The Lost Titian
Conklingstopped his car. He drew up, dry and dust-laden, in the narrow green gullet of the side-road overhung with sycamore and soft maple. A cooler breath of air sighed out through the oval frame of verdure slightly powdered with road-dust and slightly suggestive of a woman with prematurely silvered temples.
Conkling sat staring down the open throat of the hill-lane which dropped away like a waterfall toward the misty blue of Lake Erie. To the east he could see the opal green of Rond-Eau, iridescent as mercury in its verdigris-tinted shadow-box of rushes and wild-rice. Beyond that confusion of intermingling greens he could see the long line of Pointe Aux Pins, seeming neither main-land nor cloud-land, but floating aerially in the veiled light, as misted and mirage-like as the ghostly plume of smoke trailing behind a ghostly coal-boat nosing slowly in toward the harbor. Directly in front of him he could see only the diminishing mottled terraces of the tree-tops selvaged with the paler green of willows where the lake-cliffs ended abruptly in the pallid blue of the water. A mile out on this water, hazy with the windless heat of August, he could discern the vague L of a pile-driver, floating beside a row of pound-stakes. It floated there ghostly and insubstantial, a blurred and lonely shadow that seemed to belong more to the air than to the water.
Conkling liked that view, with its receding vistas and its abrupt suggestion of repose. He liked it so much that he regretted not having seen it in spring, in the virginal greenery of its first awakenings. He even surrendered to an impulse to dip deeper into it, by releasing his foot-brake and letting his car coast quietly down the overarched incline of broken shadow and sunlight. That impassive and almost noiseless descent, with his engine silent, seemed to him like an aerial flight into some older and sleepier world. When a cushioning carpet of pine-needles finally brought him to a stop, he was satisfied to sit there, within twenty paces of a weather-bleached gate which marked a gap in the straggling undergrowth of cedar.
This gate, as a gate, challenged his attention. Yet he studied it for several minutes before reaching for his pack easel and thumb box and climbing down from his car-seat. Then he proceeded to inspect the gate at closer range. It was antiquated and uninviting and it sagged on one hinge. But beyond it, he found as he leaned across its moldering top bar, lay an arresting vista of checkered sunlight and cool green shadow centering in the warm red of a brick manor-house.
That glimpse of an unexpected old garden, cool and shadowy and secluded behind the sheltering cedars, held him so close that he overlooked the No Trespassing sign which semaphored so forbiddingly down at him from a half-dead silver birch. For here in the heart of a country which had impressed him as a land without a past he had stumbled across a homestead with the true patina of time upon it.
And here, he told himself, was surely a chance for some of that old walnut and mahogany for which, in the eyes of the native, he stood ready to pay romantic prices.
So closely did he inspect the red-brick manor-house that it was several minutes before he became conscious of the girl standing within ten paces of him. She stood there in a birdlike attitude of arrested movement, with her body pressed in close to the hedge, as though timorously anxious to escape his eye. And he realized, as he stared at her, how some unconsidered protective coloration was causing her to merge into the brocaded background of that ruinous old garden. For she wore a lilac-colored sunbonnet and a frock of flowered organdie, and her hands were incased in a pair of russet gauntlets which had plainly known better days. Conkling could see that she had been engaged in clipping streamers of wild grape from the hedge which half screened her. She still held a pair of rusty-looking rose shears in her fingers.
He no longer studied the garden, with its sundial slightly awry and its unused fountain and its shadowed turf-slope and ragged paths edged with perennials. It was the girl that held his attention, and oddly enough, his first vague feeling of depression slipped away from him. Just what lay at the root of that depression he could not have said. But he felt so like a wanderer into regions of desolation touched with mystery that the opening lines ofChilde Harold to the Dark Tower Camekept recurring to his mind. And it struck him as odd that he should spot a figure so vivid in a background so dolorous. For the girl’s eyes were a cornflower blue, made deeper in color by the thickly planted black lashes. Her hair, which even the abundant hood of the sunbonnet could not altogether hide, was a burnished mahogany brown. Yet her face itself, which struck him as austere and a trifle pinched, held its undertones suggestive of still youthful vitalities, of unawakened ardencies. It was the lips, he decided, with the faintly rebellious lines about their warmth, which did the trick. But there was breeding in that face, and something even more than breeding; something which he could not quite decipher, but was content in the end to write down as intensity. This played the added trick of making her seem, to Conkling, like a child prematurely aged, vaguely silvered by the life about her, the same as her roadside sycamores had been silvered by dust. Yet as his quick gaze rested on the gravely innocent eyes and the rose-like cream and pink of the arm above the gauntlet-top he was again perplexed by a persistent sense of girlishness.
Those gravely non-committal eyes, however, were no longer even covertly observing him. The gloved hands were once more decorously busy among the grapevine tendrils. Conkling could see, by that austere preoccupation, that the grave-eyed young lady with the rose shears was respectably eliminating him from her universe. He felt his color deepen. Yet it was only by audacity, he knew, that he could win his point. And the vague but universal air of impoverishment which overhung the place breathed life into his newer boldness. He pushed open the gate and stepped through it.
“Could I sketch a corner of your garden?” he inquired with all the casualness at his command.
The face under the sunbonnet turned slowly in his direction. But the eyes were still austerely non-committal.
“Sir?”
In that short monosyllable he noticed many things. He noticed a certain sharp fastidiousness of tone which spoke of caste. He caught from it a note of warning mixed with a cool and condescending forbearance. But in it, most of all, he found a beauty of timbre, a full-throated English resonance which he had not expected to stumble across in that higher-voiced Canadian countryside. This was no peasant type, and the crisp monosyllable was apparently intended to remind him of the fact.
“Would you mind if I tried a water-color of one end of your garden?” Conkling repeated, parading the folded stool and easel and thumb box, which had obviously escaped her attention.
The rose shears went on with their clipping. She was weighing his request, and as she did so she reverted oddly back to the child type. He found it hard to think of her as a woman. She seemed disturbed by the matter-of-factness with which he had put a matter-of-fact question. But it was plain that he was an outlander, a stranger unversed in the traditions of those reticent byways.
“If you wish to,” she finally said, without stopping in her work.
