“I’m sorry,” said Conkling, “but the two Constables are only copies, and there’s no chance of being mistaken when I say the Holbein is a palpable forgery. The Correggio is not even worth considering. It impresses me as a gallery student’s sketch—the sort of thing they used to sell to tourists by the mile. Strictly speaking, it has no commercial value. As for the others—well, candidly, I’m afraid it would scarcely pay you to put them in an agent’s hands. They’re not the character of work a city dealer could handle—could handle with any degree of profit to you and your aunts, I mean.”
She studied his face with her questioning, grave eyes.
“I was afraid so,” she finally said, with a new listlessness in her voice.
“I know it hurts,” he said, moving toward her, “and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” she asked with no reciprocal movement.
“That instead of bringing you happiness at the very first I’ve only been able to bring you the other thing.”
“I wasn’t thinking about myself,” she told him. “I was thinking more about them.”
He knew that she meant the two strange old women with whom she lived, with whom she had lived; and in the strong side light, as she stood there still vital and ardent and unawakened, he tried to picture her face as it might be in the years to come, pinched with time and penury, devitalized by the vampire seasons which would drink up the blood from her warm bosom, dulled and hardened by the mean and monotonous years of backwater existence. She impressed him as too warm and rich to be wasted on that sterile air, and he fell to wondering how she would respond to the world as he knew it, to that tranquil and sophisticated world which would be so new to her. Under the fuller sun of freedom, he told himself, she would open up like one of the tea roses in the old manor-house garden below them. He imagined her emerging from the Pennsylvania Station in a taxi-cab, with all New York towering about her in the pale gold of early autumn. But that thought stopped short, for she was speaking again.
“It was their only hope,” she was saying, with her meditative eyes on the leaning array of canvases. “It seemed the only thing that could have saved them from all their hopelessness, from all the misery that has made them what they are.”
He thought of that sepulchral pair, immured in their withered and Old World narrownesses, but he thought of them without pity. They were as set as granite, those two old vultures, and nothing would ever move them—would ever change them.
“It will mean just keeping on in the same old way until the end,” he heard the voice of Julia Keswick saying.
“But surely there’s some way out for them,” he protested without giving much thought to his words.
“There is!” asserted the girl with a flash of what seemed defiance on her face.
“What is it?” he asked.
“There is a painting I haven’t shown you.”
He noticed for the first time that her face had grown almost colorless. He could see the lips that carried a touch of rebelliousness, framing themselves into what seemed a line of fortitude. It added to her air of maturity. Yet she became girlish again as she met his glance with what was almost a look of audacity.
“I didn’t intend you to see it,” she told him, and he felt that there was now almost a challenge in that steady gaze of hers.
“Why not?” he asked, nettled by a sense of remoteness drifting between them.
“Because I know my aunts would not wish it to be seen. It has been kept hidden year after year.”
“Why?” repeated Conkling.
She was silent for a moment or two. She was no longer looking at him. But for the second time he became conscious of the achieved air of fortitude in her averted face.
“They would say it was—it was sinful.”
She stood silent a moment when he asked for the reason.
“Because it’s a nude,” she finally said, looking up at him. He had no means of judging what that moment was costing her. He could even afford to smile a little.
“Well,” he demanded, “what of that?”
“I’ve already told you that my aunts do not approve of such things,” she said with an appeal in her eyes which he could not understand.
“Doyou?” he queried almost bruskly. He noticed that her pallor had increased in the last minute or two.
“Yes, I do,” she said with a return of her earlier defiant tone. “I can’t help feeling that this picture is beautiful. I know there is nothing wrong about it—that there is nothing to be ashamed of in looking at it.”
“Why should there be?” he demanded.
The girl’s glance wandered involuntarily back toward the stairhead.
“They would say it was wrong.”
That reiterated use of the pronoun began to impress him with the extent to which “they” had dominated and dwarfed her life.
“But some of the world’s most beautiful and most valuable pictures are nudes,” he protested. “Surely we don’t need to go into all that!”
