bestow upon the world as even Lister, Metchnikoff, or Pasteur.
Not much time in such a life of planned hours, tasks, and duties to
think of women. And, indeed, except as cases, he had not definitely
thought of them. But, like all Celts, he had an inner world of his own
in which he walked sometimes, and did not walk alone. A mystical subtle
knowledge was his that somewhere in the universe a woman was waiting for
him--the woman with the pale Oriental face and the grey gown. And in
his heart he listened for the delicate approach of footsteps from out
the distance and the Future.
"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow?
One look or none did you bestow
When carelessly, as strangers go,
You passed my door?"
He understood the listener in those lines with the imagination of one
who in a city office or hospital can hear the sounds of birds and
insects, and feel the wind of the moors on his face and see the gloom of
trees. The dark waves of the Atlantic had often seemed to him symbolic
of the Irish nature; dark and sad to the outward view, but when the wind
ruffles the surface showing light and beauty beneath, secret inner
palaces of green crystal.
But to-night his loneliness oppressed him as never before. It seemed to
him he had waited too long in a land of dreams and shadows. He left the
sea and stars at last and went to his cabin.
At dinner for the first time since the boat sailed the seat next his own
was occupied, though he scarcely noticed the fact until he found himself
sitting beside a woman. A young woman he saw at once by her hands, all
that he could see of her very well, for however curious a man may be it
is difficult for him to take the bearings of a person with whom he is
seated cheek by jowl. Westenra was not at all curious, but even when he
was the dreamiest of Irishmen he was also a trained observer, and to
take notes on the people with whom he came in contact whilst apparently
absorbed in his own affairs was as natural to him as breathing. He
could almost make a diagnosis from a hand, and the next deductions he
drew from the slim ones of his neighbour were not all so pleasing as the
first. For one thing he saw that she was an intensely nervous woman,
even though she spent so much time out of doors, ungloved, that her
hands were burnt to a pale brown tint. They were more like a boy's
hands than a woman's, except that they were so nervously febrile and
covered with rings. The rings called for attention. They were odd and
barbaric, and of far greater beauty than value, for most of the stones
were semi-precious, and their charm lay in their quaint settings and
brilliant colouring. There were miniatures surrounded by amethysts,
marquise rings of blue and green enamel with devices in rose-diamonds,
olivines and sardonyx set with seed-pearls and an Angelica Kauffman
under a crystal. On the thumb of her right hand she wore a very fine
black scarab heavily set in platinum, and on the index finger of the
same hand a silver ring of rough workmanship made in the shape of a V
with a stone like an uncut ruby imbedded in the point of the letter.
Nothing so commonplace as a wedding ring was to be observed amongst this
eccentric collection. The forefingers of her left hand were faintly
tinted with the amber of nicotine.
"Smokes too much," thought Westenra, and might have supposed her
left-handed but for a worn, hard little mark on her right middle finger.
"Writes, and smokes while she 's writing," he deducted, and thought none
the better of her for that. When she ordered a brandy-and-soda to drink
with the sardine she was dissecting he liked her still less.
"She won't be in the game long at that rate," he estimated grimly.
"With _her_ nerves I 'll give her another two years at most." He hated
to see women drink. Experience had taught him that few of them can do
it long without going to pieces morally. And here was one who would
certainly go to pieces physically as well. On this conclusion he felt
no further inclination for observations. But that did not prevent him
from hearing what she had to say. She had struck up a little
conversation with the man on the other side of her, speaking in a
nervous contralto voice that, without being throaty, contained a curious
husky tremor giving almost the suggestion that she wore a veil over it.
Without the assistance of his previous deductions Westenra would have
known it at once for the voice of a temperamental woman, as well as that
of a woman of the world; and was the more astonished therefore, at her
free _bon camarade_ manner with her neighbour, a French Jew with a mean
expression on a clever face--a financier or dealer in jewels Westenra
judged, and a none too scrupulous one at that. They talked about the
ice on the table and where it had come from. The Jew was not sure
whether it was Norwegian ice or manufactured on the boat, but was full
of information about the New York supply and the great frozen lakes from
which it was cut in enormous blocks.
"I must go and see them!" said the woman eagerly, "and the far solitary
tracts of ice and snow in Alaska! I _must_ see them."
She talked like a woman who had fever in her veins.
"You like cold places?" asked the Jew curiously.
"No! No! I hate cold, but I like wide, solitary, empty lands and
countries I have never been to. I would love to wake up every morning of
my life in afresh place."
Westenra admired reserve in a woman, and was thoroughly astounded at
such a lack of it. There was worse to come. Her friendly candour
revived the French heart of the Jew to a corresponding friendliness
which by some persons might have been considered impertinent, but did
not seem in the least to offend this one.
"Excuse me, mad'moiselle, but I never saw such original bracelets.
Might one ask what they are made of?"
"Ivory," she answered pleasantly. "I got them in Central Africa. They
were cut green from an elephant's trunk."
"Elephant's trunk!" murmured the Jew, and even Westenra had to smile.
"Oh! tusk I mean, of course. And the red things imbedded in them are
garnets from De Beers's Mine in Kimberley. I think they are ever so
much nicer than diamonds, don't you?"
The Jew tried to look as if he did, and succeeded fairly well.
"Here is another in my silver ring. A Zulu made this ring for me in
Natal, out of a half-crown. I gave him the garnet to put in, and
another half-crown for making it."
If the Jew were outraged at the idea of any lady wearing such cheap
jewellery, he concealed his feelings under a silky smile.
"Then you know Africa, mad'moiselle?"
"I know every country except America," she said. "But I think Africa is
the only one in the world that I could stay in always without getting
bored."
"Ah! Is it Johannesburg you like?"
"Oh, no--Rhodesia--Zululand--the Drakenberg Mountains--the open veldt."
The Jew stared.
"For a lady you have been to very unusual places," he commented, and if
the words were ambiguous the tone was not lacking in courtesy.
"I love to travel," she said, "and it is my business to see things and
places. I am a journalist."
"Indeed!" said the Jew, and stared again, for she was quite unlike any
journalist he had ever met or heard of. But she gave him no time for
any further astonished questions.
"I must go," she said abruptly. "This saloon is too hot." Smiling
pleasantly at him she drank up her brandy-and-soda and departed, the Jew
rising up also and bowing her out of her seat in a way that Westenra
considered officious, yet could not but notice that with a courteous
smile on him the fellow was not so mean-looking after all. The Irishman
gave a glance after the figure of his late neighbour. She was tall and
slight with a firm light walk, but as she went down the aisle made by
two long dining-tables the ship rolled gently, and she put out her pale
brown hands here and there touching a chair back.
Proceeding with his dinner, which had as yet only reached the second
course, Westenra reflected that it would be difficult for any woman,
even with a bet to win, to give herself and her affairs away more
thoroughly in a short space of time than his late neighbour had done.
"With both hands she did it--and her tongue," he mused cynically. "In
no longer a time than it took to dine off a brandy-and-soda and the
outline of a sardine!"
After sitting next to her for a matter of twenty minutes he knew all
there was to be known of her tastes, her profession, her temperament,
her habits. She had travelled, she wrote for the
newspapers,--sensational stuff probably, her head was too small for a
thinker's head,--she was entirely modern, cursed with nerves,
restlessness, and dissatisfaction; she was unreserved, unreposeful,
uncontrolled, undisciplined; she drank, she smoked. He really could not
think of anything about her, except her charming voice, which of course
she could not help, that was not in violent opposition to his every idea
of what a woman should be, and the fact filled him with resentment born
of a kind of chivalrous discontent that any woman should be so far from
the ideal standard. He entirely withdrew his earlier supposition that
she was a woman of the world, in spite of the evidence of travel and
experience.
"A woman of her type could never contend with any kind of social life.
The way she let that Jew draw her was childish."
At that moment something happened that thrilled through his nerves and
veins like an electric shock, and left him mentally stunned.
The woman of whom he had been thinking was coming back down the long
saloon, her delicate hands put out to the chair backs in the same little
frond-like movement as before. For the first time he saw her face clear
and full; and he did not have to look twice to recognise it. Though it
had always eluded his memory in waking hours he knew it now that he saw
it as well as his own. _It was the face of the woman he had dreamed of
for years_. He knew her hair, her eyes, her mouth, the grey gown she
had on, the deep collar of fine lace ivoried by age that turned away
from the base of a long throat that had fine ivory tints of its own. He
even knew the necklace of luminous grey-green beads that swung to her
waist. The wistfulness of the Irishry that he remembered so well lurked
elusively about her eyes and mouth, and the touch of Orientalism was
there too, though it was hard to tell of what it came, for if her hair
was black and her skin Arab-pale, her sad eyes were not dark but of a
curious smoky blue. As she came nearer she looked straight at him, her
glance for a moment seeming to rest in his, and he saw that like the
eyes of many clever people hers possessed a slight defect; they were
different in shape and expression; one seemed to be long and sleepy and
almost cynical looking, the other, rounder, held an eager inquiring
glance that suggested great vitality and ardour. This was Westenra's
fleeting impression, there was no time for more, and he was almost too
aghast for clear thought; but a glance of his eye went a good deal
further than most people's, and in this instance his vision was
sharpened by the strange circumstances of his dream.
It appeared that she had come back to her seat to fetch a little silk
bag of the kind that women were then using to carry about their
handkerchiefs and purses. She spoke to no one, only leaned over the
back of her seat, took her bag and went away, and it was all over in two
or three seconds. But in those few seconds a man's life had been
changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra.
Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat
next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was
the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had
for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic
roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious
and irreplaceable. Something was broken and gone from his life. The
beautiful spun-glass globe of illusion he had carried so secretly was
shattered in the dust. In that moment of bitter realisation he was not
a surgeon and scientist from New York, but a primitive man from Ireland
keening in silence for a nameless sorrow. The desert grief of his race
welled up from the depths of him, and the taste of his waters was as the
taste of the waters of Marah.
----
There were few people on deck. The wind was chill, and the stars burned
with the brilliant sapphire pallor of electric light. There was a
special spot where Westenra always stood to smoke, because it gave him a
leaning place against the rail where he could command the length of the
deck, and yet get an uninterrupted view of the grey waves with their
pale sea palaces. Close beside him in a canvas-sheltered corner stood
his deck chair. He lit a cigar, but he might have been smoking seaweed
for all the aroma there was in it for him. Abstractedly he stared at
the phosphorescent waves, but his attention was on the door of the
companion-way, and presently, as he had felt sure she would, the woman
in grey came through it with her swaying movements and her hands put out
a little. She had wrapped herself in a long silky cloak that gleamed in
the starlight, and as she strayed up and down the deck like a grey
ghost, the wind took hold of it and flicked it about her making it crack
like a silken sail. It took fronds of her hair too and made them into
lashes that beat her face and blew above her head. She laughed a little
to herself as she was blown this way and that, and for the first time
that night she pleased Westenra, for he loved the wind, and it seemed to
him that she loved it too. He stood very still listening to the
tap-tapping of her heels, thinking of--
"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow...?"
and of how long he had listened in office and hospital for the sound of
a woman's feet coming towards him. He remembered the bare broken feet
of the woman in his dream, though he had always dimly recognised that
the mud and blood were symbolical of the rough paths she had walked.
These that tapped the deck near him were daintily shod in grey _suede_,
but from her own telling they had strayed in far places of the earth and
echoed in lonely spots before they came his way, as they were coming
now. Would they halt when they reached him? Resentful, antagonistic,
and disillusioned as he was, something in his fatalistic Irish nature
responded, some bird sang in a pale green palace when she stood still
beside him, and spoke:
"Do you think I might sit in this nice sheltered corner?" She looked at
the chair and then at him, with a boyish _bon camarade_ smile that
banished all the sadness and shadows from her face.
"I 'm sure you might--please do."
He moved forward swiftly and arranged the chair for her. She sat down,
and as he did not move away began to talk to him in the same friendly
easy way as she had used to the Jew, and he found himself, like the Jew,
answering her if not eagerly at least with interest. However they
touched only on generalities. She did not tell him nearly so much as
she had told the Jew and he found in that too something to resent.
Possibly she missed the French receptivity, or with the quicksilver
sensitiveness of some women divined antagonism, for something like a
little note of appeal came presently into her voice: it was as though
she were trying to soften his heart towards her. In answer to some
observation of his with regard to travelling she said rather wearily:
"Yes; one discovers these things when one has knocked about the world
long enough."
"Knocking about the world" was not a process that usually enhanced a
woman's charm, in his eyes at least; but he soon became aware that all
charm was far from being knocked out of this one. Charm came out of her
like a perfume, and stole towards him. But he steeled his heart against
it and against her, so that a glint of the steel presently came into his
eyes and seemed to ring in his voice. Certainly something in him
chilled the little tendrils of good fellowship and friendliness that she
seemed inclined to extend. At last shivering slightly and drawing her
cloak about her, she stirred in her chair, preparing to go. But he
stayed her with an odd and unexpected question.
"Do you always wear grey?"
She laughed and turned to look at him curiously.
"Now I wonder what makes you ask such a strange question?"
Enraged with himself, resentful of her, he was far from any intention of
telling her his real reason.
"It hardly seems to be your colour." He spoke abruptly and realised
immediately that he was being rude. But she was not offended at the wry
compliment. Whatever her faults might be she seemed at least to be
untroubled by that one paramount in most women--vanity.
"Are you an artist?" She leaned forward and looked at him with the free
curiosity of a child.
"No."
She waited an instant as though expecting to hear him supplement his
curt answer, but her frank impulsive methods waked no answering echoes,
and she sank back with a little sigh. He felt ashamed of his
churlishness. Never before had he been so unresponsive to friendly
advances; but apart from his instinct not to allow this woman to probe
him, it had always been a principle with him never to disclose his
profession to fellow-travellers. When he came abroad it was to rest,
and he had found that the best way of doing so was to keep his identity
dark from the world at large. However, his taciturnity if it chilled
her could not make her change her manners and customs.
"You are quite right," she said at last, speaking as though there had
been no awkward interlude. "Grey is not my colour. I always wear blues
and reds and oranges--anything bright and Oriental: not only because I
am pale but because I love vivid colours. If when I am unhappy I put on
something crimson it seems to warm and cheer my heart like a fire.
Don't you think the robin is happier for his red breast?"
Westenra said nothing. She had switched his mind off oddly to the
things he loved in his boyhood--birds hopping in the garden, the robin's
note--a rabbit flashing past through the dewy grass.
"If ever you are in deep despair and can see a field of poppies all glad
and aflare under the blaze of the sun----"
She appeared to have forgotten him and to be talking to herself. He too
was away amongst the dews and tender sunshine of Ireland. He knew no
blazing fields of poppies, but remembered them gay amongst the corn in
the long fields.
"Or sunlight on fields of glowing corn," she said softly, "green land
growing right down to the blue sea--trees turning to red and gold in the
autumn--a bank of purple irises--gilded aloes spiking against the sky."
There was a strange little dreaming silence.
"I never had a grey gown in my life until now," she said suddenly.
Westenra looked pale in the starlight; there seemed almost to be in his
skin a tinge of the colour she mentioned. Her words switched him back
too suddenly from Ireland to a remembrance of her unwarranted likeness
to his dream woman. She had even gone so far as to talk in the way that
woman might have done! To pretend that she cared for the things that
woman would care for!
"What made you get one now?" He knew not what fatalistic curiosity
prompted the question.
