Читать книгу: «The Key to Yesterday», страница 13

“Does she need me?” he asked, almost breathlessly.

Hautecoeur nodded, and St. John turned toward the door. Steele went with him, and, as they climbed the steep stairs, the old man leaned heavily on his support.

The Kentuckian waited in St. John’s room most of that night. In the next apartment were the girl, her father and the physician. A little before dawn, the old man came out. His step was almost tottering, and he seemed to have aged a decade since he entered the door of the sick-room.

“My daughter is dead,” he said very simply, as his guest paused at the threshold. “I am leaving Paris. My people except for me have borne a good name. I wanted to ask you to save that name from exposure. I wanted to bury with my daughter everything that might shadow her memory. For myself, nothing matters.”

Steele took the hand the Englishman held tremblingly outstretched.

“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.

St. John shook his head.

“That will be quite all,” he answered.

Such things as had to be done, however, Steele did, and two days later, when Alfred St. John took the train for Calais and the Channel, it was with assurances that, while they could not at this time cheer him, at least fortified him against all fear of need.

It was a week later that Cornish sent for the Kentuckian, who was waiting in the court.

“I think you can see him now,” said the physician briefly, “and I think you will see a man who has no gaps in his memory.”

Steele went with some misgiving to the sick-room. He found Marston looking at him with eyes as clear and lucid as his own. As he came up, the other extended a hand with a trembling gesture of extreme weakness. Steele clasped it in silence.

For a time, neither spoke.

While Steele waited, the other’s face became drawn. He was evidently struggling with himself in desperate distress. There was something to be said which Marston found it bitterly difficult to say. At last, he spoke slowly, forcing his words and holding his features in masklike rigidity of control.

“I remember it all now, George.” He hesitated as his friend nodded; then, with a drawing of his brows and a tremendous effort, he added, huskily:

“And I must go to my wife.”

Steele hesitated before answering.

“You can’t do that, Bob,” he said, gently. “I was near her as long as could be. I think she is entirely happy now.”

The man in the bed looked up. His eyes read the eyes of the other. If there was in his pulse a leaping sense of release, he gave it no expression.

“Dead?” he whispered.

Steele nodded.

For a time, Marston gazed up at the ceiling with a fixed stare. Then, his face clouded with black self-reproach.

“If I could blot out that injury from memory! God knows I meant it as kindness.”

“There is time enough to forget,” said Steele.

It was some days later that Marston went with Steele to the Hôtel Voltaire. There was much to be explained and done. He learned for the first time the details of the expedition that Steele had made to South America, and then to Europe; of the matter of the pictures and St. John’s connection with them, and of the mystifying circumstances of the name registered at the Elysée Palace Hôtel. That incident they never fathomed.

St. John had buried his daughter in the Cimetière Montmartre. After the first mention of the matter on his recovery to consciousness, Marston had not again alluded to his former wife, until he was able to go to the spot, and place a small tribute on her grave. Standing there, somewhat awestruck, his face became deeply grave, and, looking up at his friend, he spoke with deep agitation:

“There is one part of my life that was a tremendous mistake. I sought to act with regard for a misconceived duty and kindness, and I only inflicted infinite pain. I want you to know, and I tell you here at a spot that is to me very solemn, that I never abandoned her. When I left for America, it was at her command. It was with the avowal that I should remain subject to her recall as long as we both lived. I should have kept my word. It’s not a thing that I can talk of again. You know all that has happened since, but for once I must tell you.”

Steele felt that nothing he could say would make the recital easier, and he merely inclined his head.

“I shall have her removed to England, if St. John wishes it,” Marston said. “God knows I’d like to have the account show some offsetting of the debit.”

As they left the gates for the omnibus, Marston added:

“If St. John will continue to act as my agent, he can manage it from the other side of the Channel. I shall not be often in Paris.”

Later, he turned suddenly to the Kentuckian, with a half-smile.

“We swindled St. John,” he exclaimed. “We bought back the pictures at Saxon prices.” His voice became unusually soft. “And Frederick Marston can never paint another so good as the portrait. We must set that right. Do you know – ” the man laughed sheepishly – “it’s rather disconcerting to find that one has spent seven years in self-worship?”

Steele smiled with relief at the change of subject.

“Is that the sensation of being deified?” he demanded. “Does one simply feel that Olympus is drawn down to sea level?”

Shortly after, Marston sent a brief note to Duska.

“I shall say little,” he wrote. “I can’t be sure you will give me a hearing, but also I can not go on until I have begged it. I can not bear that any report shall reach you until I have myself reported. My only comfort is that I concealed nothing that I had the knowledge to tell you. There is now no blank in my life, and yet it is all blank, and must remain blank unless I can come to you. I am free to speak, and, if you give it to me, no one else can deny me the right to speak. All that I said on that night when a certain garden was bathed in the moon is more true now than then, and now I speak with full knowledge. Can you forgive everything?”

And the girl reading the letter let it drop in her lap, and looked out through her window across the dazzling whiteness of the Promenade des Anglais to the purple Mediterranean. Once more, her eyes lighted from deep cobalt to violet.

“But there was nothing to forgive,” she softly told the sea.