“I’ve felt that way,” she said after a silence, as though the confession were a relinquishment of something momentous, of something which she would not lightly part with.
“Would you rather I didn’t see this picture?” he asked with a second wind of patience, troubled by the look on her face.
“No!” she said almost with fierceness. “I want you to see it! You must see it!”
Julia Keswickstooped low as she stepped in under the sloping roof, coming to a stop before a large canvas, covered with faded blue-and-white ticking, which leaned against the wall. Conkling watched her, with a revived impression of the epochal close about him, as she drew away this ticking and swung the framed picture about so that it faced him.
Yet his next impression was one of sharp disappointment, for all he saw was a mediocre landscape of muddy and mediocre colors. It struck him as a climax of disillusionment, and his heart went down like a lift. And like a lift, having reached bottom, it began to ascend again, for he could see the stooping girl oddly intent on turning the metal latches on the back of the heavy frame. When the inclosed canvas was released she let it fall back a little from its confining ledges, and then drew it sidewise out of the frame. The movement reminded him of a photographer withdrawing the slide from a plate holder.
But he had no chance to let his mind dwell on that movement, for a moment later his eyes were startled by a sudden impression of gold and ivory merging into a flow of soft and melting line and re-emerging into vivid and gracious contours which brought a catch in his throat. He stood staring at this second canvas which had been hidden under the first, stood staring at it with that faint tingling of the nerve ends with which the astonished senses sometimes dizzily capitulate to sheer bewilderment.
“Great God!” he gasped. And there was reverence in that ejaculation, for all its sharpness.
“What is it?” whispered the girl, catching an echo of his amazement.
“Great God!” he repeated in his own whisper of awe. “It’s a Titian!”
He saw before him the figure of a woman holding an apple. The apple was golden, but not more golden than the soft ivory glow of the woman’s body, bathed in its wash of purifying color. That body made Conkling’s mind flash back to the Borghese with itsSacred and Profane Loveand a moment later revert to theMagdalenin the Pitti. There was the same divine fullness of throat and breast, the same wealth of red-gold hair, the unmistakable mellowness of color and melting loveliness of line. There was a largeness and power in the conception of the figure, a stubborn yet exalted animality, which convinced Conkling the canvas before him belonged to Titian’s later days. Yet as he studied it he objected to the word “animality.” He preferred to substitute the phrase “spiritualized paganism” as he deciphered subtler effects which made him think of the National GalleryMagdalenand remember the abundant glow of bosom in theFloraof the Uffizi, the machinery of human life made adorable to human eyes.
“It’s a Titian!” he repeated in a shocked and half incredulous whisper as he stepped still closer to the canvas.
That canvas, he could see, had suffered somewhat through the vicissitudes of its history. Extremes of heat and cold obviously had imposed a slight rimple of fine lines on its surface. But this did not greatly trouble Conkling. He even found in it, in fact, an accidental and subsidiary delight, for it added eloquence to its tone of time and enriched its note of history with an accentuation of age. But the miracle that it could have been carried unknown and unheralded across the Atlantic, that it could lie for years in the attic of a dilapidated Ontario manor-house, tended to take his breath away. He knew enough of Titian to remember that much of that great Venetian’s work had been lost. He had Vasari to back him up in that. More had been lost, in fact, than had survived, but behind the possession of that painting, he knew, lay a history which would not be easy to unravel. It impressed him as something which kings might have intrigued over. He recalled how nearly two centuries ago, when theFlorawas unearthed to Florence, a nation practically ceased warfare to come and stare at the canvas—and it would soon be America’s time to stop and stare.
The girl moved closer to his side, but he remained unconscious of her presence there. He did not see the rapt light in her eyes. The look of vague triumph on her face was lost to him. It was, in fact, several minutes before he even remembered her. Then it came home to him what the picture meant, not to the America which was to stop and stare, but to the impoverished household where it lay like a jewel hidden away in a straw mattress. He remembered what it would mean to that haughty and broken pair so in need of sustenance. It was their release—their salvation. That benignant golden figure with the apple of desire in her clustered fingers stood the goddess who was to work the miracle, who in a day might transform their penury into plenty. And this thought took his attention back to Julia Keswick.