It struck Conkling as odd that her face should go pale over a decision so trivial. It struck him as equally odd, when he unfolded stool and easel in the shadow of the cedar hedge, that the thin face should just as suddenly flush again. For he had sagaciously made note of the direction in which the girl was working her way along this hedge, and he chose his position so that her activities, as time went on, would not take her farther away from him. Yet he opened up his thumb box and fell to work without further addressing her, only too conscious of the uninterrupted clicking of the shears behind him. If he sniffed an aroma of the idyllic in that situation he betrayed no signs of it. She had not, at any rate, taken to her heels; and he could afford to leave the outcome on the lap of time.
He turned, with a less impersonal eye, and studied the house. He was impressed by the pathos of its faded grandeur. It might at one time, built as it was in imitation of an English manor, have been a pretentious enough pile. But everything about it had long since fallen into decay. The neglected cornices drooped without paint. The mortar had fallen away from between the bricks. The dilapidated verandas, half covered with masses of Virginia creeper, showed a roof sadly broken and a railing much awry. Here and there, in the tall French windows, a pane of glass had been replaced by an unpainted board. A broken stretch of eave troughing hung from an upper façade like an unkempt tress from a faded brow. On the parched slope to the right of its main entrance wandered a flock of hungry ducks, and under the maples, beyond the ducks, hobbled a solitary and disheveled peacock, which screamed from time to time at the advent of a stranger within its domains. On the nearer side of the house, beyond parterres of weeds and brambles which might at one time have been a rose garden, stood a tilted chicken brooder which had once been painted red, and the ruins of a cider press, with a row of overturned beehives in the background.
To the south, where the lawn sloped down to the empty fountain basin and was bisected by a narrow walk along which still flamed the valiant and invincible perennials, the aspect was less ruinous. Conkling could make out iris and phlox and ragged sailor and golden glow and tiger lilies in a glorious tangle and riot of color. Beyond the sundial he could discern an arbor with broken seats, and beyond that again the heavy and huddled foliage which on all sides screened in from the outside world that little area of color and quietness. The next moment, however, his casually wandering glance came to a stop. It came to a stop abruptly, with his startled attention balking as a colt balks at a shadow across the roadway of reason. For before him, in the unequivocal open light of the afternoon, he saw an overturned marble sarcophagus. It was the sort of thing one stumbled across now and then in Italy, the sort of thing he had himself seen crated and lowered into ships’ holds at Palermo and Catania, the sort of thing they kept behind brass railings in New World museums. But here it stood weather-stained on a slope of turf, with three tin milk-pans sunning on its mottled upturned bottom.
He sat squinting at the strange thing for a full minute. Then he turned to speak to the girl in the lilac sunbonnet.
But he did not speak. For from the direction of the house came the sound of a new and quite unexpected voice. It was a thin and acrid voice, obviously barbed with indignation.
“Julia!” was the repeated and reproving cry which echoed through the quietness.
The girl with the rose shears, more childlike than ever, turned a frightened face toward the house. But she did not answer.
“Is that a man in the grounds?” demanded the distant monitorial voice. And Conkling, for the first time, was no longer at his ease.
“Y-yes,” the girl called hesitatingly back.
Her face was quite pale, and the meekness in her voice rather disturbed the man at the easel. He peered about for the author of that over-disturbing challenge, but he could see nothing.
“Lavinia,” commanded the shrill and mysteriously distant voice—and Conkling for a moment wondered why that name should fret his memory with an uncaptured association—“Lavinia, unchain Nero at once!”
Conkling caught a sound like a gasp from the girl with the shears.
“Please don’t mind,” she said without turning her head. “He’s so old!”
“Who’s so old?” asked Conkling. He had begun to repack his thumb box.
“Nero. I have to soak his bread crusts for him. He has no teeth left. But I really think you ought to go!”
There was no misjudging her distress. It amounted almost to terror, and the mystery of it was sufficient to revive his audacity.
“May I come back?” he asked, tingling a trifle before the amazed innocence of her eyes.
“What good could it do?” she found the courage to inquire.
“That’s what I intended to find out,” he told her. He said it more determinedly than he had intended.
“I don’t think you understand,” she said with her austere and troubled eyes on his face.
“Understand what?” he demanded.
“Us!” was all she said.
And it was all she had a chance to say, for the next moment the distant and indignant voice was commanding her to come to the house, and to come at once. She went without hesitation, like a bidden child. Conkling saw the deep gloom of one of the French windows swallow up the lilac sunbonnet and the organdie gown. Then he folded his easel and his camp stool, stared for a minute or two at the decrepid peacock and the overturned sarcophagus, and told himself that without a shadow of doubt he would come back.
Conklingwent back. It was, indeed, rather a habit with him, this going back to authenticate the questionable, this returning to appraise the survivals of undecipherable civilizations. But before going back the technique of his calling as a collector, of his activities as an antiquarian, prompted him to assemble what data he could concerning the occupants of the old Kent County manor-house on the Lake Road.
He did not discover a great deal, and much of this, in the end, proved contradictory. But once he had tapped the rock of rural reticence he found a copious enough flow of the waters of hostility. The countryside apparently had very little that was good to say of the Keswicks. They were “queer” and felt themselves above their neighbors. They had even shot off an old blunderbuss at certain youths of Weston who had raided the row of oxheart cherries in their orchard, and had allowed a horse to die of distemper without calling in a veterinary surgeon. As for the girl, Julia Keswick, she wasn’t so bad as the two old she-dragons, but she was reputed to be a spitfire and hard to hold down. This, however, Conkling found neutralized by later information to the effect that the girl was as shy as a rabbit, and no one ever knew what she was up to. But she gave herself airs, chiefly, apparently, because she had been at a convent school in Quebec.
“And there was them as called her a beauty, and them as preferred a woman with more meat’n a sparrow on her bones!”
