Horton House, where Duska Filson made her home with her aunt and
uncle, was a half-mile from the cabin in which the two painters were
lodged. That was the distance reckoned via driveway and turnpike, but
a path, linking the houses, reduced it to a quarter of a mile. This
"air line," as Steele dubbed it, led from the hill where the cabin
perched, through a blackberry thicket and paw-paw grove, across a
meadow, and then entered, by a picket gate and rose-cumbered fence,
the old-fashioned garden of the "big house."
Before the men had been long at their summer place, the path had
become as well worn as neighborly paths should be. To the gracious
household at Horton House, they were "the boys." Steele had been on
lifelong terms of intimacy, and the guest was at once taken into the
family on the same basis as the host.
"Horton House" was a temple dedicated to hospitality. Mrs. Horton,
its delightful mistress, occasionally smiled at the somewhat
pretentious name, but it had been "Horton House" when the Nashville
stage rumbled along the turnpike, and the picturesque little village
of brick and stone at its back had been the "quarters" for the slaves.
It would no more do to rechristen it than to banish the ripened old
family portraits, or replace the silver-laden mahogany sideboard with
less antique things. The house had been added to from time to time,
until it sprawled a commodious and composite record of various eras,
but the name and spirit stood the same.
Saxon began to feel that he had never lived before. His life, in so
far as he could remember it, had been varied, but always touched with
isolation. Now, in a family not his own, he was finding the things
which had hitherto been only names to him and that richness of
congenial companionship which differentiates life from existence.
While he felt the wine-like warmth of it in his heart, he felt its
seductiveness in his brain. The thought of its ephemeral quality
brought him moments of depression that drove him stalking away alone
into the hills to fight things out with himself. At times, his
canvases took on a new glow; at times, he told himself he was painting
daubs.
About a week after their arrival, Mrs. Horton and Miss Filson came
over to inspect the quarters and to see whether bachelor efforts had
made the place habitable.
Duska was as delighted as a child among new toys. Her eyes grew
luminous with pleasure as she stood in the living-room of the "shack"
and surveyed the confusion of canvases, charcoal sketches and studio
paraphernalia that littered its walls and floor. Saxon had hung his
canvases in galleries where the juries were accounted sternly
critical; he had heard the commendation of brother artists generously
admitting his precedence. Now, he found himself almost flutteringly
anxious to hear from her lips the pronouncement, "Well done."
Mrs. Horton, meanwhile, was sternly and beneficently inspecting the
premises from living-room to pantry, with Steele as convoy, and Saxon
was left alone with the girl.
As he brought canvas after canvas from various unturned piles and
placed them in a favorable light, he found one at whose vivid glow and
masterful execution, his critic caught her breath in a delighted
little gasp.
It was a thing done in daring colors and almost blazing with the glare
of an equatorial sun. An old cathedral, partly vine-covered, reared
its yellowed walls and towers into a hot sky. The sun beat cruelly
down on the cobbled street while a clump of ragged palms gave the
contrasting key of shade.
Duska, half-closing her eyes, gazed at it with uptilted chin resting
on slender fingers. For a time, she did not speak, but the man read
her delight in her eyes. At last, she said, her voice low with
appreciation:
"I love it!"
Turning away to take up a new picture, he felt as though he had
received an accolade.
"It might have been the very spot," she said thoughtfully, "that Senor
Ribero described in his story."
Saxon felt a cloud sweep over the sunshine shed by her praise. His
back was turned, but his face grew suddenly almost gray.
The girl only heard him say quietly:
"Senor Ribero spoke of South America. This was in Yucatan."
When the last canvas had been criticized, Saxon led the girl out to
the shaded verandah.
"Do you know," she announced with severe directness, "when I know you
just a little better, I'm going to lecture you?"
"Lecture me!" His face mirrored alarm. "Do it now--then, I sha'n't
have it impending to terrorize better acquaintance."
She gazed away for a time, her eyes clouding with doubt. At last, she
laughed.
"It makes me seem foolish," she confessed, "because you know so much
more than I do about the subject of this lecture--only," she added
with conviction, "the little I know is right, and the great deal you
know may be wrong."
"I plead guilty, and throw myself on the mercy of the court." He made
the declaration in a tone of extreme abjectness.
"But I don't want you to plead guilty. I want you to reform."
Not knowing the nature of the reform required, Saxon remained
discreetly speechless.
"You are the first disciple of Frederick Marston," she said, going to
the point without preliminaries. "You don't have to be anybody's
disciple. I don't know a great deal about art, but I've stood before
Marston's pictures in the galleries abroad and in this country. I love
them. I've seen your pictures, too, and you don't have to play tag
with Frederick Marston."
For a moment, Saxon sat twisting his pipe in his fingers. His silence
might almost have been an ungracious refusal to discuss the matter.
"Oh, I know it's sacrilege," she said, leaning forward eagerly, her
eyes deep in their sincerity, "but it's true."
The man rose and paced back and forth for a moment, then halted before
her. When he spoke, it was with a ring like fanaticism in his voice.
