The Key to Yesterday Part 24

Her hand fell gently on his shoulder.

"I am sorry--about your daughter," she said, softly.

St. John straightened, and spoke more steadily.

"The story is not ended. In those days, it was almost starvation. No one would buy my pictures. No one would buy her verse. The one source of revenue we might have had was what Marston sought to give us, but that she would not accept. She said she had not married him for alimony. He tried often and in many ways, but she refused. Then, he left. He had done that before. No one wondered. After his absence had run to two years, I was in Spain, and stumbled on a house, a sort of _pension_, near Granada, where he had been painting under an a.s.sumed name, as was his custom. Then, he had gone again--no one knew where.

But he had left behind him a great stack of finished canvases. _Mon dieu_, how feverishly the man must have worked during those months--for he had then been away from the place almost a year. The woman who owned the house did not know the value of the pictures. She only knew that he had ordered his rooms reserved, and had not returned, and that rental and storage were due her. I paid the charges, and took the pictures. Then, I investigated. My investigations proved that my surmise as to his death was correct. I was cautious in disposing of the pictures. They were like the diamonds of Kimberley, too precious to throw upon the market in sufficient numbers to glut the art-appet.i.te of the world. I h.o.a.rded them. I let them go one or two at a time, or in small consignments. He had always sold his pictures cheaply. I was afraid to raise the price too suddenly. From time to time, I pretended to receive letters from the painter. I had then no definite plan. When they had reached the highest point of fame and value, I would announce his death. But, meanwhile, I discovered the work young Saxon was doing in America. I followed his development, and I hesitated to announce the death of Marston. An idea began to dawn on me in a nebulous sort of way, that somehow this man's work might be profitably utilized by subst.i.tution.

At first, it was very foggy--my idea--but I felt that in it was a possibility, at all events enough to be thought over--and so I did not announce the death of Marston. Then, I realized that I could supplement the Marston supply with these canvases. I was timid. Such sales must be cautiously made, and solely to private individuals who would remove the pictures from public view. At last, I found these two which you saw at Milan. I felt that Mr. Saxon could never improve them. I would take the chance, even though I had to exhibit them publicly. The last of the Marstons, save a few, had been sold. I could realize enough from these to take my daughter to Cairo, where she might have a chance to live. I bought the canvases in New York in person. They have never been publicly shown save in Milan; they were there but for a day only, and were not to be photographed. When you sent for me, I thought it was an American Croesus, and that I had succeeded." St. John had talked rapidly and with agitation. Now, as he paused, he wiped the moisture from his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief.

"I have planned the thing with the utmost care. I have had no confederates. I even collected a few of Mr. Saxon's earlier and less effective pictures, and exhibited them beside Marston's best, so the public might compare and be convinced in its idea that the boundary between the master and the follower was the boundary between the sublime and the merely meritorious. That is all. For a year I have hesitated. When I entered this room, I realized my danger. Even in the growing twilight, I recognized the lady as the original of the portrait."

"But didn't you know," questioned the girl, "that sooner or later the facts must become known--that at any time Mr. Saxon might come to Europe, and see one of his own pictures as I saw the portrait of myself in Milan?"

St. John bowed his head.

"I was desperate enough to take that chance," he answered, "though I safeguarded myself in many ways. My sales would invariably be to purchasers who would take their pictures to private galleries. I should only have to dispose of a few at a time. Mr. Saxon has sold many pictures in Paris under his own name, and does not know who bought them. Selling them as Marston's, though somewhat more complicated, might go on for some time--and my daughter's life can not last long. After that, nothing matters."

"Have you actually sold any Saxons as Marstons heretofore?" demanded Steele.

St. John hesitated for a moment, and then nodded his head.

"Possibly, a half-dozen," he acknowledged, "to private collectors, where I felt it was safe."

"I have no wish to be severe," Steele spoke quietly, "but those two pictures we must have. I will pay you a fair profit. For the time, at least, the matter shall go no further."

St. John bowed with deep grat.i.tude.

"They shall be delivered," he said.

Steele stood watching St. John bow himself out, all the bravado turned to obsequiousness. Then, the Kentuckian shook his head.

"We have unearthed that conspiracy," he said, "but we have learned nothing. To-morrow, I shall visit the studio where the Marston enthusiasts work, and see if there is anything to be learned there."

"And I shall go with you," the girl promptly declared.

CHAPTER XVIII

On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the _Boulevard St. Michel_, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fas.h.i.+on as all its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which the _concierge_ presides. This house has had other years in which it stood pretentious, with the pride of a mansion, among its peers. Now, its splendor is tarnished, its respectability is faded, and the face it presents to the street wears the gloom that comes of past glory, heightened, perhaps, by the dark-spiritedness of many tenants who have failed to enroll their names among the great.

Yet, for all its forbidding frown, its front bespeaks a certain consciousness of lingering dignity. A plate, set in the door-case, announces that the great Marston painted here a few scant years ago, and here still that more-or-less-distinguished instructor, Jean Hautecoeur, tells his pupils in the second-floor _atelier_ how it was done.

