The Key to Yesterday. Charles Buck
I drew a picture of a freezing, starving cow, and wrote back, ‘This is how.’ The boss showed that picture around, and some folk thought it bore so much family resemblance to a starving cow that on the strength of it they gambled on me. They staked me to an education in illustrating and painting.”
“And you made good!” she concluded, enthusiastically.
“I hope to make good,” he smiled.
After a pause, she said:
“If you were not busy, I’d guide you to some places along the creek where there are wonderful things to see.”
The man reached for his discarded hat.
“Take me there,” he begged.
“Where?” she demanded. “I spoke of several places.”
“To any of them,” he promptly replied; “better yet, to all of them.”
She shook her head dubiously.
“I ought not to begin as an interruption,” she demurred.
“On the contrary,” he argued confidently, “the good general first acquaints himself with his field.”
An hour later, standing at a gap in a tangle of briar, where the paw-paw trees grew thick, he watched her crossing the meadow toward the roof of her house which topped the foliage not far away. Then, he held up his right hand, and scrutinized the scar, almost invisible under the tan. It seemed to him to grow larger as he looked.
CHAPTER V
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 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