She was studying him, he saw, with troubled eyes in which some new anxiety seemed to be formulating itself.
“You needn’t worry,” he told her, though he smiled the next moment at the inadequacy of his phrasing. “That canvas is a Titian. There’s not a shadow of doubt about it. There’s no chance of a mistake. No copyist could ever turn the trick like that—not in a thousand years! The only thing that leaves me stumped is how it ever got here.”
“I’ve never been told about it, of course,” she explained, with a slight tremolo of excitement in her voice. “I don’t think there was anybody to tell about it after my father died. But in a letter to a French artist named Branchaud, which must have been returned undelivered after he went to Italy for the last time and was among his papers, father wrote that he’d live on acorns and sleep in a dog kennel before he’d part with the T. ‘T,’ I remember, was all he had written. He said it had cost him too much—too much in blood and tears and worry and work. There was something about a monk at Parma, a monk who had sinned against both God and man, as the letter put it, to whom father had first gone to buy one of West’s portraits of Shelley.”
“Where is that letter?” asked Conkling.
“My aunts burned it four or five years ago. They saw nothing in it but what was discreditable, and destroyed it along with the other things of father’s which they wanted out of existence.”
“The fools!” he cried with a sudden hot resentment.
“What father wrote about it costing him so much in worry and work used to make me wonder if he had copied it at some time with his own hand. I tried to believe that, and it made me prouder of him.”
Conkling shook his head.
“You were wrong there,” he said. “That canvas has got what you can’t copy. The secret of it slipped away from the world over three centuries ago. And no one has ever got within speaking distance of it again.”
Slowly she moved her head up and down, as though consoled by some final confirmation of a long doubtful issue. A faint tinge of color even crept back into her face, and Conkling stood arrested by the miraculous echo of loveliness which the living face seemed to catch from the painted face so close above it. It made him think of a woodland pool overhung by an April twilight. Then his eye wandered on to the Quaker gray of her gown. It made a frame too dull for the buoyant ardencies of her thin young body. And it came home to him how soon, now, that dullness could be done away with.
“All this reminds me of what brought me here under your roof,” he went on, doing his best to key down to her own quietness of tone. “You’ve asked me to tell you what your pictures are worth. But all I’m going to do is to try to give you an idea of what this one is worth. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I’d say this one canvas is worth your farm, and your neighbors’ farms, and every farm and all they hold between here and Weston!”
“You mean to an artist?” she ventured, with the color once more slipping away from her face.
“No, I mean to a dealer, to a collector, to any one with the brains to recognize what it is. As I say, I don’t want to exaggerate. In one way it’s not easy to figure out—in dollars and cents, I mean. But I’m being as reasonable as a man who says a loaf of bread is worth ten cents when I say this Titian is to-day, as it stands there, worth at least three or four hundred thousand dollars.”
It was bewilderment, more than elation, that showed on her face. He even detected a touch of incredulity there as she turned back to the mellow glow of light reflected from the canvas.
“That sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but I know about such things. It has been my business to know. For instance, there was the PanshangerRaphael, sometimes spoken of as the Small CowperMadonna, which Widener paid seven hundred thousand dollars for. And the same collector, when he bought Rembrandt’sMill, paid a cool half million for it, just as he paid a half million for a Vandyke from the Cattaneo collection. And Huntington paid four hundred thousand dollars for Velasquez’sDuke of Olivares, and Frick paid the same amount for a Gainsborough portrait, and a quarter of a million for a small Rembrandt. And I could go on that way until you got tired listening to me. But that’s not the important thing. All you’ve got to do is look at it. You’d know——”
He broke off with a sense of inadequacy. Then wakening to the extent to which he had overlooked her in his excitement, he linked his arm fraternally through hers as she stood studying the canvas.
