Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
tears and without a widow's desolate mien. When it was presently
observed that she also dispensed with the habiliments of wo, and went
about in London as if nothing had happened, she was severely criticised,
and people began to dislike her. Moreover, a mangled history of the
unhappy marriage got out; it was soon known that there had been great
faults on one side or the other. Tales with a tang to them of
Valentine's friendships abroad with well-known men were told in the
clubs, and as the men concerned had mostly died or disappeared, there
was no one on the spot interested or well informed enough to dispute the
truth of them. What was worse, an entirely cruel and untrue version of
her relation to Dick Rowan during their travels and exploits together
was bruited about, though always so carefully that the victim of the
scandal only caught dim echoes of it, and was never able to seize and
nail the lie to the mast. In the end, needless to say, the woman paid.
"Gallant Horace Valdana" got more than the benefit of the doubt as far
as the unhappy marriage was concerned, and his widow was sent to social
Coventry.
Little she cared. The world meant nothing to her. She had wrestled too
bitterly with life to set any undue value on the approval of society,
even had she not possessed a congenital carelessness amounting to
indifference to the opinions of any except those she loved. As long as
those few knew the truth--as they could not help doing, knowing her--and
their love loyally remained unaffected, she gave little heed to calumny;
it was enough for her to realise that she was free at last of Valdana.
She tried not to rejoice too much at that, but rather to weed out from
her heart the last blade of bitterness and scorn of the dead man, so
that the rest of life might be lived unpoisoned by hateful memories.
At this period of vague mental unrest and retrospection, the offer to
her from a famous newspaper to visit America on its behalf came
pleasantly _a propos_. Sick of London and the arid memories it
contained for her, she was thankful to shake its dust from her feet for
a time at least and turn her face to a new and unknown horizon.
And now, during the process of getting into her soul once more the dew
of forgiveness and loving-kindness, Westenra had come marching into her
life, and her heart cried out as the heart of Iole cried out when they
asked her how she knew that Hercules was a god:
"Because I was content when my eyes fell upon him."
CHAPTER IV
A SKELETON AND A SHRINE
"The heart of a pure man is a deep vase."
And while Valentine stayed on her knees thanking God for the happiness
that had come to her, Garrett Westenra was pacing the darkened decks
with misgiving in his heart. The misgiving was not regret. When you
are of those who stand by your given word you do not waste time in
anything so idle as regret. Besides, what had come to pass between
Valentine Valdana and himself seemed a thing so predestined and
inevitable, so unsought by either of them, that it would have been as
vain to regret it afterwards as to have fought against it at the time.
Some one once said of the Irish that they appear to be impulsive, but
are really the most deliberate people in the world. They know long
beforehand what they are going to do, though they perform it at a given
moment with all the appearance of impulse. This was true in a way of
what had happened between Westenra and Valentine. He had known from the
first what was going to happen even when he said in his cabin, "this has
got to stop." He had really put up a hard struggle with Fate, for while
he was certain that Val was the woman originally intended for him, it
seemed that something had gone wrong with the plan. Somehow she had got
lost on her way to him, and life had changed her until she was no longer
the woman he wanted and had dreamed of, though she still resembled her.
He felt as if there was a hole in his nature, in his life, that only she
could fill, that must go unfilled for ever unless he let her in, yet he
wished to keep her out! So he had fought against the thing, but as a
man fights who knows he must be overwhelmed in the end by superior
force. It was that force, something outside himself and far bigger and
stronger, that had been at work when he turned so deliberately and
kissed Valentine's lips. The moment had possessed an extraordinary
enchantment. Never had he known such a magic, glowing sweetness as
surged through his being when she surrendered her lips to his. And a
little later she had strangely said:
"I think this was written from the beginning of things!"
It was indeed so written. None knew better than he who for years had
been haunted by her face. He told her so, or the something that was
outside himself and greater than he told her so.
"I have known you all my life, Valentine. For years I have seen your
face in my dreams. I recognised it the moment I saw you. I always knew
you were somewhere in the world, coming towards me, for me."
And yet he could not feel sure that he loved her! Every word they said
bound them closer. He was as much hers as she was his. Never again
could they be nothing to one another. And yet ... and yet ... was this
love? No answer among the stars nor in the phosphorescent water
flashing past. And if his heart knew the answer it would not speak, but
lay strangely still and sad in his breast. With a mental jerk he forced
his mind to another matter, and one that urgently called for
consideration. In those few magic moments of sweetness drawn from a
woman's lips, the whole current of his life for the next few years had
been changed. The plans he had built up were thrown down and broken.
The big thing starred out for his own special contribution to medical
science had been pushed far back into the future where he could only
reach it after years--instead of going right straight to it now, as he
had meant when he started on this voyage!
