The Key to Yesterday
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In one of the packing rooms, the suspicions of Duska were corroborated. Two canvases were found about the same shape and size as the two that had been bought by the foreign art-lover. Palpably, Saxon, in his hurry of boxing, had wrongly labeled them.
In the flood of her despair, the girl found room for a new pang. It was not only because these pictures were the fulfillment of Saxon’s most mature genius that their loss became a little tragedy; not even merely because in them she felt that she had in a measure triumphed over Marston’s hold on the man she loved, but because by every association that was important to her and to him they were canonized.
That evening, Steele made his announcement. He was going to Havre and Paris. If anything could be learned at that end, he would find it out, and while there he would trace the pictures.
“You see,” he assured her, with a cheery confidence he by no means felt, “it’s really much simpler than it looks. He was hurt, and he did not recover at once. By the time he reaches France, the sea-voyage will have restored him, and he will cable. Those tramp steamers are slow, and he hasn’t yet had time. If he takes a little longer to get well, I’ll be there to look after him, and bring him home.”
The girl shook her head.
“You haven’t thought about the main thing,” she said quickly, leaning forward and resting her fingers lightly on his arm, “or perhaps you thought of it, George dear, and were too kind to speak of it. After this, he may wake up – he may wake up the other man. I must go to him myself. I must be with him.” Her voice became eager and vibrant: “I want to be the first living being he will greet.”
Steele found a thousand objections rising up for utterance, but, as he looked at the steady blue of her eyes, he left them all unsaid. She had gone to South America, of course she would go to France.
It would be imaginative flattery to call the lodgings of Alfred St. John and his daughter commodious, even with the added comforts that the late years had brought to the alleviation of their barrenness. The windows still looked out over the dismal roofs of the Quartier Latin and the frowning gray chimney pots where the sparrows quarreled.
St. John might have moved to more commodious quarters, for the days were no longer as pinched as had been those of the past, yet he remained in the house where he had lived before his own ambition died.
His stock-in-trade was his agency in handling the paintings of Frederick Marston, the half-mad painter who, since he had left Paris shortly after his marriage, had not returned to his ancient haunts, or had any parcel in the life of the art world that idolized him, except as he was represented by this ambassador.
St. John sold the pictures that the painter, traveling about, presumably concealing himself under assumed names, sent back to the waiting market and the eager critics.
And St. John knew that, inasmuch as he had been poor, in the half-starved, hungry way of being poor, now his commissions clothed him and paid for his claret, and, above all, made it possible for him to indulge the one soul he loved with the simple comforts that softened her suffering.
The daughter of St. John required some small luxuries which it delighted the Englishman to give her. He had been proud when she married Frederick Marston, he had been distressed when the marriage proved a thing of bitterness, and during the past years he had watched her grow thin, and had feared at first, and known later, that she had fallen prey to the tubercular troubles which had caused her mother’s death.
St. John had been a petty sort, and had not withstood the whisperings of dishonest motives. Paradoxically his admiration for Frederick Marston was, seemingly at least, wholly sincere.
In this hero-worship for the painter, who had failed as a husband to make his daughter happy, there was no disloyalty for the daughter. He knew that Marston had given all but the love he had not been able to give and that he had simulated this until her own insight pierced the deception, refusing compassion where she demanded love.
The men who rendered unto Marston their enthusiastic admiration were men of a cult, and tinged with a sort of cult fanaticism. St. John, as father-in-law, agent and correspondent, was enabled to pose along the Boulevard St. Michel as something of a high priest, and in this small vanity he gloried. So, when the questioners of the cafés bombarded him with inquiries as to when Marston would tire of his pose of hermit and return to Paris, the British father-in-law would throw out his shallow chest, and allow an enigmatical smile to play in his pale eyes, and a faint uplift to come to the corners of his thin lips, but he never told.
“I have a letter here,” he would say, tapping the pocket of his coat. “The master is well, and says that he feels his art to be broadening.”
