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Title: False Dawn (The 'Forties)

Author: Edith Wharton

Illustrator: Edward C. Caswell

Release date: February 2, 2020 [eBook #61297]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, MWS and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
        produced from images generously made available by The
        Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FALSE DAWN (THE 'FORTIES) ***




Produced by Chuck Greif, MWS and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









                             OLD NEW YORK

                              FALSE DAWN

                           (_The ’Forties_)




                           By EDITH WHARTON


                           OLD NEW YORK

                              FALSE DAWN
                              THE OLD MAID
                              THE SPARK
                              NEW YEAR’S DAY

                           THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

                           THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

                           SUMMER

                           THE REEF

                           THE MARNE

                           FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING




                             OLD NEW YORK

                              FALSE DAWN

                           (_The ’Forties_)

                                  BY

                             EDITH WHARTON

                AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.

                     DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

                     NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV

                          COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY

                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY


          _Copyright, 1923, by The Curtis Publishing Company_

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                              FALSE DAWN

                           (_The ’Forties_)




                                PART I




                              FALSE DAWN

                           (_The ’Forties_)




I


Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large
strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of
pale yellow cup on the verandah table: an old Georgian bowl, with
complex reflections on polygonal flanks, engraved with the Raycie arms
between lions’ heads. Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing
hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they
did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose
verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High
Point.

The strawberries came from Mr. Raycie’s kitchen garden; the Georgian
bowl came from his great-grandfather (father of the Signer); the
verandah was that of his country-house, which stood on a height above
the Sound, at a convenient driving distance from his town house in Canal
Street.

“Another glass, Commodore,” said Mr. Raycie, shaking out a cambric
handkerchief the size of a table-cloth, and applying a corner of it to
his steaming brow.

Mr. Jameson Ledgely smiled and took another glass. He was known as “the
Commodore” among his intimates because of having been in the Navy in his
youth, and having taken part, as a midshipman under Admiral Porter, in
the war of 1812. This jolly sunburnt bachelor, whose face resembled
that of one of the bronze idols he might have brought back with him, had
kept his naval air, though long retired from the service; and his white
duck trousers, his gold-braided cap and shining teeth, still made him
look as if he might be in command of a frigate. Instead of that, he had
just sailed over a party of friends from his own place on the Long
Island shore; and his trim white sloop was now lying in the bay below
the point.

The Halston Raycie house overlooked a lawn sloping to the Sound. The
lawn was Mr. Raycie’s pride: it was mown with a scythe once a fortnight,
and rolled in the spring by an old white horse specially shod for the
purpose. Below the verandah the turf was broken by three round beds of
rose-geranium, heliotrope and Bengal roses, which Mrs. Raycie tended in
gauntlet gloves, under a small hinged sunshade that folded back on its
carved ivory handle. The house, remodelled and enlarged by Mr. Raycie on
his marriage, had played a part in the Revolutionary war as the
settler’s cottage where Benedict Arnold had had his headquarters. A
contemporary print of it hung in Mr. Raycie’s study; but no one could
have detected the humble outline of the old house in the majestic
stone-coloured dwelling built of tongued-and-grooved boards, with an
angle tower, tall narrow windows, and a verandah on chamfered posts,
that figured so confidently as a “Tuscan Villa” in Downing’s “Landscape
Gardening in America.” There was the same difference between the rude
lithograph of the earlier house and the fine steel engraving of its
successor (with a “specimen” weeping beech on the lawn) as between the
buildings themselves. Mr. Raycie had reason to think well of his
architect.

He thought well of most things related to himself by ties of blood or
interest. No one had ever been quite sure that he made Mrs. Raycie
happy, but he was known to have the highest opinion of her. So it was
with his daughters, Sarah Anne and Mary Adeline, fresher replicas of the
lymphatic Mrs. Raycie; no one would have sworn that they were quite at
ease with their genial parent, yet every one knew how loud he was in
their praises. But the most remarkable object within the range of Mr.
Raycie’s self-approval was his son Lewis. And yet, as Jameson Ledgely,
who was given to speaking his mind, had once observed, you wouldn’t have
supposed young Lewis was exactly the kind of craft Halston would have
turned out if he’d had the designing of his son and heir.

Mr. Raycie was a monumental man. His extent in height, width and
thickness was so nearly the same that whichever way he was turned one
had an almost equally broad view of him; and every inch of that mighty
circumference was so exquisitely cared for that to a farmer’s eye he
might have suggested a great agricultural estate of which not an acre is
untilled. Even his baldness, which was in proportion to the rest, looked
as if it received a special daily polish; and on a hot day his whole
person was like some wonderful example of the costliest irrigation.
There was so much of him, and he had so many planes, that it was
fascinating to watch each runnel of moisture follow its own particular
watershed. Even on his large fresh-looking hands the drops divided,
trickling in different ways from the ridges of the fingers; and as for
his forehead and temples, and the raised cushion of cheek beneath each
of his lower lids, every one of these slopes had its own particular
stream, its hollow pools and sudden cataracts; and the sight was never
unpleasant, because his whole vast bubbling surface was of such a clean
and hearty pink, and the exuding moisture so perceptibly flavoured with
expensive eau de Cologne and the best French soap.