"I got several," she said quietly. Her manner was still friendly, but
there had come into it a certain graveness that he thought might be
intended by way of rebuke, until he heard the end of her sentence. "You
will never see me in any other colour on this ship. I am wearing grey
as a sort of mourning for my husband."
"I beg your pardon," he said slowly, startled, astounded, and puzzled.
A widow! Oh! She _could n't_ be the woman he had dreamed--the whole
thing was ridiculous! Grey for mourning? That was new to him. But
perhaps the fellow had been dead a long time, and she was just going out
of mourning? As if in answer to his thoughts she made another of her
curious statements.
"We had been such bitter enemies that I felt it would be hypocritical to
go into real mourning for him. But he died a fine death, and in honour
of that I thought I might at least absent me awhile from the felicity of
bright colour."
She rose to say good-night, and as she stood there looking at him for a
moment with her elusive Irish smile and her Oriental air, he saw that,
tell himself what he might, widow or no widow, hers was indeed the face
he knew so well. The long shadows thrown by the lights behind her fell
about her feet recalling the vulture shadows of his dream. Her cloak
flickered round her like a silken sail, and the beads about her neck
swung and softly clicked as dice might click in the hands of Fate.
CHAPTER II
GREY AND GOLD
"Two shall be born the whole wide world apart,
And speak in different tongues, and have no thought
Each of the other's being, and no heed;
And these, o'er unknown seas to unknown lands
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;
And all unconsciously shape every act
And bend each wandering step to this one end--
That one day, out of darkness they shall meet,
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes."
There are few men who in thinking ahead, however vaguely, to the time
when they will share life with a woman do not expect to find their
ultimate kingdom in the heart of some girl with a face like the morning
and a nature fresh and unspoiled as an opening rose. With the freshness
faded from his own heart and the "songs of the morning" long forgotten,
this modest instinct to allot to himself the beautiful and the ideal
remains deeply rooted in the best and worst of men. Of Irishmen it
should be said in extenuation that they are usually greater idealists
than the generality of men, and possess the instinct of worship more
strongly. They do not always make fortunes nor gain fame; but they make
shrines. And deep in the nature of every one of them sits fast the
belief that the finest woman in the world is surely for him because he
has the finest shrine ready for her. If she does not fit, it is not the
fault of the shrine, which is composed of the very best materials--that
stuff of which dreams are made.
Garrett Westenra had all the bigoted simplicity of the man who has never
loved and been deceived. There is nothing like a wrecked shrine or two
for getting rid of unworkable notions about the uses of women as idols;
but no woman had ever deceived him, so he had kept all his faith and
bigotry and generous beliefs to bestow upon the one woman--a golden
apple with a bitter core perhaps, for it is not always fair to the woman
to have too much in this line to bestow. Being a citizen of the world
he did not of course suppose that fine qualities and a beautiful nature
are only to be found in the opening-rose type of woman, but certainly he
had unconsciously or otherwise assigned to the woman of his dreams all
the traditional virtues and graces of character and bearing. He had come
of fine simple people: one of the old Irish families who through poverty
and misfortune had lived for generations with the simplicity and
austerity of peasants, but whose men had never lost their breeding and
bearing, and whose women were strong and fearless without breaking the
laws of their religion.
One of his ancestresses had eloped with a Westenra, and pursued by her
disapproving brothers, the pair had swum a river abreast; later, when
having fought one brother after the other the bridegroom, wounded in the
legs, was unable to walk, his wife carried him on her back for miles to
a place of safety--not that he was small and weak (no Westenra was ever
that), but that she was big and strong and fine; her wedding ring, a
thin thread of gold, had come down through generations to Garrett
Westenra and fitted his third finger easily. His great-grandmother,
daughter too of an old but impoverished family, had not disdained to
rebuild with her own hands the house in which she afterwards lived and
died. These were the single-hearted, simple, faithful women,
"Strong and quiet like the hills,"
from whom Westenra had sprung. Tradition dies hard when it is rooted in
such firm ground. Small wonder that dismay blotted out delight when he
recognised at last the romantic face of the woman he had waited for,
only to find it allied to the strange, rootless, roving, almost vagrant
personality of Valentine Valdana.
Even if every one on the ship except himself had not appeared to know
that she was Mrs. Valdana _the_ journalist, he could not long have
remained in ignorance of her name for "Val Valdana" in writing so
illegible as to invoke curiosity was written on everything she
possessed, and she left her possessions everywhere. She was the most
careless woman in the world. She lost and mislaid books, cushions,
papers, and rugs; her shoes were frequently undone, and her hair almost
always on the point of coming down. Yet she never looked untidy because
her feet were pretty and her hair was of the feathery kind; and in the
matter of her lost possessions she preserved entire calmness, for some
one was always obliging enough to find them for her and bring them back.
Once she left on deck a book full of audacious sketches and notes about
the passengers, and the wind ruffling the leaves of it dispersed scraps
of paper in every direction. One of these displayed a pair of
love-birds sitting beak to beak on a branch, but the birds possessed the
life-like features of two cranky old maid passengers who were
continually squabbling in public; beneath was the scribbled legend: "_If
we comfort not each other, Who shall comfort us in the dark days to
come?_" ... Another entitled "_La planche_" was the portrait of an
enormously fat lady passenger grown extraordinarily slim and pretty. A
little pink hard-shelled woman with a habit of making up to people only
to say something extremely unpleasant to them was cartooned as a crab
reaching out and nipping everything within reach. A moony-looking
individual with a wry neck, peering eyes, and a loud brown check suit
had lent his individuality to the sketch of a tortoise pottering
curiously about the deck. A newly-married couple who were always
sipping egg-nog together had been pilloried as the Siamese twins joined
by a large egg.
Yet when the cartoonist came on deck the victims of her pencil were all
ready to smile at her, and return her property without resentment. It
was so patent somehow that malice was the one thing absent from the
mental make-up of Mrs. Valdana.
Another day soon after their first meeting, Westenra found her in her
deck chair with one slim foot twisted round to inspect what is sometimes
known as a "potato" in the heel of her stocking.
"Isn't it amazing how holes in one's stockings arrive?" she remarked to
him pleasantly. "I would n't mind only I 've got such tender heels."
Impossible for a thoughtful man who has known poverty and carried
memories of his mother's fingers worn with darning to imagine such a
woman as a wife and mother. Plainly the shrine Westenra had built for
the woman of his dreams could never be occupied by this one. No shrine
could keep for long so restless a heart, nor fireside and cradle detain
such wandering feet! As the days went by the likeness in fact that he
had seen in her to his vision became blurred and faded. It was not
difficult at last to persuade himself that his recognition of her had
been a fantasy of his brain. Once the thought dismissed of any mystical
bond between them, he could not help liking the incompetent, careless
creature and finding pleasure in her society. She was a good companion:
not gay herself so much as the cause of gaiety in others. She rarely
said witty things, but it was surprising how witty others became in her
company. Her art was of the kind that seems to underlie rather than
break through the surface of conversation, leaving the best points for
others to make. But sometimes when things were at their dullest she
would suddenly send up a little sparkling rocket that lit the mental
horizon and thrilled the surroundings with colour.
Westenra, whose native wit and eloquence needed little sharpening, was
at his best with her, and he became his pleasant and extremely engaging
self while enjoying to the full that charm in her that from the first he
had not denied. Her ardent feeling for the ideal and the original was a
spur to his intellect, and not only re-awoke his natural gaiety, but set
stirring all his altruistic dreams. For there was greatness smouldering
in Westenra, that needed only the right woman's hand to fan it into
flame.
No one observing Mrs. Valdana listening, almost thirsting for all he had
to say, would have guessed that as far as actual experience of life
went, hers had been far wider and greater than his, for the usual
results of experience--callous indifference or a calm philosophic
outlook--were amazingly absent from her. She was vividly interested in
life, and the more she saw of it, the less _blasee_ she became; and
because ideas interested her even more than experience she was deeply
interested in Westenra.
If the latter had ever lived in England he would infallibly have
recognised the name of Valentine Valdana as being that of one of the
foremost women journalists in the world. Even had he been in the habit
of reading those American Sunday journals whose overseas cables in a
surprisingly small space manage to mention the doings of everyone of
importance, he would have realised that so far from being the
"small-headed, yellow journalist" he supposed, she occupied a unique and
enviable position in the newspaper world. But he had never concerned
himself with the doings of European journalists. America is a big
country, with big enough personalities and interests of its own to
absorb such attention as a man wrapped up in his work and the great
scientific facts of life has to give to public affairs. Thus it came to
pass that he did not know there was one thing Mrs. Valdana, with her odd
eccentric gowns and ornaments, a hole in the heel of her stocking, and
her black hair endlessly coming down, was not careless about, and that
one thing was her work--and that because of her work she was famous.
Certainly she was not the person to tell him, being as reticent about
the astonishing things she had done as she was childishly frank about
her picturesque tastes and fancies. She would show her ivory bracelets
cut green from the tusks of an elephant in Central Africa, or howl in
the moonlight like a jackal, or dance like a Somali warrior (as she did
at the concert got up for the sailors' benefit), or describe the orchids
that hang like glowing lamps from the trees in the deep steaming forests
of the Congo; but she would say nothing of her articles on sleeping
sickness and Congo atrocities, or how she had nearly lost a foot on a
terrible march in Somaliland, but turned out an amazing Odyssey on the
manners and customs of a little known people. She always forgot to
mention that it was she who had shot the elephant from whose tusks the
bracelets came, and that her knowledge of jackal music was acquired in a
lion-infested part of Bechuanaland, where she had got lost from her
party and spent a sinister night up a tree.
Next to Africa she loved India best in the world, and could discourse
alluringly on the subject of _phul-karries_, and silk embroideries from
Delhi, of sunsets seen across the plains when the buffaloes and the
goats are being herded home in a mist of golden dust; of paddy-birds
standing in shallow grey pools, and the grace of the swathed women
coming from the wells. Chanting through her nose a thin monotonous
wail, while with three fingers and her thumb she made a measured
thrumming tattoo on the table, she could conjure up the very heart-throb
of the Indian Bazaar until the never-ending rhythmic torment of the East
dragged at the heart of those who listened. She could tell too every
kind of amusing story and scandal about Anglo-Indian society; but she
would never mention that she had been sent out in '97 to get for her
paper the truth about the Tochi rising--and had got it; that she was at
Simla when the English were waiting breathlessly for news from their men
at the front, knowing that any serious reverse in the Tirah might
possibly mean an attempt at a general rising and massacre in the plains
and hill stations of the Punjab, and that she was one of those women who
had gone out as usual to balls, and laughed and jested with sickening
fear in their hearts, under the keen eyes of the native servants--and
afterwards had sat in her room hour after hour sorting and classifying
her facts, embodying them in the strong vivid articles that a few weeks
later made England "sit up" for awhile and realise that all was not
peace and fair contentment in the Indian Empire.
There were lots of other interesting things Mrs. Valdana never told.
She had been in Russia on a mission for Mr. Stead, and in Turkey to
probe out the affair of a secret concession for turquoise searching
granted by the Sultan to an English Member of Parliament. She had
interviewed De Witte, the Red Sultan, and Paul Kruger, and stayed at
Groot Schuur as Cecil Rhodes's guest. But all these things were part of
her work, and of her work (except to other journalists) she never spoke.
It spoke for itself.
Though she had done special work for many of the big London papers she
was a free lance and under bonds to no journal. No inducement that
could be held out to her was strong enough to lure her from her ways,
which were the ways of a literary vagabond who came and went at no man's
bidding, but achieved her best work by wandering only where she listed,
and writing only what her heart urged. This might have been fatal to
financial success, but that it was allied to an instinct that amounted
to genius for the big vivid things that take hold of the public
imagination. Every good journalist has a nose for news; Valentine
Valdana had the added gift of an "eye for colour"; she saw it across
continents, recognised it overseas, followed it as her star; and what
she wrote concerning it editors were pleased to scramble for. If one
disapproved of her "stuff" another was only too glad to embrace it. She
revised and blue-pencilled for no man. Her creed was Byron's when he
wrote to Murray: "Cut me up in the _Quarterly_, rend me in the Reviews,
do unto me as did the Levite unto his concubine, but do not ask me to
revise, for I cannot and I will not." She would not either, and she did
not have to. Enough that her stuff was signed with her well-known
nom-de-plume "Wanderfoot" for it to sell like hot cakes. In fact, in
her own line Valentine Valdana was famous; and Garrett Westenra did not
know it.
Nor would he have been greatly impressed if he had known. He was
entirely opposed to that kind of fame for a woman.
All Irishmen, whatever their rank or situation, are at bottom profound
lovers of nature, virtue, and simplicity; and from this great quality of
the heart springs the singular charm that makes them the most attractive
people in the world; but it has a defect in its almost peasant
standardising of women. Lack of money in Ireland has created in the
Irish an eternal oversense of the value of riches; but though there has
never been any lack of women in Ireland they are not undervalued on this
account (in fact, as has been shown, they are given shrines to occupy).
Still there is a secret and peculiar hatred in the Irishman's nature for
any change in the status of women, moral or intellectual, since the time
of Mother Eve or the beloved Madonna. The wife-and-mother is the ideal,
and very rightly so, but she is a meek and submissive and gentle
wife-and-mother, and she sits eternally by the fireside with a child on
her knee. Yes, though in his heart he will crown her with a golden
crown and burn incense before her, that is where an Irishman always sees
the ideal woman--by the fireside, with a child on her knee. No true
Irishman will ever be a suffragist.
Considering these things it was surely unwise of Garrett Westenra, very
much an Irishman, to linger day after day by the deck chair of a
vagabond woman, who, from all accounts and appearances, had never
possessed a fireside of her own, nor was ever likely to appreciate one.
Yet linger he did, and day by day her charm wrought upon him and wound
itself round him and penetrated him until it seemed to become part of
him. By no effort of hers was the thing done. She grew strangely
silent as the voyage drew towards an end, sitting in her chair with
still eyes and hands, like a woman in a dream drifting down a dream
river. Once more she began to resemble the woman Westenra knew so
well--the mystery woman with whom he had walked for many years in his
secret garden. And when he came on deck and did not find her in her
place, the deck and the ship and the world seemed to become suddenly
empty--with an appalling emptiness.
But always when alone in his cabin he made the same observation to
himself.
"This thing has got to stop. It is rank foolishness. What do I know of
her? God knows what her life has been. She is not the woman I have
dreamed of. She is not within a hundred miles of the kind of woman I
could spend my life with.... A reckless, careless vagabond!
Good-hearted, yes, full of fine impulses ... full of charm! But when
the glamour has gone ... what then?"
He had that gift and curse of his race of seeing too far--the
worthlessness of the prize at the end of the race, the rotten core
inside the rosy apple. Perhaps why Irishmen achieve so little, is that
nothing which can be got seems to them worth while getting!
So he said to himself firmly:
"This thing has got to stop."
He said it and meant it right up to the last night of the voyage--a
night when they stayed late in their deck chairs under a glorious moon
that transformed the sea into a golden harvest of promise. Many other
couples sat along the deck laughing and jesting, announcing their
intention to stay up until the Statue of Liberty hove in sight, but well
aware that the purser would be prowling along the deck at about
half-past ten with hinting scowls for all loiterers. Long before the
purser came, however, the keen air had driven most people below, and
there was no one left except Westenra and Mrs. Valdana, and a far couple
in the shadow of the bridge.
A silence had fallen upon Westenra and his companion, one of those
silences that have lips to speak and hands to caress. A little wind
blew past them carrying a snatch of her hair across his lips. He had
never before felt a woman's hair on his lips! Her pale hand nervous and
lonely lay outside the rug in which she was wrapped.
