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 blühn?
Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn,
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.