“Yes, it’s lovely,” she murmured, without responding to the pressure on her arm. She seemed suddenly small and fragile there under the shadow of his shoulder.
“There’s only one thing in all the world lovelier,” he told her as he smiled down into her face, grown pitiful with its shadows of fatigue.
“One thing lovelier?” she echoed absently, clinging to him with a touch of forlornness. That morning of tangled emotions had plainly been a little too much for her.
“I mean you,” he said.
She raised ardent eyes at that, flushing happily as she looked up into his troubled face. For his thoughts, even as he spoke, had gone pioneering off into the uncertain future. And he turned her jealously away from the glow of the canvas.
“It mustn’t take you away from me,” he cried out, with a parade of self-pity.
She smiled surrenderingly, at that, and still again looked up into his eyes with a gaze so shot through with incongruously mingled hunger and gratitude that he turned sharply and took her in his arms.
She lay there passively, with her eyes half closed again. And he studied her, satisfied with the silence and her nearness.
He was still studying her when the sharp clangor of a bell sounded from below stairs. She drew away from him with a stricken light in her eyes.
The bell sounded again, more authoritatively, more angrily.
“That’s Aunt Georgina,” she said, with a look of childishness creeping back into her face. “She keeps that bell beside her bed. It means she wants me.”
He arrested her retreat, resenting the meekness which that summons had imposed upon her.
“But what are we to do about this?” he demanded, with a gesture toward the Titian.
“What is best to do?” she asked in a whisper.
It took some time before he seemed able to answer that question.
“First thing, I want to wire for Banning. He’s the head of our house. This thing’s too big for me to handle alone. I’ve got to get Banning here as soon as wheels can bring him. Then—oh, confound that bell! It sounds like something out of Dante!”
“I must go!” she told him.
He was tempted to smile for a moment at what seemed like terror on her face. But there were certain things he had not forgotten.
“And what will you do with me?” he asked, holding her back by one white hand.
“You’ll have to go down by the back stairway,” she whispered.
“But I’m not going for long,” he stoutly asserted as he held her face up to the light. “From to-day,” he said, as he stooped and kissed her impassive lips, “the new era begins, and you’ll see me back to-morrow—with trumpets blowing.”
Itwas not with trumpets blowing, and it was not the next morning, that Conkling returned to the tumble-down old manor-house overlooking Lake Erie.
It was before sundown of the same day that he returned. And he went back without the reasons for doing so being altogether clear to his own mind. It was a movement born of subliminal propulsions as vague yet as compelling as those of a young mother creeping through midnight darkness to the disturbingly silent crib of the new life she had brought into being.
Conkling had thought, at first, to have Banning join him, for now that the movement had taken on dimensions so bewildering he felt the need not so much of pilotage from the older man as of partnership in the knowledge of a fact which had the power of leaving him a bit dizzy.
Yet his efforts to connect with Banning over the long-distance telephone had not met with success, and the mere despatch of a telegram, worded as judicially as he could contrive it, brought no sense of response and no companionable easing off of his own excitement.
It was noon before that initial high tension fried itself in its own juices. With the lengthening day Conkling grew, if not calmer, at least more coherent, and afterthought paced sedulously at his elbow. He began to see difficulties and dangers. The disturbing thought of even a second Alcazar crept into his mind, for such a thing as insurance, of course, had never entered the heads of those two old incompetents of the manor-house. Then his attention swung away from the Titian and centered more and more on Julia Keswick. He had no liking for the situation in which she had been left, short-lived as it was bound to prove. She was as wonderful, in a way, as the Titian itself. In many ways she was much more wonderful. She had been tragically held in, repressed, walled up with her own self-communing young soul. But the potentialities were there, and he was to throw open the gates of life for her. He had already seen knowledge come to that intent and eager young face. The memory of it, in fact, still had the power to quicken his pulse. That had never happened to him before. It was something which he could not analyze, which he had no wish to analyze. Instinct, he felt, had already shown itself infallible. Besides being infallible, it was also incontestable. It had swept him, helpless, into a feverish and unexpected happiness. And that happiness, he told himself, was only the beginning.
