The Key to Yesterday

But, when the steamer was under way, crawling slowly down the world by the same route he had taken, the days between quick sunrise and sudden sunset seemed interminable.

Outwardly, she was the blithest passenger on the steamer, and daily she held a sort of salon for the few other passengers who were doomed to the heat and the weariness of such a voyage.

But, when she was alone with Steele in the evening, looking off at the moonlit sea, or in her own cabin, her brow would furrow, and her hands would clench with the tensity of her anxiety. And, when at last Puerto Frio showed across the purple water with a glow of brief sunset behind the brown shoulder of San Francisco, she stood by the rail, almost holding her breath in suspense, while the anchor chains ran out.

As soon as Steele had ensconced Mrs. Horton and Duska at the Frances y Ingles, he hurried to the American Legation for news of Saxon. When he left Duska in the hotel patio, he knew, from the anxious little smile she threw after him, that for her the jury deciding the supreme question was going out, leaving her as a defendant is left when the panel files into the room where they ballot on his fate. He rushed over to the legation with sickening fear that, when he came back, it might have to be like the juryman whose verdict is adverse.

As it happened, he caught Mr. Pendleton without delay, and before he had finished his question the envoy was looking about for his Panama hat. Mr. Pendleton wanted to do several things at once. He wanted to tell the story of Saxon’s coming and going, and he wanted to go in person, and have the party moved over to the legation, where they must be his guests while they remained in Puerto Frio. It would be several days before another steamer sailed north. They had missed by a day the vessel on which Saxon had gone. Meanwhile, there were sights in the town that might beguile the intervening time. Saxon had interested the envoy, and Saxon’s friends were welcome. Hospitality is simplified in places where faces from God’s country are things to greet with the fervor of delight.

At dinner that evening, sitting at the right of the minister, Duska heard the full narrative of Saxon’s brief stay and return home. Mr. Pendleton was at his best. There was no diplomatic formality, and the girl, under the reaction and relief of her dispelled anxiety, though still disappointed at the hapless coincidence of missing Saxon, was as gay and childlike as though she had not just emerged from an overshadowing uncertainty.

“I’m sorry that he couldn’t accept my hospitality here at the legation,” said the minister at the end of his story, with much mock solemnity, “but etiquette in diplomatic circles is quite rigid, and he had an appointment to sleep at the palace.”

“So, they jugged him!” chuckled Steele, with a grin that threatened his ears. “I always suspected he’d wind up in the Bastile.”

“He was,” corrected the girl, her chin high, though her eyes sparkled, “a guest of the President, and, as became his dignity, was supplied with a military escort.”

“He needn’t permit himself any vaunting pride about that,” Steele assured her. “It’s just difference of method. In our country, a similar honor would have been accorded with a patrol wagon and a couple of policemen.”

After dinner, Duska insisted on dispatching a cablegram which should intercept the City of Rio at some point below the Isthmus. It was not an original telegram, but, had Saxon received it, it would have delighted him immoderately. She said:

“I told you so. Sail by Orinoco.”

The following morning, there were tours of discovery, personally conducted by the young Mr. Partridge. Duska had wanted to leave the carriage at the old cathedral, and stand flat against the blank wall, but she refrained, and satisfied herself with marching up very close and regarding it with hostility. As the carriage turned into the main plaza, a regiment of infantry went by, the band marching ahead playing, with the usual blare, the national anthem. Then, as the coachman drew up his horses at the legation door, there was sudden confusion, followed by the noise of popping guns. It was the hour just preceding the noon siesta. The plaza was indolent with lounging figures, and droning in the sleeping sing-song chorus of lazy voices. At the sound, which for the moment impressed the girl like the exploding of a pack of giant crackers, a sudden stillness fell on the place, closely followed by a startled outcry of voices as the figures in the plaza broke wildly for cover, futilely attempting to shield their faces with their arms against possible bullets. Then, there came a deeper detonation, and somewhere the crumbling of an adobe wall. The first sound came just as Mrs. Horton was stepping to the sidewalk. Duska had already leaped lightly out, and stood looking on in surprise. But Mr. Partridge knew his Puerto Frio. He led them hastily through the huge street-doors, and they had no sooner passed than the porter, with many mumbled prayers to the Holy Mother, slammed the great barriers against the outside world. The final assault for Vegas y Libertad had at last begun.

