aloof in the dining-room, seemed not to see his fellow-traveller. The
truth was that Lewis was dying for a little conversation. His
astonishing experiences were so tightly packed in him (with no outlet
save the meagre trickle of his nightly diary) that he felt they would
soon melt into the vague blur of other people’s travels unless he could
give them fresh reality by talking them over. And the stranger with the
deep-blue eyes that matched his coat, the scarred cheek and eloquent
lip, seemed to Lewis a worthy listener. The Englishman appeared to think
otherwise. He preserved an air of moody abstraction, which Lewis’s
vanity imagined him to have put on as the gods becloud themselves for
their secret errands; and the curtness of his goodnight was (Lewis
flattered himself) surpassed only by the young New Yorker’s.
But today all was different. The stranger advanced affably, raised his
hat from his tossed statue-like hair, and enquired with a smile: “Are
you by any chance interested in the forms of cirrous clouds?”
His voice was as sweet as his smile, and the two were reinforced by a
glance so winning that it made the odd question seem not only pertinent
but natural. Lewis, though surprised, was not disconcerted. He merely
coloured with the unwonted sense of his ignorance, and replied
ingenuously: “I believe, sir, I am interested in everything.”
“A noble answer!” cried the other, and held out his hand.
“But I must add,” Lewis continued with courageous honesty, “that I have
never as yet had occasion to occupy myself particularly with the forms
of cirrous clouds.”
His companion looked at him merrily. “That,” said he, “is no reason why
you shouldn’t begin to do so now!” To which Lewis as merrily agreed.
“For in order to be interested in things,” the other continued more
gravely, “it is only necessary to see them; and I believe I am not wrong
in saying that you are one of the privileged beings to whom the seeing
eye has been given.”
Lewis blushed his agreement, and his interlocutor continued: “You are
one of those who have been on the road to Damascus.”
“On the road? I’ve been to the place itself!” the wanderer exclaimed,
bursting with the particulars of his travels; and then blushed more
deeply at the perception that the other’s use of the name had of course
been figurative.
The young Englishman’s face lit up. “You’ve been to Damascus--literally
been there yourself? But that may be almost as interesting, in its quite
different way, as the formation of clouds or lichens. For the present,”
he continued with a gesture toward the mountain, “I must devote myself
to the extremely inadequate rendering of some of these delicate
_aiguilles_; a bit of drudgery not likely to interest you in the face of
so sublime a scene. But perhaps this evening--if, as I think, we are
staying in the same inn--you will give me a few minutes of your society,
and tell me something of your travels. My father,” he added with his
engaging smile, “has had packed with my paint-brushes a few bottles of a
wholly trustworthy Madeira; and if you will favour me with your company
at dinner....”
He signed to his servant to undo the sketching materials, spread his
cloak on the rock, and was already lost in his task as Lewis descended
to the carriage.
* * * * *
The Madeira proved as trustworthy as his host had promised. Perhaps it
was its exceptional quality which threw such a golden lustre over the
dinner; unless it were rather the conversation of the blue-eyed
Englishman which made Lewis Raycie, always a small drinker, feel that in
his company every drop was nectar.
When Lewis joined his host it had been with the secret hope of at last
being able to talk; but when the evening was over (and they kept it up
to the small hours) he perceived that he had chiefly listened. Yet there
had been no sense of suppression, of thwarted volubility; he had been
given all the openings he wanted. Only, whenever he produced a little
fact it was instantly overflowed by the other’s imagination till it
burned like a dull pebble tossed into a rushing stream. For whatever
Lewis said was seen by his companion from a new angle, and suggested a
new train of thought; each commonplace item of experience became a
many-faceted crystal flashing with unexpected fires. The young
Englishman’s mind moved in a world of associations and references far
more richly peopled than Lewis’s; but his eager communicativeness, his
directness of speech and manner, instantly opened its gates to the
simpler youth. It was certainly not the Madeira which sped the hours
and flooded them with magic; but the magic gave the Madeira--excellent,
and reputed of its kind, as Lewis afterward learned--a taste no other
vintage was to have for him.
“Oh, but we must meet again in Italy--there are many things there that I
could perhaps help you to see,” the young Englishman declared as they
swore eternal friendship on the stairs of the sleeping inn.
V
It was in a tiny Venetian church, no more than a chapel, that Lewis
Raycie’s eyes had been unsealed--in a dull-looking little church not
even mentioned in the guide-books. But for his chance encounter with the
young Englishman in the shadow of Mont Blanc, Lewis would never have
heard of the place; but then what else that was worth knowing would he
ever have heard of, he wondered?
