The Key to Yesterday Part 9

"Are you ill?" he asked, in a frightened voice.

She shook her head, and smiled. She had read the love-letters, and she had read, too, what silence must cost him. Other persons might see only wonderful art in the portrait, but she saw all the rest, and, because she saw it, silence seemed futile.

"It is a miracle!" she whispered.

The man stood for a moment at her side, then his face became gray, and he half-wheeled and covered it with his hands.

The girl took a quick step to his side, and her young hands were on his shoulders.

"What is it, dear?" she asked.

With an exclamation that stood for the breaking of all the d.y.k.es he had been building and fortifying and strengthening through the past months, he closed his arms around her, and crushed her to him.

For a moment, he was oblivious of every lesser thing. The past, the future had no existence. Only the present was alive and vital and in love. There was no world but the garden, and that world was flooded with the sun and the light of love. The present could not conceivably give way to other times before or after. It was like the hills that looked down--unchangeable to the end of things!

Nothing else could count--could matter. The human heart and human brain could not harbor meaner thoughts. She loved him. She was in his arms, therefore his arms circled the universe. Her breath was on his face, and life was good.

Then came the shock of realization. His sphinx rose before him--not a sphinx that kept the secrets of forty dead centuries, but one that held in cryptic silence all the future. He could not offer a love tainted with such peril without explaining how tainted it was. Now, he must tell her everything.

"I love you," he found himself repeating over and over; "I love you."

He heard her voice, through singing stars:

"I love you. I have never said that to anyone else--never until now.

And," she added proudly, "I shall never say it again--except to you."

In his heart rose a torrent of rebellion. To tell her now--to poison her present moment, wonderful with the happiness of surrender--would be cruel, brutal. He, too, had the right to his hour of happiness, to a life of happiness! In the strength of his exaltation, it seemed to him that he could force fate to surrender his secret. He would settle things without making her a sharer in the knowledge that peril shadowed their love. He would find a way!

Standing there with her close to his heart, and her own palpitating against his breast, he felt more than a match for mere facts and conditions. It seemed ridiculous that he had allowed things to bar his way so long. Now, he was thrice armed, and must triumph!

"I know now why the world was made," he declared, joyfully. "I know why all the other wonderful women and all the other wonderful loves from the beginning of time have been! It was," he announced with the supreme egotism of the moment, "that I might compare them with this."

And so the resolve to be silent was cast away, and after it went the sudden resolve to tell everything. Saxon, feeling only triumph, did not realize that he had, in one moment, lost his second and third battles.

An hour later, they strolled back together toward the house. Saxon was burdened with the canvas on which he had painted his masterpiece. They were silent, but walking on the milky way, their feet stirring nothing meaner than star-dust. On the verandah, Steele met them, and handed his friend a much-forwarded letter, addressed in care of the Louisville club where he had dined. It bore the stamp of a South American Republic.

It was not until he had gone to his room that night that the man had time to glance at it, or even to mark its distant starting point.

Then, he tore open the envelope, and read this message:

"My Erstwhile Comrade:

"Though I've had no line from you in these years I don't flatter myself that you've forgotten me. It has come to my hearing through certain channels--subterranean, of course--that your present name is Saxon and that you've developed genius and glory as a paint-wizard.

"It seems you are now a perfectly respectable artist!

Congratulations--also bravo!

"My object is to tell you that I've tried to get word to you that despite appearances it was not I who tipped you off to the government. That is G.o.d's truth and I can prove it. I would have written before, but since you beat it to G.o.d's Country and went West your whereabouts have been a well-kept secret. I am innocent, as heaven is my witness! Of course, I am keeping mum.

"H. S. R."

CHAPTER VII

A short time ago, Saxon had felt stronger than all the forces of fate.

He had believed that circ.u.mstances were plastic and man invincible.

Now, as he bent forward in his chair, the South American letter hanging in limp fingers and the coal-oil lamp on the table throwing its circle of light on the foreign postmark and stamp of the envelope, he realized that the battle was on. The forces of which he had been contemptuous were to engage him at once, with no breathing s.p.a.ce before the combat. Viewing it all in this light, he felt the qualms of a general who encounters an aggressive enemy before his line is drawn and his battle front arranged.

He had so entirely persuaded himself that his duty was clear and that he must not speak to the girl of love that now, when he had done so, his entire plan of campaign must be revised, and new problems must be considered. When he had been swept away on the tide that carried him to an avowal, it had been with the vague sense of realization that, if he spoke at all, he must tell the whole story. He had not done so, and now came a new question: Had he the right to tell the story until, in so far as possible, he had probed its mystery? Suppose his worst fears proved themselves. The certainty would be little harder to confess than the presumption and the suspense. Suppose, on the other hand, the fighting chance to which every man clings should, after all, acquit him? Would it not be needless cruelty to inflict on her the fears that harried his own thoughts? Must he not try first to arm himself with a definite report for, or against, himself?