Mr. Pendleton had insisted that the ladies remain at the rear of the house, but Duska, with her adventurous passion for seeing all there was to see, threatened insubordination. To her, the idea of leaving several perfectly good balconies vacant, and staying at the back of a house, when the only battle one would probably ever see was occurring in the street just outside, seemed far from sensible. But, after she had looked out for a few moments, had seen a belated fruit-vender crumple to the street, and had smelled the acrid stench of the burnt powder, she was willing to turn away.

Inasmuch as the stay of Duska and her aunt involved several days of waiting for the sailing of the next ship, Duska was somewhat surprised at hearing nothing from Saxon in the meanwhile. He had had time to reach the point to which the cablegram was addressed. She had told him she would sail by the Orinoco, since that was the first available steamer. At such a time, Saxon would certainly answer that message. She fancied he would even manage to join her steamer, either by coming down to meet it, or waiting to intercept it at the place where he had received her message. Consequently, when she reached that port and sailed again without either seeing Saxon or receiving a message from him, she was decidedly surprised, and, though she did not admit it even to herself, she was likewise alarmed.

It happened that one of her fellow passengers on the steamer Orinoco was a tall, grave gentleman, who wore his beard trimmed in the French fashion, and who in his bearing had a certain air of distinction.

On a coast vessel, it was unusual for a passenger to hold himself apart and reserved against the chance companionships of a voyage. Yet, this gentleman did so. He had been introduced by the captain as M. Hervé, had bowed and smiled, but since that he had not sought to further the acquaintanceship, or to recognize it except by a polite bow or smile when he passed one of the party on his solitary deck promenades.

Possibly, this perfunctory greeting would have been the limit and confine of their associations, had he not chanced to be standing one day near enough to Duska and Steele to overhear their conversation. The voyage was almost ended, and New York was not far off. Long ago, the lush rankness of the tropics had given way to the more temperate beauty of the higher zones, and this beauty was the beauty of early autumn.

Steele was talking of Frederick Marston, and the girl was listening with interest. As long as Saxon insisted on remaining the first disciple, she must of course be interested in his demi-god. Just now, however, Saxon’s name was not mentioned. Finally, the stranger turned, and came over with a smile.

“When I hear the name of Frederick Marston,” he said, “I am challenged to interest. Would I be asking too much if I sought to join you in your talk of him?”

The girl looked up and welcomed him with her accustomed graciousness, while Steele drew up a camp-stool, and the Frenchman seated himself.

For a while, he listened sitting there, his fingers clasped about his somewhat stout knee, and his face gravely speculative, contributing to the conversation nothing except his attention.

“You see, I am interested in Marston,” he at length began.

The girl hesitated. She had just been expressing the opinion, possibly absorbed from Saxon, that the personality of the artist was extremely disagreeable. As she glanced at M. Hervé, the thought flashed through her mind that this might possibly be Marston himself. She knew that master’s fondness for the incognito. But she dismissed the idea as highly fanciful, and even ventured frankly to repeat her criticism.

At last, Hervé replied, with great gravity:

“Mademoiselle, I had the honor to know the great Frederick Marston once. It was some years ago. He keeps himself much as a hermit might in these days, but I am sure that the portion of the story I know is not that of the vain man or of the poseur. Possibly,” he hesitated modestly, “it might interest mademoiselle?”

“I’m sure of it,” declared the girl.

“Marston,” he began, “drifted into the Paris ateliers from your country, callow, morbid, painfully young and totally inexperienced. He was a tall, gaunt boy with a beard that grew hardly as fast as his career, though finally it covered his face. Books and pictures he knew with passionate love. With life, he was unacquainted; at men, he looked distantly over the deep chasm of his bashfulness. Women he feared, and of them he knew no more than he knew of dragons.

