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There was silence for a space, except for the laughter that floated up from the verandah below them, where a few of the members sat smoking, and the softened clicking of ivory from the open windows of the billiard-room. The painter’s fingers, resting on the iron rail, closed over a tendril of clambering moon-flower vine, and nervously twisted the stem.

With an impulsive movement, he leaned forward. His voice was eager.

“Suppose,” he questioned, “suppose you knew such a man – can you imagine any circumstances under which you could make excuses for him?”

She stood a moment weighing the problem. “It’s a hard question,” she replied finally, then added impulsively: “Do you know, I’m afraid I’m a terrible heathen? I can excuse so much where there is courage – the cold sort of chilled-steel courage that he had. What do you think?”

The painter drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his moist forehead, but, before he could frame his answer, the girl heard a movement in the room, and turned lightly to join her chaperon.

Following her, Saxon found himself saying good-night to a group that included Ribero. As the attaché shook hands, he held Saxon’s somewhat longer than necessary, seeming to glance at a ring, but really studying a scar.

“You are a good story-teller, Mr. Ribero,” said Saxon, quietly.

“Ah,” countered the other quickly, “but that is easy, señor, where one has so good a listener. By the way, señor, did you ever chance to visit Puerto Frio?”

The painter shook his head.

“Not unless in some other life – some life as dead as that of the pharaohs.”

“Ah, well – ” the diplomat turned away, still smiling – “some of the pharaohs are remarkably well preserved.”

CHAPTER IV

Steele himself had not been a failure at his art. There was in him no want of that sensitive temperament and dream-fire which gives the artist, like the prophet, a better sight and deeper appreciation than is accorded the generality. The only note missing was the necessity for hard application, which might have made him the master where he was satisfied to be the dilettante. The extreme cleverness of his brush had at the outset been his handicap, lulling the hard sincerity of effort with too facile results. Wealth, too, had drugged his energies, but had not crippled his abilities. If he drifted, it was because drifting in smooth seas is harmless and pleasant, not because he was unseaworthy or fearful of stormier conditions. In Saxon, he had not only recognized a greater genius, but found a friend, and with the insouciance of a graceful philosophy he reasoned it out to his own contentment. Each craft after its own uses! Saxon was meant for a greater commerce. His genius was intended to be an argosy, bearing rich cargo between the ports of the gods and those of men. If, in the fulfillment of that destiny, the shallop of his own lesser talent and influence might act as convoy and guide, luring the greater craft into wider voyaging, he would be satisfied. Just now, that guidance ought to be away from the Marston influence where lay ultimate danger and limitation. He was glad that where people discussed Frederick Marston they also discussed his foremost disciple. Marston himself had loomed large in the star-chart of painting only a dozen years ago, and was now the greatest of luminaries. His follower had been known less than half that long. If he were to surpass the man he was now content to follow, he must break away from Marston-worship and let his maturer efforts be his own – his ultimate style his own. Prophets and artists have from the beginning of time arisen from second place to a preëminent first – pupils have surpassed their teachers. He had hoped that these months in a new type of country and landscape would slowly, almost insensibly, wean Saxon away from the influence that had made his greatness and now in turn threatened to limit its scope.

The cabin to which he brought his guest was itself a reflection of Steele’s whim. Fashioned by its original and unimaginative builders only as a shelter, with no thought of appearances, it remained, with its dark logs and white “chinking,” a thing of picturesque beauty. Its generous stone chimneys and wide hearths were reminders of the ancient days. Across its shingled roof, the sunlight was spotted with shadows thrown down from beeches and oaks that had been old when the Indian held the country and the buffalo gathered at the salt licks. Vines of honeysuckle and morning-glory had partly preëmpted the walls. Inside was the odd mingling of artistic junk that characterizes the den of the painter.

Saxon’s enthusiasm had been growing that morning since the automobile had left the city behind and pointed its course toward the line of knobs. The twenty-mile run had been a panorama sparkling with the life of color, tempered with tones of richness and soft with haunting splendor. Forest trees, ancient as Druids, were playing at being young in the almost shrill greens of their leafage. There were youth and opulence in the way they filtered the sun through their gnarled branches with a splattering and splashing of golden light. Blossoming dogwood spread clusters of white amid endless shades and conditions of green, and, when the view was not focused into the thickness of woodland interiors, it offered leagues of yellow fields and tender meadows stretching off to soberer woods in the distance. Back of all that were the hills, going up from the joyous sparkle of the middle distance to veiled purple where they met the bluest of skies. Saxon’s fingers had been tingling for a brush to hold and his lids had been unconsciously dropping, that his eyes might appraise the colors in simplified tones and values.

