“Her hand was still on her sword hilt, the spur was still on her heel,She had not cast her harness of gray war-dinted steel;High on her red-splashed charger, beautiful, bold and browned,Bright-eyed out of the battle, the Young Queen rode to be crowned.”
“Her hand was still on her sword hilt, the spur was still on her heel,She had not cast her harness of gray war-dinted steel;High on her red-splashed charger, beautiful, bold and browned,Bright-eyed out of the battle, the Young Queen rode to be crowned.”
He did not realize that he had repeated the lines aloud, until she turned her face and spoke with something nearer to bitterness than he had ever heard in her voice:
“Rode to be crowned—did you say?” And she laughed unhappily.
For more than a week after the ride to the cliff, Duska withdrew herself from the orbit in which Saxon revolved, and the man, feeling that she wished to dismiss him, in part at least, used the “air line” much less frequently than in the days that had been. Once, when Steele had left the cabin early to dine at the “big house,” Saxon protested that he must stay and write letters. He slipped away, however, in the summer starlight, and took one of the canoes from the boat-house on the river. He drove the light craft as noiselessly and gloomily as a funeral barge along the shadow of the bank, the victim of utter misery, and his blackness of mood was intensified when he saw a second canoe pass in mid-channel, and recognized Steele’s tenor in the drifting strains of a sentimental song. There was no moon, and the river was only a black mirror for the stars. The tree-grown banks were blacker fringes of shadow, but he could make out a slender figure wielding the stern paddle with an easy gracewhich he knew was Duska’s. His sentiment was in no wise jealousy, but it was in every wise heart-hunger.
When they did meet, she was cordial and friendly, but the old intimate régime had been disturbed, and for the man the sun was clouded. He was to send a consignment of pictures to his Eastern agent for exhibition and sale, and he wished to include several of the landscapes he had painted since his arrival at the cabin. Finding creative work impossible, he devoted himself to that touching up and varnishing which is largely mechanical, and made frequent trips to town for the selection of frames.
So much of his time had been spent at Horton House that unbroken absence would have been noticeable. His visits were, however, rarer, and on one occasion Mrs. Horton made an announcement which he found decidedly startling.
“I have been wanting to take a trip to Cuba early in the fall, and possibly go on to Venezuela where some old friends are in the diplomatic service,” she said, “but Mr. Horton pleads business, and I can’t persuade Duska to go with me.”
At once, Steele had taken up the project with enthusiasm, asking to be admitted to the party and beginning an outline of plans.
Saxon found himself shuddering at the idea of the girl’s going to the coast where perhaps he himself had a criminal record. He had procrastinated too long. He had secretly planned his own trip of self-investigation for a time when the equatorial heat had begun to abate its midsummer ferocity. Evidently, he must hasten his departure. But the girl’s answer in part reassured him.
“It doesn’t appeal, Aunty. Why not get the Longmores? They are always ready to go touring. They’ve exhausted the far East, and are weeping for new worlds.”
Saxon went back early that night, and once more tramped the woods. Steele lingered, and later, while the whippoorwills were calling and a small owl plaintively lamenting, he and Duska sat alone on the white-columned verandah.
“Duska,” he said suddenly, “is there no chance for me—no little outside chance?”
She looked up, and shook her head slowly.
“I wish I could say something else, George,”she answered earnestly, “because I love you as a very dearest brother and friend, but that is all it can ever be.”
“Is there no way I can remake or remold myself?” he urged. “I have held the Platonic attitude all summer, but to-night makes all the old uncontrollable thoughts rise up and clamor for expression. Is there no way?”
“George”—her voice was very soft—“it hurts me to hurt you—but I’d have to lie to you if I said there was a way. There can’t be—ever.”
“Is there any—any new reason?” he asked.
For a moment, she hesitated in silence, and the man bent forward.
“I shouldn’t have asked that, Duska—I don’t ask it,” he hastened to amend. “Whether there is a new reason or just all the old ones, is there any way I can help—any way, leaving myself out of it, of course?”
Again, she shook her head.
“I guess there’s no way anyone can help,” she said.
Back at the cabin, Steele found his guest moodily pacing the verandah. The glow of hispipe bowl was a point of red against the black. The Kentuckian dropped into a chair, and for a time neither spoke.
At last, Steele said slowly:
“Bob, I have just asked Duska if I had a chance.”
The other man wheeled in astonishment. Steele had indeed maintained his Platonic pose so well that the other had not suspected the fire under what he believed to be an extinct crater. His own feeling had been the one thing he had not confided. They had never spoken to each other of Duska in terms of love.
“You!” he said, dully. “I didn’t know—”
Steele rose. With his hand on the door-knob, he paused.
“Bob,” he said, “the answer was the old one. It’s also been, ‘No.’ I’ve had my chance. Of course, I really knew it all the while, and yet I had to ask once more. I sha’n’t ask again. It hurts her—and I want to see her happy.” He turned and went in, closing the door behind him.
But Duska was far from happy, however much Steele and others might wish to see her so. She spent much time in solitary rides andwalks. She knew now that she loved Saxon, and she knew that he had shown in every wordless way that he loved her, yet could she be mistaken? Would he ever speak, since he had not spoken at the cliff? Her own eyes had held a declaration, and she had read in his that he understood the message. His silence at that time must be taken to mean silence for all time.
Saxon had reached his conclusion. He knew that he had hurt her pride, had rejected his opportunity. But that might be a transient grief for her. For him, it would of course be permanent. Men may love at twenty, and recover and love again, even to the number of many times, but to live to the age which he guessed his years would total, and then love as he did, was irremediable. For just that reason, he must remain silent, and must go away. To enter her life by the gate she seemed willing to open for him would mean the taking into that sacred inclosure of every hideous possibility that clouded his own future. He must not enter the gate, and, in order to be sure that a second mad impulse would not drive him through it, he must put distance between himself and the gate.
On one point, he temporized. He was eager to do one piece of work that should be his masterpiece. The greatest achievement of his art life must be her portrait. He wanted to paint it, not in the conventional evening-gown in which she seemed a young queen among women, but in the environment that he liked to think was her own by divine right. It was the dryad that he sought to put on canvas.
