The Key to Yesterday Part 25

"It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then understand why I find it impossible to answer her question."

When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow, long voyage ahead, his shanghaied pa.s.senger had gone from stunned unconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of brain-fever. There was a brus.h.i.+ng of shoulders with death. There were fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr.

Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious care--through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ash.o.r.e a man who in the parlance of the peasants was a poor "innocent," a human blank-book in a binding once handsome, now worn, with nothing inscribed on its pages.

For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this helpless creature--who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio, despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a figure of a man--had pa.s.sed into permanent darkness. The light would again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world.

So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain Harris' modest lodgings in the _Rue St. Jacques_, and, inasmuch as the captain's lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks, the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He had hoped to be in charge of a government's work of health and sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings in the _Rue St. Jacques_. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of that room and the court in the center of the house had been the boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to persuade him to move about, but his apathy had been insuperable.

Sometimes, he wandered about the court like a small child. He had no speech. Often, he fingered a rusty key as a baby fingers a rattle. On the day that Steele and Duska had gone to the academy of M.

Hautecoeur, Dr. Cornish and Paul Harris had left the lodgings for a time, and Saxon sat as usual at a window, looking absently out on the court.

In its center stood a stone _jardiniere_, now empty. About it was the flagged area, also empty. In front was the street-door--closed. Saxon looked out with the opaque stare of pupils that admit no images to the brain. They were as empty as the stone jar. Possibly, the sun, borrowing some of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the area.

At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but the _concierge_ stood near.

"_Cordon?_" inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate to let them in or out.

Saxon looked up, and across the hitherto unbroken vacancy of his pupils flickered a disturbed, puzzled tremor of mental groping.

He opened his thin lips, closed them again, then smiled, and said with perfect distinctness:

"_Cordon, s'il vous plait._"

The _concierge_ knew only that monsieur was an invalid. In his next question was nothing more than simple Gallic courtesy.

"_Est-ce que monsieur va mieux aujour d'hui?_"

Once more, Saxon's lips hesitated, then mechanically moved.

"_Oui, merci_," he responded.

The man who found himself standing aimlessly on the sidewalk of the _Rue St. Jacques_, was a man clothed in an old and ill-fitting suit of Captain Harris' clothes. He was long-haired, hollow-cheeked and bearded like a pirate. At last, he hesitatingly turned and wandered away at random. About him lay Paris and the world, but Paris and the world were to him things without names or meaning.

His unguided steps carried him to the banks of the Seine, and finally he stood on the island, gazing without comprehension at the square towers of _Notre Dame_, his brows strangely puckered as his eyes picked out the carvings of the "Last Judgment" and the _Galerie des Rois_.

He shook his head dully, and, turning once more, went on without purpose until at the end of much wandering he again halted. This time, he had before him the _Pantheon's_ entrance, and confronting him on its pedestal sat a human figure in bronze. It was Rodin's unspeakably melancholy conception, "_le Penseur_," and it might have stood for Saxon's self as it half-crouched with limbs tense and brows drawn in, in the agony of brooding thought-travail.

Then, Saxon's head came up, and into his eyes stole a confused groping, as though reason's tentacles were struggling out blindly for something upon which to lay hold. With such a motion perhaps, the prehistoric man-creature may have thrown up his chin at the bursting into being of thought's first coherent germ. But from "_le Penseur_"

Saxon turned away with a futile shake of his head to resume his wanderings.

Finally, in a narrow cross street, he halted once more, and looked about him with a consciousness of vast weariness. He had traversed the length of many blocks in his aimlessness, crossing and recrossing his own course, and he was still feeble from long days of illness and inertia.

Suddenly, he raised his head, and his lips, which had been half-parted in the manner of lips not obeying a positive brain, closed in a firm line that seemed to make his chin and jaw take on a stronger contour.

He drew his brows together as he stood studying the door before him, and his pupils were deeply vague and perplexed. But it was a different perplexity. The vacuity was gone.

Automatically, one thin hand went into the trousers-pocket, and came out clutching a rusty key. For another moment, he stood regarding the thing, turning it over in his fingers. Then, he laughed, and drew back his sagging shoulders. With the gesture, he threw away all imbecility, and followed the inexorable call of some impulse which he could not yet fully understand, but which was neither vague nor haphazard.

At that moment, Dr. Cornish, chancing to glance up from his course a block away, stopped dumfounded at the sight of his patient. When he had gathered his senses, and looked again, the patient had disappeared.

Saxon walked a few steps further, turned into an open street-door, pa.s.sed the _concierge_ without a word, and toilsomely, but with a purposeful tread, mounted the narrow, ill-lighted stairs. At the turning where strangers usually stumbled, he lifted his foot clear for the longer stride, yet he had not glanced down.

