The Key to Yesterday
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“Some day – when I can tell you my whole story – you will know what Marston means to me. What little I have done, I have done in stumbling after him. If I ever attain his perfection, I shall still be as you say only the copyist – yet, I sometimes think I would rather be the true copyist of Marston than the originator of any other school.”
She sat listening, the toe of one small foot tapping the floor below the short skirt of her gown, her brow delightfully puckered with seriousness. A shaft of sun struck the delicate color of her cheeks, and discovered coppery glints in her brown hair. She was very slim and wonderful, Saxon thought, and out beyond the vines the summer seemed to set the world for her, like a stage. The birds with tuneful delirium provided the orchestration.
“I know just how great he is,” she conceded warmly; “I know how wonderfully he paints. He is a poet with a brush for a pen. But there’s one thing he lacks – and that is a thing you have.”
The man raised his brows in challenged astonishment.
“It’s the one thing I miss in his pictures, because it’s the one thing I most admire – strength, virility.” She was talking more rapidly as her enthusiasm gathered headway. “A man’s pictures are, in a way, portraits of his nature. He can’t paint strong things unless he is strong himself.”
Saxon felt his heart leap. It was something to know that she believed his canvases reflected a quality of strength inherent to himself.
“You and your master,” she went on, “are unlike in everything except your style. Can you fancy yourself hiding away from the world because you couldn’t face the music of your own fame? That’s not modesty – it’s insanity. When I was in Paris, everybody was raving about some new pictures from his brush, but only his agent knew where he actually was, or where he had been for years.”
“For the man,” he acceded, “I have as small respect as you can have, but for the work I have something like worship! I began trying to paint, and I was groping – groping rather blindly after something – I didn’t know just what. Then, one day, I stood before his ‘Winter Sunset.’ You know the picture?” She nodded assent. “Well, when I saw it, I wanted to go out to the Metropolitan entrance, and shout Eureka up and down Fifth Avenue. It told me what I’d been reaching through the darkness of my novitiate to grasp. It seemed to me that art had been revealed to me. Somehow,” the man added, his voice falling suddenly from its enthused pitch to a dead, low one, “everything that comes to me seems to come by revelation!”
Into Duska’s eyes came quick light of sympathy. He had halted before her, and now she arose impulsively, and laid a light hand for a moment on his arm.
“I understand,” she agreed. “I think that for most artists to come as close as you have come would be triumph enough, but you – ” she looked at him a moment with a warmth of confidence – “you can do a great deal more.” So ended her first lesson in the independence of art, leaving the pupil’s heart beating more quickly than at its commencement.
In the days that followed, as May gave way to June and the dogwood blossoms dropped and withered to be supplanted by flowering locust trees, Saxon confessed to himself that he had lost the first battle of his campaign. He had resolved that this close companionship should be platonically hedged about; that he would never allow himself to cross the frontier that divided the realm of friendship from the hazardous territory of love. Then, as the cool, unperfumed beauty of the dogwood was forgotten for the sense-steeping fragrance of the locust, he knew that he was only trying to deceive himself. He had really crossed this forbidden frontier when he passed through the gate that separated the grandstand at Churchill Downs from the club-house inclosure. With the realization came the resolution of silence. He was a man whose life might at any moment renew itself in untoward developments. Until he could drag the truth from the sphinx that guarded his secret, his love must be as inarticulate as was his sphinx. He spent harrowing afternoons alone, and swore with many solemn oaths that he would never divulge his feelings, and, when he sought about for the most sacred and binding of vows, he swore by his love for Duska.
Because of these things, he sometimes shocked and startled her with sporadic demonstrations of the brusquerie into which he withdrew when he felt too potential an impulse urging him to the other extreme. And she, not understanding it, yet felt that there was some riddle behind it all. It pained and puzzled her, but she accepted it without resentment – belying her customary autocracy. While she had never gone into the confessional of her heart as he had done, these matters sometimes had the power of making her very miserable.