He asked her with so much genuine pleading in his voice that she smilingly consented, and the sittings began in the old-fashioned garden at Horton House. She was posed under a spread of branches and in such a position that the sun struck down through the leaves, kissing into color her cheeks and eyes and hair. It was a pose that called for a daring palette, one which, if he succeeded in getting on his canvas what he felt, would give a result whereon he might well rest his reputation. But to him it meant more than just that, for it was giving expression to what he saw through his love of art and his art of love.
The hours given to the first sittings were silent hours, but that was not remarkable. Saxonalways worked in silence, though there were times when he painted with gritted teeth because of thoughts he read in the face he was studying—thoughts which the model did not know her face revealed. At times, Mrs. Horton sat in the shade near by, and watched the hand that nursed the canvas with its brush, the steady, bare forearm that needed no mahlstick for support and the eyes that were narrowed to slits as he studied his tones and wide as he painted. Sometimes, Steele lingered near with a novel which he read aloud, but it happened that in the final sittings there was no one save painter and model.
It was now late in July, and the canvas had begun to take form with a miraculous quality and glow. Perhaps, the man himself did not realize that he could never again paint such a portrait, or any landscape that would be comparable with it. Some men write love-letters that are wonderful heart documents, but they write them in black and white, with words. Saxon was not only writing a love-letter, but was painting all that his resolve did not let him say. He was putting into the work pent-uplove of such force that it was almost bursting his heart. Here on canvas as through some wonderful safety-valve, he was passionately converting it all into the vivid eloquence of color.
It had been his fancy, since the picture had become something more than a strong, preliminary sketch, that Duska should not see it until it neared completion, and she, wishing to have her impression one unspoiled by foretastes, had assented to the idea. Each day after the posing ended, and while he rested, and let her rest, the face of the canvas was covered with another which was blank. Finally came the time to ask her opinion. The afternoon light had begun to change with the hint of lengthening shadows. The out-door world was aglow with gracious weather and the air had the wonderful, almost pathetic softness that sometimes comes to Kentucky for a few days in July, bringing, as it seems, a fragment strayed out of Indian Summer and lost in the mid-heat of the year.
The man stood back and covered the portrait, then, when the girl had seated herself beforethe easel, he stepped forward, and laid his hand on the covering. He hesitated a moment, and his fingers on the blank canvas trembled. He was unveiling the effort of his life, and to him she was the world. If he had failed! Then, with a deft movement, he lifted the concealing canvas, and waited.
For a moment, the girl looked with bated breath, then something between a groan and a stifled cry escaped her. She turned her eyes to him, and rose unsteadily from her seat. Her hands went to her breast, and she wavered as though she would fall. Saxon was at her side in a moment, and, as he supported her, he felt her arm tremble.
“Are you ill?” he asked, in a frightened voice.
She shook her head, and smiled. She had read the love-letters, and she had read, too, what silence must cost him. Other persons might see only wonderful art in the portrait, but she saw all the rest, and, because she saw it, silence seemed futile.
“It is a miracle!” she whispered.
The man stood for a moment at her side,then his face became gray, and he half-wheeled and covered it with his hands.
The girl took a quick step to his side, and her young hands were on his shoulders.
“What is it, dear?” she asked.
With an exclamation that stood for the breaking of all the dykes he had been building and fortifying and strengthening through the past months, he closed his arms around her, and crushed her to him.
For a moment, he was oblivious of every lesser thing. The past, the future had no existence. Only the present was alive and vital and in love. There was no world but the garden, and that world was flooded with the sun and the light of love. The present could not conceivably give way to other times before or after. It was like the hills that looked down—unchangeable to the end of things!
Nothing else could count—could matter. The human heart and human brain could not harbor meaner thoughts. She loved him. She was in his arms, therefore his arms circled the universe. Her breath was on his face, and life was good.
Then came the shock of realization. Hissphinx rose before him—not a sphinx that kept the secrets of forty dead centuries, but one that held in cryptic silence all the future. He could not offer a love tainted with such peril without explaining how tainted it was. Now, he must tell her everything.
“I love you,” he found himself repeating over and over; “I love you.”
He heard her voice, through singing stars:
“I love you. I have never said that to anyone else—never until now. And,” she added proudly, “I shall never say it again—except to you.”
In his heart rose a torrent of rebellion. To tell her now—to poison her present moment, wonderful with the happiness of surrender—would be cruel, brutal. He, too, had the right to his hour of happiness, to a life of happiness! In the strength of his exaltation, it seemed to him that he could force fate to surrender his secret. He would settle things without making her a sharer in the knowledge that peril shadowed their love. He would find a way!
Standing there with her close to his heart, and her own palpitating against his breast, he felt more than a match for mere facts andconditions. It seemed ridiculous that he had allowed things to bar his way so long. Now, he was thrice armed, and must triumph!
“I know now why the world was made,” he declared, joyfully. “I know why all the other wonderful women and all the other wonderful loves from the beginning of time have been! It was,” he announced with the supreme egotism of the moment, “that I might compare them with this.”
And so the resolve to be silent was cast away, and after it went the sudden resolve to tell everything. Saxon, feeling only triumph, did not realize that he had, in one moment, lost his second and third battles.
An hour later, they strolled back together toward the house. Saxon was burdened with the canvas on which he had painted his masterpiece. They were silent, but walking on the milky way, their feet stirring nothing meaner than star-dust. On the verandah, Steele met them, and handed his friend a much-forwarded letter, addressed in care of the Louisville club where he had dined. It bore the stamp of a South American Republic.
It was not until he had gone to his room that night that the man had time to glance at it, or even to mark its distant starting point. Then, he tore open the envelope, and read this message:
“My Erstwhile Comrade:“Though I’ve had no line from you in these years I don’t flatter myself that you’ve forgotten me. It has come to my hearing through certain channels—subterranean, of course—that your present name is Saxon and that you’ve developed genius and glory as a paint-wizard.“It seems you are now a perfectly respectable artist! Congratulations—also bravo!“My object is to tell you that I’ve tried to get word to you that despite appearances it was not I who tipped you off to the government. That is God’s truth and I can prove it. I would have written before, but since you beat it to God’s Country and went West your whereabouts have been a well-kept secret. I am innocent, as heaven is my witness! Of course, I am keeping mum.“H. S. R.”
“My Erstwhile Comrade:
“Though I’ve had no line from you in these years I don’t flatter myself that you’ve forgotten me. It has come to my hearing through certain channels—subterranean, of course—that your present name is Saxon and that you’ve developed genius and glory as a paint-wizard.