“He was eighteen then. He was in the Salon at twenty-two, and at the height of fame at twenty-six. He is now only thirty-three. What he will be at forty, one can not surmise.”

The Frenchman gazed for a moment at the spiraling smoke from his cigarette, and halted with the uncertainty of a bard who doubts his ability to do justice to his lay.

“I find the story difficult.” He smiled with some diffidence, then continued: “Had I the art to tell it, it would be pathos. Marston was a generous fellow, beloved by those who knew him, but quarantined by his morbid reserve from wide acquaintanceship. Temperament – ah, that is a wonderful thing! It is to a man what clouds and mists are to a land! Without them, there is only arid desert – with too many, there are storm and endless rain and dreary winds. He had the storms and rain and winds in his life – but over all he had the genius! The masters knew that before they had criticized him six months. In a year, they stood abashed before him.”

“Go on, please!” prompted Duska, in a soft voice of sympathetic interest.

“He dreaded notoriety, he feared fame. He never had a photograph taken, and, when it was his turn to pose in the sketch classes, where the students alternate as models for their fellows, his nervousness was actual suffering. To be looked at meant, for him, to drop his eyes and find his hands in his way – the hands that could paint the finest pictures in Europe!”

“To understand his half-mad conduct, one must understand his half-mad genius. To most men who can command fame, the plaudits of clapping hands are as the incense of triumph. To him, there was but the art itself – the praise meant only embarrassment. His ideal was that of the English poet – a land where

‘ – only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame:And no one shall work for money and no one shall work for fame.’

That was what he wished, and could not have in Paris.

“It was in painting only that he forgot himself, and became a disembodied magic behind a brush. When a picture called down unusual comment from critics and press, he would disappear – remain out of sight for months. No one knew where he went. Once, I remember, in my time, he stayed away almost a year.

“He knew one woman in Paris, besides the models, who were to him impersonal things. Of that one woman alone, he was not afraid. She was a pathetic sort of a girl. Her large eyes followed him with adoring hero-worship. She was the daughter of an English painter who could not paint, one Alfred St. John, who lodged in the rear of the floor above. She herself was a poet who could not write verse. To her, he talked without bashfulness, and for her he felt vast sorrow. Love! Mon dieu, no! If he had loved her, he would have fled from her in terror!

“But she loved him. Then, he fell ill. Typhoid it was, and for weeks he was in his bed, with the papers crying out each day what a disaster threatened France and the world, if he should die. And she nursed him, denying herself rest. Typhoid may be helped by a physician, but the patient owes his life to the nurse. When he recovered, his one obsessing thought was that his life really belonged to her rather than to himself. I have already said he was morbid half to the point of madness. Genius is sometimes so!

“By no means a constant absintheur, in his moods he liked to watch the opalescent gleams that flash in a glass of Pernod. One night, when he had taken more perhaps than was his custom, he returned to his lodgings, resolved to pay the debt, with an offer of marriage.

“I do not know how much was the morbidness of his own temperament, and how much was the absinthe. I know that after that it was all wormwood for them both.

“She was proud. She soon divined that he had asked her solely out of sympathy, and perhaps it was at her urging that he left Paris alone. Perhaps, it was because his fame was becoming too great to allow his remaining there longer a recluse. At all events, he went away without warning – fled precipitantly. No one was astonished. His friends only laughed. For a year they laughed, then they became a trifle uneasy. Finally, however, these fears abated. St. John, his father-in-law, admitted that he was in constant correspondence with the master, and knew where he was in hiding. He refused to divulge his secret of place. He said that Marston exacted this promise – that he wanted to hide. Then came new pictures, which St. John handled as his son-in-law’s agent. Paris delighted in them. Marston travels about now, and paints. Whether he is mildly mad, or only as mad as his exaggerated genius makes him, I have often wondered.”

“What became of the poor girl?” Duska’s voice put the question, very tenderly.

“She, also, left Paris. Whether she let her love conquer her pride and joined him, or whether she went elsewhere – also alone, no one knows but St. John, and he does not encourage questions.”

