WHEN I returned to Fleetwater, Marion was gone. It was better so, I
felt, much as I missed her. Indeed, our last good-bye had been said in
the place she had chosen for it,—on the Chapel Hill where she had turned
and left me.
Two days later Eric’s verdict on the picture came. It was short and to
the point.
“Dear Harold,
“Why, it’s a Bronzino (he wrote), the great Bronzino at Madrid. I
mean, of course, a copy. But a remarkably good one, and worth
something if only for the excellence of the work. I’ll do what I can
with it. The original is safe, as you know, in the Museum at
Madrid—at least it was, unless you have stolen it since I left the
place last autumn.
“Yours affectionately,
“ERIC.”
I do not know what other answer we could have expected. But
notwithstanding, it was a disappointment to all of us. Most fortunate it
proved that I had seen the original at Madrid, and been able, in
consequence, to repress the growing confidence of those around me in the
value of the picture. Indeed, I had been obliged to insist on this point
again and again in my conversations with the Rector and Marion, neither
of whom could in any wise be persuaded that it was only a copy. Marion,
if possible, had been the more obstinate of the two, and had almost
succeeded in convincing me that I had never seen the original at all. “I
believe it was a dream, Harold,” she would say, “and that you only
fancied you saw it. Why, I’ve had the same feeling a hundred times over.
Dreams with me often take such a real and tangible form that I’ve found
myself hunting again and again for some article which I was sure I had in
my possession, and which very possibly never existed at all. Reason in
such cases is absolutely powerless. Even to this very day I constantly
wake up with a belief that I’ve bought a whole gallery of pictures, and
am short of the money to pay for them. And so real is the fancy that I
could describe to you at this moment the shop where I bought them, the
man who sold them to me, and the subject of each picture in detail.
“Besides, you must have been picture-blind by the time you got to Madrid.
By your own showing it came at the end of a long round of galleries, and
I suspect that this dream-picture of yours is a sort of blend of all the
best pictures you’d been seeing at Rome and Florence and Dresden. A
cardinal gave you the dress, and Bindo Altoviti the face, and lo and
behold you had your portrait complete.”
And the Rector, who had a fine eye for drawing and colouring, had been
not one whit more easy to persuade. “I can’t solve the mystery,
Stirling. But of one thing I’m certain—that no copyist did it. Do you
mean to tell me that a painter who could do work like that would waste
his time on the slavish task of copying? Why, the man who painted that
picture might command the Royal Academy. It’s no such easy matter,
remember, to reproduce a picture in flaming scarlet, without a touch of
any other colour to relieve it. Try it, my boy—you’re a dabbler in the
art yourself—and see if you can produce anything on the same lines that
will be worth hanging as a signboard on the village Inn.”
Even Peggy, too, had had her fling at my unbelief. “Why, it’s simply
lovely, Mr. Stirling,” she’d tell me, “though I say it as shouldn’t, for
it goes sore against my conscience to praise that idolatrous young
heathen, who, but for the cut of his dress, might be the Scarlet Woman
herself. And even she couldn’t have chosen herself a more beautiful
material; I will say that for it, scarlet or no scarlet. You can’t find
such a texture as that in a shop now-a-days for love or money. Look at
the gloss and sheen on it, and the beautiful folds that it makes, that’ll
never show a crease in them till years after that young jackanapes has
grown out of it.”
Well, I had my revenge on all of them at last when Eric’s letter came,
confirming my statement that I had left the original at Madrid.
But I question whether revenge is ever at any time satisfactory; it
certainly was not so to me.