“George!” she breathed in a tense whisper. “George!”
He followed her impulsively pointed finger, and further along, as the crowd of spectators opened, he saw, smiling from a frame on the wall, the eyes and lips of the girl herself. Under the well-arranged lights, the figure stood out as though it would leave its fixed place on the canvas and mingle with the human beings below, hardly more lifelike than itself.
“The portrait!” exclaimed Steele, breathlessly. “Come, Duska; that may develop something.”
As they anxiously approached, they saw above the portrait another familiar canvas; a landscape presenting a stretch of valley and checkered flat, with hills beyond, and a sky tuneful with the spirit of a Kentucky June.
Then, as they came near enough to read the labels, Steele drew back, startled, and his brows darkened with anger.
“My God!” he breathed.
The girl standing at his elbow read on a brass tablet under each frame, “Frederick Marston, pnxt.”
“What does it mean?” she indignantly demanded, looking at the man whose face had become rigid and unreadable.
“It means they have stolen his pictures!” he replied, shortly. “It means infamous thievery at least, and I’m afraid—” In his anger and surprise, he had almost forgotten to whom he was speaking. Now, with realization, he bit off his utterance.
She was standing very straight.
“You needn’t be afraid to tell me,” she said quietly; “I want to know.”
“I’m afraid,” said Steele, “it means foulplay. Of course,” he added in a moment, “Marston himself is not a party to the fraud. It’s conceivable that his agent, this man St. John, has done this in Marston’s absence. I must get to Paris and see.”
In the compartment of the railway carriage, Steele was gazing fixedly at the lace “tidy” on the cushioned back of the opposite seat. His brows were closely knit in thought. He was evolving a plan.
Duska sat with her elbow on the sill of the compartment window, her chin on her gloved hand, her eyes gazing out, vague and unseeing. Yet, she loved beauty, and just outside the panes there was beauty drawn to a scale of grandeur.
They were climbing, behind the double-header of engines, up where it seemed that one could reach out and touch the close-hanging clouds, into tunnels and out of tunnels, through St. Gothard’s Pass and on where the Swiss Alps reached up into the fog that veiled the summits. The mountain torrents came roaring down, to beat their green water into swirling foam, and dash over the lower rocks like frenzied mill-races. Her eyes did notwake to a sparkle at sight of the quaint châlets which seemed to stagger under huge roof slabs of rugged slate. She did not even notice how they perched high on seemingly unattainable crags like stranded arks on Helvetian Ararats.
Each tunnel was the darkness between changed tableaux, and the mouth of each offered a new and more wonderful picture. The car-windows framed glimpses of Lake Como, Lake Lugano, and valleys far beneath where villages were only a jumble of toy blocks; yet, all these things did not change the utter weariness of Duska’s eyes where enthusiasm usually dwelt, or tempt Steele’s fixity of gaze from the lace “tidy.”
At Lucerne, his thinking found expression in a lengthy telegram to Paris. The Milan exhibit had opened up a new channel for speculation. If Saxon’s pictures were being pirated and sold as Marston’s, there was no one upon whom suspicion would fall more naturally than the unscrupulous St. John, Marston’s factor in Paris. Steele vaguely remembered the Englishman with his petty pride for his stewardship,though his own art life had lain in circles that rarely intercepted that of the Marston cult even at its outer rim. If this fraud were being practiced, its author was probably swindling both artists, and the appearance of either of them in Paris might drive St. John to desperate means of self-protection.
The conversion of the rooms formerly occupied by Marston into a school had been St. John’s doing. Thisatelierwas in the house where St. John himself lived, and the Kentuckian knew that, unless he had moved his lodgings, he could still be found there, as could the very minor “academy” of Marston-idolizers, with their none-too-exalted instructor, Jean Hautecoeur.
At all events, it was to this address that Steele directed his message. Its purport was to inform St. John that Americans, who had only a short stay in Paris, were anxious to procure a Marston of late date, and to summon him to the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay for the day of their arrival there.