Between the man and his daughter, the subject of the painter was never mentioned. After her return from England, where she had spent the first year after Marston dropped out of her life, she had exacted from her father a promise that his name should not be spoken between them, and the one law St. John never transgressed was that of devotion to her.
Her life was spent in the lodgings, to which St. John clung because they were in the building where Marston had painted. She never suggested a removal to more commodious quarters. Possibly, into her pallid life had crept a sentimental fondness for the place for the same reason. Her weakness was growing into feebleness. Less, each day, she felt like going down the steep flights of stairs for a walk in the Boulevard of St. Michael, and climbing them again on her return. More heavily each day, she leaned on his supporting arm. All these things St. John noted, and day by day the traces of sandy red in his mustache and beard faded more and more into gray, and the furrow between his pale blue eyes deepened more perceptibly.
St. John had gone one afternoon to a neighboring atelier, and the girl, wandering into his room, saw a portrait standing on the easel which St. John had formerly used for his own canvases. Most of the pictures that came here were Marston’s. This one, like the rest, was unsigned. She sank into the deeply cushioned chair that St. John kept for her in his own apartment, and gazed fixedly at the portrait.
It was a picture of a woman, and the woman in the chair smiled at the woman on the canvas.
“You are very beautiful – my successor!” she murmured. For a time, she studied the warm, vivid tones of the painted features, then, with the same smile, devoid of bitterness, she went on talking to the other face.
“I know you are my successor,” she said, “because the enthusiasm painted into your face is not the enthusiasm of art alone – nor,” she added slowly, “is it pity!”
Then, she noticed that one corner of the canvas caught the light with the shimmer of wet paint. It was the corner where ordinarily an artist affixes his name. She rose and went to the heavy studio-easel, and looked again with her eyes close to the stretchers. The paint was evidently freshly applied to that corner of the canvas. To her peering gaze, it almost seemed that through the new coating of the background she could catch a faint underlying line of red, as though it had been a stroke in the letter of a name. Then, she noticed her father’s palette lying on a chair near the easel, and the brushes were damp. The lake and Van Dyke brown and neutral-tint that had been squeezed from their tubes were mixed into a rich tone on the palette, which matched the background of the portrait. Sinking back in the chair, fatigued even by such a slight exertion, she heard her father’s returning tread on the stairs.
From the door, he saw her eyes on the picture, but true to his promise he remained silent, though, as he caught her gaze on the palette, his own eyes took on something of anxiety and foreboding.
“Does he sign his pictures now?” she asked abruptly.
“No. Why?”
“It looked – almost,” she said wearily, “as though the signature had been painted out there at the corner.”
For an instant, St. John eyed his daughter with keen intentness.
“The canvas was scraped in shipping,” he said, at last. “I touched up the spot where the paint was rubbed.”
For a time, both were silent. The father saw that two hectic spots glowed on the girl’s bloodless cheeks, and that her eyes, fixed on the picture, wore a deeply wistful longing.
He, too, knew that this picture was a declaration of love, that in her silence she was torturing herself with the thought that these other eyes had stirred the heart that had remained closed to her. He did not want to admit to her that this was not a genuine Marston; yet, he faltered a moment, and resolved that he could not, even for so necessary a deception, let her suffer.
“That portrait, my child,” he confessed slowly, “was not painted by – by him. It’s by another artist, a lesser man, named Saxon.”
Into the deep-set eyes surged a look of incredulous, but vast, relief. The frail shoulders drew back from their shallow-chested sag, and the thin lips smiled.
“Doesn’t he sign his pictures, either?” she demanded, finally.
For an instant, St. John hesitated awkwardly for an explanation.
“Yes,” he said at last, a little lamely. “This canvas was cut down for framing, and the signature was thrown so close to the edge that the frame conceals the name.” He paused, then added, quietly: “I have kept my promise of silence, but now – do you want to hear of him?”
She looked up – then shook her head, resolutely.
“No,” she said.