He had stood a long time looking at the frescoes, put off at first--he
could admit it now--by a certain stiffness in the attitudes of the
people, by the childish elaboration of their dress (so different from
the noble draperies which Sir Joshua’s Discourses on Art had taught him
to admire in the great painters), and by the innocent inexpressive look
in their young faces--for even the gray-beards seemed young. And then
suddenly his gaze had lit on one of these faces in particular: that of a
girl with round cheeks, high cheek-bones and widely set eyes under an
intricate head-dress of pearl-woven braids. Why, it was Treeshy--Treeshy
Kent to the life! And so far from being thought “plain,” the young lady
was no other than the peerless princess about whom the tale revolved.
And what a fairy-land she lived in--full of lithe youths and round-faced
pouting maidens, rosy old men and burnished blackamoors, pretty birds
and cats and nibbling rabbits--and all involved and enclosed in golden
balustrades, in colonnades of pink and blue, laurel-garlands festooned
from ivory balconies, and domes and minarets against summer seas!
Lewis’s imagination lost itself in the scene; he forgot to regret the
noble draperies, the exalted sentiments, the fuliginous backgrounds, of
the artists he had come to Italy to admire--forgot Sassoferrato, Guido
Reni, Carlo Dolce, Lo Spagnoletto, the Carracci, and even the
Transfiguration of Raphael, though he knew it to be the greatest picture
in the world.
After that he had seen almost everything else that Italian art had to
offer; had been to Florence, Naples, Rome; to Bologna to study the
Eclectic School, to Parma to examine the Correggios and the Giulio
Romanos. But that first vision had laid a magic seed between his lips;
the seed that makes you hear what the birds say and the grasses whisper.
Even if his English friend had not continued at his side, pointing out,
explaining, inspiring, Lewis Raycie flattered himself that the round
face of the little Saint Ursula would have led him safely and
confidently past all her rivals. She had become his touchstone, his
star: how insipid seemed to him all the sheep-faced Virgins draped in
red and blue paint after he had looked into her wondering girlish eyes
and traced the elaborate pattern of her brocades! He could remember now,
quite distinctly, the day when he had given up even Beatrice Cenci ...
and as for that fat naked Magdalen of Carlo Dolce’s, lolling over the
book she was not reading, and ogling the spectator in the good old way
... faugh! Saint Ursula did not need to rescue him from _her_....
His eyes had been opened to a new world of art. And this world it was
his mission to reveal to others--he, the insignificant and ignorant
Lewis Raycie, as “but for the grace of God,” and that chance encounter
on Mont Blanc, he might have gone on being to the end! He shuddered to
think of the army of Neapolitan beggar-boys, bituminous monks, whirling
prophets, languishing Madonnas and pink-rumped _amorini_ who might have
been travelling home with him in the hold of the fast new steam-packet.
His excitement had something of the apostle’s ecstasy. He was not only,
in a few hours, to embrace Treeshy, and be reunited to his honoured
parents; he was also to go forth and preach the new gospel to them that
sat in the darkness of Salvator Rosa and Lo Spagnoletto....
* * * * *
The first thing that struck Lewis was the smallness of the house on the
Sound, and the largeness of Mr. Raycie.
He had expected to receive the opposite impression. In his recollection
the varnished Tuscan villa had retained something of its impressiveness,
even when compared to its supposed originals. Perhaps the very contrast
between their draughty distances and naked floors, and the expensive
carpets and bright fires of High Point, magnified his memory of the
latter--there were moments when the thought of its groaning board
certainly added to the effect. But the image of Mr. Raycie had meanwhile
dwindled. Everything about him, as his son looked back, seemed narrow,
juvenile, almost childish. His bluster about Edgar Poe, for
instance--true poet still to Lewis, though he had since heard richer
notes; his fussy tyranny of his womenkind; his unconscious but total
ignorance of most of the things, books, people, ideas, that now filled
his son’s mind; above all, the arrogance and incompetence of his
artistic judgments. Beyond a narrow range of reading--mostly, Lewis
suspected, culled in drowsy after-dinner snatches from Knight’s
“Half-hours with the Best Authors”--Mr. Raycie made no pretence to
book-learning; left _that_, as he handsomely said, “to the professors.”
