affected the air of modesty which people think it proper to assume when
their possessions are admired. “The Macrino d’Alba? Y--yes ... it was
the only thing I managed to capture out of the Raycie collection.”
“The only thing? Well----”
“Ah, but you should have seen the Mantegna; _and_ the Giotto; _and_ the
Piero della Francesca--hang it, one of the most beautiful Piero della
Francescas in the world.... A girl in profile, with her hair in a pearl
net, against a background of columbines; _that_ went back to
Europe--the National Gallery, I believe. And the Carpaccio, the most
exquisite little St. George ... that went to California ... _Lord!_” He
sat down with the sigh of a hungry man turned away from a groaning
board. “Well, it nearly broke me buying _this_!” he murmured, as if at
least that fact were some consolation.
I was turning over my early memories in quest of a clue to what he spoke
of as the Raycie collection, in a tone which implied that he was
alluding to objects familiar to all art-lovers.
Suddenly: “They weren’t poor little Louisa’s pictures, by any chance?” I
asked, remembering my mother’s cryptic smile.
Selwyn looked at me perplexedly. “Who the deuce is poor little Louisa?”
And, without waiting for my answer, he went on: “They were that fool
Netta Cosby’s until a year ago--and she never even knew it.”
We looked at each other interrogatively, my friend perplexed at my
ignorance, and I now absorbed in trying to run down the genealogy of
Netta Cosby. I did so finally. “Netta Cosby--you don’t mean Netta Kent,
the one who married Jim Cosby?”
“That’s it. They were cousins of the Raycies’, and she inherited the
pictures.”
I continued to ponder. “I wanted awfully to marry her, the year I left
Harvard,” I said presently, more to myself than to my hearer.
“Well, if you had you’d have annexed a prize fool; _and_ one of the most
beautiful collections of Italian Primitives in the world.”
“In the world?”
“Well--you wait till you see them; if you haven’t already. And I seem to
make out that you haven’t--that you can’t have. How long have you been
in Japan? Four years? I thought so. Well, it was only last winter that
Netta found out.”
“Found out what?”
“What there was in old Alethea Raycie’s attic. You must remember the old
Miss Raycie who lived in that hideous house in Tenth Street when we were
children. She was a cousin of your mother’s, wasn’t she? Well, the old
fool lived there for nearly half a century, with five millions’ worth of
pictures shut up in the attic over her head. It seems they’d been there
ever since the death of a poor young Raycie who collected them in Italy
years and years ago. I don’t know much about the story; I never was
strong on genealogy, and the Raycies have always been rather dim to me.
They were everybody’s cousins, of course; but as far as one can make
out that seems to have been their principal if not their only function.
Oh--and I suppose the Raycie Building was called after them; only _they_
didn’t build it!
“But there was this one young fellow--I wish I could find out more about
him. All that Netta seems to know (or to care, for that matter) is that
when he was very young--barely out of college--he was sent to Italy by
his father to buy Old Masters--in the ’forties, it must have been--and
came back with this extraordinary, this unbelievable collection ... a
boy of that age!... and was disinherited by the old gentleman for
bringing home such rubbish. The young fellow and his wife died ever so
many years ago, both of them. It seems he was so laughed at for buying
such pictures that they went away and lived like hermits in the depths
of the country. There were some funny spectral portraits of them that
old Alethea had up in her bedroom. Netta showed me one of them the last
time I went to see her: a pathetic drawing of the only child, an anæmic
little girl with a big forehead. Jove, but that must have been your
little Louisa!”
I nodded. “In a plaid frock and embroidered pantalettes?”
“Yes, something of the sort. Well, when Louisa and her parents died, I
suppose the pictures went to old Miss Raycie. At any rate, at some time
or other--and it must have been longer ago than you or I can
remember--the old lady inherited them with the Tenth Street house; and
when _she_ died, three or four years ago, her relations found she’d
never even been upstairs to look at them.”
“Well----?”
“Well, she died intestate, and Netta Kent--Netta Cosby--turned out to
be the next of kin. There wasn’t much to be got out of the estate (or so
they thought) and, as the Cosbys are always hard up, the house in Tenth
Street had to be sold, and the pictures were very nearly sent off to the
auction room with all the rest of the stuff. But nobody supposed they
would bring anything, and the auctioneer said that if you tried to sell
pictures with carpets and bedding and kitchen furniture it always
depreciated the whole thing; and so, as the Cosbys had some bare walls
to cover, they sent for the lot--there were about thirty--and decided to
have them cleaned and hang them up. ‘After all,’ Netta said, ‘as well as
I can make out through the cobwebs, some of them look like rather jolly
copies of early Italian things.’ But as she was short of cash she
decided to clean them at home instead of sending them to an expert; and
one day, while she was operating on this very one before you, with her
sleeves rolled up, the man called who always _does_ call on such
occasions; the man who knows. In the given case, it was a quiet fellow
connected with the Louvre, who’d brought her a letter from Paris, and
whom she’d invited to one of her stupid dinners. He was announced, and
she thought it would be a joke to let him see what she was doing; she
has pretty arms, you may remember. So he was asked into the dining-room,
where he found her with a pail of hot water and soap-suds, and _this_
laid out on the table; and the first thing he did was to grab her pretty
arm so tight that it was black and blue, while he shouted out: ‘God in
heaven! Not _hot_ water!’”
My friend leaned back with a sigh of mingled resentment and
satisfaction, and we sat silently looking up at the lovely “Adoration”
above the mantelpiece.
“That’s how I got it a little cheaper--most of the old varnish was gone
for good. But luckily for her it was the first picture she had attacked;
and as for the others--you must see them, that’s all I can say.... Wait;
I’ve got the catalogue somewhere about....”
He began to rummage for it, and I asked, remembering how nearly I had
married Netta Kent: “Do you mean to say she didn’t keep a single one of
them?”
“Oh, yes--in the shape of pearls and Rolls-Royces. And you’ve seen their
new house in Fifth Avenue?” He ended with a grin of irony: “The best of
the joke is that Jim was just thinking of divorcing her when the
pictures were discovered.”
“Poor little Louisa!” I sighed.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's False Dawn, by Edith Wharton and E. C. Caswell