“It seems you are now a perfectly respectable artist! Congratulations—also bravo!
“My object is to tell you that I’ve tried to get word to you that despite appearances it was not I who tipped you off to the government. That is God’s truth and I can prove it. I would have written before, but since you beat it to God’s Country and went West your whereabouts have been a well-kept secret. I am innocent, as heaven is my witness! Of course, I am keeping mum.
“H. S. R.”
A short time ago, Saxon had felt stronger than all the forces of fate. He had believed that circumstances were plastic and man invincible. Now, as he bent forward in his chair, the South American letter hanging in limp fingers and the coal-oil lamp on the table throwing its circle of light on the foreign postmark and stamp of the envelope, he realized that the battle was on. The forces of which he had been contemptuous were to engage him at once, with no breathing space before the combat. Viewing it all in this light, he felt the qualms of a general who encounters an aggressive enemy before his line is drawn and his battle front arranged.
He had so entirely persuaded himself that his duty was clear and that he must not speak to the girl of love that now, when he had done so, his entire plan of campaign must be revised, and new problems must be considered. When he had been swept away on the tide that carried him to an avowal, it had been with thevague sense of realization that, if he spoke at all, he must tell the whole story. He had not done so, and now came a new question: Had he the right to tell the story until, in so far as possible, he had probed its mystery? Suppose his worst fears proved themselves. The certainty would be little harder to confess than the presumption and the suspense. Suppose, on the other hand, the fighting chance to which every man clings should, after all, acquit him? Would it not be needless cruelty to inflict on her the fears that harried his own thoughts? Must he not try first to arm himself with a definite report for, or against, himself?
After all, he argued weakly, or perhaps it was the devil’s advocate that whispered the insidious counsel, there might be a mistake. The man of Ribero’s story might still be some one else. He had never felt the instincts of murder. Surely, he had not been the embezzler, the libertine, the assassin! But, in answer to that argument, his colder logic contended there might have been to his present Dr. Jekyll a Mr. Hyde of the past. The letter he held in his hand of course meant nothingmore than that Ribero had talked to some one. It might be merely the fault of some idle gossip in a Latin-American café, when the claret flowed too freely. The writer, this unknown “H. S. R.,” had probably taken Ribero’s testimony at its face value. Then, out of the page arose insistently the one sentence that did mean something more, the new link in a chain of definite conclusion. “Since you beat it to God’s Country and went West—” That was the new evidence this anonymous witness had contributed. He had certainly gone West!
Assuredly, he must go to South America, and prosecute himself. To do this meant to thrust himself into a situation that held a hundred chances, but there was no one else who could determine it for him. It was not merely a matter of collecting and sifting evidence. It was also a test of subjecting his dormant memory to the stimulus of place and sights and sounds and smells. When he stood at the spot where Carter had faced his executioners, surely, if he were Carter, he would awaken to self-recognition. He would slip away on some pretext, and try out the issue, and then, when he spoke toDuska, he could speak in definite terms. And if he were the culprit? The question came back as surely as the pendulum swings to the bottom of the arc, and rested at the hideous conviction that he must be the malefactor. Then, Saxon rose and paced the floor, his hand convulsively crushing the letter into a crumpled wad.
Well, he would not come back! If that were his world, he would not reënter it. He was willing to try himself—to be his own prosecutor, but, if the thing spelled a sentence of disgrace, he reserved the right to be also his own executioner.
Then, the devil’s advocate again whispered seductively into his perplexity.
Suppose he went and tested the environment, searching conscience and memory—and suppose no monitor gave him an answer. Would he not then have the right to assume his innocence? Would he not have the right to feel certain that his memory, so stimulated and still inactive, was not only sleeping, but dead? Would he not be justified in dismissing the fear of a future awakening, and, as Steele hadsuggested, in going forward in the person of Robert A. Saxon, abandoning the past as completely as he had perhaps abandoned previous incarnations?
So, for the time, he stilled his fears, and under his brush the canvases became more wonderful than they had ever been. He had Duska at his side, not only in the old intimacy, but in the new and more wonderful intimacy that had come of her acknowledged love. He would finish the half-dozen pictures needed to complete the consignment for the Eastern and European exhibits, then he would start on his journey.
A week later, Saxon took Duska to a dance at the club-house on the top of one of the hills of the ridge, and, after she had tired of dancing, they had gone to a point where the brow of the knob ran out to a jutting promontory of rock. It was a cape in the dim sea of night mist which hung upon, and shrouded, the flats below. Beyond the reaches of silver gray, the more distant hills rose in mystic shadow-shapes of deep cobalt. There were stars overhead, but they were pale in the whiter light of the moon, andall the world was painted, as the moon will paint it, in silvers and blues.
Back of them was the softened waltz-music that drifted from the club-house and the bright patches of color where the Chinese lanterns swung among the trees.
As they talked, the man felt with renewed force that the girl had given him her love in the wonderful way of one who gives but once, and gives all without stint or reserve. It was as though she had presented him unconditionally with the key to the archives of her heart, and made him possessor of the unspent wealth of all the Incas.
Suddenly, he realized that his plan of leaving her without explanation, on a quest that might permit no return, was meeting her gift with half-confidence and deception. What he did with himself now, he did with her property. He was not at liberty to act without her full understanding and sympathy in his undertakings. The plan was one of infinite brutality.
He must tell her everything, and then go. He struck a match for his cigar, to give himself a moment of arranging his words, and, ashe stood shielding the light against a faintly stirring breeze, the miniature glare fell on her delicately chiseled lips and nose and chin. Her expression made him hesitate. She was very young, very innocently childlike and very happy. To tell her now would be like spoiling a little girls’ party. It must be told soon, but not while the dance music was still in their ears and the waxy smell of the dance candles still in their nostrils.
When he left her at Horton House, he did not at once return to the cabin. He wanted the open skies for his thoughts, and there was no hope of sleep.
He retraced his steps from the road, and wandered into the old-fashioned garden. At last, he halted by the seat where he had posed her for the portrait. The moon was sinking, and the shadows of the garden wall and trees and shrubs fell in long, fantastic angles across the silvered earth. The house itself was dark except where the panes of her window still glowed. Standing between the tall stalks of the hollyhocks, he held his watch up to the moon. It was half-past two o’clock.