Mrs. Raycie, though built on a less heroic scale, had a pale amplitude
which, when she put on her best watered silk (the kind that stood
alone), and framed her countenance in the innumerable blonde lace
ruffles and clustered purple grapes of her newest Paris cap, almost
balanced her husband’s bulk. Yet from this full-rigged pair, as the
Commodore would have put it, had issued the lean little runt of a Lewis,
a shrimp of a baby, a shaver of a boy, and now a youth as scant as an
ordinary man’s midday shadow.

All these things, Lewis himself mused, dangling his legs from the
verandah rail, were undoubtedly passing through the minds of the four
gentlemen grouped about his father’s bowl of cup.

Mr. Robert Huzzard, the banker, a tall broad man, who looked big in any
company but Mr. Raycie’s, leaned back, lifted his glass, and bowed to
Lewis.

“Here’s to the Grand Tour!”

“Don’t perch on that rail like a sparrow, my boy,” Mr. Raycie said
reprovingly; and Lewis dropped to his feet, and returned Mr. Huzzard’s
bow.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he stammered. It was his too frequent excuse.

Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, the banker’s younger brother, Mr. Ledgely and Mr.
Donaldson Kent, all raised their glasses and cheerily echoed: “The Grand
Tour!”

Lewis bowed again, and put his lips to the glass he had forgotten. In
reality, he had eyes only for Mr. Donaldson Kent, his father’s cousin, a
silent man with a lean hawk-like profile, who looked like a retired
Revolutionary hero, and lived in daily fear of the most trifling risk or
responsibility.

To this prudent and circumspect citizen had come, some years earlier,
the unexpected and altogether inexcusable demand that he should look
after the daughter of his only brother, Julius Kent. Julius had died in
Italy--well, that was his own business, if he chose to live there. But
to let his wife die before him, and to leave a minor daughter, and a
will entrusting her to the guardianship of his esteemed elder brother,
Donaldson Kent Esquire, of Kent’s Point, Long Island, and Great Jones
Street, New York--well, as Mr. Kent himself said, and as his wife said
for him, there had never been anything, anything whatever, in Mr. Kent’s
attitude or behaviour, to justify the ungrateful Julius (whose debts he
had more than once paid) in laying on him this final burden.

The girl came. She was fourteen, she was considered plain, she was small
and black and skinny. Her name was Beatrice, which was bad enough, and
made worse by the fact that it had been shortened by ignorant foreigners
to Treeshy. But she was eager, serviceable and good-tempered, and as Mr.
and Mrs. Kent’s friends pointed out, her plainness made everything easy.
There were two Kent boys growing up, Bill and Donald; and if this
penniless cousin had been compounded of cream and roses--well, she would
have taken more watching, and might have rewarded the kindness of her
uncle and aunt by some act of wicked ingratitude. But this risk being
obviated by her appearance, they could be goodnatured to her without
afterthought, and to be goodnatured was natural to them. So, as the
years passed, she gradually became the guardian of her guardians; since
it was equally natural to Mr. and Mrs. Kent to throw themselves in
helpless reliance on every one whom they did not nervously fear or
mistrust.

“Yes, he’s off on Monday,” Mr. Raycie said, nodding sharply at Lewis,
who had set down his glass after one sip. “Empty it, you shirk!” the nod
commanded; and Lewis, throwing back his head, gulped down the draught,
though it almost stuck in his lean throat. He had already had to take
two glasses, and even this scant conviviality was too much for him, and
likely to result in a mood of excited volubility, followed by a morose
evening and a head the next morning. And he wanted to keep his mind
clear that day, and to think steadily and lucidly of Treeshy Kent.

Of course he couldn’t marry her--yet. He was twenty-one that very day,
and still entirely dependent on his father. And he wasn’t altogether
sorry to be going first on this Grand Tour. It was what he had always
dreamed of, pined for, from the moment when his infant eyes had first
been drawn to the prints of European cities in the long upper passage
that smelt of matting. And all that Treeshy had told him about Italy had
confirmed and intensified the longing. Oh, to have been going there
with her--with her as his guide, his Beatrice! (For she had given him a
little Dante of her father’s, with a steel-engraved frontispiece of
Beatrice; and his sister Mary Adeline, who had been taught Italian by
one of the romantic Milanese exiles, had helped her brother out with the
grammar.)

The thought of going to Italy with Treeshy was only a dream; but later,
as man and wife, they would return there, and by that time, perhaps, it
was Lewis who would be her guide, and reveal to her the historic marvels
of her birthplace, of which after all she knew so little, except in
minor domestic ways that were quaint but unimportant.

The prospect swelled her suitor’s bosom, and reconciled him to the idea
of their separation. After all, he secretly felt himself to be still a
boy, and it was as a man that he would return: he meant to tell her that
when they met the next day. When he came back his character would be
formed, his knowledge of life (which he already thought considerable)
would be complete; and then no one could keep them apart. He smiled in
advance to think how little his father’s shouting and booming would
impress a man on his return from the Grand Tour....

The gentlemen were telling anecdotes about their own early experiences
in Europe. None of them--not even Mr. Raycie--had travelled as
extensively as it was intended that Lewis should; but the two Huzzards
had been twice to England on banking matters, and Commodore Ledgely, a
bold man, to France and Belgium as well--not to speak of his early
experiences in the Far East. All three had kept a vivid and amused
recollection, slightly tinged with disapprobation, of what they had
seen--“Oh, those French wenches,” the Commodore chuckled through his
white teeth--but poor Mr. Kent, who had gone abroad on his honeymoon,
had been caught in Paris by the revolution of 1830, had had the fever in
Florence, and had nearly been arrested as a spy in Vienna; and the only
satisfactory episode in this disastrous, and never repeated, adventure,
had been the fact of his having been mistaken for the Duke of Wellington
(as he was trying to slip out of a Viennese hotel in his courier’s blue
surtout) by a crowd who had been--“Well, very gratifying in their
enthusiasm,” Mr. Kent admitted.

