The Key to Yesterday

As he passed a certain café, which he had once known as the informal club of the Marston cult, he realized that here the hilarity was more pronounced than elsewhere. The boulevard itself was for squares a thread, stringing cafés like beads in a necklace. Each had its crowd of revelers; its boisterous throng of frowsy, velvet-jacketed, long-haired students; its laughing models; its inevitable brooding and despondent absintheurs sitting apart in isolated melancholy. Yet, here at the “Chat Noir,” the chorus was noisier. Although the evening was chill, the sidewalk tables were by no means deserted. The Parisian proves his patriotism by his adherence to the out-door table, even if he must turn up his collar, and shiver as he sips his wine.

Listlessly, Steele turned into the place. It was so crowded this evening that for a time it looked as though he would have difficulty in finding a seat. At last, a waiter led him to a corner where, dropping to the seat along the wall, he ordered his wine, and sat gloomily looking on.

The place was unchanged. There were still the habitués quarreling over their warring tenets of the brush; men drawn to the center of painting as moths are drawn to a candle; men of all nationalities and sorts, alike only in the general quality of their unkempt grotesquerie.

There was music of a sort; a plaintive chord long-drawn from the violin occasionally made its sweet wail heard above the babel and through the reeking smoke of the room. Evidently, it was some occasion beyond the ordinary, and Steele, leaning over to the student nearest him, inquired in French:

“Is there some celebration?”

The stranger was a short man, with hair that fell low on his neck and greased his collar. He had a double-pointed beard and deep-set black eyes, which he kept fixed on his absinthe as it dripped drop by drop from the nickeled device attached to his frappé glass. At the question, he looked up, astonished.

“But is it possible monsieur does not know? We are all brothers here – brothers in the worship of the beautiful! Does not monsieur know?”

Steele did not know, and he told the stranger so without persiflage.

“It is that the great Marston has returned!” proclaimed the student, in a loud voice. “It is that the master has come back to us – to Paris!”

The sound of his voice had brought others about the table. “Does monsieur know that the Seine flows?” demanded a pearly pretty model, raising her glass and flashing from her dark eyes a challenging glance of ridicule.

Steele did not object to the good-humored baiting, but he looked about him, and was thankful that the girl on her way to Nice could not look in on this enthusiasm over the painter’s home-coming; could not see to what Marston was returning; what character of devotees were pledging the promotion of the first disciple to the place of the worshiped master.

Some half-drunken student, his hand upon the shoulder of a model, lifted a tilting glass, and shouted thickly, “Vive l’art! Vive Marston!” The crowd took up the shout, and there was much clinking of glass.

Steele, with a feeling of deep disgust, rose to go. The other quais of the Seine were better after all. But, as he reached for his hat, he felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning, recognized, with a glow of welcome, the face of M. Hervé. Like himself, M. Hervé seemed out of his element, or would have seemed so had he also not had, like Steele, that adaptability which makes some men fit into the picture wherever they may find themselves. The two shook hands, and dropped back on the cushions of the wall seat.

“I have heard the story,” the Frenchman assured Steele. “Monsieur may spare himself the pain of repeating it. It is a miracle!”

Steele was looking into his glass.

“It is a most unhappy miracle,” he replied.

“But, mon dieu!” M. Hervé looked across the table, tapping the Kentuckian’s sleeve with his outstretched fingers. “It makes one think, mon ami– it makes one think!”

His vis-à-vis only nodded, and Hervé went on:

“It brings home to one the indestructibility of the true genius – the unquenchable fire of it! Destiny plays a strange game. She has here taken a man, and juggled with his life; battered his identity to unrecognizable fragments; set a seal on his past. Yet, his genius she could not efface. That burned through to the light – sounded on insistently through the confusion of wreck, even as that violin sounds through this hell of noises and disorder – the great unsilenced chord! The man thinks he copies another. Not so – he is merely groping to find himself. Never have I thought so deeply as since I have heard this story.”

For a time, Steele did not reply. To him, the personal element drowned the purely academic interest of the psychological phase in this tragedy.

Suddenly, a new element of surprise struck him, and he leaned across the table, his voice full of questioning.

“But you,” he demanded, “you had studied under Marston. You knew him, and yet, when you saw Saxon, you had no recognition.”

M. Hervé nodded his head with grave assent.

“That was my first incredulous thought when I heard of this miracle,” he admitted; “yet, only for a moment. After all, that was inevitable. They were different. Now, bearded, ill, depleted, I fancy he may once more look the man I knew – that man whose hair was a mane, and whose morbid timidity gave to his eyes a haunted and uncertain fire. When I saw Saxon, it is true I saw a man wounded and unconscious; his face covered with blood and the dirt of the street, yet he was, even so, the man of splendid physique – the new man remade by the immensity of your Western prairies – having acquired all that the man I had known lacked. He was transformed. In that, his Destiny was kind – she gave it not only to his body, but to his brush. He was before a demi-god of the palette. Now, he is the god.”

“Do you chance to know,” asked Steele suddenly, “how his hand was pierced?”

“Have you not heard that story?” the Frenchman asked. “I am regrettably responsible for that. We sought to make him build the physical man. I persuaded him to fence, though he did it badly and without enthusiasm. One evening, we were toying with sharpened foils. Partly by his carelessness and partly by my own, the blade went through his palm. For a long period, he could not paint.”

Frederick Marston was not at once removed from the lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques. Absolute rest was what he most required. When he awoke again, unless he awoke refreshed by sufficient rest, Dr. Cornish held out no hope. The strain upon enfeebled body and brain had been great, and for days he remained delirious or unconscious. Dr. Cornish was like adamant in his determination that he should be left undisturbed for a week or more.

Meanwhile, the episode had unexpected results. The physician who had come to Paris fleeing from a government he had failed to overturn, who had taken an emergency case because there was no one else at hand, found himself suddenly heralded by the Paris press as “that distinguished specialist, Dr. Cornish, who is effecting a miraculous recovery for the greatest of painters.”

During these days, Steele was constantly at the lodgings, and with him, sharing his anxiety, was M. Hervé. There were many callers to inquire – painters and students of the neighborhood, and the greater celebrities from the more distinguished schools.

But no one was more constantly in attendance than Alfred St. John. He divided his time between the bedside of his daughter and the lodgings where Marston lay. The talk that filled the Latin Quarter, and furiously excited the studio on the floor below, was studiously kept from the girl confined to her couch upstairs.

One day while St. John was in the Rue St. Jacques, pacing the small cour with Steele and Hervé, Jean Hautecoeur came in hurriedly. His manner was that of anxious embarrassment, and for a moment he paused, seeking words.

St. John’s face turned white with a divination of his tidings.

“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.