Читать книгу: «The Key to Yesterday», страница 4

“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!

“I know now why the world was made,” he declared, joyfully. “I know why all the other wonderful women and all the other wonderful loves from the beginning of time have been! It was,” he announced with the supreme egotism of the moment, “that I might compare them with this.”

And so the resolve to be silent was cast away, and after it went the sudden resolve to tell everything. Saxon, feeling only triumph, did not realize that he had, in one moment, lost his second and third battles.

An hour later, they strolled back together toward the house. Saxon was burdened with the canvas on which he had painted his masterpiece. They were silent, but walking on the milky way, their feet stirring nothing meaner than star-dust. On the verandah, Steele met them, and handed his friend a much-forwarded letter, addressed in care of the Louisville club where he had dined. It bore the stamp of a South American Republic.

It was not until he had gone to his room that night that the man had time to glance at it, or even to mark its distant starting point. Then, he tore open the envelope, and read this message:

“My Erstwhile Comrade:

“Though I’ve had no line from you in these years I don’t flatter myself that you’ve forgotten me. It has come to my hearing through certain channels – subterranean, of course – that your present name is Saxon and that you’ve developed genius and glory as a paint-wizard.

“It seems you are now a perfectly respectable artist! Congratulations – also bravo!

“My object is to tell you that I’ve tried to get word to you that despite appearances it was not I who tipped you off to the government. That is God’s truth and I can prove it. I would have written before, but since you beat it to God’s Country and went West your whereabouts have been a well-kept secret. I am innocent, as heaven is my witness! Of course, I am keeping mum.

“H. S. R.”

CHAPTER VII

A short time ago, Saxon had felt stronger than all the forces of fate. He had believed that circumstances were plastic and man invincible. Now, as he bent forward in his chair, the South American letter hanging in limp fingers and the coal-oil lamp on the table throwing its circle of light on the foreign postmark and stamp of the envelope, he realized that the battle was on. The forces of which he had been contemptuous were to engage him at once, with no breathing space before the combat. Viewing it all in this light, he felt the qualms of a general who encounters an aggressive enemy before his line is drawn and his battle front arranged.

He had so entirely persuaded himself that his duty was clear and that he must not speak to the girl of love that now, when he had done so, his entire plan of campaign must be revised, and new problems must be considered. When he had been swept away on the tide that carried him to an avowal, it had been with the vague sense of realization that, if he spoke at all, he must tell the whole story. He had not done so, and now came a new question: Had he the right to tell the story until, in so far as possible, he had probed its mystery? Suppose his worst fears proved themselves. The certainty would be little harder to confess than the presumption and the suspense. Suppose, on the other hand, the fighting chance to which every man clings should, after all, acquit him? Would it not be needless cruelty to inflict on her the fears that harried his own thoughts? Must he not try first to arm himself with a definite report for, or against, himself?

After all, he argued weakly, or perhaps it was the devil’s advocate that whispered the insidious counsel, there might be a mistake. The man of Ribero’s story might still be some one else. He had never felt the instincts of murder. Surely, he had not been the embezzler, the libertine, the assassin! But, in answer to that argument, his colder logic contended there might have been to his present Dr. Jekyll a Mr. Hyde of the past. The letter he held in his hand of course meant nothing more than that Ribero had talked to some one. It might be merely the fault of some idle gossip in a Latin-American café, when the claret flowed too freely. The writer, this unknown “H. S. R.,” had probably taken Ribero’s testimony at its face value. Then, out of the page arose insistently the one sentence that did mean something more, the new link in a chain of definite conclusion. “Since you beat it to God’s Country and went West – ” That was the new evidence this anonymous witness had contributed. He had certainly gone West!

Assuredly, he must go to South America, and prosecute himself. To do this meant to thrust himself into a situation that held a hundred chances, but there was no one else who could determine it for him. It was not merely a matter of collecting and sifting evidence. It was also a test of subjecting his dormant memory to the stimulus of place and sights and sounds and smells. When he stood at the spot where Carter had faced his executioners, surely, if he were Carter, he would awaken to self-recognition. He would slip away on some pretext, and try out the issue, and then, when he spoke to Duska, he could speak in definite terms. And if he were the culprit? The question came back as surely as the pendulum swings to the bottom of the arc, and rested at the hideous conviction that he must be the malefactor. Then, Saxon rose and paced the floor, his hand convulsively crushing the letter into a crumpled wad.

Well, he would not come back! If that were his world, he would not reënter it. He was willing to try himself – to be his own prosecutor, but, if the thing spelled a sentence of disgrace, he reserved the right to be also his own executioner.

Then, the devil’s advocate again whispered seductively into his perplexity.

Suppose he went and tested the environment, searching conscience and memory – and suppose no monitor gave him an answer. Would he not then have the right to assume his innocence? Would he not have the right to feel certain that his memory, so stimulated and still inactive, was not only sleeping, but dead? Would he not be justified in dismissing the fear of a future awakening, and, as Steele had suggested, in going forward in the person of Robert A. Saxon, abandoning the past as completely as he had perhaps abandoned previous incarnations?

So, for the time, he stilled his fears, and under his brush the canvases became more wonderful than they had ever been. He had Duska at his side, not only in the old intimacy, but in the new and more wonderful intimacy that had come of her acknowledged love. He would finish the half-dozen pictures needed to complete the consignment for the Eastern and European exhibits, then he would start on his journey.