At last, they had ensconced themselves, and a little later Saxon emerged from the cabin disreputably clad in a flannel shirt and briar-torn, paint-spotted trousers. In his teeth, he clamped a battered briar pipe, and in his hand he carried an equally battered sketching-easel and paint-box.

Steele, smoking a cigar in a hammock, looked up from an art journal at the sound of a footstep on the boards.

“Did you see this?” he inquired, holding out the magazine. “It would appear that your eccentric demi-god is painting in Southern Spain. He continues to remain the recluse, avoiding the public gaze. His genius seems to be of the shrinking type. Here’s his latest sensation as it looks to the camera.”

Saxon took the magazine, and studied the half-tone reproduction.

“His miracle is his color,” announced the first disciple, briefly. “The black and white gives no idea. As to his personality, it seems to be that of the poseur– almost of the snob. His very penchant for frequent wanderings incognito and revealing himself only through his work is in itself a bid for publicity. He arrogates to himself the attributes of traveling royalty. For my master as the man, I have small patience. It’s the same affectation that causes him to sign nothing. The arrogant confidence that no one can counterfeit his stroke, that signature is superfluous.”

Steele laughed.

“Why not show him that some one can do it?” he suggested. “Why not send over an unsigned canvas as a Marston, and drag him out of his hiding place to assert himself and denounce the impostor?”

“Let him have his vanities,” Saxon said, almost contemptuously. “So long as the world has his art, what does it matter?” He turned and stepped from the low porch, whistling as he went.

The stranger strolled along with a free stride and confident bearing, tempted by each vista, yet always lured on by other vistas beyond.

At last, he halted near a cluster of huge boulders. Below him, the creek reflected in rippled counterpart the shimmer of overhanging greenery. Out of a tangle of undergrowth beyond reared two slender poplars. The middle distance was bright with young barley, and in the background stretched the hills in misty purple.

There, he set up his easel, and, while his eyes wandered, his fingers were selecting the color tubes with the deft accuracy of the pianist’s touch on the keys.

For a time, he saw only the thing he was to paint; then, there rose before his eyes the face of a girl, and beyond it the sinister visage of the South American. His brow darkened. Always, there had lurked in the background of his thoughts a specter, some Nemesis who might at any moment come forward, bearing black reminders – possible accusations. At last, it seemed the specter had come out of the shadow, and taken the center of the stage, and in the spotlight he wore the features of Señor Ribero. He had intended questioning Ribero, but had hesitated. The thing had been sudden, and it is humiliating to go to a man one has never met before to learn something of one’s self, when that man has assumed an attitude almost brutally hostile from the outset. The method must first be considered, and, when early that morning he had inquired about the diplomat, it had been to learn that a night train had taken the man to his legation in Washington. He must give the problem in its new guise reflection, and, meanwhile, he must live in the shadow of its possible tragedy.

There was no element of the coward’s procrastination in Saxon’s thoughts. Even his own speculation as to what the other man might have been, had never suggested the possibility that he was a craven.

He held up his hand, and studied the scar. The bared forearm, under the uprolled sleeve, was as brown and steady as a sculptor’s work in bronze.

Suddenly, he heard a laugh at his back, a tuneful laugh like a trill struck from a xylophone, and came to his feet with a realization of a blue gingham dress, a girlish figure, a sunbonnet and a huge cluster of dogwood blossoms. The sunbonnet and dogwood branches seemed conspiring to hide all the face except the violet eyes that looked out from them. Near by stood a fox terrier, silently and alertly regarding him, its head cocked jauntily to the side.

But, even before she had lowered the dogwood blossoms enough to reveal her face, the lancelike uprightness of her carriage brought recognition and astonishment.

“Do you mind my staring at you?” she demanded, innocently. “Isn’t turn-about fair play?”

“But, Miss Filson,” he stammered, “I – I thought you lived in town!”

“Then, George didn’t tell you that we were to be the closest sort of neighbors?” The merriment of her laugh was spontaneous. She did not confide to Saxon just why Steele’s silence struck her as highly humorous. She knew, however, that the place had originally recommended itself to its purchaser by reason of just that exact circumstance – its proximity.