CHAPTER XXI

When, a month later, Frederick Marston went to the hotel on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, it was a much improved and rejuvenated man as compared with the wasted creature who had opened the closed door of the “academy” in the Quartier Latin, and had dropped the key on the floor. Although still a trifle gaunt, he was much the same person who, almost a year before, had clung to the pickets at Churchill Downs, and halted in his view of a two-year-old finish. Just as the raw air of the north had given place to the wooing softness of the Riviera, and the wet blankets of haze over the gardens of the Tuileries to the golden sunlight of the flower-decked south, so he had come again out of winter into spring, and the final result of his life’s equation was the man that had been Saxon, untouched by the old Marston.

Duska’s stay at Nice had been begun in apathy. About her were all the influences of beauty and roses and soft breezes, but it was not until she had read this first letter from Marston that these things meant anything to her. Then, suddenly, she had awakened to a sense of its delight. She knew that he would not come at once, and she felt that this was best. She wanted him to come back to her when he could come as the man who had been in her life, and, since she knew he was coming, she could wait. Her eyes had become as brightly blue as the Mediterranean mirroring the sky, and her cheeks had again taken on their kinship to the roses of the Riviera. Once more, she was one with the nature of this favored spot, a country that some magical realist seems to have torn bodily from the enchanted Isles of Imagination, and transplanted in the world of Fact.

Now, she became eager to see everything, and it so happened that, when Marston, who had not notified her of the day of his arrival, reached her hotel, it was to find that she and her aunt had motored over to Monte Carlo, by the upper Corniche Road, that show-drive of the world which climbs along the heights with the sea below and the sky, it would seem, not far above.

The man turned out again to the Promenade des Anglais. The sun was shining on its whiteness, and it seemed that the city was a huge structure of solid marble, set between the sea and the color-spotted slopes of the villa-clad hills.

Marston was highly buoyant as he made his way to the garage where he could secure a car to give chase. He even paused with boyish and delighted interest to gaze into the glittering shop windows of the Promenade and the Avenue Felix Faure, where were temptingly displayed profound booklets guaranteeing the purchaser a sure system for conquering the chances of roulette “on a capital of £9, playing red or black, manque or passe, pair or impair, and compiled by one with four years of experience.”

He had soon negotiated for a car, and had gained the friendship of a chauffeur, who grinned happily and with contentment when he learned that monsieur’s object was speed. Ahead of him stretched nine miles of perfect macadam, with enough beauty to fill the eye and heart with joy for every mile, and at the end of the journey – unless he could happily overtake her sooner – was Duska.

The car sped up between the villas, up to the white ribbon of road where the ships, lying at anchor in the purpled water beneath, were white toys no longer than pencils, where towns were only patches of roof tiles, and mountainsides mere rumpled blankets of green and color; where the road-houses were delights of picturesque rusticity and flower-covered walls.

Thanks to a punctured tire, Marston found a large dust-coated car standing at the roadside when he had covered only half of the journey. It was drawn up near a road-house that sat back of a rough stone wall, and was abandoned save for the chauffeur, who labored over his task of repair. But Marston stopped and ran up the stone stairs to the small terrace, where, between rose bushes that crowded the time-stained façade of the modest caravansery, were set two or three small tables under a trellis; and, at one of the tables, he recognized Mrs. Horton.

Mrs. Horton rose with a little gasp of delight to welcome him, and recognized how his eyes were ranging in search for an even more important personage while he greeted her. Off beyond the road, with its low guarding wall of stone, the mountainside fell away precipitously to the sea, stretching out below in a limitless expanse of the bluest blue that our eyes can endure. The slopes were thickly wooded.

“We blew out a tire,” explained Mrs. Horton, “and Duska is exploring somewhere over the wall there. I was content to sit here and wait – but you are younger,” she added with a smile. “I won’t keep you here.”

From inside the tavern came the tinkle of guitars, from everywhere in the clear crystalline air hung the perfume of roses. Marston, with quick apologies, hastened across the road, vaulted the wall, and began his search. It was a brief one, for, turning into a clearing, he saw her below him on a ledge. She stood as straight and slim and gracefully erect as the lancelike young trees.

He made his way swiftly down the slope, and she had not turned nor heard his approach. He went straight to her, and took her in his arms.

The girl wheeled with a little cry of recognition and delight; then, after a moment, she held him off at arms’ length, and looked at him. Her eyes were deep, and needed no words. About them was all the world and all the beauty of it.

Finally, she laughed with the old, happy laugh.

“Once,” she said very slowly, “you quoted poetry to me – a verse about the young queen’s crowning. Do you remember?”

He nodded.

“But that doesn’t apply now,” he assured her. “You are going to crown me with an undeserved and unspeakable crown.”

“Quote it to me now,” she commanded, with reinstated autocracy.

For a moment, the man looked into her face as the sun struck down on its delicate color, under the softness of hat and filmy automobile veil; then, clasping her very close, he whispered the lines:

 
“Beautiful, bold and browned,
Bright-eyed out of the battle,
The young queen rode to be crowned.”
 

“Do you remember some other lines in the same verse?” she questioned, in a voice that made his throbbing pulses bound faster; but, before he could answer, she went on:

 
“‘Then the young queen answered swift,
“We hold it crown of our crowning, to take our crown for a gift.”’”
 

They turned together, and started up the slope.