Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
"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