“How my poor brother Julius could have lived in Europe! Well, look at
the consequences--” he used to say, as if poor Treeshy’s plainness gave
an awful point to his moral.

“There’s one thing in Paris, my boy, that you must be warned against:
those gambling-hells in the Pally Royle,” Mr. Kent insisted. “I never
set foot in the places myself; but a glance at the outside was enough.”

“I knew a feller that was fleeced of a fortune there,” Mr. Henry Huzzard
confirmed; while the Commodore, at his tenth glass, chuckled with moist
eyes: “The trollops, oh, the trollops--”

“As for Vienna--” said Mr. Kent.

“Even in London,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “a young man must be on his
look-out against gamblers. Every form of swindling is practised, and the
touts are always on the look-out for greenhorns; a term,” he added
apologetically, “which they apply to any traveller new to the country.”

“In Paris,” said Mr. Kent, “I was once within an ace of being challenged
to fight a duel.” He fetched a sigh of horror and relief, and glanced
reassuredly down the Sound in the direction of his own peaceful
roof-tree.

“Oh, a duel,” laughed the Commodore. “A man can fight duels here. I
fought a dozen when I was a young feller in New Erleens.” The
Commodore’s mother had been a southern lady, and after his father’s
death had spent some years with her parents in Louisiana, so that her
son’s varied experiences had begun early. “’Bout women,” he smiled
confidentially, holding out his empty glass to Mr. Raycie.

“The ladies--!” exclaimed Mr. Kent in a voice of warning.

The gentlemen rose to their feet, the Commodore quite as promptly and
steadily as the others. The drawing-room window opened, and from it
emerged Mrs. Raycie, in a ruffled sarsenet dress and Point de Paris cap,
followed by her two daughters in starched organdy with pink spencers.
Mr. Raycie looked with proud approval at his womenkind.

“Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Raycie, in a perfectly even voice, “supper is on
the table, and if you will do Mr. Raycie and myself the favour--”

“The favour, ma’am,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “is on your side, in so
amiably inviting us.”

Mrs. Raycie curtsied, the gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Raycie said: “Your
arm to Mrs. Raycie, Huzzard. This little farewell party is a family
affair, and the other gentlemen must content themselves with my two
daughters. Sarah Anne, Mary Adeline--”

The Commodore and Mr. John Huzzard advanced ceremoniously toward the two
girls, and Mr. Kent, being a cousin, closed the procession between Mr.
Raycie and Lewis.

Oh, that supper-table! The vision of it used sometimes to rise before
Lewis Raycie’s eyes in outlandish foreign places; for though not a large
or fastidious eater when he was at home, he was afterward, in lands of
chestnut-flour and garlic and queer bearded sea-things, to suffer many
pangs of hunger at the thought of that opulent board. In the centre
stood the Raycie _épergne_ of pierced silver, holding aloft a bunch of
June roses surrounded by dangling baskets of sugared almonds and striped
peppermints; and grouped about this decorative “motif” were Lowestoft
platters heavy with piles of raspberries, strawberries and the first
Delaware peaches. An outer flanking of heaped-up cookies, crullers,
strawberry short-cake, piping hot corn-bread and deep golden butter in
moist blocks still bedewed from the muslin swathings of the dairy, led
the eye to the Virginia ham in front of Mr. Raycie, and the twin dishes
of scrambled eggs on toast and broiled blue-fish over which his wife
presided. Lewis could never afterward fit into this intricate pattern
the “side-dishes” of devilled turkey-legs and creamed chicken hash, the
sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, the heavy silver jugs of butter-coloured
cream, the floating-island, “slips” and lemon jellies that were somehow
interwoven with the solider elements of the design; but they were all
there, either together or successively, and so were the towering piles
of waffles reeling on their foundations, and the slender silver jugs of
maple syrup perpetually escorting them about the table as black Dinah
replenished the supply.

They ate--oh, how they all ate!--though the ladies were supposed only to
nibble; but the good things on Lewis’s plate remained untouched until,
ever and again, an admonishing glance from Mr. Raycie, or an entreating
one from Mary Adeline, made him insert a languid fork into the heap.

And all the while Mr. Raycie continued to hold forth.

“A young man, in my opinion, before setting up for himself, must see the
world; form his taste; fortify his judgment. He must study the most
famous monuments, examine the organization of foreign societies, and the
habits and customs of those older civilizations whose yoke it has been
our glory to cast off. Though he may see in them much to deplore and to
reprove--” (“Some of the gals, though,” Commodore Ledgely was heard to
interject)--“much that will make him give thanks for the privilege of
having been born and brought up under our own Free Institutions, yet I
believe he will also”--Mr. Raycie conceded it with magnanimity--“be able
to learn much.”

“The Sundays, though,” Mr. Kent hazarded warningly; and Mrs. Raycie
breathed across to her son: “Ah, that’s what _I_ say!”

