To-day, Cousin Felix himself hardly knows at what age he began to fit
various facts together, with an accuracy damaging to the Lafayette myth.
If, as family tradition had it, the porringer had been ordered in Paris
by our seafaring ancestor, in the year 1779, was it really likely that at
that date Lafayette’s exploits, either warlike or otherwise, either in
Egypt or elsewhere, were already so noised abroad as to be stock subjects
for the silversmith’s skill? Absurd! “Any sophomore would know better,”
reasoned the youth Felix; “even a Harvard man.” But by the time Felix
had taken his degree at Yale, and was beginning at the bottom round of
the paint business, his interest in the vanished porringer had become
dormant; for many years thereafter, his business career, his new home and
growing family occupied his mind to the exclusion of childish trifles.
Nevertheless, at the destined hour, his collector’s passion overtook
him, and was thenceforth to remain with him. He began to haunt auction
rooms, private collections, museums. Pictures, books, furniture—he loved
them all; but Colonial silver was his chief desire. He read much, studied
much, and even wrote a little, now and then, upon this subject paramount.
And though he scarcely owned it, even to himself, the missing part of
the Fairlee porringer was the central object of his quest. As the years
rushed on with gathering speed, the by-products of this pursuit became
very considerable; his collection vied with that of Lockwood or of Halsey
or of Clearwater. Silver tankards and platters were his; also silver
braziers and caudle cups and chocolate pots, silver ladles and buckles
and patchboxes. But porringers were really his long suit, he said. Of
these, he possessed enough to lend a score to various museums, and yet to
keep in his own cabinet a more than sufficient number (all of the middle
period) to serve as soup-bowls for his famous dinners of twelve.
Naturally his delight in what he had merely whetted his longing for what
he had not. Whenever his birthdays impended, as they continued to do with
annoying annual precision, his wife and the elder children (especially
young Felicia) would once more set out hunting for “the Lafayette
bottom,” and failing always in their search, would in despair purchase
some costly and inadequate substitute for the thing they sought. Indeed,
“Father’s feeling for antique silver, you know!” had made him no niggard
with modern gold, and his offspring, even in their early youth, had their
many-leaved, rigorously inspected check-books. Nor could I ever see that
they were in any way the worse for this indulgence.
Felix smiled happily enough when, on the morning of his fifty-first
birthday, young Felicia bounded into his study, and plumped down upon
his table an ill-favored bulbous tankard of somewhat baroque design; a
piece which she jubilantly declared was “a genuine John Cony,” but which
was really, as our wise expert whispered to himself in the midst of his
outspoken praise and thanksgiving, “no more a Cony than I am a king.”
“No use, dad,” said young Felicia, shaking a wise blonde head, in her
funny little perpetual morning-glory way. “Mother and I have given up
the Lafayette bottom for keeps. We’ve searched high and low for the old
thing, from Salem, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, and so have
you. Nothing doing. _I_ don’t believe there ever _was_ a Lafayette
bottom, anyway!” This last with the air of uttering a superb and daring
heresy, possibly epoch-making in the annals of silver-collecting in
America.
“As for that,” replied Felix, whose self-imposed rôle it was never to
turn a hair at the opinions of youth, “I haven’t believed it myself, this
long time.”
Felicia started indignantly. “Why, Payrent, Payrent! What do you mean by
such—recalcitrating? I thought you staked your life on that Lafayette
business!”
“I’m afraid you haven’t been keeping up with the times,” retorted the
parent. “For the past ten years, at least, I’ve discounted the tale. I’ve
been putting two and two together, and I really don’t see the sense in
trying to make a baker’s dozen out of it, do you?”
“Oh, well, if you’re bringing it down to cold mathematics, father, I
rather think you’re going to miss some of the joys of your job!”
“On the contrary, my dear Flickey, the joys will be all the keener.”
“Well, I wish you’d explain your change of base.”
“I haven’t made any change of base. And haven’t I told you a hundred
times that the true collector should never venture out of doors without
being armored in doubt? Why, from the time of dear Grammer Bradford’s
maunderings about Lafayette in Egypt, when I was a little boy in a
wine-colored plaid shirt, I had my misgivings about the tale. It’s the
doubt that makes the chase interesting. Of course, all of us Bradfords
know that our Fairlee ancestor was with Paul Jones on the ship Ranger in
the harbor of Quiberon in 1779 when that ship received the first national
salute ever given to the American flag in Europe.”
Flickey stifled a yawn behind her preposterous dinner-ring.
“So far, so good. Next, we have reason to believe that our seafaring
grandsire got up to Paris that same year, and there ordered the Fairlee
porringer, the cover of which I now possess, the bowl being mysteriously
dog-lost.”