The man took a hasty step forward, and spoke with the brusqueness of a cross-examiner:

“No. Why didn’t he tell me? He should have told me! He – ” He halted abruptly, conscious that his manner was one of resentment for being led, unwarned, into displeasing surroundings, which was not at all what he meant. Then, as the radiant smile on the girl’s face – the smile such as a very little girl might have worn in the delight of perpetrating an innocent surprise – suddenly faded into a pained wonderment, he realized the depth of his crudeness. Of course, she could not know that he had come there to run away, to seek asylum. She could not guess, that, in the isolation of such a life as his uncertainty entailed, associates like herself were the most hazardous; that, because she seemed to him altogether wonderful, he distrusted his power to quarantine his heart against her artless magnetism. As he stood abashed at his own crassness, he wanted to tell her that he developed these crude strains only when he was thrown into touch with so fine grained a nature as her own; that it was the very sense of his own pariah-like circumstance. Then, before she had time to speak, came a swift artistic leaping at his heart. He should have known that she would be here! It was her rightful environment! She belonged as inherently under blossoming dogwood branches as the stars belong beyond the taint of earth-smoke. She was a dryad, and these were her woods. After all, how could it matter? He had run away bravely. Now, she was here also, and the burden of responsibility might rest on the woodsprites or the gods or his horoscope or wherever it belonged. As for himself, he would enjoy the present. The future was with destiny. Of course, friendship is safe so long as love is barred, and of course it would be only friendship! Does the sun shine anywhere on trellised vines with a more golden light than where the slopes of Vesuvius bask just below the smoking sands? He, too, would enjoy the radiance, and risk the crater.

She stood, not angry, but a trifle bewildered, a trifle proud in her attitude of uptilted chin. In all her little autocratic world, her gracious friendliness had never before met anything so like rebuff.

Then, having resolved, the man felt an almost boyish reaction to light-hearted gayety. It was much the same gay abandonment that comes to a man who, having faced ruin until his heart and brain are sick, suddenly decides to squander in extravagant and riotous pleasure the few dollars left in his pocket.

“Of course, George should have told me,” he declared. “Why, Miss Filson, I come from the world where things are commonplace, and here it all seems a sequence of wonders: this glorious country, the miracle of meeting you again – after – ” he paused, then smilingly added – “after Babylon and Macedonia.”

“From the way you greeted me,” she naïvely observed, “one might have fancied that you’d been running away ever since we parted in Babylon and Macedon. You must be very tired.”

“I am afraid of you,” he avowed.

She laughed.

“I know you are a woman-hater. But I was a boy myself until I was seventeen. I’ve never quite got used to being a woman, so you needn’t mind.”

“Miss Filson,” he hazarded gravely, “when I saw you yesterday, I wanted to be friends with you so much that – that I ran away. Some day, I’ll tell you why.”

For a moment, she looked at him with a puzzled interest. The light of a smile dies slowly from most faces. It went out of his eyes as suddenly as an electric bulb switched off, leaving the features those of a much older man. She caught the look, and in her wisdom said nothing – but wondered what he meant.

Her eyes fell on the empty canvas. “How did you happen to begin art?” she inquired. “Did you always feel it calling you?”

He shook his head, then the smile came back.

“A freezing cow started me,” he announced.

“A what?” Her eyes were once more puzzled.

“You see,” he elucidated, “I was a cow-puncher in Montana, without money. One winter, the snow covered the prairies so long that the cattle were starving at their grazing places. Usually, the breeze from the Japanese current blows off the snow from time to time, and we can graze the steers all winter on the range. This time, the Japanese current seemed to have been switched off, and they were dying on the snow-bound pastures.”

“Yes,” she prompted. “But how did that – ?”

“You see,” he went on, “the boss wrote from Helena to know how things were going. I drew a picture of a freezing, starving cow, and wrote back, ‘This is how.’ The boss showed that picture around, and some folk thought it bore so much family resemblance to a starving cow that on the strength of it they gambled on me. They staked me to an education in illustrating and painting.”

“And you made good!” she concluded, enthusiastically.

“I hope to make good,” he smiled.

After a pause, she said:

“If you were not busy, I’d guide you to some places along the creek where there are wonderful things to see.”

The man reached for his discarded hat.

“Take me there,” he begged.

“Where?” she demanded. “I spoke of several places.”

“To any of them,” he promptly replied; “better yet, to all of them.”

She shook her head dubiously.

“I ought not to begin as an interruption,” she demurred.

“On the contrary,” he argued confidently, “the good general first acquaints himself with his field.”

An hour later, standing at a gap in a tangle of briar, where the paw-paw trees grew thick, he watched her crossing the meadow toward the roof of her house which topped the foliage not far away. Then, he held up his right hand, and scrutinized the scar, almost invisible under the tan. It seemed to him to grow larger as he looked.

CHAPTER V

Horton House, where Duska Filson made her home with her aunt and uncle, was a half-mile from the cabin in which the two painters were lodged. That was the distance reckoned via driveway and turnpike, but a path, linking the houses, reduced it to a quarter of a mile. This “air line,” as Steele dubbed it, led from the hill where the cabin perched, through a blackberry thicket and paw-paw grove, across a meadow, and then entered, by a picket gate and rose-cumbered fence, the old-fashioned garden of the “big house.”