CHAPTER XVI
Late one evening in the café beneath the Elysée Palace Hôtel, a tall man of something like thirty-five, though aged to the seeming of a bit more, sat over his brandy and soda and the perusal of a packet of letters. He wore traveling dress, and, though the weather had hardly the bitterness to warrant it, a fur-trimmed great-coat fell across the empty chair at his side. It was not yet late enough for the gayety that begins with midnight, and the place was consequently uncrowded. The stranger had left a taxicab at the door a few minutes before, and, without following his luggage into the office, he had gone directly to the café, to glance over his mail before being assigned to a room.
The man was tall and almost lean. Had Steele entered the café at that moment, he would have rushed over to the seated figure, and grasped a hand with a feeling that his quest had ended, then, on second sight, he would have drawn back, incredulous and mystified. This guest lacked no feature that Robert Saxon possessed. His eyes held the same trace of the dreamer, though a close scrutiny showed also a hard glitter – his dreams were different. The hand that held the letter was marked front and back, though a narrow inspection would have shown the scar to be a bit more aggravated, more marked with streaked wrinkles about the palm. He and the American painter were as identical as models struck from one die in the lines and angles that make face and figure. Yet, in this man, there was something foreign and alien to Saxon, a difference of soul-texture. Saxon was a being of flesh, this man a statue of chilled steel.
The envelope he had just cast upon the table fell face upward, and the waiting garçon could hardly help observing that it was addressed to Señor George Carter, care of a steamship agency in the Rue Scribe.
As Carter read the letter it had contained, his brows gathered first in great interest, then in surprise, then in greater interest and greater surprise.
“There has been a most strange occurrence here,” said the writer, who dated his communication from Puerto Frio, and wrote in Spanish. “Just before the revolution broke, a man arrived who was called Robert A. Saxon. He was obviously mistaken for you by the government and was taken into custody, but released on the interference of his minister. The likeness was so remarkable that I was myself deceived and consequently astounded you should make so bold as to return. He, however, established a clean bill of health and that very fact has suggested to me an idea which I think will likewise commend itself to you, amigo mio. That I am speaking only from my sincere interest in you, you need not question when you consider that I have kept you advised through these years of matters here and have divulged to no soul your whereabouts. This man left at once, but the talk spread rapidly in confidential circles than an Americano had come who was the double of yourself. Some men even contended that it was really you, and that it was you also who betrayed the plans of Vegas to the government, but that scandal is not credited. Most of those who are well informed know that the traitor was one whom we trusted, a man who in your day was on the side of the established government. That man is now in high influence by reason of playing the Judas, and it may be that he will make an effort to secure your extradition. Embezzlement, you know, is not a political offense, and he still holds a score against you. You know to whom I refer. That is why I warn you. You have a double and your double has a clean record. For a time if there is no danger of crossing tracks with him, I should advise that you be Señor Saxon instead of Señor Carter. This should be safe enough since Señor Saxon sailed on the day after his arrival for North America. I have the felicity to inscribe myself,” etc., etc. – A dash served as a signature, but Carter knew the writing, and was satisfied. For a time, he sat in deep reverie, then, rising, took up his coat, and went to the door. His stride was precisely the stride of Robert Saxon.
At the desk above, he discussed apartments. Having found one that suited his taste, he signed the guest-card with the name of Robert Saxon, and inquired as to the hour of departure of trains for Calais on the following morning. He volunteered the information that he was leaving then for London. True to his word, on the next day he left the hotel in a taximeter cab which turned down the Champs Elysées.
When it was definitely settled that Duska and her aunt were to go to Europe, Steele conceived a modification of the plans, to which only after much argument and persuasion and even a touch of deception he won the girl’s consent. The object of his amendment was secretly to give him a chance to arrive first on the scene, accomplish what he could of search, and be prepared with fore-knowledge to stand as a buffer between Duska and the first shock of any ill tidings. Despite his persistent optimism of argument, the man was far from confident. The plan was that the two ladies should embark for Genoa, and go from there to Paris by rail, while he should economize days by hurrying over the northern ocean track. Duska chafed at the delay involved, but Steele found ingenious arguments. The tramp steamer, he declared, with its roundabout course, would be slow, and it would be better for him to be armed against their coming with such facts as he could gather, in order that he might be a more effective guide.
