For more than a week after the ride to the cliff, Duska withdrew
herself from the orbit in which Saxon revolved, and the man, feeling
that she wished to dismiss him, in part at least, used the "air line"
much less frequently than in the days that had been. Once, when Steele
had left the cabin early to dine at the "big house," Saxon protested
that he must stay and write letters. He slipped away, however, in the
summer starlight, and took one of the canoes from the boat-house on
the river. He drove the light craft as noiselessly and gloomily as a
funeral barge along the shadow of the bank, the victim of utter
misery, and his blackness of mood was intensified when he saw a second
canoe pass in mid-channel, and recognized Steele's tenor in the
drifting strains of a sentimental song. There was no moon, and the
river was only a black mirror for the stars. The tree-grown banks were
blacker fringes of shadow, but he could make out a slender figure
wielding the stern paddle with an easy grace which he knew was
Duska's. His sentiment was in no wise jealousy, but it was in every
wise heart-hunger.
When they did meet, she was cordial and friendly, but the old intimate
regime had been disturbed, and for the man the sun was clouded. He was
to send a consignment of pictures to his Eastern agent for exhibition
and sale, and he wished to include several of the landscapes he had
painted since his arrival at the cabin. Finding creative work
impossible, he devoted himself to that touching up and varnishing
which is largely mechanical, and made frequent trips to town for the
selection of frames.
So much of his time had been spent at Horton House that unbroken
absence would have been noticeable. His visits were, however, rarer,
and on one occasion Mrs. Horton made an announcement which he found
decidedly startling.
"I have been wanting to take a trip to Cuba early in the fall, and
possibly go on to Venezuela where some old friends are in the
diplomatic service," she said, "but Mr. Horton pleads business, and I
can't persuade Duska to go with me."
At once, Steele had taken up the project with enthusiasm, asking to
be admitted to the party and beginning an outline of plans.
Saxon found himself shuddering at the idea of the girl's going to the
coast where perhaps he himself had a criminal record. He had
procrastinated too long. He had secretly planned his own trip of
self-investigation for a time when the equatorial heat had begun to
abate its midsummer ferocity. Evidently, he must hasten his departure.
But the girl's answer in part reassured him.
"It doesn't appeal, Aunty. Why not get the Longmores? They are always
ready to go touring. They've exhausted the far East, and are weeping
for new worlds."
Saxon went back early that night, and once more tramped the woods.
Steele lingered, and later, while the whippoorwills were calling and a
small owl plaintively lamenting, he and Duska sat alone on the
white-columned verandah.
"Duska," he said suddenly, "is there no chance for me--no little
outside chance?"
She looked up, and shook her head slowly.
"I wish I could say something else, George," she answered earnestly,
"because I love you as a very dearest brother and friend, but that is
all it can ever be."
"Is there no way I can remake or remold myself?" he urged. "I have
held the Platonic attitude all summer, but to-night makes all the old
uncontrollable thoughts rise up and clamor for expression. Is there no
way?"
"George"--her voice was very soft--"it hurts me to hurt you--but I'd
have to lie to you if I said there was a way. There can't be--ever."
"Is there any--any new reason?" he asked.
For a moment, she hesitated in silence, and the man bent forward.
"I shouldn't have asked that, Duska--I don't ask it," he hastened to
amend. "Whether there is a new reason or just all the old ones, is
there any way I can help--any way, leaving myself out of it, of
course?"
Again, she shook her head.
"I guess there's no way anyone can help," she said.
Back at the cabin, Steele found his guest moodily pacing the verandah.
The glow of his pipe bowl was a point of red against the black. The
Kentuckian dropped into a chair, and for a time neither spoke.
At last, Steele said slowly:
"Bob, I have just asked Duska if I had a chance."
The other man wheeled in astonishment. Steele had indeed maintained
his Platonic pose so well that the other had not suspected the fire
under what he believed to be an extinct crater. His own feeling had
been the one thing he had not confided. They had never spoken to each
other of Duska in terms of love.
"You!" he said, dully. "I didn't know--"
Steele rose. With his hand on the door-knob, he paused.
"Bob," he said, "the answer was the old one. It's also been, 'No.'
I've had my chance. Of course, I really knew it all the while, and yet
I had to ask once more. I sha'n't ask again. It hurts her--and I want
to see her happy." He turned and went in, closing the door behind him.
