The Key to Yesterday
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For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this helpless creature – who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio, despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a figure of a man – had passed into permanent darkness. The light would again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world. So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain Harris’ modest lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques, and, inasmuch as the captain’s lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks, the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He had hoped to be in charge of a government’s work of health and sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of that room and the court in the center of the house had been the boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to persuade him to move about, but his apathy had been insuperable. Sometimes, he wandered about the court like a small child. He had no speech. Often, he fingered a rusty key as a baby fingers a rattle. On the day that Steele and Duska had gone to the academy of M. Hautecoeur, Dr. Cornish and Paul Harris had left the lodgings for a time, and Saxon sat as usual at a window, looking absently out on the court.
In its center stood a stone jardinière, now empty. About it was the flagged area, also empty. In front was the street-door – closed. Saxon looked out with the opaque stare of pupils that admit no images to the brain. They were as empty as the stone jar. Possibly, the sun, borrowing some of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the area.
At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but the concierge stood near.
“Cordon?” inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate to let them in or out.
Saxon looked up, and across the hitherto unbroken vacancy of his pupils flickered a disturbed, puzzled tremor of mental groping.
He opened his thin lips, closed them again, then smiled, and said with perfect distinctness:
“Cordon, s’il vous plait.”
The concierge knew only that monsieur was an invalid. In his next question was nothing more than simple Gallic courtesy.
“Est-ce que monsieur va mieux aujour d’hui?”
Once more, Saxon’s lips hesitated, then mechanically moved.
“Oui, merci,” he responded.
The man who found himself standing aimlessly on the sidewalk of the Rue St. Jacques, was a man clothed in an old and ill-fitting suit of Captain Harris’ clothes. He was long-haired, hollow-cheeked and bearded like a pirate. At last, he hesitatingly turned and wandered away at random. About him lay Paris and the world, but Paris and the world were to him things without names or meaning.
His unguided steps carried him to the banks of the Seine, and finally he stood on the island, gazing without comprehension at the square towers of Nôtre Dame, his brows strangely puckered as his eyes picked out the carvings of the “Last Judgment” and the Galerie des Rois.
He shook his head dully, and, turning once more, went on without purpose until at the end of much wandering he again halted. This time, he had before him the Panthéon’s entrance, and confronting him on its pedestal sat a human figure in bronze. It was Rodin’s unspeakably melancholy conception, “le Penseur,” and it might have stood for Saxon’s self as it half-crouched with limbs tense and brows drawn in, in the agony of brooding thought-travail.
Then, Saxon’s head came up, and into his eyes stole a confused groping, as though reason’s tentacles were struggling out blindly for something upon which to lay hold. With such a motion perhaps, the prehistoric man-creature may have thrown up his chin at the bursting into being of thought’s first coherent germ. But from “le Penseur” Saxon turned away with a futile shake of his head to resume his wanderings.
Finally, in a narrow cross street, he halted once more, and looked about him with a consciousness of vast weariness. He had traversed the length of many blocks in his aimlessness, crossing and recrossing his own course, and he was still feeble from long days of illness and inertia.
Suddenly, he raised his head, and his lips, which had been half-parted in the manner of lips not obeying a positive brain, closed in a firm line that seemed to make his chin and jaw take on a stronger contour. He drew his brows together as he stood studying the door before him, and his pupils were deeply vague and perplexed. But it was a different perplexity. The vacuity was gone.
Automatically, one thin hand went into the trousers-pocket, and came out clutching a rusty key. For another moment, he stood regarding the thing, turning it over in his fingers. Then, he laughed, and drew back his sagging shoulders. With the gesture, he threw away all imbecility, and followed the inexorable call of some impulse which he could not yet fully understand, but which was neither vague nor haphazard.
At that moment, Dr. Cornish, chancing to glance up from his course a block away, stopped dumfounded at the sight of his patient. When he had gathered his senses, and looked again, the patient had disappeared.
Saxon walked a few steps further, turned into an open street-door, passed the concierge without a word, and toilsomely, but with a purposeful tread, mounted the narrow, ill-lighted stairs. At the turning where strangers usually stumbled, he lifted his foot clear for the longer stride, yet he had not glanced down.
For just a moment, he paused for breath in the hall, upon which opened several doors identical in appearance. Without hesitation, he fitted the ancient key into an equally ancient lock, opened the door, and entered.
At the click of the thrown tumbler of the lock, some of the occupants of the place glanced up. They saw the door swing wide, and frame between its jambs a tall, thin man, who stood unsteadily supporting himself against the case. The black-bearded face was flushed with a burning fever, but the eyes that looked out from under the heavy brows were wide awake and intelligent.