Mr. Raycie did not like interruption; and he met it by growing visibly
larger. His huge bulk hung a moment, like an avalanche, above the
silence which followed Mr. Kent’s interjection and Mrs. Raycie’s murmur;
then he crashed down on both.

“The Sundays--the Sundays? Well, what of the Sundays? What is there to
frighten a good Episcopalian in what we call the Continental Sunday? I
presume that we’re all Churchmen here, eh? No puling Methodists or
atheistical Unitarians at my table tonight, that I’m aware of? Nor will
I offend the ladies of my household by assuming that they have secretly
lent an ear to the Baptist ranter in the chapel at the foot of our lane.
No? I thought not! Well, then, I say, what’s all this flutter about the
Papists? Far be it from me to approve of their heathenish
doctrines--but, damn it, they go to church, don’t they? And they have a
real service, as we do, don’t they? And real clergy, and not a lot of
nondescripts dressed like laymen, and damned badly at that, who chat
familiarly with the Almighty in their own vulgar lingo? No, sir”--he
swung about on the shrinking Mr. Kent--“it’s not the Church I’m afraid
of in foreign countries, it’s the sewers, sir!”

Mrs. Raycie had grown very pale: Lewis knew that she too was deeply
perturbed about the sewers. “And the night-air,” she scarce-audibly
sighed.

But Mr. Raycie had taken up his main theme again. “In my opinion, if a
young man travels at all, he must travel as extensively as
his--er--means permit; must see as much of the world as he can. Those
are my son’s sailing orders, Commodore; and here’s to his carrying them
out to the best of his powers!”

Black Dinah, removing the Virginia ham, or rather such of its bony
structure as alone remained on the dish, had managed to make room for a
bowl of punch from which Mr. Raycie poured deep ladlefuls of perfumed
fire into the glasses ranged before him on a silver tray. The gentlemen
rose, the ladies smiled and wept, and Lewis’s health and the success of
the Grand Tour were toasted with an eloquence which caused Mrs. Raycie,
with a hasty nod to her daughters, and a covering rustle of starched
flounces, to shepherd them softly from the room.

“After all,” Lewis heard her murmur to them on the threshold, “your
father’s using such language shows that he’s in the best of humour with
dear Lewis.”




II


In spite of his enforced potations, Lewis Raycie was up the next morning
before sunrise.

Unlatching his shutters without noise, he looked forth over the wet lawn
merged in a blur of shrubberies, and the waters of the Sound dimly seen
beneath a sky full of stars. His head ached but his heart glowed; what
was before him was thrilling enough to clear a heavier brain than his.

He dressed quickly and completely (save for his shoes), and then,
stripping the flowered quilt from his high mahogany bed, rolled it in a
tight bundle under his arm. Thus enigmatically equipped he was feeling
his way, shoes in hand, through the darkness of the upper story to the
slippery oak stairs, when he was startled by a candle-gleam in the
pitch-blackness of the hall below. He held his breath, and leaning over
the stair-rail saw with amazement his sister Mary Adeline come forth,
cloaked and bonneted, but also in stocking-feet, from the passage
leading to the pantry. She too carried a double burden: her shoes and
the candle in one hand, in the other a large covered basket that weighed
down her bare arm.

Brother and sister stopped and stared at each other in the blue dusk:
the upward slant of the candle-light distorted Mary Adeline’s mild
features, twisting them into a frightened grin as Lewis stole down to
join her.

“Oh--” she whispered. “What in the world are you doing here? I was just
getting together a few things for that poor young Mrs. Poe down the
lane, who’s so ill--before mother goes to the storeroom. You won’t tell,
will you?”

Lewis signalled his complicity, and cautiously slid open the bolt of the
front door. They durst not say more till they were out of ear-shot. On
the doorstep they sat down to put on their shoes; then they hastened on
without a word through the ghostly shrubberies till they reached the
gate into the lane.

“But you, Lewis?” the sister suddenly questioned, with an astonished
stare at the rolled-up quilt under her brother’s arm.

“Oh, I--. Look here, Addy--” he broke off and began to grope in his
pocket--“I haven’t much about me ... the old gentleman keeps me as close
as ever ... but here’s a dollar, if you think that poor Mrs. Poe could
use it ... I’d be too happy ... consider it a privilege....”

“Oh, Lewis, Lewis, how noble, how generous of you! Of course I can buy a
few extra things with it ... they never see meat unless I can bring them
a bit, you know ... and I fear she’s dying of a decline ... and she and
her mother are so fiery-proud....” She wept with gratitude, and Lewis
drew a breath of relief. He had diverted her attention from the
bed-quilt.

“Ah, there’s the breeze,” he murmured, sniffing the suddenly chilled
air.

“Yes; I must be off; I must be back before the sun is up,” said Mary
Adeline anxiously, “and it would never do if mother knew--”

“She doesn’t know of your visits to Mrs. Poe?”

A look of childish guile sharpened Mary Adeline’s undeveloped face.
“She _does_, of course; but yet she doesn’t ... we’ve arranged it so.
You see, Mr. Poe’s an Atheist; and so father--”

“I see,” Lewis nodded. “Well, we part here; I’m off for a swim,” he said
glibly. But abruptly he turned back and caught his sister’s arm.
“Sister, tell Mrs. Poe, please, that I heard her husband give a reading
from his poems in New York two nights ago--”

(“Oh, Lewis--_you_? But father says he’s a blasphemer!”)

“--And that he’s a great poet--a Great Poet. Tell her that from me, will
you, please, Mary Adeline?”