Yet the data concerning her two aunts, Georgina and Lavinia Keswick, was less ambiguous in coloring. These two antique maiden-ladies were variously described as “a couple of old crows,” “a pair o’ bloodless old hardheads,” and “a team o’ skinflints who put pennies in the collection plate of a Sunday.” There had been a brother once, a rolling stone who wasted the family substance and went off to Europe once a year to buy marble lions and tombstones and paint little pictures on pieces of canvas. He had been a poor sort, this brother, and it couldn’t have been much loss when he died of Roman fever somewhere in Italy, for he had always preferred daubing a picture of a field to driving a plow up and down its landsides. And you can’t farm in a country like Canada with a camel’s-hair brush! Not by a long shot! The two old crows still tried to run that farm, for they would endure no man about the place, but they couldn’t even pay the interest on the mortgage, and year by year things were only getting worse. They’d be foreclosing on ’em any time now.
It would make great tobacco land, the upper half of the farm, once it was worked right. They could get five or six hundred a year out of it, easy, growing Burley on shares, but the two elderly Keswick women had religious scruples about surrendering land for the cultivation of the filthy weed.
Yet Belinda Brittner, who had been in service with them in the old days, claimed their religion to be a pretense and a mockery, remembering as she did how Miss Lavinia had turned the clock back on Saturday night so as to finish her strawberry jam without breaking the Sabbath, as she put it. And their believing themselves to be better than other folks was likewise a deception and a mockery before the Lord, for Belinda wasn’t so blind that she didn’t know they dined on dog-fish discarded on the beach by the pound-net fisherman, and frugally bought cat-meat which went to no cats, but was frugally stewed with sour-dock for their own parsimonious table. And when theAnnie Huffmissed the harbor mouth at Rond-Eau and pounded to pieces in a south-easter on the beach just below the Keswick farm the two old vultures had been discovered by certain midnight wanderers frugally salvaging everything washed up from the wreck.
Just why this was held against them Conkling could not quite define, just as he could not actively share in the rural indignation against Kendal Keswick’s fifteen-year-old crime of importing a figure model from New York. A justice of the peace had taken a hand in that affair and there had been high words in the attic studio of the old manor-house, where the model had been ordered in the name of the law to put on her clothes and take her departure by the first train to the States. And Kendal Keswick, after roundly cursing the country, had also taken his departure. That eccentric dilettante went morosely off to Italy, for a chance, as he put it, to breathe again. But there, ironically enough, he breathed his last before the end of the year.
All this, piled up before Conkling in a garrulous campaign of discouragement, only added a razor edge to that cool-eyed connoisseur’s determination to revisit the Keswick manor-house. There was, he kept reminding himself, every reason to assume that this old house might be rich in the things he was most eager to obtain. But that purely antiquarian curiosity became perplexingly involved with the memory of an intense-eyed girl with mahogany-tinted hair.
So two days later, when he parked his car in the deep shadow of a horse-chestnut beside the Lake Road, he felt that luck was with him when he caught sight of a lilac sunbonnet on the far side of the half-strangled cedar hedge. Yet his heart skipped a beat as he pushed open the broken gate, and in stepping through it seemed to step back a century in time.
The girl, who had a garden rake in her hand, paled a little as she caught sight of him.
“It was good of you to come back,” she said quite simply. But that acknowledgment seemed enriched by the look of intensity on her face. It was a look, he was beginning to see, which was habitual with her, and had much to do with her persistent aura of childishness.
“I call it good of you to let me,” he protested. Yet his eyes, as he spoke, were on the faded front of the old manor-house.
“Theydidn’t understand,” she said with her childlike immediacy.
“Understand what?” he asked.
“That you were an artist,” she explained.
“But I’m not. I’m only a curio hound for a kindly old gentleman named Banning, who gives me a car and pays me money for wandering about and enjoying life.”
“But you paint,” she reminded him.
Conkling could afford to laugh at her solemnity.
“I thought I could paint once, but two years in Paris showed me I was barking up the wrong tree. About all I’m good for now is to size up other people’s painting.”
The girl’s gaze became impersonal.
“Theyfound that out,” she admitted.
“Who did?”
“My aunts; and they’re rather sorry now about Nero.”
“Why?” he asked, with his eyes on her rapt young face. She was, after all, more of a child than he had imagined. But he had not missed the heat-lightning smile of humor that had played momentarily about her lips. And he was grateful for it. It humanized her; it tended to authenticate her reality. He wanted, above everything else, to establish her as real, through and through, very much as he might wish some find in old mahogany not to thin out into mere veneer.
“Because my Aunt Georgina is rather anxious to see you,” the girl was saying.
“About what?”
“About the things you’re interested in.”
“But how does she know what I’m interested in?” he demanded, pondering the fact that the enemy had also been active in the fields of reconnaissance.
The faded lilac sunbonnet slowly turned until it faced the house front.
“I don’t think I can talk to you any longer,” said the girl, with her non-committal eyes once more on his. “But she’ll probably come out when she sees you here.”
“But it’s you that I’m interested in,” he protested, impressed by the latent tragedy in the face which a lilac sunbonnet tended to turn into a mockery. It made him think of columbines in a churchyard.
Her color deepened painfully, but she did not speak again. She left him there and crossed the sloping, parched lawn and entered the house.
Conkling, as he unfolded his camp stool and set up his easel, resented the passing of that slender and lightly swaying figure. The riot of color along the tangled garden paths seemed without meaning. The tones that had first caught his eyes became crude and uncoordinated under a hot afternoon sun. But he remembered what she had said, and he sat there, washing absurd colors together and wondering if she would come back. Then, as the shadows lengthened and time dragged on, he wondered if he was to be ignored even by the monitorial old aunts. But he daubed stubbornly on, and when his patience was all but exhausted he was rewarded by seeing a figure emerge from the house.
It was a remarkable figure, and as it bore down on him in silence he studied it with oblique intentness. For it was that of an extremely tall and an extremely angular woman, well past middle life, clad in rusty black silk. On the iron-gray hair, parted and drawn severely down across the pale and narrow forehead, reposed a small black satin cap edged with coffee-colored lace. Half mittens of knitted linen were on the lank hands clasped so fastidiously in front of a narrow waist elongated by its ruchings of rusty silk. On the scrawny throat hung a cameo brooch, oddly repeating the line of the pendulous dewlap under the yellow chin, where the neck, as long and lean as a turkey’s, suggested a poised and persistent wariness. But once this was passed over, there was a general air of limpness, of deadness, about every line of the long body. It was something suggestive of starvation, of starved lives and starved souls, of empty years eked out in empty ways.