Possibly, he argued, the tramp ship had gone by way of the Madeiras, and might soon be in the harbor of Funchal. If she took the southerly track, she could go at once by a steamer that would give her a day there, and, armed with letters he would send to the consulate, this contingency could be probed, leaving him free to work at the other end. If he learned anything first, she would learn of it at once by wireless.
So, at last, he stood on a North River pier, and saw the girl waving her good-by across the rail, until the gap of churning water had widened and blurred the faces on the deck. Then, he turned and hastened to make his own final arrangements for sailing by the Mauretania on the following day.
In Havre, he found himself utterly baffled. He haunted the water-front, and browbeat the agents, all to no successful end.
In Paris, matters seemed to bode no better results. He first exhausted the more probable points. Saxon’s agent, the commissaire de police, the consulate, the hospitals – he even made a melancholy visit to the grewsome building where the morgue squats behind Nôtre Dame. Then he began the almost endless round of hotels. His “taxi” sped about through the swift, seemingly fluid currents of traffic, as a man in a hurry can go only in Paris, the frictionless. The town was familiar to him in most of its aspects, and he was able to work with the readiness and certainty of one operating in accustomed haunts, commanding the tongue and the methods. At last, he learned of the registry at the Elysée Palace Hôtel. He questioned the clerk, and that functionary readily enough gave him the description of the gentleman who had so inscribed himself. It was a description of the man he sought. Steele fell into one grave error. He did not ask to see the signature itself. “Where had Monsieur Saxon gone? To London. Certainment, he had taken all his luggage with him. No, he had not spoken of returning to Paris. Yes, monsieur seemed in excellent health.”
So, Steele turned his search to London, and in London found himself even more hopelessly mixed in baffling perplexity. He had learned only one thing, and that one thing filled him with vague alarm. Saxon had apparently been here. He had been to all seeming sane and well, and had given his own name. His conduct was inexplicable. It was inconceivable that he should have failed to communicate with Duska. Steele cabled to America, thinking Saxon might have done so since their departure. Nothing had been heard at home.
Late in the afternoon on the day of his arrival in London, Steele went for a walk, hoping that before he returned some clew would occur to him, upon which he could concentrate his efforts. His steps wandered aimlessly along Pall Mall, and, after the usage of former habit, carried him to a club, where past experience told him he would meet old friends. But, at the club door, he halted, realizing that he did not want to meet men. He could think better alone. So, with his foot on the stone stairs, he wheeled abruptly, and went on to Trafalgar Square, where once more he halted, under the lions of the Nelson Column, and racked his brain for any thought or hint that might be followed to a definite end.
He stood with the perplexed air of a man without definite objective. The square was well-nigh empty except for a few loiterers about the basins, and the view was clear to the elevation on the side where, at the cab-stand, waited a row of motor “taxis” and hansoms. The afternoon was bleak, and the solemn monotone of London was graver and more forbidding than usual.
Suddenly, his heart pounded with a violence that made his chest feel like a drum. With a sudden start, he called loudly, “Saxon! Hold on, Saxon!” then went at a run toward the cab-stand.
He had caught a fleeting and astounding vision. A man, with the poise and face that he sought, had just stepped into one of the waiting vehicles, and given an order to the driver. Even in his haste, Steele was too late to do anything more than take a second cab, and shout to the man on the box to follow the vehicle that had just left the curb. As his “taxi” turned into the Strand, and slurred through the mud past the Cecil and the Savoy, he kept his eyes strained on the cab ahead, threading its way through the congested traffic, disappearing, dodging, reappearing, and taxing his gaze to the utmost. For a moment after they had both crowded into Fleet Street, he lost it, and, as he leaned forward, searching the jumble of traffic, his own vehicle came to a halt just opposite the Law Courts. He looked hastily out, to see the familiar shoulders of the man he followed disappearing beyond a street-door, under the swinging “Sign of the Cock.”
