Crucial Instances
by
Edith Wharton
Part 1 out of 3
Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, William Flis, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
CRUCIAL INSTANCES
BY
EDITH WHARTON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I _The Duchess at Prayer_
II _The Angel at the Grave_
III _The Recovery_
IV _"Copy": A Dialogue_
V _The Rembrandt_
VI _The Moving Finger_
VII _The Confessional_
THE DUCHESS AT PRAYER
Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house,
that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest
behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the
activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life
flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the
villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall
windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there
may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the
arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the
disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors....
II
From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue
barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated
vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes
and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored lichen had sheeted
the balustrade as with fine _laminae_ of gold, vineyards stooped to
the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white
villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on
fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was
lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the
shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I
hugged the sunshine.
"The Duchess's apartments are beyond," said the old man.
He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he
seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him
with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the
pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a _lira_ to the gate-keeper's
child. He went on, without removing his eye:
"For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the
Duchess."
"And no one lives here now?"
"No one, sir. The Duke, goes to Como for the summer season."
I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging
groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.
"And that's Vicenza?"
"_Proprio_!" The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading
from the walls behind us. "You see the palace roof over there, just to the
left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking
flight? That's the Duke's town palace, built by Palladio."
"And does the Duke come there?"
"Never. In winter he goes to Rome."
"And the palace and the villa are always closed?"
"As you see--always."
"How long has this been?"
"Since I can remember."
I looked into his eyes: they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting
nothing. "That must be a long time," I said involuntarily.
"A long time," he assented.
I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the
box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts.
Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and
slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing
traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the
art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of
whining beggars; faun-eared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the
laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin
in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.
"Let us go in," I said.
The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a
knife.
"The Duchess's apartments," he said.
Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same
scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with
inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the
room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese
monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit
haughtily ignored us.
"Duke Ercole II.," the old man explained, "by the Genoese Priest."
It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, high-nosed and
cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and
vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal
errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a
round yes or no. One of the Duke's hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a
simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned
the pages of a folio propped on a skull.
"Beyond is the Duchess's bedroom," the old man reminded me.
Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars
deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a dais the bedstead, grim, nuptial,
official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the
curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.
The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face
it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow,
and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo's lenient
goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth century
dress!
"No one has slept here," said the old man, "since the Duchess Violante."
"And she was--?"
"The lady there--first Duchess of Duke Ercole II."
He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked a door at the farther end of the
room. "The chapel," he said. "This is the Duchess's balcony." As I turned
to follow him the Duchess tossed me a sidelong smile.
I stepped into a grated tribune above a chapel festooned with stucco.
Pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters; the
artificial roses in the altar-vases were gray with dust and age, and under
the cobwebby rosettes of the vaulting a bird's nest clung. Before the altar
stood a row of tattered arm-chairs, and I drew back at sight of a figure
kneeling near them.
"The Duchess," the old man whispered. "By the Cavaliere Bernini."
It was the image of a woman in furred robes and spreading fraise, her hand
lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in
the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned
shrine. Her face was hidden, and I wondered whether it were grief or
gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no
living prayer joined her marble invocation. I followed my guide down the
tribune steps, impatient to see what mystic version of such terrestrial
graces the ingenious artist had found--the Cavaliere was master of such
arts. The Duchess's attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs
fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I saw how
admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope
of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face--it was a
frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human
countenance....
The old man crossed himself and shuffled his feet on the marble.
"The Duchess Violante," he repeated.
"The same as in the picture?"
"Eh--the same."
"But the face--what does it mean?"
He shrugged his shoulders and turned deaf eyes on me. Then he shot a glance
round the sepulchral place, clutched my sleeve and said, close to my ear:
"It was not always so."
"What was not?"
"The face--so terrible."
"The Duchess's face?"
"The statue's. It changed after--"
"After?"
"It was put here."
"The statue's face _changed_--?"
He mistook my bewilderment for incredulity and his confidential finger
dropped from my sleeve. "Eh, that's the story. I tell what I've heard. What
do I know?" He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. "This is a bad
place to stay in--no one comes here. It's too cold. But the gentleman said,
_I must see everything_!"
I let the _lire_ sound. "So I must--and hear everything. This story,
now--from whom did you have it?"
His hand stole back. "One that saw it, by God!"
"That saw it?"
"My grandmother, then. I'm a very old man."
"Your grandmother? Your grandmother was--?"
"The Duchess's serving girl, with respect to you."
"Your grandmother? Two hundred years ago?"
"Is it too long ago? That's as God pleases. I am a very old man and she
was a very old woman when I was born. When she died she was as black as a
miraculous Virgin and her breath whistled like the wind in a keyhole. She
told me the story when I was a little boy. She told it to me out there in
the garden, on a bench by the fish-pond, one summer night of the year she
died. It must be true, for I can show you the very bench we sat on...."
III
Noon lay heavier on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale
exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watchers
by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames and the
bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of
dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, a yellow marble slab above rotting
secrets. The villa looked across it, composed as a dead face, with the
cypresses flanking it for candles....
IV
"Impossible, you say, that my mother's mother should have been the
Duchess's maid? What do I know? It is so long since anything has happened
here that the old things seem nearer, perhaps, than to those who live in
cities.... But how else did she know about the statue then? Answer me that,
sir! That she saw with her eyes, I can swear to, and never smiled again,
so she told me, till they put her first child in her arms ... for she was
taken to wife by the steward's son, Antonio, the same who had carried
the letters.... But where am I? Ah, well ... she was a mere slip, you
understand, my grandmother, when the Duchess died, a niece of the upper
maid, Nencia, and suffered about the Duchess because of her pranks and the
funny songs she knew. It's possible, you think, she may have heard from
others what she afterward fancied she had seen herself? How that is, it's
not for an unlettered man to say; though indeed I myself seem to have seen
many of the things she told me. This is a strange place. No one comes here,
nothing changes, and the old memories stand up as distinct as the statues
in the garden....
"It began the summer after they came back from the Brenta. Duke Ercole had
married the lady from Venice, you must know; it was a gay city, then, I'm
told, with laughter and music on the water, and the days slipped by like
boats running with the tide. Well, to humor her he took her back the first
autumn to the Brenta. Her father, it appears, had a grand palace there,
with such gardens, bowling-alleys, grottoes and casinos as never were;
gondolas bobbing at the water-gates, a stable full of gilt coaches, a
theatre full of players, and kitchens and offices full of cooks and
lackeys to serve up chocolate all day long to the fine ladies in masks
and furbelows, with their pet dogs and their blackamoors and their
_abates_. Eh! I know it all as if I'd been there, for Nencia, you see,
my grandmother's aunt, travelled with the Duchess, and came back with her
eyes round as platters, and not a word to say for the rest of the year to
any of the lads who'd courted her here in Vicenza.
"What happened there I don't know--my grandmother could never get at
the rights of it, for Nencia was mute as a fish where her lady was
concerned--but when they came back to Vicenza the Duke ordered the villa
set in order; and in the spring he brought the Duchess here and left her.
She looked happy enough, my grandmother said, and seemed no object for
pity. Perhaps, after all, it was better than being shut up in Vicenza,
in the tall painted rooms where priests came and went as softly as cats
prowling for birds, and the Duke was forever closeted in his library,
talking with learned men. The Duke was a scholar; you noticed he was
painted with a book? Well, those that can read 'em make out that they're
full of wonderful things; as a man that's been to a fair across the
mountains will always tell his people at home it was beyond anything
_they'll_ ever see. As for the Duchess, she was all for music,
play-acting and young company. The Duke was a silent man, stepping quietly,
with his eyes down, as though he'd just come from confession; when the
Duchess's lap-dog yapped at his heels he danced like a man in a swarm of
hornets; when the Duchess laughed he winced as if you'd drawn a diamond
across a window-pane. And the Duchess was always laughing.
"When she first came to the villa she was very busy laying out the gardens,
designing grottoes, planting groves and planning all manner of agreeable
surprises in the way of water-jets that drenched you unexpectedly, and
hermits in caves, and wild men that jumped at you out of thickets. She had
a very pretty taste in such matters, but after a while she tired of it, and
there being no one for her to talk to but her maids and the chaplain--a
clumsy man deep in his books--why, she would have strolling players out
from Vicenza, mountebanks and fortune-tellers from the market-place,
travelling doctors and astrologers, and all manner of trained animals.
Still it could be seen that the poor lady pined for company, and her
waiting women, who loved her, were glad when the Cavaliere Ascanio, the
Duke's cousin, came to live at the vineyard across the valley--you see
the pinkish house over there in the mulberries, with a red roof and a
pigeon-cote?
"The Cavaliere Ascanio was a cadet of one of the great Venetian houses,
_pezzi grossi_ of the Golden Book. He had been' meant for the Church,
I believe, but what! he set fighting above praying and cast in his lot with
the captain of the Duke of Mantua's _bravi_, himself a Venetian of
good standing, but a little at odds with the law. Well, the next I know,
the Cavaliere was in Venice again, perhaps not in good odor on account of
his connection with the gentleman I speak of. Some say he tried to carry
off a nun from the convent of Santa Croce; how that may be I can't say; but
my grandmother declared he had enemies there, and the end of it was that on
some pretext or other the Ten banished him to Vicenza. There, of course,
the Duke, being his kinsman, had to show him a civil face; and that was how
he first came to the villa.
"He was a fine young man, beautiful as a Saint Sebastian, a rare musician,
who sang his own songs to the lute in a way that used to make my
grandmother's heart melt and run through her body like mulled wine. He
had a good word for everybody, too, and was always dressed in the French
fashion, and smelt as sweet as a bean-field; and every soul about the place
welcomed the sight of him.
"Well, the Duchess, it seemed, welcomed it too; youth will have youth,
and laughter turns to laughter; and the two matched each other like the
candlesticks on an altar. The Duchess--you've seen her portrait--but to
hear my grandmother, sir, it no more approached her than a weed comes up to
a rose. The Cavaliere, indeed, as became a poet, paragoned her in his song
to all the pagan goddesses of antiquity; and doubtless these were finer
to look at than mere women; but so, it seemed, was she; for, to believe
my grandmother, she made other women look no more than the big French
fashion-doll that used to be shown on Ascension days in the Piazza. She
was one, at any rate, that needed no outlandish finery to beautify her;
whatever dress she wore became her as feathers fit the bird; and her hair
didn't get its color by bleaching on the housetop. It glittered of itself
like the threads in an Easter chasuble, and her skin was whiter than fine
wheaten bread and her mouth as sweet as a ripe fig....
