The Key to Yesterday Part 26

She shook her head, and, as she answered, it was in a dead voice.

"There is nothing to do."

"If I leave you, will you promise to cry? You must cry," he commanded.

"I can't cry," she answered, in the same expressionless flatness of tone.

"Duska, can you forgive me?" He had moved around, and stood leaning forward with his hands resting upon the table.

"Forgive you for what?"

"For being the author of all this hideous calamity," he burst out with self-accusation, "for bringing him there--for introducing you."

She reached out suddenly, and seized his hand.

"Don't!" she pleaded. "Do you suppose that I would give up a memory that I have? Why, all my world is memory now! Do you suppose I blame you--or him?"

"You might very well blame us both. We both knew of the possibilities, and let things go on."

She rose, and let her eyes rest on him with directness. Her voice was not angry, but very earnest.

"That is not true," she said. "It couldn't be helped. It was written.

He told me everything. He asked me to forget, and I held him--because we loved each other. He could no more help it than he could help being himself, fulfilling his genius when he thought he was following another man. There are just some things--" she halted a moment, and shook her head--"some things," she went on quietly, "that are bigger than we are."

"But, now----" He stopped.

"But, now--" the quiet of her words hurt the man more than tears could have done--"now, his real life has claimed him--the life that only loaned him to me."

The telephone jangled suddenly, and Steele, whose nerves were all on edge, started violently at the sound. Mechanically, he took up the instrument from its table-rack, and listened.

"Yes, this is Mr. Steele. What? Mr. St. John? Tell him I'll see him down there--to wait for me." Steele was about to replace the receiver, when Duska's hand caught his wrist.

"No," she said quickly, "have him come here."

"Wait. Hold the wire." The man turned to the girl.

"Duska, you are only putting yourself on the rack," he pleaded. "Let me see him alone." She shook her head with the old determination.

"Have him come here," she repeated.

"Send Mr. St. John up," ordered the Kentuckian.

One might have seen from his eyes that, when Mr. St. John arrived, his reception would be ungracious. The man felt all the stored-up savagery born of his helpless remonstrance. It must have some vent. Every one and everything that had contributed to her misery were alike hateful to him. Had he been able to talk to Saxon just then, his unreasoning wrath would have poured itself forth as readily and bitterly as on St.

John. The sight of the agent standing in the door a few moments later, inoffensive, even humble, failed to mollify him.

"I shall have the two pictures delivered within the next day,"

ventured the Englishman.

Steele turned brutally on the visitor.

"Do you mean to risk remaining in Paris now?" he demanded.

At the tone, St. John stiffened. He was humble because these people had been kind. Now, meeting hostility, he threw off his lowly demeanor.

"Why, may I ask, should I leave Paris?" There was a touch of delicately shaded defiance in the questioning voice.

"Because, now, you must reckon with Mr. Saxon for pirating his work!

Because he may choose to make you walk the plank."

Steele whipped out his answer in rapid, angry sentences.

St. John met the eyes of the Kentuckian insolently.

"Pardon the suggestion that you misstate the case," he said, softly.

"I have never sold a picture as a Marston that was not a Marston--it would appear that unconsciously I was, after all, honest. As for Mr.

Saxon, there is, it seems, no Mr. Saxon. That gentleman was entirely mythical. It was an alias, if you please."

It was Steele who winced now, but his retort was contemptuously cool:

"Do you fancy Mr. Marston will accept that explanation?"

"Mr. Steele--" the derelict drew back his thin shoulders, and faced the other with a glint in the pale pupils that was an echo of the days when he had been able to look men in the face. "Before I became a scoundrel, sir, I was a gentleman. My daughter is extremely ill. I must remain with her, and take the chance as to what Mr. Marston may choose to do. I shall hope that he will make some allowance for a father's desperate--if unscrupulous--effort to care for his daughter.

I hope so particularly inasmuch as that daughter is also his wife."

Steele started forward, his eyes going involuntarily to the girl, but she sat unflinching, except that a sudden, spasm of pain crossed the hopelessness of her eyes. Somewhere among Duska Filson's ancestors, there had been a stoic. Instantly, Steele realized that it was he himself who had brought about the needless cruelty of that reminder.

St. John had disarmed him, and put him in the wrong.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said.

"I came here," said St. John slowly, "not only to notify you about your canvases. There was something else. You were both very considerate when I was here before. It is strange that a man who will do dishonest things still clings to the wish that his occasional honest motives shall not be misconstrued. I don't want you to think that I intentionally lied to you then. I told you Frederick Marston was dead. I believed it. Before I began this--this piracy, I investigated, and satisfied myself on the point. Time corroborated me.

It is as though he had arisen from the grave. That is all."

The man paused; then, looking at the girl, he continued:

"And Mr. Saxon--" he hesitated a moment upon the name, but went resolutely on--"Mr. Saxon will recover. When he wakes next, the doctors believe, he will awake to everything. After his violent exertion and the shock of his partial realization, he became delirious. For several days perhaps, he must have absolute quiet, but he will take up a life in which there are no empty s.p.a.ces."

The girl rose, and, as she spoke, there was a momentary break in her voice that led Steele to hope for the relief of tears, but her tone steadied itself, and her eyes remained dry.

"Mr. St. John," she said slowly, "may I go and see--your daughter?"

For a moment, the Englishman looked at her quietly, then tears flooded his eyes. He thought of the message of the portrait, and, with no information except that of his own observing eyes, he read a part at least of the situation.

"Miss Filson," he said with as simple a dignity as though his name had never been tarnished, as though the gentleman had never decayed into the derelict, "my daughter would be happy to receive you, but she is in no condition to hear startling news. By her own wish, we have not in seven years spoken of Mr. Marston. She does not know that I believed him dead, she does not know that he has reappeared. To tell her would endanger her life."

"I shall not go as a bearer of news," the girl a.s.sured him; "I shall go only as a friend of her father's, and--because I want to."

St. John hesitatingly put out his hand. When the girl gave him hers, he bent over it with a catch in his voice, but a remnant of the grand manner, and kissed her fingers in the fas.h.i.+on of the old days.

Driving with Steele the next morning to St. John's lodgings, the girl looked straight ahead steadfastly. The rain of the night had been forgotten, and the life of Paris glittered with sun and brilliant abandon. Pleasure-wors.h.i.+p and vivacious delight seemed to lie like a spirit of the departed summer on the boulevards. Along the _Champs Elysees_, from the _Place de la Concorde_ to the _Arc de Triomphe_, flowed a swift, continuous parade of motors, bearing in state gaily dressed women, until the nostrils were filled with a strangely blended odor of gasoline and flowers. The pavement cafes and sidewalks flashed color, and echoed laughter. Nowhere, from the spot where the guillotine had stood to the circle where Napoleon decreed his arch, did there seem a niche for sorrow.