The Key to Yesterday Part 2

"I wonder if we have not met somewhere before? It seems to me----"

"Often," he a.s.serted. "I think it was in Babylon first, perhaps. And you were a girl in Macedon when I was a spearman in the army of Alexander."

She sat as reflective and grave as though she were searching her recollections of Babylon and Macedon for a chance acquaintance, but under the gravity was a repressed sparkle of mischievous delight.

After a moment, he demanded brazenly:

"Would you mind telling me which colt won that first race?"

CHAPTER II

"His career has been pretty much a march of successive triumphs through the world of art, and he has left the critics only one peg on which to hang their carping."

Steele spoke with the warmth of enthusiasm. He had succeeded in capturing Duska for a few minutes of monopoly in the semi-solitude of the verandah at the back of the club-house. Though he had a hopeless cause of his own to plead, it was characteristic of him that his first opportunity should go to the praise of his friend.

"What is that?" The girl found herself unaccountably interested and ready to a.s.sume this stranger's defense even before she knew with what his critics charged him.

"That he is a copyist," explained the man; "that he is so enamored of the style of Frederick Marston that his pictures can't shake off the influence. He is great enough to blaze his own trail--to create his own school, rather than to follow in the tracks of another. Of course," he hastened to defend, "that is hardly a valid indictment.

Every master is, at the beginning of his career, strongly affected by the genius of some greater master. The only mistake lies in following in the footsteps of one not yet dead. To play follow-the-leader with a man of a past century is permissible and laudable, but to give the same allegiance to a contemporary is, in the narrow view of the critics, to accept a secondary place."

The Kentuckian sketched with ardor the das.h.i.+ng brilliance of the other's achievement: how five years had brought him from lethal obscurity to international fame; how, though a strictly American product who had not studied abroad, his _Salon_ pictures had electrified Paris. And the girl listened with attentive interest.

When the last race was ended and the thousands were crowding out through the gates, Saxon heard his host accepting a dinner invitation for the evening.

"I shall have a friend stopping in town on his way East, whom I want you all to meet," explained Mr. Bellton, the prospective host. "He is one Senor Ribero, an attache of a South American legation, and he may prove interesting."

Saxon caught himself almost frowning. He did not care for society's offerings, but the engagement was made, and he had now no alternative to adding his declaration of pleasure to that of his host. He was, however, silent to taciturnity as Steele's runabout chugged its way along in the parade of motors and carriages through the gates of the race-track inclosure. In his pupils, the note of melancholy unrest was decided, where ordinarily there was only the hint.

"There is time," suggested the host, "for a run out the Boulevard; I'd like to show you a view or two."

The suggestion of looking at a promising landscape ordinarily challenged Saxon's interest to the degree of enthusiasm. Now, he only nodded.

It was not until Steele, who drove his own car, stopped at the top of the Iroquois Park hill that Saxon spoke. They had halted at the southerly brow of the ridge from which the eye sweeps a radius of twenty miles over purpled hills and polychromatic valleys, to yet other hills melting into a sky of melting turquois. Looking across the colorful reaches, Saxon gave voice to his enthusiasm.

They left the car, and stood on the rocks that jut out of the clay at the road's edge. Beneath them, the wooded hillside fell away, three hundred feet of precipitous slope and tangle. For a time, Saxon's eyes were busy with the avid drinking in of so much beauty, then once more they darkened as he wheeled toward his companion.

"George," he said slowly, "you told me that we were to go to a cabin of yours tucked away somewhere in the hills, and paint landscape. I caught the idea that we were to lead a sort of camp-life--that we were to be hermits except for the companions.h.i.+p of our palettes and nature and each other--and the few neighbors that one finds in the country, and----" The speaker broke off awkwardly.

Steele laughed.

"'It is so nominated in the bond.' The cabin is over there--some twenty miles." He pointed off across the farthest dim ridge to the south. "It is among hills where--but to-morrow you shall see for yourself!"

"To-morrow?" There was a touch of anxious haste in the inquiry.

"Are you so impatient?" smiled Steele.

Saxon wheeled on his host, and on his forehead were beads of perspiration though the breeze across the hilltops was fresh with the coming of evening. His answer broke from his lips with the abruptness of an exclamation.

"My G.o.d, man, I'm in panic!"

The Kentuckian looked up in surprise, and his bantering smile vanished. Evidently, he was talking with a man who was suffering some stress of emotion, and that man was his friend.

For a moment, Saxon stood rigidly, looking away with drawn brow, then he began with a short laugh in which there was no vestige of mirth:

"When two men meet and find themselves congenial companions," he said slowly, "there need be no questions asked. We met in a Mexican hut."

Steele nodded.

"Then," went on Saxon, "we discovered a common love of painting. That was enough, wasn't it?"

Steele again bowed his a.s.sent.

"Very well." The greater painter spoke with the painfully slow control of one who has taken himself in hand, selecting tone and words to safeguard against any betrayal into sudden outburst. "As long as it's merely you and I, George, we know enough of each other. When it becomes a matter of meeting your friends, your own people, you force me to tell you something more."

"Why?" Steele demanded; almost hotly. "I don't ask my friends for references or bonds!"

Saxon smiled, but persistently repeated:

"You met me in Mexico, seven months ago. What, in G.o.d's name, do you know about me?"

The other looked up, surprised.

"Why, I know," he said, "I know----" Then, suddenly wondering what he did know, he stopped, and added lamely: "I know that you are a landscape-painter of national reputation and a d.a.m.ned good fellow."

"And, aside from that, nothing," came the quick response. "What I am on the side, preacher, porch-climber, bank-robber--whatever else, you don't know." The speaker's voice was hard.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that, before you present me to your friends, to such people for example--well such people as I met to-day--you have the right to ask; and the unfortunate part of it is that, when you ask, I can't answer."

"You mean----" the Kentuckian halted in perplexed silence.

"I mean," said Saxon, forcing his words, "that G.o.d Almighty only knows who I am, or where I came from. I don't."

Of all the men Steele had ever known, Saxon had struck him, through months of intimacy, as the most normal, sane and cleanly const.i.tuted.

Eccentricity was alien to him. In the same measure that all his physical bents were straight and clean-cut, so he had been mentally a contradiction of the morbid and irrational. The Kentuckian waited in open-eyed astonishment, gazing at the man whose own words had just convicted him of the wildest insanity.

Saxon went on, and even now, in the face of self-conviction of lunacy, his words fell coldly logical:

"I have talked to you of my work and my travels during the past five or six years. I have told you that I was a cow-puncher on a Western range; that I drifted East, and took up art. Did I ever tell you one word of my life prior to that? Do you know of a single episode or instance preceding these few fragmentary chapters? Do you know who, or what I was seven years ago?"

Steele was dazed. His eyes were studiously fixed on the gnarled roots and twisted hole of a scrub oak that hung out over the edge of things with stubborn and distorted tenacity.

"No," he heard the other say, "you don't, and I don't."