The Key to Yesterday

“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.”

CHAPTER VII

A short time ago, Saxon had felt stronger than all the forces of fate. He had believed that circumstances were plastic and man invincible. Now, as he bent forward in his chair, the South American letter hanging in limp fingers and the coal-oil lamp on the table throwing its circle of light on the foreign postmark and stamp of the envelope, he realized that the battle was on. The forces of which he had been contemptuous were to engage him at once, with no breathing space before the combat. Viewing it all in this light, he felt the qualms of a general who encounters an aggressive enemy before his line is drawn and his battle front arranged.

He had so entirely persuaded himself that his duty was clear and that he must not speak to the girl of love that now, when he had done so, his entire plan of campaign must be revised, and new problems must be considered. When he had been swept away on the tide that carried him to an avowal, it had been with the vague sense of realization that, if he spoke at all, he must tell the whole story. He had not done so, and now came a new question: Had he the right to tell the story until, in so far as possible, he had probed its mystery? Suppose his worst fears proved themselves. The certainty would be little harder to confess than the presumption and the suspense. Suppose, on the other hand, the fighting chance to which every man clings should, after all, acquit him? Would it not be needless cruelty to inflict on her the fears that harried his own thoughts? Must he not try first to arm himself with a definite report for, or against, himself?

After all, he argued weakly, or perhaps it was the devil’s advocate that whispered the insidious counsel, there might be a mistake. The man of Ribero’s story might still be some one else. He had never felt the instincts of murder. Surely, he had not been the embezzler, the libertine, the assassin! But, in answer to that argument, his colder logic contended there might have been to his present Dr. Jekyll a Mr. Hyde of the past. The letter he held in his hand of course meant nothing more than that Ribero had talked to some one. It might be merely the fault of some idle gossip in a Latin-American café, when the claret flowed too freely. The writer, this unknown “H. S. R.,” had probably taken Ribero’s testimony at its face value. Then, out of the page arose insistently the one sentence that did mean something more, the new link in a chain of definite conclusion. “Since you beat it to God’s Country and went West – ” That was the new evidence this anonymous witness had contributed. He had certainly gone West!

Assuredly, he must go to South America, and prosecute himself. To do this meant to thrust himself into a situation that held a hundred chances, but there was no one else who could determine it for him. It was not merely a matter of collecting and sifting evidence. It was also a test of subjecting his dormant memory to the stimulus of place and sights and sounds and smells. When he stood at the spot where Carter had faced his executioners, surely, if he were Carter, he would awaken to self-recognition. He would slip away on some pretext, and try out the issue, and then, when he spoke to Duska, he could speak in definite terms. And if he were the culprit? The question came back as surely as the pendulum swings to the bottom of the arc, and rested at the hideous conviction that he must be the malefactor. Then, Saxon rose and paced the floor, his hand convulsively crushing the letter into a crumpled wad.

Well, he would not come back! If that were his world, he would not reënter it. He was willing to try himself – to be his own prosecutor, but, if the thing spelled a sentence of disgrace, he reserved the right to be also his own executioner.

Then, the devil’s advocate again whispered seductively into his perplexity.

Suppose he went and tested the environment, searching conscience and memory – and suppose no monitor gave him an answer. Would he not then have the right to assume his innocence? Would he not have the right to feel certain that his memory, so stimulated and still inactive, was not only sleeping, but dead? Would he not be justified in dismissing the fear of a future awakening, and, as Steele had suggested, in going forward in the person of Robert A. Saxon, abandoning the past as completely as he had perhaps abandoned previous incarnations?

So, for the time, he stilled his fears, and under his brush the canvases became more wonderful than they had ever been. He had Duska at his side, not only in the old intimacy, but in the new and more wonderful intimacy that had come of her acknowledged love. He would finish the half-dozen pictures needed to complete the consignment for the Eastern and European exhibits, then he would start on his journey.

A week later, Saxon took Duska to a dance at the club-house on the top of one of the hills of the ridge, and, after she had tired of dancing, they had gone to a point where the brow of the knob ran out to a jutting promontory of rock. It was a cape in the dim sea of night mist which hung upon, and shrouded, the flats below. Beyond the reaches of silver gray, the more distant hills rose in mystic shadow-shapes of deep cobalt. There were stars overhead, but they were pale in the whiter light of the moon, and all the world was painted, as the moon will paint it, in silvers and blues.

Back of them was the softened waltz-music that drifted from the club-house and the bright patches of color where the Chinese lanterns swung among the trees.

