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.