“Oh, brother, I couldn’t ... we never speak of him,” the startled girl
faltered, hurrying away.

In the cove where the Commodore’s sloop had ridden a few hours earlier a
biggish rowing-boat took the waking ripples. Young Raycie paddled out
to her, fastened his skiff to the moorings, and hastily clambered into
the boat.

From various recesses of his pockets he produced rope, string, a
carpet-layer’s needle, and other unexpected and incongruous tackle;
then, lashing one of the oars across the top of the other, and jamming
the latter upright between the forward thwart and the bow, he rigged the
flowered bed-quilt on this mast, knotted a rope to the free end of the
quilt, and sat down in the stern, one hand on the rudder, the other on
his improvised sheet.

Venus, brooding silverly above a line of pale green sky, made a pool of
glory in the sea as the dawn-breeze plumped the lover’s sail....

       *       *       *       *       *

On the shelving pebbles of another cove, two or three miles down the
Sound, Lewis Raycie lowered his queer sail and beached his boat. A
clump of willows on the shingle-edge mysteriously stirred and parted,
and Treeshy Kent was in his arms.

The sun was just pushing above a belt of low clouds in the east,
spattering them with liquid gold, and Venus blanched as the light spread
upward. But under the willows it was still dusk, a watery green dusk in
which the secret murmurs of the night were caught.

“Treeshy--Treeshy!” the young man cried, kneeling beside her--and then,
a moment later: “My angel, are you sure that no one guesses--?”

The girl gave a faint laugh which screwed up her funny nose. She leaned
her head on his shoulder, her round forehead and rough braids pressed
against his cheek, her hands in his, breathing quickly and joyfully.

“I thought I should never get here,” Lewis grumbled, “with that
ridiculous bed-quilt--and it’ll be broad day soon! To think that I was
of age yesterday, and must come to you in a boat rigged like a child’s
toy on a duck-pond! If you knew how it humiliates me--”

“What does it matter, dear, since you’re of age now, and your own
master?”

“But am I, though? He says so--but it’s only on his own terms; only
while I do what he wants! You’ll see ... I’ve a credit of ten thousand
dollars ... ten ... thou ... sand ... d’you hear?... placed to my name
in a London bank; and not a penny here to bless myself with
meanwhile.... Why, Treeshy darling, why, what’s the matter?”

She flung her arms about his neck, and through their innocent kisses he
could taste her tears. “What _is_ it, Treeshy?” he implored her.

“I ... oh, I’d forgotten it was to be our last day together till you
spoke of London--cruel, cruel!” she reproached him; and through the
green twilight of the willows her eyes blazed on him like two stormy
stars. No other eyes he knew could express such elemental rage as
Treeshy’s.

“You little spitfire, you!” he laughed back somewhat chokingly. “Yes,
it’s our last day--but not for long; at our age two years are not so
very long, after all, are they? And when I come back to you I’ll come as
my own master, independent, free--come to claim you in face of
everything and everybody! Think of that, darling, and be brave for my
sake ... brave and patient ... as I mean to be!” he declared
heroically.

“Oh, but you--you’ll see other girls; heaps and heaps of them; in those
wicked old countries where they’re so lovely. My uncle Kent says the
European countries are all wicked, even my own poor Italy....”

“But _you_, Treeshy; you’ll be seeing cousins Bill and Donald
meanwhile--seeing them all day long and every day. And you know you’ve a
weakness for that great hulk of a Bill. Ah, if only I stood six-foot-one
in my stockings I’d go with an easier heart, you fickle child!” he tried
to banter her.

“Fickle? Fickle? _Me_--oh, Lewis!”

He felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, and his untried courage failed
him. It was delicious, in theory, to hold weeping beauty to one’s
breast, but terribly alarming, he found, in practice. There came a
responsive twitching in his throat.

“No, no; firm as adamant, true as steel; that’s what we both mean to be,
isn’t it, _cara_?”

“_Caro_, yes,” she sighed, appeased.

“And you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy--long long letters? I may
count on that, mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered,
every one of them, so that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one;
remember!”

“And, Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not
_all_,” she added, laughing, “for they’d make such a big bundle that
you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella--but always at least the
last one, just the last one. Promise!”

“Always, I promise--as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling
to take a spirited line.

“Oh, Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are--and long long
afterward....”

Venus failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.




III


The crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would be not that of his
farewell to Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.

On that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more
distant prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the
dew-drenched grass, he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s
windows, and thanked his stars that they were still tightly shuttered.

There was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using
language” before ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed
and slippered, as it were--a state his family so seldom saw him in that
Lewis had sometimes impertinently wondered to what awful descent from
the clouds he and his two sisters owed their timorous being.

It was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of
the money was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little
finger. What difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his
marriage, had quietly taken over the management of his wife’s property,
and deducted, from the very moderate allowance he accorded her, all her
little personal expenses, even to the postage-stamps she used, and the
dollar she put in the plate every Sunday. He called the allowance her
“pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he paid all the household
bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance could be
entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.

“And will be, if you respect my wishes, my dear,” he always added. “I
like to see a handsome figure well set-off, and not to have our friends
imagine, when they come to dine, that Mrs. Raycie is sick above-stairs,
and I’ve replaced her by a poor relation in _allapacca_.” In compliance
with which Mrs. Raycie, at once flattered and terrified, spent her last
penny in adorning herself and her daughters, and had to stint their
bedroom fires, and the servants’ meals, in order to find a penny for any
private necessity.

