wanted to show off before a lot of ignoramuses like yourself. You
wanted--how’d I know what you wanted? It’s as if I’d never given you an
instruction or laid a charge on you! And the money--God! Where’d it go
to? Buying _this_? Nonsense--.” Mr. Raycie raised himself heavily on his
stick and fixed his angry eyes on his son. “Own up, Lewis; tell me they
got it out of you at cards. Professional gamblers the lot, I make no
doubt; your Ruskin and your Morris and your Rossiter. Make a business to
pick up young American greenhorns on their travels, I daresay.... No?
Not that, you say? Then--women?... God A’mighty, Lewis,” gasped Mr.
Raycie, tottering toward his son with outstretched stick, “I’m no
blue-nosed Puritan, sir, and I’d a damn sight rather you told me you’d
spent it on a woman, every penny of it, than let yourself be fleeced
like a simpleton, buying these things that look more like cuts out o’
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than Originals of the Old Masters for a
Gentleman’s Gallery.... Youth’s youth.... Gad, sir, I’ve been young
myself ... a fellow’s got to go through his apprenticeship.... Own up
now: women?”
“Oh, not women----”
“Not even!” Mr. Raycie groaned. “All in pictures, then? Well, say no
more to me now.... I’ll get home, I’ll get home....” He cast a last
apoplectic glance about the room. “The Raycie Gallery! That pack of
bones and mummers’ finery!... Why, let alone the rest, there’s not a
full-bodied female among ’em.... Do you know what those Madonnas of
yours are like, my son? Why, there ain’t one of ’em that don’t remind me
of a bad likeness of poor Treeshy Kent.... I should say you’d hired half
the sign-painters of Europe to do her portrait for you--if I could
imagine your wanting it.... No, sir! I don’t need your arm,” Mr. Raycie
snarled, heaving his great bulk painfully across the hall. He withered
Lewis with a last look from the doorstep. “And to buy _that_ you
overdrew your account?--No, I’ll drive home alone.”
VII
Mr. Raycie did not die till nearly a year later; but New York agreed it
was the affair of the pictures that had killed him.
The day after his first and only sight of them he sent for his lawyer,
and it became known that he had made a new will. Then he took to his bed
with a return of the gout, and grew so rapidly worse that it was thought
“only proper” to postpone the party Mrs. Raycie was to have given that
autumn to inaugurate the gallery. This enabled the family to pass over
in silence the question of the works of art themselves; but outside of
the Raycie house, where they were never mentioned, they formed, that
winter, a frequent and fruitful topic of discussion.
Only two persons besides Mr. Raycie were known to have seen them. One
was Mr. Donaldson Kent, who owed the privilege to the fact of having
once been to Italy; the other, Mr. Reedy, the agent, who had unpacked
the pictures. Mr. Reedy, beset by Raycie cousins and old family friends,
had replied with genuine humility: “Why, the truth is, I never was
taught to see any difference between one picture and another, except as
regards the size of them; and these struck me as smallish ... on the
small side, I would say....”
Mr. Kent was known to have unbosomed himself to Mr. Raycie with
considerable frankness--he went so far, it was rumoured, as to declare
that he had never seen any pictures in Italy like those brought back by
Lewis, and begged to doubt if they really came from there. But in public
he maintained that noncommittal attitude which passed for prudence, but
proceeded only from timidity; no one ever got anything from him but the
guarded statement: “The subjects are wholly inoffensive.”
It was believed that Mr. Raycie dared not consult the Huzzards. Young
John Huzzard had just brought home a Raphael; it would have been hard
not to avoid comparisons which would have been too galling. Neither to
them, nor to any one else, did Mr. Raycie ever again allude to the
Raycie Gallery. But when his will was opened it was found that he had
bequeathed the pictures to his son. The rest of his property was left
absolutely to his two daughters. The bulk of the estate was Mrs.
Raycie’s; but it was known that Mrs. Raycie had had her instructions,
and among them, perhaps, was the order to fade away in her turn after
six months of widowhood. When she had been laid beside her husband in
Trinity church-yard her will (made in the same week as Mr. Raycie’s, and
obviously at his dictation) was found to allow five thousand dollars a
year to Lewis during his life-time; the residue of the fortune, which
Mr. Raycie’s thrift and good management had made into one of the largest
in New York, was divided between the daughters. Of these, the one
promptly married a Kent and the other a Huzzard; and the latter, Sarah
Ann (who had never been Lewis’s favourite), was wont to say in later
years: “Oh, no, I never grudged my poor brother those funny old
pictures. You see, we have a Raphael.”