"That hand looks cold lying there," he said, and taking it drew it under
a fold of his own rug, and held it fast. It lay in his without response
like a little stone hand, but through his palm he could feel her pulse
beating wild and uncertain, and that stirred him strangely, yet awoke
the doctor in him too. He remembered the brandy-and-soda she had drunk
the first evening, and every evening since. He remembered too his own
cynical thought, and repeated it now, though his voice held little
cynicism.
"I 'll give you two years longer to live if you keep on at this rate."
"What rate?" she asked in surprise.
"Drinking, smoking, taking drugs. What drug is it you take?"
"You seem to know all my vices," she said laughing a little tremulously.
She was leaning back in her chair looking very pale. "I have to take
veronal sometimes to make me sleep."
"You would sleep naturally if you gave up smoking and drinking, and
lived a quiet natural life."
"But then I could n't write."
"Well, you must give up writing."
"But then I could n't live," she said laughing. "You don't seem to know
that I write for my living--it is my work."
"Your work is a curse to you if it makes you do these things."
"It is all I have," was her strange answer.
He turned in his chair and looked at her. In her face was none of the
bitter humiliation of the woman whose weaknesses are suddenly exposed
and condemned. She was smiling a little, a smile with a twist to it,
like the smile of a child who is determined not to weep. And her
smoke-coloured eyes, bright and sad with tears, and exile, and lost
joys, and all the sorrow of the Irishry, were the eyes of the woman who
had been given him in a dream. While he looked at her she closed them
and sat very still. At last he knew that there was no question of
fleeing from Fate. He leaned forward and laid his lips on her sad
smiling mouth, and found there the answer to many a question.
Yet when he spoke it was to ask another.
"Now will you leave writing?"
"Yes, Garrett," she said simply. "I will leave everything for you; I
think it was written so in the beginning of things."
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."
CHAPTER IV
A SKELETON AND A SHRINE
"The heart of a pure man is a deep vase."
And while Valentine stayed on her knees thanking God for the happiness
that had come to her, Garrett Westenra was pacing the darkened decks
with misgiving in his heart. The misgiving was not regret. When you
are of those who stand by your given word you do not waste time in
anything so idle as regret. Besides, what had come to pass between
Valentine Valdana and himself seemed a thing so predestined and
inevitable, so unsought by either of them, that it would have been as
vain to regret it afterwards as to have fought against it at the time.
Some one once said of the Irish that they appear to be impulsive, but
are really the most deliberate people in the world. They know long
beforehand what they are going to do, though they perform it at a given
moment with all the appearance of impulse. This was true in a way of
what had happened between Westenra and Valentine. He had known from the
first what was going to happen even when he said in his cabin, "this has
got to stop." He had really put up a hard struggle with Fate, for while
he was certain that Val was the woman originally intended for him, it
seemed that something had gone wrong with the plan. Somehow she had got
lost on her way to him, and life had changed her until she was no longer
the woman he wanted and had dreamed of, though she still resembled her.
He felt as if there was a hole in his nature, in his life, that only she
could fill, that must go unfilled for ever unless he let her in, yet he
wished to keep her out! So he had fought against the thing, but as a
man fights who knows he must be overwhelmed in the end by superior
force. It was that force, something outside himself and far bigger and
stronger, that had been at work when he turned so deliberately and
kissed Valentine's lips. The moment had possessed an extraordinary
enchantment. Never had he known such a magic, glowing sweetness as
surged through his being when she surrendered her lips to his. And a
little later she had strangely said:
"I think this was written from the beginning of things!"
It was indeed so written. None knew better than he who for years had
been haunted by her face. He told her so, or the something that was
outside himself and greater than he told her so.
"I have known you all my life, Valentine. For years I have seen your
face in my dreams. I recognised it the moment I saw you. I always knew
you were somewhere in the world, coming towards me, for me."
And yet he could not feel sure that he loved her! Every word they said
bound them closer. He was as much hers as she was his. Never again
could they be nothing to one another. And yet ... and yet ... was this
love? No answer among the stars nor in the phosphorescent water
flashing past. And if his heart knew the answer it would not speak, but
lay strangely still and sad in his breast. With a mental jerk he forced
his mind to another matter, and one that urgently called for
consideration. In those few magic moments of sweetness drawn from a
woman's lips, the whole current of his life for the next few years had
been changed. The plans he had built up were thrown down and broken.
The big thing starred out for his own special contribution to medical
science had been pushed far back into the future where he could only
reach it after years--instead of going right straight to it now, as he
had meant when he started on this voyage!
Vaguely he had known it must be so if he let Valentine into that empty
place which no woman had ever occupied. The knowledge that he must
sacrifice that ideal of his, must leave following the star to which he
had hitched his car for something else--something of which he did not
know the value, or if it had any value at all--was one of the reasons
that had urged and compelled him in his cabin to fight against that
force which was stronger than himself.
Well! It was over now. The die was cast. All that remained to do was
to rearrange certain circumstances in his life in accordance with this
new plan. The circumstances resolved themselves into the bitter
ungarnished fact that he was not rich enough to marry and still carry on
his fight for science. As a bachelor living with a simplicity that
amounted to austerity, his income, the savings of unceasing labour for
ten years, sufficed. It was not enormous, but it served to relieve him
from the wear and tear of general practice, and allowed him many hours
of leisure in his laboratory. The only hospital appointment he had
retained, on giving up his practice, was one where facilities were
afforded for studying the disease in which he was specially interested.
Thus the main part of his life was spent between the hospital and his
laboratory. He scarcely practised medicine at all in the ordinary way,
except as a consultant on the diseases in which he had specialised. But
now he must return to the old routine of visits and office hours.
Marriage demanded an income, so the laboratory must be pushed into the
background, and a scheme for money-making take the boards!
However, he had realised from the first that marriage entailed this
sacrifice, and with the sweetness of Val's lips, he accepted the
condition. It was too late now to look back to his waiting laboratory,
and unflinchingly he shut down on the thought. That phase of life was
finished with--for some years. He had no right to ask a woman to accept
life in a bachelor's quarters on a bachelor's income just because his
laboratory held for him a dream that might some day crystallise into
Fame. He told himself with gloomy stoicism that women want nearer and
dearer things than fame glimmering at the end of a long vista of years.
He must return to the arena of money-making, beat up his old practice,
get back into the harness he had thrown off little more than a year ago.
It would be difficult at first, but he was not afraid of difficulties.
He flung back his head a little at the thought. Then his mind fell
suddenly busy on a plan that had been suggested to him just before
leaving New York by a clever young physician named Godfrey, a
fellow-student at Columbia. Godfrey had a scheme for a nursing home, and
wanted Westenra to stand in with him on it. The idea was to take a
large house near Central Park, equip and furnish it as a private
hospital with plenty of bedrooms and a good operating-room. There
Westenra could perform all his operations and hand over his patients
afterwards to Godfrey's care, while Godfrey could in like manner hand
over his surgical cases to Westenra. Thus the two would work into each
other's hands in a perfectly legitimate manner, and double their
incomes. It is a favourite method of money-making with New York medical
men, but it had no appeal for Westenra, and he had smilingly told
Godfrey that he was not the man for the business.
"But you are," urged the physician. "You are 'It.' There is no other
fellow in New York to whom I would hand over my cases so fearlessly. And
then, there are very few who could return me such a _quid pro quo_ as
you can."
Which was perfectly true. Westenra's practice when he renounced it had
been very large. Few surgeons had one like it. Certainly it lay among
the working classes. But it is the people of the working classes in New
York who pay their doctors' bills more conscientiously than any other.
Godfrey's practice, on the other hand, lay among the leisured class and
was of a more precarious nature, bringing in large sums at one time and
at another very little. Combining the two practices would undoubtedly
regularise and increase the incomes of both men. Many medical men far
less successful and well-known than Godfrey and Westenra were making
fortunes by this method. However, Westenra, with ambitions very
different to Godfrey's taking shape in his mind, had not thought twice
about rejecting the offer. Now he wondered if it were still open, and
determined to go and see Godfrey instantly on his return.
It was after midnight when he finished his deck-pacing and pulled up at
the smoke-room with the idea of getting a light for a final smoke before
turning in. Being the last night of the voyage many of the men
passengers had stayed up later than usual making merry. However, all
had retired now except a party of four lingering over drinks at a table.
One still shuffled a pack of cards though the game was plainly at an
end; two others smoked idly; all were listening to the gossip of the
fourth, a certain Reeder--a narrow-nosed, cynical fellow who had
something to do with the publishing world, and whose specialty was
retailing scandal about the private lives of writers. He was pleasantly
occupied with his favourite topic when Westenra quietly entered.
"Clever woman, yes. I should say she had cracked or broken most of the
commandments except the eleventh in the course of her career.... I 'll
swear no woman could live with Dick Rowan without chipping the
seventh--even if she did call herself his stepdaughter. Certainly
Valdana was a rotten scamp ... but no doubt he had his little cross to
bear while she was gadding the earth with half a dozen other fellows....
Journalists are gay dogs! ... I remember hearing of her----"
He glanced up to find Westenra staring at him with ice-cold eyes, and
for a moment he faltered, changing colour. The other men's facial
expressions varied from apprehension to a certain degree of jeering
amusement. They were all aware of Westenra's constant companionship
with the most attractive woman on the boat. For days the matter had
been a topic for speculation among the first-class passengers. However,
Reeder was not without a dash of cur-dog pluck, and with an effort
regained his composure and essayed to continue his story, though now he
was wise enough to employ a certain amount of discretion.
"I remember hearing of the lady of whom we were speaking----"
"Be good enough to leave that lady out of your vile smoke-room
scandals," said Westenra quietly--so quietly that a pistol shot could
not have been more effective.
Reeder moistened his lips.
"Indeed! And why?"
"Because otherwise I shall be obliged to knock your lies back down your
throat."
"Lies?"
"Yes, lies!" Westenra came close and bulked over him, ready to eat him
up if he said another word. He would have liked to beat the fellow's
brains out on the spot. But Reeder like a wise man climbed down
hastily, ate up his scandal, apologised with profusion, and slunk away.
In a few moments Westenra had the smoking-room to himself. But he could
not breathe in it--even when he returned to the deck and his pacing,
with all the winds of the Atlantic at his disposal, there did not seem
sufficient air for him to breathe with ease. His tongue was dry and the
taste of life was bitter in his mouth.
Now he knew why his heart lay still in his breast and gave no answer
when he had asked if this were love! The empty place in his nature, in
his life, in his heart, was a shrine--and Valentine Valdana could never
fill a shrine. She was charming and delightful, she called for pity and
for chivalry, she might be a bright comrade on a weary way, there was a
magic sweetness in her lips ... but she would never fill a man's shrine!
----
A few hours later the big ship slid peacefully into home waters, the
pale gold sunlight of a September morning flickering delicately on the
waves, piercing the lavender-tinted land mists and gilding the torch in
Liberty's upraised hand.
Westenra, somewhat haggard-eyed, paced the deck once more, but he was
not alone. Mrs. Valdana, fresh as the morning itself, looking rather
like a wild violet in a swathed purple cloak and velvet hat of the same
colour crushed down on her hair, took the deck with long gliding steps
beside him.
With the exception of an old lady sitting huddled in rugs by the
companion-way, and a stony-eyed New Yorker gazing fixedly over the
taffrail at the approaching shores of "God's own country," they were
alone. Every one else seemed to be hustling luggage or busy downstairs
with the port officers.
In her hand Mrs. Valdana swung her rope of luminous beads. They were
queer pale green things almost as large as the ordinary "white alley"
marble; too delicate and light to be of stone, there was yet something
so natural about them it was impossible to suppose them a composition.
They reminded Westenra a little of his pale sea-palaces, seeming to be
lighted from within by some pearly luminous light, soft yet strong. Each
bead had on it a perfect little picture painted with the minute and
exquisite art of the Chinese. On one a flight of tiny blue birds, on
another a delicate spray of mimosa, a branch of peach blossom, a
snow-peaked mountain, a scarlet-legged flamingo, a still blue lake, a
volcano, a tree bursting into bud, a line of sapphire hills. One could
spend a day examining them, for there were a hundred and fifty, each
more wonderful than the others. Westenra, who had never seen her without
them round her neck, asked her now why she was not wearing them.
"I hope never to wear them again," she said. "They are my comfort beads,
and only to be worn in time of unhappiness. An old exiled Russian gave
them to my mother in Spain saying, 'If ever you or your children are in
great misery these beads will help you.' And it was quite true. She
always wore them when she was in deep trouble and they gave her comfort.
Mr. Bernstein, that nice French Jew who sits the other side of me at
table asked me the other day to let him know if I ever want to sell
them. But I shall never want to--they are so beautiful, aren't they?"
She drew them rippling through her fingers. She said "aren't" like the
people of his country, an inheritance from her Irish grandfather
perhaps, together with the superstition that assigns to inanimate things
the power to do good or ill!
"I should n't be too certain of not wearing them again," said Westenra,
smiling a little grimly, for vaguely he knew that the woman who married
him might very well at times have need for comfort.
"I know," she said gravely. "It is only when one loves that one
realises how one may fall upon misery at any moment. The world seems
suddenly to turn into a place of pits and precipices. Oh, Garrett! oh,
Garrett! If ever I were to lose you now I have got you--!" She turned
burning eyes to him and in them a glance that held little of the
conventional and much of some primeval element. It warmed Westenra
through to his heart and loosened the grip of an icy hand that had held
him all night. After all there was something of greatness in this
woman's love!
Suddenly the brightness slipped out of her face. She touched his hand a
little tremulously, and her eyes took on the vague far-seeing look of
the Celt. She hated to open up those sad graves of the past on this
sunny morning--the happiest of her life. But she must carry out her
resolution made the night before. Afterwards the bright breeze would
blow her words away and drown them far behind in the deep Atlantic,
where they would be forgotten for ever.
"Garrett."
He put his hand on hers.
"You must call me Joe. It was always my home name."
Curiously enough, it was a name very dear to her. One of the few women
she had loved, Lily Hill, had been by her nicknamed "Joe" and always so
called.
"I am so glad. I love that name. And you must call me Val, Joe."
"Val," he said gently.
"I want to speak to you, Joe--to tell you things about myself. You know
so little of me--it is good of you to take me on trust like this--but I
must tell you all about my wandering, vagabond life, my wretched
marriage."
His arm stiffened under her hand. They had reached the stern-end of the
deck, and instead of turning again he drew her to the taffrail; they
stood facing the vast waste of heaving violet waters that lay in their
awake.
"Leave it all behind you, as we are leaving that troubled sea," he said
quietly. He seemed to have grown paler, and his mouth looked hard for
all his gentle words.
"If you wish it?" she faltered.
"I do wish it."
"Oh, how glad I should be! There has been much in my life that I loved,
Joe--my work has been dear to me and my wanderings. But there have been
bitter things--and my sorrows--they hurt, they hurt--it makes me sick to
drag them up from their graves, like sad little corpses into the
sunlight of our happiness."
It made him sick too. It was bitterer to him than death that in the
life of this woman of his dreams there should be such graves that feared
the light. He too feared the miserable process of exhumation. God knew
what ghastly unforgettable bones might be turned up! He did not realise
that through this very cowardly fear he was building up a skeleton to
stand between them, clanking its bones in their dearest moments.
"Leave them all, Val," he spoke violently. "God knows I want to know
nothing--only to make the condition with you that you forget all your
life until we met--that you pull up every old root--burn every boat?"