His happiest achievements resulted from sketching trips taken to points she knew in the hills. He had called her a dryad when she first appeared in the woods, and he had been right, for she knew all the twisting paths in the tangle of the knobs, unbroken and virgin save where the orchards of peach-growers had reclaimed bits of sloping soil. One morning at the end of June, they started out together on horseback, armed with painting paraphernalia, luncheon and rubber ponchos in the event of rain. For this occasion, she had saved a coign of vantage she knew, where his artist’s eye might swing out from a shelving cliff over miles of checkered valley and flat, and league upon league of cloud and sky. She led the way by zigzag hill roads where they caught stinging blows from back-lashing branches and up steep, slippery acclivities. It was one of the times when Saxon was drinking the pleasant nectar of to-day, refusing to think of to-morrow. She sang as she rode in advance, and he followed with the pleasure of a man to whom being unmounted brings a sense of incompleteness. He knew that he rode no better than she – and he knew that he could ride. In his ears was the exuberance of the birds saluting the morning, and in his nostrils the loamy aroma stirred by their horses’ hoofs from the steeping fragrance of last year’s leaves. At the end was a view that brought his breath in deep draughts of delight.
For two hours, he worked, and only once his eyes left the front. On that occasion, he glanced back to see her slim figure stretched with childlike and unconscious grace in the long grass, her eyes gazing unblinkingly and thoughtfully up to the fleece that drifted across the blue of the sky. Clover heads waved fragrantly about her, and one long-stemmed blossom brushed her cheek. She did not see him, and the man turned his gaze back to the canvas with a leap in his pulses. After that, he painted feverishly. Finally, he turned to find her at his elbow.
“What is the verdict?” he demanded.
She looked with almost tense eyes. Her voice was low and thrilled with wondering delight.
“There is something,” she said slowly, “that you never caught before; something wonderful, almost magical. I don’t know what it is.”
With a swift, uncontrollable gesture, he bent a little toward her. His face was the face of a man whose heart is in insurrection. His voice was impassioned.
“I know what it is,” he cried. Then, as she read his look, her cheeks crimsoned, and it would have been superfluous for him to have added, “Love.” He drew back almost with a start, and began to scrape the paint smears from his palette. He had quelled the insurrection. At least in words, he had not broken his vow.
For a moment, the girl stood silent. She felt herself trembling; then, taking refuge in childlike inconsequence, she peered over the edge of the cliff.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as though the last few moments had not been lived through, “there is the most wonderfulest flower!” Her voice was disappointment-laden. “And it’s just out of reach.”
Saxon had regained control of himself. He answered with a composure too calm to be genuine and an almost flippant note that rang false.
“Of course. The most wonderfulest things are always just out of reach. The edelweiss grows only among the glaciers, and the excelsior crop must be harvested on inaccessible pinnacles.”
He came and looked over the edge, stopping close to her shoulder. He wanted to demonstrate his regained command of himself. A delicate purple flower hung on the cliff below as though it had been placed there to lure men over the edge.
He looked down the sheer drop, appraised with his eye the frail support of a jutting root, then slipped quietly over, resting by his arms on the ledge of rock and groping for the root with his toe.
With a short, gasping exclamation, the girl bent forward and seized both his elbows. Her fingers clutched him with a strength belied by their tapering slenderness.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
She was kneeling on the ledge, and in her eyes, only a few inches from his own, he read, not only alarm, but back of that in the depths of the pupils something else. It might have been the reflection of what she had a few moments before read in his own. He could feel the soft play of her breath on his forehead, and his heart pounded so wildly that it seemed to him he must raise his voice to be heard above it. Yet, his words and smile were sane.
“I am going to gather flowers,” he assured her. “You see,” he added with an irrelevant whimsicality, “I want to see if the unattainable is really beyond me.”
“If you go,” she said with ominous quietness of voice, “I shall come, too.”
The man clambered back to the ledge. “I’m not going,” he announced.