It was, Conkling had to admit, a striking enough face, with its long and narrow boniness and its high-bridged nose. But there was a promise of cruelty in the small mouth with its down-drawn corners, where the earlier lines of haughtiness had merged into a pursed-up network of little wrinkles. The eyes were deep-set and cold, of faded blue, with a touch of tragedy in the looseness of the skin-fold under the thin and high circling brows.
It was not the sort of face to make Conkling feel altogether at ease. Yet it held him spellbound. It seemed to step from another century.
He sat behind the fragile shelter of his easel, studying that face as it came to a stop before him, as it towered above him with a frown of interrogation on its flinty brows.
“Might I make so bold as to inquire the nature of your visit here?” the woman demanded in a voice as austere and unconceding as her face.
“The young lady said I might make a sketch of the garden,” he explained, exasperated by the meekness which had crept into his own voice.
The scorn on the lean old face confronting him did not add to Conkling’s happiness.
“Gentlemen were once in the habit of rising, as I remember it, when accosted by a lady.”
“I’m sorry,” cried Conkling, nettling brick red as he rose to his feet with his hat in his hand. “I beg your pardon,” he murmured again as he essayed a jack-knife bow in which deference was not visibly shot through with mockery.
“I presume you are a stranger in this neighborhood,” she said in an acridly condoning tone of voice.
“You are quite correct in that presumption,” retorted Conkling, a little tired of being treated like an urchin caught in a cherry tree.
“Otherwise you would have respected the long-established wishes of the owner of this garden,” concluded his enemy, with a glance at the No Trespassing sign.
“Undoubtedly, if I’d known in time,” admitted the intruder.
The woman in the half mittens shifted her position a little.
“Since you paint, I suppose you are interested in paintings,” she suggested.
Along that glacial frontier Conkling thought he detected certain surface meltings, certain vague trickles of surrendering austerities.
“That is my business,” he admitted.
“What is?” she demanded, not unaware of the impatience in his tone.
“Paintings and old furniture andobjets d’artin general,” he told her. “That’s what I go about appraising and buying up for the New York expert who is foolish enough to trust such matters to my judgment.”
She was plainly puzzled by his ironic note of levity.
“Am I to accept this as an acknowledgment that you do not understand your own business?” she asked in her pointed, monitorial severity of tone.
“To err is human,” he said as he folded up his camp stool. “And several times I’ve paid good money for mahogany that turned out to be dyed boxwood.”
Her solemnity, however, was unshakable.
“But in the matter of paintings,” she persisted. “You’ve had experience with them?”
“Some very disagreeable experiences,” he evaded, consoled by the consciousness that his enemy was in some mysterious way on the defensive.
“But if it’s your business,” she went on, with the austere old eyes fixed on his face, “you must understand about their value; you must have a reasonable idea of what they are worth.”
“Madam, nobody understands that nowadays.”
“Apparently not,” she admitted. “But it’s at least possible to estimate the market value of such things, is it not? The value which the dealers in a big city such as yours would set on a collection of canvases?”
There was a note of concession, of unlooked-for hesitation, in her voice as she spoke. It caused Conkling to become serious again.
“It’s possible in a way,” he explained to her. “But there are cases, of course, where even experts differ.”
“But when it’s a matter of old masters?” she pursued, with her pale eyes fixed on his face.
“Oh, they’re all pretty much evaluated,” he told her, “provided they are old masters.”
She was about to speak again, but an interruption came in the form of a slow and distant clangor. It was a dinner gong, Conkling suspected. There was, however, no note of blitheness in its summons. It fell on his ears as depressingly mournful as a bell-buoy tolling over a fog-bound reef. It made him think of bells that he had heard in the second act ofMacbeth.
“We are about to take tea,” announced Georgina Keswick with the utmost solemnity, “and I trust you will give us the honor of your company.”
Conkling was tempted to smile at this ponderous unbending. But he became sober again as he caught sight of a slender young figure in organdie passing from one side of the old manor to the other.
“That’s very kind of you,” he said, with his gaze following the girl in organdie as she disappeared through one of the French windows. “I should like to very much.”
He saw, as he started toward the house again, the solitary and stately peacock, perched motionless on the moldering upper bar of a grape trellis. He couldn’t help wondering why it had no mate. He couldn’t help wondering how it endured that decrepid grandeur of burnished crest and plume unshared by another. And he couldn’t help wondering, as he meekly followed the gaunt and solemn woman in rusty black across the parched lawn-slopes, just what was ahead of him.
Conklingfound himself in a faded room with faded damask curtains. It was a somber and musty-smelling room, but two walls of it were lined with open bookshelves edged with pinked morocco and surmounted by three Tanagra figurines which momentarily made him forget the mustiness about him. He caught sight of a carvedleggiothat must have come from the choir of an Italian church, and a mahogany pedestal table with dragon-claw feet on which stood a brass candelabrum with a square marble base. Yet the next moment he was shuddering inwardly at the sight of a handworked fire screen. On this screen, with thread and needle, patient fingers had fabricated a foolish landscape of waterfall and woodland and strolling ladies in hoop-skirts. It impressed him as not so much a monument of wasted effort as it was a betrayal of a childish and impoverished outlook on life. And the house began to depress him, for even the black horsehair furniture so in need of repair became significant of a mean discomfort heroically endured.
His feeling of depression increased when the second sister entered the room. She came austere and silent and arrayed in plum-colored moiré. She impressed him as having hurriedly changed for the occasion and as still chafing under the necessity for that change. She seemed bonier and more muscular than her sister Georgina, and when Conkling saw her hands, calloused and toil-hardened and bloodless as bird claws, he was persuaded that she had been called away from labor in some neighboring field. Even her bow of greeting was a hostile one. And the young man in the stiff-backed horsehair chair fell to wondering why she had been so resolutely commandeered from her agrarian activities; and why, also, he was being so laboriously introduced into that house of sinister antiquities. He expected, until he saw tea actually being served, that the girl, Julia Keswick, would be included in the gathering. But in this he was disappointed.