Then, he looked up and started with surprise as he saw her standing in the path before him. At first, he thought that his imagination had projected her there. Since she had left him at the stairs, the picture she had made in her white gown and red roses had been vividly permanent, though she herself had gone.
But, now, her voice was real.
“Do you prowl under my windows all night, kind sir?” she laughed, happily. “I believe you must be almost as much in love as I am.”
The man reached forward, and seized her hand.
“It’s morning,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she assured him. Then, she added serenely: “Do you suppose that the moon shines like this every night, or that I can always expect times like these? You know,” she taunted, “it was so hard to get you to admit that you cared that it was an achievement. I must be appreciative, mustn’t I? You are an altogether reserved and cautious person.”
He seized her in his arms with neither reserve nor caution.
“Listen,” he said in an impassioned voice, “I have no right to touch you. In five minutes, you will probably not even let me speak to you. I had no right to speak. I had no right to tell you that I loved you!”
She did not draw away. She only looked into his eyes very solemnly.
“You had no right?” she repeated, in a bewildered voice. “Don’t you love me?”
“You don’t have to ask that,” he avowed. “You know it. Your own heart can answer such questions.”
“Then,” she decreed with womanlike philosophy, “you had a right to say so—because I love you, and that is settled.”
“No,” he expostulated, “I tell you I did not have the right. You must forget it. You must forget everything.” He was talking with mad impetuosity.
“It is too late,” she said simply. “Forget!” There was an indignant ring in her words. “Do you think that I could forget—or that, if I could, I would? Do you think it is a thing that happens every day?”
From a tree at the fence line came the softlylamenting note of a small owl, and across the fields floated the strident shriek of a lumbering night freight.
To Saxon’s ears, the inconsequential sounds came with a painful distinctness. It was only his own voice that seemed to him muffled in a confusion of roaring noises. His lips were so dry that he had to moisten them with his tongue.
To hesitate, to temporize, even to soften his recital, would mean another failure in the telling of it. He must plunge in after his old method of directness, even brutality, without preface or palliation.
Here, at all events, brutality were best. If his story appalled and repelled her, it would be the blow that would free her from the thraldom of the love he had unfairly stolen. If she turned from him with loathing, at least anger would hurt her less than heartbreak.
“Do you remember the story Ribero so graphically told of the filibuster and assassin and the firing squad in the plaza?” As he spoke, Saxon knew with a nauseating sense of certainty that his brain had never really doubtedhis identity. He had futilely argued with himself, but it was only his eagerness of wish that had kept clamoring concerning the possibility of a favorable solution. All the while, his reason had convicted him. Now, as he spoke, he felt sure, as sure as though he could really remember, and he felt also his unworthiness to speak to her, as though it were not Saxon, but Carter, who held her in his arms. He suddenly stepped back and held her away at arms’ length, as though he, Saxon, were snatching her from the embrace of the other man, Carter. Then, he heard her murmuring:
“Yes, of course I remember.”
“And did you notice his look of astonishment when I came? Did you catch the covert innuendoes as he talked—the fact that he talked at me—that he was accusing me—my God! recognizing me?”
The girl put up her hands, and brushed the hair back from her forehead. She shook her head as though to shake off some cloud of bewilderment and awaken herself from the shock of a nightmare. She stood so unsteadily that the man took her arm, and led her to the benchagainst the wall. There, she sank down with her face in her hands. It seemed a century, but, when she looked up again, her face, despite its pallor in the moonlight, was the face of one seeking excuses for one she loves, one trying to make the impossible jibe with fact.
“I suppose you did not catch the full significance of that narrative. No one did except the two of us—the unmasker and the unmasked. Later, he studied a scar on my hand. It’s too dark to see, but you can feel it.”
He caught her fingers in his own. They were icy in his hot clasp, as he pressed them against his right palm.
“Tell me how it happened. Tell me that—that the sequel was a lie!” She imperiously commanded, yet there was under the imperiousness a note of pleading.
“I can’t,” he answered. “He seemed to know the facts. I don’t.”
Her senses were unsteady, reeling things, and he in his evening clothes was an axis of black and white around which the moonlit world spun drunkenly.
Her voice was incredulous, far away.
“You don’t know?” she repeated, slowly. “You don’t know what you did?”
Then, for the first time, he remembered that he had not told her of the blind door between himself and the other years. He had presented himself only on a plea of guilty to the charge, without even the palliation of forgetfulness.
Slowly steeling himself for the ordeal, he went through his story. He told it as he had told Steele, but he added to it all that he had not told Steele—all of the certainty that was building itself against his future out of his past. He presented the case step by step as a prosecutor might have done, adding bit of testimony after bit of testimony, and ending with the sentence from the letter, which told him that he had gone West. He had played the coward long enough. Now, he did not even mention the hope he had tried to foster, that there might be a mistake. It was all so horribly certain that those hopes were ghosts, and he could no longer call them from their graves. The girl listened without a word or an interruption of any sort.
“And so,” he said calmly at the end, “thepossibility that I vaguely feared has come forward. The only thing that I know of my other life is a disgraceful thing—and ruin.”
There was a long, torturing silence as she sat steadily, almost hypnotically, gazing into his eyes.
Then, a remarkable thing happened. The girl came to her feet with the old lithe grace that had for the moment forsaken her, leaving her a shape of slender distress. She rose buoyantly and laughed! With a quick step forward, she threw her arms around his neck, and stood looking into his drawn face.
He caught at her arms almost savagely.
“Don’t!” he commanded, harshly. “Don’t!”
“Why?” Her question was serene.
“Because it was Robert Saxon that you loved. You sha’n’t touch Carter. I can’t let Carter touch you.” He was holding her wrists tightly, and pressing her away from him.
“I have never touched Carter,” she said, confidently. “They lied about it, dear. You were never Carter.”
In the white light, her upturned eyes were sure with confidence.
“Now, you listen,” she ordered. “You told me a case that your imagination has constructed from foundation to top. It is an ingenious case. Its circumstantial evidence is skilfully woven into conviction. They have hanged men on that sort of evidence, but here there is a court of appeals. I know nothing about it. I have only my woman’s heart, but my woman’s heart knows you. There is no guilt in you—there never has been. You have tortured yourself because you look like a man whose name is Carter.”
She said it all so positively, so much with the manner of a decree from the supreme bench, that, for a moment, the ghosts of hope began to rise and gather in the man’s brain; for a moment, he forgot that this was not really the final word.