For a time, neither spoke. Each, with a consciousness of being much shaken, was seeking about for the safe ground of commonplace. The man’s face had suddenly become almost drawn. He was conscious of having been too close to the edge in more ways than one, and with the consciousness came the old sense of necessity for silence. He was approaching one of the moods that puzzled the girl: the attitude of fighting her off; the turtle’s churlish defense of drawing into himself.
It was Duska who spoke first. She laughed as she said lightly:
“For a man who is a great artist, you are really very young and very silly.”
His voice was hard.
“I’m worse than that,” he acceded.
For a moment more, there was awkward silence; then, Duska asked simply:
“Aren’t you going to paint any more?”
He was gazing at the canvas moodily, almost savagely.
“No,” he answered shortly; “if I were to touch it now, I should ruin it.”
The girl said nothing. She half-turned away from him, and her lips set themselves tightly.
As he began packing the impedimenta, storm-pregnant clouds rolled swiftly forth over the valley, and emptied themselves in a deluge on the two wanderers. The girl, riding under dripping trees, her poncho and “nor’wester” shining like metal under the slanting lines of rain, went on ahead. In her man’s saddle, she sat almost rigidly erect, and the gauntleted hand that held the reins of the heavy cavalry bridle clutched them with unconscious tautness of grip. Saxon’s face was a picture of struggle, and neither spoke until they had come to the road at the base of the hill where two horses could go abreast. Then, he found himself quoting:
“Her hand was still on her sword hilt, the spur was still on her heel,She had not cast her harness of gray war-dinted steel;High on her red-splashed charger, beautiful, bold and browned,Bright-eyed out of the battle, the Young Queen rode to be crowned.”He did not realize that he had repeated the lines aloud, until she turned her face and spoke with something nearer to bitterness than he had ever heard in her voice:
“Rode to be crowned – did you say?” And she laughed unhappily.
CHAPTER VI
For more than a week after the ride to the cliff, Duska withdrew herself from the orbit in which Saxon revolved, and the man, feeling that she wished to dismiss him, in part at least, used the “air line” much less frequently than in the days that had been. Once, when Steele had left the cabin early to dine at the “big house,” Saxon protested that he must stay and write letters. He slipped away, however, in the summer starlight, and took one of the canoes from the boat-house on the river. He drove the light craft as noiselessly and gloomily as a funeral barge along the shadow of the bank, the victim of utter misery, and his blackness of mood was intensified when he saw a second canoe pass in mid-channel, and recognized Steele’s tenor in the drifting strains of a sentimental song. There was no moon, and the river was only a black mirror for the stars. The tree-grown banks were blacker fringes of shadow, but he could make out a slender figure wielding the stern paddle with an easy grace which he knew was Duska’s. His sentiment was in no wise jealousy, but it was in every wise heart-hunger.
When they did meet, she was cordial and friendly, but the old intimate régime had been disturbed, and for the man the sun was clouded. He was to send a consignment of pictures to his Eastern agent for exhibition and sale, and he wished to include several of the landscapes he had painted since his arrival at the cabin. Finding creative work impossible, he devoted himself to that touching up and varnishing which is largely mechanical, and made frequent trips to town for the selection of frames.
So much of his time had been spent at Horton House that unbroken absence would have been noticeable. His visits were, however, rarer, and on one occasion Mrs. Horton made an announcement which he found decidedly startling.
“I have been wanting to take a trip to Cuba early in the fall, and possibly go on to Venezuela where some old friends are in the diplomatic service,” she said, “but Mr. Horton pleads business, and I can’t persuade Duska to go with me.”
At once, Steele had taken up the project with enthusiasm, asking to be admitted to the party and beginning an outline of plans.
Saxon found himself shuddering at the idea of the girl’s going to the coast where perhaps he himself had a criminal record. He had procrastinated too long. He had secretly planned his own trip of self-investigation for a time when the equatorial heat had begun to abate its midsummer ferocity. Evidently, he must hasten his departure. But the girl’s answer in part reassured him.
“It doesn’t appeal, Aunty. Why not get the Longmores? They are always ready to go touring. They’ve exhausted the far East, and are weeping for new worlds.”
