As Maurice motored down to the station, the maple and beech leaves
spurned by his tires rose up in their passing glory and sang Hal’s
message, over and over, with variations; and on the night train, the
wheels took up the refrain, with grinding insistence. “Buyer buyer waits
your wire,” though probably due in part to a mistake at the office,
sounded a little like the new poetry; Maurice hoped there might be truth
as well as poetry in it. “Top price cash down” had its own music, of
course; but “immediate withdrawal from gallery” was less pleasing to the
ear. It had implications. That part of the message, reverberated in the
too sonorous breathing of lower nine, just opposite, really annoyed our
painter. As he afterward told Hal, adapting his language to his hearer,
“it got his goat.” “Immediate withdrawal,” indeed! Such words were not to
be addressed to a Price.
Emerging from the sordid practicalities of the Pullman, he sought his
Club for breakfast; he felt that the morning air on his face, even in the
few steps from the Grand Central to the Century, might supplement the
sketchy passes he had made before the shiny Pullman basin, while lower
nine, perspiring in purple pajamas, awaited his turn; lower nine, in
waking as in sleeping hours, still suggesting “immediate withdrawal.” The
offending phrase followed Maurice into the breakfast-room. He had eaten
it in his grapefruit and was thoughtfully stirring it into his coffee,
when Mr. William Saltonstall, that early bird among collectors, sauntered
in, and after a moment’s hesitation, hastened to grasp his hand.
Maurice in his absorption did not associate his enigmatic “buyer buyer”
with Mr. Saltonstall. Indeed, that gentleman was known everywhere as a
connoisseur in figure-pieces; he never bought landscapes. Yet there was
something unusual in his manner; his dark melancholy eyes, usually very
gentle, were smouldering with a kind of suppressed excitement, in which
both joy and pain were suggested.
“Surely I have the right explanation, haven’t I?” he began, with anxious
courtesy.
“If you have,” replied Maurice, “I wish you’d share it with me, along
with breakfast.”
Acting on a fantastic impulse to match another man’s perplexities with
his own, he pushed the crumpled telegram across the table.
Mr. Saltonstall smiled. “Oh, yes, I asked Wrayne to wire you.”
A glimmer of light broke over Maurice. “Are you—by any chance—this ‘buyer
buyer’?”
His friend nodded nervously. “Still waiting your wire! But I don’t ask
immediate withdrawal, now. That is, if the truth is what I think it is.”
“But what _is_ the truth?” cried the bewildered painter.
“You should know,” returned the other. “I have my belief, my strong
belief!—but you, you have the knowledge! For God’s sake, man, was it a
landscape or—a lady—that you sent down to that cousin of yours?”
Maurice could see that Saltonstall was trembling with emotion. In a
flash, he remembered Amouretta. “Oh,” he cried out, in a shocked voice,
“a landscape, a thousand times a landscape! Did you think I _could_ have
meant the other, the one on the back? _Amouretta?_”
Mr. Saltonstall looked relieved, triumphant, ashamed. “Yes, I did, at
first! And why not, when it was just that ribald portrait, and nothing
else, that Wrayne showed me there, in an exquisite frame, in his
confounded Court of New Departures? I tell you, Maurice Price, I was wild
when I saw it. In my heart I vowed vengeance on you and all your tribe.
I couldn’t believe it of you—you, of all men; yet there it was before
my eyes. I couldn’t let that thing stay there! No man, who felt as I
did about Amouretta, could let it stay, to be gaped at by the multitude
looking for new sensations in art, and to be written up in the art
column of the Sunday papers! Oh, I admit, of course, there was something
captivating about it, too; captivating as well as desecrating, yes. Well,
I made Wrayne take an oath to put it away, away, out of the world’s
sight, and send you a wire.”
Maurice of the compassionate eyes saw the drops of sweat gather on
Saltonstall’s lean temples.
