For a moment more, there was awkward silence; then, Duska asked simply:

"Aren't you going to paint any more?"

He was gazing at the canvas moodily, almost savagely.

"No," he answered shortly; "if I were to touch it now, I should ruin it."

The girl said nothing. She half-turned away from him, and her lips set themselves tightly.

As he began packing the impedimenta, storm-pregnant clouds rolled swiftly forth over the valley, and emptied themselves in a deluge on the two wanderers. The girl, riding under dripping trees, her poncho and "nor'wester" shining like metal under the slanting lines of rain, went on ahead. In her man's saddle, she sat almost rigidly erect, and the gauntleted hand that held the reins of the heavy cavalry bridle clutched them with unconscious tautness of grip. Saxon's face was a picture of struggle, and neither spoke until they had come to the road at the base of the hill where two horses could go abreast. Then, he found himself quoting:

"Her hand was still on her sword hilt, the spur was still on her heel, She had not cast her harness of gray war-dinted steel; High on her red-splashed charger, beautiful, bold and browned, Bright-eyed out of the battle, the Young Queen rode to be crowned."

He did not realize that he had repeated the lines aloud, until she turned her face and spoke with something nearer to bitterness than he had ever heard in her voice:

"Rode to be crowned--did you say?" And she laughed unhappily.

CHAPTER VI

For more than a week after the ride to the cliff, Duska withdrew herself from the orbit in which Saxon revolved, and the man, feeling that she wished to dismiss him, in part at least, used the "air line"

much less frequently than in the days that had been. Once, when Steele had left the cabin early to dine at the "big house," Saxon protested that he must stay and write letters. He slipped away, however, in the summer starlight, and took one of the canoes from the boat-house on the river. He drove the light craft as noiselessly and gloomily as a funeral barge along the shadow of the bank, the victim of utter misery, and his blackness of mood was intensified when he saw a second canoe pa.s.s in mid-channel, and recognized Steele's tenor in the drifting strains of a sentimental song. There was no moon, and the river was only a black mirror for the stars. The tree-grown banks were blacker fringes of shadow, but he could make out a slender figure wielding the stern paddle with an easy grace which he knew was Duska's. His sentiment was in no wise jealousy, but it was in every wise heart-hunger.

When they did meet, she was cordial and friendly, but the old intimate regime had been disturbed, and for the man the sun was clouded. He was to send a consignment of pictures to his Eastern agent for exhibition and sale, and he wished to include several of the landscapes he had painted since his arrival at the cabin. Finding creative work impossible, he devoted himself to that touching up and varnishing which is largely mechanical, and made frequent trips to town for the selection of frames.

So much of his time had been spent at Horton House that unbroken absence would have been noticeable. His visits were, however, rarer, and on one occasion Mrs. Horton made an announcement which he found decidedly startling.

"I have been wanting to take a trip to Cuba early in the fall, and possibly go on to Venezuela where some old friends are in the diplomatic service," she said, "but Mr. Horton pleads business, and I can't persuade Duska to go with me."

At once, Steele had taken up the project with enthusiasm, asking to be admitted to the party and beginning an outline of plans.

Saxon found himself shuddering at the idea of the girl's going to the coast where perhaps he himself had a criminal record. He had procrastinated too long. He had secretly planned his own trip of self-investigation for a time when the equatorial heat had begun to abate its midsummer ferocity. Evidently, he must hasten his departure.

But the girl's answer in part rea.s.sured him.

"It doesn't appeal, Aunty. Why not get the Longmores? They are always ready to go touring. They've exhausted the far East, and are weeping for new worlds."

Saxon went back early that night, and once more tramped the woods.

Steele lingered, and later, while the whippoorwills were calling and a small owl plaintively lamenting, he and Duska sat alone on the white-columned verandah.

"Duska," he said suddenly, "is there no chance for me--no little outside chance?"

She looked up, and shook her head slowly.

"I wish I could say something else, George," she answered earnestly, "because I love you as a very dearest brother and friend, but that is all it can ever be."

"Is there no way I can remake or remold myself?" he urged. "I have held the Platonic att.i.tude all summer, but to-night makes all the old uncontrollable thoughts rise up and clamor for expression. Is there no way?"

"George"--her voice was very soft--"it hurts me to hurt you--but I'd have to lie to you if I said there was a way. There can't be--ever."

"Is there any--any new reason?" he asked.

For a moment, she hesitated in silence, and the man bent forward.

"I shouldn't have asked that, Duska--I don't ask it," he hastened to amend. "Whether there is a new reason or just all the old ones, is there any way I can help--any way, leaving myself out of it, of course?"

Again, she shook her head.

"I guess there's no way anyone can help," she said.

Back at the cabin, Steele found his guest moodily pacing the verandah.