But now that the die had been cast, he had his obligations to the woman he loved. Yet he had passively left her in a situation which was anything but savory. She was a woman, in a way, but that house of hate, that atmosphere of fundamental intolerances, cramped her back into something akin to childhood. The memory of that raucous call bell began to grate on him. Equally distasteful to him grew the thought of her being confronted by two inquisitorial old tyrants who had stumbled across the new secret of her life. Their power to harm her was already gone. He would see to that promptly enough. But their power to make that day one of unhappiness for her remained still with them. He asked himself if she could possibly need him. And once that question had been put, his disquieted soul wondered if through the clairvoyance of passion she was not striving to reach him at that very moment, if she was not calling to him through the hot and lonely afternoon.
He put a sudden end to those questionings and his own mounting unrest. He did so by climbing into his car and starting out for the Keswick home, and he was racing before he was half-way there as though some etheric summons kept reminding him that he must make up for lost time.
When he arrived there he found the gate nailed up. This disturbed him, but it did not deter him. He promptly removed a moldering picket from the fence which ran beside the overgrown cedar hedge, crept through the opening and pushed his way on through the tangle of dry shrubbery. He heard the inhospitable scream of the peacock as he crossed the parched lawn, and the bawling of a neglected calf in one of the outbuildings beyond the grim-fronted manor-house. He stared up at that house as he entered the lengthening shadow from its dormer-windowed hip roof, and as he did so he was tempted to laugh down what seemed little more than half-hysteric fears huddling about his heart. It was sheer paganism, he tried to tell himself, this foolish fretting of his own soul with the thought that exceptional happiness such as his promised to be stood in some way involved with exceptional penalties. He even stopped and looked up at the house again, deciphering something reassuring in its unaltered and unaltering face. Then, of a sudden, his heart seemed to stop beating. For drifting out of its open attic window he saw a thinly-coiling column of smoke.
He stood, for a ponderable space of time, frowning vacuously up at it. Then, as he ran to the broken veranda steps, a thin tumult of voices crept down to him. He heard the repeated high-pitched call of “Unclean! Unclean!” and a voice which reminded him of the frenzied prayer of camp-meeting supplicants cry out, “And forgive, O God, these abominations which have been thrust before thee!”
He did not stop to hear more. He went up the steps two at a time, tried the door, and found it locked. Then without hesitation he ran to one of the French windows, found it fastened and broke away its flimsy catch with one taurine thrust of his shoulder.
He called out as he crossed the shadowy room, knocking over a horsehair chair as he went. But his call remained unanswered. He circled about to the door that opened into the hallway, ran through it and started up the half-lighted stairs with the walnut banister. He was startled by the bright eyes of a cat staring down at him through the gloom. They seemed burning with hate, those luminous and barricading eyes. They even prompted Conkling, in advancing on them, to crouch low as a man crouches before the spring of a cougar. But they were gone, gone completely, by the time he reached the stairhead.
Even before he arrived at the second and steeper stairway leading to the attic he once more caught the sound of voices from that upper story. They were excited voices, shrill with ecstasy, though one seemed fuller-timbred than the other. It was this voice which he heard intone: “Lust shall not dwell in this house! This abomination has been in our house and has been a curse to us! Cleanse us, O God, of the grossness which has been thrust upon us!” and through this strange incantation the shriller voice piped: “Nor shall we fatten on nakedness and live slothfully on the fruits of sin! And she who has degraded herself before Thine eyes shall be lashed with scorpions and branded with shame!”
And crowding on this came the drunken chanting of the deeper voice: “Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face that thy shame may appear. I have seen thine adulteries and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom and thine abominations on the hills in the fields—and thou wilt be made clean!”
