The Key to Yesterday

by Charles Neville Buck

In this hero-worship for the painter, who had failed as a husband to make his daughter happy, there was no disloyalty for the daughter. He knew that Marston had given all but the love he had not been able to give and that he had simulated this until her own insight pierced the deception, refusing compassion where she demanded love.

The men who rendered unto Marston their enthusiastic admiration were men of a cult, and tinged with a sort of cult fanaticism. St. John, as father-in-law, agent and correspondent, was enabled to pose along the Boulevard St. Michel as something of a high priest, and in this small vanity he gloried. So, when the questioners of the cafés bombarded him with inquiries as to when Marston would tire of his pose of hermit and return to Paris, the British father-in-law would throw out his shallow chest, and allow an enigmatical smile to play in his pale eyes, and a faint uplift to come to the corners of his thin lips, but he never told.

“I have a letter here,” he would say, tapping the pocket of his coat. “The master is well, and says that he feels his art to be broadening.”

Between the man and his daughter, the subject of the painter was never mentioned. After her return from England, where she had spent the first year after Marston dropped out of her life, she had exacted from her father a promise that his name should not be spoken between them, and the one law St. John never transgressed was that of devotion to her.

Her life was spent in the lodgings, to which St. John clung because they were in the building where Marston had painted. She never suggested a removal to more commodious quarters. Possibly, into her pallid life had crept a sentimental fondness for the place for the same reason. Her weakness was growing into feebleness. Less, each day, she felt like going down the steep flights of stairs for a walk in the Boulevard of St. Michael, and climbing them again on her return. More heavily each day, she leaned on his supporting arm. All these things St. John noted, and day by day the traces of sandy red in his mustache and beard faded more and more into gray, and the furrow between his pale blue eyes deepened more perceptibly.

St. John had gone one afternoon to a neighboring atelier, and the girl, wandering into his room, saw a portrait standing on the easel which St. John had formerly used for his own canvases. Most of the pictures that came here were Marston’s. This one, like the rest, was unsigned. She sank into the deeply cushioned chair that St. John kept for her in his own apartment, and gazed fixedly at the portrait.

It was a picture of a woman, and the woman in the chair smiled at the woman on the canvas.

“You are very beautiful—my successor!” she murmured. For a time, she studied the warm, vivid tones of the painted features, then, with the same smile, devoid of bitterness, she went on talking to the other face.

“I know you are my successor,” she said, “because the enthusiasm painted into your face is not the enthusiasm of art alone—nor,” she added slowly, “is it pity!”

Then, she noticed that one corner of the canvas caught the light with the shimmer of wet paint. It was the corner where ordinarily an artist affixes his name. She rose and went to the heavy studio-easel, and looked again with her eyes close to the stretchers. The paint was evidently freshly applied to that corner of the canvas. To her peering gaze, it almost seemed that through the new coating of the background she could catch a faint underlying line of red, as though it had been a stroke in the letter of a name. Then, she noticed her father’s palette lying on a chair near the easel, and the brushes were damp. The lake and Van Dyke brown and neutral-tint that had been squeezed from their tubes were mixed into a rich tone on the palette, which matched the background of the portrait. Sinking back in the chair, fatigued even by such a slight exertion, she heard her father’s returning tread on the stairs.