“I hope,” said the girl slowly, “she went back, and made him love her.”

Hervé caught the melting sympathy in Duska’s eyes, and his own were responsive.

“If she did,” he said with conviction, “it must have made the master happy. He gave her what he could. He did not withhold his heart from stint, but because it was so written.” He paused, then in a lighter voice went on:

“And, speaking of Marston, one finds it impossible to refrain from reciting an extraordinary adventure that has just befallen his first disciple, Mr. Saxon, who is a countryman of yours.”

The girl’s eyes came suddenly away from the sea to the face of the speaker, as he continued:

“I happened to be on the streets, when wiser folk were in their homes, just after the battle in Puerto Frio. I found Mr. Robert Saxon – perhaps the second landscape painter in the world – lying wounded on a pavement among dead revolutionists, and I helped to carry him to an insurrecto haunt. He was smuggled unconscious on a ship sailing for some point in my own land – Havre, I think. Allons! Life plays pranks with men that make the fairy tales seem feeble!”

Steele had been so astounded that he had found no opportunity to stop the Frenchman. Now, as he made a sign, M. Hervé looked at the girl. She was sitting quite rigid in her steamer chair, and her lips were white. Her eyes were on his own, and were entirely steady.

“Will you tell us the whole story, M. Hervé?” she asked.

“Mon dieu! I have been indiscreet. I have made a faux pas!”

The Frenchman’s distress was genuinely deep.

“No,” answered the girl. “I must know all the story. I thank you for telling me.”

As Hervé told his story, he realized that the woman whom Saxon had turned back to warn, according to Rodman’s sketching, was the woman sitting before him on the deck of the Orinoco.

CHAPTER XV

Captain Harris had been, like Rodman, one of the men who make up the world’s flotsam and jetsam. He, too, had meddled in the affairs of that unstable belt which lies just above and below the “line.” South and Central American politics and methods were familiar to him. He had not attained the command of the tramp freighter Albatross without learning one decisive lesson, that of eliminating curiosity from his plan of living. He argued that his passenger was an insurrecto, and, once seized in Puerto Frio, could hardly hope to shield himself behind American citizenship. There had been many men in Puerto Frio when the captain sailed who would have paid well for passage to any port beyond the frontier, but to have taken them might have brought complications. He had been able at some risk to slip two men at most to his vessel under the curtain of night, and to clear without interference. He had chosen the man who was his friend, Dr. Cornish, and the man who was his countryman and helpless. Of course, all the premises upon which both Rodman and this sea-going man acted were false premises. Had he been left, Saxon would have been in no danger. He had none the less been shanghaied for a voyage of great length, and he had been shanghaied out of sincere kindness.

It had not occurred to either the captain or the physician that the situation could outlast the voyage. The man had a fractured skull, and he might die, or he might recover; but one or the other he must do, and that presumably before the completion of the trip across the Atlantic. That he should remain in a comatose state for days proved mildly surprising and interesting to the physician, but that at the end of this time he should suffer a long attack of brain fever was an unexpected development. Saxon knew nothing of his journeying, and his only conversation was that of delirium. He owed his life to the skill and vigilance of the doctor, who had seen and treated human ills under many crude conditions, and who devoted himself with absorption to the case. Neither the physician nor the captain knew that the man had once been called Robert Saxon. There was nothing to identify him. He had come aboard in the riding clothes borrowed from the lockers of the Phyllis, and his pockets held only a rusty key, some American gold and a little South American silver. Without name or consciousness or baggage, he was slowly crossing the Atlantic.

Other clothing was provided, and into the newer pockets Captain Harris and Dr. Cornish scrupulously transferred these articles. That Carter, if he recovered, could reimburse the skipper was never questioned. If he died, the care given him would be charged to the account of humanity, together with other services this rough man had rendered in his diversified career.

