WANDERFOOT
(THE DREAM SHIP)
BY
CYNTHIA STOCKLEY
AUTHOR OF "POPPY," "THE CLAW," ETC
TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913
BY
CYNTHIA STOCKLEY
"_Wanderfoot_" is published in England under the title of
"_The Dream Ship_"
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO
MY DAUGHTER
DOROTHY
"O Beauty, I have wandered far;
Peace, I have suffered seeking thee:
Life, I have sought to see thy star,
That other men might see.
And after wandering nights and days,
A gleam in a beloved soul
Shows how life's elemental blaze
Goes wandering through the whole."
CONTENTS
PART I
AMERICA
CHAPTER
I. Secret Palaces
II. Grey and Gold
III. Fate's Winding Paths
IV. A Skeleton and a Shrine
V. Squirrel in a Trap
VI. Kisses and Crosses
VII. More Winding Paths
VIII. Wounds in the Rain
PART II
JERSEY
IX. New Roads to Fortune
X. Worry-Bells
XI. A Ship on the Rocks
XII. Children of Ishmael
PART III
FRANCE
XIII. The Ways of a Lover
XIV. The Ways of Literature
XV. Ways Sacred and Secular
XVI. The Ways of Girls
XVII. The Ways of Boys
XVIII. The Way of The Sea
XIX. The Way of Nemesis
XX. The Ways of Life and Death
XXI. Lonely Ways
XXII. The Way of Love
Part I
America
CHAPTER I
SECRET PALACES
"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion."
The _Bavaric_ had been four fine September days at sea, and it was time
for the vague pain and melancholy that always haunted Westenra after
leaving Ireland to pass; yet it stayed with him as never before it had
stayed. The voice of the Atlantic sang a dirge in his ears, and looking
at the long grey rollers he thought of his mother's hair which he would
never see again, of the mists that enveloped _Inishaan_ as Ireland
passed from sight, of the ghosts of Raths, and all grey things; and life
looked grey before him and dull. It was as though the mists and shadows
of his land lay upon his spirit and would not be lifted. More than ever
he was lonely, more than ever an exile, for now there was none but the
dead left to him in the land of his birth; the last root had gone, the
last frond been cut away. His mother had died on the day he sailed from
New York to pay her his annual visit, and long before he reached
Queenstown she had been laid away to rest by his father's side in the
fair valley of Glendalough.
For awhile he had roamed about Ireland with something of the aimlessness
of a wounded creature, choosing wild solitary places where the sorrowful
beauty of lake and forest and mountain, so unique, so different in its
wistful allurement to any other scenery in the world, had seemed to
brood with him in his grief and lay with mysterious hands some healing
spikenard in his heart. But the shadow of loneliness had not been
lifted from him.
He had never spent more than a few weeks of his yearly holiday with his
mother, and the rest of the two months in different parts of Europe, but
always he had felt her in his life; sitting by her fireside in her
beautiful little Carlow home she had constituted his bit of Ireland, his
share of the world. Now he was a lonely man without home or kin. The
ache of emptiness was in his heart as he stared at the few pale early
stars that had ventured forth into the evening sky.
Nothing was left in his life now except a child and a woman; but the
child was not even his own, and the woman was only a vision. For years
she had come to him in his dreams, so many years that he could not
remember the first time, but usually she appeared when he was in Ireland
or coming away from it, never in America; and because he was fresh from
Ireland, and the supernatural element that is in the Celtic nature had
been recently renewed so that supernatural things still seemed to him
the real things of life, he thought of her now as if she were a real
woman, and wondered why it was so long since he had seen her flickering
through the night in her pale grey gown with fine lace at the throat and
a chain of luminous beads swinging before her neck. He tried to recall
the strangely Oriental face, but, as always it eluded him, and he could
only remember the wistful lurking sadness that divined in her something
of the Irishry, the knowledge of sorrow and longing for far places in
her eyes; the subtle suggestion of mourning for some lost land, like an
echo of Goethe's song:
"Kennst Du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?
Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen gluehn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht
Die Myrte, still und hoch der Lorbeer steht."
There were other things that troubled him too: dark shadows hovering
about her, flecks of mud and blood upon her bare feet, and the weary
look of one who has come a long way upon a bad road. But what was sweet
to his lonely heart was that she seemed so unquestionably to belong to
him, so wholly and inevitably his.
The Irish boy who never loved has never lived, and Westenra cherished
with characteristic ardour the remembrance of one or two youthful
romances, but apart from these and his great love for his mother there
had been no woman's influence in his life. He had been too busy to let
women in.