The house stood on the corner of Third Avenue and Tenth Street. It had
lately come to Lewis Raycie as his share in the property of a distant
cousin, who had made an “old New York will” under which all his kin
benefited in proportion to their consanguinity. The neighbourhood was
unfashionable, and the house in bad repair; but Mr. and Mrs. Lewis
Raycie, who, since their marriage, had been living in retirement at
Tarrytown, immediately moved into it.
Their arrival excited small attention. Within a year of his father’s
death, Lewis had married Treeshy Kent. The alliance had not been
encouraged by Mr. and Mrs. Kent, who went so far as to say that their
niece might have done better; but as that one of their sons who was
still unmarried had always shown a lively sympathy for Treeshy, they
yielded to the prudent thought that, after all, it was better than
having her entangle Bill.
The Lewis Raycies had been four years married, and during that time had
dropped out of the memory of New York as completely as if their exile
had covered half a century. Neither of them had ever cut a great figure
there. Treeshy had been nothing but the Kents’ Cinderella, and Lewis’s
ephemeral importance, as heir to the Raycie millions, had been effaced
by the painful episode which resulted in his being deprived of them.
So secluded was their way of living, and so much had it come to be a
habit, that when Lewis announced that he had inherited Uncle Ebenezer’s
house his wife hardly looked up from the baby-blanket she was
embroidering.
“Uncle Ebenezer’s house in New York?”
He drew a deep breath. “Now I shall be able to show the pictures.”
“Oh, Lewis--” She dropped the blanket. “Are we going to live there?”
“Certainly. But the house is so large that I shall turn the two corner
rooms on the ground floor into a gallery. They are very suitably
lighted. It was there that Cousin Ebenezer was laid out.”
“Oh, Lewis----”
If anything could have made Lewis Raycie believe in his own strength of
will it was his wife’s attitude. Merely to hear that unquestioning
murmur of submission was to feel something of his father’s tyrannous
strength arise in him; but with the wish to use it more humanely.
“You’ll like that, Treeshy? It’s been dull for you here, I know.”
She flushed up. “Dull? With _you_, darling? Besides, I like the
country. But I shall like Tenth Street too. Only--you said there were
repairs?”
He nodded sternly. “I shall borrow money to make them. If necessary--”
he lowered his voice--“I shall mortgage the pictures.”
He saw her eyes fill. “Oh, but it won’t be! There are so many ways still
in which I can economize.”
He laid his hand on hers and turned his profile toward her, because he
knew it was so much stronger than his full face. He did not feel sure
that she quite grasped his intention about the pictures; was not even
certain that he wished her to. He went in to New York every week now,
occupying himself mysteriously and importantly with plans,
specifications and other business transactions with long names; while
Treeshy, through the hot summer months, sat in Tarrytown and waited for
the baby.
A little girl was born at the end of the summer and christened Louisa;
and when she was a few weeks old the Lewis Raycies left the country for
New York.
“_Now!_” thought Lewis, as they bumped over the cobblestones of Tenth
Street in the direction of Cousin Ebenezer’s house.
The carriage stopped, he handed out his wife, the nurse followed with
the baby, and they all stood and looked up at the house-front.
“Oh, Lewis--” Treeshy gasped; and even little Louisa set up a
sympathetic wail.
Over the door--over Cousin Ebenezer’s respectable, conservative and
intensely private front-door--hung a large sign-board bearing, in gold
letters on a black ground, the inscription:
GALLERY OF CHRISTIAN ART
OPEN ON WEEK-DAYS FROM 2 TO 4
ADMISSION 25 CENTS. CHILDREN 10 CENTS.
Lewis saw his wife turn pale, and pressed her arm in his. “Believe me,
it’s the only way to make the pictures known. And they _must_ be made
known,” he said with a thrill of his old ardour.
“Yes, dear, of course. But ... to every one? Publicly?”
“If we showed them only to our friends, of what use would it be? Their
opinion is already formed.”
She sighed her acknowledgment. “But the ... the entrance fee....”
“If we can afford it later, the gallery will be free. But
meanwhile----”
“Oh, Lewis, I quite understand!” And clinging to him, the
still-protesting baby in her wake, she passed with a dauntless step
under the awful sign-board.
“At last I shall see the pictures properly lighted!” she exclaimed, and
turned in the hall to fling her arms about her husband.
“It’s all they need ... to be appreciated,” he answered, aglow with her
encouragement.
* * * * *
Since his withdrawal from the world it had been a part of Lewis’s system
never to read the daily papers. His wife eagerly conformed to his
example, and they lived in a little air-tight circle of aloofness, as if
the cottage at Tarrytown had been situated in another and happier
planet.