“You must know,” said the artist gently, “it was never I who painted that
portrait of Amouretta. It was Anthony’s studio assistant; you remember,
the lad that died just before our Roman Prize was awarded. If you’ve
looked at the painting, you know, of course, there’s diabolically clever
work in it. Those pearls—_I_ couldn’t surpass them! But if you saw only
that portrait (and right there, if you please, there’s something that
Master Hal will have to explain off the map!) how on earth did you happen
to find my landscape?”
Saltonstall smiled in his sad way. “Well, I wanted to be sure Wrayne
had kept his word about hiding the picture, so I dropped in on him
unexpectedly, yesterday afternoon. Wrayne was all right! The thing was
swathed and roped and even sealed. In fact, he had insisted on calling in
that famulus of his the day before, when I was there, and having him do
all that in my very presence, while he and I sat back and watched.”
“Perfectly good gesture,” laughed Maurice.
“Oh, yes, and in the grand style, I assure you! Queer chap, Wrayne, but
he’ll succeed, even though he doesn’t yet know the rudiments of his
trade. Can you believe it, he had not observed that the painting was on
wood instead of canvas! I was wild to see it again; I made him uncover
it and show it to me. My wrath hadn’t gone down with the sun, I can
tell you, but I had sense enough left to see that the frame was quite
out of the common; good as the Stanford White frames, but different. So
I stepped behind to find the maker’s name, if I could; and behold, a
landscape of great Price! Wrayne never even knew it was there. Mistake of
that famulus, I believe.”
“You liked it?” Maurice put the question almost timidly. The landscape he
loved seemed to him suddenly to lose importance, in the presence of his
friend’s deep feeling.
“You’ve surpassed your best self in it! I can’t tell why, but there’s
something in it that assuages for me the grief of things; something of
yourself that you’ve put into it, I suppose,—some beauty or solemnity
that was not there, really, until you yourself brought it there,
with your own two hands. Perhaps I never knew, till now, why men buy
landscapes—” Saltonstall spoke dreamily. His recollective eyes, looking
far beyond his listener, seemed to peer into some Paradise not wholly
lost.
Both men were moved. They had more to say to each other, things not to be
told over egg-shells and coffee-stains.
“I suppose,” hesitated Maurice, as they took their hats, “you wonder why
I never painted out that figure on the back, at any rate, before I sent
off the landscape?”
“Oh, no,” answered the other, simply. “I know how you felt, I do, indeed!
You couldn’t quite bring yourself to do it, could you, even though you
tried? Neither could I, I am sure. Something keeps me from wanting to
destroy it; I don’t yet know whether it’s the person or the painting!
Though, of course, I never saw any picture of Amouretta that was really
right, except that one little thing of yours you showed last winter in
the Vanderbilt Gallery; and what’s-his-name, the man at the desk, said
very emphatically it wasn’t for sale—”
“No,” interrupted Maurice, “it wasn’t for sale, and never will be. It is
one of the few things I couldn’t take money for! My wife and I intended
to give it as a wedding-present to Amouretta. We both of us loved that
child; we felt her roseleaf exquisiteness! Helen was so happy, tying up
that little portrait in white paper. And afterwards,—well, I boxed it up
and addressed it to you, with a note explaining it and begging you to
keep it. But it was overlooked and forgotten, during my illness; and when
I got up, I found I had lost my nerve about sending it to you. I feared
you might not like it, or worse yet, might think I was trying to sell you
something—”
“Oh, Maurice Price,” sighed the collector, “then even _you_ didn’t know
how much I _needed_ Amouretta, and anything that would recall her truly,
just as she was, and not as those who didn’t know her imagined her to be?
We Saltonstalls—” But the rest was lost in the roar of the traffic, as
the men crossed the avenue, and walked rapidly together toward the Court
of New Departures. It was not too late in the day to read the morning
lesson to young Hal; it would do him good. After all, though, he was a
plucky chap; the sooner he had whatever per cent was coming to him, the
better. An amicable three-cornered arrangement could be made, about that.
Certainly, where there’s a quartette of skirts, somebody must pay the
piper!