"Yes, yes, I will, Joe--and leave the ruins of them behind us in that
troubled sea, while you and I sail on in this ship with our love and our
dreams bound for the Islands of the Blest."
Her eyes full of hope glimmered up into his.
"You must never give a backward glance," he said harshly. "Never want
to return to journalism or meet again the people who have been in your
old life. That is my condition. _You must leave all for me_. Is it
too much to ask?"
"No! No!"
Perhaps he forgot Who it was that first made that command to men and
women alike, and Who with eternity to offer found few to accept.
The "all" life has meant to a woman of twenty-six is not so easy to
leave behind, however much she may wish to desert and forget it. You
cannot leave experience behind nor fill the holes it has made in your
heart. You cannot desert the scars life has given you, nor divest
yourself of her compensating gifts. Moreover, Valentine was a woman who
had triumphs to brandish as well as sorrows; laurels and hard-wrung
victories to flag over the graves of defeat. Yet none more ready than
she to believe that it could be done, that love could wipe out suffering
and scars and make the face of life to shine anew like the face of a
little child. For love she was ready to forswear Art, her profession,
her friends, her past, and forget that she ever had a career. Westenra
could not ask too much of her. Gladly she turned her back upon the
past, and her face to the future, and gladly she embraced the conditions
Westenra attached. As she walked the decks of her dream ship America
seemed to her to beckon with the fair alluring hand of the unknown. The
grim, undecorative buildings on the Hudson's banks were faintly veiled
in a delicate haze composed of lilac smoke and autumn sunshine, and for
the moment New York's lack of resemblance to an Island of the Blest was
not too pronouncedly marked.
----
Westenra's plan was that she should marry him at once. He would not
even discuss the idea of her going back to London to arrange her affairs
and collect her possessions. She must have no affairs from thenceforth
but his, no possessions except those he bestowed. He was afraid of any
trace or shadow of that past life of hers on their future
together--afraid (though he hardly acknowledged it in thought) of the
mud from the old paths, the vulture-like shadows that had hovered about
the woman of his dream. In the magic discovery of their mutual
attraction he had forgotten these things for a while, but too long had
he lived with them for them not to recur and haunt his memory. Already
the skeleton, whose sketchy outline had appeared to him in the
smoke-room of the _Bavaric_, and been filled in later on the decks of
the same ship, was beginning to clank its bones! But Val had no
suspicion of its existence. She only thought Westenra jealous with the
natural jealousy of a man for the life he has not shared with the
beloved. She could love with fierce jealousy herself, and so
understood. Entering into the spirit of the thing, she cast from her
with all the ardour of the unpractical every possession of the past,
every memory sweet or bitter he had not shared. She made, by letter,
all arrangements for the letting of her London flat, until such time as
her lease would have run out and her property could be sold. But apart
from some good curios and beautiful things she had picked up in her
travels, she owned very little. As always, she was living up to every
penny of her income, and her assets were practically nil. Her name was
her chief asset, and she could never use that more.
She was obliged to wring from Westenra permission to write to Branker
Preston, her agent through whom she conducted all business affairs and
signed her contracts. Consent was only gained by the fact that if
Preston were not communicated with in order that he might propitiate the
London Daily, in whose interests she had come to America, something very
unpleasant and public might happen in the way of a lawsuit for a broken
contract. As such an affair would have been highly obnoxious to
Westenra, he gave in, but his dogged and bitter opposition revealed to
Val how deeply he felt on the subject of her past life, and stayed her
from making a further request that was very urgent in her heart.
She had a woman friend, Harriott Kesteven, who was very dear and near to
her, and she felt a great longing to let Harriott know of her changed
life. She possessed a keen appreciation of the claims and rights of
friendship, and it hurt her deeply to think how Harriott would suffer
over her mysterious disappearance from the known paths of her old life.
It was very feminine, too, that longing to share the secret of her
happiness with another woman, though it was only with Harriott that she
wished to do it. To let any one else into the wonder and beauty of it
all would have meant to spoil what was only for Westenra and herself.
However, she resisted the longing to communicate to Harriott even
indirectly what had happened. After all, that Westenra wished for
secrecy was reason enough to pit against a whole world of anxious and
loving friends!
And so they were married in a passionate hurry, and went away to spend a
few days together before starting the affair of house-hunting. Westenra,
whose vacation was already over, could not afford the time for a
honeymoon in the Adirondacks which he would have loved Val to see in all
the glory of autumn. They went no farther afield than a little house on
the edge of Bronx Park, whence, favoured by mild and lovely weather,
they adventured forth daily into the beautiful natural woods that skirt
this northern point of New York.
To Val at least those were flawless days. For once in her life she had
got what she wanted, and the gift had not turned to dust and ashes in
her hand. Happiness and gaiety radiated from her, and Westenra, caught
in the rays, reflected them back, so that no one would have guessed that
he was not so happy as she. Though, indeed, for a man who has the
perilous gift of seeing through life's red and golden apples to the
little spot of decay at the core, he was extraordinarily content. And at
last now that she was his wife he took her into his confidence about his
life and profession. Only to a certain extent, however, for he was a
deeply reserved man, and constitutionally unable to lay his heart and
inner thoughts bare (allowing that such a thing were desirable) to even
the best beloved of eyes. That he hid this intense reserve behind frank
manners and a witty tongue was a characteristic of his race. The Irish
are the jesters of the world, but their laughter is a screen for their
hopeless hearts and the deep melancholy of their souls.
Marriage is full of surprises, and not always happy ones. This barrier
of reserve that she soon divined in her husband was one of the things
that amazed Val. Her own heart was a book ready to open at the touch of
love. True, some of its pages were scrawled and scribbled, blotted too
in places and stained with tears; but there it was, ready to fly open to
a trusted hand. It was not her fault that Westenra had refused to turn
up those pages, but rather at his wish that they had been sealed and
locked away. Well! that was the book of yesterday. She had begun
another since they met, and there, at least, he might turn the pages
when he listed and read without misgiving.
But she longed and wished that he would trust her wholly too. Would let
her, if not into the secret chambers of his heart, then at least past
its outer portals. Spite of his frank, gay ways with her she knew well
by the subtle and winding paths in which the minds of women travel, that
behind his deep grey-green eyes there was another Garrett Westenra whom
she had not yet reached. The knowledge amazed her but did not daunt
her. Neither did it spoil her honeymoon. Her faith in love was of the
quality that moves mountains. In the meantime life was passing dear and
sweet.
But it was characteristic of each of them that until the first days in
New York Val did not even know that Westenra was a surgeon. It sounds
absurd and improbable and everything that is unpractical; but Val was
all of these things, and the fact is she had never given the matter five
minutes' thought. She knew he could do something and do it well: that
was written all over the man, and that was the only thing of importance.
Once or twice, struck by his logic and extraordinary faculty for stating
cases briefly and clearly, she had vaguely wondered if he were a lawyer.
It might perhaps be supposed that after her unhappy experience with
Valdana she would have exercised a certain caution in the choice of a
second husband. Not so--Valentine's was a nature that could never learn
caution. What she had learned, however, was a better judgment of men,
and she could not have been imposed upon twice by a man of Valdana's
stamp. Years of intimate friendship with men who "did and dared" had
taught her to know unerringly a "good" man when she met him, meaning by
"good," a man who worked with his brain and heart at some business, or
even game, in which his principles and honour were involved. In Westenra
she recognised the type instantly. This was no man shirking the battle
of life and seeking a woman to support him!
Therefore, if Westenra had announced his profession as that of a
travelling tinker, she would have been quite undismayed. Indeed, life
as the wife of a travelling tinker whom she happened to love would have
suited her very pleasantly.
As for Westenra, it has been stated that one of his principles was never
to give to fellow-travellers information about himself that did not
concern them; and on the ship, right up to the last night, he had
essayed to look upon Val as nothing more than a fellow-traveller;
therefore, his profession was no concern of hers. Afterwards, when it
was so swiftly settled that she was to become his wife, the information
did concern her, he made her free of it. She accepted it as she
accepted all things concerning him, with ardour and pride. It seemed to
her that she could not have chosen any more desirable profession in the
world for her man. She had known several doctors abroad, clever and
delightful men, but none of them had happened to be married, so she had
no idea as to what the special functions and duties of a doctor's wife
might be. Whatever they were she was quite ready to tackle them with a
stout heart for the sake of Garrett Westenra.
He had taken her to see his bachelor quarters in the deeps of the city
where for years he had lived and worked. They were simple almost to
bareness, but Val liked them well. They reminded her of her own
quarters in London, and she foresaw that with one good maid she would be
able to run her little home without the risk of Westenra's ever finding
out what a bad housekeeper he had married. It came as a shock to hear
that he was considering the matter of leaving these rooms to take a
house somewhere else, near Central Park for choice, where he could have
a fine operating-room and good accommodation for cases after operation.
It must of necessity be a very large house, with an efficient staff of
servants and nurses attached. The idea of collaboration with Godfrey had
been rejected. He had decided to stand or fall on his own merits.
"Would you mind very much, dearest?" he asked, somewhat diffidently. "I
know it is too bad to ask you to make your home in a sort of hospital,
but it is for both our sakes. The only way surgeons can really make
good on the money side is by having their own place for operations."
Something in her dismayed glance made him add slowly:
"But if you dislike the thought, we can have a home apart from it...."
"No, no," she said quickly. "Of course I don't dislike it. I want to
be right in your life, Joe, whatever you undertake."
Nevertheless her heart sank into her boots. Not for lack of courage,
but from a thorough knowledge of her own inefficiency for so responsible
a position as she might presently find herself occupying.
It was their last day in the woods. The late afternoon sunlight
flickered on them through the half-stripped trees, and leaves fluttered
and rustled all about the open glade where they sat. Val, with her
camping instinct, had lighted a little fire of twigs, just for the
pleasure of the sweet pungent odour of green burning and the sight of
smoke curling blue against the silver sky. This sudden news of
Westenra's sounded in her ears like the knell of all camp-fires, and
sunshine in woods and wild places. Panic seized her vagabond soul.
"Does the money side matter so much, Joe?" she faltered.
He smiled a little grimly. It had never mattered much to him, but she
could not know that.
"It has to matter in New York. The man who does n't rustle for the
dollars, and rustle successfully, gets left."
She looked at him wistfully. It seemed to her that she did not know
this rustler for dollars very well. It must be part of his hidden self
that he would not let her reach.
"I am not a rich man, Val. I told you that from the first, did n't I?"
He spoke coldly. "I cannot afford to disdain the opportunity that my
reputation affords for money-making,"--he had almost added "now," but
bit back the word in time. He was far from intending her to realise
what a change his marriage involved, what a sacrifice of plans and
principles it meant for him to be emerging once more from the laboratory
to take part in the scramble for dollars.
CHAPTER V
SQUIRREL IN A TRAP
"Do not thou make answer to an angry master."
"O speak that which is soft while he is uttering that which
is of wrath."
_Maxims of Art_.
The first thing, then, after leaving their honeymoon woods, was to find
a suitable house for the new venture. In the press of work that greeted
him on his return, Westenra found it impossible to give much time to
house-hunting, so this business practically devolved upon Val. Behold
her, then, utterly inexperienced in the conditions of American life, and
without a glimmering of intuition as to the requirements of an
up-to-date nursing home--whose ideal was a life in the wilds, sharing
the sunshine or the shade of a tree with her beloved, whose domestic
requirements vaguely included a pot and a blanket, who would have been
more at home on the veldt tracking a buck for dinner--rushing from one
end to the other of the most neoteric city in the world, inspecting
houses with "every modern improvement," weighing the advantages of
furnace-heating as compared to steam-heating, examining "open-work
plumbing" and "bathroom extensions," peering into kitchen ranges and
domestic offices, interesting herself in the things from which all her
life instinct had bade her fly, and from which she had fled!
But love was hers and a whole-hearted devotion to Westenra's interests
that even he could not quench, though he did his best. Nowhere could
she discover a house that pleased him. Every time she found something
she thought ideal, he would emerge for a few hours from his office and
completely demolish her hopes. Picking her find to pieces point by
point, he would thereafter retire and leave her to commence the search
anew.
Few things are more wearing to body and soul than a prolonged course of
house-hunting in a large city. There is nothing in the process to feed
the soul and everything to tire the body. At the end of a month Val's
spirits were several degrees below zero, and though her smile was
undaunted, there were signs of physical fatigue on her that did not
escape her husband's practised eye. He rarely saw her now except in the
evenings, for always with the resolution to shut down firmly on his old
life and its (for the moment) vain aspirations, he decided against going
back, even temporarily, to his bachelor quarters and letting her share
them, and had instead taken quiet rooms uptown, near the locality in
which he hoped to find a house. Here he sought her whenever he could
escape from the practice which he was now nursing with assiduity, but it
was nearly always late at night, and at such times she was nearly half
dead with fatigue, although she tried to disguise the fact under a gay
air. Westenra's heart was sore for her, but he could not quite
understand the position. He had realised that, in spite of her nerves,
she was anything but a delicate woman, and it puzzled and vaguely
disappointed him that she should knock under so soon. He knew nothing
of the wandering dryad in her nature with whom she struggled in the
house-hunt, trying to school it to the prospect of life in a nursing
home; how the clang and clamour of New York's street cars, railways, and
fire-bells dazzled and wearied her; how the actual effort to bear with
these things and keep her trouble to herself wore her down. In a very
few weeks more, however, a reason that sufficed him for her fatigue was
made clear. She told him one night as they drove home from the
Metropolitan Opera House. They had locked up the house-hunting problem
for a few hours and forgotten it in the enchantment of a Beethoven
concert. With the glamour of the 17th Sonata still on them, making
stormy echoes in their hearts, she leaned her face to his in the
darkness, and gave him the dear and wonderful news.
"Since when?" he asked, thrilling into tenderness and some other
poignant sense he had never known in all his life.
"Since the first moment, I think," she whispered laughingly--"an
impetuous Irishman anxious to get into the thick of the fight!"
"How can you be sure it is n't an Irish girl?"
"Oh, I know--I know. God will give me a son, Joe."
After that, however important the matter of his private hospital, it was
far more important that the arduous house-hunt should come to an end.
Besides, they were both sick to death of the whole thing. So, in a kind
of despair at last they decided on a house which, though it had a very
charming exterior, was inferior in many ways and less suitable to their
purpose than some of those rejected earlier in the search. A five-story
residence, it stood towards the Broadway end of 68th Street, and had a
beautiful flight of marble steps leading up to its front door--which was
something to the good; but there was a great deal in the way of
alteration to be done before it was suitable for a hospital, and the
cost of this had to come from Westenra's private purse. However, Val
seemed to be drawn to it for some vague, mystic reason. Fortunately,
Westenra could not look into her mind, or he would have discovered that
she was congratulating herself on the bird songs they would hear in the
early mornings from Central Park close by. That might have irritated
Westenra, for, though he loved birds as much as any one, he did not
allow them to sway his destiny.
