The Key to Yesterday Part 11

"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, whether or not you are the man they want, the circ.u.mstantial 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. He had 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Senor Ribero told his story."

"It would mean this much," he argued. "I should have followed to its end every clew that was 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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.sented, 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 heart she 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, "than anybody 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 called the 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 c.o.c.ked 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 accommodations for 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 pa.s.senger-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 pa.s.sionate in matters of life and death.

He saw the stars come out, low-hanging and large, and the water blaze with phosph.o.r.escence 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 pa.s.senger 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 Panama hat. "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 pa.s.senger 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 disappearing into 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 pa.s.senger 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 turned suddenly, 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.