He had crucified himself in the recital to make it easier for her to abandon him. He had told one side only, and she had seen only the force of what he had left unsaid. If that could be possible, it might be possible she was right. With the reaction came a wild momentaryjoyousness. Then, his face grew grave again.
“I had sworn by every oath I knew,” he told her, “that I would speak no word of love to you until I was no longer anonymous. I must go to Puerto Frio at once, and determine it.”
Her arms tightened about his neck, and she stood there, her hair brushing his face as though she would hold him away from everything past and future except her own heart.
“No! no!” she passionately dissented. “Even if you were the man, which you are not, you are no more responsible for that dead life than for your acts in some other planet. You are mine now, and I am satisfied.”
“But, if afterward,” he went on doggedly, “if afterward I should awake into another personality—don’t you see? Neither you nor I, dearest, can compromise with doubtful things. To us, life must be a thing clean beyond the possibility of blot.”
She still shook her head in stubborn negation.
“You gave yourself to me,” she said, “andI won’t let you go. You won’t wake up in another life. I won’t let you—and, if you do—” she paused, then added with a smile on her lips that seemed to settle matters for all time—“that is a bridge we will cross when we come to it—and we will cross it together.”
When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he would have called “full-dress suits,” still sitting over their cigars on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a friendship that needs no further testing. Steele was not the type that goes into an embittered exile. His face had become somewhat fixed as he listened, but there had been no surprise. He had known already, and, when the story was ended, he was an ally.
“There are two courses open to you,” he said, when he rose at last from his seat, “the plan you have of going to South America, and the one I suggested of facing forward and leaving the past behind. If you do the first, whetheror not you are the man they want, the circumstantial case is strong. You know too little of your past to defend yourself, and you are placing yourself in the enemy’s hands. The result will probably be against you with equal certainty whether innocent or guilty.”
“Letting things lie,” demurred Saxon, “solves nothing.”
“Why solve them?” Steele paused at his door. “It would seem to me that with her in your life you would be safe against forgetting your present at all events—and that present is enough.”
The summer was drawing to its close while Saxon still wavered. Unless he faced the charge that seemed impending near the equator, he must always stand, before himself at least, convicted. Yet, Duska was immovable in her decision, and Steele backed her intuition with so many plausible, masculine arguments that he waited. He was packing and preparing the pictures that were to be shipped to New York. Some of them would be exhibited and sold there. Others, to be selected by his Eastern agent, would go on to the Paris market. Hehad included the landscape painted on the cliff, on the day when the purple flower lured him over the edge, and the portrait of the girl. These pictures, however, he specified, were only for exhibition, and were not under any circumstances to be sold.
Each day, he insisted on the necessity of his investigation, and argued it with all the forcefulness he could command, but Duska steadfastly overruled him.
Once, as the sunset dyed the west with the richness of gold and purple and orange and lake, they were walking their horses along a hill lane between pines and cedars. The girl’s eyes were drinking in the color and abundant beauty, and the man rode silent at her saddle skirt. She had silenced his continual argument after her usual decisive fashion. Now, she turned her head, and demanded:
“Suppose you went and settled this, would you be nearer your certainty? The very disproving of this suspicion would leave you where you were before Señor Ribero told his story.”
“It would mean this much,” he argued. “I should have followed to its end every clew thatwas given me. I should have exhausted the possibilities, and I could then with a clear conscience leave the rest to destiny. I could go on feeling that I had a right to abandon the past because I had questioned it as far as I knew.”
She was resolute.
“I should,” he urged, “feel that in letting you share the danger I had at least tried to end it.”
She raised her chin almost scornfully, and her eyes grew deeper.
“Do you think that danger can affect my love? Are we the sort of people who have no eyes in our hearts, and no hearts in our eyes, who live and marry and die, and never have a hint of loving as the gods love? I want to love you that way—audaciously—taking every chance. If the stars up there love, they love like that.”
Some days later, Mrs. Horton again referred to her wish to make the trip to Venezuela. To the man’s astonishment, Duska appeared this time more than half in favor of it, and spoke as though she might after all reconsider her refusal to be her aunt’s traveling companion. Later, when they were alone, he questioned her,and she laughed with the note of having a profound secret. At last, she explained.
“I am interested in South America now,” she informed him. “I wasn’t before. I shouldn’t think of letting you go there, but I guess I’m safe in Puerto Frio, and I might settle your doubts myself. You see,” she added judicially, “I’m the one person you can trust not to betray your secret, and yet to find out all about this mysterious Mr. Carter.”
Saxon was frankly frightened. Unless she promised that she would do nothing of the sort, he would himself go at once. He had waited in deference to her wishes, but, if the thing were to be recognized as deserving investigation at all, he must do it himself. He could not protect himself behind her as his agent. She finally assented, yet later Mrs. Horton once more referred to the idea of the trip as though she expected Duska to accompany her.
Then it was that Saxon was driven back on strategy. The idea was one that he found it hard to accept, yet he knew that he could never gain her consent, and her suggestion proved that, though she would not admit it, at heartshe realized the necessity of a solution. The hanging of his canvases for exhibition afforded an excuse for going to New York. On his arrival there, he would write to her, explaining his determination to take a steamer for the south, and “put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.” There seemed to be no alternative.
He did not take Steele into his confidence, because Steele agreed with Duska, and should be able to say, when questioned, that he had not been a party to the conspiracy. When Saxon stood, a few days later, on the step of an inbound train, the girl stood waving her sunbonnet, slenderly outlined against the green background of the woods beyond the flag-station. A sudden look of pain crossed the man’s face, and he leaned far out for a last glimpse of her form.
Steele saw Duska’s smile grow wistful as the last car rounded the curve.
“I can’t quite accustom myself to it,” he said, slowly: “this new girl who has taken the place of the other, of the girl who did not know how to love.”
“I know more about it,” she declared, “thananybody else that ever lived. And I’ve only one life to give to it.”
Saxon’s first mistake was born of the precipitate haste of love. He wrote the letter to Duska that same evening on the train. It was a difficult letter to write. He had to explain, and explain convincingly, that he was disobeying her expressed command only because his love was not the sort that could lull itself into false security. If fate held any chance for him, he would bring back victory. If he laid the ghost of Carter, he would question his sphinx no further.