He thought about her a great deal as he sat drinking his tea. It was not good tea. It was weak and watery, just as a slight aroma of mustiness clung to the solitary biscuit which was served with it. The skimmed milk which was soberly spoken of as cream, the loaf of sugar which was doled out so sparingly, the old Coalport so pathetically chipped and cracked, all united to confirm his earlier impressions of a genteel poverty grimly accepted.
He wondered how the girl could stand it, and he could foretell what it would do to her. She would get like the other two in time. The years would pinch her in body and soul alike. Her color would fade and the fuller line of lip and throat would wither. Yet in her face he had detected something unawakened and anticipatory, something which made that grim house oppress him afresh with its sheathed claws of cruelty.
He was surprised to see Lavinia Keswick, having drunk her cup of tea and eaten her wafer, rise grimly from her chair and as grimly leave their presence. Conkling surmised that she was already resolutely removing the plum-colored moiré and making ready for a delayed return to her scuffle hoe.
It was not until Georgina Keswick was alone with her guest that she returned to the matter uppermost in her mind.
“You have doubtless heard of my brother, Kendal Keswick, in the art world?”
She paused, as though waiting for the name to strike home. But to Conkling it meant nothing. For a moment the tragic pale eyes in the tragic old face took on a deeper pathos.
“He was an artist himself in his time,” she stiffly acknowledged. “But he was also a collector.”
“He would be before my time,” mercifully explained the young man, puzzled by the air of hesitancy which had overtaken the rusty old crow confronting him.
“I presume so,” acknowledged the woman in black, contriving to make her survey of Conkling’s still youthful figure a slightly contemptuous one.
“You spoke of him as a collector,” Conkling found the heart to remind her, out of the ensuing silence. “And that naturally prompts me to ask what became of his collection.”
The pallid old eyes grew less abstracted.
“Some of it he sold a year or two before his death.”
“And the rest of it?”
“The rest of it has remained ever since in the possession of the family. They are, in fact, held in trust here by me and my sister.”
“Paintings, you mean?”
“Yes, paintings,” she admitted.
“Then they’re the property, I take it, of your niece, Julia?” suggested the young man, only too glad to direct the line of talk into more congenial channels.
“Nominally, but not altogether,” was the somewhat acidulated reply. “Julia’s father, at his death, left many obligations behind him.”
Conkling, vaguely chilled, waited for the woman in rusty black to speak again.
“In a country such as this there are few persons with a knowledge of art—of great art,” she continued with an obvious effort. “And of late it has seemed advisable—advisable that these paintings, or at least a certain number of them, should be disposed of.”
Conkling felt almost sorry for her. She was plainly not a woman who could easily ask a favor, yet behind that grim front, for all its momentary embarrassment, lurked an equally grim purpose.
“And you’d like me to look them over and tell you what I consider they’re worth,” suggested her visitor—“what they’re worth from the New York dealer’s standpoint?”
She blinked her eyes like an old eagle, plainly disturbed by his slightly impatient short-cut to directness.
“It would be a great service,” she said out of the silence.
“On the contrary, it would be a great pleasure,” contended Conkling. “So what’s the matter with getting at it while the light’s still good?”
He was startled to see a ghost of a flush creep up into her faded cheeks.
“That would be impossible to-day,” she told him with something oddly akin to terror in the eyes which evaded his.
“Why not to-day?” he asked, intent on his study of her mysterious abashment.
“They will have to be prepared,” she replied, ill at ease.
“What do you mean by prepared?”
“They will have to be cleaned, for one thing.”
“And how do you propose cleaning them?” he demanded.
“I have always regarded coal oil and turpentine as quite satisfactory,” she retorted, plainly resenting his tone.
“Then if your canvases are of any value you’ve been using something which will very quickly take the value out of them. You’d kill their color in no time. We wash a picture with cheesecloth in warm water and soap, the same as you’d wash fine lace; and a part of the trick is to dry it quickly to keep it from warping. Then dissolve mastic tears in turpentine and put it on with a camel’s hair brush, if you have to.”
It was plain that she was as averse to criticism as she was unaccustomed to it.
“In that case perhaps the cleaning can be dispensed with,” she replied with dignity.
“Then I suppose I can see ’em at once,” he suggested. But her embarrassment returned to her.
“They will have to be arranged,” she said with a solemnity which in some way went lame.
“How many canvases are there?” he asked.
“Between twenty and thirty,” was the hesitating reply.
Conkling showed his surprise.
“It’ll take time, of course, to go over a bunch like that.”
“That,” said Georgina Keswick with an air of escape, “is why I should prefer making an appointment for some other day.”
“It all depends on the pictures, of course, just how long it’ll take me.”
“I don’t think you’ll find them altogether trivial.”
He recalled the earlier allusion to old masters. But he had had experience with the bucolic conception of such things.
“Who are the artists?” he asked in his most matter-of-fact tone.
“I’m not sure,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “At least, not sure of all of them.”
“But the ones you know?” he prompted. And again a period of silence reigned in the shadowy room before she spoke.
“There’s a Decamps and two Corots and a Holbein,” she said very quietly. “There is also a Constable—no, two Constables—and one Boldini, and what we were once led to believe was a copy of Correggio, though our late rector, who was in both Rome and Florence once, remained strongly persuaded that it was an original.”
Conkling, as he sat staring at the faded face in the fading light, lost a little of his own color. It took his breath away. It was too much to believe.
“That’s rather a formidable list,” he murmured weakly enough, for the whole thing still seemed incredible.
Here, in the obscure corner of a Canadian colony, he was threatened with stumbling across a collection that might be the envy of a national gallery. They were claiming to have Corot and Correggio, Decamps and Holbein, housed in this decrepid old homestead hidden away in its ruinous old garden.
His bewildered eye rested for a moment on the Tanagra figurines. Yet they only added to his disturbance, for the man who had captured them, he knew, had been a good picker; and nothing, after all, was too preposterous for such a house.
“When shall I come back?” he asked, with rather an anxious face.
“Will to-morrow at two be convenient?” he heard his hostess in rusty black inquiring.