Though he was only thirty-three, America had heard of him as a surgeon,
and that is no slight triumph in a land of many clever surgeons. What
was dearer to him was the fact that in Medical Science the "other
fellows" knew of him--the big, silent men beating their way by inches
along the hampered road of Progress--they recognised him as one of
themselves, a worker not for money nor personal glory, but for humanity.
Skill with the knife, being at its best no more than a fine
collaboration of hand and eye, never yet sufficed a brilliant intellect,
and it had not sufficed Westenra. His keen mind, not content to follow
on the lines laid down by other men, craved for higher work in the
discovery and formulation of new principles of treatment in diseases
that defied the surgeon's knife; and it was in the laboratory that he
had won the triumphs he most valued. In spite of a heavy hospital and
private practice, he had found time to do some unique experimental work
in connection with the intestinal canals, while on the subject of
locomotor ataxia he was already considered something more than an
expert. But the diseases that lured him most were those in which
surgery failed to give the relief hoped for, and one such he had
specially starred out for laborious investigation. He knew when he
determined to devote himself to the subject of the metabolic disorders
underlying diabetes, that years, perhaps a lifetime, of experiment and
ardent unpaid labour lay before him, but he faced the prospect boldly,
for he doubted not that in the end he would have as great a gift to
bestow upon the world as even Lister, Metchnikoff, or Pasteur.
Not much time in such a life of planned hours, tasks, and duties to
think of women. And, indeed, except as cases, he had not definitely
thought of them. But, like all Celts, he had an inner world of his own
in which he walked sometimes, and did not walk alone. A mystical subtle
knowledge was his that somewhere in the universe a woman was waiting for
him--the woman with the pale Oriental face and the grey gown. And in
his heart he listened for the delicate approach of footsteps from out
the distance and the Future.
"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow?
One look or none did you bestow
When carelessly, as strangers go,
You passed my door?"
He understood the listener in those lines with the imagination of one
who in a city office or hospital can hear the sounds of birds and
insects, and feel the wind of the moors on his face and see the gloom of
trees. The dark waves of the Atlantic had often seemed to him symbolic
of the Irish nature; dark and sad to the outward view, but when the wind
ruffles the surface showing light and beauty beneath, secret inner
palaces of green crystal.
But to-night his loneliness oppressed him as never before. It seemed to
him he had waited too long in a land of dreams and shadows. He left the
sea and stars at last and went to his cabin.
At dinner for the first time since the boat sailed the seat next his own
was occupied, though he scarcely noticed the fact until he found himself
sitting beside a woman. A young woman he saw at once by her hands, all
that he could see of her very well, for however curious a man may be it
is difficult for him to take the bearings of a person with whom he is
seated cheek by jowl. Westenra was not at all curious, but even when he
was the dreamiest of Irishmen he was also a trained observer, and to
take notes on the people with whom he came in contact whilst apparently
absorbed in his own affairs was as natural to him as breathing. He
could almost make a diagnosis from a hand, and the next deductions he
drew from the slim ones of his neighbour were not all so pleasing as the
first. For one thing he saw that she was an intensely nervous woman,
even though she spent so much time out of doors, ungloved, that her
hands were burnt to a pale brown tint. They were more like a boy's
hands than a woman's, except that they were so nervously febrile and
covered with rings. The rings called for attention. They were odd and
barbaric, and of far greater beauty than value, for most of the stones
were semi-precious, and their charm lay in their quaint settings and
brilliant colouring. There were miniatures surrounded by amethysts,
marquise rings of blue and green enamel with devices in rose-diamonds,
olivines and sardonyx set with seed-pearls and an Angelica Kauffman
under a crystal. On the thumb of her right hand she wore a very fine
black scarab heavily set in platinum, and on the index finger of the
same hand a silver ring of rough workmanship made in the shape of a V
with a stone like an uncut ruby imbedded in the point of the letter.
Nothing so commonplace as a wedding ring was to be observed amongst this
eccentric collection. The forefingers of her left hand were faintly
tinted with the amber of nicotine.
"Smokes too much," thought Westenra, and might have supposed her
left-handed but for a worn, hard little mark on her right middle finger.
"Writes, and smokes while she 's writing," he deducted, and thought none
the better of her for that. When she ordered a brandy-and-soda to drink
with the sardine she was dissecting he liked her still less.
"She won't be in the game long at that rate," he estimated grimly.
"With _her_ nerves I 'll give her another two years at most." He hated
to see women drink. Experience had taught him that few of them can do
it long without going to pieces morally. And here was one who would