Mr. Raycie had long since convinced his wife that this method of dealing
with her, if not lavish, was suitable, and in fact “handsome”; when she
spoke of the subject to her relations it was with tears of gratitude for
her husband’s kindness in assuming the management of her property. As he
managed it exceedingly well, her hard-headed brothers (glad to have the
responsibility off their hands, and convinced that, if left to herself,
she would have muddled her money away in ill-advised charities) were
disposed to share her approval of Mr. Raycie; though her old mother
sometimes said helplessly: “When I think that Lucy Ann can’t as much as
have a drop of gruel brought up to her without his weighing the
oatmeal....” But even that was only whispered, lest Mr. Raycie’s
mysterious faculty of hearing what was said behind his back should bring
sudden reprisals on the venerable lady to whom he always alluded, with a
tremor in his genial voice, as “my dear mother-in-law--unless indeed she
will allow me to call her, more briefly but more truly, my dear mother.”

To Lewis, hitherto, Mr. Raycie had meted the same measure as to the
females of the household. He had dressed him well, educated him
expensively, lauded him to the skies--and counted every penny of his
allowance. Yet there was a difference; and Lewis was as well aware of it
as any one.

The dream, the ambition, the passion of Mr. Raycie’s life, was (as his
son knew) to found a Family; and he had only Lewis to found it with. He
believed in primogeniture, in heirlooms, in entailed estates, in all the
ritual of the English “landed” tradition. No one was louder than he in
praise of the democratic institutions under which he lived; but he never
thought of them as affecting that more private but more important
institution, the Family; and to the Family all his care and all his
thoughts were given. The result, as Lewis dimly guessed, was, that upon
his own shrinking and inadequate head was centred all the passion
contained in the vast expanse of Mr. Raycie’s breast. Lewis was his
very own, and Lewis represented what was most dear to him; and for both
these reasons Mr. Raycie set an inordinate value on the boy (a quite
different thing, Lewis thought from loving him).

Mr. Raycie was particularly proud of his son’s taste for letters.
Himself not a wholly unread man, he admired intensely what he called the
“cultivated gentleman”--and that was what Lewis was evidently going to
be. Could he have combined with this tendency a manlier frame, and an
interest in the few forms of sport then popular among gentlemen, Mr.
Raycie’s satisfaction would have been complete; but whose is, in this
disappointing world? Meanwhile he flattered himself that, Lewis being
still young and malleable, and his health certainly mending, two years
of travel and adventure might send him back a very different figure,
physically as well as mentally. Mr. Raycie had himself travelled in his
youth, and was persuaded that the experience was formative; he secretly
hoped for the return of a bronzed and broadened Lewis, seasoned by
independence and adventure, and having discreetly sown his wild oats in
foreign pastures, where they would not contaminate the home crop.

All this Lewis guessed; and he guessed as well that these two
wander-years were intended by Mr. Raycie to lead up to a marriage and an
establishment after Mr. Raycie’s own heart, but in which Lewis’s was not
to have even a consulting voice.

“He’s going to give me all the advantages--for his own purpose,” the
young man summed it up as he went down to join the family at the
breakfast table.

Mr. Raycie was never more resplendent than at that moment of the day and
season. His spotless white duck trousers, strapped under kid boots, his
thin kerseymere coat, and drab _piqué_ waistcoat crossed below a snowy
stock, made him look as fresh as the morning and as appetizing as the
peaches and cream banked before him.

Opposite sat Mrs. Raycie, immaculate also, but paler than usual, as
became a mother about to part from her only son; and between the two was
Sarah Anne, unusually pink, and apparently occupied in trying to screen
her sister’s empty seat. Lewis greeted them, and seated himself at his
mother’s right.

Mr. Raycie drew out his _guillochée_ repeating watch, and detaching it
from its heavy gold chain laid it on the table beside him.

“Mary Adeline is late again. It is a somewhat unusual thing for a sister
to be late at the last meal she is to take--for two years--with her only
brother.”

“Oh, Mr. Raycie!” Mrs. Raycie faltered.

“I say, the idea is peculiar. Perhaps,” said Mr. Raycie sarcastically,
“I am going to be blessed with a _peculiar_ daughter.”

“I’m afraid Mary Adeline is beginning a sick headache, sir. She tried to
get up, but really could not,” said Sarah Anne in a rush.

Mr. Raycie’s only reply was to arch ironic eyebrows, and Lewis hastily
intervened: “I’m sorry, sir; but it may be my fault--”

Mrs. Raycie paled, Sarah Anne, purpled, and Mr. Raycie echoed with
punctilious incredulity: “Your--fault?”

“In being the occasion, sir, of last night’s too-sumptuous festivity--”

“Ha--ha--ha!” Mr. Raycie laughed, his thunders instantly dispelled.

He pushed back his chair and nodded to his son with a smile; and the
two, leaving the ladies to wash up the teacups (as was still the habit
in genteel families) betook themselves to Mr. Raycie’s study.

What Mr. Raycie studied in this apartment--except the accounts, and ways
of making himself unpleasant to his family--Lewis had never been able to
discover. It was a small bare formidable room; and the young man, who
never crossed the threshold but with a sinking of his heart, felt it
sink lower than ever. “_Now!_” he thought.

