Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)

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