“But Marston will one day return to us,” Monsieur Hautecoeur was declaring to Steele and the girl, who, with backs to the door, were studying a picture on the wall. “He will return, and then – ”
The instructor had caught the sound of the opening door, and he half-turned his head to cast a side glance in its direction. His words died suddenly on his lips. His pose became petrified; his features transfixed with astonishment. His rigid fixity of face and figure froze the watching students into answering tenseness. Even the blanket-wrapped model held a freshly lighted cigarette poised half-way to her lips. Then, the man in the door took an unsteady step forward, and from his trembling fingers the key fell to the floor, where in the dead stillness it seemed to strike with a crash. The girl and Steele wheeled. At that moment, the lips of the bearded face moved, and from them came the announcement:
“Me voici, je viens d’arriver.”
The voice broke the hypnotic suspense of the silence as a pin-point snaps a toy balloon.
Hautecoeur sprang excitedly forward.
“Marston! Marston has returned!” he shouted, in a great voice that echoed against the sky-light.
As the man stepped forward, he staggered slightly, and would have fallen had he not been already folded in the giant embrace of the lesser master.
Duska stood as white as the fresh sheets of drawing-paper at her feet. Her fingers spasmodically clenched and opened at her sides, and from her teeth, biting into the lower lip, her breathing came in gasps. The walls seemed to race in circles, and it was with half-realization that she heard Steele calling the man, wildly demanding recognition.
The newcomer was leaning heavily on Hautecoeur’s arm. He did not appear to notice Steele, but his gaze met and held the girl’s pallid face and the intensely anguished eyes that looked into his. For an instant, they stood facing each other, neither speaking; then, in a voice of polite concern, the tall man said:
“Mademoiselle is ill!” There was no note of recognition – only, the solicitous tone of any man who sees a woman who is obviously suffering.
Duska raised her chin. Her throat gave a convulsive jerk, but she only caught her lip more tightly between her teeth, so that a moment later, when she spoke, there were purplish indentations on its almost bloodless line.
She half-turned to Steele. Her voice was an utterly hopeless whisper, but as steady as Marston’s had been.
“For God’s sake,” she said, “take me home!”
At the door, they encountered the excited physician, who stumbled against them with a mumbled apology as he burst into the atelier.
CHAPTER XIX
Late that afternoon, in Mrs. Horton’s drawing-room at the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay, Steele stood at the window, his gaze almost sullen in the moodiness of his own ineffectual sympathy. The day had grown as cheerless as himself. Outside, across the Quai d’Orsay, a cold rain pelted desolately into the gray water of the Seine, and drew a wet veil across the opposite bank. Through the reeking mist, the remote gray branches in the Gardens of the Tuileries stood out starkly naked. Even the vague masses of the Louvre seemed as forbidding as the shadowy bulk of some buttressed prison. The “taxis” slurred by through wet streets, and those persons who were abroad went with streaming umbrellas and hurried steps. The raw chill of Continental hotels permeated the place. He knew that in the center of the room Duska sat, her elbows resting on the table top; her eyes, distressfully wide, fixed on the wet panes of the other window. He knew that, if he spoke to her, her lips would shape themselves into a pathetic smile, and her answer would be steady. He knew that she had given herself no luxury of outburst, but that she had remained there, in much the same attitude, all afternoon; sometimes, crushing her small handkerchief into a tight wad of lace and linen; sometimes, opening it out and smoothing it with infinite care into a tiny square upon the table. He knew that her feet, with their small shoes and high-arched, silk-stockinged insteps, twitched nervously from time to time; that the gallant shoulders drooped forward. These details were pictured in his mind, and he kept his eyes stolidly pointed toward the outer gloom so that he might not be forced to see it all again in actuality.
At last, he wheeled with a sudden gesture of desperation, and, going across to the table, dropped his hand over hers.
She looked up with the unchanged expression of wide-eyed suffering that has no outlet.
“Duska, dear,” he asked, “can I do anything?”
She shook her head, and, as she answered, it was in a dead voice. “There is nothing to do.”
“If I leave you, will you promise to cry? You must cry,” he commanded.
“I can’t cry,” she answered, in the same expressionless flatness of tone.
“Duska, can you forgive me?” He had moved around, and stood leaning forward with his hands resting upon the table.
“Forgive you for what?”
“For being the author of all this hideous calamity,” he burst out with self-accusation, “for bringing him there – for introducing you.”
She reached out suddenly, and seized his hand.
“Don’t!” she pleaded. “Do you suppose that I would give up a memory that I have? Why, all my world is memory now! Do you suppose I blame you – or him?”
“You might very well blame us both. We both knew of the possibilities, and let things go on.”
She rose, and let her eyes rest on him with directness. Her voice was not angry, but very earnest.
“That is not true,” she said. “It couldn’t be helped. It was written. He told me everything. He asked me to forget, and I held him – because we loved each other. He could no more help it than he could help being himself, fulfilling his genius when he thought he was following another man. There are just some things – ” she halted a moment, and shook her head – “some things,” she went on quietly, “that are bigger than we are.”
