Late one July afternoon, Amanda Alexander Blakeney had ensconced herself
with Queen Victoria in a shady corner of the terrace, and was looking
forward to an hour of tranquil enjoyment with Lehzen’s caraway seeds, and
Lord M. To her vexation, the very first paragraph was punctuated for her
by footsteps on the brick walk; and peering through the pine boughs, she
spied a gay young pair who had evidently just descended from a car, left
in quite the wrong place in her courtyard.
“I hope,” she said to herself, “it isn’t another brazen couple come to
ask if this is a ‘gift-shop-’n’-tea-house,’ and can they have something
wet. Well, they’ll hear from me, and—”
A brisk voice broke in, man-fashion.
“Hello, hello, Aunt Mandy! Anything wet for the weary prodigal nevvy?”
“Well, of all things,” replied the great Museum authority on silver,
beaming with pleasure upon her favorite Alexander nephew. Lord M. was
readily enough forgotten in the vivid presence of the young people, and
the subject of silver readily enough approached with the arrival of a
tea-tray laden with various products reflecting credit alike upon the
collector and her cook. Mrs. Blakeney was a childless widow, distinctly
pretty, with a young face framed by abundant white hair. In her fresh
lilac gown with its touches of old lace, and in her daintily buckled
slippers, of a Victorian slenderness, she was, as Felicia afterwards
declared, a “regular story-book fairy-godmother person.” Old silver was
her love, her life, her knowledge. Everybody’s silver was of interest to
her; she was always ready to talk or even to hear others talk concerning
caudle cups or apostle spoons or salt-cellars or tankards.
She gave a delicately amused attention to Flickey’s chatter of her
father’s quest for the Lafayette bottom. The young girl naturally felt
that her hostess’s interest was due, in part, to her own pleasing
vivacity in telling the story of the child Lydia, the Fairlee porringer,
Rover, and the evil Ellicksenders. At the mention of that name,
_Ellicksender_, Mrs. Blakeney started, and even changed color; one would
have said that a feeling of indignant protest surged over her when the
“den of thieves” was blithely insisted upon by young Felicia; but the
lady did not interrupt.
“And the fun of it is,” Felicia continued, stimulated by the fact that
Jimmy was admiring her within an inch of his life, while even Mrs.
Blakeney was spellbound, “the fun of it is, father still has the drawing
his Grandma Bradford made when she was a little girl. You know she made a
drawing of the Lafayette bowl just by laying it down on paper and tracing
around it, as young things do!” One would have supposed that the speaker
was a thousand years removed from such simplicities.
“But that isn’t all,” added Flickey, taking from her beaded bag a folded
paper, and passing it to Mrs. Blakeney. “What must father do but go ahead
and have half a dozen copies made of that old drawing, perfect in every
detail; and he has given one to each of us children, mother included,
so that wherever we are, we can always be prepared to find a porringer
bottom that will fit exactly, if there is such a thing. Regular Bradford
family identification tag, I call it. Of course father has the top; but
we’ve never had any luck in finding the bottom, though mother and I
have hunted and delved and dug. Sometimes the circle would be right,
or almost right, but the handles—oh, dear! We’ve looked at _gorms_ of
handles, all of them terribly wrong.”
She paused a moment to wonder whether she had been talking too much;
she did not wish to appear the raw young feminine ignoramus in the eyes
of a person so delightful as Aunt Amanda, who, as Felicia now saw, was
studying that drawing, and with a kind of passionate earnestness, too.
The expert’s face was itself a study; doubt, amazement, and recognition
were to be seen struggling there. The polite interest had become acute.
Flickey, jubilantly aware that as usual she was making a success of
her conversation, was inspired to further efforts. In imitation of her
father’s most discriminating manner, she continued, “Of course, from the
collector’s point of view, we don’t attach any undue importance to the
Lafayette myth, and—”
“Neither do I,” observed Mrs. Blakeney, with unexpected decisiveness. “If
you’d both care to come and look at some of my things, perhaps you’ll see
why not.”
The boy and girl followed the lady into her gray-panelled drawing-room,
fresh and delicately fragrant with the spice of July pinks nodding from
crystal vases. It seemed to Felicia that she had never before entered
a room that was at once so simple and so sophisticated, so withdrawn
from the world, yet so inviting to a guest. Mrs. Blakeney, no less
than Felicia, carried a beaded handbag; but Mrs. Blakeney’s, Felicia
subsequently reported to an attentive father, made her own look like
thirty cents.