The writing was premature, because he had to stop in Washington and seek Ribero. He had some questions to ask. But, at Washington, he learned that Ribero had been recalled by government. Then, hurrying through his business in New York, Saxon took the first steamer sailing. It happened to be by a slow line, necessitating several transfers.
It was characteristic of Duska that, when she received the letter hardly a day after Saxon’s departure, she did not at once open it, but, slipping it, dispatch-like, into her belt, she calledthe terrier, and together they went into the woods. Here, sitting among the ferns with the blackberry thicket at her back and the creek laughing below, she read and reread the pages.
For a while, she sat stunned, her brow drawn; then, she said to the terrier in a voice as nearly plaintive as she ever allowed it to be:
“I don’t like it. I don’t want him ever to go away—and yet—” she tossed her head upward—“yet, I guess I shouldn’t have much use for him if he didn’t do just such things.”
The terrier evidently approved the sentiment, for he cocked his head gravely to the side, and slowly wagged his stumpy tail.
But the girl did not remain long in idleness. For a time, her forehead was delicately corrugated under the stress of rapid thinking as she sat, her fingers clasped about her updrawn knees, then she rose and hurried to Horton House. There were things to be done and done at once, and it was her fashion, once reaching resolution, to act quickly.
It was necessary to take Mrs. Horton into her full confidence, because it was necessary that Mrs. Horton should be ready to go with her,as fast as trains and steamers could carry them, to a town called Puerto Frio in South America, and South America was quite a long way off. Mrs. Horton had known for weeks that something more was transpiring than showed on the surface. She had even inferred that there was “an understanding” between her niece and the painter, and this inference she had not found displeasing. The story that Duska told did astonish her, but under her composure of manner Mrs. Horton had the ability to act with prompt decision. Mr. Horton knew only part, but was complacent, and saw no reason why a trip planned for a later date should not be “advanced on the docket,” and it was so ordered.
Steele, of course, already knew most of the story, and it was he who kept the telephone busy between the house and the city ticket-offices. While the ladies packed, he was acquiring vast information as to schedules and connections. He learned that they could catch an outgoing steamer from New Orleans, which would probably put them at their destination only a day or two behind Saxon. Incidentally, in making these arrangements, Steele reserved accommodationsfor himself as well as Mrs. Horton and her niece.
With the American coast left behind, Saxon’s journey through the Caribbean, even with the palliation of the trade-winds, was insufferably hot. The slenderly filled passenger-list gave the slight alleviation of an uncrowded ship. Those few travelers whose misfortunes doomed them to such a cruise at such a time, lay listlessly under the awnings, and watched the face of the water grow bluer, bluer, bluer to the hot indigo of the twentieth parallel, where nothing seemed cool enough for energy or motion except the flying fish and the pursuing gull.
There were several days of this to be endured, and the painter, thinking of matters further north and further south, found no delight in its beauty. He would stand, deep in thought, at the bow when day died and night was born without benefit of twilight, watching the disk of the sun plunge into the sea like a diver. It seemed that Nature herself was here sudden and passionate in matters of life and death. He saw the stars come out, low-hanging and large,and the water blaze with phosphorescence wherever a wave broke, brilliantly luminous where the propeller churned the wake. It was to him an ominous beauty, fraught with crowding portents of ill omen.
The entering and leaving of ports became monotonous. Each was a steaming village of hot adobe walls, corrugated-iron custom houses and sweltering, ragged palms. At last, at a town no more or less appealing than the others, just as the ear-splitting whistle screeched its last warning of departure, a belated passenger came over the side from a frantically-driven row-boat. The painter was looking listlessly out at the green coast line, and did not notice the new arrival.
The newcomer followed his luggage up the gangway to the deck, his forehead streaming perspiration, his none-too-fresh gray flannels splashed with salt water. At the top, he shook the hand of the second officer, with the manner of an old acquaintance.
“I guess that was close!” he announced, as he mopped his face with a large handkerchief, and began fanning himself with a stained Panamahat. “Did the—the stuff get aboard all right at New York?”
The officer looked up, with a quick, cautious glance about him.
“The machinery is stowed away in the hold,” he announced.
“Good,” replied the newcomer, energetically. “That machinery must be safeguarded. It is required in the development of a country that needs developin’. Do I draw my usual stateroom? See the purser? Good!”
The tardy passenger was tall, a bit under six feet, but thin almost to emaciation. His face was keen, and might have been handsome except that the alertness was suggestive of the fox or the weasel—furtive rather than intelligent. The eyes were quick-seeing and roving; the nose, aquiline; the lips, thin. On them sat habitually a half-satirical smile. The man had black hair sprinkled with gray, yet he could not have been more than thirty-six or seven.
“I’ll just run in and see the purser,” he announced, with his tireless energy. Saxon, turning from the hatch, caught only a vanishing glimpse of a tall, flannel-clad figure disappearinginto the doorway of the main saloon, as he himself went to his stateroom to freshen himself up for dinner.
As the painter emerged from his cabin a few minutes before the call of the dinner-bugle, the thin man was lounging against the rail further aft.
Saxon stood for a moment drinking in the grateful coolness that was creeping into the air with the freshening of the evening breeze.
The stranger saw him, and started. Then, he looked again, with the swift comprehensiveness that belonged to his keen eyes, and stepped modestly back into the protecting angle where he could himself be sheltered from view by the bulk of a tarpaulined life-boat. When Saxon turned and strolled aft, the man closely followed these movements, then went into his own cabin.
That evening, at dinner, the new passenger did not appear. He dined in his stateroom, but later, as Saxon lounged with his own thoughts on the deck, the tall American was never far away, though he kept always in the blackest shadow thrown by boats or superstructure on the moonlit deck. If Saxon turnedsuddenly, the other would flatten himself furtively and in evident alarm back into the blackness. He had the manner of a man who is hunted, and who has recognized a pursuer.
Saxon, ignorant even of the other’s presence, had no knowledge of the interest he was himself exciting. Had his curiosity been aroused to inquiry, he might have learned that the man who had recently come aboard was one Howard Stanley Rodman. It is highly improbable, however, that he would have discovered the additional fact that the “stuff” Rodman had asked after as he came aboard was not the agricultural implements described in its billing, but revolutionary muskets to be smuggled off at sunrise to-morrow to the coast village La Punta, five miles above Puerto Frio.