A week later, Saxon took Duska to a dance at the club-house on the top of one of the hills of the ridge, and, after she had tired of dancing, they had gone to a point where the brow of the knob ran out to a jutting promontory of rock. It was a cape in the dim sea of night mist which hung upon, and shrouded, the flats below. Beyond the reaches of silver gray, the more distant hills rose in mystic shadow-shapes of deep cobalt. There were stars overhead, but they were pale in the whiter light of the moon, and all the world was painted, as the moon will paint it, in silvers and blues.

Back of them was the softened waltz-music that drifted from the club-house and the bright patches of color where the Chinese lanterns swung among the trees.

As they talked, the man felt with renewed force that the girl had given him her love in the wonderful way of one who gives but once, and gives all without stint or reserve. It was as though she had presented him unconditionally with the key to the archives of her heart, and made him possessor of the unspent wealth of all the Incas.

Suddenly, he realized that his plan of leaving her without explanation, on a quest that might permit no return, was meeting her gift with half-confidence and deception. What he did with himself now, he did with her property. He was not at liberty to act without her full understanding and sympathy in his undertakings. The plan was one of infinite brutality.

He must tell her everything, and then go. He struck a match for his cigar, to give himself a moment of arranging his words, and, as he stood shielding the light against a faintly stirring breeze, the miniature glare fell on her delicately chiseled lips and nose and chin. Her expression made him hesitate. She was very young, very innocently childlike and very happy. To tell her now would be like spoiling a little girls’ party. It must be told soon, but not while the dance music was still in their ears and the waxy smell of the dance candles still in their nostrils.

When he left her at Horton House, he did not at once return to the cabin. He wanted the open skies for his thoughts, and there was no hope of sleep.

He retraced his steps from the road, and wandered into the old-fashioned garden. At last, he halted by the seat where he had posed her for the portrait. The moon was sinking, and the shadows of the garden wall and trees and shrubs fell in long, fantastic angles across the silvered earth. The house itself was dark except where the panes of her window still glowed. Standing between the tall stalks of the hollyhocks, he held his watch up to the moon. It was half-past two o’clock.

Then, he looked up and started with surprise as he saw her standing in the path before him. At first, he thought that his imagination had projected her there. Since she had left him at the stairs, the picture she had made in her white gown and red roses had been vividly permanent, though she herself had gone.

But, now, her voice was real.

“Do you prowl under my windows all night, kind sir?” she laughed, happily. “I believe you must be almost as much in love as I am.”

The man reached forward, and seized her hand.

“It’s morning,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she assured him. Then, she added serenely: “Do you suppose that the moon shines like this every night, or that I can always expect times like these? You know,” she taunted, “it was so hard to get you to admit that you cared that it was an achievement. I must be appreciative, mustn’t I? You are an altogether reserved and cautious person.”

He seized her in his arms with neither reserve nor caution.

“Listen,” he said in an impassioned voice, “I have no right to touch you. In five minutes, you will probably not even let me speak to you. I had no right to speak. I had no right to tell you that I loved you!”

She did not draw away. She only looked into his eyes very solemnly.

“You had no right?” she repeated, in a bewildered voice. “Don’t you love me?”

“You don’t have to ask that,” he avowed. “You know it. Your own heart can answer such questions.”

“Then,” she decreed with womanlike philosophy, “you had a right to say so – because I love you, and that is settled.”

“No,” he expostulated, “I tell you I did not have the right. You must forget it. You must forget everything.” He was talking with mad impetuosity.

“It is too late,” she said simply. “Forget!” There was an indignant ring in her words. “Do you think that I could forget – or that, if I could, I would? Do you think it is a thing that happens every day?”

From a tree at the fence line came the softly lamenting note of a small owl, and across the fields floated the strident shriek of a lumbering night freight.

To Saxon’s ears, the inconsequential sounds came with a painful distinctness. It was only his own voice that seemed to him muffled in a confusion of roaring noises. His lips were so dry that he had to moisten them with his tongue.

To hesitate, to temporize, even to soften his recital, would mean another failure in the telling of it. He must plunge in after his old method of directness, even brutality, without preface or palliation.

Here, at all events, brutality were best. If his story appalled and repelled her, it would be the blow that would free her from the thraldom of the love he had unfairly stolen. If she turned from him with loathing, at least anger would hurt her less than heartbreak.

“Do you remember the story Ribero so graphically told of the filibuster and assassin and the firing squad in the plaza?” As he spoke, Saxon knew with a nauseating sense of certainty that his brain had never really doubted his identity. He had futilely argued with himself, but it was only his eagerness of wish that had kept clamoring concerning the possibility of a favorable solution. All the while, his reason had convicted him. Now, as he spoke, he felt sure, as sure as though he could really remember, and he felt also his unworthiness to speak to her, as though it were not Saxon, but Carter, who held her in his arms. He suddenly stepped back and held her away at arms’ length, as though he, Saxon, were snatching her from the embrace of the other man, Carter. Then, he heard her murmuring:

“Yes, of course I remember.”

“And did you notice his look of astonishment when I came? Did you catch the covert innuendoes as he talked – the fact that he talked at me – that he was accusing me – my God! recognizing me?”

The girl put up her hands, and brushed the hair back from her forehead. She shook her head as though to shake off some cloud of bewilderment and awaken herself from the shock of a nightmare. She stood so unsteadily that the man took her arm, and led her to the bench against the wall. There, she sank down with her face in her hands. It seemed a century, but, when she looked up again, her face, despite its pallor in the moonlight, was the face of one seeking excuses for one she loves, one trying to make the impossible jibe with fact.