After all, he argued weakly, or perhaps it was the devil's advocate that whispered the insidious counsel, there might be a mistake. The man of Ribero's story might still be some one else. He had never felt the instincts of murder. Surely, he had not been the embezzler, the libertine, the a.s.sa.s.sin! But, in answer to that argument, his colder logic contended there might have been to his present Dr. Jekyll a Mr.

Hyde of the past. The letter he held in his hand of course meant nothing more than that Ribero had talked to some one. It might be merely the fault of some idle gossip in a Latin-American cafe, when the claret flowed too freely. The writer, this unknown "H. S. R.," had probably taken Ribero's testimony at its face value. Then, out of the page arose insistently the one sentence that did mean something more, the new link in a chain of definite conclusion. "Since you beat it to G.o.d's Country and went West--" That was the new evidence this anonymous witness had contributed. He had certainly gone West!

a.s.suredly, he must go to South America, and prosecute himself. To do this meant to thrust himself into a situation that held a hundred chances, but there was no one else who could determine it for him. It was not merely a matter of collecting and sifting evidence. It was also a test of subjecting his dormant memory to the stimulus of place and sights and sounds and smells. When he stood at the spot where Carter had faced his executioners, surely, if he were Carter, he would awaken to self-recognition. He would slip away on some pretext, and try out the issue, and then, when he spoke to Duska, he could speak in definite terms. And if he were the culprit? The question came back as surely as the pendulum swings to the bottom of the arc, and rested at the hideous conviction that he must be the malefactor. Then, Saxon rose and paced the floor, his hand convulsively crushing the letter into a crumpled wad.

Well, he would not come back! If that were his world, he would not reenter it. He was willing to try himself--to be his own prosecutor, but, if the thing spelled a sentence of disgrace, he reserved the right to be also his own executioner.

Then, the devil's advocate again whispered seductively into his perplexity.

Suppose he went and tested the environment, searching conscience and memory--and suppose no monitor gave him an answer. Would he not then have the right to a.s.sume his innocence? Would he not have the right to feel certain that his memory, so stimulated and still inactive, was not only sleeping, but dead? Would he not be justified in dismissing the fear of a future awakening, and, as Steele had suggested, in going forward in the person of Robert A. Saxon, abandoning the past as completely as he had perhaps abandoned previous incarnations?

So, for the time, he stilled his fears, and under his brush the canvases became more wonderful than they had ever been. He had Duska at his side, not only in the old intimacy, but in the new and more wonderful intimacy that had come of her acknowledged love. He would finish the half-dozen pictures needed to complete the consignment for the Eastern and European exhibits, then he would start on his journey.

A week later, Saxon took Duska to a dance at the club-house on the top of one of the hills of the ridge, and, after she had tired of dancing, they had gone to a point where the brow of the k.n.o.b ran out to a jutting promontory of rock. It was a cape in the dim sea of night mist which hung upon, and shrouded, the flats below. Beyond the reaches of silver gray, the more distant hills rose in mystic shadow-shapes of deep cobalt. There were stars overhead, but they were pale in the whiter light of the moon, and all the world was painted, as the moon will paint it, in silvers and blues.

Back of them was the softened waltz-music that drifted from the club-house and the bright patches of color where the Chinese lanterns swung among the trees.

As they talked, the man felt with renewed force that the girl had given him her love in the wonderful way of one who gives but once, and gives all without stint or reserve. It was as though she had presented him unconditionally with the key to the archives of her heart, and made him possessor of the unspent wealth of all the Incas.

Suddenly, he realized that his plan of leaving her without explanation, on a quest that might permit no return, was meeting her gift with half-confidence and deception. What he did with himself now, he did with her property. He was not at liberty to act without her full understanding and sympathy in his undertakings. The plan was one of infinite brutality.

He must tell her everything, and then go. He struck a match for his cigar, to give himself a moment of arranging his words, and, as he stood shielding the light against a faintly stirring breeze, the miniature glare fell on her delicately chiseled lips and nose and chin. Her expression made him hesitate. She was very young, very innocently childlike and very happy. To tell her now would be like spoiling a little girls' party. It must be told soon, but not while the dance music was still in their ears and the waxy smell of the dance candles still in their nostrils.

When he left her at Horton House, he did not at once return to the cabin. He wanted the open skies for his thoughts, and there was no hope of sleep.

He retraced his steps from the road, and wandered into the old-fashioned garden. At last, he halted by the seat where he had posed her for the portrait. The moon was sinking, and the shadows of the garden wall and trees and shrubs fell in long, fantastic angles across the silvered earth. The house itself was dark except where the panes of her window still glowed. Standing between the tall stalks of the hollyhocks, he held his watch up to the moon. It was half-past two o'clock.

Then, he looked up and started with surprise as he saw her standing in the path before him. At first, he thought that his imagination had projected her there. Since she had left him at the stairs, the picture she had made in her white gown and red roses had been vividly permanent, though she herself had gone.

But, now, her voice was real.

"Do you prowl under my windows all night, kind sir?" she laughed, happily. "I believe you must be almost as much in love as I am."

The man reached forward, and seized her hand.

"It's morning," he said. "What are you doing here?"