"There is no Art but Art, and Marston is her prophet. That is my Koran
of the palette." For a while, she said nothing, but shook her head
with a dissenting smile, which carried up the corners of her lips in
maddeningly delicious fashion. Then, the man went on, speaking now
slowly and in measured syllables:
"Some day--when I can tell you my whole story--you will know what
Marston means to me. What little I have done, I have done in stumbling
after him. If I ever attain his perfection, I shall still be as you
say only the copyist--yet, I sometimes think I would rather be the
true copyist of Marston than the originator of any other school."
She sat listening, the toe of one small foot tapping the floor below
the short skirt of her gown, her brow delightfully puckered with
seriousness. A shaft of sun struck the delicate color of her cheeks,
and discovered coppery glints in her brown hair. She was very slim and
wonderful, Saxon thought, and out beyond the vines the summer seemed
to set the world for her, like a stage. The birds with tuneful
delirium provided the orchestration.
"I know just how great he is," she conceded warmly; "I know how
wonderfully he paints. He is a poet with a brush for a pen. But
there's one thing he lacks--and that is a thing you have."
The man raised his brows in challenged astonishment.
"It's the one thing I miss in his pictures, because it's the one thing
I most admire--strength, virility." She was talking more rapidly as
her enthusiasm gathered headway. "A man's pictures are, in a way,
portraits of his nature. He can't paint strong things unless he is
strong himself."
Saxon felt his heart leap. It was something to know that she believed
his canvases reflected a quality of strength inherent to himself.
"You and your master," she went on, "are unlike in everything except
your style. Can you fancy yourself hiding away from the world because
you couldn't face the music of your own fame? That's not modesty--it's
insanity. When I was in Paris, everybody was raving about some new
pictures from his brush, but only his agent knew where he actually
was, or where he had been for years."
"For the man," he acceded, "I have as small respect as you can have,
but for the work I have something like worship! I began trying to
paint, and I was groping--groping rather blindly after something--I
didn't know just what. Then, one day, I stood before his 'Winter
Sunset.' You know the picture?" She nodded assent. "Well, when I saw
it, I wanted to go out to the Metropolitan entrance, and shout Eureka
up and down Fifth Avenue. It told me what I'd been reaching through
the darkness of my novitiate to grasp. It seemed to me that art had
been revealed to me. Somehow," the man added, his voice falling
suddenly from its enthused pitch to a dead, low one, "everything that
comes to me seems to come by revelation!"
Into Duska's eyes came quick light of sympathy. He had halted before
her, and now she arose impulsively, and laid a light hand for a moment
on his arm.
"I understand," she agreed. "I think that for most artists to come as
close as you have come would be triumph enough, but you--" she looked
at him a moment with a warmth of confidence--"you can do a great deal
more." So ended her first lesson in the independence of art, leaving
the pupil's heart beating more quickly than at its commencement.
In the days that followed, as May gave way to June and the dogwood
blossoms dropped and withered to be supplanted by flowering locust
trees, Saxon confessed to himself that he had lost the first battle of
his campaign. He had resolved that this close companionship should be
platonically hedged about; that he would never allow himself to cross
the frontier that divided the realm of friendship from the hazardous
territory of love. Then, as the cool, unperfumed beauty of the dogwood
was forgotten for the sense-steeping fragrance of the locust, he knew
that he was only trying to deceive himself. He had really crossed this
forbidden frontier when he passed through the gate that separated the
grandstand at Churchill Downs from the club-house inclosure. With the
realization came the resolution of silence. He was a man whose life
might at any moment renew itself in untoward developments. Until he
could drag the truth from the sphinx that guarded his secret, his love
must be as inarticulate as was his sphinx. He spent harrowing
afternoons alone, and swore with many solemn oaths that he would
never divulge his feelings, and, when he sought about for the most
sacred and binding of vows, he swore by his love for Duska.
Because of these things, he sometimes shocked and startled her with
sporadic demonstrations of the brusquerie into which he withdrew when
he felt too potential an impulse urging him to the other extreme. And
she, not understanding it, yet felt that there was some riddle behind
it all. It pained and puzzled her, but she accepted it without
resentment--belying her customary autocracy. While she had never gone
into the confessional of her heart as he had done, these matters
sometimes had the power of making her very miserable.
His happiest achievements resulted from sketching trips taken to
points she knew in the hills. He had called her a dryad when she first
appeared in the woods, and he had been right, for she knew all the
twisting paths in the tangle of the knobs, unbroken and virgin save
where the orchards of peach-growers had reclaimed bits of sloping
soil. One morning at the end of June, they started out together on
horseback, armed with painting paraphernalia, luncheon and rubber
ponchos in the event of rain. For this occasion, she had saved a coign
of vantage she knew, where his artist's eye might swing out from a
shelving cliff over miles of checkered valley and flat, and league
upon league of cloud and sky. She led the way by zigzag hill roads
where they caught stinging blows from back-lashing branches and up
steep, slippery acclivities. It was one of the times when Saxon was
drinking the pleasant nectar of to-day, refusing to think of
to-morrow. She sang as she rode in advance, and he followed with the
pleasure of a man to whom being unmounted brings a sense of
incompleteness. He knew that he rode no better than she--and he knew
that he could ride. In his ears was the exuberance of the birds
saluting the morning, and in his nostrils the loamy aroma stirred by
their horses' hoofs from the steeping fragrance of last year's leaves.