But on matters of art he was dogmatic and explicit, prepared to justify
his opinions by the citing of eminent authorities and of market-prices,
and quite clear, as his farewell talk with his son had shown, as to
which Old Masters should be privileged to figure in the Raycie
collection.
The young man felt no impatience of these judgments. America was a long
way from Europe, and it was many years since Mr. Raycie had travelled.
He could hardly be blamed for not knowing that the things he admired
were no longer admirable, still less for not knowing why. The pictures
before which Lewis had knelt in spirit had been virtually undiscovered,
even by art-students and critics, in his father’s youth. How was an
American gentleman, filled with his own self-importance, and paying
his courier the highest salary to show him the accredited
“Masterpieces”--how was he to guess that whenever he stood rapt before a
Sassoferrato or a Carlo Dolce one of those unknown treasures lurked near
by under dust and cobwebs?
No; Lewis felt only tolerance and understanding. Such a view was not one
to magnify the paternal image; but when the young man entered the study
where Mr. Raycie sat immobilized by gout, the swathed leg stretched
along his sofa seemed only another reason for indulgence....
Perhaps, Lewis thought afterward, it was his father’s prone position,
the way his great bulk billowed over the sofa, and the lame leg reached
out like a mountain-ridge, that made him suddenly seem to fill the room;
or else the sound of his voice booming irritably across the threshold,
and scattering Mrs. Raycie and the girls with a fierce: “And now,
ladies, if the hugging and kissing are over, I should be glad of a
moment with my son.” But it was odd that, after mother and daughters had
withdrawn with all their hoops and flounces, the study seemed to grow
even smaller, and Lewis himself to feel more like a David without the
pebble.
“Well, my boy,” his father cried, crimson and puffing, “here you are at
home again, with many adventures to relate, no doubt; and a few
masterpieces to show me, as I gather from the drafts on my exchequer.”
“Oh, as to the masterpieces, sir, certainly,” Lewis simpered, wondering
why his voice sounded so fluty, and his smile was produced with such a
conscious muscular effort.
“Good--good,” Mr. Raycie approved, waving a violet hand which seemed to
be ripening for a bandage. “Reedy carried out my orders, I presume? Saw
to it that the paintings were deposited with the bulk of your luggage in
Canal Street?”
“Oh, yes, sir; Mr. Reedy was on the dock with precise instructions. You
know he always carries out your orders,” Lewis ventured with a faint
irony.
Mr. Raycie stared. “Mr. Reedy,” he said, “does what I tell him, if
that’s what you mean; otherwise he would hardly have been in my employ
for over thirty years.”
Lewis was silent, and his father examined him critically. “You appear to
have filled out; your health is satisfactory? Well ... well.... Mr.
Robert Huzzard and his daughters are dining here this evening, by the
way, and will no doubt be expecting to see the latest French novelties
in stocks and waistcoats. Malvina has become a very elegant figure, your
sisters tell me.” Mr. Raycie chuckled, and Lewis thought: “I _knew_ it
was the oldest Huzzard girl!” while a slight chill ran down his spine.
“As to the pictures,” Mr. Raycie pursued with growing animation, “I am
laid low, as you see, by this cursèd affliction, and till the doctors
get me up again, here must I lie and try to imagine how your treasures
will look in the new gallery. And meanwhile, my dear boy, I need hardly
say that no one is to be admitted to see them till they have been
inspected by me and suitably hung. Reedy shall begin unpacking at once;
and when we move to town next month Mrs. Raycie, God willing, shall give
the handsomest evening party New York has yet seen, to show my son’s
collection, and perhaps ... eh, well?... to celebrate another
interesting event in his history.”
Lewis met this with a faint but respectful gurgle, and before his
blurred eyes rose the wistful face of Treeshy Kent.
“Ah, well, I shall see her tomorrow,” he thought, taking heart again as
soon as he was out of his father’s presence.
VI
Mr. Raycie stood silent for a long time after making the round of the
room in the Canal Street house where the unpacked pictures had been set
out.
He had driven to town alone with Lewis, sternly rebuffing his daughters’
timid hints, and Mrs. Raycie’s mute but visible yearning to accompany
him. Though the gout was over he was still weak and irritable, and Mrs.
Raycie, fluttered at the thought of “crossing him,” had swept the girls
away at his first frown.
Lewis’s hopes rose as he followed his parent’s limping progress. The
pictures, though standing on chairs and tables, and set clumsily askew
to catch the light, bloomed out of the half-dusk of the empty house
with a new and persuasive beauty. Ah, how right he had been--how
inevitable that his father should own it!