Not knowing that a conspirator was hiding away in a cabin through fear of him, Saxon was of course equally unconscious of having as shipmate a man as dangerous as the cornered wolf to one who stands between itself and freedom.
La Punta is hardly a port. The shipping for this section of the east coast goes to PuertoFrio, and Saxon had not come out of his cabin the next morning when Rodman left. The creaking of crane chains disturbed his sleep, but he detected nothing prophetic in the sound. To have done so, he must have understood that the customs officer at this ocean flag station was up to his neck in a revolutionary plot which was soon to burst; that the steamship line, because of interests of its own which a change of government would advance, had agreed to regard the rifles in the hold as agricultural implements, and that Mr. Rodman was among the most expert of traveling salesmen for revolutions and organizers ofjuntas. To all that knowledge, he must then have added the quality of prophecy. It is certain, however, that, had he noted the other’s interest in himself and coupled with that interest the coincidence that the initials of the furtive gentleman’s name on the purser’s list were “H. S. R.,” he would have slept still more brokenly.
If he had not looked Mr. Rodman up on the list, Mr. Rodman had not been equally delinquent. The name Robert A. Saxon had by no means escaped his attention.
Puerto Frio sits back of its harbor, a medley of corrugated iron roofs, adobe walls and square-towered churches. Along the water front is a fringe of ragged palms. At one end of the semicircle that breaks the straight coast line, a few steamers come to anchorage; at the other rise jugged groups of water-eaten rocks, where the surf runs with a cannonading of breakers, and tosses back a perpetual lather of infuriated spray. From the mole, Saxon had his first near view of the city. He drew a long inhalation of the hot air, and looked anxiously about him.
He had been asking himself during the length of his journey whether a reminder would be borne in on his senses, and awaken them to a throb of familiarity. He had climbed the slippery landing stairs with the oppressing consciousness that he might step at their top into a new world—or an old and forgotten world.Now, he drew to one side, and swept his eyes questioningly about.
Before him stretched a broad open space, through which the dust swirled hot and indolent. Beyond lay the Plaza of Santo Domingo, and on the twin towers of its church two crosses leaned dismally askew. A few barefooted natives slouched across the sun-refracting square, their shadows blue against the yellow heat. Saxon’s gaze swung steadily about the radius of sight, but his brain, like a paralyzed nerve, touched with the testing-electrode, gave no reflex—no response.
There was a leap at his heart which became hope as his cab jolted on to the Hotel Frances y Ingles over streets that awoke no convicting memories. He set out almost cheerfully for the American Legation to present the letters of introduction he had brought from New York and to tell his story. Thus supplied with credentials and facts, the official might be prepared to assist him.
His second step—the test upon which he mainly depended—involved a search for a yellow cathedral wall, surrounded with redflowers and facing an open area. There, Saxon wanted to stand, for a moment, against the masonry, with the sounds of the street in his ears and the rank fragrance of the vine in his nostrils. There he would ask his memory, under the influence of these reminders, the question the water-front had failed to answer.
That wandering, however, should be reserved for the less conspicuous time of night. He would spend the greater part of the day, since his status was so dubious, in the protection of his room at the hotel.
If night did not answer the question, he would go again at sunrise, and await the early glare on the wall, since that would exactly duplicate former conditions. The night influences would be softer, less cruel—and less exact, but he would go first by darkness and reconnoiter the ground—unless his riddle were solved before.
The American Legation, he was informed, stood as did his hostelry, on the main Plaza, only a few doors distant and directly opposite the palace of the President.
He was met by Mr. Partridge, the secretary of legation. The minister was spendingseveral days at Miravista, but was expected back that evening, or to-morrow morning at the latest. In the meantime, if the secretary could be of service to a countryman, he would be glad. The secretary was a likable young fellow with frank American eyes. He fancied Saxon’s face, and was accordingly cordial.
“There is quite a decent club here for Anglo-Saxon exiles,” announced Mr. Partridge. “Possibly, you’d like to look in? I’m occupied for the day, but I’ll drop around for you this evening, and make you out a card.”
Saxon left his letters with the secretary to be given to the chief on arrival, and returned to the “Frances y Ingles.”
He did not again emerge from his room until evening, and, as he left thepatioof the hotel for his journey to the old cathedral, the moon was shining brightly between the shadows of the adobe walls and the balconies that hung above the pavements. As he went out through the street-door, Mr. Howard Stanley Rodman glanced furtively up from a corner table, and tossed away a half-smoked cigarette.
The old cathedral takes up a square. In theniches of its outer wall stand the stone effigies of many saints. Before its triple, iron-studded doors stretches a tiled terrace. At its right runs a side-street, and, attracted by a patch of clambering vine on the time-stained walls, where the moon fell full upon them, Saxon turned into the byway. At the far end, the façade rose blankly, fronting a bare drill-ground, and there he halted. The painter had not counted on the moon. Now, as he took his place against the wall, it bathed him in an almost effulgent whiteness. The shadows of the abutments were inky in contrast, and the disused and ancient cannon, planted at the curb for a corner post, stood out boldly in relief. But the street was silent and, except for himself, absolutely deserted.
For a time, he stood looking outward. From somewhere at his back, in the vaultlike recesses of the building, drifted the heavy pungency of incense burning at a shrine.
His ears were alert for the sounds that might, in their drifting inconsequence, mean everything. Then, as no reminder came, he closed his eyes, and wracked his imagination inconcentrated thought as a monitor to memory. He groped after some detail of the other time, if the other time had been an actual fragment of his life. He strove to recall the features of the officer who commanded the death squad, some face that had stood there before him on that morning; the style of uniforms they wore. He kept his eyes closed, not only for seconds, but for minutes, and, when in answer to his focused self-hypnotism and prodding suggestion no answer came, there came in its stead a torrent of joyous relief.
Then, he heard something like a subdued ejaculation, and opened his eyes upon a startling spectacle.
Leaning out from the shadow of an abutment stood a thin man, whose face in the moon showed a strange mingling of savagery and terror. It was a face Saxon did not remember to have seen before. The eyes glittered, and the teeth showed as the thin lips were drawn back over them in a snarling sort of smile. But the most startling phase of the tableau, to the man who opened his eyes upon it without warning, was the circumstance of the unknown’spressing an automatic pistol against his breast. Saxon’s first impression was that he had fallen prey to a robber, but he knew instinctively that this expression was not that of a man bent on mere thievery. It had more depth and evil satisfaction. It was the look of a man who turns a trick in an important game.
