CHAPTER XVII
In the compartment of the railway carriage, Steele was gazing fixedly at the lace “tidy” on the cushioned back of the opposite seat. His brows were closely knit in thought. He was evolving a plan.
Duska sat with her elbow on the sill of the compartment window, her chin on her gloved hand, her eyes gazing out, vague and unseeing. Yet, she loved beauty, and just outside the panes there was beauty drawn to a scale of grandeur.
They were climbing, behind the double-header of engines, up where it seemed that one could reach out and touch the close-hanging clouds, into tunnels and out of tunnels, through St. Gothard’s Pass and on where the Swiss Alps reached up into the fog that veiled the summits. The mountain torrents came roaring down, to beat their green water into swirling foam, and dash over the lower rocks like frenzied mill-races. Her eyes did not wake to a sparkle at sight of the quaint châlets which seemed to stagger under huge roof slabs of rugged slate. She did not even notice how they perched high on seemingly unattainable crags like stranded arks on Helvetian Ararats.
Each tunnel was the darkness between changed tableaux, and the mouth of each offered a new and more wonderful picture. The car-windows framed glimpses of Lake Como, Lake Lugano, and valleys far beneath where villages were only a jumble of toy blocks; yet, all these things did not change the utter weariness of Duska’s eyes where enthusiasm usually dwelt, or tempt Steele’s fixity of gaze from the lace “tidy.”
At Lucerne, his thinking found expression in a lengthy telegram to Paris. The Milan exhibit had opened up a new channel for speculation. If Saxon’s pictures were being pirated and sold as Marston’s, there was no one upon whom suspicion would fall more naturally than the unscrupulous St. John, Marston’s factor in Paris. Steele vaguely remembered the Englishman with his petty pride for his stewardship, though his own art life had lain in circles that rarely intercepted that of the Marston cult even at its outer rim. If this fraud were being practiced, its author was probably swindling both artists, and the appearance of either of them in Paris might drive St. John to desperate means of self-protection.
The conversion of the rooms formerly occupied by Marston into a school had been St. John’s doing. This atelier was in the house where St. John himself lived, and the Kentuckian knew that, unless he had moved his lodgings, he could still be found there, as could the very minor “academy” of Marston-idolizers, with their none-too-exalted instructor, Jean Hautecoeur.
At all events, it was to this address that Steele directed his message. Its purport was to inform St. John that Americans, who had only a short stay in Paris, were anxious to procure a Marston of late date, and to summon him to the Hôtel Palais d’Orsay for the day of their arrival there.
When they reached the hotel, he told the girl of his plan, suggesting that it might be best for him to have this interview with the agent alone, but admitting that, if she insisted on being present, it was her right. She elected to hear the conversation, and, when St. John arrived, he was conducted to the sitting-room of Mrs. Horton’s suite.