Mr. Raycie took the only easy-chair, and began.

“My dear fellow, our time is short, but long enough for what I have to
say. In a few hours you will be setting out on your great journey: an
important event in the life of any young man. Your talents and
character--combined with your means of improving the opportunity--make
me hope that in your case it will be decisive. I expect you to come home
from this trip a man--”

So far, it was all to order, so to speak; Lewis could have recited it
beforehand. He bent his head in acquiescence.

“A man,” Mr. Raycie repeated, “prepared to play a part, a considerable
part, in the social life of the community. I expect you to be a figure
in New York; and I shall give you the means to be so.” He cleared his
throat. “But means are not enough--though you must never forget that
they are essential. Education, polish, experience of the world; these
are what so many of our men of standing lack. What do they know of Art
or Letters? We have had little time here to produce either as yet--you
spoke?” Mr. Raycie broke off with a crushing courtesy.

“I--oh, no,” his son stammered.

“Ah; I thought you might be about to allude to certain blasphemous
penny-a-liners whose poetic ravings are said to have given them a kind
of pothouse notoriety.”

Lewis reddened at the allusion but was silent, and his father went on:

“Where is our Byron--our Scott--our Shakespeare? And in painting it is
the same. Where are our Old Masters? We are not without contemporary
talent; but for works of genius we must still look to the past; we must,
in most cases, content ourselves with copies.... Ah, here, I know, my
dear boy, I touch a responsive chord! Your love of the arts has not
passed unperceived; and I mean, I desire, to do all I can to encourage
it. Your future position in the world--your duties and obligations as a
gentleman and a man of fortune--will not permit you to become, yourself,
an eminent painter or a famous sculptor; but I shall raise no objection
to your dabbling in these arts as an amateur--at least while you are
travelling abroad. It will form your taste, strengthen your judgment,
and give you, I hope, the discernment necessary to select for me a few
masterpieces which shall _not_ be copies. Copies,” Mr. Raycie pursued
with a deepening emphasis, “are for the less discriminating, or for
those less blessed with this world’s goods. Yes, my dear Lewis, I wish
to create a gallery: a gallery of Heirlooms. Your mother participates
in this ambition--she desires to see on our walls a few original
specimens of the Italian genius. Raphael, I fear, we can hardly aspire
to; but a Domenichino, an Albano, a Carlo Dolci, a Guercino, a Carlo
Maratta--one or two of Salvator Rosa’s noble landscapes ... you see my
idea? There shall be a Raycie Gallery; and it shall be your mission to
get together its nucleus.” Mr. Raycie paused, and mopped his flowing
forehead. “I believe I could have given my son no task more to his
liking.”

“Oh, no, sir, none indeed!” Lewis cried, flushing and paling. He had in
fact never suspected this part of his father’s plan, and his heart
swelled with the honour of so unforeseen a mission. Nothing, in truth,
could have made him prouder or happier. For a moment he forgot love,
forgot Treeshy, forgot everything but the rapture of moving among the
masterpieces of which he had so long dreamed, moving not as a mere
hungry spectator but as one whose privilege it should at least be to
single out and carry away some of the lesser treasures. He could hardly
take in what had happened, and the shock of the announcement left him,
as usual, inarticulate.

He heard his father booming on, developing the plan, explaining with his
usual pompous precision that one of the partners of the London bank in
which Lewis’s funds were deposited was himself a noted collector, and
had agreed to provide the young traveller with letters of introduction
to other connoisseurs, both in France and Italy, so that Lewis’s
acquisitions might be made under the most enlightened guidance.

“It is,” Mr. Raycie concluded, “in order to put you on a footing of
equality with the best collectors that I have placed such a large sum at
your disposal. I reckon that for ten thousand dollars you can travel for
two years in the very best style; and I mean to place another five
thousand to your credit”--he paused, and let the syllables drop slowly
into his son’s brain: “five thousand dollars for the purchase of works
of art, which eventually--remember--will be yours; and will be handed
on, I trust, to your sons’ sons as long as the name of Raycie
survives”--a length of time, Mr. Raycie’s tone seemed to imply, hardly
to be measured in periods less extensive than those of the Egyptian
dynasties.

Lewis heard him with a whirling brain. _Five thousand dollars!_ The sum
seemed so enormous, even in dollars, and so incalculably larger when
translated into any continental currency, that he wondered why his
father, in advance, had given up all hope of a Raphael.... “If I travel
economically,” he said to himself, “and deny myself unnecessary
luxuries, I may yet be able to surprise him by bringing one back. And my
mother--how magnanimous, how splendid! Now I see why she has consented
to all the little economies that sometimes seemed so paltry and so
humiliating....”

The young man’s eyes filled with tears, but he was still silent, though
he longed as never before to express his gratitude and admiration to his
father. He had entered the study expecting a parting sermon on the
subject of thrift, coupled with the prospective announcement of a
“suitable establishment” (he could even guess the particular Huzzard
girl his father had in view); and instead he had been told to spend his
princely allowance in a princely manner, and to return home with a
gallery of masterpieces. “At least,” he murmured to himself, “it shall
contain a Correggio.”

“Well, sir?” Mr. Raycie boomed.

“Oh, sir--” his son cried, and flung himself on the vast slope of the
parental waistcoat.

