Wanderfoot Part 4

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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 phosph.o.r.escent water flas.h.i.+ng 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 circ.u.mstances in his life in accordance with this new plan. The circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.dfrey, a fellow-student at Columbia. G.o.dfrey 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 G.o.dfrey's care, while G.o.dfrey 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 G.o.dfrey 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 cla.s.ses. But it is the people of the working cla.s.ses in New York who pay their doctors' bills more conscientiously than any other.

G.o.dfrey's practice, on the other hand, lay among the leisured cla.s.s 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 G.o.dfrey and Westenra were making fortunes by this method. However, Westenra, with ambitions very different to G.o.dfrey'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 G.o.dfrey 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 pa.s.sengers 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 d.i.c.k 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. They were all aware of Westenra's constant companions.h.i.+p with the most attractive woman on the boat. For days the matter had been a topic for speculation among the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 sh.o.r.es of "G.o.d'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 superst.i.tion that a.s.signs 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."