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 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 _suede_, 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.