"Well, sir, you could no more keep them apart than the bees and the
lavender. They were always together, singing, bowling, playing cup and
ball, walking in the gardens, visiting the aviaries and petting her grace's
trick-dogs and monkeys. The Duchess was as gay as a foal, always playing
pranks and laughing, tricking out her animals like comedians, disguising
herself as a peasant or a nun (you should have seen her one day pass
herself off to the chaplain as a mendicant sister), or teaching the lads
and girls of the vineyards to dance and sing madrigals together. The
Cavaliere had a singular ingenuity in planning such entertainments and the
days were hardly long enough for their diversions. But toward the end of
the summer the Duchess fell quiet and would hear only sad music, and the
two sat much together in the gazebo at the end of the garden. It was there
the Duke found them one day when he drove out from Vicenza in his gilt
coach. He came but once or twice a year to the villa, and it was, as my
grandmother said, just a part of her poor lady's ill-luck to be wearing
that day the Venetian habit, which uncovered the shoulders in a way the
Duke always scowled at, and her curls loose and powdered with gold. Well,
the three drank chocolate in the gazebo, and what happened no one knew,
except that the Duke, on taking leave, gave his cousin a seat in his
carriage; but the Cavaliere never returned.
"Winter approaching, and the poor lady thus finding herself once more
alone, it was surmised among her women that she must fall into a deeper
depression of spirits. But far from this being the case, she displayed such
cheerfulness and equanimity of humor that my grandmother, for one, was
half-vexed with her for giving no more thought to the poor young man who,
all this time, was eating his heart out in the house across the valley. It
is true she quitted her gold-laced gowns and wore a veil over her head; but
Nencia would have it she looked the lovelier for the change and so gave the
Duke greater displeasure. Certain it is that the Duke drove out oftener to
the villa, and though he found his lady always engaged in some innocent
pursuit, such as embroidery or music, or playing games with her young
women, yet he always went away with a sour look and a whispered word to
the chaplain. Now as to the chaplain, my grandmother owned there had been
a time when her grace had not handled him over-wisely. For, according to
Nencia, it seems that his reverence, who seldom approached the Duchess,
being buried in his library like a mouse in a cheese--well, one day he made
bold to appeal to her for a sum of money, a large sum, Nencia said, to buy
certain tall books, a chest full of them, that a foreign pedlar had brought
him; whereupon the Duchess, who could never abide a book, breaks out at
him with a laugh and a flash of her old spirit--'Holy Mother of God, must
I have more books about me? I was nearly smothered with them in the first
year of my marriage;' and the chaplain turning red at the affront, she
added: 'You may buy them and welcome, my good chaplain, if you can find
the money; but as for me, I am yet seeking a way to pay for my turquoise
necklace, and the statue of Daphne at the end of the bowling-green, and
the Indian parrot that my black boy brought me last Michaelmas from the
Bohemians--so you see I've no money to waste on trifles;' and as he backs
out awkwardly she tosses at him over her shoulder: 'You should pray to
Saint Blandina to open the Duke's pocket!' to which he returned, very
quietly, 'Your excellency's suggestion is an admirable one, and I have
already entreated that blessed martyr to open the Duke's understanding.'
"Thereat, Nencia said (who was standing by), the Duchess flushed
wonderfully red and waved him out of the room; and then 'Quick!' she cried
to my grandmother (who was too glad to run on such errands), 'Call me
Antonio, the gardener's boy, to the box-garden; I've a word to say to him
about the new clove-carnations....'
"Now I may not have told you, sir, that in the crypt under the chapel there
has stood, for more generations than a man can count, a stone coffin
containing a thighbone of the blessed Saint Blandina of Lyons, a relic
offered, I've been told, by some great Duke of France to one of our own
dukes when they fought the Turk together; and the object, ever since, of
particular veneration in this illustrious family. Now, since the Duchess
had been left to herself, it was observed she affected a fervent devotion
to this relic, praying often in the chapel and even causing the stone slab
that covered the entrance to the crypt to be replaced by a wooden one,
that she might at will descend and kneel by the coffin. This was matter of
edification to all the household and should have been peculiarly pleasing
to the chaplain; but, with respect to you, he was the kind of man who
brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.
"However that may be, the Duchess, when she dismissed him, was seen running
to the garden, where she talked earnestly with the boy Antonio about the
new clove-carnations; and the rest of the day she sat indoors and played
sweetly on the virginal. Now Nencia always had it in mind that her grace
had made a mistake in refusing that request of the chaplain's; but she said
nothing, for to talk reason to the Duchess was of no more use than praying
for rain in a drought.
"Winter came early that year, there was snow on the hills by All Souls,
the wind stripped the gardens, and the lemon-trees were nipped in the
lemon-house. The Duchess kept her room in this black season, sitting over
the fire, embroidering, reading books of devotion (which was a thing she
had never done) and praying frequently in the chapel. As for the chaplain,
it was a place he never set foot in but to say mass in the morning,
with the Duchess overhead in the tribune, and the servants aching with
rheumatism on the marble floor. The chaplain himself hated the cold, and
galloped through the mass like a man with witches after him. The rest of
the day he spent in his library, over a brazier, with his eternal books....
"You'll wonder, sir, if I'm ever to get to the gist of the story; and I've
gone slowly, I own, for fear of what's coming. Well, the winter was long
and hard. When it fell cold the Duke ceased to come out from Vicenza,
and not a soul had the Duchess to speak to but her maid-servants and the
gardeners about the place. Yet it was wonderful, my grandmother said, how
she kept her brave colors and her spirits; only it was remarked that she
prayed longer in the chapel, where a brazier was kept burning for her all
day. When the young are denied their natural pleasures they turn often
enough to religion; and it was a mercy, as my grandmother said, that she,
who had scarce a live sinner to speak to, should take such comfort in a
dead saint.
"My grandmother seldom saw her that winter, for though she showed a brave
front to all she kept more and more to herself, choosing to have only
Nencia about her and dismissing even her when she went to pray. For
her devotion had that mark of true piety, that she wished it not to be
observed; so that Nencia had strict orders, on the chaplain's approach, to
warn her mistress if she happened to be in prayer.
"Well, the winter passed, and spring was well forward, when my grandmother
one evening had a bad fright. That it was her own fault I won't deny, for
she'd been down the lime-walk with Antonio when her aunt fancied her to be
stitching in her chamber; and seeing a sudden light in Nencia's window, she
took fright lest her disobedience be found out, and ran up quickly through
the laurel-grove to the house. Her way lay by the chapel, and as she crept
past it, meaning to slip in through the scullery, and groping her way, for
the dark had fallen and the moon was scarce up, she heard a crash close
behind her, as though someone had dropped from a window of the chapel. The
young fool's heart turned over, but she looked round as she ran, and there,
sure enough, was a man scuttling across the terrace; and as he doubled
the corner of the house my grandmother swore she caught the whisk of the
chaplain's skirts. Now that was a strange thing, certainly; for why should
the chaplain be getting out of the chapel window when he might have passed
through the door? For you may have noticed, sir, there's a door leads from
the chapel into the saloon on the ground floor; the only other way out
being through the Duchess's tribune.
"Well, my grandmother turned the matter over, and next time she met Antonio
in the lime-walk (which, by reason of her fright, was not for some days)
she laid before him what had happened; but to her surprise he only laughed
and said, 'You little simpleton, he wasn't getting out of the window, he
was trying to look in'; and not another word could she get from him.
"So the season moved on to Easter, and news came the Duke had gone to Rome
for that holy festivity. His comings and goings made no change at the
villa, and yet there was no one there but felt easier to think his yellow
face was on the far side of the Apennines, unless perhaps it was the
chaplain.
"Well, it was one day in May that the Duchess, who had walked long with
Nencia on the terrace, rejoicing at the sweetness of the prospect and the
pleasant scent of the gilly-flowers in the stone vases, the Duchess toward
midday withdrew to her rooms, giving orders that her dinner should be
served in her bed-chamber. My grandmother helped to carry in the dishes,
and observed, she said, the singular beauty of the Duchess, who in honor
of the fine weather had put on a gown of shot-silver and hung her bare
shoulders with pearls, so that she looked fit to dance at court with an
emperor. She had ordered, too, a rare repast for a lady that heeded so
little what she ate--jellies, game-pasties, fruits in syrup, spiced cakes
and a flagon of Greek wine; and she nodded and clapped her hands as the
women set it before her, saying again and again, 'I shall eat well to-day.'
"But presently another mood seized her; she turned from the table, called
for her rosary, and said to Nencia: 'The fine weather has made me neglect
my devotions. I must say a litany before I dine.'
"She ordered the women out and barred the door, as her custom was; and
Nencia and my grandmother went down-stairs to work in the linen-room.
"Now the linen-room gives on the court-yard, and suddenly my grandmother
saw a strange sight approaching. First up the avenue came the Duke's
carriage (whom all thought to be in Rome), and after it, drawn by a long
string of mules and oxen, a cart carrying what looked like a kneeling
figure wrapped in death-clothes. The strangeness of it struck the girl dumb
and the Duke's coach was at the door before she had the wit to cry out that
it was coming. Nencia, when she saw it, went white and ran out of the room.
My grandmother followed, scared by her face, and the two fled along the
corridor to the chapel. On the way they met the chaplain, deep in a book,
who asked in surprise where they were running, and when they said, to
announce the Duke's arrival, he fell into such astonishment and asked them
so many questions and uttered such ohs and ahs, that by the time he let
them by the Duke was at their heels. Nencia reached the chapel-door first
and cried out that the Duke was coming; and before she had a reply he was
at her side, with the chaplain following.
"A moment later the door opened and there stood the Duchess. She held her
rosary in one hand and had drawn a scarf over her shoulders; but they shone
through it like the moon in a mist, and her countenance sparkled with
beauty.