When they reached the hotel, he told the girl of his plan, suggesting that it might be best forhim to have this interview with the agent alone, but admitting that, if she insisted on being present, it was her right. She elected to hear the conversation, and, when St. John arrived, he was conducted to the sitting-room of Mrs. Horton’s suite.
Pleased with the prospect of remunerative sales, Marston’s agent made his entrance jauntily. The shabbiness of the old days had been put by. He was now sprucely clothed, and in his lapel he wore a bunch of violets.
His thin, dissipated face was adorned with a rakishly trimmed mustache and Vandyke of gray which still held a fading trace of its erstwhile sandy red. His eyes were pale and restless as he stood bowing at the door. The afternoon was waning, and the lights had not yet been turned on.
“Mr. Steele?” he inquired.
Steele nodded.
St. John looked expectantly toward the girl in the shadow, as though awaiting an introduction, which was not forthcoming. As he looked, he seemed to grow suddenly nervous and ill-at-ease.
“You are Mr. Marston’s agent, I believe?” Steele spoke crisply.
“I have had that honor since Mr. Marston left Paris some years ago. You know, doubtless, that the master spends his time in foreign travel.” The agent spoke with a touch of self-importance.
“I want you to deliver to me here the portrait and the landscape now on exhibition at Milan,” ordered the American.
“It will be difficult—perhaps expensive—but I think it may be possible.” St. John spoke dubiously.
Steele’s eyes narrowed.
“I am not requesting,” he announced, “I am ordering.”
“But those canvases, my dear sir, represent the highest note of a master’s work!” began St. John, almost indignantly. “They are the perfection of the art of the greatest living painter, and you direct me to procure them as though they were a grocer’s staple on a shelf! Already, they are as good as sold. One does not have to peddle Marston’s canvases!”
Steele walked over to the door, and, plantinghis back against its panels, folded his arms. His voice was deliberate and dangerous:
“It’s not worth while to bandy lies with you. We both know that those pictures are from the brush of Robert Saxon. We both know that you have bought them at the price of a pupil’s work, and mean to sell them at the price of the master’s. I shall be in a position to prove the swindle, and to hand you over to the courts.”
St. John had at the first words stiffened with a sudden flaring of British wrath under his gray brows. As he listened, the red flush of anger faded to the coward’s pallor.
“That is not all,” went on Steele. “We both know that Mr. Saxon came to Paris a short while ago. For him to learn the truth meant your unmasking. He disappeared. We both know whose interests were served by that disappearance. You will produce those canvases, and you will produce Mr. Saxon within twenty-four hours, or you will face not only exposure for art-piracy, but prosecution for what is more serious.”
As he listened, St. John’s face betrayed not only fear, but also a slowly dawning wonderthat dilated his vague pupils. Steele, keenly reading the face, as he talked, knew that the surprise was genuine.
“As God is my witness,” avowed the Englishman, earnestly, “if Mr. Saxon is in Paris, or in Europe, I know nothing of it.”
“That,” observed Steele dryly, “will be a matter for you to prove.”
“No, no!” The Englishman’s voice was charged with genuine terror, and the hand that he raised in pleading protest trembled. His carefully counterfeited sprightliness of guise dropped away, and left him an old man, much broken.
“I will tell you the whole story,” he went on. “It’s a miserable enough tale without imputing such evil motives as you suggest. It’s a shameful confession, and I shall hold back nothing. The pictures you saw are Saxon’s pictures. Of course, I knew that. Of course, I bought them at what his canvases would bring with the intention of selling them at the greater price commanded by the greater painter. I knew that the copyist had surpassed the master, but the world did not know. I knew thatEurope would never admit that possible. I knew that, if once I palmed off this imitation as genuine, all the art-world would laugh to scorn the man who announced the fraud. Mr. Saxon himself could not hope to persuade the critics that he had done those pictures, once they were accepted as Marston’s. The art-world is led like sheep. It believes there is one Marston, and that no other can counterfeit him. And I knew that Marston himself could not expose me, because I know that Marston is dead.” The man was ripping out his story in labored, detached sentences.
Steele looked up with astonished eyes. The girl sat listening, with her lips parted.