Saxon went back early that night, and once more tramped the woods. Steele lingered, and later, while the whippoorwills were calling and a small owl plaintively lamenting, he and Duska sat alone on the white-columned verandah.
“Duska,” he said suddenly, “is there no chance for me – no little outside chance?”
She looked up, and shook her head slowly.
“I wish I could say something else, George,” she answered earnestly, “because I love you as a very dearest brother and friend, but that is all it can ever be.”
“Is there no way I can remake or remold myself?” he urged. “I have held the Platonic attitude all summer, but to-night makes all the old uncontrollable thoughts rise up and clamor for expression. Is there no way?”
“George” – her voice was very soft – “it hurts me to hurt you – but I’d have to lie to you if I said there was a way. There can’t be – ever.”
“Is there any – any new reason?” he asked.
For a moment, she hesitated in silence, and the man bent forward.
“I shouldn’t have asked that, Duska – I don’t ask it,” he hastened to amend. “Whether there is a new reason or just all the old ones, is there any way I can help – any way, leaving myself out of it, of course?”
Again, she shook her head.
“I guess there’s no way anyone can help,” she said.
Back at the cabin, Steele found his guest moodily pacing the verandah. The glow of his pipe bowl was a point of red against the black. The Kentuckian dropped into a chair, and for a time neither spoke.
At last, Steele said slowly:
“Bob, I have just asked Duska if I had a chance.”
The other man wheeled in astonishment. Steele had indeed maintained his Platonic pose so well that the other had not suspected the fire under what he believed to be an extinct crater. His own feeling had been the one thing he had not confided. They had never spoken to each other of Duska in terms of love.
“You!” he said, dully. “I didn’t know – ”
Steele rose. With his hand on the door-knob, he paused.
“Bob,” he said, “the answer was the old one. It’s also been, ‘No.’ I’ve had my chance. Of course, I really knew it all the while, and yet I had to ask once more. I sha’n’t ask again. It hurts her – and I want to see her happy.” He turned and went in, closing the door behind him.
But Duska was far from happy, however much Steele and others might wish to see her so. She spent much time in solitary rides and walks. She knew now that she loved Saxon, and she knew that he had shown in every wordless way that he loved her, yet could she be mistaken? Would he ever speak, since he had not spoken at the cliff? Her own eyes had held a declaration, and she had read in his that he understood the message. His silence at that time must be taken to mean silence for all time.
Saxon had reached his conclusion. He knew that he had hurt her pride, had rejected his opportunity. But that might be a transient grief for her. For him, it would of course be permanent. Men may love at twenty, and recover and love again, even to the number of many times, but to live to the age which he guessed his years would total, and then love as he did, was irremediable. For just that reason, he must remain silent, and must go away. To enter her life by the gate she seemed willing to open for him would mean the taking into that sacred inclosure of every hideous possibility that clouded his own future. He must not enter the gate, and, in order to be sure that a second mad impulse would not drive him through it, he must put distance between himself and the gate.
On one point, he temporized. He was eager to do one piece of work that should be his masterpiece. The greatest achievement of his art life must be her portrait. He wanted to paint it, not in the conventional evening-gown in which she seemed a young queen among women, but in the environment that he liked to think was her own by divine right. It was the dryad that he sought to put on canvas.
He asked her with so much genuine pleading in his voice that she smilingly consented, and the sittings began in the old-fashioned garden at Horton House. She was posed under a spread of branches and in such a position that the sun struck down through the leaves, kissing into color her cheeks and eyes and hair. It was a pose that called for a daring palette, one which, if he succeeded in getting on his canvas what he felt, would give a result whereon he might well rest his reputation. But to him it meant more than just that, for it was giving expression to what he saw through his love of art and his art of love.
The hours given to the first sittings were silent hours, but that was not remarkable. Saxon always worked in silence, though there were times when he painted with gritted teeth because of thoughts he read in the face he was studying – thoughts which the model did not know her face revealed. At times, Mrs. Horton sat in the shade near by, and watched the hand that nursed the canvas with its brush, the steady, bare forearm that needed no mahlstick for support and the eyes that were narrowed to slits as he studied his tones and wide as he painted. Sometimes, Steele lingered near with a novel which he read aloud, but it happened that in the final sittings there was no one save painter and model.