"The Duke took her hand with a bow. 'Madam,' he said, 'I could have had no
greater happiness than thus to surprise you at your devotions.'
"'My own happiness,' she replied, 'would have been greater had your
excellency prolonged it by giving me notice of your arrival.'
"'Had you expected me, Madam,' said he, 'your appearance could scarcely
have been more fitted to the occasion. Few ladies of your youth and beauty
array themselves to venerate a saint as they would to welcome a lover.'
"'Sir,' she answered, 'having never enjoyed the latter opportunity, I am
constrained to make the most of the former.--What's that?' she cried,
falling back, and the rosary dropped from her hand.
"There was a loud noise at the other end of the saloon, as of a heavy
object being dragged down the passage; and presently a dozen men were seen
haling across the threshold the shrouded thing from the oxcart. The Duke
waved his hand toward it. 'That,' said he, 'Madam, is a tribute to your
extraordinary piety. I have heard with peculiar satisfaction of your
devotion to the blessed relics in this chapel, and to commemorate a zeal
which neither the rigors of winter nor the sultriness of summer could abate
I have ordered a sculptured image of you, marvellously executed by the
Cavaliere Bernini, to be placed before the altar over the entrance to the
crypt.'
"The Duchess, who had grown pale, nevertheless smiled playfully at this.
'As to commemorating my piety," she said, 'I recognize there one of your
excellency's pleasantries--'
"'A pleasantry?' the Duke interrupted; and he made a sign to the men, who
had now reached the threshold of the chapel. In an instant the wrappings
fell from the figure, and there knelt the Duchess to the life. A cry of
wonder rose from all, but the Duchess herself stood whiter than the marble.
"'You will see,' says the Duke, 'this is no pleasantry, but a triumph
of the incomparable Bernini's chisel. The likeness was done from your
miniature portrait by the divine Elisabetta Sirani, which I sent to the
master some six months ago, with what results all must admire.'
"'Six months!' cried the Duchess, and seemed about to fall; but his
excellency caught her by the hand.
"'Nothing,' he said, 'could better please me than the excessive emotion you
display, for true piety is ever modest, and your thanks could not take a
form that better became you. And now,' says he to the men, 'let the image
be put in place.'
"By this, life seemed to have returned to the Duchess, and she answered him
with a deep reverence. 'That I should be overcome by so unexpected a grace,
your excellency admits to be natural; but what honors you accord it is my
privilege to accept, and I entreat only that in mercy to my modesty the
image be placed in the remotest part of the chapel.'
"At that the Duke darkened. 'What! You would have this masterpiece of a
renowned chisel, which, I disguise not, cost me the price of a good
vineyard in gold pieces, you would have it thrust out of sight like the
work of a village stonecutter?'
"'It is my semblance, not the sculptor's work, I desire to conceal.'
"'It you are fit for my house, Madam, you are fit for God's, and entitled
to the place of honor in both. Bring the statue forward, you dawdlers!' he
called out to the men.
"The Duchess fell back submissively. 'You are right, sir, as always; but I
would at least have the image stand on the left of the altar, that, looking
up, it may behold your excellency's seat in the tribune.'
"'A pretty thought, Madam, for which I thank you; but I design before long
to put my companion image on the other side of the altar; and the wife's
place, as you know, is at her husband's right hand.'
"'True, my lord--but, again, if my poor presentment is to have the
unmerited honor of kneeling beside yours, why not place both before the
altar, where it is our habit to pray in life?'
"'And where, Madam, should we kneel if they took our places? Besides,' says
the Duke, still speaking very blandly, 'I have a more particular purpose
in placing your image over the entrance to the crypt; for not only would I
thereby mark your special devotion to the blessed saint who rests there,
but, by sealing up the opening in the pavement, would assure the perpetual
preservation of that holy martyr's bones, which hitherto have been too
thoughtlessly exposed to sacrilegious attempts.'
"'What attempts, my lord?' cries the Duchess. 'No one enters this chapel
without my leave.'
"'So I have understood, and can well believe from what I have learned of
your piety; yet at night a malefactor might break in through a window,
Madam, and your excellency not know it.'
"'I'm a light sleeper,' said the Duchess.
"The Duke looked at her gravely. 'Indeed?' said he. 'A bad sign at your
age. I must see that you are provided with a sleeping-draught.'
"The Duchess's eyes filled. 'You would deprive me, then, of the consolation
of visiting those venerable relics?'
"'I would have you keep eternal guard over them, knowing no one to whose
care they may more fittingly be entrusted.'
"By this the image was brought close to the wooden slab that covered the
entrance to the crypt, when the Duchess, springing forward, placed herself
in the way.
"'Sir, let the statue be put in place to-morrow, and suffer me, to-night,
to say a last prayer beside those holy bones.'
"The Duke stepped instantly to her side. 'Well thought, Madam; I will go
down with you now, and we will pray together.'
"'Sir, your long absences have, alas! given me the habit of solitary
devotion, and I confess that any presence is distracting.'
"'Madam, I accept your rebuke. Hitherto, it is true, the duties of my
station have constrained me to long absences; but henceforward I remain
with you while you live. Shall we go down into the crypt together?"
"'No; for I fear for your excellency's ague. The air there is excessively
damp.'
"'The more reason you should no longer be exposed to it; and to prevent the
intemperance of your zeal I will at once make the place inaccessible.'
"The Duchess at this fell on her knees on the slab, weeping excessively and
lifting her hands to heaven.
"'Oh,' she cried, 'you are cruel, sir, to deprive me of access to the
sacred relics that have enabled me to support with resignation the solitude
to which your excellency's duties have condemned me; and if prayer and
meditation give me any authority to pronounce on such matters, suffer me to
warn you, sir, that I fear the blessed Saint Blandina will punish us for
thus abandoning her venerable remains!'
"The Duke at this seemed to pause, for he was a pious man, and my
grandmother thought she saw him exchange a glance with the chaplain; who,
stepping timidly forward, with his eyes on the ground, said, 'There is
indeed much wisdom in her excellency's words, but I would suggest, sir,
that her pious wish might be met, and the saint more conspicuously honored,
by transferring the relics from the crypt to a place beneath the altar.'
"'True!' cried the Duke, 'and it shall be done at once.'
"But thereat the Duchess rose to her feet with a terrible look.
"'No,' she cried, 'by the body of God! For it shall not be said that, after
your excellency has chosen to deny every request I addressed to him, I owe
his consent to the solicitation of another!'
"The chaplain turned red and the Duke yellow, and for a moment neither
spoke.
"Then the Duke said, 'Here are words enough, Madam. Do you wish the relics
brought up from the crypt?'
"'I wish nothing that I owe to another's intervention!'
"'Put the image in place then,' says the Duke furiously; and handed her
grace to a chair.
"She sat there, my grandmother said, straight as an arrow, her hands
locked, her head high, her eyes on the Duke, while the statue was dragged
to its place; then she stood up and turned away. As she passed by Nencia,
'Call me Antonio,' she whispered; but before the words were out of her
mouth the Duke stepped between them.
"'Madam,' says he, all smiles now, 'I have travelled straight from Rome to
bring you the sooner this proof of my esteem. I lay last night at Monselice
and have been on the road since daybreak. Will you not invite me to
supper?'
"'Surely, my lord,' said the Duchess. 'It shall be laid in the
dining-parlor within the hour.'
"'Why not in your chamber and at once, Madam? Since I believe it is your
custom to sup there.'
"'In my chamber?' says the Duchess, in disorder.
"'Have you anything against it?' he asked.
"'Assuredly not, sir, if you will give me time to prepare myself.'
"'I will wait in your cabinet,' said the Duke.
"At that, said my grandmother, the Duchess gave one look, as the souls in
hell may have looked when the gates closed on our Lord; then she called
Nencia and passed to her chamber.
"What happened there my grandmother could never learn, but that the
Duchess, in great haste, dressed herself with extraordinary splendor,
powdering her hair with gold, painting her face and bosom, and covering
herself with jewels till she shone like our Lady of Loreto; and hardly
were these preparations complete when the Duke entered from the cabinet,
followed by the servants carrying supper. Thereupon the Duchess dismissed
Nencia, and what follows my grandmother learned from a pantry-lad who
brought up the dishes and waited in the cabinet; for only the Duke's
body-servant entered the bed-chamber.
"Well, according to this boy, sir, who was looking and listening with his
whole body, as it were, because he had never before been suffered so near
the Duchess, it appears that the noble couple sat down in great good humor,
the Duchess playfully reproving her husband for his long absence, while the
Duke swore that to look so beautiful was the best way of punishing him.
In this tone the talk continued, with such gay sallies on the part of the
Duchess, such tender advances on the Duke's, that the lad declared they
were for all the world like a pair of lovers courting on a summer's night
in the vineyard; and so it went till the servant brought in the mulled
wine.
"'Ah,' the Duke was saying at that moment, 'this agreeable evening repays
me for the many dull ones I have spent away from you; nor do I remember
to have enjoyed such laughter since the afternoon last year when we drank
chocolate in the gazebo with my cousin Ascanio. And that reminds me,' he
said, 'is my cousin in good health?'
"'I have no reports of it,' says the Duchess. 'But your excellency should
taste these figs stewed in malmsey--'
"'I am in the mood to taste whatever you offer,' said he; and as she helped
him to the figs he added, 'If my enjoyment were not complete as it is,
I could almost wish my cousin Ascanio were with us. The fellow is rare
good company at supper. What do you say, Madam? I hear he's still in the
country; shall we send for him to join us?'
"'Ah,' said the Duchess, with a sigh and a languishing look, 'I see your
excellency wearies of me already.'
"'I, Madam? Ascanio is a capital good fellow, but to my mind his chief
merit at this moment is his absence. It inclines me so tenderly to him
that, by God, I could empty a glass to his good health.'
"With that the Duke caught up his goblet and signed to the servant to fill
the Duchess's.
"'Here's to the cousin,' he cried, standing, 'who has the good taste to
stay away when he's not wanted. I drink to his very long life--and you,
Madam?'
"At this the Duchess, who had sat staring at him with a changed face, rose
also and lifted her glass to her lips.