“But, now – ” He stopped.
“But, now – ” the quiet of her words hurt the man more than tears could have done – “now, his real life has claimed him – the life that only loaned him to me.”
The telephone jangled suddenly, and Steele, whose nerves were all on edge, started violently at the sound. Mechanically, he took up the instrument from its table-rack, and listened.
“Yes, this is Mr. Steele. What? Mr. St. John? Tell him I’ll see him down there – to wait for me.” Steele was about to replace the receiver, when Duska’s hand caught his wrist.
“No,” she said quickly, “have him come here.”
“Wait. Hold the wire.” The man turned to the girl.
“Duska, you are only putting yourself on the rack,” he pleaded. “Let me see him alone.” She shook her head with the old determination. “Have him come here,” she repeated.
“Send Mr. St. John up,” ordered the Kentuckian.
One might have seen from his eyes that, when Mr. St. John arrived, his reception would be ungracious. The man felt all the stored-up savagery born of his helpless remonstrance. It must have some vent. Every one and everything that had contributed to her misery were alike hateful to him. Had he been able to talk to Saxon just then, his unreasoning wrath would have poured itself forth as readily and bitterly as on St. John. The sight of the agent standing in the door a few moments later, inoffensive, even humble, failed to mollify him.
“I shall have the two pictures delivered within the next day,” ventured the Englishman.
Steele turned brutally on the visitor.
“Do you mean to risk remaining in Paris now?” he demanded.
At the tone, St. John stiffened. He was humble because these people had been kind. Now, meeting hostility, he threw off his lowly demeanor.
“Why, may I ask, should I leave Paris?” There was a touch of delicately shaded defiance in the questioning voice.
“Because, now, you must reckon with Mr. Saxon for pirating his work! Because he may choose to make you walk the plank.”
Steele whipped out his answer in rapid, angry sentences.
St. John met the eyes of the Kentuckian insolently.
“Pardon the suggestion that you misstate the case,” he said, softly. “I have never sold a picture as a Marston that was not a Marston – it would appear that unconsciously I was, after all, honest. As for Mr. Saxon, there is, it seems, no Mr. Saxon. That gentleman was entirely mythical. It was an alias, if you please.”
It was Steele who winced now, but his retort was contemptuously cool:
“Do you fancy Mr. Marston will accept that explanation?”
“Mr. Steele – ” the derelict drew back his thin shoulders, and faced the other with a glint in the pale pupils that was an echo of the days when he had been able to look men in the face. “Before I became a scoundrel, sir, I was a gentleman. My daughter is extremely ill. I must remain with her, and take the chance as to what Mr. Marston may choose to do. I shall hope that he will make some allowance for a father’s desperate – if unscrupulous – effort to care for his daughter. I hope so particularly inasmuch as that daughter is also his wife.”
Steele started forward, his eyes going involuntarily to the girl, but she sat unflinching, except that a sudden, spasm of pain crossed the hopelessness of her eyes. Somewhere among Duska Filson’s ancestors, there had been a stoic. Instantly, Steele realized that it was he himself who had brought about the needless cruelty of that reminder. St. John had disarmed him, and put him in the wrong.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said.
“I came here,” said St. John slowly, “not only to notify you about your canvases. There was something else. You were both very considerate when I was here before. It is strange that a man who will do dishonest things still clings to the wish that his occasional honest motives shall not be misconstrued. I don’t want you to think that I intentionally lied to you then. I told you Frederick Marston was dead. I believed it. Before I began this – this piracy, I investigated, and satisfied myself on the point. Time corroborated me. It is as though he had arisen from the grave. That is all.”
The man paused; then, looking at the girl, he continued:
“And Mr. Saxon – ” he hesitated a moment upon the name, but went resolutely on – “Mr. Saxon will recover. When he wakes next, the doctors believe, he will awake to everything. After his violent exertion and the shock of his partial realization, he became delirious. For several days perhaps, he must have absolute quiet, but he will take up a life in which there are no empty spaces.”
The girl rose, and, as she spoke, there was a momentary break in her voice that led Steele to hope for the relief of tears, but her tone steadied itself, and her eyes remained dry.
“Mr. St. John,” she said slowly, “may I go and see – your daughter?”
For a moment, the Englishman looked at her quietly, then tears flooded his eyes. He thought of the message of the portrait, and, with no information except that of his own observing eyes, he read a part at least of the situation.
“Miss Filson,” he said with as simple a dignity as though his name had never been tarnished, as though the gentleman had never decayed into the derelict, “my daughter would be happy to receive you, but she is in no condition to hear startling news. By her own wish, we have not in seven years spoken of Mr. Marston. She does not know that I believed him dead, she does not know that he has reappeared. To tell her would endanger her life.”