“You see—” the Englishman’s voice was impassioned in its bitterness—“I am not shielding myself. I am giving you the unrelieved truth. When I determined the fact of his death, I devised a scheme. I did not at that time know that this American would be able to paint pictures that could be mistaken for Marston’s. Had I known it, I should have endeavored to ascertain if he would share the scheme with me. Collaborating in the fraud,we could have levied fortunes from the art world, whereas in his own name he must have painted a decade more to win the verdict of his true greatness. I was Marston’s agent. I am Marston’s father-in-law. When I speak, it is as his ambassador. Men believe me. My daughter—” the man’s voice broke—“my daughter lies on her death-bed. For her, there are a few months, perhaps only a few weeks, left of life. I have provided for her by trading on the name and greatness of her husband. If you turn me over to the police, you will kill her. For myself, it would be just, but I am not guilty of harming Mr. Saxon, and she is guilty of nothing.” The narrator halted in his story, and covered his face with his talon-like fingers. St. John was not a strong man. The metal of his soul was soft and without temper. He dropped into a chair, and for a while, as his auditors waited in silence, gave way to his emotion.
“I tell you,” he groaned, “I have at least been true to one thing in life. I have loved my child. I don’t want her punished for my offenses.”
Suddenly, he rose and faced the girl.
“I don’t know you,” he said passionately, “but I am an old man. I am an outcast—a derelict! I was not held fit for an introduction, but I appeal to you. Life can drive a man to anything. Life has driven me to most things, but not to all. I knew that any day might bring my exposure. If it had come after my daughter’s death, I would have been satisfied. I have for months been watching her die—wanting her to live, yet knowing that her death and my disgrace were racing together.” He paused, then added in a quaking voice: “There were days when I might have been introduced to a woman like you, many years ago.”
Duska was not fitted by nature to officiate at “third degree” proceedings. As she looked back into the beseeching face, she saw only that it was the face of an old man, broken and terrified, and that even through its gray terror it showed the love of which he talked.
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 ofpension, near Granada, where he had been painting under an assumed 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 dueher. 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-appetite of the world. I hoarded 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 substitution. 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 thatI 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 besideMarston’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—andmy 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 gratitude.
“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.
On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles theBoulevard St. Michel, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fashion as all its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which theconciergepresides. 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-flooratelierhow 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 accumulated 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 god.
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 knob with a scowl for the interruption. For a moment, he stood talking through the slit with a gentlemanin 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 theatelier, 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 likemany of the smaller schools in which he had himself painted. To the girl, who had never seen a life-class 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 havepassed 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 pass 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 spaces—of the broad spirit of your great country—of the pride that comes to a man inthe 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 fashion 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 assure you, no!” prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness. “It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then understand why I find it impossible to answer her question.”
When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow, long voyage ahead, his shanghaied passenger had gone from stunnedunconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of brain-fever. There was a brushing of shoulders with death. There were fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr. Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious care—through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ashore a man who in the parlance of the peasants was a poor “innocent,” a human blank-book in a binding once handsome, now worn, with nothing inscribed on its pages.
For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this helpless creature—who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio, despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a figure of a man—had passed into permanent darkness. The light would again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world. So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain Harris’ modest lodgings in theRue St. Jacques, and, inasmuch as the captain’s lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks, the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He had hoped to be in charge of a government’s work of healthand sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings in theRue St. Jacques. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of that room and the court in the center of the house had been the boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to persuade him to move about, but his apathy had been insuperable. Sometimes, he wandered about the court like a small child. He had no speech. Often, he fingered a rusty key as a baby fingers a rattle. On the day that Steele and Duska had gone to the academy of M. Hautecoeur, Dr. Cornish and Paul Harris had left the lodgings for a time, and Saxon sat as usual at a window, looking absently out on the court.
In its center stood a stonejardinière, now empty. About it was the flagged area, also empty. In front was the street-door—closed.Saxon looked out with the opaque stare of pupils that admit no images to the brain. They were as empty as the stone jar. Possibly, the sun, borrowing some of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the area.
At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but theconciergestood near.
