The Key to Yesterday. Charles Buck
celebrity,” went on Mr. Bellton, ignoring the charge of inefficiency, “avoids women.” He paused to laugh. “He was telling Steele that he had come to paint landscape, and I am afraid he will have to be brought lagging into your presence.”
“It seems rather brutal to drag him here,” suggested Anne Preston. “I, for one, am willing to spare him the ordeal.”
“However,” pursued Mr. Bellton with some zest of recital, “I have warned him. I told him what dangerous batteries of eyes he must encounter. It seemed to me unfair to let him charge into the lists of loveliness all unarmed – with his heart behind no shield.”
“And he … how did he take your warning?” demanded Miss Buford.
“I think it is his craven idea to avoid the danger and retreat at the first opportunity. He said that he was a painter, had even been a cow-puncher once, but that society was beyond his powers and his taste.”
The group had been neglecting the track. Now, from the grandstand came once more the noisy outburst that ushers the horses into the stretch, and conversation died as the party came to its feet.
None of its members noticed for the moment the two young men who had made their way between the chairs of the verandah until they stood just back of the group, awaiting their turn for recognition.
As the horses crossed the wire and the pandemonium of the stand fell away, George Steele stepped forward to present his guest.
“This is Mr. Robert Saxon,” he announced. “He will paint the portraits of you girls almost as beautiful as you really are… It’s as far as mere art can go.”
Saxon stood a trifle abashed at the form of presentation as the group turned to greet him. Something in the distance had caught Duska Filson’s imagination-brimming eyes. She was sitting with her back turned, and did not hear Steele’s approach nor turn with the others.
Saxon’s casually critical glance passed rapidly over the almost too flawless beauty of the Preston sisters and the flower-like charm of little Miss Buford, then fell on a slender girl in a simple pongee gown and a soft, wide-brimmed Panama hat. Under the hat-brim, he caught the glimpse of an ear that might have been fashioned by a jeweler and a curling tendril of brown hair. If Saxon had indeed been the timorous man Bellton intimated, the glimpse would have thrown him into panic. As it was, he showed no sign of alarm.
His presentation as a celebrity had focused attention upon him in a manner momentarily embarrassing. He found a subtle pleasure in the thought that it had not called this girl’s eyes from whatever occupied them out beyond the palings. Saxon disliked the ordinary. His canvases and his enthusiasms were alike those of the individualist.
“Duska,” laughed Miss Buford, “come back from your dreams, and be introduced to Mr. Saxon.”
The painter acknowledged a moment of suspense. What would be her attitude when she recognized the man who had stared at her down by the paddock fence?
The girl turned. Except himself, no one saw the momentary flash of amused surprise in her eyes, the quick change from grave blue to flashing violet and back again to grave blue. To the man, the swiftly shifting light of it seemed to say: “You are at my mercy; whatever liberality you receive is at the gift and pleasure of my generosity.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said simply, extending her hand. “I was just thinking – ” she paused to laugh frankly, and it was the music of the laugh that most impressed Saxon – “I hardly know what I was thinking.”
He dropped with a sense of privileged good-fortune into the vacant chair at her side.
With just a hint of mischief riffling her eyes, but utter artlessness in her voice, she regarded him questioningly.
“I wonder if we have not met somewhere before? It seems to me – ”
“Often,” he asserted. “I think it was in Babylon first, perhaps. And you were a girl in Macedon when I was a spearman in the army of Alexander.”
She sat as reflective and grave as though she were searching her recollections of Babylon and Macedon for a chance acquaintance, but under the gravity was a repressed sparkle of mischievous delight.
After a moment, he demanded brazenly:
“Would you mind telling me which colt won that first race?”
CHAPTER II
“His career has been pretty much a march of successive triumphs through the world of art, and he has left the critics only one peg on which to hang their carping.”
Steele spoke with the warmth of enthusiasm. He had succeeded in capturing Duska for a few minutes of monopoly in the semi-solitude of the verandah at the back of the club-house. Though he had a hopeless cause of his own to plead, it was characteristic of him that his first opportunity should go to the praise of his friend.
“What is that?” The girl found herself unaccountably interested and ready to assume this stranger’s defense even before she knew with what his critics charged him.
“That he is a copyist,” explained the man; “that he is so enamored of the style of Frederick Marston that his pictures can’t shake off the influence. He is great enough to blaze his own trail – to create his own school, rather than to follow in the tracks of another. Of course,” he hastened to defend, “that is hardly a valid indictment. Every master is, at the beginning of his career, strongly affected by the genius of some greater master. The only mistake lies in following in the footsteps of one not yet dead. To play follow-the-leader with a man of a past century is permissible and laudable, but to give the same allegiance to a contemporary is, in the narrow view of the critics, to accept a secondary place.”
The Kentuckian sketched with ardor the dashing brilliance of the other’s achievement: how five years had brought him from lethal obscurity to international fame; how, though a strictly American product who had not studied abroad, his Salon pictures had electrified Paris. And the girl listened with attentive interest.
When the last race was ended and the thousands were crowding out through the gates, Saxon heard his host accepting a dinner invitation for the evening.
“I shall have a friend stopping in town on his way East, whom I want you all to meet,” explained Mr. Bellton, the prospective host. “He is one Señor Ribero, an attaché of a South American legation, and he may prove interesting.”
Saxon caught himself almost frowning. He did not care for society’s offerings, but the engagement was made, and he had now no alternative to adding his declaration of pleasure to that of his host. He was, however, silent to taciturnity as Steele’s runabout chugged its way along in the parade of motors and carriages through the gates of the race-track inclosure. In his pupils, the note of melancholy unrest was decided, where ordinarily there was only the hint.
“There is time,” suggested the host, “for a run out the Boulevard; I’d like to show you a view or two.”
The suggestion of looking at a promising landscape ordinarily challenged Saxon’s interest to the degree of enthusiasm. Now, he only nodded.
It was not until Steele, who drove his own car, stopped at the top of the Iroquois Park hill that Saxon spoke. They had halted at the southerly brow of the ridge from which the eye sweeps a radius of twenty miles over purpled hills and polychromatic valleys, to yet other hills melting into a sky of melting turquois. Looking across the colorful reaches, Saxon gave voice to his enthusiasm.
They left the car, and stood on the rocks that jut out of the clay at the road’s edge. Beneath them, the wooded hillside fell away, three hundred feet of precipitous slope and tangle. For a time, Saxon’s eyes were busy with the avid drinking in of so much beauty, then once more they darkened as he wheeled toward his companion.
“George,” he said slowly, “you told me that we were to go to a cabin of yours tucked away somewhere in the hills, and paint landscape. I caught the idea that we were to lead a sort of camp-life – that we were to be hermits except for the companionship of our palettes and nature and each other – and the few neighbors that one finds