“I shall not go as a bearer of news,” the girl assured him; “I shall go only as a friend of her father’s, and – because I want to.”
St. John hesitatingly put out his hand. When the girl gave him hers, he bent over it with a catch in his voice, but a remnant of the grand manner, and kissed her fingers in the fashion of the old days.
Driving with Steele the next morning to St. John’s lodgings, the girl looked straight ahead steadfastly. The rain of the night had been forgotten, and the life of Paris glittered with sun and brilliant abandon. Pleasure-worship and vivacious delight seemed to lie like a spirit of the departed summer on the boulevards. Along the Champs Elysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, flowed a swift, continuous parade of motors, bearing in state gaily dressed women, until the nostrils were filled with a strangely blended odor of gasoline and flowers. The pavement cafés and sidewalks flashed color, and echoed laughter. Nowhere, from the spot where the guillotine had stood to the circle where Napoleon decreed his arch, did there seem a niche for sorrow.
“Will you wait here to see to what he awakens?” questioned Steele.
Duska shook her head.
“I have no right to wait. And yet – yet, I can’t go home!” She leaned toward him, impulsively. “I couldn’t bear going back to Kentucky now,” she added, plaintively; “I couldn’t bear it.”
“You will go to Nice for a while,” said Steele, firmly. He had fallen into the position, of arranging their affairs. Mrs. Horton, distressed in Duska’s distress, found herself helpless to act except upon his direction.
The girl nodded, apathetically.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
Then, she looked up again.
“But I want you to stay. I want you to do everything you can for both of them.” She paused, and her next words were spoken with an effort: “And I don’t want – I don’t want you to speak of me. I don’t want you to try to remind him.”
“He will question me,” demurred Steele.
Duska’s head was raised with a little gesture of pride.
“I am not afraid,” she said, “that he will ask you anything he should not – anything that he has not the right to ask.”
CHAPTER XX
When he turned back, a day later, from the turmoil of the station, from the strenuous labor of weighing trunks, locating the compartment in the train, subsidizing the guards, and, hardest of all, saying good-bye to Duska with a seeming or normal cheerfulness, Steele found himself irritably out of measure with the quick-step of Paris. Mrs. Horton and the girl were on their way to the Riviera. He was left behind to watch results; almost, it seemed to him, to sit by and observe the post-mortem on every hope in the lives of three people. Nice should still be quiet. The tidal wave of “trippers” would not for a little while sweep over its rose-covered slopes and white beaches and dazzling esplanades, and the place would afford the girl at least every soothing influence that nature could offer. That would not be much, but it would be something.
As for himself, he felt the isolation of Paris. On a desert, a man may become lonely; in deep forests and on high mountains, he may come to know and hate his own soul in solitude, but the last note of aloofness, of utter exile, is that which comes to him who looks vainly for one face in a sea of other faces, whose small cosmos lies in unwept and unnoticed ruin in the midst of a giant city that moves along its indifferent way to the time of dance-music. In the hotel, there was the chatter of tourists. His own tongue was prattled by men and women whose lives seemed to revolve around the shops of the Rue de la Paix, or whose literature was the information of the guide-books. He felt that everyone was invading his somberness of mood with trivialities, until, in revulsion against the whole stage-setting of things, he had himself and his luggage transported to the Hôtel Voltaire, where the life about him was the simpler life of the less pretentious quais of the Seine.
After his déjeuner, he sat for a time attempting to readjust his ideas. He had told Saxon that he would never again speak of love to Duska. Now, he realized how barren of hope it would ever be for him to renew his plea. She had bankrupted his heart. He had buried his own hopes, and no one except himself had known at what cost to himself. He had taken his place in the niche dedicated to closest friend, just outside the inner shrine reserved for the one who could penetrate that far. Now, he was in a greater distress. Now, he wanted only her happiness, and as he had never wanted it before. Now, he realized that the only source through which this could come was the source that seemed hopelessly clogged. There was no doubt of his sincerity. Even his own intimate questioning acquitted him of self-consideration. Could he at that moment have had one wish fulfilled by some magic agency of miracle, that wish would have been that he might lead Robert Saxon, as Robert Saxon had been, to Duska, with all his memory and love intact, and free from any incumbrance that might divide them. That would have been the gift of all gifts, and the only gift that would drive the look of heart-hunger and despair from her eyes.
Steele was restless, and, taking up his hat, he strolled out along the quay, and turned at last into the Boulevard St. Michel, stretching off in a broad vista of café-lined sidewalks. The life of the “Boule Mich” held no attraction for him. In his earlier days, he had known it from the river to the Boulevard Montparnasse. He knew its tributary streets, its lodgings, its schools and the life which the spirit of the modern is so rapidly revolutionizing from Bohemia’s shabby capital to a conventionalized district. None of these things held for him the piquant challenge of novelty.