Amid all these accumulated joys there murmured deep down in him the
thought that nothing had been said or done to interfere with his secret
plans about Treeshy. It seemed almost as if his father had tacitly
accepted the idea of their unmentioned engagement; and Lewis felt half
guilty at not confessing to it then and there. But the gods are
formidable even when they unbend; never more so, perhaps, than at such
moments....




                                PART II




IV


Lewis Raycie stood on a projecting rock and surveyed the sublime
spectacle of Mont Blanc.

It was a brilliant August day, and the air, at that height, was already
so sharp that he had had to put on his fur-lined pelisse. Behind him, at
a respectful distance, was the travelling servant who, at a signal, had
brought it up to him; below, in the bend of the mountain road, stood the
light and elegant carriage which had carried him thus far on his
travels.

Scarcely more than a year had passed since he had waved a farewell to
New York from the deck of the packet-ship headed down the bay; yet, to
the young man confidently facing Mont Blanc, nothing seemed left in him
of that fluid and insubstantial being, the former Lewis Raycie, save a
lurking and abeyant fear of Mr. Raycie senior. Even that, however, was
so attenuated by distance and time, so far sunk below the horizon, and
anchored on the far side of the globe, that it stirred in its sleep only
when a handsomely folded and wafered letter in his parent’s writing was
handed out across the desk of some continental counting-house. Mr.
Raycie senior did not write often, and when he did it was in a bland and
stilted strain. He felt at a disadvantage on paper, and his natural
sarcasm was swamped in the rolling periods which it cost him hours of
labour to bring forth; so that the dreaded quality lurked for his son
only in the curve of certain letters, and in a positively awful way of
writing out, at full length, the word _Esquire_.

It was not that Lewis had broken with all the memories of his past of a
year ago. Many still lingered in him, or rather had been transferred to
the new man he had become--as for instance his tenderness for Treeshy
Kent, which, somewhat to his surprise, had obstinately resisted all the
assaults of English keepsake beauties and almond-eyed houris of the
East. It startled him, at times, to find Treeshy’s short dusky face,
with its round forehead, the widely spaced eyes and the high
cheek-bones, starting out at him suddenly in the street of some
legendary town, or in a landscape of languid beauty, just as he had now
and again been arrested in an exotic garden by the very scent of the
verbena under the verandah at home. His travels had confirmed rather
than weakened the family view of Treeshy’s plainness; she could not be
made to fit into any of the patterns of female beauty so far submitted
to him; yet there she was, ensconced in his new heart and mind as deeply
as in the old, though her kisses seemed less vivid, and the peculiar
rough notes of her voice hardly reached him. Sometimes, half irritably,
he said to himself that with an effort he could disperse her once for
all; yet she lived on in him, unseen yet ineffaceable, like the image on
a daguerreotype plate, no less there because so often invisible.

To the new Lewis, however, the whole business was less important than he
had once thought it. His suddenly acquired maturity made Treeshy seem a
petted child rather than the guide, the Beatrice, he had once considered
her; and he promised himself, with an elderly smile, that as soon as he
got to Italy he would write her the long letter for which he was now
considerably in her debt.

His travels had first carried him to England. There he spent some weeks
in collecting letters and recommendations for his tour, in purchasing
his travelling-carriage and its numerous appurtenances, and in driving
in it from cathedral town to storied castle, omitting nothing, from
Abbotsford to Kenilworth, which deserved the attention of a cultivated
mind. From England he crossed to Calais, moving slowly southward to the
Mediterranean; and there, taking ship for the Piræus, he plunged into
pure romance, and the tourist became a Giaour.

It was the East which had made him into a new Lewis Raycie; the East, so
squalid and splendid, so pestilent and so poetic, so full of knavery
and romance and fleas and nightingales, and so different, alike in its
glories and its dirt, from what his studious youth had dreamed. After
Smyrna and the bazaars, after Damascus and Palmyra, the Acropolis,
Mytilene and Sunium, what could be left in his mind of Canal Street and
the lawn above the Sound? Even the mosquitoes, which seemed at first the
only connecting link, were different, because he fought with them in
scenes so different; and a young gentleman who had journeyed across the
desert in Arabian dress, slept under goats’-hair tents, been attacked by
robbers in the Peloponnesus and despoiled by his own escort at Baalbek,
and by customs’ officials everywhere, could not but look with a smile on
the terrors that walk New York and the Hudson river. Encased in security
and monotony, that other Lewis Raycie, when his little figure bobbed up
to the surface, seemed like a new-born babe preserved in alcohol. Even
Mr. Raycie senior’s thunders were now no more than the far-off murmur of
summer lightning on a perfect evening. Had Mr. Raycie ever really
frightened Lewis? Why, now he was not even frightened by Mont Blanc!

He was still gazing with a sense of easy equality at its awful pinnacles
when another travelling-carriage paused near his own, and a young man,
eagerly jumping from it, and also followed by a servant with a cloak,
began to mount the slope. Lewis at once recognized the carriage, and the
light springing figure of the young man, his blue coat and swelling
stock, and the scar slightly distorting his handsome and eloquent mouth.
It was the Englishman who had arrived at the Montanvert inn the night
before with a valet, a guide, and such a cargo of books, maps and
sketching-materials as threatened to overshadow even Lewis’s outfit.

Lewis, at first, had not been greatly drawn to the newcomer, who, seated
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....”

“Ay; but that didn’t suit you. You didn’t _want_ to be advised. You
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.

My host squared his shoulders, thrust his hands into his pockets, and
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





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