Lewis, nevertheless, the day after the opening of the Gallery of
Christian Art, deemed it his duty to derogate from this attitude, and
sallied forth secretly to buy the principal journals. When he re-entered
his house he went straight up to the nursery where he knew that, at that
hour, Treeshy would be giving the little girl her bath. But it was later
than he supposed. The rite was over, the baby lay asleep in its modest
cot, and the mother sat crouched by the fire, her face hidden in her
hands. Lewis instantly guessed that she too had seen the papers.
“Treeshy--you mustn’t ... consider this of any consequence ...,” he
stammered.
She lifted a tear-stained face. “Oh, my darling! I thought you never
read the papers.”
“Not usually. But I thought it my duty----”
“Yes; I see. But, as you say, what earthly consequence----?”
“None whatever; we must just be patient and persist.”
She hesitated, and then, her arms about him, her head on his breast:
“Only, dearest, I’ve been counting up again, ever so carefully; and even
if we give up fires everywhere but in the nursery, I’m afraid the wages
of the door-keeper and the guardian ... especially if the gallery’s open
to the public every day....”
“I’ve thought of that already, too; and I myself shall hereafter act as
door-keeper and guardian.”
He kept his eyes on hers as he spoke. “This is the test,” he thought.
Her face paled under its brown glow, and the eyes dilated in her effort
to check her tears. Then she said gaily: “That will be ... very
interesting, won’t it, Lewis? Hearing what the people say.... Because,
as they begin to know the pictures better, and to understand them, they
can’t fail to say very interesting things ... can they?” She turned and
caught up the sleeping Louisa. “Can they ... oh, you darling--darling?”
Lewis turned away too. Not another woman in New York would have been
capable of that. He could hear all the town echoing with this new
scandal of his showing the pictures himself--and she, so much more
sensitive to ridicule, so much less carried away by apostolic ardour,
how much louder must that mocking echo ring in her ears! But his pang
was only momentary. The one thought that possessed him for any length of
time was that of vindicating himself by making the pictures known; he
could no longer fix his attention on lesser matters. The derision of
illiterate journalists was not a thing to wince at; once let the
pictures be seen by educated and intelligent people, and they would
speak for themselves--especially if he were at hand to interpret them.
VIII
For a week or two a great many people came to the gallery; but, even
with Lewis as interpreter, the pictures failed to make themselves heard.
During the first days, indeed, owing to the unprecedented idea of
holding a paying exhibition in a private house, and to the mockery of
the newspapers, the Gallery of Christian Art was thronged with noisy
curiosity-seekers; once the astonished metropolitan police had to be
invited in to calm their comments and control their movements. But the
name of “Christian Art” soon chilled this class of sightseer, and before
long they were replaced by a dumb and respectable throng, who roamed
vacantly through the rooms and out again, grumbling that it wasn’t worth
the money. Then these too diminished; and once the tide had turned, the
ebb was rapid. Every day from two to four Lewis still sat shivering
among his treasures, or patiently measured the length of the deserted
gallery: as long as there was a chance of any one coming he would not
admit that he was beaten. For the next visitor might always be the one
who understood.
One snowy February day he had thus paced the rooms in unbroken solitude
for above an hour when carriage-wheels stopped at the door. He hastened
to open it, and in a great noise of silks his sister Sarah Anne Huzzard
entered.
Lewis felt for a moment as he used to under his father’s glance.
Marriage and millions had given the moon-faced Sarah something of the
Raycie awfulness; but her brother looked into her empty eyes, and his
own kept their level.
“Well, Lewis,” said Mrs. Huzzard with a simpering sternness, and caught
her breath.
“Well, Sarah Anne--I’m happy that you’ve come to take a look at my
pictures.”
“I’ve come to see you and your wife.” She gave another nervous gasp,
shook out her flounces, and added in a rush: “And to ask you how much
longer this ... this spectacle is to continue....”
“The exhibition?” Lewis smiled. She signed a flushed assent.
“Well, there has been a considerable falling-off lately in the number of
visitors----”
“Thank heaven!” she interjected.
“But as long as I feel that any one wishes to come ... I shall be here
... to open the door, as you see.”
She sent a shuddering glance about her. “Lewis--I wonder if you realize
...?”
“Oh, fully.”
“Then _why_ do you go on? Isn’t it enough--aren’t you satisfied?”
“With the effect they have produced?”
“With the effect _you_ have produced--on your family and on the whole of
New York. With the slur on poor Papa’s memory.”
“Papa left me the pictures, Sarah Anne.”