For just a moment, he paused for breath in the hall, upon which opened several doors identical in appearance. Without hesitation, he fitted the ancient key into an equally ancient lock, opened the door, and entered.

At the click of the thrown tumbler of the lock, some of the occupants of the place glanced up. They saw the door swing wide, and frame between its jambs a tall, thin man, who stood unsteadily supporting himself against the case. The black-bearded face was flushed with a burning fever, but the eyes that looked out from under the heavy brows were wide awake and intelligent.

"But Marston will one day return to us," Monsieur Hautecoeur was declaring to Steele and the girl, who, with backs to the door, were studying a picture on the wall. "He will return, and then----"

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Saxon arrives at the atelier}]

The instructor had caught the sound of the opening door, and he half-turned his head to cast a side glance in its direction. His words died suddenly on his lips. His pose became petrified; his features transfixed with astonishment. His rigid fixity of face and figure froze the watching students into answering tenseness. Even the blanket-wrapped model held a freshly lighted cigarette poised half-way to her lips. Then, the man in the door took an unsteady step forward, and from his trembling fingers the key fell to the floor, where in the dead stillness it seemed to strike with a crash. The girl and Steele wheeled. At that moment, the lips of the bearded face moved, and from them came the announcement:

"_Me voici, je viens d'arriver._"

The voice broke the hypnotic suspense of the silence as a pin-point snaps a toy balloon.

Hautecoeur sprang excitedly forward.

"Marston! Marston has returned!" he shouted, in a great voice that echoed against the sky-light.

As the man stepped forward, he staggered slightly, and would have fallen had he not been already folded in the giant embrace of the lesser master.

Duska stood as white as the fresh sheets of drawing-paper at her feet.

Her fingers spasmodically clenched and opened at her sides, and from her teeth, biting into the lower lip, her breathing came in gasps. The walls seemed to race in circles, and it was with half-realization that she heard Steele calling the man, wildly demanding recognition.

The newcomer was leaning heavily on Hautecoeur's arm. He did not appear to notice Steele, but his gaze met and held the girl's pallid face and the intensely anguished eyes that looked into his. For an instant, they stood facing each other, neither speaking; then, in a voice of polite concern, the tall man said:

"Mademoiselle is ill!" There was no note of recognition--only, the solicitous tone of any man who sees a woman who is obviously suffering.

Duska raised her chin. Her throat gave a convulsive jerk, but she only caught her lip more tightly between her teeth, so that a moment later, when she spoke, there were purplish indentations on its almost bloodless line.

She half-turned to Steele. Her voice was an utterly hopeless whisper, but as steady as Marston's had been.

"For G.o.d's sake," she said, "take me home!"

At the door, they encountered the excited physician, who stumbled against them with a mumbled apology as he burst into the _atelier_.

CHAPTER XIX

Late that afternoon, in Mrs. Horton's drawing-room at the _Hotel Palais d'Orsay_, Steele stood at the window, his gaze almost sullen in the moodiness of his own ineffectual sympathy. The day had grown as cheerless as himself. Outside, across the _Quai d'Orsay_, a cold rain pelted desolately into the gray water of the Seine, and drew a wet veil across the opposite bank. Through the reeking mist, the remote gray branches in the Gardens of the _Tuileries_ stood out starkly naked. Even the vague ma.s.ses of the _Louvre_ seemed as forbidding as the shadowy bulk of some b.u.t.tressed prison. The "taxis" slurred by through wet streets, and those persons who were abroad went with streaming umbrellas and hurried steps. The raw chill of Continental hotels permeated the place. He knew that in the center of the room Duska sat, her elbows resting on the table top; her eyes, distressfully wide, fixed on the wet panes of the other window. He knew that, if he spoke to her, her lips would shape themselves into a pathetic smile, and her answer would be steady. He knew that she had given herself no luxury of outburst, but that she had remained there, in much the same att.i.tude, all afternoon; sometimes, crus.h.i.+ng her small handkerchief into a tight wad of lace and linen; sometimes, opening it out and smoothing it with infinite care into a tiny square upon the table. He knew that her feet, with their small shoes and high-arched, silk-stockinged insteps, twitched nervously from time to time; that the gallant shoulders drooped forward. These details were pictured in his mind, and he kept his eyes stolidly pointed toward the outer gloom so that he might not be forced to see it all again in actuality.

At last, he wheeled with a sudden gesture of desperation, and, going across to the table, dropped his hand over hers.

She looked up with the unchanged expression of wide-eyed suffering that has no outlet.

"Duska, dear," he asked, "can I do anything?"