Of course, being two thoroughly unpractical and inexperienced people,
they were entirely at the mercy of that most astute person in the world,
the American Real Estate Agent, and got the worst possible terms. The
arrangement about reparations was unsatisfactory, the lease too long,
the rent higher than any one else would have paid. Dimly they knew
this, and dimly they knew it would always be so, and that it was a pity
that one or other of them was not practical and clever in a worldly
sense. Brilliant people often feel this helpless sense of foolishness,
and it irritates them so much that they long to stab somebody for it
(and they usually stab the person they love best, with the cruel little
knives lovers keep specially for each other!). Val remembered that
Westenra in the early days on the ship had told her that the happiest
marriages he had known of in America were between Irish and Germans, the
Teuton common sense and equability acting as ballast to Celtic
flightiness. And the remembrance vexed her. She saw that as ballast
she was of no more use than a red robin. She wondered if Westenra
realised it, and one day when the painful affair of furnishing was going
forward she could not help saying:
"Oh, Joe; if I were only a nice, stolid, lumpy German, I should know by
instinct what to buy for the dining-room and kitchen."
Joe froze slightly. Prescribing wives for your compatriots is one
thing; taking the same prescription is another, and as it happened he
was antipathetic to Germans. Nevertheless, since Val had put the idea
in his head, he did think that a little _hausfrau_ knowledge of what was
fitting furniture for a doctor's dining-room and kitchen would not have
been out of place in a doctor's wife, and he said somewhat dryly:
"Could n't we try and strike a note somewhere between stolid and
fantastic?"
He was thinking of the furniture, but Val received the impression that
her taste was being indicted. She took the little dagger to her breast
with a quivering smile, and it hurt her deeply because she knew that her
ideas on furnishing were indeed fantastic, though beautiful.
Unfortunately they were all she had, and she was obliged to use them,
for Westenra had none at all. He only knew there was something wrong
with the furnishing of the living rooms in his private sanatorium. Had
he ever lived in the Bohemia of big cities he might have recognised that
his drawing, dining, and reception rooms looked like a series of
charmingly arranged _ateliers_. But, fortunately, he did not know it.
He only saw that the bills were amazing, and that was bad enough, for
the fact that nothing but the most modern and expensive appliances and
fittings would satisfy him for his operating-room had already accounted
for a large outlay of money. The house needed a good deal of renovating
before it could be used, and by the time they were settled in their new
home there was a hole in his capital large enough to sail a ship
through, and several rents and tears in the magic veil of comradeship
with which the two had hoped to wrap themselves from the world.
Then began a weary search through guilds and registries and bureaus, for
a staff of capable servants. This, of course, was Val's exclusive
affair. Westenra neither could nor would be beguiled into it, so alone
she wrestled with the problem, and made acquaintance with false
references and all the guile and tricks of the servant class. For the
American domestic, who is not American at all, but of every other
nationality under the sun, is truly the worst in the world. When she is
honest she is a fool; when she is competent she is a knave. The mistress
takes not her choice but her chance of one or the other; and in either
case she pays.
After a long series of "weekly trials" which usually ended in a day or
two with a demand for unearned wages, impudence, and vulgar insults from
the "weighed and found wanting," a _menage_ was eventually established,
comprising a red-haired cook, who, under a bland and benevolent
exterior, was a calculating robber of the most cold-blooded description,
and who, while despising her mistress for a "soft fool of a greenhorn,"
congratulated herself on the circumstance and resolved to take full
advantage of it; a couple of housemaids one of whom was raw from minding
goats on the Kerry hills, and the other recommended herself by a modest
demand to be allowed to go to confession every Friday night. (The last
had subsequently to be dismissed in spite of her holiness because,
according to her story, she had been "ordered by her dochtor" to take an
egg in brandy for her breakfast every morning and several times during
the day, and faithfully followed the prescription except that she
omitted the egg.) There was also a furnace and general utility man who
fought with both cook and maids, and in the end stole Westenra's bicycle
from the cellar; and a laundry woman who by arrangement "took two
dollars a day," and appeared to spend most of her time seated at the
kitchen table taking heavy meals as well.
Fortunately event and sequence rarely occur together, so that Val was
not flooded out all at once by these disquieting things; they fell upon
her from day to day like the gentle drips of water that wear away the
stone. But life began to press and gibber in a strangely nightmare
fashion round the vagabond journalist, and sometimes there would creep
into the smoke-coloured eyes that loved so much to look upon colour and
wide spaces, and "watch the silences," an expression slightly
reminiscent of a wild thing caught in a trap--a trap full of pots and
pans and daily menus, and weekly bills, and fighting cooks and shirking
housemaids, and domestic problems,--such a trap as almost every woman
finds herself caught in when she engages upon the career of wife to a
professional man, and one in which few find success unless specially
endowed with an ability for management, economy, and order. Poor Val's
endowments were not of this kind. Well she knew it, but would not admit
the fact even to herself.
She had dreamed of a little space of time between the date of their
settling in with their servants about them and the opening of the
hospital--a little space like the clearing in the midst of a tangled
forest, where she could pitch a tent and rest for awhile with the
thought of her wonderful happiness that Westenra's child was to be hers.
She meant to recapture into their lives the magic air of that happy week
in the Bronx woods. Once more they would adjust and gather about them
the fabric of comradeship and love that was to be the veil between
themselves and the world, and that somehow in the last few weeks of
rushing turmoil had been mishandled and torn.
But the dream was vain. No sooner did the domestic mechanism of the
house begin to work, creaking and straining like an old ship with an
amateur hand at the wheel, when cases for operation were hurried in, the
place was filled with nurses, other doctors and students bustled up and
down the stairs, and there were endless comings and goings of patients'
friends. The strangely disquieting scent of ether came stealing down
like a living presence from the upper floor into the atmosphere of home
Val was trying to establish in the rooms she and her husband occupied in
the big house. It seemed to her, too, that other shadows came in and
lingered around; that when operations were in progress pain-troubled
spirits wandered through the house, hiding in corners, waiting
fearfully. In the fight against these illusions, as well as with the
complicated problems of housekeeping and management, life began to
resolve itself into something very like Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens."
The burden of fifty-dollar-a-week nurses, rude and arrogant and of a
self-reverence amazing, who fought like cannibals with the servants, and
made turmoil all round them except in the splendid silence of the sick
room. The burden of telephone bells that sounded from morning till
night with the injurious sayings of waiting patients. The burden of
bitter cold, as the winter came on, and Val suffered as only a tropical
bird or flower can suffer in a bleak climate--the grim December dawns
when the quiet of three feet of snow lay on the city, unbroken save by
the jingle of the bells on the milkman's sleigh, or the shriek of the
first car upon the frozen metals! The burden of the elevated railway in
the avenue close by; the hideous rush of it through the night, like some
monstrous winged beast on a ceaseless quest for its prey--the ferocity
of its approach, the sinister melancholy of its receding cry! The
burden of "bathroom extensions" where the water-pipes burst every night,
dislocating the business of the house for hours--of frozen cisterns, and
New York plumbers! Of a cellar furnace that would not heat the house,
or, acting on some aesthetic principle of its own turned the bathrooms
into ovens, while the patients were in cold-storage and in the
operating-room the sponges froze to the tables! The burden of snow on
the sidewalk, and policemen knocking at the front door to say it must be
cleared, or that some one had fallen down and broken something, and
compensation would have to be paid later by the householder!
The burden of a beloved man who, when things went wrong in office or
operating-room, came roaring like a tiger in pain to his mate. For
alas! Garrett Westenra was no Angel in the House! That was one of the
strangest of all burdens to be borne, for Val always wanted to laugh at
it, and yet she knew it was no laughing matter. Westenra at work and
Westenra at play were two very different persons.
Val had been aware from the moment of their return to New York of a
great nervous change in her husband's mentality. It seemed to her that
as soon as they got into their new home he became all nerves and
torment, and difficult and exigeant as a child. It had not taken her
long to find that he possessed all the easily roused devils of the
easy-going Irishman. At first she was amazed by this discovery, then
confused, but in the end she loved him the better for it. Only it
always seemed to her madly funny that a man with such width and height
of mind should be no better than a cross-grained baby about some of the
ordinary vexing trifles of everyday life. It was hard to believe that a
medical scientist of the first water could fall into a state of fury
over a wrongly entered telephone message, a mislaid stethoscope, or
because a careless housemaid had misplaced something in his office; that
a man who had nothing small or mean about him should swear vividly over
the fact that some one had put a used tampon into his waste-paper basket
instead of burning it or thrown a burnt-out match into his fireplace.
There was a dumb-waiter that travelled on a rope up and down between
Val's sitting-room on the first floor and a little surgery at the back
of Westenra's consulting-room, and never a day passed but that rope was
rattled violently for Val to come to her little opening and receive some
furious complaint concerning a negligent maid or a stupid nurse. Many a
time and oft Westenra's special swear--a peculiar combination of his
own--rang up the shaft.
"Hell's blood and blazes! What has that girl from the Kerry hills done
with my stethoscope? How dare she touch it? She must have touched
it--it's not on my desk.--Where are those No. 1 bandages?--Who has moved
my note-book?--Will you find out from Nurse Soames why there are no
tampons made?--Hell's bells!--Is this a doctor's house?--What kind of a
doctor's house?"
The dumb-waiter travelled no farther than Val's room, and she issued
orders that no one was to answer the rattle of the rope but herself.
She realised that it was Westenra's safety-valve in moments of intense
irritation. It gave her a spasm of painful merriment, even in the midst
of her greatest weariness and worries, to hear her signal to come to the
shaft and receive the storm. Later, when the stress of the day was over,
she might laugh at him, and he, first furious, then ashamed, would
finally laugh himself and beg her pardon like a generous and
hot-tempered boy. But at the time she always gravely listened, and
without comment put the trouble right as swiftly as she could. She
realised only too clearly that the hospital was on his nerves as well as
her own, and that his irritation came from a multiplicity of cares
pressing on him, rather than from the one small incident that caused the
explosion. Indeed, life was pressing hard on Westenra. He was working
like a dog, and the dollars were rustling in, but the sound of their
rustling gave him no great joy. His heart was elsewhere, in other work
which must stand still, or perhaps, which was worse, be done by some one
else. The hospital hemmed him in it too. He, quite as much as Val,
felt caged. His work, his private life, all his interests for the
moment seemed narrowly centralised into one street, one house, an affair
of grubbing within four walls. Something in him rebelled at that, and
not less because he himself had so arranged it. It irked him terribly
to be mixed up with the machinery of this hospital, and his reserved
nature chafed under the lack of privacy in the place that should have
been his home. There were nurses everywhere. Val and he were never
together for five minutes without being intruded upon by some one
wanting something. Val had no control over the nurses; they did and
said what they chose, having fear of no one but the doctor. He knew she
had trouble with them every day, but he would not go into the matter.
It was not his province to wrangle with women; he had told her so from
the first when she came to him for advice. She must manage that part of
the scheme by herself, he said; he had his own share of trouble and
could not undertake hers as well. She had recoiled wonderingly before
his unsympathetic attitude, but never again worried him about anything
in the house. But he was aware that she was having a stiff time, and
from his heart he pitied her. But what was to be done? They were in it
now for loss or gain. His fortune was pledged to this thing and they
had got to do or die by it. And he did not mean it to be die! Westenra
was no quitter. It hurt Val to see the way he worked. She had never
realised before what a dog's life is a doctor's. Her husband was at
every one's beck and call but her own, and never could be sure of a
peaceful hour to himself.
In her own way she worked even harder than he, and it was a
heart-breaking thought that with it all she was not making a success of
the place. Though money was coming in fast, it flowed out still faster
through her incompetent fingers. The problem of how to make things pay
was a black beast which she fought by day and wrestled with in nightly
dreams, and the more she fought and wrestled the more it grinned and dug
its malignant claws into her heart. Even courage and ardour cannot
overcome inexperience and triumph over disability. Despair came often
to sit with her and whispered that this was not her place, and _here_
would never be laurels for her. But she did not want laurels for
herself--only for Westenra; and the more despair filled her the more she
loved her big difficult Irishman, whose nerves and torment and prevision
for the rottenness of life's rewards nearly drove her crazy.
Bills were another burden heavy in the bearing. Like all good men,
Westenra was "tight with money." He never said a word when Val with
heaving heart produced her weekly pile, large as a roll of drugget, but
what he left unsaid during the short interval between sighting the sum
total and producing his cheque-book would have filled a library.
They were always double what they should have been, those bills, and
triple what they would have been with an experienced woman at the head
of things: he knew it and she knew it; and they thought of the stolid,
lumpy German, and sometimes they spoke of her and of red robins that
were no good as ballast! And she felt as if she were drawing his
heart's blood, and so did he. Not that he was mean--far from it; only
he realised that his was not the money-making head, and he suffered from
the fear all brain-workers know--that their money-making capacity may
give out at any time.
"Simple people like you and me can never make fortunes, Val," he would
say sadly, "the only thing for us is to hang on tight to what we have
come by so hardly." But when he adjured her earnestly to "try and
economise," her face became as haggard as if he had thrust a dagger into
her, so that he made haste to add:
"I know you do, darling. It is only that I 've got into the habit of
saying it--forgive me!"
She forgave him gladly, and lay awake more than ever thinking out
impractical plans for economising. She hated to take the dollars that
he had sweated for as only doctors and treadmill prisoners can sweat, to
bestow them on insolent cooks who stole, housemaids who drank and
shirked their duties, tradesmen who took advantage of her "English
accent" to charge her twice as much as they would charge other people.
When she found that almost every good American housekeeper defeats the
dishonesty of servants by doing her own marketing, she shouldered the
business too, and made acquaintance with Baumgarten's Market, a huge
place where everything save groceries could be obtained for household
consumption. Some of the darkest hours of her life were spent at
Baumgarten's. It was there, sitting upon a high chair before the meat
and poultry counter awaiting her turn to be served, that she most keenly
realised her defeat. All around her, good American wives were examining
the grain of beef and the breasts of chickens. Poor Val could never
understand how they extracted information from the process. She herself
always got the toughest meat and the oldest birds for the highest
prices. She knew nothing of the breasts of chickens and never would
know anything. She, who could write a mile long passage from the
classics and never forget a poet's inspired word, found it impossible to
remember from day to day the price of sugar, and how much she ought to
pay for butter. Information like that simply passed through her head
like an express train through a tunnel. She never got the bargains
other women got. She was the victim of every sharper, and was "done" on
every side. On a desert island she would have been a treasure. In a
civilised city, battling with extraordinary conditions on a professional
man's income, she was a failure, and the knowledge deepened day by day
and was bitter as gall. She fought on with the courage of the desperate
and the doomed, but despair was in her heart and her eyes, and sometimes
Westenra saw it there, and thought she hated this life to which he had
brought her. He saw that she was a round peg in a square hole, and the
last woman in the world for the practical life she pursued with the
ardour of a doomed squirrel. The knowledge never interfered with his
affection for her, but it sometimes interfered with his nerves. It was
a bad dream from which they only woke up at night, for then together for
a few hours a natural reaction from the strain of the day took place,
and they would laugh like two children over the cares and problems of
the day. The night nurses, passing up- and down-stairs, often wondered
what it was the doctor and his wife found so amusing when they were shut
up in their rooms together. The fact was that in the practical affairs
of life they were no more than children, either of them, for all their
brains and experience. It is often so with gifted people. Of course,
Westenra knew his business as a doctor--none better, but the business of
being a practical and responsible husband and head of a household was a
sealed book to him, just as the problem of how to become the successful
manageress of a private nursing home was one that Val would never solve.
But if she could not defeat the cares that the day brought, she could at
least be extremely humorous over her mistakes and failures, and the
valiant spirit of her that was ready to get up from one day's knock-out
blows and face the same round next morning, could not but appeal to the
chivalry in Westenra, as well as awaken his own sense of humour.
CHAPTER VI
KISSES AND CROSSES
"For 'Im and 'E and 'It
(An' Two an' One makes Three)."
