Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)

Cover

Cynthia Stockley

WANDERFOOT

(THE DREAM SHIP)

CYNTHIA STOCKLEY

AUTHOR OF "POPPY," "THE CLAW," ETC

TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
1913

"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

[Secret Palaces]
[Grey and Gold]
[Fate's Winding Paths]
[A Skeleton and a Shrine]
[Squirrel in a Trap]
[Kisses and Crosses]
[More Winding Paths]
[Wounds in the Rain]

PART II

JERSEY

[New Roads to Fortune]
[Worry-Bells]
[A Ship on the Rocks]
[Children of Ishmael]

PART III

FRANCE

[The Ways of a Lover]
[The Ways of Literature]
[Ways Sacred and Secular]
[The Ways of Girls]
[The Ways of Boys]
[The Way of The Sea]
[The Way of Nemesis]
[The Ways of Life and Death]
[Lonely Ways]
[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 blühn?

Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn,

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 suède, 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 blasée 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 métier 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 mésalliance, 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 à 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.