Mrs. Blakeney’s bag held a key, with which she opened a highboy, gleaming
discreetly from a nook just beyond the fireplace. Its shelves were laden
with treasure; and Flickey, although long inured to the surprises that
a collector can spring upon his family, exclaimed with joy before those
marshalled riches. For Felicia, like her father before her, was fated
to pursue beauty; even her girlish mistakes—her collection of athletic
collegians, for example, her amethystine earrings, her overwrought,
overworking dinner-ring in all its preposterousness—resulted from her
thirst after loveliness rather than from her vanity. Jimmy himself was to
her largely one last pure product of the beautiful. In Mrs. Blakeney’s
drawing-room, before the highboy and its spoils, her eyes filled with
tears of thankfulness for beauty. She felt that the ranks of silver
vessels beaming and gleaming upon her had in some mysterious way gathered
into themselves and greatly multiplied all over their surfaces all
possible beauty from all known worlds, only to reflect it back upon
those who were fortunate enough to be near. Not only the faded rose of
the hangings and the dim gray of the panelling and the dusky orange
outline of the spinet were reflected winkingly from those silver shapes;
it seemed to her that the very fragrance of the pinks and the breath of
summer itself were wafted to her by silver voices. Flickey sometimes
passed for flippant; but this was not her flippant day. Indeed, she was
startled out of a mood that was partly pleasure and partly prayer by Aunt
Amanda’s matter-of-fact remark,—
“My French stuff, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I keep it locked
because—oh, well, there are just a few trifles—Jimmy, reach me down that
top piece, will you, please? The one at the right of the alms basin.”
With a certain grave excitement, Mrs. Blakeney had already placed
Felicia’s drawing upon a little table; she smoothed out the folds of the
paper, especially those that crossed the lacelike handles. Then, with
but a casual glance at the delicately wrought bowl that Jimmy put into
her hands, she set it, with dramatic exactness, over the outline traced
by the child Lydia.
Each one of the trio felt for a moment the touch of a bygone day. There
could be no doubt whatever that the lost piece of silver was found.
Unless, indeed, as the young lawyer’s mind profanely suggested, those
old boys made such things by the gross, like the green spectacles that
Moses bought! But the surmise was too grotesque for utterance. Even with
his slender knowledge of the silversmith’s art, he could discern that
the Fairlee porringer was no machine-made product. It had been created
by many touches, but by few hands; perhaps by only one pair of hands,
and that a master’s. Felicia’s eyes (not wholly untrained, however
subject to occasional error) rested admiringly, even reverently, on a
master-craftsman’s work.
She turned toward Mrs. Blakeney. “I feel just as if you had taken down a
receiver, and asked me to listen into it, and that I heard a voice say,
oh, ever so long-distance! ‘This is little Lydia speaking.’”
Jimmy, too, was thoughtful. “But where does Lafayette come in, I wonder?
Lafayette in Egypt?”
Aunt Amanda smiled, picked up the bowl, and pointed out, just below the
rim, a tiny engraving of a long-eared beast, bearing a cloaked figure,
while another personage trudged at the side. Palm trees and a pyramid
completed the scene. How strange that any one, above all a God-fearing
Fairlee, could ever have failed to recognize the Bible story of Mary and
Joseph, fleeing with the Child! Many curves and scrolls enclosed this
specimen of the graver’s art, and among these could be discerned, in the
flourishy French writing of which Grandma Bradford had often spoken, the
legend—
_La Fuite en Egypte_
For a collector, Mrs. Blakeney was certainly sportsmanlike, yes,
magnanimous. We called it broad-minded when she gave to Jimmy Alexander’s
bride, as a wedding-gift, her “Flight into Egypt” piece; an object so
tenderly cherished by her that she had never even made mention of it
in any of her monographs, but had kept it unspotted from the world,
in her own collection. She had always, and with reason, considered it
an Alexander heirloom to which she was justly entitled, through the
bequest of her grand-uncle, Judge Alexander. She knew, however, that
the Alexanders, like most of us, had had ups and downs; she knew that
one branch of the family, had been prolific in good-for-nothings,
some of whom had fallen so low as to misspell the family name for a
whole generation, writing it Ellicksender, when they wrote it at all.
Though she doubted the justice of calling the humble Ellicksender home
a “den of thieves,” she nevertheless believed it probable that Judge
Alexander’s “_La Fuite en Egypte_” porringer had come into his family’s
possession in some vague, unexplained way, rather than by purchase. For
Judge Alexander’s father, Dr. Phineas Alexander, that pillar of the
Presbyterian faith, had originally been a mere Ellicksender, so-called;
he it was who had “turned out real good,” and so had failed to win
the interest of either Felix or myself, in our childish days. As Mrs.
Blakeney said, “The ironies of Time certainly do iron out everything, if
you wait long enough”; and it was Dr. Alexander, _alias_ Ellicksender,
who had lifted up the fallen fortunes of his family to their former lofty
place in American history.
Felicia is really a kindly little soul. When I went to see Cousin Felix
after the wedding, I was not surprised to find that on the ground of
safety first, she insists that the Lafayette bottom shall remain, during
her father’s lifetime, remarried to its fluted, flame-topped cover. The
_écuelle_ is easily the pride of the collector’s heart. “Of course I have
costlier pieces,” quoth Felix, “but none so dear to me as this.”
We grinned at each other as he repeated his boyhood’s gesture, wetting a
thumb and forefinger before he touched the flame.