KIPLING.
Acquaintance with a further element in her husband's life to which she
had so far been a stranger was reserved for Val when at Easter his
adopted child, Haidee Halston, came home to 68th Street. Westenra, it
is true, had told her all the circumstances, and no one was better
qualified than Val to appreciate that sense of responsibility towards
the helpless and unprotected which had prompted him to take upon himself
the entire support and education of a friend's child. Westenra and Pat
Halston had been friends from boyhood. The same county in Ireland had
been their birthplace, they were at Carlow College together, and,
sailing for America within a year of each other, met again in New York,
and graduated together from Columbia University, where they obtained
their medical degree. Later, launched upon the same profession but
inspired by very different ambitions, the paths of the two friends had
diverged somewhat. Halston, greatly gifted and of a magnetic
personality, aimed for a fashionable practice that would bring him
social success as well as a fortune with which to pursue further
aims--in fact, like many another he meant medicine to serve him only as
a step to the more lucrative and exciting profession of politics,
wherefore he followed it only when it led him into the highways of the
rich and influential. Westenra, on the other hand, inspired by a racial
thirst for knowledge, as well as for eminence in his profession, did not
disdain the by-ways, even when they led him into the lowest slums of New
York. It was natural, in the circumstances, that the two men should see
little of each other, but the bond of boyhood held good, and when "Death
and Dismay" all too swiftly and unforeseen came to Halston, it was to
Westenra that he turned at the last. Poor Halston had, unfortunately,
put a spoke into his own wheel of ambition by marrying a lovely, but
very flighty English girl, who came to America as a governess in the
family of one of his fashionable patients. Halston adored his pretty
wife, but she made ducks and drakes with his money and brought him to
the verge of bankruptcy through her extravagance. When death by septic
poisoning swooped suddenly down on him, she was within a short period of
giving birth to their only child, and the thought of this darkened the
dying man's vision until Westenra, with a firm hand on his friend's,
gave his promise that the welfare of Mrs. Halston and her child would be
his most sacred task. Within a few weeks Mrs. Halston joined her
husband in the great beyond, and Westenra found himself the sole
guardian of the little baby girl fancifully called by its dying
mother--Haidee. That was ten years before, and now Haidee was a
beautiful, arrogant slip of a girl with deep dark eyes, a deep dark cave
or two in her soul, and the manners of a cowboy. The school at which
she had been educated for several years, to the extreme detriment of
Westenra's banking account, was one of those highly modern institutions
where at the most expensive rates girls are encouraged to "develop their
individuality," and Haidee, a hoyden by nature, had developed hers along
the cowboy-brigand line. Her idea of argument with servants or other
children was to push them down-stairs or administer a hack on the shins
with one of her extremely useful-looking feet.
These unsatisfactory reports had for a long time troubled the peace of
Westenra, whose sense of responsibility to Pat Halston's child was
perhaps a slightly exaggerated one. A vague idea had occurred to him of
sending her to a convent to see what the gentle influence of nuns could
do for her, but Haidee jibbed like a mule at the mention of nuns, and
declared darkly that if he sent her to a convent _he would see_.
When he spoke to Val of his worries on the subject she said, ready at
once to embrace any project or protege of his without thought of the
fresh tasks entailed:
"Oh, why not have her here for awhile, Joe? A little home life will tame
her down, I expect. Look how it has tamed even such a wild ass of the
desert as I," she added, with a gay smile in which there was more than a
touch of wistfulness. But Westenra said a trifle abruptly that he did
not fancy somehow it would be a good plan.
"You have enough worries already," he added, but not quite quickly
enough to prevent Val from perceiving that there was some other reason,
though she was far from guessing what that reason might be.
In the end, however, by the gift of circumstance, Haidee came to 68th
Street after all. For at the expiration of the Easter term the school
authorities wrote a brief but eloquent letter to the effect that they
wished to be relieved of the care of Westenra's ward. If it did not
exactly amount to an expulsion, it certainly could not be looked upon as
a certificate of good conduct for presentation at her next school, and
for the moment all thought of the convent had to be dismissed. So
Haidee came home from New Jersey, bag and baggage, and utterly unashamed
of her peccadilloes. Val, with a heart open for anything or any one
loved by Westenra, was eager to mother the motherless creature of whom
she had heard so much. But Haidee was apparently not in search of a
mother, and received her advances coldly and in a keep-off-the-grass
manner that only an American-bred child would have the _sang-froid_ to
use. More than a hint of hostility, too, was to be found in the
deep-set eyes, when they watched Val and Westenra together. The fact
was that to find her guardian installed in a house with "a strange
woman" had given the girl a great shock. Westenra, following his usual
habit of reserve, had prepared her for nothing of the kind when he said,
on his return journey from New Jersey:
"I am married now, Haidee."
She never dreamed that such a thing would make any difference to her
absolute monopoly of her beloved guardian, and indeed, because Val was
generous and he was kind, it would have made but little, if she had not
instantly determined to be as obnoxious and tiresome as she could be, in
the hope that Val would get tired of her and go away.
From the first she nobly contributed her share towards the business of
making life at No. 700 more unlivable than it was already. She fought
with the servants, got into the way of the nurses, and disturbed the
patients with her noise. A day-school was found for her near at hand,
and that kept her energies employed for a certain number of hours, but
her new teachers were soon on the war-path after her, and she arrived
home daily, flustered with combat, and bringing long accounts of their
tyranny and brutality! When it was time for her to go to school in the
mornings the house had to be hunted for her from top to bottom by Val or
a housemaid. She hated to go to bed, and there was a scene every night
before she could be induced to do so; then, on being left alone, she
would invariably hop out again, turn up the lights, and amuse herself in
some illicit fashion, such as hanging out of the window and dropping
things on the heads of patients coming up the front-door steps. Yet in
the mornings it almost needed a charge of dynamite to dislocate her from
her blankets. She had a rooted aversion to taking baths, and would
never brush her teeth unless some one stood over her and saw it done. In
fact, she had all the faults and naughtinesses of an ordinary child
strongly accentuated, and a sense of perversity extraordinarily
developed. Withal she was as clever as paint, and grew prettier every
day. What vexed Val most was that everlastingly she broke in upon
Westenra, claiming his attention for her troubles, her lessons, her
amusements, unless Val were on the alert to prevent it. She would wait
outside his office door and slip in "between patients" to relate some
woe, and Westenra would listen patiently and in the end the trouble
evaporated into smiles and laughter. But this wasted his time and told
upon his temper in some later affair of the day, or brought him up to
bed a little more tired than usual.
Presently, too, Haidee's jealousy of Val's place in Westenra's life
began to take a more active form, and if it had not been for her
disarming innocence of mind where worldly matters were concerned, Val
would have almost come to dislike her. Instead of which she felt pity
for the child who, in her adoration for Westenra, resented being ousted
from the central position in his life. Haidee could not or would not
understand why a mere wife should have first claim. She considered that
she herself possessed it, because she had been first in Westenra's life.
One night Val, going to her husband's room to see that everything was
prepared for him to go straight to rest as soon as he got in from a late
consultation, found Haidee in her nightgown, curled up and scowling, on
Westenra's bed.
"Haidee! What on earth--? I thought you were in bed and asleep long
ago."
"Well, I 'm not, you see," was the surly response.
"But, dear chicken, what are you doing here?"
"I 'm waiting for Garry."
"Oh, Haidee, how silly! When Garry comes home he 'll be dead tired and
not want to be bothered. You really must have a little consideration
for him, dear--besides, you ought to be in bed and asleep by now."
The child suddenly burst out at her like a tornado:
"Why aren't _you_ in bed and asleep, I 'd like to know ... why can _you_
wait up for him and not me? ... I know ... you think he belongs to you
... and that you can have him all the time. You are a greedy guts. You
have him every night ... why should n't I have him sometimes? You are
trying to take him right away from me. Who asked you to come from your
rotten old England and take my Garry away from me? Before you came he
was all mine ... when I was little he used to let me sleep with my arms
round his neck. But now, whenever I ask if I can come and sleep in his
bed he laughs and says I have grown too big and active with my hoofs.
But your hoofs are not too big, I suppose! Oh, no! ... and he 's not
too tired, however late he comes in for _you_ to come to his room and
talk to him.... Mean pig that you are ... greedy guts! I hate you ...
and I _will_ sleep with Garry ... I will, I will!"
She burst into a torrent of tears, and Val stood staring at her in
amazement that swiftly softened to pity. The trouble with Val was that
she could always feel sympathy for another person's point of view, and
that frame of mind is very disarming to anger. Immediately she threw
her arms round the sobbing creature and began to comfort her.
"Dear old thing, you mustn't feel like that about me. I don't want to
take him away from you. I know he is all you have. I only want you to
help me as much as you can to make things easier for him. Think how he
works ... for both of us--you and me! And how tired he is at nights....
As for my coming to his room ... dear chick, don't you understand that I
am his wife? When you are grown up you 'll marry some nice man ... and
you 'll want to be greedy over him too a little bit."
"I 'll never marry anybody. I always meant to marry Garry ... and now
_you_--" Vindictiveness came into her voice again, and Val's heart gave
a little weary sigh, for she was dead beat, and this was her legitimate
time of rest, hard wrung from the day. To have to face this exhausting
scene late at night seemed very much like the last straw that was one
too many for the camel.
However, it was urgent to get it over and done with before Westenra came
in, so she stayed on talking to the unhappy child, trying to beguile her
from her misery and once and for all place their relationship on a
footing of sympathy and affection. It seemed almost a hopeless task,
but in the end the effective thing was that she told Haidee of what so
far she had spoken to no one but Westenra--her deep, sweet, secret joy
in the thought of the child that was coming. It was Haidee's first
glimpse into the workings of nature, and she sat wide-eyed and dumb,
searching Val from top to toe for circumstantial evidence, while Val,
with a faint flush in her pale face, but serene-eyed and in simple
words, following on Carpenter's advice in _Love's Coming of Age_, made
all clear to the child. She even, with a touch of guile, let Haidee
into the secret of suffering to be endured before the baby could come
into the world, believing that to touch the heart of the child to a
little sympathy might not be an unwise thing. And she was right: from
sympathy to compassion is a natural step, and Haidee went to bed in a
glow of good resolution to be as helpful and considerate as possible in
the days to come. Indeed, without turning into an angel, or even a
moderately good child, she did improve greatly in behaviour during the
next few months, while waiting with burning impatience for what was to
come when the bleak spring days were over.
June came at last, and brought its gift to Valentine and Westenra--a
son. Like an impetuous Irishman, as Val had declared, anxious to get
into the thick of the fight, he had practically started their married
life with them, and arrived as soon as compatibility with schedule
permitted. That was a great day in the Westenra household when the
golden head of a baby lit up like a star the gloom of dark and difficult
ways. Instead of one baby, indeed, there were three. Two of them
haggard and thin, but content and care-free as the third in that glad
hour of love made incarnate. Even Haidee softened and turned into a real
child as she hung with perpetual curiosity over the cot of the
new-comer.
"It's got blue eyes, just like the lion cubs in the Zoo.... Oh, look at
it clutching on to me! You are lucky, Val.... I wish I could get one,
too. Oh, _could n't_ I have it to sleep with me?"
She sulked bitterly when she was not permitted to take charge of it to
play with like a doll, and thereafter constantly complained to Westenra
of Val's greediness.
"You 'd think it was all hers--and how can it be if it is half yours?
And if it is yours it belongs to me too," was the burden of her
complaint.
When Val got up and resumed life again, the question of a name for the
baby arose. Val was all for Patrick.
"Patrick seems to stand for Ireland, and he is our link with Ireland,
Joe."
"It is an unlucky name with us," Westenra objected. "My father was
crazy for sons, but three he called Patrick died one after the other.
When I came they took no more risks, and gave me an old family name.
Choose another, Val."
"Well," she said shyly, after a little thought, "would you mind
Richard?"
"Richard?" he mused.
Val had long yearned to talk to Westenra of Dick Rowan, only the ban he
had placed on all past things had so far prevented her. But that the
day must come when no subject would be taboo between them, she felt
confident.
"We could call him Dick," she said. "I once cared very much----"
Westenra turned on her like a flash, white to the lips.
"Is that the way you burn your boats?" he said, in a low, hard voice,
and looked at her with furious eyes she did not know. While she stared
at him in pain and amazement he rose abruptly and left the room. Slowly
her eyes filled with tears. She made no further reference to the matter.
She did not know what to say. It seemed she could not refer to that
time and tell him who Dick was, and how good he had been to her without
giving pain. Therefore it was better to be silent. On the day of the
christening itself he said:
"We 'll call him Bran if you like, Val--one of Ireland's old savage
kings. I think that son of yours will be some one fine some day," he
added with a boyish, lovable smile, that had something of pride in it,
and something of humility too, and for those words Val forgave him and
was happy again. And the baby was baptised into the Holy Catholic
Church under the pagan and kingly name of Bran.
CHAPTER VII
MORE WINDING PATHS
"There is a crack in everything God has made."
EMERSON.
There is a saying that during the hot weather every one in New York,
except doctors and cats, leave the city. Westenra, with his yearly
habit of pulling stakes and heading for Europe at the first hint of
heat, had always been an exception to this rule, and he invariably
advised other men that his was the only possible way to keep fit after
nine months' hard work. But now, though the brazen heat beat down on to
the city and burnt up through the pavements as if Pluto had lighted a
special furnace under New York, Westenra laughed at his own advice and
made no move to get away. Val knew why, and the knowledge etched new
shadows under her salient cheek-bones. In spite of his working like a
bee from morning till night, the Sanatorium being constantly full, and
operations always in progress, Westenra was harassed for money. The
venture did not pay. An experienced woman at the head of things could
have made it pay. The stolid, lumpy German with a good hospital
training grafted on to a knowledge of household affairs would have made
a roaring success of it, and coined money for all concerned. Even an
ordinarily good manager with free hands and no nerves might have
achieved a margin of profit. The vagabond journalist not only could not
make it pay, she was turning it into a dead loss. Every day good money
went cantering after bad.
What Westenra should have done, even at that eleventh hour, was to
engage a capable, working matron to manage the place, while Val devoted
her loving fervour to the baby and himself. But he felt doubtful as to
the success of such an arrangement, first because Val would probably not
like to live elsewhere; secondly, because he had managed hospitals
before, and knew all about trouble with matrons. Experience had taught
him that in America women rarely work well except in the interests of
some one with whom they are in love. This rule applies very pertinently
to American nurses, who are usually middle-aged Germans intent on
marrying a doctor; but it may very well be applied to women all the
world over, though Westenra was not aware of the fact. What he did know
was that a managing matron would probably work for her own hand and not
for his. Even if she made a roaring success of the place, later there
would surely come the subtle introduction of other methods and other
interests than his, into his own hospital. Worst of all would be the
fact of strangers within his gates spying out the secrets of his
reserved nature, bearing witness to his moods and nerves, all the irk of
daily contact with people who were making a business out of his brains.
This idea of outsiders being "let in on him," of alien eyes coming close
enough to look over the wall behind which he kept his conflicting
tempers and emotions from the world, was peculiarly irritating to him.
Only Val, privileged by love, must have the gift of a share in his
torment, the right to hear his swears. With all others he smiled and
smiled and hid his heart, and put distance between himself and them.