"'And I to his happy death,' says she in a wild voice; and as she spoke the
empty goblet dropped from her hand and she fell face down on the floor.
"The Duke shouted to her women that she had swooned, and they came and
lifted her to the bed.... She suffered horribly all night, Nencia said,
twisting herself like a heretic at the stake, but without a word escaping
her. The Duke watched by her, and toward daylight sent for the chaplain;
but by this she was unconscious and, her teeth being locked, our Lord's
body could not be passed through them.
* * * * *
"The Duke announced to his relations that his lady had died after partaking
too freely of spiced wine and an omelet of carp's roe, at a supper she had
prepared in honor of his return; and the next year he brought home a new
Duchess, who gave him a son and five daughters...."
V
The sky had turned to a steel gray, against which the villa stood out
sallow and inscrutable. A wind strayed through the gardens, loosening here
and there a yellow leaf from the sycamores; and the hills across the valley
were purple as thunder-clouds.
* * * * *
"And the statue--?" I asked.
"Ah, the statue. Well, sir, this is what my grandmother told me, here on
this very bench where we're sitting. The poor child, who worshipped the
Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress,
spent a night of horror, you may fancy, shut out from her lady's room,
hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her
corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke's lean face in
the door, and the chaplain skulking in the antechamber with his eyes on
his breviary. No one minded her that night or the next morning; and toward
dusk, when it became known the Duchess was no more, the poor girl felt the
pious wish to say a prayer for her dead mistress. She crept to the chapel
and stole in unobserved. The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced
she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that
its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you
know--and the moaning seemed to come from its lips. My grandmother turned
cold, but something, she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking
out, and she turned and ran from the place. In the passage she fell in a
swoon; and when she came to her senses, in her own chamber, she heard that
the Duke had locked the chapel door and forbidden any to set foot there....
The place was never opened again till the Duke died, some ten years later;
and then it was that the other servants, going in with the new heir,
saw for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her
bosom...."
"And the crypt?" I asked. "Has it never been opened?"
"Heaven forbid, sir!" cried the old man, crossing himself. "Was it not the
Duchess's express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?"
THE ANGEL AT THE GRAVE
The House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village street,
in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic protest against
old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness. This candid exposure to
the public eye is more probably a result of the gregariousness which, in
the New England bosom, oddly coexists with a shrinking from direct social
contact; most of the inmates of such houses preferring that furtive
intercourse which is the result of observations through shuttered windows
and a categorical acquaintance with the neighboring clothes-lines. The
House, however, faced its public with a difference. For sixty years it had
written itself with a capital letter, had self-consciously squared itself
in the eye of an admiring nation. The most searching inroads of village
intimacy hardly counted in a household that opened on the universe; and a
lady whose door-bell was at any moment liable to be rung by visitors from
London or Vienna was not likely to flutter up-stairs when she observed a
neighbor "stepping over."
The solitary inmate of the Anson House owed this induration of the social
texture to the most conspicuous accident in her annals: the fact that she
was the only granddaughter of the great Orestes Anson. She had been born,
as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label;
the first foundations of her consciousness being built on the rock of
her grandfather's celebrity. To a little girl who acquires her earliest
knowledge of literature through a _Reader_ embellished with fragments
of her ancestor's prose, that personage necessarily fills an heroic space
in the foreground of life. To communicate with one's past through the
impressive medium of print, to have, as it were, a footing in every library
in the country, and an acknowledged kinship with that world-diffused clan,
the descendants of the great, was to be pledged to a standard of manners
that amazingly simplified the lesser relations of life. The village street
on which Paulina Anson's youth looked out led to all the capitals of
Europe; and over the roads of intercommunication unseen caravans bore back
to the elm-shaded House the tribute of an admiring world.
Fate seemed to have taken a direct share in fitting Paulina for her part as
the custodian of this historic dwelling. It had long been secretly regarded
as a "visitation" by the great man's family that he had left no son and
that his daughters were not "intellectual." The ladies themselves were the
first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the
gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for
their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their
congenital incapacity to understand what he had written. Laura, who had her
moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much
easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she
could recite, with feeling, portions of _The Culprit Fay_ and of the
poems of Mrs. Hemans; and Phoebe, who was more conspicuous for memory than
imagination, kept an album filled with "selections." But the great man
was a philosopher; and to both daughters respiration was difficult on the
cloudy heights of metaphysic. The situation would have been intolerable
but for the fact that, while Phoebe and Laura were still at school,
their father's fame had passed from the open ground of conjecture to the
chill privacy of certitude. Dr. Anson had in fact achieved one of those
anticipated immortalities not uncommon at a time when people were apt to
base their literary judgments on their emotions, and when to affect plain
food and despise England went a long way toward establishing a man's
intellectual pre-eminence. Thus, when the daughters were called on to
strike a filial attitude about their parent's pedestal, there was little
to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to
which the immobility of worship is not a strain. A legend had by this time
crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest
to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off
his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic. A
great man never draws so near his public as when it has become unnecessary
to read his books and is still interesting to know what he eats for
breakfast.
As recorders of their parent's domestic habits, as pious scavengers of his
waste-paper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled. They always had an
interesting anecdote to impart to the literary pilgrim, and the tact with
which, in later years, they intervened between the public and the growing
inaccessibility of its idol, sent away many an enthusiast satisfied to have
touched the veil before the sanctuary. Still it was felt, especially by old
Mrs. Anson, who survived her husband for some years, that Phoebe and Laura
were not worthy of their privileges. There had been a third daughter so
unworthy of hers that she had married a distant cousin, who had taken her
to live in a new Western community where the _Works of Orestes Anson_
had not yet become a part of the civic consciousness; but of this daughter
little was said, and she was tacitly understood to be excluded from the
family heritage of fame. In time, however, it appeared that the traditional
penny with which she had been cut off had been invested to unexpected
advantage; and the interest on it, when she died, returned to the Anson
House in the shape of a granddaughter who was at once felt to be what Mrs.
Anson called a "compensation." It was Mrs. Anson's firm belief that the
remotest operations of nature were governed by the centripetal force of her
husband's greatness and that Paulina's exceptional intelligence could be
explained only on the ground that she was designed to act as the guardian
of the family temple.
The House, by the time Paulina came to live in it, had already acquired
the publicity of a place of worship; not the perfumed chapel of a romantic
idolatry but the cold clean empty meeting-house of ethical enthusiasms. The
ladies lived on its outskirts, as it were, in cells that left the central
fane undisturbed. The very position of the furniture had come to have a
ritual significance: the sparse ornaments were the offerings of kindred
intellects, the steel engravings by Raphael Morghen marked the Via Sacra
of a European tour, and the black-walnut desk with its bronze inkstand
modelled on the Pantheon was the altar of this bleak temple of thought.
To a child compact of enthusiasms, and accustomed to pasture them on the
scanty herbage of a new social soil, the atmosphere of the old house was
full of floating nourishment. In the compressed perspective of Paulina's
outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white
portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive
to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw "residence" of a
raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their panelled
walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors
and of ringleted "females" in crayon, furnished the child with the historic
scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the
past. To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have
suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and
sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the
coloring-matter, and Paulina's brimmed with the richest hues.
Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her. She had her
confused out-reachings toward other centres of sensation, her vague
intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady
pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her
neck to the yoke. Vanity had a share in her subjugation; for it had early
been discovered that she was the only person in the family who could read
her grandfather's works. The fact that she had perused them with delight at
an age when (even presupposing a metaphysical bias) it was impossible for
her to understand them, seemed to her aunts and grandmother sure evidence
of predestination. Paulina was to be the interpreter of the oracle, and the
philosophic fumes so vertiginous to meaner minds would throw her into the
needed condition of clairvoyance. Nothing could have been more genuine than
the emotion on which this theory was based. Paulina, in fact, delighted in
her grandfather's writings. His sonorous periods, his mystic vocabulary,
his bold flights into the rarefied air of the abstract, were thrilling to
a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions. This purely verbal pleasure
was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning
from the rhetorical board. What could have been more stimulating than
to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this
Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina's opinions had reached the stage when
ossification sets in their form was fatally predetermined.
The fact that Dr. Anson had died and that his apotheosis had taken
place before his young priestess's induction to the temple, made her
ministrations easier and more inspiring. There were no little personal
traits--such as the great man's manner of helping himself to salt, or the
guttural cluck that started the wheels of speech--to distract the eye
of young veneration from the central fact of his divinity. A man whom
one knows only through a crayon portrait and a dozen yellowing, tomes on
free-will and intuition is at least secure from the belittling effects of
intimacy.
Paulina thus grew up in a world readjusted to the fact of her grandfather's
greatness; and as each organism draws from its surroundings the kind of
nourishment most needful to its growth, so from this somewhat colorless
conception she absorbed warmth, brightness and variety. Paulina was the
type of woman who transmutes thought into sensation and nurses a theory in
her bosom like a child.
In due course Mrs. Anson "passed away"--no one died in the Anson
vocabulary--and Paulina became more than ever the foremost figure of the
commemorative group. Laura and Phoebe, content to leave their father's
glory in more competent hands, placidly lapsed into needlework and fiction,
and their niece stepped into immediate prominence as the chief "authority"
on the great man. Historians who were "getting up" the period wrote to
consult her and to borrow documents; ladies with inexplicable yearnings
begged for an interpretation of phrases which had "influenced" them, but
which they had not quite understood; critics applied to her to verify some
doubtful citation or to decide some disputed point in chronology; and the
great tide of thought and investigation kept up a continuous murmur on the
quiet shores of her life.
An explorer of another kind disembarked there one day in the shape
of a young man to whom Paulina was primarily a kissable girl, with an
after-thought in the shape of a grandfather. From the outset it had been
impossible to fix Hewlett Winsloe's attention on Dr. Anson. The young man
behaved with the innocent profanity of infants sporting on a tomb. His
excuse was that he came from New York, a Cimmerian outskirt which survived
in Paulina's geography only because Dr. Anson had gone there once or twice
to lecture. The curious thing was that she should have thought it worth
while to find excuses for young Winsloe. The fact that she did so had not
escaped the attention of the village; but people, after a gasp of awe, said
it was the most natural thing in the world that a girl like Paulina Anson
should think of marrying. It would certainly seem a little odd to see a
man in the House, but young Winsloe would of course understand that the
Doctor's books were not to be disturbed, and that he must go down to the
orchard to smoke--. The village had barely framed this _modus vivendi_
when it was convulsed by the announcement that young Winsloe declined to
live in the House on any terms. Hang going down to the orchard to smoke!