As they talked, the man felt with renewed force that the girl had given him her love in the wonderful way of one who gives but once, and gives all without stint or reserve. It was as though she had presented him unconditionally with the key to the archives of her heart, and made him possessor of the unspent wealth of all the Incas.

Suddenly, he realized that his plan of leaving her without explanation, on a quest that might permit no return, was meeting her gift with half-confidence and deception. What he did with himself now, he did with her property. He was not at liberty to act without her full understanding and sympathy in his undertakings. The plan was one of infinite brutality.

He must tell her everything, and then go. He struck a match for his cigar, to give himself a moment of arranging his words, and, as he stood shielding the light against a faintly stirring breeze, the miniature glare fell on her delicately chiseled lips and nose and chin. Her expression made him hesitate. She was very young, very innocently childlike and very happy. To tell her now would be like spoiling a little girls’ party. It must be told soon, but not while the dance music was still in their ears and the waxy smell of the dance candles still in their nostrils.

When he left her at Horton House, he did not at once return to the cabin. He wanted the open skies for his thoughts, and there was no hope of sleep.

He retraced his steps from the road, and wandered into the old-fashioned garden. At last, he halted by the seat where he had posed her for the portrait. The moon was sinking, and the shadows of the garden wall and trees and shrubs fell in long, fantastic angles across the silvered earth. The house itself was dark except where the panes of her window still glowed. Standing between the tall stalks of the hollyhocks, he held his watch up to the moon. It was half-past two o’clock.

Then, he looked up and started with surprise as he saw her standing in the path before him. At first, he thought that his imagination had projected her there. Since she had left him at the stairs, the picture she had made in her white gown and red roses had been vividly permanent, though she herself had gone.

But, now, her voice was real.

“Do you prowl under my windows all night, kind sir?” she laughed, happily. “I believe you must be almost as much in love as I am.”

The man reached forward, and seized her hand.

“It’s morning,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she assured him. Then, she added serenely: “Do you suppose that the moon shines like this every night, or that I can always expect times like these? You know,” she taunted, “it was so hard to get you to admit that you cared that it was an achievement. I must be appreciative, mustn’t I? You are an altogether reserved and cautious person.”

He seized her in his arms with neither reserve nor caution.

“Listen,” he said in an impassioned voice, “I have no right to touch you. In five minutes, you will probably not even let me speak to you. I had no right to speak. I had no right to tell you that I loved you!”

She did not draw away. She only looked into his eyes very solemnly.

“You had no right?” she repeated, in a bewildered voice. “Don’t you love me?”

“You don’t have to ask that,” he avowed. “You know it. Your own heart can answer such questions.”

“Then,” she decreed with womanlike philosophy, “you had a right to say so – because I love you, and that is settled.”

“No,” he expostulated, “I tell you I did not have the right. You must forget it. You must forget everything.” He was talking with mad impetuosity.

“It is too late,” she said simply. “Forget!” There was an indignant ring in her words. “Do you think that I could forget – or that, if I could, I would? Do you think it is a thing that happens every day?”

From a tree at the fence line came the softly lamenting note of a small owl, and across the fields floated the strident shriek of a lumbering night freight.

To Saxon’s ears, the inconsequential sounds came with a painful distinctness. It was only his own voice that seemed to him muffled in a confusion of roaring noises. His lips were so dry that he had to moisten them with his tongue.

To hesitate, to temporize, even to soften his recital, would mean another failure in the telling of it. He must plunge in after his old method of directness, even brutality, without preface or palliation.

Here, at all events, brutality were best. If his story appalled and repelled her, it would be the blow that would free her from the thraldom of the love he had unfairly stolen. If she turned from him with loathing, at least anger would hurt her less than heartbreak.

“Do you remember the story Ribero so graphically told of the filibuster and assassin and the firing squad in the plaza?” As he spoke, Saxon knew with a nauseating sense of certainty that his brain had never really doubted his identity. He had futilely argued with himself, but it was only his eagerness of wish that had kept clamoring concerning the possibility of a favorable solution. All the while, his reason had convicted him. Now, as he spoke, he felt sure, as sure as though he could really remember, and he felt also his unworthiness to speak to her, as though it were not Saxon, but Carter, who held her in his arms. He suddenly stepped back and held her away at arms’ length, as though he, Saxon, were snatching her from the embrace of the other man, Carter. Then, he heard her murmuring:

“Yes, of course I remember.”

“And did you notice his look of astonishment when I came? Did you catch the covert innuendoes as he talked – the fact that he talked at me – that he was accusing me – my God! recognizing me?”

