The Key to Yesterday Part 21

The girl glanced at them impatiently. The work was great, and she was proud of its praise, but just now she was feeling that it really meant nothing at all to her in comparison with the painter himself. To her, he would have been quite as important, she realized, had no critic praised him; had his brush never forced a compliment from the world.

Her brow gathered in perplexity over one paragraph that met her eye.

"The most notable piece of work that has yet come from this remarkable palette," said the critic, "is a canvas ent.i.tled, 'Portrait of a lady.' In this, Mr. Saxon has done something more than approximate the genius of Frederick Marston. He has seemed to carry it a point forward, and one is led to believe that such an effort may be the door through which the artist shall issue from the distinction of being 'Marston's first disciple' into a larger distinction more absolutely his own." There was more, but the feature which caught her eye was the fact stated that, "A gentleman bought this picture for his private collection, refusing to give his name."

"What does it mean?" demanded Duska, handing the clipping to Steele.

"That picture and the landscape from the k.n.o.b were not for sale."

The dealer was puzzled.

"Mr. Saxon," he explained, "directed that from this a.s.signment two pictures were to be reserved. They were designated by marks on the back of the cases and the canvases. Neither the portrait nor the landscape was so marked."

"He must have made a mistake, in the hurry of packing," exclaimed the girl, in deep distress. "He must have marked them wrong!"

"Who bought them?" demanded Steele.

The dealer shook his head.

"It was a gentleman, evidently an Englishman, though he said he lived in Paris. He declined to give his name, and paid cash. He took the pictures with him in a cab to his hotel. He did not even state where he was stopping." The dealer paused, then added: "He explained to me that he collected for the love of pictures, and that he found the notoriety attaching to the purchase of famous paintings extremely distasteful."

"Have you ever seen this gentleman before?" urged Steele.

"Yes," the art agent answered reflectively, "he has from time to time picked up several of Mr. Saxon's pictures, and his conversation indicated that he was equally familiar with the work of Marston himself. He said he knew the Paris agent of Mr. Saxon quite well, and it is possible that through that source you might be able to locate him. I am very sorry the mistake occurred, and, while I am positive that you will find the letters 'N. F. S.' (not for sale) on the two pictures I have held, I shall do all in my power to trace the lost ones."

In one of the packing rooms, the suspicions of Duska were corroborated. Two canvases were found about the same shape and size as the two that had been bought by the foreign art-lover. Palpably, Saxon, in his hurry of boxing, had wrongly labeled them.

In the flood of her despair, the girl found room for a new pang. It was not only because these pictures were the fulfillment of Saxon's most mature genius that their loss became a little tragedy; not even merely because in them she felt that she had in a measure triumphed over Marston's hold on the man she loved, but because by every a.s.sociation that was important to her and to him they were canonized.

That evening, Steele made his announcement. He was going to Havre and Paris. If anything could be learned at that end, he would find it out, and while there he would trace the pictures.

"You see," he a.s.sured her, with a cheery confidence he by no means felt, "it's really much simpler than it looks. He was hurt, and he did not recover at once. By the time he reaches France, the sea-voyage will have restored him, and he will cable. Those tramp steamers are slow, and he hasn't yet had time. If he takes a little longer to get well, I'll be there to look after him, and bring him home."

The girl shook her head.

"You haven't thought about the main thing," she said quickly, leaning forward and resting her fingers lightly on his arm, "or perhaps you thought of it, George dear, and were too kind to speak of it. After this, he may wake up--he may wake up the other man. I must go to him myself. I must be with him." Her voice became eager and vibrant: "I want to be the first living being he will greet."

Steele found a thousand objections rising up for utterance, but, as he looked at the steady blue of her eyes, he left them all unsaid. She had gone to South America, of course she would go to France.

It would be imaginative flattery to call the lodgings of Alfred St.

John and his daughter commodious, even with the added comforts that the late years had brought to the alleviation of their barrenness. The windows still looked out over the dismal roofs of the _Quartier Latin_ and the frowning gray chimney pots where the sparrows quarreled.

St. John might have moved to more commodious quarters, for the days were no longer as pinched as had been those of the past, yet he remained in the house where he had lived before his own ambition died.

His stock-in-trade was his agency in handling the paintings of Frederick Marston, the half-mad painter who, since he had left Paris shortly after his marriage, had not returned to his ancient haunts, or had any parcel in the life of the art world that idolized him, except as he was represented by this amba.s.sador.

St. John sold the pictures that the painter, traveling about, presumably concealing himself under a.s.sumed names, sent back to the waiting market and the eager critics.

And St. John knew that, inasmuch as he had been poor, in the half-starved, hungry way of being poor, now his commissions clothed him and paid for his claret, and, above all, made it possible for him to indulge the one soul he loved with the simple comforts that softened her suffering.