He meant to take his wife to New York. The village drew its breath and
watched.
Did Persephone, snatched from the warm fields of Enna, peer
half-consentingly down the abyss that opened at her feet? Paulina, it must
be owned, hung a moment over the black gulf of temptation. She would have
found it easy to cope with a deliberate disregard of her grandfather's
rights; but young Winsloe's unconsciousness of that shadowy claim was as
much a natural function as the falling of leaves on a grave. His love was
an embodiment of the perpetual renewal which to some tender spirits seems a
crueller process than decay.
On women of Paulina's mould this piety toward implicit demands, toward
the ghosts of dead duties walking unappeased among usurping passions,
has a stronger hold than any tangible bond. People said that she gave up
young Winsloe because her aunts disapproved of her leaving them; but such
disapproval as reached her was an emanation from the walls of the House,
from the bare desk, the faded portraits, the dozen yellowing tomes that no
hand but hers ever lifted from the shelf.
II
After that the House possessed her. As if conscious of its victory, it
imposed a conqueror's claims. It had once been suggested that she should
write a life of her grandfather, and the task from which she had shrunk as
from a too-oppressive privilege now shaped itself into a justification of
her course. In a burst of filial pantheism she tried to lose herself in the
vast ancestral consciousness. Her one refuge from scepticism was a blind
faith in the magnitude and the endurance of the idea to which she had
sacrificed her life, and with a passionate instinct of self-preservation
she labored to fortify her position.
The preparations for the _Life_ led her through by-ways that the most
scrupulous of the previous biographers had left unexplored. She accumulated
her material with a blind animal patience unconscious of fortuitous risks.
The years stretched before her like some vast blank page spread out to
receive the record of her toil; and she had a mystic conviction that she
would not die till her work was accomplished.
The aunts, sustained by no such high purpose, withdrew in turn to their
respective divisions of the Anson "plot," and Paulina remained alone with
her task. She was forty when the book was completed. She had travelled
little in her life, and it had become more and more difficult to her to
leave the House even for a day; but the dread of entrusting her document to
a strange hand made her decide to carry it herself to the publisher. On the
way to Boston she had a sudden vision of the loneliness to which this last
parting condemned her. All her youth, all her dreams, all her renunciations
lay in that neat bundle on her knee. It was not so much her grandfather's
life as her own that she had written; and the knowledge that it would come
back to her in all the glorification of print was of no more help than, to
a mother's grief, the assurance that the lad she must part with will return
with epaulets.
She had naturally addressed herself to the firm which had published her
grandfather's works. Its founder, a personal friend of the philosopher's,
had survived the Olympian group of which he had been a subordinate member,
long enough to bestow his octogenarian approval on Paulina's pious
undertaking. But he had died soon afterward; and Miss Anson found herself
confronted by his grandson, a person with a brisk commercial view of his
trade, who was said to have put "new blood" into the firm.
This gentleman listened attentively, fingering her manuscript as though
literature were a tactile substance; then, with a confidential twist of his
revolving chair, he emitted the verdict: "We ought to have had this ten
years sooner."
Miss Anson took the words as an allusion to the repressed avidity of her
readers. "It has been a long time for the public to wait," she solemnly
assented.
The publisher smiled. "They haven't waited," he said.
She looked at him strangely. "Haven't waited?"
"No--they've gone off; taken another train. Literature's like a big
railway-station now, you know: there's a train starting every minute.
People are not going to hang round the waiting-room. If they can't get
to a place when they want to they go somewhere else."
The application of this parable cost Miss Anson several minutes of
throbbing silence. At length she said: "Then I am to understand that the
public is no longer interested in--in my grandfather?" She felt as though
heaven must blast the lips that risked such a conjecture.
"Well, it's this way. He's a name still, of course. People don't exactly
want to be caught not knowing who he is; but they don't want to spend
two dollars finding out, when they can look him up for nothing in any
biographical dictionary."
Miss Anson's world reeled. She felt herself adrift among mysterious forces,
and no more thought of prolonging the discussion than of opposing an
earthquake with argument. She went home carrying the manuscript like a
wounded thing. On the return journey she found herself travelling straight
toward a fact that had lurked for months in the background of her life,
and that now seemed to await her on the very threshold: the fact that
fewer visitors came to the House. She owned to herself that for the last
four or five years the number had steadily diminished. Engrossed in her
work, she had noted the change only to feel thankful that she had fewer
interruptions. There had been a time when, at the travelling season, the
bell rang continuously, and the ladies of the House lived in a chronic
state of "best silks" and expectancy. It would have been impossible then to
carry on any consecutive work; and she now saw that the silence which had
gathered round her task had been the hush of death.
Not of _his_ death! The very walls cried out against the implication.
It was the world's enthusiasm, the world's faith, the world's loyalty that
had died. A corrupt generation that had turned aside to worship the brazen
serpent. Her heart yearned with a prophetic passion over the lost sheep
straying in the wilderness. But all great glories had their interlunar
period; and in due time her grandfather would once more flash full-orbed
upon a darkling world.
The few friends to whom she confided her adventure reminded her with
tender indignation that there were other publishers less subject to the
fluctuations of the market; but much as she had braved for her grandfather
she could not again brave that particular probation. She found herself,
in fact, incapable of any immediate effort. She had lost her way in a
labyrinth of conjecture where her worst dread was that she might put her
hand upon the clue.
She locked up the manuscript and sat down to wait. If a pilgrim had come
just then the priestess would have fallen on his neck; but she continued
to celebrate her rites alone. It was a double solitude; for she had always
thought a great deal more of the people who came to see the House than of
the people who came to see her. She fancied that the neighbors kept a keen
eye on the path to the House; and there were days when the figure of a
stranger strolling past the gate seemed to focus upon her the scorching
sympathies of the village. For a time she thought of travelling; of going
to Europe, or even to Boston; but to leave the House now would have
seemed like deserting her post. Gradually her scattered energies centred
themselves in the fierce resolve to understand what had happened. She was
not the woman to live long in an unmapped country or to accept as final
her private interpretation of phenomena. Like a traveller in unfamiliar
regions she began to store for future guidance the minutest natural signs.
Unflinchingly she noted the accumulating symptoms of indifference that
marked her grandfather's descent toward posterity. She passed from the
heights on which he had been grouped with the sages of his day to the lower
level where he had come to be "the friend of Emerson," "the correspondent
of Hawthorne," or (later still) "the Dr. Anson" mentioned in their letters.
The change had taken place as slowly and imperceptibly as a natural
process. She could not say that any ruthless hand had stripped the leaves
from the tree: it was simply that, among the evergreen glories of his
group, her grandfather's had proved deciduous.
She had still to ask herself why. If the decay had been a natural process,
was it not the very pledge of renewal? It was easier to find such arguments
than to be convinced by them. Again and again she tried to drug her
solicitude with analogies; but at last she saw that such expedients were
but the expression of a growing incredulity. The best way of proving her
faith in her grandfather was not to be afraid of his critics. She had no
notion where these shadowy antagonists lurked; for she had never heard of
the great man's doctrine being directly combated. Oblique assaults there
must have been, however, Parthian shots at the giant that none dared face;
and she thirsted to close with such assailants. The difficulty was to
find them. She began by re-reading the _Works_; thence she passed to
the writers of the same school, those whose rhetoric bloomed perennial
in _First Readers_ from which her grandfather's prose had long
since faded. Amid that clamor of far-off enthusiasms she detected no
controversial note. The little knot of Olympians held their views in common
with an early-Christian promiscuity. They were continually proclaiming
their admiration for each other, the public joining as chorus in this
guileless antiphon of praise; and she discovered no traitor in their midst.
What then had happened? Was it simply that the main current of thought
had set another way? Then why did the others survive? Why were they still
marked down as tributaries to the philosophic stream? This question carried
her still farther afield, and she pressed on with the passion of a champion
whose reluctance to know the worst might be construed into a doubt of his
cause. At length--slowly but inevitably--an explanation shaped itself.
Death had overtaken the doctrines about which her grandfather had draped
his cloudy rhetoric. They had disintegrated and been re-absorbed, adding
their little pile to the dust drifted about the mute lips of the Sphinx.
The great man's contemporaries had survived not by reason of what they
taught, but of what they were; and he, who had been the mere mask through
which they mouthed their lesson, the instrument on which their tune was
played, lay buried deep among the obsolete tools of thought.
The discovery came to Paulina suddenly. She looked up one evening from her
reading and it stood before her like a ghost. It had entered her life with
stealthy steps, creeping close before she was aware of it. She sat in the
library, among the carefully-tended books and portraits; and it seemed to
her that she had been walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of
dead ideas. She felt a desperate longing to escape into the outer air,
where people toiled and loved, and living sympathies went hand in hand. It
was the sense of wasted labor that oppressed her; of two lives consumed in
that ruthless process that uses generations of effort to build a single
cell. There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather's fruitless
toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice. Each in turn had kept vigil by a
corpse.
III
The bell rang--she remembered it afterward--with a loud thrilling note. It
was what they used to call the "visitor's ring"; not the tentative tinkle
of a neighbor dropping in to borrow a sauce-pan or discuss parochial
incidents, but a decisive summons from the outer world.
Miss Anson put down her knitting and listened. She sat up-stairs now,
making her rheumatism an excuse for avoiding the rooms below. Her interests
had insensibly adjusted themselves to the perspective of her neighbors'
lives, and she wondered--as the bell re-echoed--if it could mean that Mrs.
Heminway's baby had come. Conjecture had time to ripen into certainty, and
she was limping toward the closet where her cloak and bonnet hung, when her
little maid fluttered in with the announcement: "A gentleman to see the
house."
"The _House_?"
"Yes, m'm. I don't know what he means," faltered the messenger, whose
memory did not embrace the period when such announcements were a daily part
of the domestic routine.