Conkling, emerging from the well of the narrow stairway, stood panting and stunned. The air was thick with smoke, and for a moment or two he found it far from easy to see. But he made out two gaunt old women, disheveled and rapt, so intent on their own ends that they neither challenged nor regarded him. He saw the taller one kneeling beside the hone-white sarcophagus which stood toward the center of the attic floor. In this wide basin of marble she had built what first impressed him as a funeral pyre. Heavy coils of smoke were rising from it as she rocked her body back and forth and prayed aloud. But a vaguely familiar smell about that heavy smoke brought Conkling toward her at a bound, for his nostrils, he knew, were sniffing the odors of burning canvas impregnated with oil. But he stopped midway in his flight and ran to the far side of the room, where he knew the Titian stood. He saw there only the empty frame from which the canvas had been slashed. That took him at a leap back to the sarcophagus.
As he stared down through the thick air he saw a stretch of rimpled canvas belly up with the heat of the flames beneath it. He saw the mellowed and magic ivory gold of a rounded breast swell up and burst in a darkening bubble of heat. He stooped forward with a gasp and caught at one unseared edge of the crumpled-up canvas. Then he just as quickly dropped it and wheeled about. For a repeated hissing sound, followed by a gasp that might have been an echo of his own, fell on his ears.
He saw Lavinia Keswick, with her hair down, with a face like a mænad and with a crop of plaited leather in her hand. Beyond her in the blue-gray air he saw the slender white back of a girl. Her posture impressed him as singularly unnatural, until he suddenly wakened to the fact that she was tied with a cotton rope to the heavy-timbered easel in front of her. Then as he saw the mænad with the flying scant tresses raise the whip in her hand he realized what was taking place.
He forgot about the crumpled canvas in the narrow marble basin. He ran for the claw that held the whip, caught it and twisted it back. With almost one and the same movement he wrested the rawhide from that shaking claw and sent the bony figure tumbling back over a headless winged lion in marble.
“You muckers! Oh, you muckers!” he cried out, reverting in his excitement to the language of his school-days. Then he turned back to the easel. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” he kept mumbling as he tugged at the knotted cotton rope, for he could see two stripes of red across the whiteness of the stooping slender back.
The girl’s face, when he had set her free, was as white as the shoulders from which the clothing had been stripped. She said nothing. She did not even raise her eyes to his. But she drew back as he essayed a futile effort to lift her fallen waist up about her naked shoulders. His hands were shaking and the thick air stung his throat. He turned about, dazed, as he heard the renewed shrill duet of voices in prayer. The two frenzied old women were on their knees side by side in front of the smoking sarcophagus. They were on their knees, swaying back and forth and calling on God to cleanse their house of its lewdness. In the sarcophagus lay nothing but a layer of smoldering ashes, subsiding slowly, like melting snow. And Conkling, who knew by this time entirely what it meant, felt a blind wave of hate untouched by pity well through his body.
“You fools!” he gasped. “You hopeless fools!”
He was even sobbing a little with the nauseous reaction of it all, and he tried to smother his shame by a parade of ferocity as he turned back to the white-faced girl.
“They’ve made their nest, the muckers, and now they can lie in it!” he cried, as the girl shrank away a little to stare at the intoning pair still on their knees. She, he remembered as he in turn stared at the youthful face with the prematurely tragic look in its eyes, was all that he could get out of it now. But it was enough, God knew! And the time for claiming his own was at hand.
“You must come with me,” he said as he reached for her. He felt the weight of her body on his arm, weak and relaxed, as he groped his way toward the stairhead.
He thought for a moment that she had fainted. But she said very quietly, “This way,” as he made a wrong turn in the gloom of the lower hallway.
THE END
The House of IntrigueThe Door of DreadThe Man Who Couldn’t SleepThe Prairie WifeThe Prairie Mother
The House of Intrigue
The Door of Dread
The Man Who Couldn’t Sleep
The Prairie Wife
The Prairie Mother
Transcriber’s Notes:
The list of Other Titles by Mr. Stringer has been moved from the front of the book to the end of the eBook. A few obvious typesetting and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Spelling and hyphenation have been left in the original publication.
[End ofTwin Tales: Are All Men Alike and The Lost Titianby Arthur Stringer]