But Duska was far from happy, however much Steele and others might
wish to see her so. She spent much time in solitary rides and walks.
She knew now that she loved Saxon, and she knew that he had shown in
every wordless way that he loved her, yet could she be mistaken? Would
he ever speak, since he had not spoken at the cliff? Her own eyes had
held a declaration, and she had read in his that he understood the
message. His silence at that time must be taken to mean silence for
all time.
Saxon had reached his conclusion. He knew that he had hurt her pride,
had rejected his opportunity. But that might be a transient grief for
her. For him, it would of course be permanent. Men may love at twenty,
and recover and love again, even to the number of many times, but to
live to the age which he guessed his years would total, and then love
as he did, was irremediable. For just that reason, he must remain
silent, and must go away. To enter her life by the gate she seemed
willing to open for him would mean the taking into that sacred
inclosure of every hideous possibility that clouded his own future. He
must not enter the gate, and, in order to be sure that a second mad
impulse would not drive him through it, he must put distance between
himself and the gate.
On one point, he temporized. He was eager to do one piece of work
that should be his masterpiece. The greatest achievement of his art
life must be her portrait. He wanted to paint it, not in the
conventional evening-gown in which she seemed a young queen among
women, but in the environment that he liked to think was her own by
divine right. It was the dryad that he sought to put on canvas.
He asked her with so much genuine pleading in his voice that she
smilingly consented, and the sittings began in the old-fashioned
garden at Horton House. She was posed under a spread of branches and
in such a position that the sun struck down through the leaves,
kissing into color her cheeks and eyes and hair. It was a pose that
called for a daring palette, one which, if he succeeded in getting on
his canvas what he felt, would give a result whereon he might well
rest his reputation. But to him it meant more than just that, for it
was giving expression to what he saw through his love of art and his
art of love.
The hours given to the first sittings were silent hours, but that was
not remarkable. Saxon always worked in silence, though there were
times when he painted with gritted teeth because of thoughts he read
in the face he was studying--thoughts which the model did not know her
face revealed. At times, Mrs. Horton sat in the shade near by, and
watched the hand that nursed the canvas with its brush, the steady,
bare forearm that needed no mahlstick for support and the eyes that
were narrowed to slits as he studied his tones and wide as he painted.
Sometimes, Steele lingered near with a novel which he read aloud, but
it happened that in the final sittings there was no one save painter
and model.
It was now late in July, and the canvas had begun to take form with a
miraculous quality and glow. Perhaps, the man himself did not realize
that he could never again paint such a portrait, or any landscape that
would be comparable with it. Some men write love-letters that are
wonderful heart documents, but they write them in black and white,
with words. Saxon was not only writing a love-letter, but was painting
all that his resolve did not let him say. He was putting into the work
pent-up love of such force that it was almost bursting his heart.
Here on canvas as through some wonderful safety-valve, he was
passionately converting it all into the vivid eloquence of color.
It had been his fancy, since the picture had become something more
than a strong, preliminary sketch, that Duska should not see it until
it neared completion, and she, wishing to have her impression one
unspoiled by foretastes, had assented to the idea. Each day after the
posing ended, and while he rested, and let her rest, the face of the
canvas was covered with another which was blank. Finally came the time
to ask her opinion. The afternoon light had begun to change with the
hint of lengthening shadows. The out-door world was aglow with
gracious weather and the air had the wonderful, almost pathetic
softness that sometimes comes to Kentucky for a few days in July,
bringing, as it seems, a fragment strayed out of Indian Summer and
lost in the mid-heat of the year.
The man stood back and covered the portrait, then, when the girl had
seated herself before the easel, he stepped forward, and laid his
hand on the covering. He hesitated a moment, and his fingers on the
blank canvas trembled. He was unveiling the effort of his life, and to
him she was the world. If he had failed! Then, with a deft movement,
he lifted the concealing canvas, and waited.
For a moment, the girl looked with bated breath, then something
between a groan and a stifled cry escaped her. She turned her eyes to
him, and rose unsteadily from her seat. Her hands went to her breast,
and she wavered as though she would fall. Saxon was at her side in a
moment, and, as he supported her, he felt her arm tremble.
"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 dykes 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 God's truth and I can prove it. I
would have written before, but since you beat it to God'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."