As the painter gazed at the face and figure bending forward from the abutment’s sooty shadow like some chimera or gargoyle fashioned in the wall, his first sentiment was less one of immediate peril than of argument with himself. Surely, so startling a dénouement should serve to revive his memory, if he had faced other muzzles there!
When the man with the pistol spoke, it was in words that were illuminating. The voice was tremulous with emotion, probably nervous terror, yet the tone was intended to convey irony, and was partly successful.
“I presume,” it said icily, “you wished to enjoy the sensation of standing at that point—this time with the certainty of walking away alive. It must be a pleasant reminiscence, but one never can tell.” The thin man paused, andthen began afresh, his voice charged with a bravado that somehow seemed to lack genuineness.
“Last time, you expected to be carried away dead—and went away living. This time, you expected to walk away in safety, and, instead, you’ve got to die. Your execution was only delayed.” He gave a short, nervous laugh, then his voice came near breaking as he went on almost wildly: “I’ve got to kill you, Carter. God knows I don’t want to do it, but I must have security! This knowledge that you are watching me to drop on me like a hawk on a rat, will drive me mad. They’ve told me up and down both these God-forsaken coasts, from Ancon to Buenos Ayres, from La Boca to Concepcion, that you would get me, and now it’s sheer self-defense with me. I know you never forgave a wrong—and God knows that I never did you the wrong you are trying to revenge. God knows I am innocent.”
Rodman halted breathless, and stood with his flat chest rising and falling almost hysterically. He was in the state when men are most irresponsible and dangerous.
Meanwhile, a pistol held in an unsteady hand, its trigger under an uncertain finger, emphasized a situation that called for electrical thinking. To assert a mistake in identity would be ludicrous. Saxon was not in a position to claim that. The other man seemed to have knowledge that he himself lacked. Moreover, that knowledge was the information which Saxon, as self-prosecutor, must have. The only course was to meet the other’s bravado with a counter show of bravado, and keep him talking. Perhaps, some one would pass in the empty street.
“Well,” demanded Rodman between gasping breaths, “why in hell don’t you say something?”
Saxon began to feel the mastery of the stronger man over the weaker, despite the fact that the weaker supplemented his inferiority with a weapon.
“It appears to me,” came the answer, and it was the first time Rodman had heard the voice, now almost velvety, “it appears to me that there isn’t very much for me to say. You seem to be in the best position to do the talking.”
“Yes, damn you!” accused the other, excitedly. “You are always the same—always making the big pyrotechnic display! You have grandstanded and posed as the debonair adventurer, until it’s come to be second nature. That won’t help now!” The thin man’s braggadocio changed suddenly to something like a whine.
“You know I’m frightened, and you’re throwing a bluff. You’re a fool not to realize that it’s because I’m so frightened that I am capable of killing you. I’ve craned my neck around every corner, and jumped at every shadow since that day—always watching for you. Now, I’m going to end it. I see your plan as if it were printed on a glass pane. You’ve discovered my doings, and, if you left here alive, you’d inform the government.”
Here, at least, Saxon could speak, and speak truthfully.
“I don’t know anything, or care anything, about your plans,” he retorted, curtly.
“That’s a damned lie!” almost shrieked the other man. “It’s just your style. It’s just your infernal chicanery. I wrote you thatletter in good faith, and you tracked me. You found out where I was and what I was doing. How you learned it, God knows, but I suppose it’s still easy for you to get into the confidence of thejuntas. The moment I saw you on the boat, the whole thing flashed on me. It was your fine Italian brand of work to come down on the very steamer that carried my guns—to come ashore just at the psychological moment, and turn me over to the authorities on the exact verge of my success! Your brand of humor saw irony in that—in giving me the same sort of death you escaped. But it’s too late. Vegas has the guns in spite of you! There’ll be a new president in the palace within three days.” The man’s voice became almost triumphant. He was breathing more normally once again, as his courage gained its second wind.
Saxon was fencing for time. Incidentally, he was learning profusely about the revolution of to-morrow, but nothing of the revolution of yesterday.
“I neither know, nor want to know, anything about your dirty work,” he said, shortly.“Moreover, if you think I’m bent on vengeance, you are a damned fool to tell me.”
Rodman laughed satirically.
“Oh, I’m not so easy as you give me credit for being. You are trying to ‘kiss your way out,’ as the thieves put it. You’re trying to talk me out of killing you, but do you know why I’m willing to tell you all this?” He halted, then went on tempestuously. “I’ll tell you why. In the first place, you know it already, and, in the second place, you’ll never repeat any information after to-night. It’s idiotic perhaps, but my reason for not killing you right at the start is that I’ve got a fancy for telling you the true facts, whether you choose to believe them or not. It will ease my conscience afterward.”
Saxon stood waiting for the next move, bracing himself for an opportunity that might present itself, the pistol muzzle still pointed at his chest.
“I’m not timid,” went on the other. “You know me. Howard Rodman, speakin’ in general, takes his chances. But I am afraid of you, more afraid than I am of the devil inhell. I know I can’t bluff you. I saw you stand against this wall with the soldiers out there in front, and, since you can’t be frightened off, you must be killed.” The man’s voice gathered vehemence as he talked, and his face showed growing agitation. “And the horrible part is that it’s all a mistake, that I’d rather be friends with you, if you’d let me. I never was informant against you.”
He paused, exhausted by his panic and his flow of words. Saxon, with a strong effort, collected his staggered senses.
“Why do you think I come for vengeance?” he asked.
“Why do I think it?” The thin man laughed bitterly. “Why, indeed? What except necessity or implacable vengeance could drive a man to this God-forsaken strip of coast? And you—you with money enough to live richly in God’s country, you whose very face in these boundaries invites imprisonment or death! What else could bring you? But I knew you’d come—and, so help me God, I’m innocent.”
A sudden idea struck Saxon. This might bethe cue to draw on the frightened talker without self-revelation.
“What do you want me to believe were the real facts?” he demanded, with an assumption of the cold incredulity that seemed expected of him.
The other spoke eagerly.
“That morning when General Ojedas’ forces entered Puerto Frio, and the government seized me, you were free. Then, I was released, and you arrested. You drew your conclusions. Oh, they were natural enough. But, before heaven, they were wrong!”