"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.
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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!