Miss Anson glanced at the proffered card. The name it bore--_Mr. George
Corby_--was unknown to her, but the blood rose to her languid cheek.
"Hand me my Mechlin cap, Katy," she said, trembling a little, as she laid
aside her walking stick. She put her cap on before the mirror, with rapid
unsteady touches. "Did you draw up the library blinds?" she breathlessly
asked.
She had gradually built up a wall of commonplace between herself and her
illusions, but at the first summons of the past filial passion swept away
the frail barriers of expediency.
She walked down-stairs so hurriedly that her stick clicked like a girlish
heel; but in the hall she paused, wondering nervously if Katy had put a
match to the fire. The autumn air was cold and she had the reproachful
vision of a visitor with elderly ailments shivering by her inhospitable
hearth. She thought instinctively of the stranger as a survivor of the days
when such a visit was a part of the young enthusiast's itinerary.
The fire was unlit and the room forbiddingly cold; but the figure which, as
Miss Anson entered, turned from a lingering scrutiny of the book-shelves,
was that of a fresh-eyed sanguine youth clearly independent of any
artificial caloric. She stood still a moment, feeling herself the victim of
some anterior impression that made this robust presence an insubstantial
thing; but the young man advanced with an air of genial assurance which
rendered him at once more real and more reminiscent.
"Why this, you know," he exclaimed, "is simply immense!"
The words, which did not immediately present themselves as slang to Miss
Anson's unaccustomed ear, echoed with an odd familiarity through the
academic silence.
"The room, you know, I mean," he explained with a comprehensive gesture.
"These jolly portraits, and the books--that's the old gentleman himself
over the mantelpiece, I suppose?--and the elms outside, and--and the whole
business. I do like a congruous background--don't you?"
His hostess was silent. No one but Hewlett Winsloe had ever spoken of her
grandfather as "the old gentleman."
"It's a hundred times better than I could have hoped," her visitor
continued, with a cheerful disregard of her silence. "The seclusion, the
remoteness, the philosophic atmosphere--there's so little of that kind
of flavor left! I should have simply hated to find that he lived over
a grocery, you know.--I had the deuce of a time finding out where he
_did_ live," he began again, after another glance of parenthetical
enjoyment. "But finally I got on the trail through some old book on Brook
Farm. I was bound I'd get the environment right before I did my article."
Miss Anson, by this time, had recovered sufficient self-possession to seat
herself and assign a chair to her visitor.
"Do I understand," she asked slowly, following his rapid eye about the
room, "that you intend to write an article about my grandfather?"
"That's what I'm here for," Mr. Corby genially responded; "that is, if
you're willing to help me; for I can't get on without your help," he added
with a confident smile.
There was another pause, during which Miss Anson noticed a fleck of dust on
the faded leather of the writing-table and a fresh spot of discoloration in
the right-hand upper corner of Raphael Morghen's "Parnassus."
"Then you believe in him?" she said, looking up. She could not tell what
had prompted her; the words rushed out irresistibly.
"Believe in him?" Corby cried, springing to his feet. "Believe in Orestes
Anson? Why, I believe he's simply the greatest--the most stupendous--the
most phenomenal figure we've got!"
The color rose to Miss Anson's brow. Her heart was beating passionately.
She kept her eyes fixed on the young man's face, as though it might vanish
if she looked away.
"You--you mean to say this in your article?" she asked.
"Say it? Why, the facts will say it," he exulted. "The baldest kind of a
statement would make it clear. When a man is as big as that he doesn't need
a pedestal!"
Miss Anson sighed. "People used to say that when I was young," she
murmured. "But now--"
Her visitor stared. "When you were young? But how did they know--when the
thing hung fire as it did? When the whole edition was thrown back on his
hands?"
"The whole edition--what edition?" It was Miss Anson's turn to stare.
"Why, of his pamphlet--_the_ pamphlet--the one thing that counts, that
survives, that makes him what he is! For heaven's sake," he tragically
adjured her, "don't tell me there isn't a copy of it left!"
Miss Anson was trembling slightly. "I don't think I understand what you
mean," she faltered, less bewildered by his vehemence than by the strange
sense of coming on an unexplored region in the very heart of her dominion.
"Why, his account of the _amphioxus_, of course! You can't mean that
his family didn't know about it--that _you_ don't know about it? I came
across it by the merest accident myself, in a letter of vindication that
he wrote in 1830 to an old scientific paper; but I understood there were
journals--early journals; there must be references to it somewhere in the
'twenties. He must have been at least ten or twelve years ahead of Yarrell;
and he saw the whole significance of it, too--he saw where it led to. As
I understand it, he actually anticipated in his pamphlet Saint Hilaire's
theory of the universal type, and supported the hypothesis by describing
the notochord of the _amphioxus_ as a cartilaginous vertebral column.
The specialists of the day jeered at him, of course, as the specialists in
Goethe's time jeered at the plant-metamorphosis. As far as I can make out,
the anatomists and zoologists were down on Dr. Anson to a man; that was why
his cowardly publishers went back on their bargain. But the pamphlet must
be here somewhere--he writes as though, in his first disappointment, he had
destroyed the whole edition; but surely there must be at least one copy
left?"
His scientific jargon was as bewildering as his slang; and there were even
moments in his discourse when Miss Anson ceased to distinguish between
them; but the suspense with which he continued to gaze on her acted as a
challenge to her scattered thoughts.
"The _amphioxus_," she murmured, half-rising. "It's an animal, isn't
it--a fish? Yes, I think I remember." She sank back with the inward look of
one who retraces some lost line of association.
Gradually the distance cleared, the details started into life. In her
researches for the biography she had patiently followed every ramification
of her subject, and one of these overgrown paths now led her back to
the episode in question. The great Orestes's title of "Doctor" had in
fact not been merely the spontaneous tribute of a national admiration;
he had actually studied medicine in his youth, and his diaries, as his
granddaughter now recalled, showed that he had passed through a brief phase
of anatomical ardor before his attention was diverted to super-sensual
problems. It had indeed seemed to Paulina, as she scanned those early
pages, that they revealed a spontaneity, a freshness of feeling somehow
absent from his later lucubrations--as though this one emotion had reached
him directly, the others through some intervening medium. In the excess of
her commemorative zeal she had even struggled through the unintelligible
pamphlet to which a few lines in the journal had bitterly directed her. But
the subject and the phraseology were alien to her and unconnected with her
conception of the great man's genius; and after a hurried perusal she had
averted her thoughts from the episode as from a revelation of failure.
At length she rose a little unsteadily, supporting herself against the
writing-table. She looked hesitatingly about the room; then she drew a key
from her old-fashioned reticule and unlocked a drawer beneath one of the
book-cases. Young Corby watched her breathlessly. With a tremulous hand she
turned over the dusty documents that seemed to fill the drawer. "Is this
it?" she said, holding out a thin discolored volume.
He seized it with a gasp. "Oh, by George," he said, dropping into the
nearest chair.
She stood observing him strangely as his eye devoured the mouldy pages.
"Is this the only copy left?" he asked at length, looking up for a moment
as a thirsty man lifts his head from his glass.
"I think it must be. I found it long ago, among some old papers that my
aunts were burning up after my grandmother's death. They said it was of no
use--that he'd always meant to destroy the whole edition and that I ought
to respect his wishes. But it was something he had written; to burn it was
like shutting the door against his voice--against something he had once
wished to say, and that nobody had listened to. I wanted him to feel that I
was always here, ready to listen, even when others hadn't thought it worth
while; and so I kept the pamphlet, meaning to carry out his wish and
destroy it before my death."
Her visitor gave a groan of retrospective anguish. "And but for me--but for
to-day--you would have?"
"I should have thought it my duty."
"Oh, by George--by George," he repeated, subdued afresh by the inadequacy
of speech.
She continued to watch him in silence. At length he jumped up and
impulsively caught her by both hands.
"He's bigger and bigger!" he almost shouted. "He simply leads the field!
You'll help me go to the bottom of this, won't you? We must turn out all
the papers--letters, journals, memoranda. He must have made notes. He
must have left some record of what led up to this. We must leave nothing
unexplored. By Jove," he cried, looking up at her with his bright
convincing smile, "do you know you're the granddaughter of a Great Man?"
Her color flickered like a girl's. "Are you--sure of him?" she whispered,
as though putting him on his guard against a possible betrayal of trust.
"Sure! Sure! My dear lady--" he measured her again with his quick confident
glance. "Don't _you_ believe in him?"
She drew back with a confused murmur. "I--used to." She had left her
hands in his: their pressure seemed to send a warm current to her heart.
"It ruined my life!" she cried with sudden passion. He looked at her
perplexedly.
"I gave up everything," she went on wildly, "to keep him alive. I
sacrificed myself--others--I nursed his glory in my bosom and it died--and
left me--left me here alone." She paused and gathered her courage with a
gasp. "Don't make the same mistake!" she warned him.
He shook his head, still smiling. "No danger of that! You're not alone, my
dear lady. He's here with you--he's come back to you to-day. Don't you see
what's happened? Don't you see that it's your love that has kept him alive?
If you'd abandoned your post for an instant--let things pass into other
hands--if your wonderful tenderness hadn't perpetually kept guard--this
might have been--must have been--irretrievably lost." He laid his hand on
the pamphlet. "And then--then he _would_ have been dead!"
"Oh," she said, "don't tell me too suddenly!" And she turned away and sank
into a chair.
The young man stood watching her in an awed silence. For a long time she
sat motionless, with her face hidden, and he thought she must be weeping.
At length he said, almost shyly: "You'll let me come back, then? You'll
help me work this thing out?"
She rose calmly and held out her hand. "I'll help you," she declared.
"I'll come to-morrow, then. Can we get to work early?"
"As early as you please."
"At eight o'clock, then," he said briskly. "You'll have the papers ready?"
"I'll have everything ready." She added with a half-playful hesitancy: "And
the fire shall be lit for you."
He went out with his bright nod. She walked to the window and watched his
buoyant figure hastening down the elm-shaded street. When she turned back
into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.
THE RECOVERY
To the visiting stranger Hillbridge's first question was, "Have you seen
Keniston's things?" Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House,
the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck
and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had
known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to
open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.
Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid
the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman
and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic
character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to "know"
Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its
effect on "atmosphere," on _milieu_. Hillbridge was Keniston's milieu,
and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert
that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without
recognizing it. "It simply didn't want to be seen in such surroundings; it
was hiding itself under an incognito," she declared.
It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the
artist's best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered
him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor
Driffert, who had a reputation for "collecting," had one day hung a sketch
on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert's visitors (always
a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one
might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an
etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently
subjected to the Professor's off-hand inquiry, "By-the-way, have you seen
my Keniston?" The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical
distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to
keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopaedia. The
name was not in the Encyclopaedia; but, as a compensating fact, it became
known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an
artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some
one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next
year, on the occasion of the President's golden jubilee, the Faculty, by
unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there
was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York
and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly
attempted to buy Professor Driffert's sketch, which the art journals cited
as a rare example of the painter's first or silvery manner. Thus there
gradually grew up a small circle of connoisseurs known in artistic, circles
as men who collected Kenistons.
Professor Wildmarsh, of the chair of Fine Arts and Archaeology, was the
first critic to publish a detailed analysis of the master's methods and
purpose. The article was illustrated by engravings which (though they had
cost the magazine a fortune) were declared by Professor Wildmarsh to give
but an imperfect suggestion of the esoteric significance of the originals.
The Professor, with a tact that contrived to make each reader feel himself
included among the exceptions, went on to say that Keniston's work would
never appeal to any but exceptional natures; and he closed with the usual
assertion that to apprehend the full meaning of the master's "message" it
was necessary to see him in the surroundings of his own home at Hillbridge.
Professor Wildmarsh's article was read one spring afternoon by a young
lady just speeding eastward on her first visit to Hillbridge, and already
flushed with anticipation of the intellectual opportunities awaiting her.
In East Onondaigua, where she lived, Hillbridge was looked on as an Oxford.
Magazine writers, with the easy American use of the superlative, designated
it as "the venerable Alma Mater," the "antique seat of learning," and
Claudia Day had been brought up to regard it as the fountain-head of
knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than
knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and
exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those
intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the
thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to
Hillbridge--whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend
who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University
professors--Claudia's spirit dilated with the sense of new possibilities.
The vision of herself walking under the "historic elms" toward the Memorial
Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in,
from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President's
reminiscences of the Concord group--this vividness of self-projection into
the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so
exquisite a moment.
It was in this mood that she opened the article on Keniston. She knew about
him, of course; she was wonderfully "well up," even for East Onondaigua.
She had read of him in the magazines; she had met, on a visit to New York,
a man who collected Kenistons, and a photogravure of a Keniston in an
"artistic" frame hung above her writing-table at home. But Professor
Wildmarsh's article made her feel how little she really knew of the master;
and she trembled to think of the state of relative ignorance in which, but
for the timely purchase of the magazine, she might have entered Hillbridge.
She had, for instance, been densely unaware that Keniston had already had
three "manners," and was showing symptoms of a fourth. She was equally
ignorant of the fact that he had founded a school and "created a formula";
and she learned with a thrill that no one could hope to understand him who
had not seen him in his studio at Hillbridge, surrounded by his own works.
"The man and the art interpret each other," their exponent declared; and
Claudia Day, bending a brilliant eye on the future, wondered if she were
ever to be admitted to the privilege of that double initiation.
Keniston, to his other claims to distinction, added that of being hard to
know. His friends always hastened to announce the fact to strangers--adding
after a pause of suspense that they "would see what they could do."
Visitors in whose favor he was induced to make an exception were further
warned that he never spoke unless he was interested--so that they mustn't
mind if he remained silent. It was under these reassuring conditions that,
some ten days after her arrival at Hillbridge, Miss Day was introduced
to the master's studio. She found him a tall listless-looking man, who
appeared middle-aged to her youth, and who stood before his own pictures
with a vaguely interrogative gaze, leaving the task of their interpretation
to the lady who had courageously contrived the visit. The studio, to
Claudia's surprise, was bare and shabby. It formed a rambling addition to
the small cheerless house in which the artist lived with his mother and
a widowed sister. For Claudia it added the last touch to his distinction
to learn that he was poor, and that what he earned was devoted to the
maintenance of the two limp women who formed a neutral-tinted background to
his impressive outline. His pictures of course fetched high prices; but he
worked slowly--"painfully," as his devotees preferred to phrase it--with
frequent intervals of ill health and inactivity, and the circle of Keniston
connoisseurs was still as small as it was distinguished. The girl's fancy
instantly hailed in him that favorite figure of imaginative youth, the
artist who would rather starve than paint a pot-boiler. It is known to
comparatively few that the production of successful pot-boilers is an art
in itself, and that such heroic abstentions as Keniston's are not always
purely voluntary. On the occasion of her first visit the artist said so
little that Claudia was able to indulge to the full the harrowing sense of
her inadequacy. No wonder she had not been one of the few that he cared
to talk to; every word she uttered must so obviously have diminished the
inducement! She had been cheap, trivial, conventional; at once gushing
and inexpressive, eager and constrained. She could feel him counting the
minutes till the visit was over, and as the door finally closed on the
scene of her discomfiture she almost shared the hope with which she
confidently credited him--that they might never meet again.
II
Mrs. Davant glanced reverentially about the studio. "I have always said,"
she murmured, "that they ought to be seen in Europe."
Mrs. Davant was young, credulous and emotionally extravagant: she reminded
Claudia of her earlier self--the self that, ten years before, had first set
an awestruck foot on that very threshold.
"Not for _his_ sake," Mrs. Davant continued, "but for Europe's."
Claudia smiled. She was glad that her husband's pictures were to be
exhibited in Paris. She concurred in Mrs. Davant's view of the importance
of the event; but she thought her visitor's way of putting the case a
little overcharged. Ten years spent in an atmosphere of Keniston-worship
had insensibly developed in Claudia a preference for moderation of speech.
She believed in her husband, of course; to believe in him, with an
increasing abandonment and tenacity, had become one of the necessary laws
of being; but she did not believe in his admirers. Their faith in him was
perhaps as genuine as her own; but it seemed to her less able to give an
account of itself. Some few of his appreciators doubtless measured him
by their own standards; but it was difficult not to feel that in the
Hillbridge circle, where rapture ran the highest, he was accepted on
what was at best but an indirect valuation; and now and then she had a
frightened doubt as to the independence of her own convictions. That
innate sense of relativity which even East Onondaigua had not been able to
check in Claudia Day had been fostered in Mrs. Keniston by the artistic
absolutism of Hillbridge, and she often wondered that her husband remained
so uncritical of the quality of admiration accorded him. Her husband's
uncritical attitude toward himself and his admirers had in fact been one of
the surprises of her marriage. That an artist should believe in his
potential powers seemed to her at once the incentive and the pledge of
excellence: she knew there was no future for a hesitating talent. What
perplexed her was Keniston's satisfaction in his achievement. She had
always imagined that the true artist must regard himself as the imperfect
vehicle of the cosmic emotion--that beneath every difficulty overcome a new
one lurked, the vision widening as the scope enlarged. To be initiated into
these creative struggles, to shed on the toiler's path the consolatory ray
of faith and encouragement, had seemed the chief privilege of her marriage.
But there is something supererogatory in believing in a man obviously
disposed to perform that service for himself; and Claudia's ardor gradually
spent itself against the dense surface of her husband's complacency. She
could smile now at her vision of an intellectual communion which should
admit her to the inmost precincts of his inspiration. She had learned
that the creative processes are seldom self-explanatory, and Keniston's
inarticulateness no longer discouraged her; but she could not reconcile
her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air
of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to
posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed
herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he
mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so little to
express.
"It's for Europe," Mrs. Davant vaguely repeated; and Claudia noticed that
she was blushingly intent on tracing with the tip of her elaborate sunshade
the pattern of the shabby carpet.
"It will be a revelation to them," she went on provisionally, as though
Claudia had missed her cue and left an awkward interval to fill.
Claudia had in fact a sudden sense of deficient intuition. She felt that
her visitor had something to communicate which required, on her own part,
an intelligent co-operation; but what it was her insight failed to suggest.
She was, in truth, a little tired of Mrs. Davant, who was Keniston's latest
worshipper, who ordered pictures recklessly, who paid for them regally
in advance, and whose gallery was, figuratively speaking, crowded with
the artist's unpainted masterpieces. Claudia's impatience was perhaps
complicated by the uneasy sense that Mrs. Davant was too young, too rich,
too inexperienced; that somehow she ought to be warned.--Warned of what?
That some of the pictures might never be painted? Scarcely that, since
Keniston, who was scrupulous in business transactions, might be trusted not
to take any material advantage of such evidence of faith. Claudia's impulse
remained undefined. She merely felt that she would have liked to help Mrs.
Davant, and that she did not know how.
"You'll be there to see them?" she asked, as her visitor lingered.
"In Paris?" Mrs. Davant's blush deepened. "We must all be there together."
Claudia smiled. "My husband and I mean to go abroad some day--but I don't
see any chance of it at present."
"But he _ought_ to go--you ought both to go this summer!" Mrs. Davant
persisted. "I know Professor Wildmarsh and Professor Driffert and all the
other critics think that Mr. Keniston's never having been to Europe has
given his work much of its wonderful individuality, its peculiar flavor
and meaning--but now that his talent is formed, that he has full command
of his means of expression," (Claudia recognized one of Professor
Driffert's favorite formulas) "they all think he ought to see the work of
the _other_ great masters--that he ought to visit the home of his
ancestors, as Professor Wildmarsh says!" She stretched an impulsive hand to
Claudia. "You ought to let him go, Mrs. Keniston!"
Claudia accepted the admonition with the philosophy of the wife who is used
to being advised on the management of her husband. "I sha'n't interfere
with him," she declared; and Mrs. Davant instantly caught her up with a cry
of, "Oh, it's too lovely of you to say that!" With this exclamation she
left Claudia to a silent renewal of wonder.
A moment later Keniston entered: to a mind curious in combinations it
might have occurred that he had met Mrs. Davant on the door-step. In one
sense he might, for all his wife cared, have met fifty Mrs. Davants on the
door-step: it was long since Claudia had enjoyed the solace of resenting
such coincidences. Her only thought now was that her husband's first words
might not improbably explain Mrs. Davant's last; and she waited for him to
speak.