Mr. Raycie halted in the middle of the room. He was still silent, and
his face, so quick to frown and glare, wore the calm, almost
expressionless look known to Lewis as the mask of inward perplexity.
“Oh, of course it will take a little time,” the son thought, tingling
with the eagerness of youth.
At last, Mr. Raycie woke the echoes by clearing his throat; but the
voice which issued from it was as inexpressive as his face. “It is
singular,” he said, “how little the best copies of the Old Masters
resemble the originals. For these _are_ Originals?” he questioned,
suddenly swinging about on Lewis.
“Oh, absolutely, sir! Besides--” The young man was about to add: “No
one would ever have taken the trouble to copy them”--but hastily checked
himself.
“Besides----?”
“I meant, I had the most competent advice obtainable.”
“So I assume; since it was the express condition on which I authorized
your purchases.”
Lewis felt himself shrinking and his father expanding; but he sent a
glance along the wall, and beauty shed her reviving beam on him.
Mr. Raycie’s brows projected ominously; but his face remained smooth and
dubious. Once more he cast a slow glance about him.
“Let us,” he said pleasantly, “begin with the Raphael.” And it was
evident that he did not know which way to turn.
“Oh, sir, a Raphael nowadays--I warned you it would be far beyond my
budget.”
Mr. Raycie’s face fell slightly. “I had hoped nevertheless ... for an
inferior specimen....” Then, with an effort: “The Sassoferrato, then.”
Lewis felt more at his ease; he even ventured a respectful smile.
“Sassoferrato is _all_ inferior, isn’t he? The fact is, he no longer
stands ... quite as he used to....”
Mr. Raycie stood motionless: his eyes were vacuously fixed on the
nearest picture.
“Sassoferrato ... no longer ...?”
“Well, sir, _no_; not for a collection of this quality.”
Lewis saw that he had at last struck the right note. Something large and
uncomfortable appeared to struggle in Mr. Raycie’s throat; then he gave
a cough which might almost have been said to cast out Sassoferrato.
There was another pause before he pointed with his stick to a small
picture representing a snub-nosed young woman with a high forehead and
jewelled coif, against a background of delicately interwoven columbines.
“Is _that_,” he questioned, “your Carlo Dolce? The style is much the
same, I see; but it seems to me lacking in his peculiar sentiment.”
“Oh, but it’s not a Carlo Dolce: it’s a Piero della Francesca, sir!”
burst in triumph from the trembling Lewis.
His father sternly faced him. “It’s a _copy_, you mean? I thought so!”
“No, no; not a copy; it’s by a great painter ... a much greater....”
Mr. Raycie had reddened sharply at his mistake. To conceal his natural
annoyance he assumed a still more silken manner. “In that case,” he
said, “I think I should like to see the inferior painters first. Where
_is_ the Carlo Dolce?”
“There _is_ no Carlo Dolce,” said Lewis, white to the lips.
* * * * *
The young man’s next distinct recollection was of standing, he knew not
how long afterward, before the armchair in which his father had sunk
down, almost as white and shaken as himself.
“This,” stammered Mr. Raycie, “this is going to bring back my gout....”
But when Lewis entreated: “Oh, sir, do let us drive back quietly to the
country, and give me a chance later to explain ... to put my case” ...
the old gentleman had struck through the pleading with a furious wave of
his stick.
“Explain later? Put your case later? It’s just what I insist upon your
doing here and now!” And Mr. Raycie added hoarsely, and as if in actual
physical anguish: “I understand that young John Huzzard returned from
Rome last week with a Raphael.”
After that, Lewis heard himself--as if with the icy detachment of a
spectator--marshalling his arguments, pleading the cause he hoped his
pictures would have pleaded for him, dethroning the old Powers and
Principalities, and setting up these new names in their place. It was
first of all the names that stuck in Mr. Raycie’s throat: after spending
a life-time in committing to memory the correct pronunciation of words
like Lo Spagnoletto and Giulio Romano, it was bad enough, his wrathful
eyes seemed to say, to have to begin a new set of verbal gymnastics
before you could be sure of saying to a friend with careless accuracy:
“And _this_ is my Giotto da Bondone.”
But that was only the first shock, soon forgotten in the rush of greater
tribulation. For one might conceivably learn how to pronounce Giotto da
Bondone, and even enjoy doing so, provided the friend in question
recognized the name and bowed to its authority. But to have your effort
received by a blank stare, and the playful request: “You’ll have to say
that over again, please”--to know that, in going the round of the
gallery (the Raycie Gallery!) the same stare and the same request were
likely to be repeated before each picture; the bitterness of this was so
great that Mr. Raycie, without exaggeration, might have likened his case
to that of Agag.
“God! God! God! Carpatcher, you say this other fellow’s called? Kept
him back till the last because it’s the gem of the collection, did you?
Carpatcher--well, he’d have done better to stick to his trade. Something
to do with those new European steam-cars, I suppose, eh?” Mr. Raycie was
so incensed that his irony was less subtle than usual. “And Angelico you
say did that kind of Noah’s Ark soldier in pink armour on gold-leaf?
Well, _there_ I’ve caught you tripping, my boy. Not Angelic_o_,
Angelic_a_; Angelica Kauffman was a lady. And the damned swindler who
foisted that barbarous daub on you as a picture of hers deserves to be
drawn and quartered--and shall be, sir, by God, if the law can reach
him! He shall disgorge every penny he’s rooked you out of, or my name’s
not Halston Raycie! A bargain ... you say the thing was a _bargain_?
Why, the price of a clean postage stamp would be too dear for it!
God--my son; do you realize you had a _trust_ to carry out?”
“Yes, sir, yes; and it’s just because--”
“You might have written; you might at least have placed your views
before me....”
How could Lewis say: “If I had, I knew you’d have refused to let me buy
the pictures?” He could only stammer: “I _did_ allude to the revolution
in taste ... new names coming up ... you may remember....”
“Revolution! New names! Who says so? I had a letter last week from the
London dealers to whom I especially recommended you, telling me that an
undoubted Guido Reni was coming into the market this summer.”
“Oh, the dealers--_they_ don’t know!”
“The dealers ... don’t?... Who does ... except yourself?” Mr. Raycie
pronounced in a white sneer.
Lewis, as white, still held his ground. “I wrote you, sir, about my
friends; in Italy, and afterward in England.”
“Well, God damn it, I never heard of one of _their_ names before,
either; no more’n of these painters of yours here. I supplied you with
the names of all the advisers you needed, and all the painters, too; I
all but made the collection for you myself, before you started.... I was
explicit enough, in all conscience, wasn’t I?”
Lewis smiled faintly. “That’s what I hoped the pictures would be....”
“What? Be what? What’d you mean?”
“Be explicit.... Speak for themselves ... make you see that their
painters are already superseding some of the better-known....”
Mr. Raycie gave an awful laugh. “They are, are they? In whose
estimation? Your friends’, I suppose. What’s the name, again, of that
fellow you met in Italy, who picked ’em out for you?”
“Ruskin--John Ruskin,” said Lewis.
Mr. Raycie’s laugh, prolonged, gathered up into itself a fresh shower of
expletives. “Ruskin--Ruskin--just plain John Ruskin, eh? And who _is_
this great John Ruskin, who sets God A’mighty right in his judgments?
Who’d you say John Ruskin’s father was, now?”
“A respected wine-merchant in London, sir.”
Mr. Raycie ceased to laugh: he looked at his son with an expression of
unutterable disgust.
“Retail?”
“I ... believe so....”
“Faugh!” said Mr. Raycie.
“It wasn’t only Ruskin, father.... I told you of those other friends in
London, whom I met on the way home. They inspected the pictures, and
all of them agreed that ... that the collection would some day be very
valuable.”
“_Some day_--did they give you a date ... the month and the year? Ah,
those other friends; yes. You said there was a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Hunt
and a Mr. Rossiter, was it? Well, I never heard of any of those names,
either--except perhaps in a trades’ directory.”
“It’s not Rossiter, father: Dante Rossetti.”
“Excuse me: Rossetti. And what does Mr. Dante Rossetti’s father do? Sell
macaroni, I presume?”
Lewis was silent, and Mr. Raycie went on, speaking now with a deadly
steadiness: “The friends I sent you to were judges of art, sir; men who
know what a picture’s worth; not one of ’em but could pick out a
genuine Raphael. Couldn’t you find ’em when you got to England? Or
hadn’t they the time to spare for you? You’d better not,” Mr. Raycie
added, “tell me _that_, for I know how they’d have received your
father’s son.”
“Oh, most kindly ... they did indeed, sir....”