It was 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 of _cloisonné_ enamel 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’s _Breakfast on the Grass_ and the other was
the _Olympe_.”
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?”
“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.
“Do _you_?” 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!”