The daughter of St. John required some small luxuries which it delighted the Englishman to give her. He had been proud when she married Frederick Marston, he had been distressed when the marriage proved a thing of bitterness, and during the past years he had watched her grow thin, and had feared at first, and known later, that she had fallen prey to the tubercular troubles which had caused her mother's death.

St. John had been a petty sort, and had not withstood the whisperings of dishonest motives. Paradoxically his admiration for Frederick Marston was, seemingly at least, wholly sincere.

In this hero-worship for the painter, who had failed as a husband to make his daughter happy, there was no disloyalty for the daughter. He knew that Marston had given all but the love he had not been able to give and that he had simulated this until her own insight pierced the deception, refusing compa.s.sion where she demanded love.

The men who rendered unto Marston their enthusiastic admiration were men of a cult, and tinged with a sort of cult fanaticism. St. John, as father-in-law, agent and correspondent, was enabled to pose along the Boulevard St. Michel as something of a high priest, and in this small vanity he gloried. So, when the questioners of the cafes bombarded him with inquiries as to when Marston would tire of his pose of hermit and return to Paris, the British father-in-law would throw out his shallow chest, and allow an enigmatical smile to play in his pale eyes, and a faint uplift to come to the corners of his thin lips, but he never told.

"I have a letter here," he would say, tapping the pocket of his coat.

"The master is well, and says that he feels his art to be broadening."

Between the man and his daughter, the subject of the painter was never mentioned. After her return from England, where she had spent the first year after Marston dropped out of her life, she had exacted from her father a promise that his name should not be spoken between them, and the one law St. John never transgressed was that of devotion to her.

Her life was spent in the lodgings, to which St. John clung because they were in the building where Marston had painted. She never suggested a removal to more commodious quarters. Possibly, into her pallid life had crept a sentimental fondness for the place for the same reason. Her weakness was growing into feebleness. Less, each day, she felt like going down the steep flights of stairs for a walk in the Boulevard of St. Michael, and climbing them again on her return. More heavily each day, she leaned on his supporting arm. All these things St. John noted, and day by day the traces of sandy red in his mustache and beard faded more and more into gray, and the furrow between his pale blue eyes deepened more perceptibly.

St. John had gone one afternoon to a neighboring _atelier_, and the girl, wandering into his room, saw a portrait standing on the easel which St. John had formerly used for his own canvases. Most of the pictures that came here were Marston's. This one, like the rest, was unsigned. She sank into the deeply cushioned chair that St. John kept for her in his own apartment, and gazed fixedly at the portrait.

It was a picture of a woman, and the woman in the chair smiled at the woman on the canvas.

"You are very beautiful--my successor!" she murmured. For a time, she studied the warm, vivid tones of the painted features, then, with the same smile, devoid of bitterness, she went on talking to the other face.

"I know you are my successor," she said, "because the enthusiasm painted into your face is not the enthusiasm of art alone--nor," she added slowly, "is it pity!"

Then, she noticed that one corner of the canvas caught the light with the shimmer of wet paint. It was the corner where ordinarily an artist affixes his name. She rose and went to the heavy studio-easel, and looked again with her eyes close to the stretchers. The paint was evidently freshly applied to that corner of the canvas. To her peering gaze, it almost seemed that through the new coating of the background she could catch a faint underlying line of red, as though it had been a stroke in the letter of a name. Then, she noticed her father's palette lying on a chair near the easel, and the brushes were damp.

The lake and Van d.y.k.e brown and neutral-tint that had been squeezed from their tubes were mixed into a rich tone on the palette, which matched the background of the portrait. Sinking back in the chair, fatigued even by such a slight exertion, she heard her father's returning tread on the stairs.

From the door, he saw her eyes on the picture, but true to his promise he remained silent, though, as he caught her gaze on the palette, his own eyes took on something of anxiety and foreboding.

"Does he sign his pictures now?" she asked abruptly.

"No. Why?"

"It looked--almost," she said wearily, "as though the signature had been painted out there at the corner."

For an instant, St. John eyed his daughter with keen intentness.

"The canvas was sc.r.a.ped in shipping," he said, at last. "I touched up the spot where the paint was rubbed."

For a time, both were silent. The father saw that two hectic spots glowed on the girl's bloodless cheeks, and that her eyes, fixed on the picture, wore a deeply wistful longing.

He, too, knew that this picture was a declaration of love, that in her silence she was torturing herself with the thought that these other eyes had stirred the heart that had remained closed to her. He did not want to admit to her that this was not a genuine Marston; yet, he faltered a moment, and resolved that he could not, even for so necessary a deception, let her suffer.

"That portrait, my child," he confessed slowly, "was not painted by--by him. It's by another artist, a lesser man, named Saxon."

Into the deep-set eyes surged a look of incredulous, but vast, relief.

The frail shoulders drew back from their shallow-chested sag, and the thin lips smiled.

"Doesn't he sign his pictures, either?" she demanded, finally.