“Yes, dog-gone lost, forever and a day.”
Felix fingered the scrolled thumb-piece of the supposed John Cony. “But
didn’t you ever stop to think, my dear, just what Lafayette was up to,
those days? He was only twenty when he came over to us, in 1777. Is it
at all likely that he’d ever been in Egypt before that time? Not enough
to notice, I’ll be bound! No, I can’t think he was celebrated enough in
1779 to warrant having his exploits, real or imaginary, engraved on the
side of a porringer, to make a household word of himself.”
“Another illusion overboard,” cried Felicia hopefully, as if pleased with
a parent’s progress. But she departed, thoughtful.
“Do you know,” she announced to her mother, afterwards, “dad doesn’t
really swallow that Lafayette stuff, any more than you and I do?”
“Of course not, dearie!”
“Well, of all the gay parental deceivers, you two are the limit! You’ll
be saying there’s no Santa Claus, next!” Flickey flounced off in a
dudgeon not wholly pretended. She was thoughtful, too. As her parents’
interest in the quest waned, her own waxed stronger.
“The old dears got a rise out of _me_, all right,” she confided to Jimmy
Alexander, a Princeton boy who had succeeded in wresting forever from
Yale Felicia’s sworn allegiance, originally granted to Harvard, and for a
brief hour wavering between Amherst and Columbia.
“So much depends upon where you spend your summers,” Felicia had once
ingenuously remarked; and not without some anxiety, her parents had made
a similar observation. However, it was with a certain feeling of relief
that Felix and his wife had compared notes upon the subject of Jimmy
Alexander. Weighed in the balance with every other collegian in Flickey’s
career, the young man triumphed conspicuously. Incidentally, he had
an interest in old silver, an interest which even the skeptical Felix
believed was genuine.
The fount and origin of that interest would have been clear to our cousin
the collector could he have overheard Flickey and Jimmy in the arbor,
after a game of tennis. “I’ll beat you to it,” Flickey was saying. “You
find me that Lafayette bottom, and your fortune’s made, with father.
He tells us now, after all these years, that he doesn’t believe there
_is_ such a thing. But all the same there’s a look of holy faith shining
behind those shell rims of his. Say, Jimmy, did you ever notice how blue
father’s eyes are? They’re the eyes of a believer, every time!”
Jimmy was too much engrossed with Felicia’s eyes to spare a thought for
Felix’s. But the girl’s suggestion about the Lafayette bottom caught his
fancy. An up-and-coming lawyer, such as he intended eventually to be,
ought to be able to hunt down a silver bowl; or rather, what is more to
the point with lawyers, to get some one else to do it.
“My Aunt Amanda at Lost River,” he mused aloud, “has quite a little
collection of such trifles, and I’m sure she’d be glad to advise—”
“Your Aunt Amanda, at Lost River,” hooted Felicia, the morning-glory
willingly assuming the rôle of owl. “Oh, Jimmy, you innocent, don’t
you suppose father has been up hill and down dale, from Lost River to
Newfoundland Bay, looking for that bowl? Don’t you know that half the
dealers in New York are out with bloodhounds seeking stuff for father’s
cabinets to devour? Your Aunt Amanda, indeed! And Lost River! Huh!”
Jimmy was nettled, but not defeated. “All the same,” he retorted
stubbornly, “my Aunt Amanda is just as good as anybody else’s, and in
fact a lot better than most; and there’s as good fish in Lost River
as you can buy in all New York. And furthermore, if you don’t mind my
mentioning it, my Aunt Amanda is an authority on Early American silver.
You probably are not aware of the fact that it was she who wrote the
famous Blakeney monograph! Amanda Alexander Blakeney is her name.”
Flickey was taken aback for a fraction of a second. “A. A. Blakeney? Why,
we were brought up on her! I thought it was a him, I did, really! Dad
swears by his Blakeney.”
“Then why shouldn’t we Dodge up to Lost River,” urged Jimmy, appeased,
“and see auntie about it?”
Felicia’s eyes shone, but her words were circumspect. “Of course we
could Dodge it in your car, or Ford it in mine; but hadn’t we better get
father and mother to take us up in the family ark, with Priscilla and the
children—?”
“Not on your blooming passport! Where do I come in, with a deal like
that? If anything results, does little Jimmy draw the prestige? No, no,
I want to perform the quest by myself—with you, of course. Can’t ask any
one else, my runabout won’t stand for it. After all, I’m furnishing an
aunt; and I think I ought to have something to say.”
“I’ll see how mother feels about it,” vouchsafed Flickey. She added to
herself, “I’ll wear my pink-and-white stripe, with the rose blazer. But
perhaps not the earrings—you never can tell about earrings—”