“Cordon?” inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate to let them in or out.
Saxon looked up, and across the hitherto unbroken vacancy of his pupils flickered a disturbed, puzzled tremor of mental groping.
He opened his thin lips, closed them again, then smiled, and said with perfect distinctness:
“Cordon, s’il vous plait.”
Theconciergeknew only that monsieur was an invalid. In his next question was nothing more than simple Gallic courtesy.
“Est-ce que monsieur va mieux aujour d’hui?”
Once more, Saxon’s lips hesitated, then mechanically moved.
“Oui, merci,” he responded.
The man who found himself standing aimlessly on the sidewalk of theRue St. Jacques, was a man clothed in an old and ill-fitting suit of Captain Harris’ clothes. He was long-haired, hollow-cheeked and bearded like a pirate. At last, he hesitatingly turned and wandered away at random. About him lay Paris and the world, but Paris and the world were to him things without names or meaning.
His unguided steps carried him to the banks of the Seine, and finally he stood on the island, gazing without comprehension at the square towers ofNôtre Dame, his brows strangely puckered as his eyes picked out the carvings of the “Last Judgment” and theGalerie des Rois.
He shook his head dully, and, turning once more, went on without purpose until at the end of much wandering he again halted. This time, he had before him thePanthéon’sentrance, and confronting him on its pedestal sat a human figure in bronze. It was Rodin’s unspeakablymelancholy conception, “le Penseur,” and it might have stood for Saxon’s self as it half-crouched with limbs tense and brows drawn in, in the agony of brooding thought-travail.
Then, Saxon’s head came up, and into his eyes stole a confused groping, as though reason’s tentacles were struggling out blindly for something upon which to lay hold. With such a motion perhaps, the prehistoric man-creature may have thrown up his chin at the bursting into being of thought’s first coherent germ. But from “le Penseur” Saxon turned away with a futile shake of his head to resume his wanderings.
Finally, in a narrow cross street, he halted once more, and looked about him with a consciousness of vast weariness. He had traversed the length of many blocks in his aimlessness, crossing and recrossing his own course, and he was still feeble from long days of illness and inertia.
Suddenly, he raised his head, and his lips, which had been half-parted in the manner of lips not obeying a positive brain, closed in a firm line that seemed to make his chin and jawtake on a stronger contour. He drew his brows together as he stood studying the door before him, and his pupils were deeply vague and perplexed. But it was a different perplexity. The vacuity was gone.
Automatically, one thin hand went into the trousers-pocket, and came out clutching a rusty key. For another moment, he stood regarding the thing, turning it over in his fingers. Then, he laughed, and drew back his sagging shoulders. With the gesture, he threw away all imbecility, and followed the inexorable call of some impulse which he could not yet fully understand, but which was neither vague nor haphazard.
At that moment, Dr. Cornish, chancing to glance up from his course a block away, stopped dumfounded at the sight of his patient. When he had gathered his senses, and looked again, the patient had disappeared.
Saxon walked a few steps further, turned into an open street-door, passed theconciergewithout a word, and toilsomely, but with a purposeful tread, mounted the narrow, ill-lighted stairs. At the turning where strangers usuallystumbled, he lifted his foot clear for the longer stride, yet he had not glanced down.
For just a moment, he paused for breath in the hall, upon which opened several doors identical in appearance. Without hesitation, he fitted the ancient key into an equally ancient lock, opened the door, and entered.
At the click of the thrown tumbler of the lock, some of the occupants of the place glanced up. They saw the door swing wide, and frame between its jambs a tall, thin man, who stood unsteadily supporting himself against the case. The black-bearded face was flushed with a burning fever, but the eyes that looked out from under the heavy brows were wide awake and intelligent.