He was telling them now. The model, who had been posed as, "Aphrodite Rising from the Foam," was resting. She sat on the dilapidated throne amid a circle of easels. A blanket was thrown about her, from the folds of which protruded a bare and shapely arm, the hand holding lightly between two fingers the cigarette with which she beguiled her recess.

The master, looking about on the many industrious, if not intellectual, faces, was discoursing on Marston's feeling for values.

"He did not learn it," declared M. Hautecoeur: "he was born with it.

He did not acquire it: he evolved it. A faulty value caused him pain as a false note causes pain to the true musician." Then, realizing that this was dangerous doctrine from the lips of one who was endeavoring to instill the quality into others, born with less gifted natures, he hastened to amend. "Yet, other masters, less facile, have gained by study what they lacked by heritage."

The room was bare except for its accessories of art. A few well-chosen casts hung about the walls. Many unmounted canvases were stacked in the corners, the floors were chalk-marked where easel-positions had been recorded; charcoal fragments crunched underfoot when one walked across the boards. From the sky-light--for the right of the building had only two floors--fell a flood of afternoon light, filtering through acc.u.mulated dust and soot. The door upon the outer hall was latched. The students, bizarre and unkempt in the bohemianism of their cult, mixed colors on their palettes as they listened. In their little world of narrow horizons, the discourse was like a prophet's eulogy of a G.o.d.

As the master, his huge figure somewhat grotesque in its long, paint-smeared blouse and cap, stood delivering his lecture with much eloquence of gesture, he was interrupted by a rap on the door. Jacques du Bois, whose easel stood nearest the threshold, reluctantly took his pipe from his teeth, and turned the k.n.o.b with a scowl for the interruption. For a moment, he stood talking through the slit with a gentleman in the hall-way, his eyes meanwhile studying with side-glances the lady who stood behind the gentleman. Then, he bowed and closed the door.

"Someone wishes a word with M. Hautecoeur," he announced.

The master stepped importantly into the hall, and Steele introduced himself. M. Hautecoeur declared that he quite well remembered monsieur and his excellent painting. He bowed to mademoiselle with unwieldly gallantry.

"Mr. Robert Saxon," began the American, "is, I believe, one of the most distinguished of the followers of Frederick Marston. Miss Filson and I are both friends of Mr. Saxon, and, while in Paris, we wished to visit the shrine of the Marston school. We have taken the liberty of coming here. Is it possible to admit us?"

The instructor looked cautiously into the _atelier_, satisfied himself that the model had not resumed her throne and nudity, then flung back the door with a ceremonious sweep. Steele, familiar with such surroundings, cast only a casual glance about the interior. It was like many of the smaller schools in which he had himself painted. To the girl, who had never seen a life-cla.s.s at work, it was stepping into a new world. Her eyes wandered about the walls, and came back to the faces.

"I have never had the honor of meeting your friend, Monsieur Saxon,"

declared the instructor in English. "But his reputation has crossed the sea! I have had the pleasure of seeing several of his canvases.

There is none of us following in the footsteps of Marston who would not feel his life crowned with high success, had he come as close as Saxon to grasping the secret that made Marston Marston. Your great country should be proud of him."

Steele smiled.

"Our country could also claim Marston. You forget that, monsieur."

The instructor spread his hands in a deprecating gesture.

"Ah, _mon ami_, that is debatable. True, your country gave him birth, but it was France that gave him his art."

"Did you know," suggested Steele, "that some of the unsigned Saxon pictures have pa.s.sed competent critics as the work of Marston?"

Hautecoeur lifted his heavy brows.

"Impossible, monsieur," he protested; "quite impossible! It is the master's boast that any man who can pa.s.s a painting as a Marston has his invitation to do so. He never signs a canvas--it is unnecessary--his stroke--his treatment--these are sufficient signature. I do not belittle the art of your friend," he hastened to explain, "but there is a certain--what shall I say?--a certain individualism about the work of this greatest of moderns which is inimitable. One must indeed be much the novice to be misled. Yet, I grant you there was one quality the master himself did not formerly possess which the American grasped from the beginning."

"His virility of touch?" inquired Steele.

"Just so! Your man's art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American's style was the outgrowth of the bigness of your vast s.p.a.ces--of the broad spirit of your great country--of the pride that comes to a man in the consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the snow-shoe." Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept him into metaphor.

"Yet--" Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he sought--"yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same quality."

"Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the thing we urged upon him--the robust vision."

The girl spoke for the first time, putting, after the fas.h.i.+on of the uninitiated, the question which, the more learned hesitate to propound:

"What is this thing you call the secret? What is it that makes the difference?"

"Ah, mademoiselle, if I knew that!" The instructor sighed as he smiled. "How says the English Fitzgerald? 'A hair perhaps divides the false and true.' Had Marston had the making of the famous epigram, he would not have said he mixed his paints with brains. Rather would he have confessed, he mixed them with ideals."

"But I fear we delay the posing," suggested Steele, moving, with sudden apprehension, toward the door.

"I a.s.sure you, no!" prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness.