“You’re _so_ artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.
Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me
I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the
last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as
circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes
the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose
future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s
Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of
Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was
no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the
curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty
cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none
too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in
Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets:
the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s
own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor,
that none of the ready-made virtues ever _had_ fitted her: they all
pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.
Therefore when she said to me, “You’re _so_ artistic.” emphasizing the
conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all
weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely
stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”
She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture--a Rembrandt!”
“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”
“Well”--she smiled--“that, of course, depends on _you_.”
“On me?”
“On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the
change--though she’s very conservative.”
A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced: “One can’t judge of a picture
in this weather.”
“Of course not. I’m coming for you to-morrow.”
“I’ve an engagement to-morrow.”
“I’ll come before or after your engagement.”
The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation
of the weather-report. It said “Rain to-morrow,” and I answered briskly:
“All right, then; come at ten”--rapidly calculating that the clouds on
which I counted might lift by noon.
My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league
with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten
Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.
I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor’s
hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case. I guessed beforehand that the
lady we were about to visit had lapsed by the most distressful degrees from
opulence to a “hall-bedroom”; that her grandfather, if he had not been
Minister to France, had signed the Declaration of Independence; that the
Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for
years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now
the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic
obliquity.
Previous experience had taught me that all Eleanor’s “cases” presented a
harrowing similarity of detail. No circumstance tending to excite the
spectator’s sympathy and involve his action was omitted from the history of
her beneficiaries; the lights and shades were indeed so skilfully adjusted
that any impartial expression of opinion took on the hue of cruelty. I
could have produced closetfuls of “heirlooms” in attestation of this fact;
for it is one more mark of Eleanor’s competence that her friends usually
pay the interest on her philanthropy. My one hope was that in this case the
object, being a picture, might reasonably be rated beyond my means; and
as our cab drew up before a blistered brown-stone door-step I formed the
self-defensive resolve to place an extreme valuation on Mrs. Fontage’s
Rembrandt. It is Eleanor’s fault if she is sometimes fought with her own
weapons.
The house stood in one of those shabby provisional-looking New York streets
that seem resignedly awaiting demolition. It was the kind of house that,
in its high days, must have had a bow-window with a bronze in it. The
bow-window had been replaced by a plumber’s _devanture_, and one might
conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx
tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next
aesthetic reaction.
Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to
a bare slit of a room. “And she must leave this in a month!” she whispered
across her knock.
I had prepared myself for the limp widow’s weed of a woman that one figures
in such a setting; and confronted abruptly with Mrs. Fontage’s white-haired
erectness I had the disconcerting sense that I was somehow in her presence
at my own solicitation. I instinctively charged Eleanor with this reversal
of the situation; but a moment later I saw it must be ascribed to a
something about Mrs. Fontage that precluded the possibility of her asking
any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic,
demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity
nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The
room was unconcealably poor: the little faded “relics,” the high-stocked
ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio,
grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the
wall-paper, served only to accentuate the contrast of a past evidently
diversified by foreign travel and the enjoyment of the arts. Even Mrs.
Fontage’s dress had the air of being a last expedient, the ultimate outcome
of a much-taxed ingenuity in darning and turning. One felt that all the
poor lady’s barriers were falling save that of her impregnable manner.
To this manner I found myself conveying my appreciation of being admitted
to a view of the Rembrandt.
Mrs. Fontage’s smile took my homage for granted. “It is always,” she
conceded, “a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters.” Her
slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.
“It’s _so_ interesting, dear Mrs. Fontage,” I heard Eleanor
exclaiming, “and my cousin will be able to tell you exactly--“ Eleanor, in
my presence, always admits that she knows nothing about art; but she gives
the impression that this is merely because she hasn’t had time to look into
the matter--and has had me to do it for her.
Mrs. Fontage seated herself without speaking, as though fearful that a
breath might disturb my communion with the masterpiece. I felt that she
thought Eleanor’s reassuring ejaculations ill-timed; and in this I was of
one mind with her; for the impossibility of telling her exactly what I
thought of her Rembrandt had become clear to me at a glance.
My cousin’s vivacities began to languish and the silence seemed to shape
itself into a receptacle for my verdict. I stepped back, affecting a more
distant scrutiny; and as I did so my eye caught Mrs. Fontage’s profile. Her
lids trembled slightly. I took refuge in the familiar expedient of asking
the history of the picture, and she waved me brightly to a seat.
This was indeed a topic on which she could dilate. The Rembrandt, it
appeared, had come into Mr. Fontage’s possession many years ago, while
the young couple were on their wedding-tour, and under circumstances so
romantic that she made no excuse for relating them in all their parenthetic
fulness. The picture belonged to an old Belgian Countess of redundant
quarterings, whom the extravagances of an ungovernable nephew had compelled
to part with her possessions (in the most private manner) about the time of
the Fontages’ arrival. By a really remarkable coincidence, it happened that
their courier (an exceptionally intelligent and superior man) was an old
servant of the Countess’s, and had thus been able to put them in the way of
securing the Rembrandt under the very nose of an English Duke, whose agent
had been sent to Brussels to negotiate for its purchase. Mrs. Fontage could
not recall the Duke’s name, but he was a great collector and had a famous
Highland castle, where somebody had been murdered, and which she herself
had visited (by moonlight) when she had travelled in Scotland as a girl.
The episode had in short been one of the most interesting “experiences” of
a tour almost chromo-lithographic in vivacity of impression; and they had
always meant to go back to Brussels for the sake of reliving so picturesque
a moment. Circumstances (of which the narrator’s surroundings declared the
nature) had persistently interfered with the projected return to Europe,
and the picture had grown doubly valuable as representing the high-water
mark of their artistic emotions. Mrs. Fontage’s moist eye caressed the
canvas. “There is only,” she added with a perceptible effort, “one slight
drawback: the picture is not signed. But for that the Countess, of course,
would have sold it to a museum. All the connoisseurs who have seen it
pronounce it an undoubted Rembrandt, in the artist’s best manner; but the
museums”--she arched her brows in smiling recognition of a well-known
weakness--“give the preference to signed examples--“
Mrs. Fontage’s words evoked so touching a vision of the young tourists of
fifty years ago, entrusting to an accomplished and versatile courier the
direction of their helpless zeal for art, that I lost sight for a moment
of the point at issue. The old Belgian Countess, the wealthy Duke with a
feudal castle in Scotland, Mrs. Fontage’s own maiden pilgrimage to Arthur’s
Seat and Holyrood, all the accessories of the naïf transaction, seemed
a part of that vanished Europe to which our young race carried its
indiscriminate ardors, its tender romantic credulity: the legendary
castellated Europe of keepsakes, brigands and old masters, that
compensated, by one such “experience” as Mrs. Fontage’s, for an after-life
of aesthetic privation.
I was restored to the present by Eleanor’s looking at her watch. The action
mutely conveyed that something was expected of me. I risked the temporizing
statement that the picture was very interesting; but Mrs. Fontage’s polite
assent revealed the poverty of the expedient. Eleanor’s impatience
overflowed.
“You would like my cousin to give you an idea of its value?” she suggested.
Mrs. Fontage grew more erect. “No one,” she corrected with great
gentleness, “can know its value quite as well as I, who live with it--“
We murmured our hasty concurrence.
“But it might be interesting to hear”--she addressed herself to me--“as a
mere matter of curiosity--what estimate would be put on it from the purely
commercial point of view--if such a term may be used in speaking of a work
of art.”