“Yes. But not to make yourself a mountebank about them.”
Lewis considered this impartially. “Are you sure? Perhaps, on the
contrary, he did it for that very reason.”
“Oh, don’t heap more insults on our father’s memory! Things are bad
enough without that. How your wife can allow it I can’t see. Do you
ever consider the humiliation to _her_?”
Lewis gave another dry smile. “She’s used to being humiliated. The Kents
accustomed her to that.”
Sarah Anne reddened. “I don’t know why I should stay to be spoken to in
this way. But I came with my husband’s approval.”
“Do you need that to come and see your brother?”
“I need it to--to make the offer I am about to make; and which he
authorizes.”
Lewis looked at her in surprise, and she purpled up to the lace ruffles
inside her satin bonnet.
“Have you come to make an offer for my collection?” he asked her,
humorously.
“You seem to take pleasure in insinuating preposterous things. But
anything is better than this public slight on our name.” Again she ran
a shuddering glance over the pictures. “John and I,” she announced, “are
prepared to double the allowance mother left you on condition that this
... this ends ... for good. That that horrible sign is taken down
tonight.”
Lewis seemed mildly to weigh the proposal. “Thank you very much, Sarah
Anne,” he said at length. “I’m touched ... touched and ... and surprised
... that you and John should have made this offer. But perhaps, before I
decline it, you will accept _mine_: simply to show you my pictures. When
once you’ve looked at them I think you’ll understand----”
Mrs. Huzzard drew back hastily, her air of majesty collapsing. “Look at
the pictures? Oh, thank you ... but I can see them very well from here.
And besides, I don’t pretend to be a judge....”
“Then come up and see Treeshy and the baby,” said Lewis quietly.
She stared at him, embarrassed. “Oh, thank you,” she stammered again;
and as she prepared to follow him: “Then it’s _no_, really no, Lewis? Do
consider, my dear! You say yourself that hardly any one comes. What harm
can there be in closing the place?”
“What--when tomorrow the man may come who understands?”
Mrs. Huzzard tossed her plumes despairingly and followed him in silence.
“What--Mary Adeline?” she exclaimed, pausing abruptly on the threshold
of the nursery. Treeshy, as usual, sat holding her baby by the fire; and
from a low seat opposite her rose a lady as richly furred and feathered
as Mrs. Huzzard, but with far less assurance to carry off her
furbelows. Mrs. Kent ran to Lewis and laid her plump cheek against his,
while Treeshy greeted Sarah Anne.
“I had no idea you were here, Mary Adeline,” Mrs. Huzzard murmured. It
was clear that she had not imparted her philanthropic project to her
sister, and was disturbed at the idea that Lewis might be about to do
so. “I just dropped in for a minute,” she continued, “to see that
darling little pet of an angel child--” and she enveloped the astonished
baby in her ample rustlings and flutterings.
“I’m very glad to see you here, Sarah Anne,” Mary Adeline answered with
simplicity.
“Ah, it’s not for want of wishing that I haven’t come before! Treeshy
knows that, I hope. But the cares of a household like mine....”
“Yes; and it’s been so difficult to get about in the bad weather,”
Treeshy suggested sympathetically.
Mrs. Huzzard lifted the Raycie eyebrows. “Has it really? With two pairs
of horses one hardly notices the weather.... Oh, the pretty, pretty,
_pretty_ baby!... Mary Adeline,” Sarah Anne continued, turning severely
to her sister, “I shall be happy to offer you a seat in my carriage if
you’re thinking of leaving.”
But Mary Adeline was a married woman too. She raised her mild head and
her glance crossed her sister’s quietly. “My own carriage is at the
door, thank you kindly, Sarah Anne,” she said; and the baffled Sarah
Anne withdrew on Lewis’s arm. But a moment later the old habit of
subordination reasserted itself. Mary Adeline’s gentle countenance grew
as timorous as a child’s, and she gathered up her cloak in haste.
“Perhaps I was too quick.... I’m sure she meant it kindly,” she
exclaimed, overtaking Lewis as he turned to come up the stairs; and with
a smile he stood watching his two sisters drive off together in the
Huzzard coach.
He returned to the nursery, where Treeshy was still crooning over her
daughter.
“Well, my dear,” he said, “what do you suppose Sarah Anne came for?”
And, in reply to her wondering gaze: “To buy me off from showing the
pictures!”
His wife’s indignation took just the form he could have wished. She
simply went on with her rich cooing laugh and hugged the baby tighter.
But Lewis felt the perverse desire to lay a still greater strain upon
her loyalty.
“Offered to double my allowance, she and John, if only I’ll take down
the sign!”
“No one shall touch the sign!” Treeshy flamed.
“Not till I do,” said her husband grimly.
She turned about and scanned him with anxious eyes. “Lewis ... _you_?”
“Oh, my dear ... they’re right.... It can’t go on forever....” He went
up to her, and put his arm about her and the child. “You’ve been braver
than an army of heroes; but it won’t do. The expenses have been a good
deal heavier than I was led to expect. And I ... I can’t raise a
mortgage on the pictures. Nobody will touch them.”
She met this quickly. “No; I know. That was what Mary Adeline came
about.”
The blood rushed angrily to Lewis’s temples. “Mary Adeline--how the
devil did _she_ hear of it?”
“Through Mr. Reedy, I suppose. But you must not be angry. She was
kindness itself: she doesn’t want you to close the gallery, Lewis ...
that is, not as long as you really continue to believe in it.... She and
Donald Kent will lend us enough to go on with for a year longer. That is
what she came to say.”
For the first time since the struggle had begun, Lewis Raycie’s throat
was choked with tears. His faithful Mary Adeline! He had a sudden vision
of her, stealing out of the house at High Point before daylight to carry
a basket of scraps to the poor Mrs. Edgar Poe who was dying of a decline
down the lane.... He laughed aloud in his joy.
“Dear old Mary Adeline! How magnificent of her! Enough to give me a
whole year more....” He pressed his wet cheek against his wife’s in a
long silence. “Well, dear,” he said at length, “it’s for you to say--do
we accept?”
He held her off, questioningly, at arm’s length, and her wan little
smile met his own and mingled with it.
“Of course we accept!”
IX
Of the Raycie family, which prevailed so powerfully in the New York of
the ’forties, only one of the name survived in my boyhood, half a
century later. Like so many of the descendants of the proud little
Colonial society, the Raycies had totally vanished, forgotten by
everyone but a few old ladies, one or two genealogists and the sexton of
Trinity Church, who kept the record of their graves.
The Raycie blood was of course still to be traced in various allied
families: Kents, Huzzards, Cosbys and many others, proud to claim
cousinship with a “Signer,” but already indifferent or incurious as to
the fate of his progeny. These old New Yorkers, who lived so well and
spent their money so liberally, vanished like a pinch of dust when they
disappeared from their pews and their dinner-tables.
If I happen to have been familiar with the name since my youth, it is
chiefly because its one survivor was a distant cousin of my mother’s,
whom she sometimes took me to see on days when she thought I was likely
to be good because I had been promised a treat for the morrow.
Old Miss Alethea Raycie lived in a house I had always heard spoken of as
“Cousin Ebenezer’s.” It had evidently, in its day, been an admired
specimen of domestic architecture; but was now regarded as the hideous
though venerable relic of a bygone age. Miss Raycie, being crippled by
rheumatism, sat above stairs in a large cold room, meagrely furnished
with beadwork tables, rosewood étagères and portraits of pale
sad-looking people in odd clothes. She herself was large and saturnine,
with a battlemented black lace cap, and so deaf that she seemed a
survival of forgotten days, a Rosetta Stone to which the clue was lost.
Even to my mother, nursed in that vanished tradition, and knowing
instinctively to whom Miss Raycie alluded when she spoke of Mary
Adeline, Sarah Anne or Uncle Doctor, intercourse with her was difficult
and languishing, and my juvenile interruptions were oftener encouraged
than reproved.
In the course of one of these visits my eye, listlessly roaming, singled
out among the pallid portraits a three-crayon drawing of a little girl
with a large forehead and dark eyes, dressed in a plaid frock and
embroidered pantalettes, and sitting on a grass-bank. I pulled my
mother’s sleeve to ask who she was, and my mother answered: “Ah, that
was poor little Louisa Raycie, who died of a decline. How old was little
Louisa when she died, Cousin Alethea?”
To batter this simple question into Cousin Alethea’s brain was the
affair of ten laborious minutes; and when the job was done, and Miss
Raycie, with an air of mysterious displeasure, had dropped a deep
“Eleven,” my mother was too exhausted to continue. So she turned to me
to add, with one of the private smiles we kept for each other: “It was
the poor child who would have inherited the Raycie Gallery.” But to a
little boy of my age this item of information lacked interest, nor did I
understand my mother’s surreptitious amusement.
This far-off scene suddenly came back to me last year, when, on one of
my infrequent visits to New York, I went to dine with my old friend,
the banker, John Selwyn, and came to an astonished stand before the
mantelpiece in his new library.
“Hal_lo_!” I said, looking up at the picture above the chimney.