“But Marston will one day return to us,” Monsieur Hautecoeur was declaring to Steele and the girl, who, with backs to the door, were studying a picture on the wall. “He will return, and then——”
Saxon's entrance into the atelier startles the occupants
The instructor had caught the sound of the opening door, and he half-turned his head to cast a side glance in its direction. His words died suddenly on his lips. His pose becamepetrified; his features transfixed with astonishment. His rigid fixity of face and figure froze the watching students into answering tenseness. Even the blanket-wrapped model held a freshly lighted cigarette poised half-way to her lips. Then, the man in the door took an unsteady step forward, and from his trembling fingers the key fell to the floor, where in the dead stillness it seemed to strike with a crash. The girl and Steele wheeled. At that moment, the lips of the bearded face moved, and from them came the announcement:
“Me voici, je viens d’arriver.”
The voice broke the hypnotic suspense of the silence as a pin-point snaps a toy balloon.
Hautecoeur sprang excitedly forward.
“Marston! Marston has returned!” he shouted, in a great voice that echoed against the sky-light.
As the man stepped forward, he staggered slightly, and would have fallen had he not been already folded in the giant embrace of the lesser master.
Duska stood as white as the fresh sheets of drawing-paper at her feet. Her fingersspasmodically clenched and opened at her sides, and from her teeth, biting into the lower lip, her breathing came in gasps. The walls seemed to race in circles, and it was with half-realization that she heard Steele calling the man, wildly demanding recognition.
The newcomer was leaning heavily on Hautecoeur’s arm. He did not appear to notice Steele, but his gaze met and held the girl’s pallid face and the intensely anguished eyes that looked into his. For an instant, they stood facing each other, neither speaking; then, in a voice of polite concern, the tall man said:
“Mademoiselle is ill!” There was no note of recognition—only, the solicitous tone of any man who sees a woman who is obviously suffering.
Duska raised her chin. Her throat gave a convulsive jerk, but she only caught her lip more tightly between her teeth, so that a moment later, when she spoke, there were purplish indentations on its almost bloodless line.
She half-turned to Steele. Her voice was an utterly hopeless whisper, but as steady as Marston’s had been.
“For God’s sake,” she said, “take me home!”
At the door, they encountered the excited physician, who stumbled against them with a mumbled apology as he burst into theatelier.
Late that afternoon, in Mrs. Horton’s drawing-room at theHôtel Palais d’Orsay, Steele stood at the window, his gaze almost sullen in the moodiness of his own ineffectual sympathy. The day had grown as cheerless as himself. Outside, across theQuai d’Orsay, a cold rain pelted desolately into the gray water of the Seine, and drew a wet veil across the opposite bank. Through the reeking mist, the remote gray branches in the Gardens of theTuileriesstood out starkly naked. Even the vague masses of theLouvreseemed as forbidding as the shadowy bulk of some buttressed prison. The “taxis” slurred by through wet streets, and those persons who were abroad went with streaming umbrellas and hurried steps. The raw chill of Continental hotels permeated the place. He knew that in the center of the room Duska sat, her elbows resting on the table top; her eyes, distressfully wide, fixedon the wet panes of the other window. He knew that, if he spoke to her, her lips would shape themselves into a pathetic smile, and her answer would be steady. He knew that she had given herself no luxury of outburst, but that she had remained there, in much the same attitude, all afternoon; sometimes, crushing her small handkerchief into a tight wad of lace and linen; sometimes, opening it out and smoothing it with infinite care into a tiny square upon the table. He knew that her feet, with their small shoes and high-arched, silk-stockinged insteps, twitched nervously from time to time; that the gallant shoulders drooped forward. These details were pictured in his mind, and he kept his eyes stolidly pointed toward the outer gloom so that he might not be forced to see it all again in actuality.
At last, he wheeled with a sudden gesture of desperation, and, going across to the table, dropped his hand over hers.
She looked up with the unchanged expression of wide-eyed suffering that has no outlet.
“Duska, dear,” he asked, “can I do anything?”
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 withdirectness. 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 spaces.”
The girl rose, and, as she spoke, there was amomentary 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 assured him; “I shall go only as a friend of her father’s, and—because I want to.”
St. John hesitatingly put out his hand. Whenthe 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 fashion 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-worship and vivacious delight seemed to lie like a spirit of the departed summer on the boulevards. Along theChamps Elysées, from thePlace de la Concordeto theArc 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 cafés 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.
“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, Ican’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.”
