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.... 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 Preston were not communicated with in order that he might propitiate the London Daily, in whose interests she had come to America, something very unpleasant and public might happen in the way of a lawsuit for a broken contract. As such an affair would have been highly obnoxious to Westenra, he gave in, but his dogged and bitter opposition revealed to Val how deeply he felt on the subject of her past life, and stayed her from making a further request that was very urgent in her heart.

She had a woman friend, Harriott Kesteven, who was very dear and near to her, and she felt a great longing to let Harriott know of her changed life. She possessed a keen appreciation of the claims and rights of friendship, and it hurt her deeply to think how Harriott would suffer over her mysterious disappearance from the known paths of her old life. It was very feminine, too, that longing to share the secret of her happiness with another woman, though it was only with Harriott that she wished to do it. To let any one else into the wonder and beauty of it all would have meant to spoil what was only for Westenra and herself. However, she resisted the longing to communicate to Harriott even indirectly what had happened. After all, that Westenra wished for secrecy was reason enough to pit against a whole world of anxious and loving friends!

And so they were married in a passionate hurry, and went away to spend a few days together before starting the affair of house-hunting. Westenra, whose vacation was already over, could not afford the time for a honeymoon in the Adirondacks which he would have loved Val to see in all the glory of autumn. They went no farther afield than a little house on the edge of Bronx Park, whence, favoured by mild and lovely weather, they adventured forth daily into the beautiful natural woods that skirt this northern point of New York.

To Val at least those were flawless days. For once in her life she had got what she wanted, and the gift had not turned to dust and ashes in her hand. Happiness and gaiety radiated from her, and Westenra, caught in the rays, reflected them back, so that no one would have guessed that he was not so happy as she. Though, indeed, for a man who has the perilous gift of seeing through life's red and golden apples to the little spot of decay at the core, he was extraordinarily content. And at last now that she was his wife he took her into his confidence about his life and profession. Only to a certain extent, however, for he was a deeply reserved man, and constitutionally unable to lay his heart and inner thoughts bare (allowing that such a thing were desirable) to even the best beloved of eyes. That he hid this intense reserve behind frank manners and a witty tongue was a characteristic of his race. The Irish are the jesters of the world, but their laughter is a screen for their hopeless hearts and the deep melancholy of their souls.

Marriage is full of surprises, and not always happy ones. This barrier of reserve that she soon divined in her husband was one of the things that amazed Val. Her own heart was a book ready to open at the touch of love. True, some of its pages were scrawled and scribbled, blotted too in places and stained with tears; but there it was, ready to fly open to a trusted hand. It was not her fault that Westenra had refused to turn up those pages, but rather at his wish that they had been sealed and locked away. Well! that was the book of yesterday. She had begun another since they met, and there, at least, he might turn the pages when he listed and read without misgiving.

But she longed and wished that he would trust her wholly too. Would let her, if not into the secret chambers of his heart, then at least past its outer portals. Spite of his frank, gay ways with her she knew well by the subtle and winding paths in which the minds of women travel, that behind his deep grey-green eyes there was another Garrett Westenra whom she had not yet reached. The knowledge amazed her but did not daunt her. Neither did it spoil her honeymoon. Her faith in love was of the quality that moves mountains. In the meantime life was passing dear and sweet.

But it was characteristic of each of them that until the first days in New York Val did not even know that Westenra was a surgeon. It sounds absurd and improbable and everything that is unpractical; but Val was all of these things, and the fact is she had never given the matter five minutes' thought. She knew he could do something and do it well: that was written all over the man, and that was the only thing of importance.

Once or twice, struck by his logic and extraordinary faculty for stating cases briefly and clearly, she had vaguely wondered if he were a lawyer. It might perhaps be supposed that after her unhappy experience with Valdana she would have exercised a certain caution in the choice of a second husband. Not so--Valentine's was a nature that could never learn caution. What she had learned, however, was a better judgment of men, and she could not have been imposed upon twice by a man of Valdana's stamp. Years of intimate friendship with men who "did and dared" had taught her to know unerringly a "good" man when she met him, meaning by "good," a man who worked with his brain and heart at some business, or even game, in which his principles and honour were involved. In Westenra she recognised the type instantly. This was no man shirking the battle of life and seeking a woman to support him!

Therefore, if Westenra had announced his profession as that of a travelling tinker, she would have been quite undismayed. Indeed, life as the wife of a travelling tinker whom she happened to love would have suited her very pleasantly.

As for Westenra, it has been stated that one of his principles was never to give to fellow-travellers information about himself that did not concern them; and on the ship, right up to the last night, he had essayed to look upon Val as nothing more than a fellow-traveller; therefore, his profession was no concern of hers. Afterwards, when it was so swiftly settled that she was to become his wife, the information did concern her, he made her free of it. She accepted it as she accepted all things concerning him, with ardour and pride. It seemed to her that she could not have chosen any more desirable profession in the world for her man. She had known several doctors abroad, clever and delightful men, but none of them had happened to be married, so she had no idea as to what the special functions and duties of a doctor's wife might be. Whatever they were she was quite ready to tackle them with a stout heart for the sake of Garrett Westenra.

He had taken her to see his bachelor quarters in the deeps of the city where for years he had lived and worked. They were simple almost to bareness, but Val liked them well. They reminded her of her own quarters in London, and she foresaw that with one good maid she would be able to run her little home without the risk of Westenra's ever finding out what a bad housekeeper he had married. It came as a shock to hear that he was considering the matter of leaving these rooms to take a house somewhere else, near Central Park for choice, where he could have a fine operating-room and good accommodation for cases after operation. It must of necessity be a very large house, with an efficient staff of servants and nurses attached. The idea of collaboration with Godfrey had been rejected. He had decided to stand or fall on his own merits.

"Would you mind very much, dearest?" he asked, somewhat diffidently. "I know it is too bad to ask you to make your home in a sort of hospital, but it is for both our sakes. The only way surgeons can really make good on the money side is by having their own place for operations."

Something in her dismayed glance made him add slowly:

"But if you dislike the thought, we can have a home apart from it...."

"No, no," she said quickly. "Of course I don't dislike it. I want to be right in your life, Joe, whatever you undertake."

Nevertheless her heart sank into her boots. Not for lack of courage, but from a thorough knowledge of her own inefficiency for so responsible a position as she might presently find herself occupying.

It was their last day in the woods. The late afternoon sunlight flickered on them through the half-stripped trees, and leaves fluttered and rustled all about the open glade where they sat. Val, with her camping instinct, had lighted a little fire of twigs, just for the pleasure of the sweet pungent odour of green burning and the sight of smoke curling blue against the silver sky. This sudden news of Westenra's sounded in her ears like the knell of all camp-fires, and sunshine in woods and wild places. Panic seized her vagabond soul.

"Does the money side matter so much, Joe?" she faltered.

He smiled a little grimly. It had never mattered much to him, but she could not know that.

"It has to matter in New York. The man who does n't rustle for the dollars, and rustle successfully, gets left."

She looked at him wistfully. It seemed to her that she did not know this rustler for dollars very well. It must be part of his hidden self that he would not let her reach.

"I am not a rich man, Val. I told you that from the first, did n't I?" He spoke coldly. "I cannot afford to disdain the opportunity that my reputation affords for money-making,"--he had almost added "now," but bit back the word in time. He was far from intending her to realise what a change his marriage involved, what a sacrifice of plans and principles it meant for him to be emerging once more from the laboratory to take part in the scramble for dollars.