And Val, because she was a true lover, understood and faithfully gave of
her body and soul to pad the bumps of life for him. Whatever else she
failed in, she failed not in playing the buffer between him and the
strangers who went to and fro in his house. He little knew what it cost
her in peace of mind and serenity of spirit, this jarring with natures
so unlike her own, and jangling with those who were making a business of
life. He only knew that in spite of her impracticability and
extravagance there was no one like her, and that the place in her
incompetent hands was dearer by far than it could ever be in surer hands
that were strange. It was beginning to dawn in his heart, with the
exquisite promise of the skies, all that she was to him, this woman who
walked by his side never faltering, smiling gallantly in defeat. It was
beginning to whisper through his senses like the haunting echo of bells
whose cadence he had known all his life that defeat after all did not
matter so much since he shared it with her--that it might in fact become
a form of victory. In any case he meant to struggle on with things as
they were, hoping and working for the best.
Unfortunately, his nerves after the year of extraordinary strain were in
rags. He really needed the rest and change that was due to him. His
body and brain clamoured for it, and his fine athlete's skin took into
itself a putty tint that was neither healthy nor becoming. In vain did
Val implore him to take ship for his native land. He laughed and refused
to go unless she and the children went too. But she knew what the cost
of such an exodus would mean, and sat tight as an eagle in her eyrie;
and her little brood pecked at her heart as though determined to get at
her life-blood. Haidee grew wickeder every hour, and Bran was the
naughtiest baby in the world, sleeping all day and howling all night,
withal drinking away his mother's strength and blooming on it like a
pink rose.
Valentine grew pale as a wraith and Westenra's old, haunting fear that
his brain would give out ate him by night and day; but neither of them
was a quitter. Both possessed that stupid and over-estimated kind of
courage that does not know when it is beaten. At last Fate, like an
overtried mother who is sick of giving gentle hints to unheeding
children, brought down her hand heavily upon them. First she smote the
man. In the blasting heat of late August, Westenra went down as only the
big and the strong can go down--like a felled oak. The brilliant
colleague whom Val hastily and fearfully summoned to her husband's
bedside expressed his diagnosis in the argot of the day.
"His nerves have run out and his stomach has gone back on him. If he
does n't slip up on us it will be a near thing, Mrs. Westenra."
And it was a near thing. If it had not been for Val, Westenra would
have found eternity sooner than he expected. But it was a bad time for
her. In addition to nursing her husband, she had to manage the
rampageous Bran, a domestic crisis brought about by a servant strike,
and an ice famine. Fortunately, there were no patients but one in the
house at the time, and the nurse in attendance happened to be an
exceptionally good one, who did all she could to relieve the strain. She
was an English woman, a Miss Holland, with an able brain behind a
pretty, calm face. She would willingly have undertaken the nursing of
Westenra besides her own patient, but he was so frequently delirious
that Val was afraid to let any one share in the nursing of him. She
knew how he would hate any stranger to hear his tormented ramblings, but
she did not realise for a long time that it would perhaps have been
better at any cost that another than she should have heard them. For all
that he had hidden from her came out now in broken snatches and groans,
half dream, half delirium. She learned of his longing for his
laboratory, of the sacrifice it had cost him to abandon it, of his
despair about the Sanatorium, money worries, all the irk domestic life
held for him. What was more terrible, she gleaned in broken fragments,
halting and disjointed, as though even in his delirium he had an
instinct to hide it, something of the way he had struggled with himself
to evade her coming into his life, of his mental resistance until the
last, of the pity which rather than love had moved him to ask her to
marry him, of his dread of her past, and fear for their future. Oh!
bitter and bleak were the things that came to her ears in scraps and
broken whispers and heavy sighs, and that pieced together by her weary
yet quickened brain made a clear writing on the wall. All was plain to
her at last: all that he had succeeded in keeping dark from her, the
secret of his torment and his pain in the struggle. To her the
upholding joy in the darkest hour had always been that the man was worth
it, she loved him and considered him worthy of every sacrifice she could
make. She saw now that he had had no such thought to uphold him.
Though he had been too loyal to acknowledge the fact even to himself,
the bitter drop in his cup must have been his belief that the woman was
not worth the sacrifices marriage had entailed!
Sighs and dark mutterings told her why he had shrunk at first from
Haidee's coming to 68th Street--some duty he had to Halston, to keep his
child only among those whose lives had been pure and unspotted by the
world. The meaning of his fury at Val's suggestion for his son's naming
came whispering forth from fever-broken lips.
"Dick! ... How _could_ she? A dissipated brute .... no woman safe from
... and she ... my woman, alone with him for months ... wild places ...
lonely places."
She could not know where he had heard that scandalous tale. She could
only bow her head and take the sword to her heart.
When she heard him muttering to his mother, explaining that she was his
dream woman, that it had to be.... 'She is not like you, mother, but
she came to me in dreams ... _it had to be_ ... and now she is Bran's
mother ... you must love my Bran's mother," she thought her heart would
break for bitter aching. It seemed to her in that dark hour that
nothing could ever hurt her any more. She defied Fate to do her any
worse hurt. An unwise thing to do. Fate was in fact sitting in wait
with a worse clout in her hand.
There came an afternoon when Westenra was so much better that he could
talk a little, softly, if a trifle vaguely to Haidee who had crept in to
hold his hand. His eyes, seeming to have grown lighter in his thin,
strongly-featured face, travelled incessantly round the room, resting
here and there as though they recognised landmarks in some country he
had not visited for years. They rested on Val writing at a table near
by, and noted the wraithlike face, pale as a bone, the weary lean of her
against her own supporting arm, the droop of her lips and her shoulders.
When she came over with the medicine, he said quietly:
"You should go out for a little while, dearest. Haidee will take care of
me."
She had indeed a longing that was almost active pain for air and the
sight of sky and green things, and needed little persuasion, seeing that
he was really better. She did not even stop to change her frock, which
was old and unfashionable, and in her haste caught up an ancient
school-hat of Haidee's, trimmed with a shabby bow of silk ribbon, and
more than slightly bent out of shape about the brim. She felt it
mattered little how she looked, so long as she could escape into the
outer air. Her head ached violently.
As she hurried down the front-door steps, a man walking up the street
looked at her curiously, and something in her peculiar walk brought a
flash of amazement to his eyes and quickened his steps. He was tall and
well-dressed, with traces of breeding, and a certain dashing
handsomeness about him, but there was a green tint in his ravaged
cheeks, and the straight figure under the well-cut coat was gaunt and
shrunk. His eyes lacked lustre, and one of them jerked and winked
mechanically at irregular intervals. The man was a nervous and physical
wreck. As he passed the house from which Val had come, he looked up and
noticed its number and the name on the door-plate. A moment later he
caught up with the slight, hurrying figure, gave a swift glance at her
profile and the shabby hat above it, then, in the quiet drawling tones
of the man about town, he said politely:
"How do, Val?"
She swung round with the wild jerk of a lassoed creature and faced him.
Then he was not so sure after all that it was Val. The grey-faced
woman, with all the life gone out of her eyes, sunken cheeks and
blanched lips, was certainly not the Valentine Valdana of other days.
The figure, the walk was hers; but the face was the face of some strange
woman--some woman in trouble, too, and that was a bore. He was a man
who always avoided women in trouble. On the point of lifting his hat,
with a slight apology and walking away, her words detained him.
"_You!_" Her voice was the voice of Valentine Valdana with all the
music gone from it: harsh and grinding as stone on stone.
"Yea, verily," said he, and stared sardonically into her fearful eyes.
They stood so for a moment staring at each other. Then the man laughed;
but it was not a pleasant laugh.
"You don't seem as pleased to see me as you ought to be!"
"You!" she stammered again. It seemed all she was able to say.
"Yes, _me_, my very dear Val," he repeated with something like a snarl.
"Time appears to have dimmed your excellent eyesight, as well as robbed
you of your gift of repartee!"
She answered strangely, speaking vaguely like a woman in a nightmare,
but her words struck home like little, sharp knives, and the blood
mounted high in his dark cheeks.
"So _you_ were the slinker in the bush!--the skulker!--the deserter of
comrades and men!--_I might have known_!"
Rage flashed out of his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment he looked as if
he could strike her. Then he laughed again the jeering sardonic laugh of
the cynic, whose bones hard words have no power to break, the coward who
fears nothing but death.
"Be damned to you!" he said pleasantly. "I had as much right to save my
skin as any one else."
"_No one else saved his skin_."
"That was their lookout," he remarked with grim facetiousness, but her
silent, terrible stare, so full of indictment, disconcerted him
horribly. He essayed to change the unpleasant subject.
"So you are in New York! No one could make out where the deuce you had
got to."
That detached her from the sinister question of his conduct on the South
African veldt. But still she stared deep into him as if seeking in his
soul the key to some problem she could not solve; and he was
embarrassed, for he wished no one to search in his dark soul--there were
things hidden there that even he was afraid to look upon. As for the
situation, surely it was clear enough. He that should have been dead
was alive, and that was all there was to it. He had been looking for
her to let her know, and that he had found her by accident was so much
to the good. It had a better appearance than if he had hunted her down
(as he would have done if he had possessed any clue to work on). After
all, he argued to himself, he had a right to her sympathy. Also he
needed help in the shape of money pretty badly. He was sick of hiding
in America, and longed to get away to the cheap comfort of Europe.
Unfortunately, she did not look as if she could help his financial
situation very much. He had, in fact, never seen her look so shabby
since she ceased to occupy the proud position of wife and slave to
Horace Valdana, Esq. The thought that he might not be able to levy a
loan from her after all moved him to venom.
"I fear you have come down in the world, my poor Val! If I did not know
what a brilliant woman of letters you are, I might almost think you had
turned into a housemaid. What were you doing at Number 700?"
Then she realised he had seen her come out of the house. That was the
key she had sought. Now she knew just where she stood, and what she must
do.
"Yes," she said slowly, "you are quite right, I have come down in the
world, and I am a housemaid--at that house I have just come from."
He burst out laughing. It seemed to be the funniest news he had heard
for a long time.
"Indeed! Perhaps you will invite me to call and have some supper with
you and the cook some evening?"
"We are not allowed to have callers. I don't get on with the cook. I
am under notice to quit." She made her statements quite gravely.
"But this is great!" He began to laugh again uproariously. "So you
have got the sack! And now you will have to go back to the career of
famous journalist. But why have left it, my dear girl? Is it a joke, or
some new craze for getting copy?"
Steadily, calmly, with pale lips and toneless voice, she lied on--for
Bran's sake, for Garrett's sake, for the sake of all she held dear.
What better reason can a woman have for lying her soul away!
"No, no joke, no craze: stern necessity. I can't write any more, that
is all. I had brain fever, and when it was all over I found that I
could n't put another sentence together. I am done for as a writer. So
I just dropped out of the old life and disappeared. The only thing I
can do now is work with my hands."
"But"--he stammered. "But it will come back--all you want is time,
rest--"
"Never," she said firmly. "Never. It is finished. My brain is gone.
I am Alice Brook now--Alice Brook, housemaid. I shall never be anything
else."
"Good God!" He gazed at her aghast. There was no glimmering of doubt
in his mind as to the truth of her story. It seemed almost too
extraordinary to be true, but he had never known Val to lie. He was
aware, in fact, from painful experience that she despised liars, and
held a creed that nothing worth a lie was to be found in the world. It
was not for him to know that she had at last found something she
considered worth lying for. Besides, she so thoroughly looked the part.
Thin, hollow-eyed, and badly dressed, with the hopeless lines
unhappiness had sketched about her lips, she was the picture of an
overworked slave who worked too much by day, and got too little rest at
night.
"Good God!" he repeated blankly. "And I was going to touch you for my
fare home."
It was her turn to laugh now, and she did it silently, rocking from side
to side, holding one hand over her heart as if afraid it might burst
from her body in its wild mirth. Valdana considered her with shrewd,
savage eyes. He had never known her guilty of such a thing as a fit of
hysterics, but it looked uncommonly as if she meant to indulge in one
now, and he was not anxious to assist in anything of the kind.
"Don't be a fool, Val," he said sharply. "Pull yourself together. Come
along into the Park and we 'll discuss things."
Val's laughter was over except for a strange little sobbing sound that
escaped from her lips from time to time, as she walked slowly by his
side towards the Park. Sometimes she swayed a little and put out her
hands as if to keep herself from falling--as though the earth were
rocking under her feet.
----
There is a story told in Africa of a Dutch woman, who, during one of the
early Kaffir wars, escaped from an attacked township, and with her
family of six little children hid in the bush. They concealed
themselves in a deep swamp overhung with bushes and seething with
poisonous gnats; and there, while all round them human beasts beat the
bush seeking for prey, the little band crouched low, nothing but their
heads protruding from the filthy ooze, fearful almost to breathe lest
they should be heard and dragged forth to torture and death.
Unfortunately, the baby, sick and too young to understand the terrible
situation, whimpered endlessly at the bites of the insects, and all its
mother's fearful hushing could not quiet it. With the howls of
blood-drunken Kaffirs in her ears, and before her eyes the five tragic,
terror-stricken faces of her other children, the distracted mother found
no other thing to do than clasp her hands about the little loved,
whimpering throat that would betray them all, and still its cries for
ever.
Long after Valdana had left her Val sat on in the Park, trying not to
think, trying to get control over herself. Her overwrought brain felt
like a struggling, tortured thing, determined to burst from her head and
run brandishing its frenzy and pain to the world; while some other part
of her strove for calm, hushing and pacifying the tortured thing as the
Dutch mother had hushed the child that would betray them all; and she
felt that if she could not still its frenzied cries she must kill it.
Better that she should die than that Westenra and little Bran should
suffer. But she did not want to die; she knew she could not be spared
at that time. The mother of a little child can never be spared.
Westenra, lying weak and ill, seemed to her no more than a little child
too, and one that she must care for and protect from trouble. Dazed and
shocked as she was, with her world in pieces about her, the mother sense
alert in her warned her to get control of her nerves; that it would be
fatal to fall ill now; that everything depended upon her deliberate
action. She had seen with Westenra what happened when the brain was
sick, and she knew she could never hope to keep the truth from him if
such an illness overtook her. She was resolute to keep it from him. He
had suffered enough. He was sick and broken with suffering, and all
through her. But his pride and joy in Bran was still left him; and of
that, if she could help it, he should not be robbed. His son! Heir to
an old and honoured name if to no great fortune. What would befall if
he found that his son was nameless--heir to nothing but shame and
sorrow. Ah! some day he might have to hear the truth and bear it--but
not now, not now. She must take herself in hand strongly, force herself
to calmness, plan how to outwit Valdana, and save her loved ones.
She looked at the card Valdana had given her with an address written on
it:
MR. JOHN SEYMOUR,
_Shrapp's Hotel,_
_West 19th Street,_
_New York._
He was there under an assumed name, skulking, as he had skulked in the
bush. His mother, the only person whom he had enlightened as to his
being alive, was secretly sending him money. She dared not let his
father, an old man dying of an incurable disease, know, for fear it
would hasten his end, and she was ashamed to tell her other sons and
daughters; they were all honourable, upright people whose heads would be
lowered to the dust under the blow. With a mother's unselfish love she
wished to spare them the truth--that the man whose gallant death all
England had mourned was alive and skulking in hiding, a coward who had
deserted his comrades! But for Val she had no such feeling, and it was
she who had given him the news of Val's sailing for America and paid his
fare to do the same, counselling him to find her out and get her help.
She said it was Val's duty to stand by him, and he, pleased with such
comfortable counsel, had been in New York six months hoping to come
across his wife. At the last moment he had chanced upon her by
accident!