Tossing a half-crown to the cabman, he followed up the stairs, and entered the room, where the tables were almost deserted. A group of men was sitting in one of the stalls, deep in converse, and, though two were hidden by the dividing partitions, Steele saw the one figure he sought at the head of the table. The figure bent forward in conversation, and, while his voice was low and his words inaudible, the Kentuckian saw that the eyes were glittering with a hard, almost malevolent keenness. As he came hastily forward, he caught the voice: it was Saxon’s voice, yet infinitely harder. The two companions were strangers of foreign aspect, and they were listening attentively, though one face wore a sullen scowl.
Steele came over, and dropped his hand on the shoulder of the man he had pursued.
“Bob!” he exclaimed, then halted.
The three faces looked up simultaneously, and in all was displeasure for the abrupt interruption of a conversation evidently intended for no outside ears. Each expression was blank and devoid of recognition, and, as the tall man rose to his feet, his face was blanker than the others.
Then, with the greater leisure for scrutiny, Steele realized his mistake. For a time, he stood dumfounded at the marvelous resemblance. He knew without asking that this man was the double who had brought such a tangle into his friend’s life. He bowed coldly.
“I apologize,” he explained, shortly. “I mistook this gentleman for someone else.”
The three men inclined their heads stiffly, and the Kentuckian, dejected by his sudden reverse from apparent success to failure, turned on his heel, and left the place. It had not, of course, occurred to him to connect the appearance of his snarler of Saxon’s affairs with the name on the Paris hotel-list, and he was left more baffled than if he had known only the truth, in that he had been thrown upon a false trail.
The Kentuckian joined Mrs. Horton and her niece in Genoa on their arrival. As he met the hunger in the girl’s questioning eyes, his heart sickened at the meagerness of his news. He could only say that Paris had divulged nothing, and that a trip to London had been equally fruitless of result. He did not mention the fact that Saxon had registered at the hotel. That detail he wished to spare her.
She listened to his report, and at its end said only, “Thank you,” but he knew that something must be done. A woman who could let herself be storm-tossed by grief might ride safely out of such an affair when the tempest had beaten itself out, but she, who merely smiled more sadly, would not have even the relief that comes of surrender to tears.
At Milan, there was a wait of several hours. Steele insisted on the girl’s going with him for a drive. At a picture-exhibition, they stopped.
“Somehow,” said Steele, “I feel that where there are paintings there may be clews. Shall we go in?”
The girl listlessly assented, and they entered a gallery, which they found already well filled. Steele was the artist, and, once in the presence of great pictures, he must gnaw his way along a gallery wall as a rat gnaws its way through cheese, devouring as he went, seeing only that which was directly before him. The girl’s eyes ranged more restlessly.
Suddenly, Steele felt her clutch his arm.
“George!” she breathed in a tense whisper. “George!”
He followed her impulsively pointed finger, and further along, as the crowd of spectators opened, he saw, smiling from a frame on the wall, the eyes and lips of the girl herself. Under the well-arranged lights, the figure stood out as though it would leave its fixed place on the canvas and mingle with the human beings below, hardly more lifelike than itself.
“The portrait!” exclaimed Steele, breathlessly. “Come, Duska; that may develop something.”
As they anxiously approached, they saw above the portrait another familiar canvas; a landscape presenting a stretch of valley and checkered flat, with hills beyond, and a sky tuneful with the spirit of a Kentucky June.
Then, as they came near enough to read the labels, Steele drew back, startled, and his brows darkened with anger.
“My God!” he breathed.
The girl standing at his elbow read on a brass tablet under each frame, “Frederick Marston, pnxt.”
“What does it mean?” she indignantly demanded, looking at the man whose face had become rigid and unreadable.
“It means they have stolen his pictures!” he replied, shortly. “It means infamous thievery at least, and I’m afraid – ” In his anger and surprise, he had almost forgotten to whom he was speaking. Now, with realization, he bit off his utterance.