href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@40059@[email protected]#the-way-of-nemesis">The Way of Nemesis

Part I

America

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 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?