The girl put up her hands, and brushed the hair back from her forehead. She shook her head as though to shake off some cloud of bewilderment and awaken herself from the shock of a nightmare. She stood so unsteadily that the man took her arm, and led her to the bench against the wall. There, she sank down with her face in her hands. It seemed a century, but, when she looked up again, her face, despite its pallor in the moonlight, was the face of one seeking excuses for one she loves, one trying to make the impossible jibe with fact.

“I suppose you did not catch the full significance of that narrative. No one did except the two of us – the unmasker and the unmasked. Later, he studied a scar on my hand. It’s too dark to see, but you can feel it.”

He caught her fingers in his own. They were icy in his hot clasp, as he pressed them against his right palm.

“Tell me how it happened. Tell me that – that the sequel was a lie!” She imperiously commanded, yet there was under the imperiousness a note of pleading.

“I can’t,” he answered. “He seemed to know the facts. I don’t.”

Her senses were unsteady, reeling things, and he in his evening clothes was an axis of black and white around which the moonlit world spun drunkenly.

Her voice was incredulous, far away.

“You don’t know?” she repeated, slowly. “You don’t know what you did?”

Then, for the first time, he remembered that he had not told her of the blind door between himself and the other years. He had presented himself only on a plea of guilty to the charge, without even the palliation of forgetfulness.

Slowly steeling himself for the ordeal, he went through his story. He told it as he had told Steele, but he added to it all that he had not told Steele – all of the certainty that was building itself against his future out of his past. He presented the case step by step as a prosecutor might have done, adding bit of testimony after bit of testimony, and ending with the sentence from the letter, which told him that he had gone West. He had played the coward long enough. Now, he did not even mention the hope he had tried to foster, that there might be a mistake. It was all so horribly certain that those hopes were ghosts, and he could no longer call them from their graves. The girl listened without a word or an interruption of any sort.

“And so,” he said calmly at the end, “the possibility that I vaguely feared has come forward. The only thing that I know of my other life is a disgraceful thing – and ruin.”

There was a long, torturing silence as she sat steadily, almost hypnotically, gazing into his eyes.

Then, a remarkable thing happened. The girl came to her feet with the old lithe grace that had for the moment forsaken her, leaving her a shape of slender distress. She rose buoyantly and laughed! With a quick step forward, she threw her arms around his neck, and stood looking into his drawn face.

He caught at her arms almost savagely.

“Don’t!” he commanded, harshly. “Don’t!”

“Why?” Her question was serene.

“Because it was Robert Saxon that you loved. You sha’n’t touch Carter. I can’t let Carter touch you.” He was holding her wrists tightly, and pressing her away from him.

“I have never touched Carter,” she said, confidently. “They lied about it, dear. You were never Carter.”

In the white light, her upturned eyes were sure with confidence.

“Now, you listen,” she ordered. “You told me a case that your imagination has constructed from foundation to top. It is an ingenious case. Its circumstantial evidence is skilfully woven into conviction. They have hanged men on that sort of evidence, but here there is a court of appeals. I know nothing about it. I have only my woman’s heart, but my woman’s heart knows you. There is no guilt in you – there never has been. You have tortured yourself because you look like a man whose name is Carter.”

She said it all so positively, so much with the manner of a decree from the supreme bench, that, for a moment, the ghosts of hope began to rise and gather in the man’s brain; for a moment, he forgot that this was not really the final word.

He had crucified himself in the recital to make it easier for her to abandon him. He had told one side only, and she had seen only the force of what he had left unsaid. If that could be possible, it might be possible she was right. With the reaction came a wild momentary joyousness. Then, his face grew grave again.

“I had sworn by every oath I knew,” he told her, “that I would speak no word of love to you until I was no longer anonymous. I must go to Puerto Frio at once, and determine it.”

Her arms tightened about his neck, and she stood there, her hair brushing his face as though she would hold him away from everything past and future except her own heart.

“No! no!” she passionately dissented. “Even if you were the man, which you are not, you are no more responsible for that dead life than for your acts in some other planet. You are mine now, and I am satisfied.”

“But, if afterward,” he went on doggedly, “if afterward I should awake into another personality – don’t you see? Neither you nor I, dearest, can compromise with doubtful things. To us, life must be a thing clean beyond the possibility of blot.”

She still shook her head in stubborn negation.

“You gave yourself to me,” she said, “and I won’t let you go. You won’t wake up in another life. I won’t let you – and, if you do – ” she paused, then added with a smile on her lips that seemed to settle matters for all time – “that is a bridge we will cross when we come to it – and we will cross it together.”

