The Key to Yesterday. Charles Buck

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Señor 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:

      “Señor 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 СКАЧАТЬ