“I’ll be here at two,” he said with a belated effort at professional impersonality. But it was an abortive effort, for he had become too actively conscious that he stood on the threshold of some high adventure. And so sharp was that inner excitement that he even forgot about Julia Keswick until he saw her rose shears hanging on a cedar twig near the broken gate.
Conkling, on returning to the Keswick house for the second time, nursed an elusive sense of frustration. He nursed, as well, a sense of playing little more than a secondary rôle in a drama of deferment. For the accessories of the drama were not arranging themselves as he might have wished. On his way back to the manor-house he had come face to face with Lavinia Keswick, and that austere old figure, seated in a decrepid canopied phaëton drawn by a rawboned mare, had either failed or refused to recognize him. He was further depressed by the ominous silence which reigned when he pounded on the faded manor-door with the heavy brass knocker in the form of an ape with laughter on its embittered metal face. But in a minute or two the door was opened, and Julia Keswick herself stood confronting him.
She was dressed in Quaker gray, and seemed more repressed and more mature than when he had first caught sight of her. But she had the power, for all her quietness, of once more making his pulse skip a beat or two.
“I was to look over the pictures,” he explained, noticing her hesitancy.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible to-day,” she told him in a tone of constraint.
“But your aunt asked me to,” he reminded her.
“I know, but there has been an accident.”
“A serious one?” he asked.
“I hope not. But my Aunt Georgina slipped on the attic steps and sprained her ankle. It’s paining her a great deal, and she has gone to bed.”
“Could I possibly see her?”
A ghost of a smile appeared on the girl’s face. It would not be easy to explain to him that no living man had ever beheld her Aunt Georgina in bed. So she merely shook her head.
“Then how about your Aunt Lavinia?”
Again the girl shook her head.
“She has had to go to Weston to see a lawyer about a mortgage foreclosure—and she has always hated the pictures.”
“Then why couldn’t you show them to me?” he suggested.
“I don’t think my aunt would approve of that.”
“But in an emergency like this?” he contended.
“I wouldn’t be allowed to,” she said with an odd flattening of the voice. “Some of them are not——” she broke off. Her shoulder movement was a half-ironic one. “Even my aunt objected to some of them. She was carrying one of the bigger canvases down to her bedroom when she slipped and fell.”
“That was unfortunate,” he perfunctorily exclaimed. His mind, for the moment, seemed to be on other things. It was his glance into the girl’s face, where he sensed pennons of valor behind the bastions of silence, that brought his thoughts back to the present.
“But why to her bedroom?” he asked.
“To hide it away,” was the level-noted reply. And again their glances came together.
“What was the nature of that canvas,” he finally asked, “the canvas that caused the accident?”
There was a silence of several seconds before she answered.
“It was a Bouguereau!”
He was able to smile as he studied her in the shadow of the weather-bleached doorway. He understood, at last, the grim valor of her gaze. And she saw that he understood, and seemed glad of it.
“It’s all ridiculous, of course,” he said with his renewing smile of comprehension. “But it’s at least given me the chance of seeing you again.”
She in turn studied him for a moment or two with her intent eyes. Then she slowly changed color.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said.
“About what?”
Her slow look back over her shoulder had not escaped him. But he was quite satisfied to stand and stare at her. She seemed the only point of life in that house of dead and silent mustiness.
“I can’t talk to you any longer,” she said in lowered tones. “I really can’t!”
“Why not?” he demanded.
“I’d be punished for it,” she told him, without meeting his eye, “cruelly punished.”
She had spoken quietly enough, but there was an undertone of passion in her words.
“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” he expostulated. For she seemed, in her present mood and posture, far removed from the child.
“It isn’t,” he heard her answering. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“How old are you?” he asked with a frankness sired by impatience.
“I’m nineteen—almost twenty,” she told him, with her habitual impersonal candor.
“Then that makes it more unreasonable than ever,” he proclaimed with a touch of triumph.
“All my life has been unreasonable.”
“But——” he began, and broke off. Still again their glances had met and locked, and he seemed to drink courage from the quietness of her eyes. “Why couldn’t I see you?”
“See me?” she echoed.
“Without them knowing it,” he explained, paling under his tan.
She stood silent a moment.
“Where?” she finally asked, in little more than a whisper.
“What’s the matter with that old arbor of yours at the foot of the garden?” he suggested.
He still misunderstood her hesitation, for it was resolution and not timidity which was so completely whitening her face.
“Why couldn’t you meet me there, about nine o’clock to-night?”
“That would be too early,” she said, bewilderingly composed.
“Then say ten,” he persisted, marveling at his own unpremeditated deadly earnestness; and still again she stood silent. But she found the courage to lift her intent eyes and let them rest on his face. It seemed significant of tremendous capitulations. But when she spoke she spoke very quietly.
“I’ll be there.”
Conkling watched her retreat into the shadow and watched the faded door swing slowly shut between them. Then he turned and went down the steps. He went away this time without thinking of the pictures, and he went with no slightest sense of disappointment.
Conkling, as he waited in the shadowy arbor, was conscious of a series of rhythms. One was the distant rise and fall of lake water on its pebbled shore. Another was the antiphonal call of katydids from the mass of shrubbery behind him. Still another was the stridulous chorus of the crickets in the parched grass, rising and falling with a cadence of its own. And still another was the beat of his own pulse, quickened with an expectancy which tended to disturb him.
He waited for almost half an hour. Then Julia Keswick came ghost-like out of the dusk, heavy with its mingled smell of phlox and mignonette. He stood up, once he was sure who it was. She, too, stood, without speaking, face to face with him in the filtered moonlight.
“Was it hard?” he asked inadequately and with a quaver in his voice. She missed his small gesture of self-accusation in the darkness.
“It was dangerous,” she admitted, more composedly than he had expected.
“What would happen if they knew?” he questioned, more conscious of her nearness than of the words he was uttering.
“I could never go back,” she told him. The forlornness of her voice, for all its composure, brought a surge of pity through his body. There was, however, something faintly dismissive in her movement as she sat down on the rough seat. “I want to talk to you about the pictures,” she said in a more resolute voice.
“But I’d much rather talk about you,” he objected, and he waited, with his heart in his mouth, to see if she challenged that audacity.
