The Key to Yesterday Part 23

"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 foul play. 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."

CHAPTER XVII

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 Pa.s.s 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 not wake to a sparkle at sight of the quaint chalets 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. This _atelier_ was 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 Hotel 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 for him 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 Vand.y.k.e 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, planting his 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 wonder that dilated his vague pupils. Steele, keenly reading the face, as he talked, knew that the surprise was genuine.

"As G.o.d 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 surpa.s.sed the master, but the world did not know.

I knew that Europe 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 impa.s.sioned 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 amba.s.sador.

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 pa.s.sionately, "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.