The glow of his pipe bowl was a point of red against the black. The Kentuckian dropped into a chair, and for a time neither spoke.

At last, Steele said slowly:

"Bob, I have just asked Duska if I had a chance."

The other man wheeled in astonishment. Steele had indeed maintained his Platonic pose so well that the other had not suspected the fire under what he believed to be an extinct crater. His own feeling had been the one thing he had not confided. They had never spoken to each other of Duska in terms of love.

"You!" he said, dully. "I didn't know--"

Steele rose. With his hand on the door-k.n.o.b, he paused.

"Bob," he said, "the answer was the old one. It's also been, 'No.'

I've had my chance. Of course, I really knew it all the while, and yet I had to ask once more. I sha'n't ask again. It hurts her--and I want to see her happy." He turned and went in, closing the door behind him.

But Duska was far from happy, however much Steele and others might wish to see her so. She spent much time in solitary rides and walks.

She knew now that she loved Saxon, and she knew that he had shown in every wordless way that he loved her, yet could she be mistaken? Would he ever speak, since he had not spoken at the cliff? Her own eyes had held a declaration, and she had read in his that he understood the message. His silence at that time must be taken to mean silence for all time.

Saxon had reached his conclusion. He knew that he had hurt her pride, had rejected his opportunity. But that might be a transient grief for her. For him, it would of course be permanent. Men may love at twenty, and recover and love again, even to the number of many times, but to live to the age which he guessed his years would total, and then love as he did, was irremediable. For just that reason, he must remain silent, and must go away. To enter her life by the gate she seemed willing to open for him would mean the taking into that sacred inclosure of every hideous possibility that clouded his own future. He must not enter the gate, and, in order to be sure that a second mad impulse would not drive him through it, he must put distance between himself and the gate.

On one point, he temporized. He was eager to do one piece of work that should be his masterpiece. The greatest achievement of his art life must be her portrait. He wanted to paint it, not in the conventional evening-gown in which she seemed a young queen among women, but in the environment that he liked to think was her own by divine right. It was the dryad that he sought to put on canvas.

He asked her with so much genuine pleading in his voice that she smilingly consented, and the sittings began in the old-fashioned garden at Horton House. She was posed under a spread of branches and in such a position that the sun struck down through the leaves, kissing into color her cheeks and eyes and hair. It was a pose that called for a daring palette, one which, if he succeeded in getting on his canvas what he felt, would give a result whereon he might well rest his reputation. But to him it meant more than just that, for it was giving expression to what he saw through his love of art and his art of love.

The hours given to the first sittings were silent hours, but that was not remarkable. Saxon always worked in silence, though there were times when he painted with gritted teeth because of thoughts he read in the face he was studying--thoughts which the model did not know her face revealed. At times, Mrs. Horton sat in the shade near by, and watched the hand that nursed the canvas with its brush, the steady, bare forearm that needed no mahlstick for support and the eyes that were narrowed to slits as he studied his tones and wide as he painted.

Sometimes, Steele lingered near with a novel which he read aloud, but it happened that in the final sittings there was no one save painter and model.

It was now late in July, and the canvas had begun to take form with a miraculous quality and glow. Perhaps, the man himself did not realize that he could never again paint such a portrait, or any landscape that would be comparable with it. Some men write love-letters that are wonderful heart doc.u.ments, but they write them in black and white, with words. Saxon was not only writing a love-letter, but was painting all that his resolve did not let him say. He was putting into the work pent-up love of such force that it was almost bursting his heart.

Here on canvas as through some wonderful safety-valve, he was pa.s.sionately converting it all into the vivid eloquence of color.

It had been his fancy, since the picture had become something more than a strong, preliminary sketch, that Duska should not see it until it neared completion, and she, wishing to have her impression one unspoiled by foretastes, had a.s.sented to the idea. Each day after the posing ended, and while he rested, and let her rest, the face of the canvas was covered with another which was blank. Finally came the time to ask her opinion. The afternoon light had begun to change with the hint of lengthening shadows. The out-door world was aglow with gracious weather and the air had the wonderful, almost pathetic softness that sometimes comes to Kentucky for a few days in July, bringing, as it seems, a fragment strayed out of Indian Summer and lost in the mid-heat of the year.

The man stood back and covered the portrait, then, when the girl had seated herself before the easel, he stepped forward, and laid his hand on the covering. He hesitated a moment, and his fingers on the blank canvas trembled. He was unveiling the effort of his life, and to him she was the world. If he had failed! Then, with a deft movement, he lifted the concealing canvas, and waited.

For a moment, the girl looked with bated breath, then something between a groan and a stifled cry escaped her. She turned her eyes to him, and rose unsteadily from her seat. Her hands went to her breast, and she wavered as though she would fall. Saxon was at her side in a moment, and, as he supported her, he felt her arm tremble.