“I’ve seen you only three times before to-night,” she said, staring off through a break in the shrubbery where a stretch of the lake lay like moving quicksilver.
“Well, a good deal can happen in that time,” he argued, wondering where his courage had gone.
“I’ve found that out,” she said with her Keswick candor.
He leaned closer to see her face. She did not move.
“Everything seemed clouded and hopeless before you came,” he heard her saying.
“Oh, you’re still thinking of the pictures,” he said, with a note of disappointment.
She laughed, almost inaudibly.
“I wish we didn’t have to think about them,” she told him.
He found something oddly inflammatory in that acknowledgment. “Then let’s not think about them,” he suggested. “Why should we, on a night like this?”
She did not answer him. But out of the prolonged silence that fell between them a tree toad shrilled sharply somewhere over their heads. He turned and stared across the garden at the distant house front. It seemed less sinister, bathed as it was in its etherealized wash of light. But it depressed him.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this,” he said, with remorse in his voice.
“It’s the most wonderful night I have ever known,” her small voice answered through the dusk.
“It is to me, too,” he told her, conscious of some gathering tide which was creeping up to him, which was taking possession of him, which was carrying him along on its tumbling and racing immensities.
“And it can never happen again,” she said, as much to herself as to him.
“Why can’t it?” he demanded.
“How can it?” she quietly countered.
“But I intend to make it!” he cried.
She sat back against the arbor railing, apparently startled by the passion in his voice.
“I’d rather you didn’t say things like that,” she told him.
“Why?” he asked.
“I want you to be always wonderful to me.”
“But I mean it,” he said, his voice shaking.
She stood up with what seemed her first gesture of timidity. He could see her face, flower soft, in the ragged square of moonlight which fell across her shoulders. He rose to his feet and stood beside her, with his pulses pounding. Then in the silence he reached out for her hand and turned her about so that she faced him.
“Don’t you see what it means to me?” he said, his face above hers in the uncertain light.
She looked down at her imprisoned hand, but that was all. He leaned closer. Her eyes closed as he kissed her.
“You must not do that if you don’t mean it,” she said almost abruptly and with a passionate intensity which startled him.
“But I do mean it, so much more than I could ever put into words,” he cried, more shaken than he had imagined. “I love you.”
Her hand went up to his shoulder in a gesture of helplessness.
“Are you sure?” she exacted. “Are you certain?” she repeated, with a soft desperation which left her adorable.
He took her in his arms and held her close as he murmured, “As certain as life!”
He kissed her again, this time more appropriately, more masterfully. And with it a lifetime of repression went up in flames.
“I love you,” she said, her grim Keswick candor once more asserting itself. “I’ll always have to love you, whatever happens.” She turned away from him a little and stared toward the shadowy front of the old manor-house. “I don’t care so much now what they say.”
“Why should you?” he demanded, realizing how little he had thought of the world beyond that arbor.
“This is my only home,” she told him, quite simply. “I can live here only by doing what is demanded of me.”
“But when those demands are absurd?”
“That doesn’t seem to have made much difference.”
“But you’re—you’re a woman now, and you have your human rights.”
“That’s easy to say,” she told him. “But my world’s been very different from yours.”
“Then we’ve got to bring them closer together,” he said, stirred by the wistfulness of her face.
“Bring what together?” she asked, apparently not following him.
“Your world and mine!” he said, quite grimly.
He took possession of her hand again. But she moved her head slowly from side to side. It seemed a protest against the impossible.
“It’s got to be done!” he proclaimed. That cry, however, seemed to fall short of her attention.
“But I can show you the pictures now,” she said in a tone of quiet challenge.
“What have the pictures got to do with us?” he demanded, resenting the intrusion of a workaday world on that moment of tensed emotion.
“Everything,” the girl told him. “That’s why you must see them.”
“When?” he asked, resenting not only her movement away from him but also the manner in which the trivialities of his calling could so stubbornly re-impose themselves on his moments of exaltation.
“It will have to be like our meeting to-night—without their knowing. I’ll send you word in some way—in the morning. But it will have to be secret. And now I must go!”
“That way?” he challenged, with bitterness in his voice.
She came to a stop, staring at him through the dusk for a moment of silence. Then she slowly lifted her arms, and as slowly stepped across the filtered moonlight until she came to where he stood waiting for her.
Itwas early the next day that a sandy-headed small boy brought a note to Conkling at his hotel in Weston. The note was from Julia Keswick. It merely said “Come at once.”
The brevity of that note disturbed him, but he lost no time in responding to its summons. When, as he started out, he once more caught sight of Lavinia Keswick in the old family chariot, this time proceeding somberly down the main street of Weston, he interpreted that migration as a ponderable reason for the hurried summons. But he remained ill at ease, even as he crossed the parched lawn and dispersed the ducks gabbling about the house front.
The door opened before he had a chance to knock. The girl obviously had been on guard, awaiting him. Her hand, when he took it, was passive, and she did not return his smile. Her face seemed preoccupied and pinched. Yet if she looked older, she looked none the less lovely to him.
“They know!”
She said it in little more than a whisper, as her eyes met his.
“Know what?” he had to ask, so intent was he on what the moment held for him.
“That we were together last night,” she told him.
“And what does that mean?” he asked, surprised the next moment at her look of tragic intensity.
“It means, I suppose, that I at last have to act for myself. But I’d rather not talk about it now. The one thing I want is for you to come up and look over the pictures while we’ve still the chance.”
“I’m ready,” he said.
“We must go quietly,” she warned him.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because this is one of the things in which I’m acting for myself,” she said in the gloom of the hallway, once the door was shut behind him.
She piloted him deeper into that gloom, and up a stairway with black-walnut bannisters. Then after a moment of waiting silence at the stairhead they crept along the second gloomy hallway, passed through a door which they closed behind them, and faced a flight of steep and narrow steps leading to the upper story. There the girl, after a moment’s thought, returned to the closed door behind her and quietly turned a key in the lock. Then she motioned to Conkling to mount the little stairway, where the light hung strong above their well of gloom.