Meanwhile, on the steamer Orinoco, the girl was finding her clear, unflinching courage subjected to the longest, fiercest siege of suspense, and Steele tried in every possible manner to comfort the afflicted girl in this time of her trial and to alleviate matters with optimistic suggestions. M. Hervé was in great distress over having been the unwitting cause of fears which he hoped the future would clear away. His aloofness had ended, and, like Steele, he attached himself to her personal following, and sought with a hundred polite attentions to mitigate what he regarded as suffering of his authorship. Duska’s impulse had been to leave the vessel at the first American port, but Steele had dissuaded her. His plan was to wire to Kentucky at the earliest possible moment, and learn whether there had been any message from Saxon. Failing in that, he advocated going on to New York. If by any chance Saxon had come back to the States; if, for example, he had recovered en voyage and been transferred, as was not impossible, to a west-bound vessel, his agent in New York might have some tidings.

Hervé cursed himself for his failure to learn, in the confused half-hour at the Puerto Frio tavern, the name of the vessel that had taken Saxon on board, or at least the name of the fellow refugee who had befriended him.

When the ship came abreast of the fanglike skyline of Manhattan Island, and was shouldered against its pier at Brooklyn by swarming tugs, the girl, although outwardly calm, was not far from inward despair.

Steele’s first step was the effort to learn what steamer it might have been that left Puerto Frio for Venezuela and thence for France. But, in the promiscuous fleets of rusty-hulled tramps that beat their way about the world, following a system hardly more fixed than the course of a night-hawk cab about a city’s streets, the effort met only failure.

The girl would not consent to an interval of rest after her sea-voyage, but insisted on accompanying Steele at once to the establishment of the art dealer who had the handling of Saxon’s pictures.

The dealer had seen Mr. Saxon some time before as the artist passed through New York, but since that time had received no word. He had held a successful exhibition, and had written several letters to the Kentucky address furnished him, but to none of them had there been a reply. The dealer was enthusiastic over the art of the painter, and showed the visitors a number of clippings and reviews that were rather adulation than criticism.

The girl glanced at them impatiently. The work was great, and she was proud of its praise, but just now she was feeling that it really meant nothing at all to her in comparison with the painter himself. To her, he would have been quite as important, she realized, had no critic praised him; had his brush never forced a compliment from the world. Her brow gathered in perplexity over one paragraph that met her eye.

“The most notable piece of work that has yet come from this remarkable palette,” said the critic, “is a canvas entitled, ‘Portrait of a lady.’ In this, Mr. Saxon has done something more than approximate the genius of Frederick Marston. He has seemed to carry it a point forward, and one is led to believe that such an effort may be the door through which the artist shall issue from the distinction of being ‘Marston’s first disciple’ into a larger distinction more absolutely his own.” There was more, but the feature which caught her eye was the fact stated that, “A gentleman bought this picture for his private collection, refusing to give his name.”

“What does it mean?” demanded Duska, handing the clipping to Steele. “That picture and the landscape from the Knob were not for sale.”

The dealer was puzzled.

“Mr. Saxon,” he explained, “directed that from this assignment two pictures were to be reserved. They were designated by marks on the back of the cases and the canvases. Neither the portrait nor the landscape was so marked.”

“He must have made a mistake, in the hurry of packing,” exclaimed the girl, in deep distress. “He must have marked them wrong!”

“Who bought them?” demanded Steele.

The dealer shook his head.

“It was a gentleman, evidently an Englishman, though he said he lived in Paris. He declined to give his name, and paid cash. He took the pictures with him in a cab to his hotel. He did not even state where he was stopping.” The dealer paused, then added: “He explained to me that he collected for the love of pictures, and that he found the notoriety attaching to the purchase of famous paintings extremely distasteful.”

“Have you ever seen this gentleman before?” urged Steele.

“Yes,” the art agent answered reflectively, “he has from time to time picked up several of Mr. Saxon’s pictures, and his conversation indicated that he was equally familiar with the work of Marston himself. He said he knew the Paris agent of Mr. Saxon quite well, and it is possible that through that source you might be able to locate him. I am very sorry the mistake occurred, and, while I am positive that you will find the letters ‘N. F. S.’ (not for sale) on the two pictures I have held, I shall do all in my power to trace the lost ones.”