“I shall say little,” he wrote. “I can’t be sure you will give me a hearing, but also I can not go on until I have begged it. I can not bear that any report shall reach you until I have myself reported. My only comfort is that I concealed nothing that I had the knowledge to tell you. There is now no blank in my life, and yet it is all blank, and must remain blank unless I can come to you. I am free to speak, and, if you give it to me, no one else can deny me the right to speak. All that I said on that night when a certain garden was bathed in the moon is more true now than then, and now I speak with full knowledge. Can you forgive everything?”
And the girl reading the letter let it drop in her lap, and looked out through her window across the dazzling whiteness of the Promenade des Anglais to the purple Mediterranean. Once more, her eyes lighted from deep cobalt to violet.
“But there was nothing to forgive,” she softly told the sea.
CHAPTER XXI
When, a month later, Frederick Marston went to the hotel on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, it was a much improved and rejuvenated man as compared with the wasted creature who had opened the closed door of the “academy” in the Quartier Latin, and had dropped the key on the floor. Although still a trifle gaunt, he was much the same person who, almost a year before, had clung to the pickets at Churchill Downs, and halted in his view of a two-year-old finish. Just as the raw air of the north had given place to the wooing softness of the Riviera, and the wet blankets of haze over the gardens of the Tuileries to the golden sunlight of the flower-decked south, so he had come again out of winter into spring, and the final result of his life’s equation was the man that had been Saxon, untouched by the old Marston.
Duska’s stay at Nice had been begun in apathy. About her were all the influences of beauty and roses and soft breezes, but it was not until she had read this first letter from Marston that these things meant anything to her. Then, suddenly, she had awakened to a sense of its delight. She knew that he would not come at once, and she felt that this was best. She wanted him to come back to her when he could come as the man who had been in her life, and, since she knew he was coming, she could wait. Her eyes had become as brightly blue as the Mediterranean mirroring the sky, and her cheeks had again taken on their kinship to the roses of the Riviera. Once more, she was one with the nature of this favored spot, a country that some magical realist seems to have torn bodily from the enchanted Isles of Imagination, and transplanted in the world of Fact.
Now, she became eager to see everything, and it so happened that, when Marston, who had not notified her of the day of his arrival, reached her hotel, it was to find that she and her aunt had motored over to Monte Carlo, by the upper Corniche Road, that show-drive of the world which climbs along the heights with the sea below and the sky, it would seem, not far above.
The man turned out again to the Promenade des Anglais. The sun was shining on its whiteness, and it seemed that the city was a huge structure of solid marble, set between the sea and the color-spotted slopes of the villa-clad hills.