He found himself, when he had emerged into that light, in a hip-roofed attic with a row of dormer windows along the north. It impressed him at first as little more than a large lumber room, for it was littered, like other rural attics he had seen, with broken furniture and frayed traveling trunks, with disorderly packing boxes and obsolete bric-a-brac and the banished impedimenta of an earlier generation. A stratum of golden light flowed in through the one window on the east. This light-band was filled with floating motes, so active that it seemed like subaqueous life in its native element.
But the commonplaceness ebbed out of that dusty attic as Conkling, looking about, made out what was most unmistakably the remains of a Roman bath, a portion of a carved reredos in time-blackened oak, and beside a fractured ewer ofcloisonnéenamel a painted statuette that reminded him of the Artemis in the Museo Nazionale at Naples. He noticed a second sarcophagus, less imperfect than the one he had already observed in the dooryard, an empty easel with its heavy-timbered framework draped with cobwebs, and an artist’s manikin without a head. Beyond these, in a cleared space which lay toward the southern wall of the attic studio, he discerned a vague pile covered with yellowed cotton sheeting.
This pile, he assumed, was the pictures. Yet those pictures, in some way, had already become subsidiary. A greater interest had usurped their place in his mind. But the sense of being on the threshold of some great adventure remained with him as he watched the girl cross the dusty floor and proceed, without speaking, to lift away the faded cotton coverings.
What was to be revealed by those movements he could not tell. But it impressed him as being a pretty ridiculous way of treasuring canvases of any value or any origin, to leave them unprotected in an old fire trap of a farm-house attic. The whole thing, in fact, was ridiculous. The only element that redeemed it, that vitalized it, to him was the stooping, ardent figure with the strong side light on the creamy white of her throat and chin.
But the girl, as he stood studying her, had turned and looked at him.
“How shall I show them?” she asked in a moderated voice which he first accepted as awe, but later remembered to be based on ordinary caution.
“Just as they come,” he told her, as casually as he could, intent on impressing her with that sustained deliberateness which one expects of the critic. “One at a time, if you can manage them. And I’ll tell you when to change.”
She showed him first what must have been a small collection of family portraits, for only lineal ties and obligations, he felt, could extenuate the somber monstrosities which silently anathematized him from their dusty frames.
“These don’t count, of course,” she said, noticing the absence of all approval from his intent face.
He could see the excitement under which she was laboring, for all her restraint. He felt vaguely yet persistently sorry for her. It was not an auspicious beginning, and he would have to be more circumspect, more non-committal. For whatever happened, however things turned out, it was going to mean more to her than he had imagined.
“This,” she said in little more than a whisper as she placed a small canvas for his inspection, “is the Holbein.”
He stepped forward a little, apparently to study it more intently. But the movement was scarcely necessary, for he saw almost at a glance that the thing was nothing more than a copy by an ordinarily adept student. More than once, in fact, he had sat before the original in Munich. But he wondered how he was going to tell her.
Her questioning eye, in fact, was already on his face. So after deliberately prolonging his study he merely nodded his head.
“The next, please,” he said with judicial matter-of-factness.
“This is one of the Constables,” she quietly told him, catching her cue from that achieved impersonality of his.
His heart went down as he examined it, for it stood a confirmation of his earlier fears. The canvas in front of him was a copy, and nothing more. It was a much cleverer copy than the first one. But that scarcely excused the effrontery of the forgery, for the painting was signed. On the frame, too, was a lettered medallion, soberly attempting to authenticate it as a Constable.
“This was your father’s collection, was it not?” he asked the girl.
“Yes,” she told him.
“And he was an artist as well as a collector?”
She shook her head.
“He was not a good artist. But he loved pictures.”
“And these he brought back with him after his different visits to Europe?”
“I think that was it, but my aunt has always refused to talk about them.”
“Why?”
“She hated my father. She blames him for all the troubles that have come into her life.”
“And now she takes that hate out on you?”
The girl did not answer his question. Instead, she placed a smaller canvas for his inspection and said: “Would you care to see the Corot now?”
It was the same story over again, only this time the copy was of a canvas with which he was not familiar; and again he wondered how he was going to be able to tell her. She became conscious of his increasing gravity.
“You don’t like them?” she asked at a venture.
The only thing he liked in all that dusty-aired attic was the slender, stooping figure with its aura of repressed ardencies. But this, he knew, was not the time to say so.
“How do you feel about them?” he countered, watching her as she turned toward him and absently rubbed her fingers together. It struck him at first as a movement of repudiation, but he remembered that it was merely an effort to remove the attic dust from her hands.
“It’s hard to explain,” was her answer. “Some of them I dislike and some of them I can’t understand, and there are a few of them I almost hate.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t think I could make it clear to you,” was all she said.
He saw no light through the blind wall of his dilemma, and he could not quite see how the first move was to be made. So he asked, in a merciful effort at postponement: “What pictures were taken from this collection?”
“My father took the ones he liked when he went away the last time. He took them all but one.” She had misunderstood him.
“No; you spoke of your Aunt Georgina carrying some of them downstairs when she fell,” he reminded her. “What were they, besides the Bouguereau?”
She met his glance courageously in the clear light that flooded them.
“One was a copy of Manet’sBreakfast on the Grassand the other was theOlympe.”
He began to divine the demands he had made on her courage.
“They were nudes?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged.
“And that was the reason they were removed?” he asked, smiling in spite of himself.
“They hate everything like that.”
He found it harder than ever to go on. So he said almost curtly: “Let’s see the Correggio.”
She turned back to the stacked canvases.
“Now the others,” he commanded, after he had confirmed his suspicions as to the larger canvas with the mendacious medallion on its tarnished frame.
He went through them patiently, and the inspection left him more depressed than he could understand. Yet he was tired of equivocation. He felt that nothing was to be gained by any further deferment of the death sentence.
“I’m afraid I have a very great disappointment for you,” he began as gently as he could.
He watched her as she turned slowly away and stared at the stacked canvases and the strips of faded cotton littering the floor. He could detect no stirring of emotion on her face, and for a moment he thought she had failed to catch at the note of forewarning in his voice.
“You mean they’re not so valuable—not so valuable in the matter of dollars and cents—as my Aunt Georgina has been led to believe they are?”