The Key to Yesterday Part 27

"Will you wait here to see to what he awakens?" questioned Steele.

Duska shook her head.

"I have no right to wait. And yet--yet, I can't go home!" She leaned toward him, impulsively. "I couldn't bear going back to Kentucky now,"

she added, plaintively; "I couldn't bear it."

"You will go to Nice for a while," said Steele, firmly. He had fallen into the position, of arranging their affairs. Mrs. Horton, distressed in Duska's distress, found herself helpless to act except upon his direction.

The girl nodded, apathetically.

"It doesn't matter," she said.

Then, she looked up again.

"But I want you to stay. I want you to do everything you can for both of them." She paused, and her next words were spoken with an effort: "And I don't want--I don't want you to speak of me. I don't want you to try to remind him."

"He will question me," demurred Steele.

Duska's head was raised with a little gesture of pride.

"I am not afraid," she said, "that he will ask you anything he should not--anything that he has not the right to ask."

CHAPTER XX

When he turned back, a day later, from the turmoil of the station, from the strenuous labor of weighing trunks, locating the compartment in the train, subsidizing the guards, and, hardest of all, saying good-bye to Duska with a seeming or normal cheerfulness, Steele found himself irritably out of measure with the quick-step of Paris. Mrs.

Horton and the girl were on their way to the Riviera. He was left behind to watch results; almost, it seemed to him, to sit by and observe the post-mortem on every hope in the lives of three people.

Nice should still be quiet. The tidal wave of "trippers" would not for a little while sweep over its rose-covered slopes and white beaches and dazzling esplanades, and the place would afford the girl at least every soothing influence that nature could offer. That would not be much, but it would be something.

As for himself, he felt the isolation of Paris. On a desert, a man may become lonely; in deep forests and on high mountains, he may come to know and hate his own soul in solitude, but the last note of aloofness, of utter exile, is that which comes to him who looks vainly for one face in a sea of other faces, whose small cosmos lies in unwept and unnoticed ruin in the midst of a giant city that moves along its indifferent way to the time of dance-music. In the hotel, there was the chatter of tourists. His own tongue was prattled by men and women whose lives seemed to revolve around the shops of the _Rue de la Paix_, or whose literature was the information of the guide-books. He felt that everyone was invading his somberness of mood with trivialities, until, in revulsion against the whole stage-setting of things, he had himself and his luggage transported to the _Hotel Voltaire_, where the life about him was the simpler life of the less pretentious _quais_ of the Seine.

After his _dejeuner_, he sat for a time attempting to readjust his ideas. He had told Saxon that he would never again speak of love to Duska. Now, he realized how barren of hope it would ever be for him to renew his plea. She had bankrupted his heart. He had buried his own hopes, and no one except himself had known at what cost to himself. He had taken his place in the niche dedicated to closest friend, just outside the inner shrine reserved for the one who could penetrate that far. Now, he was in a greater distress. Now, he wanted only her happiness, and as he had never wanted it before. Now, he realized that the only source through which this could come was the source that seemed hopelessly clogged. There was no doubt of his sincerity. Even his own intimate questioning acquitted him of self-consideration.

Could he at that moment have had one wish fulfilled by some magic agency of miracle, that wish would have been that he might lead Robert Saxon, as Robert Saxon had been, to Duska, with all his memory and love intact, and free from any inc.u.mbrance that might divide them.

That would have been the gift of all gifts, and the only gift that would drive the look of heart-hunger and despair from her eyes.

Steele was restless, and, taking up his hat, he strolled out along the quay, and turned at last into the _Boulevard St. Michel_, stretching off in a broad vista of cafe-lined sidewalks. The life of the "_Boule Mich_" held no attraction for him. In his earlier days, he had known it from the river to the _Boulevard Montparna.s.se_. He knew its tributary streets, its lodgings, its schools and the life which the spirit of the modern is so rapidly revolutionizing from Bohemia's shabby capital to a conventionalized district. None of these things held for him the piquant challenge of novelty.

As he pa.s.sed a certain cafe, which he had once known as the informal club of the Marston cult, he realized that here the hilarity was more p.r.o.nounced than elsewhere. The boulevard itself was for squares a thread, stringing cafes 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 habitues 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 _frappe_ gla.s.s. At the question, he looked up, astonished.

"But is it possible monsieur does not know? We are all brothers here--brothers in the wors.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s and flas.h.i.+ng 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 wors.h.i.+ped master.

Some half-drunken student, his hand upon the shoulder of a model, lifted a tilting gla.s.s, and shouted thickly, "_Vive l'art! Vive Marston!_" The crowd took up the shout, and there was much clinking of gla.s.s.

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. Herve. Like himself, M. Herve 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 cus.h.i.+ons of the wall seat.

"I have heard the story," the Frenchman a.s.sured Steele. "Monsieur may spare himself the pain of repeating it. It is a miracle!"

Steele was looking into his gla.s.s.

"It is a most unhappy miracle," he replied.

"But, _mon dieu_!" M. Herve 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-a-vis only nodded, and Herve 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 ident.i.ty 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 h.e.l.l 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. Herve nodded his head with grave a.s.sent.

"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-G.o.d of the palette. Now, he is the G.o.d."

"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."