It was now late in July, and the canvas had begun to take form with a miraculous quality and glow. Perhaps, the man himself did not realize that he could never again paint such a portrait, or any landscape that would be comparable with it. Some men write love-letters that are wonderful heart documents, but they write them in black and white, with words. Saxon was not only writing a love-letter, but was painting all that his resolve did not let him say. He was putting into the work pent-up love of such force that it was almost bursting his heart. Here on canvas as through some wonderful safety-valve, he was passionately converting it all into the vivid eloquence of color.
It had been his fancy, since the picture had become something more than a strong, preliminary sketch, that Duska should not see it until it neared completion, and she, wishing to have her impression one unspoiled by foretastes, had assented to the idea. Each day after the posing ended, and while he rested, and let her rest, the face of the canvas was covered with another which was blank. Finally came the time to ask her opinion. The afternoon light had begun to change with the hint of lengthening shadows. The out-door world was aglow with gracious weather and the air had the wonderful, almost pathetic softness that sometimes comes to Kentucky for a few days in July, bringing, as it seems, a fragment strayed out of Indian Summer and lost in the mid-heat of the year.
The man stood back and covered the portrait, then, when the girl had seated herself before the easel, he stepped forward, and laid his hand on the covering. He hesitated a moment, and his fingers on the blank canvas trembled. He was unveiling the effort of his life, and to him she was the world. If he had failed! Then, with a deft movement, he lifted the concealing canvas, and waited.
For a moment, the girl looked with bated breath, then something between a groan and a stifled cry escaped her. She turned her eyes to him, and rose unsteadily from her seat. Her hands went to her breast, and she wavered as though she would fall. Saxon was at her side in a moment, and, as he supported her, he felt her arm tremble.
“Are you ill?” he asked, in a frightened voice.
She shook her head, and smiled. She had read the love-letters, and she had read, too, what silence must cost him. Other persons might see only wonderful art in the portrait, but she saw all the rest, and, because she saw it, silence seemed futile.
“It is a miracle!” she whispered.
The man stood for a moment at her side, then his face became gray, and he half-wheeled and covered it with his hands.
The girl took a quick step to his side, and her young hands were on his shoulders.
“What is it, dear?” she asked.
With an exclamation that stood for the breaking of all the dykes he had been building and fortifying and strengthening through the past months, he closed his arms around her, and crushed her to him.
For a moment, he was oblivious of every lesser thing. The past, the future had no existence. Only the present was alive and vital and in love. There was no world but the garden, and that world was flooded with the sun and the light of love. The present could not conceivably give way to other times before or after. It was like the hills that looked down – unchangeable to the end of things!
Nothing else could count – could matter. The human heart and human brain could not harbor meaner thoughts. She loved him. She was in his arms, therefore his arms circled the universe. Her breath was on his face, and life was good.
Then came the shock of realization. His sphinx rose before him – not a sphinx that kept the secrets of forty dead centuries, but one that held in cryptic silence all the future. He could not offer a love tainted with such peril without explaining how tainted it was. Now, he must tell her everything.
“I love you,” he found himself repeating over and over; “I love you.”
He heard her voice, through singing stars:
“I love you. I have never said that to anyone else – never until now. And,” she added proudly, “I shall never say it again – except to you.”
In his heart rose a torrent of rebellion. To tell her now – to poison her present moment, wonderful with the happiness of surrender – would be cruel, brutal. He, too, had the right to his hour of happiness, to a life of happiness! In the strength of his exaltation, it seemed to him that he could force fate to surrender his secret. He would settle things without making her a sharer in the knowledge that peril shadowed their love. He would find a way!
Standing there with her close to his heart, and her own palpitating against his breast, he felt more than a match for mere facts and conditions. It seemed ridiculous that he had allowed things to bar his way so long. Now, he was thrice armed, and must triumph!