He had left her in the Park; it was with the understanding that she was
to meet him in two days' time at Shrapp's Hotel. But she had no
intention of keeping the appointment. First of all it would be
extremely difficult for her to get away from home without lying, and
then there was a possibility of Westenra finding out where she had gone,
and suspecting something strange. She meant to take no risks where
Westenra was concerned. Secondly, she hated to meet Valdana. Quite
apart from the horrible turmoil his reappearance caused in her life, she
was shakingly revolted by his presence. The sight of him alive when he
should have been where the world believed him--among the heroic
dead--made her physically sick.
"_As much right to save his skin..._" she repeated blankly, and the
blood seemed to turn to water in her veins. "Oh, I might have known ...
I might have known! Mean souls do not suddenly become heroic! _To save
his skin!_"
And it was the name of such a man that she bore by law! For such a one
her little Bran must be branded illegitimate. She ground her teeth in
rage and despair, and gave out a little moan.
Around the black morass that surrounded her there showed only one small
glimmer of light--it was the remembrance of that faint gleam that kept
her from going mad. He had offered it as a sort of propitiation for the
fact of his being still alive, and she shuddered at her own heartless
catching at it. She might not have believed but for the bleak tint of
his skin.
"It won't be for long, anyway. I 'm booked, Val. I have the same
trouble as my father--cancer of the liver. Nothing can save me. It's
only a matter of a few months ... a year at the outside." She had
looked into his face keenly at that and recognised the possibility of
his words being true. That strange hue in his cheeks might easily be
the hue of death foreshadowing the atrocious malady from which his
father suffered.
He had gone on to tell her that all he asked was to be allowed to live
in peace, out of the world's sight, until his hour came. The truth must
never be known, he said. Even he was not so dead to decency that he
could not recognise that. He owed something to his family after all--to
say nothing of his country! These had a right to expect silence from
one who should have been dead. And he was willing enough to be silent.
The gnawing at his vitals had killed in him, he said, all taste for
gaming and dissipation. He only wanted peace in some quiet country
place, anywhere but America, which he hated with the fierce hatred of
the waster surrounded by active energetic men. He had, it appeared,
sought Val in the pretty certain belief that she could and would assist
him to the quiet life he longed for, and when he found she could not he
was more inclined to curse than to sympathise because her brain had
"given out." She smiled a tortured smile at that. Her brain had indeed
given out. That part at least of the story was true; and that she would
never be able to write again as in the old days she knew was true too.
There is nothing like a year's tussling with domestic problems for
dulling the wits. She felt that to earn a sure million she could not
have produced the energy or material for one of her old gay vivid
articles salted with wit and scented with the breeze. The power had
gone from her. Wifehood had absorbed it. Maternity had eaten and drunk
it up! Like Alice Brook, she could only work with her hands now; and,
like Alice Brook, she was sadly incompetent even with these. For there
really was a housemaid called Alice Brook at No. 700; an inefficient
English girl who could not get on with the cook, and was without the
faintest notion of her duties. As Val had no time to train her she was
obliged to give her notice, and the girl was in fact leaving the house
that night. This was why Val had felt so safe in her story.
When Valdana found out that she did not mean to meet him again, he would
probably, as discreetly as he dared, make inquiries at No. 700 for Alice
Brook. But Val would be prepared for him.
She sat still on that bench in Central Park until she had formed her
plan. She would write to him within the next two days saying that
nothing was to be gained by their meeting; that she had left 68th
Street, and that if he did not worry her and try to find her, she would
help him all she could with money, and from time to time send him,
through his mother, such sums as she could earn. There was no question,
of course, of her earning at present, but she possessed jewellery upon
which she could raise certain sums. She would pawn some at once and
send him fifty pounds for his passage to England, thus ridding herself
of his vicinity at least, and gaining untainted breathing space in which
to decide upon the next move. There must, she knew, be a terrible
reconstruction of her life with Westenra, but as yet she was too weary
and shocked to see far ahead. She only knew that she must go warily,
like
"Ate Dea, treading so soft----"
Full of schemes that it revolted her to formulate, feeling a conspirator
and traitor to all she loved, she at last retraced her steps homeward.
CHAPTER VIII
WOUNDS IN THE RAIN
"What will you do, love?
When I am going
With white sail flowing,
The seas beyond?
What will you do, love?
When waves divide us
And friends may chide us,
For being fond?"
SAMUEL LOVER.
Recuperation set in at last with Westenra, and he began to return to
health almost as swiftly as he had departed from it, and with health
came a full tide of love and gratitude to the woman who had so devotedly
nursed him back to life. But in the wraith at his bedside he hardly
recognised Val. She had strangely changed, yet poignantly recalled to
him that grey lady of long ago, whom in the past months of pain and
fevered rush he had almost forgotten. Shadows seem to hang about her as
in his dream. Almost it seemed as if she, instead of he, were returning
from the Valley of the Shadow. He was struck to the heart by her worn
and weary look. But when he put out hands of gratitude and compassion
to her, she seemed like the dream woman to elude them without moving. A
long, long distance came between them. The old sad ache of lost lands
was in her eyes and lingered about her lips. Consciousness came upon
him suddenly that he loved this woman deeply, that she was the very
heart of his heart ... then why should he have that sense of fear that
she was escaping from him?
She smiled at him with exile in her eyes when he took her hand, and
kissing it, thanked her for all her goodness to him.
"Bless you, dearest and best ... I am ashamed of myself for getting sick
like this ... to have had you half-killing yourself nursing me ... what
should I have done without you? What would I ever do without you ...
Brannie's mother?"
Was it his fancy that her hand seemed to grow a little rigid in his?
That a shadow passed over her face? He had called her the sweetest
thing he could think of, one that meant so much to him, the symbol of
their love, the treasure saved from the rocks that had broken and
wrecked them--the treasure with which they would build a new ship in
which to sail the stormy seas. He could not know that ever since the
days of delirium she had been yearning for some little word of
_personal_ love, some little name that was all for her as lover, not
mother only. Once more the sense of distance between them came to him.
She seemed suddenly to be a long way off. In effect, he had loosed her
hand and she had moved away to the window. He did not see the heavy
tears that scorched her eyes, but he noticed the droop of her shoulders
and reproached himself.
"I 'm killing her," he thought sombrely, "and she is sick of it! Sick
of nursing me, and of her life here! How can one blame her! I only
wonder it did n't come sooner. How could I ever have hoped to keep a
woman like her ... to make a slave of ... in a doctor's commonplace
home!"
He closed his eyes again and the swift despondency of the invalid welled
up in him. When she came back to his sofa the old moody shadow was on
his face, the look of strain back about his brows. Timidly, and with her
face turned from the light, so that he might not see the trace of her
tears, she said:
"Is there anything you would like, Joe?"
"No, thank you, dear ... I have you!" He spoke gently, and put out his
hand to her without opening his eyes. A moment later his sombre thought
escaped from him almost involuntarily.
"I have you--though God knows for how long!" Then he waited for the
touch of her lips on his, the rush of tender reproach for his unfaith.
He did not indeed know how passionately hungry he was for those
words--until they did not come! Nor how his lips ached for the touch of
hers--until that long, still moment of waiting! Nothing happened;
nothing came. No kiss, no word of protest. He could scarcely believe it
at first. If he had not still been holding her hand, he might have
supposed that she had risen and gone away. For he had not opened his
eyes, but lay waiting as sometimes one waits with eyes closed for the
coming of a beautiful thing. The knowledge flashed upon him suddenly
that it was a long while since Val had kissed him. So long, that he
could scarcely remember when. Was it before his illness? No: looking
back down the vista of burning days of fever and discomfort, he could
remember that before unconsciousness came upon him her fresh mouth was
often laid like a rose upon his dry one and at the memory he longed
again for its fragrance as a thirsty man in the desert longs for a cup
of cold water. He was aware that when at last she did bend over him he
would bind his arms round her, and holding her fast to his heart devour
and consume her, and never let her go from him again. But in the same
moment he was seized with the torment all true lovers know, the
agonising knowledge that however much the lips may devour and the arms
bind, and the heart strain to hold there is a limit to the reach of
human love, a door to which the key will never be found, a barrier
beyond which the aloof and lonely soul of the beloved sits stern and
contemplative, for ever lonely in its secret place. This is the torment
of all earthly love. No true lovers but have sought in each other's
eyes the key of that implacable door, striven to drag the secret from
each other's lips, known the darkness and desolation of that outer
place! Lying there, waiting for his wife's kiss, Garrett Westenra
suffered this torment for the first time.
It was characteristic of him that when at last he understood that she
meant to make no response either by word or deed to the cry of his heart
so thinly veiled beneath the sadness of his words, he did not question
or upbraid her. He only lay very still, turning over and over in his
mind the cruel fact that she was weary of him and of their life
together. Between his half-closed lids he observed her, silent and
white, looking down at the hand which, tightly held by his, lay on her
knee. He realised then how fierce his grip had been, and relaxing it
gently drew away his hand. What good to grip the casket so close when
the jewel it had held for him was gone!
"What do you think we had better do, Val?" he said at last, speaking out
of his pain, and meaning "with the rest of life." He did not expect so
quick and definite a response as she made.
"I think that as soon as you feel well enough to travel you should go
out West, and stay until you are quite strong again."
"You and the children too?"
"Oh! no, no!" she cried hastily--too hastily with so keen a listener
intent on her. She saw her mistake and tried to cover it with calm
reasoning words. "What change would it be for you with us everlastingly
at your heels? Bran rampaging, Haidee worrying--and I--oh, of course,
it would not do at all. You must see that." Her arguments might have
sounded silly but for their urgency to convince, and her pleading eyes.
He stared straight before him, but missed no single shade of her face or
voice.
"We will stay at home and mind things," she continued, "and be quite all
right, until----"
"Until?"
"Until you come back...."
"And then?"
She knew she ought not to let him draw her on, that it would be better
to wait until he returned, but she was an honest creature by nature, and
though circumstances were plunging her deep in duplicity, she had not
yet learned to conceal and wait. Besides, she wanted to get the pain
over, the thing settled and done with, past recanting. If he were cold
and angry so much the better for her. It would be easier to bear than
if he tried to detain her with kind words.
"Then," she stammered, "Garrett, I think, we--the children and I--ought
to go away for awhile ... to England, or France perhaps--some place
where living is more reasonable than here, and I can get strong again,
and be of some use to you...."
No word from him. He did not even raise his eyes. So she stumbled on
hopelessly, embittered by his silence and misunderstanding, longing to
have him see how much she cared, how it broke her heart to make such a
suggestion, yet fearing that he would combat it.
"You know, Garrett, that I am no good in this place ... never have been.
Later perhaps when I am strong again I may be of some use ... when Bran
is older.... You must see for yourself ... I cannot manage the house at
present--(I have always mismanaged it)--with Bran wanting so much
attention. It would be best to get one of your good nurses to take
charge ... anybody could do it better than I...."
So she had it all planned out! She had arranged for "the rest of life"
without consulting him! All the time he lay sick she had been plotting
to escape. Small wonder he felt the return of her old elusiveness, had
become aware of distance between them.
Separation! That was to be the end of the voyage in the dream ship--of
his life with the dream woman. Had it all been a dream perhaps? ... a
dream full of dark places, with thorns for the flesh and pits for the
feet ... but always--that was good to remember in this dark hour--always
stars overhead. The stars had never before failed though they were
dying out now. So she was a quitter after all! A deserter! Unfaithful
to the post she had chosen. Somehow he could never have believed it
except from her lips. It was hard to believe, looking at that face
softly hollowed by weariness and worry, the faithful deep eyes, the
tender lips, the hands grown diaphanous in his service. Nothing had
been too hard or base in his household for those hands to strive with,
he knew that. And how she had nursed him! That he owed his life to her
was certain. And now, so soon, so soon, she nullified all, her
tenderness and devotion, the precious unhappiness, the sacred
sacrifices--the wonderful bonds that trouble shared can make, everything
was broken and rendered void by this act of desertion!
It must be remembered that he came of a race of women who had, so to
speak, habitually lived heroic lives. The men of his family, never able
to offer ease to their women folk, expected heroism and self-sacrifice
of them, and no Westenra woman had ever failed the expectation--_until
now_! Yes, that was a thought that hurt. That ate like acid in an open
wound. Val was not one of _them_! His wife, the woman on whom he had
staked his honour and belief, was not of the stuff of which Westenra
wives were made! Until that hour, spite of failure, trouble, and
disappointment, he could have sworn away his soul on her loyalty--what
did the mere failure of plans, or lack of money matter, when they had
each other, were content to tread the same road together, the same
ideals in their hearts, their eyes fixed on the same stars! And by God
he could have sworn ... but what was the use! She had proved his
judgment wrong, that was all. She was just the ordinary woman, sick of
her job, anxious to get away from it. "Lots of women like her in
America," he reflected sardonically. No one who knew the circumstance
could blame her. He least of all would blame her. Only--his soul was
sick within him! But, as always, he hid his wound from her. Not a sign
of what he felt when at last he spoke, quietly, reflectively, almost it
sounded to her, approvingly.
"No doubt it would be a very wise arrangement."
She had been twisting her hands in nervous agitation, her beautiful,
strange eyes full of the ardour that had always been like wine to him,
though he had never told her so. Now a rush of words came from her
lips, she was almost incoherent in her gratitude.
"Oh, Joe! ... if you think so ... if you won't mind ... it will not be
for long ... only six months or so--a year perhaps."
He stared at her in bitter astonishment. (Only a year perhaps! Why not
ten years--twenty years--the rest of life?)
"I will take such care of your Brannie for you.... I 'll never let him
forget you for a moment ... and I 'll come back so different ... ready
to tackle any problem ... you 'll see what a clever housewife I will
be."
(He did n't want a clever housewife. He had believed he did, but now he
knew that all he wanted was Val. He had arrived at desiring nothing
better than her fantastic housekeeping and gipsy camping-out methods.
She had spoilt him for comfort and set rule.)
"We must get some one to take charge of the place ... Miss Holland is a
splendid woman.... I know she will make a success of it ... and before I
go I will find you a good housekeeper who will look after you well."
(Before she went! Oh! damn it, why should she look at him like that, as
though it were for his happiness she was arranging instead of her own?
As though planning loyalty instead of desertion--treachery! How could
she smile--gladly, gratefully, when she was taking herself out of his
life, robbing him of the light of his son's golden head!)
"And if you will let me have Haidee? ..." she spoke more diffidently
now. "I fear she will be a care to you. I would do my best for
her----"
"No!" he interrupted sharply, "if you take Bran I must console myself
with Haidee. I should think you could spare me her, at least!"
She turned white as death. Haidee to take Bran's place with him! Their
son--her love-baby--to be exiled from his father's heart as well as from
his home! Of what use then all her plotting, her secret grief and
suffering endured, that father and son might be spared.
"Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe!" was all she could say.
He stared at her incredulously. He had no idea she was so fond of
Haidee. It seemed indeed as if she could be fond of any one but
himself! He was thankful that Haidee herself made an end to the
miserable discussion by bounding in at the moment and embracing him
boisterously.
"And can I bring Bran in?" she cried, as soon as she had finished
hugging him. "He 's just on the stairs. Nurse has brought him home
from his walk ... he looks such a duck in his new pink pelisse."
"Yes, bring him in," said Westenra, heavily, but a moment later, when
his son was sprawling on the bed thrusting fat fists into his father's
eyes, exploring his father's nose and ears, moodiness departed from that
father, and he began to laugh like a boy.
"Just feel that leg, Haidee ...
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