Before the men had been long at their summer place, the path had become as well worn as neighborly paths should be. To the gracious household at Horton House, they were “the boys.” Steele had been on lifelong terms of intimacy, and the guest was at once taken into the family on the same basis as the host.

“Horton House” was a temple dedicated to hospitality. Mrs. Horton, its delightful mistress, occasionally smiled at the somewhat pretentious name, but it had been “Horton House” when the Nashville stage rumbled along the turnpike, and the picturesque little village of brick and stone at its back had been the “quarters” for the slaves. It would no more do to rechristen it than to banish the ripened old family portraits, or replace the silver-laden mahogany sideboard with less antique things. The house had been added to from time to time, until it sprawled a commodious and composite record of various eras, but the name and spirit stood the same.

Saxon began to feel that he had never lived before. His life, in so far as he could remember it, had been varied, but always touched with isolation. Now, in a family not his own, he was finding the things which had hitherto been only names to him and that richness of congenial companionship which differentiates life from existence. While he felt the wine-like warmth of it in his heart, he felt its seductiveness in his brain. The thought of its ephemeral quality brought him moments of depression that drove him stalking away alone into the hills to fight things out with himself. At times, his canvases took on a new glow; at times, he told himself he was painting daubs.

About a week after their arrival, Mrs. Horton and Miss Filson came over to inspect the quarters and to see whether bachelor efforts had made the place habitable.

Duska was as delighted as a child among new toys. Her eyes grew luminous with pleasure as she stood in the living-room of the “shack” and surveyed the confusion of canvases, charcoal sketches and studio paraphernalia that littered its walls and floor. Saxon had hung his canvases in galleries where the juries were accounted sternly critical; he had heard the commendation of brother artists generously admitting his precedence. Now, he found himself almost flutteringly anxious to hear from her lips the pronouncement, “Well done.”

Mrs. Horton, meanwhile, was sternly and beneficently inspecting the premises from living-room to pantry, with Steele as convoy, and Saxon was left alone with the girl.

As he brought canvas after canvas from various unturned piles and placed them in a favorable light, he found one at whose vivid glow and masterful execution, his critic caught her breath in a delighted little gasp.

It was a thing done in daring colors and almost blazing with the glare of an equatorial sun. An old cathedral, partly vine-covered, reared its yellowed walls and towers into a hot sky. The sun beat cruelly down on the cobbled street while a clump of ragged palms gave the contrasting key of shade.

Duska, half-closing her eyes, gazed at it with uptilted chin resting on slender fingers. For a time, she did not speak, but the man read her delight in her eyes. At last, she said, her voice low with appreciation:

“I love it!”

Turning away to take up a new picture, he felt as though he had received an accolade.

“It might have been the very spot,” she said thoughtfully, “that Señor Ribero described in his story.”

Saxon felt a cloud sweep over the sunshine shed by her praise. His back was turned, but his face grew suddenly almost gray.

The girl only heard him say quietly:

“Señor Ribero spoke of South America. This was in Yucatan.”

When the last canvas had been criticized, Saxon led the girl out to the shaded verandah.

“Do you know,” she announced with severe directness, “when I know you just a little better, I’m going to lecture you?”

“Lecture me!” His face mirrored alarm. “Do it now – then, I sha’n’t have it impending to terrorize better acquaintance.”

She gazed away for a time, her eyes clouding with doubt. At last, she laughed.

“It makes me seem foolish,” she confessed, “because you know so much more than I do about the subject of this lecture – only,” she added with conviction, “the little I know is right, and the great deal you know may be wrong.”

“I plead guilty, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.” He made the declaration in a tone of extreme abjectness.

“But I don’t want you to plead guilty. I want you to reform.”

Not knowing the nature of the reform required, Saxon remained discreetly speechless.

“You are the first disciple of Frederick Marston,” she said, going to the point without preliminaries. “You don’t have to be anybody’s disciple. I don’t know a great deal about art, but I’ve stood before Marston’s pictures in the galleries abroad and in this country. I love them. I’ve seen your pictures, too, and you don’t have to play tag with Frederick Marston.”

For a moment, Saxon sat twisting his pipe in his fingers. His silence might almost have been an ungracious refusal to discuss the matter.

“Oh, I know it’s sacrilege,” she said, leaning forward eagerly, her eyes deep in their sincerity, “but it’s true.”

The man rose and paced back and forth for a moment, then halted before her. When he spoke, it was with a ring like fanaticism in his voice.

“There is no Art but Art, and Marston is her prophet. That is my Koran of the palette.” For a while, she said nothing, but shook her head with a dissenting smile, which carried up the corners of her lips in maddeningly delicious fashion. Then, the man went on, speaking now slowly and in measured syllables:

“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.