Vaguely he had known it must be so if he let Valentine into that empty
place which no woman had ever occupied. The knowledge that he must
sacrifice that ideal of his, must leave following the star to which he
had hitched his car for something else--something of which he did not
know the value, or if it had any value at all--was one of the reasons
that had urged and compelled him in his cabin to fight against that
force which was stronger than himself.
Well! It was over now. The die was cast. All that remained to do was
to rearrange certain circumstances in his life in accordance with this
new plan. The circumstances resolved themselves into the bitter
ungarnished fact that he was not rich enough to marry and still carry on
his fight for science. As a bachelor living with a simplicity that
amounted to austerity, his income, the savings of unceasing labour for
ten years, sufficed. It was not enormous, but it served to relieve him
from the wear and tear of general practice, and allowed him many hours
of leisure in his laboratory. The only hospital appointment he had
retained, on giving up his practice, was one where facilities were
afforded for studying the disease in which he was specially interested.
Thus the main part of his life was spent between the hospital and his
laboratory. He scarcely practised medicine at all in the ordinary way,
except as a consultant on the diseases in which he had specialised. But
now he must return to the old routine of visits and office hours.
Marriage demanded an income, so the laboratory must be pushed into the
background, and a scheme for money-making take the boards!
However, he had realised from the first that marriage entailed this
sacrifice, and with the sweetness of Val's lips, he accepted the
condition. It was too late now to look back to his waiting laboratory,
and unflinchingly he shut down on the thought. That phase of life was
finished with--for some years. He had no right to ask a woman to accept
life in a bachelor's quarters on a bachelor's income just because his
laboratory held for him a dream that might some day crystallise into
Fame. He told himself with gloomy stoicism that women want nearer and
dearer things than fame glimmering at the end of a long vista of years.
He must return to the arena of money-making, beat up his old practice,
get back into the harness he had thrown off little more than a year ago.
It would be difficult at first, but he was not afraid of difficulties.
He flung back his head a little at the thought. Then his mind fell
suddenly busy on a plan that had been suggested to him just before
leaving New York by a clever young physician named Godfrey, a
fellow-student at Columbia. Godfrey had a scheme for a nursing home, and
wanted Westenra to stand in with him on it. The idea was to take a
large house near Central Park, equip and furnish it as a private
hospital with plenty of bedrooms and a good operating-room. There
Westenra could perform all his operations and hand over his patients
afterwards to Godfrey's care, while Godfrey could in like manner hand
over his surgical cases to Westenra. Thus the two would work into each
other's hands in a perfectly legitimate manner, and double their
incomes. It is a favourite method of money-making with New York medical
men, but it had no appeal for Westenra, and he had smilingly told
Godfrey that he was not the man for the business.
"But you are," urged the physician. "You are 'It.' There is no other
fellow in New York to whom I would hand over my cases so fearlessly. And
then, there are very few who could return me such a _quid pro quo_ as
you can."
Which was perfectly true. Westenra's practice when he renounced it had
been very large. Few surgeons had one like it. Certainly it lay among
the working classes. But it is the people of the working classes in New
York who pay their doctors' bills more conscientiously than any other.
Godfrey's practice, on the other hand, lay among the leisured class and
was of a more precarious nature, bringing in large sums at one time and
at another very little. Combining the two practices would undoubtedly
regularise and increase the incomes of both men. Many medical men far
less successful and well-known than Godfrey and Westenra were making
fortunes by this method. However, Westenra, with ambitions very
different to Godfrey's taking shape in his mind, had not thought twice
about rejecting the offer. Now he wondered if it were still open, and
determined to go and see Godfrey instantly on his return.
It was after midnight when he finished his deck-pacing and pulled up at
the smoke-room with the idea of getting a light for a final smoke before
turning in. Being the last night of the voyage many of the men
passengers had stayed up later than usual making merry. However, all
had retired now except a party of four lingering over drinks at a table.
One still shuffled a pack of cards though the game was plainly at an
end; two others smoked idly; all were listening to the gossip of the
fourth, a certain Reeder--a narrow-nosed, cynical fellow who had
something to do with the publishing world, and whose specialty was
retailing scandal about the private lives of writers. He was pleasantly
occupied with his favourite topic when Westenra quietly entered.
"Clever woman, yes. I should say she had cracked or broken most of the
commandments except the eleventh in the course of her career.... I 'll
swear no woman could live with Dick Rowan without chipping the
seventh--even if she did call herself his stepdaughter. Certainly
Valdana was a rotten scamp ... but no doubt he had his little cross to
bear while she was gadding the earth with half a dozen other fellows....