At the end was a view that brought his breath in deep draughts of
delight.
For two hours, he worked, and only once his eyes left the front. On
that occasion, he glanced back to see her slim figure stretched with
childlike and unconscious grace in the long grass, her eyes gazing
unblinkingly and thoughtfully up to the fleece that drifted across the
blue of the sky. Clover heads waved fragrantly about her, and one
long-stemmed blossom brushed her cheek. She did not see him, and the
man turned his gaze back to the canvas with a leap in his pulses.
After that, he painted feverishly. Finally, he turned to find her at
his elbow.
"What is the verdict?" he demanded.
She looked with almost tense eyes. Her voice was low and thrilled with
wondering delight.
"There is something," she said slowly, "that you never caught before;
something wonderful, almost magical. I don't know what it is."
With a swift, uncontrollable gesture, he bent a little toward her. His
face was the face of a man whose heart is in insurrection. His voice
was impassioned.
"_I_ know what it is," he cried. Then, as she read his look, her
cheeks crimsoned, and it would have been superfluous for him to have
added, "Love." He drew back almost with a start, and began to scrape
the paint smears from his palette. He had quelled the insurrection. At
least in words, he had not broken his vow.
For a moment, the girl stood silent. She felt herself trembling; then,
taking refuge in childlike inconsequence, she peered over the edge of
the cliff.
"Oh!" she exclaimed as though the last few moments had not been lived
through, "there is the most wonderfulest flower!" Her voice was
disappointment-laden. "And it's just out of reach."
Saxon had regained control of himself. He answered with a composure
too calm to be genuine and an almost flippant note that rang false.
"Of course. The most wonderfulest things are always just out of reach.
The edelweiss grows only among the glaciers, and the excelsior crop
must be harvested on inaccessible pinnacles."
He came and looked over the edge, stopping close to her shoulder. He
wanted to demonstrate his regained command of himself. A delicate
purple flower hung on the cliff below as though it had been placed
there to lure men over the edge.
He looked down the sheer drop, appraised with his eye the frail
support of a jutting root, then slipped quietly over, resting by his
arms on the ledge of rock and groping for the root with his toe.
With a short, gasping exclamation, the girl bent forward and seized
both his elbows. Her fingers clutched him with a strength belied by
their tapering slenderness.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
She was kneeling on the ledge, and in her eyes, only a few inches from
his own, he read, not only alarm, but back of that in the depths of
the pupils something else. It might have been the reflection of what
she had a few moments before read in his own. He could feel the soft
play of her breath on his forehead, and his heart pounded so wildly
that it seemed to him he must raise his voice to be heard above it.
Yet, his words and smile were sane.
"I am going to gather flowers," he assured her. "You see," he added
with an irrelevant whimsicality, "I want to see if the unattainable
is really beyond me."
"If you go," she said with ominous quietness of voice, "I shall come,
too."
The man clambered back to the ledge. "I'm not going," he announced.
For a time, neither spoke. Each, with a consciousness of being much
shaken, was seeking about for the safe ground of commonplace. The
man's face had suddenly become almost drawn. He was conscious of
having been too close to the edge in more ways than one, and with the
consciousness came the old sense of necessity for silence. He was
approaching one of the moods that puzzled the girl: the attitude of
fighting her off; the turtle's churlish defense of drawing into
himself.
It was Duska who spoke first. She laughed as she said lightly:
"For a man who is a great artist, you are really very young and very
silly."
His voice was hard.
"I'm worse than that," he acceded.
For a moment more, there was awkward silence; then, Duska asked
simply:
"Aren't you going to paint any more?"
He was gazing at the canvas moodily, almost savagely.
"No," he answered shortly; "if I were to touch it now, I should ruin
it."
The girl said nothing. She half-turned away from him, and her lips set
themselves tightly.
As he began packing the impedimenta, storm-pregnant clouds rolled
swiftly forth over the valley, and emptied themselves in a deluge on
the two wanderers. The girl, riding under dripping trees, her poncho
and "nor'wester" shining like metal under the slanting lines of rain,
went on ahead. In her man's saddle, she sat almost rigidly erect, and
the gauntleted hand that held the reins of the heavy cavalry bridle
clutched them with unconscious tautness of grip. Saxon's face was a
picture of struggle, and neither spoke until they had come to the road
at the base of the hill where two horses could go abreast. Then, he
found himself quoting:
"Her hand was still on her sword hilt, the spur was still on
her heel,
She had not cast her harness of gray war-dinted steel;
High on her red-splashed charger, beautiful, bold and browned,
Bright-eyed out of the battle, the Young Queen rode to be
crowned."
He did not realize that he had repeated the lines aloud, until she
turned her face and spoke with something nearer to bitterness than he
had ever heard in her voice:
"Rode to be crowned--did you say?" And she laughed unhappily.