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 theRue 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 theHôtel Voltaire, where the life about him was the simpler life of the less pretentiousquaisof the Seine.
After hisdéjeuner, 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. Shehad 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 incumbrance 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 theBoulevard St. Michel, stretching off ina broad vista of café-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 theBoulevard Montparnasse. 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 passed a certain café, which he had once known as the informal club of the Marston cult, he realized that here the hilarity was more pronounced than elsewhere. The boulevard itself was for squares a thread, stringing cafés 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 despondentabsintheurssitting 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 ifhe must turn up his collar, and shiver 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 habitués 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 unkemptgrotesquerie.
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. Hehad 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 hisfrappéglass. At the question, he looked up, astonished.
“But is it possible monsieur does not know? We are all brothers here—brothers in the worship 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 glass and flashing 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 Marstonwas returning; what character of devotees were pledging the promotion of the first disciple to the place of the worshiped master.
Some half-drunken student, his hand upon the shoulder of a model, lifted a tilting glass, and shouted thickly, “Vive l’art! Vive Marston!” The crowd took up the shout, and there was much clinking of glass.
Steele, with a feeling of deep disgust, rose to go. The otherquaisof 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. Hervé. Like himself, M. Hervé 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 cushions of the wall seat.
“I have heard the story,” the Frenchman assured Steele. “Monsieur may spare himself the pain of repeating it. It is a miracle!”
Steele was looking into his glass.
“It is a most unhappy miracle,” he replied.
“But,mon dieu!” M. Hervé 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-à-vis only nodded, and Hervé 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 identity 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 hell 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 struckhim, 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. Hervé nodded his head with grave assent.
“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-god of the palette. Now, he is the god.”
“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 theRue 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 casebecause 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.”
During these days, Steele was constantly at the lodgings, and with him, sharing his anxiety, was M. Hervé. There were many callers to inquire—painters and students of the neighborhood, and the greater celebrities from the more distinguished schools.
But no one was more constantly in attendance than Alfred St. John. He divided his time between the bedside of his daughter and the lodgings where Marston lay. The talk that filled the Latin Quarter, and furiously excited the studio on the floor below, was studiously kept from the girl confined to her couch upstairs.
One day while St. John was in theRue St. Jacques, pacing the smallcourwith Steele and Hervé, Jean Hautecoeur came in hurriedly. His manner was that of anxious embarrassment, and for a moment he paused, seeking words.
St. John’s face turned white with a divination of his tidings.
“Does she need me?” he asked, almost breathlessly.
Hautecoeur nodded, and St. John turned toward the door. Steele went with him, and, as they climbed the steep stairs, the old man leaned heavily on his support.
The Kentuckian waited in St. John’s room most of that night. In the next apartment were the girl, her father and the physician. A little before dawn, the old man came out. His step was almost tottering, and he seemed to have aged a decade since he entered the door of the sick-room.
“My daughter is dead,” he said very simply, as his guest paused at the threshold. “I am leaving Paris. My people except for me have borne a good name. I wanted to ask you to save that name from exposure. I wanted to bury with my daughter everything that might shadow her memory. For myself, nothing matters.”
Steele took the hand the Englishman held tremblingly outstretched.
“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.
St. John shook his head.
“That will be quite all,” he answered.
Such things as had to be done, however, Steele did, and two days later, when Alfred St. John took the train for Calais and the Channel, it was with assurances that, while they could not at this time cheer him, at least fortified him against all fear of need.
It was a week later that Cornish sent for the Kentuckian, who was waiting in the court.
“I think you can see him now,” said the physician briefly, “and I think you will see a man who has no gaps in his memory.”
Steele went with some misgiving to the sick-room. He found Marston looking at him with eyes as clear and lucid as his own. As he came up, the other extended a hand with a trembling gesture of extreme weakness. Steele clasped it in silence.
For a time, neither spoke.
While Steele waited, the other’s face became drawn. He was evidently struggling with himself in desperate distress. There was something to be said which Marston found it bitterly difficult to say. At last, he spoke slowly, forcing his words and holding his features in masklike rigidity of control.