The Key to Yesterday Part 20

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. Herve, 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, Herve 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 pa.s.sionate 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 acquaintances.h.i.+p. 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 cla.s.ses, 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 embarra.s.sment. 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-wors.h.i.+p. 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 gla.s.s 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."

Herve 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 s.h.i.+p 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. Herve 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. Herve?" 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 Herve 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 pa.s.senger was an _insurrecto_, and, once seized in Puerto Frio, could hardly hope to s.h.i.+eld himself behind American citizens.h.i.+p. There had been many men in Puerto Frio when the captain sailed who would have paid well for pa.s.sage 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. Herve 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 authors.h.i.+p. 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.

Herve 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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.