CHAPTER VIII

When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he would have called “full-dress suits,” still sitting over their cigars on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a friendship that needs no further testing. Steele was not the type that goes into an embittered exile. His face had become somewhat fixed as he listened, but there had been no surprise. He had known already, and, when the story was ended, he was an ally.

“There are two courses open to you,” he said, when he rose at last from his seat, “the plan you have of going to South America, and the one I suggested of facing forward and leaving the past behind. If you do the first, whether or not you are the man they want, the circumstantial case is strong. You know too little of your past to defend yourself, and you are placing yourself in the enemy’s hands. The result will probably be against you with equal certainty whether innocent or guilty.”

“Letting things lie,” demurred Saxon, “solves nothing.”

“Why solve them?” Steele paused at his door. “It would seem to me that with her in your life you would be safe against forgetting your present at all events – and that present is enough.”

The summer was drawing to its close while Saxon still wavered. Unless he faced the charge that seemed impending near the equator, he must always stand, before himself at least, convicted. Yet, Duska was immovable in her decision, and Steele backed her intuition with so many plausible, masculine arguments that he waited. He was packing and preparing the pictures that were to be shipped to New York. Some of them would be exhibited and sold there. Others, to be selected by his Eastern agent, would go on to the Paris market. He had included the landscape painted on the cliff, on the day when the purple flower lured him over the edge, and the portrait of the girl. These pictures, however, he specified, were only for exhibition, and were not under any circumstances to be sold.

Each day, he insisted on the necessity of his investigation, and argued it with all the forcefulness he could command, but Duska steadfastly overruled him.

Once, as the sunset dyed the west with the richness of gold and purple and orange and lake, they were walking their horses along a hill lane between pines and cedars. The girl’s eyes were drinking in the color and abundant beauty, and the man rode silent at her saddle skirt. She had silenced his continual argument after her usual decisive fashion. Now, she turned her head, and demanded:

“Suppose you went and settled this, would you be nearer your certainty? The very disproving of this suspicion would leave you where you were before Señor Ribero told his story.”

“It would mean this much,” he argued. “I should have followed to its end every clew that was given me. I should have exhausted the possibilities, and I could then with a clear conscience leave the rest to destiny. I could go on feeling that I had a right to abandon the past because I had questioned it as far as I knew.”

She was resolute.

“I should,” he urged, “feel that in letting you share the danger I had at least tried to end it.”

She raised her chin almost scornfully, and her eyes grew deeper.

“Do you think that danger can affect my love? Are we the sort of people who have no eyes in our hearts, and no hearts in our eyes, who live and marry and die, and never have a hint of loving as the gods love? I want to love you that way – audaciously – taking every chance. If the stars up there love, they love like that.”

Some days later, Mrs. Horton again referred to her wish to make the trip to Venezuela. To the man’s astonishment, Duska appeared this time more than half in favor of it, and spoke as though she might after all reconsider her refusal to be her aunt’s traveling companion. Later, when they were alone, he questioned her, and she laughed with the note of having a profound secret. At last, she explained.

“I am interested in South America now,” she informed him. “I wasn’t before. I shouldn’t think of letting you go there, but I guess I’m safe in Puerto Frio, and I might settle your doubts myself. You see,” she added judicially, “I’m the one person you can trust not to betray your secret, and yet to find out all about this mysterious Mr. Carter.”

Saxon was frankly frightened. Unless she promised that she would do nothing of the sort, he would himself go at once. He had waited in deference to her wishes, but, if the thing were to be recognized as deserving investigation at all, he must do it himself. He could not protect himself behind her as his agent. She finally assented, yet later Mrs. Horton once more referred to the idea of the trip as though she expected Duska to accompany her.

Then it was that Saxon was driven back on strategy. The idea was one that he found it hard to accept, yet he knew that he could never gain her consent, and her suggestion proved that, though she would not admit it, at heart she realized the necessity of a solution. The hanging of his canvases for exhibition afforded an excuse for going to New York. On his arrival there, he would write to her, explaining his determination to take a steamer for the south, and “put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.” There seemed to be no alternative.

He did not take Steele into his confidence, because Steele agreed with Duska, and should be able to say, when questioned, that he had not been a party to the conspiracy. When Saxon stood, a few days later, on the step of an inbound train, the girl stood waving her sunbonnet, slenderly outlined against the green background of the woods beyond the flag-station. A sudden look of pain crossed the man’s face, and he leaned far out for a last glimpse of her form.