He paused with his hands in his pockets before an unfinished picture on the
easel; then, as his habit was, he began to stroll touristlike from canvas
to canvas, standing before each in a musing ecstasy of contemplation that
no readjustment of view ever seemed to disturb. Her eye instinctively
joined his in its inspection; it was the one point where their natures
merged. Thank God, there, was no doubt about the pictures! She was what she
had always dreamed of being--the wife of a great artist. Keniston dropped
into an armchair and filled his pipe. "How should you like to go to
Europe?" he asked.
His wife looked up quickly. "When?"
"Now--this spring, I mean." He paused to light the pipe. "I should like to
be over there while these things are being exhibited."
Claudia was silent.
"Well?" he repeated after a moment.
"How can we afford it?" she asked.
Keniston had always scrupulously fulfilled his duty to the mother and
sister whom his marriage had dislodged; and Claudia, who had the atoning
temperament which seeks to pay for every happiness by making it a source
of fresh obligations, had from the outset accepted his ties with an
exaggerated devotion. Any disregard of such a claim would have vulgarized
her most delicate pleasures; and her husband's sensitiveness to it in great
measure extenuated the artistic obtuseness that often seemed to her like a
failure of the moral sense. His loyalty to the dull women who depended on
him was, after all, compounded of finer tissues than any mere sensibility
to ideal demands.
"Oh, I don't see why we shouldn't," he rejoined. "I think we might manage
it."
"At Mrs. Davant's expense?" leaped from Claudia. She could not tell why she
had said it; some inner barrier seemed to have given way under a confused
pressure of emotions.
He looked up at her with frank surprise. "Well, she has been very jolly
about it--why not? She has a tremendous feeling for art--the keenest I
ever knew in a woman." Claudia imperceptibly smiled. "She wants me to let
her pay in advance for the four panels she has ordered for the Memorial
Library. That would give us plenty of money for the trip, and my having the
panels to do is another reason for my wanting to go abroad just now."
"Another reason?"
"Yes; I've never worked on such a big scale. I want to see how those old
chaps did the trick; I want to measure myself with the big fellows over
there. An artist ought to, once in his life."
She gave him a wondering look. For the first time his words implied a sense
of possible limitation; but his easy tone seemed to retract what they
conceded. What he really wanted was fresh food for his self-satisfaction:
he was like an army that moves on after exhausting the resources of the
country.
Womanlike, she abandoned the general survey of the case for the
consideration of a minor point.
"Are you sure you can do that kind of thing?" she asked.
"What kind of thing?"
"The panels."
He glanced at her indulgently: his self-confidence was too impenetrable to
feel the pin-prick of such a doubt.
"Immensely sure," he said with a smile.
"And you don't mind taking so much money from her in advance?"
He stared. "Why should I? She'll get it back--with interest!" He laughed
and drew at his pipe. "It will be an uncommonly interesting experience. I
shouldn't wonder if it freshened me up a bit."
She looked at him again. This second hint of self-distrust struck her as
the sign of a quickened sensibility. What if, after all, he was beginning
to be dissatisfied with his work? The thought filled her with a renovating
sense of his sufficiency.
III
They stopped in London to see the National Gallery.
It was thus that, in their inexperience, they had narrowly put it; but in
reality every stone of the streets, every trick of the atmosphere, had
its message of surprise for their virgin sensibilities. The pictures were
simply the summing up, the final interpretation, of the cumulative pressure
of an unimagined world; and it seemed to Claudia that long before they
reached the doors of the gallery she had some intuitive revelation of what
awaited them within.
They moved about from room to room without exchanging a word. The vast
noiseless spaces seemed full of sound, like the roar of a distant multitude
heard only by the inner ear. Had their speech been articulate their
language would have been incomprehensible; and even that far-off murmur
of meaning pressed intolerably on Claudia's nerves. Keniston took the
onset without outward sign of disturbance. Now and then he paused before a
canvas, or prolonged from one of the benches his silent communion with some
miracle of line or color; but he neither looked at his wife nor spoke to
her. He seemed to have forgotten her presence.
Claudia was conscious of keeping a furtive watch on him; but the sum total
of her impressions was negative. She remembered thinking when she first
met him that his face was rather expressionless; and he had the habit of
self-engrossed silences.
All that evening, at the hotel, they talked about London, and he surprised
her by an acuteness of observation that she had sometimes inwardly accused
him of lacking. He seemed to have seen everything, to have examined, felt,
compared, with nerves as finely adjusted as her own; but he said nothing
of the pictures. The next day they returned to the National Gallery, and
he began to study the paintings in detail, pointing out differences of
technique, analyzing and criticising, but still without summing up his
conclusions. He seemed to have a sort of provincial dread of showing
himself too much impressed. Claudia's own sensations were too complex, too
overwhelming, to be readily classified. Lacking the craftsman's instinct to
steady her, she felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent
impressions. One point she consciously avoided, and that was the comparison
of her husband's work with what they were daily seeing. Art, she inwardly
argued, was too various, too complex, dependent on too many inter-relations
of feeling and environment, to allow of its being judged by any provisional
standard. Even the subtleties of technique must be modified by the artist's
changing purpose, as this in turn is acted on by influences of which
he is himself unconscious. How, then, was an unprepared imagination to
distinguish between such varied reflections of the elusive vision? She took
refuge in a passionate exaggeration of her own ignorance and insufficiency.
After a week in London they went to Paris. The exhibition of Keniston's
pictures had been opened a few days earlier; and as they drove through the
streets on the way to the station an "impressionist" poster here and there
invited them to the display of the American artist's work. Mrs. Davant, who
had been in Paris for the opening, had already written rapturously of the
impression produced, enclosing commendatory notices from one or two papers.
She reported that there had been a great crowd on the first day, and that
the critics had been "immensely struck."
The Kenistons arrived in the evening, and the next morning Claudia, as a
matter of course, asked her husband at what time he meant to go and see the
pictures.
He looked up absently from his guide-book.
"What pictures?"
"Why--yours," she said, surprised.
"Oh, they'll keep," he answered; adding with a slightly embarrassed laugh,
"We'll give the other chaps a show first." Presently he laid down his book
and proposed that they should go to the Louvre.
They spent the morning there, lunched at a restaurant near by, and returned
to the gallery in the afternoon. Keniston had passed from inarticulateness
to an eager volubility. It was clear that he was beginning to co-ordinate
his impressions, to find his way about in a corner of the great imaginative
universe. He seemed extraordinarily ready to impart his discoveries; and
Claudia felt that her ignorance served him as a convenient buffer against
the terrific impact of new sensations.
On the way home she asked when he meant to see Mrs. Davant.
His answer surprised her. "Does she know we're here?"
"Not unless you've sent her word," said Claudia, with a touch of harmless
irony.
"That's all right, then," he returned simply. "I want to wait and look
about a day or two longer. She'd want us to go sight-seeing with her; and
I'd rather get my impressions alone."
The next two days were hampered by the necessity of eluding Mrs. Davant.
Claudia, under different circumstances, would have scrupled to share in
this somewhat shabby conspiracy; but she found herself in a state of
suspended judgment, wherein her husband's treatment of Mrs. Davant became
for the moment merely a clue to larger meanings.
They had been four days in Paris when Claudia, returning one afternoon from
a parenthetical excursion to the Rue de la Paix, was confronted on her
threshold by the reproachful figure of their benefactress. It was not to
her, however, that Mrs. Davant's reproaches were addressed. Keniston, it
appeared, had borne the brunt of them; for he stood leaning against the
mantelpiece of their modest _salon_ in that attitude of convicted
negligence when, if ever, a man is glad to take refuge behind his wife.
Claudia had however no immediate intention of affording him such shelter.
She wanted to observe and wait.
"He's too impossible!" cried Mrs. Davant, sweeping her at once into the
central current of her grievance.
Claudia looked from one to the other.
"For not going to see you?"
"For not going to see his pictures!" cried the other nobly.
Claudia colored and Keniston shifted his position uneasily.
"I can't make her understand," he said, turning to his wife.
"I don't care about myself!" Mrs. Davant interjected.
"_I_ do, then; it's the only thing I do care about," he hurriedly
protested. "I meant to go at once--to write--Claudia wanted to go, but I
wouldn't let her." He looked helplessly about the pleasant red-curtained
room, which was rapidly burning itself into Claudia's consciousness as a
visible extension of Mrs. Davant's claims.
"I can't explain," he broke off.
Mrs. Davant in turn addressed herself to Claudia.
"People think it's so odd," she complained. "So many of the artists
here are anxious to meet him; they've all been so charming about the
pictures; and several of our American friends have come over from London
expressly for the exhibition. I told every one that he would be here
for the opening--there was a private view, you know--and they were so
disappointed--they wanted to give him an ovation; and I didn't know what
to say. What _am_ I to say?" she abruptly ended.
"There's nothing to say," said Keniston slowly.
"But the exhibition closes the day after to-morrow."
"Well, _I_ sha'n't close--I shall be here," he declared with an effort
at playfulness. "If they want to see me--all these people you're kind
enough to mention--won't there be other chances?"
"But I wanted them to see you _among_ your pictures--to hear you talk
about them, explain them in that wonderful way. I wanted you to interpret
each other, as Professor Wildmarsh says!"
"Oh, hang Professor Wildmarsh!" said Keniston, softening the commination
with a smile. "If my pictures are good for anything they oughtn't to need
explaining."
Mrs. Davant stared. "But I thought that was what made them so interesting!"
she exclaimed.
Keniston looked down. "Perhaps it was," he murmured.
There was an awkward silence, which Claudia broke by saying, with a glance
at her husband: "But if the exhibition is to remain open to-morrow, could
we not meet you there? And perhaps you could send word to some of our
friends."
Mrs. Davant brightened like a child whose broken toy is glued together.
"Oh, _do_ make him!" she implored. "I'll ask them to come in the
afternoon--we'll make it into a little tea--a _five o'clock_. I'll
send word at once to everybody!" She gathered up her beruffled boa and
sunshade, settling her plumage like a reassured bird. "It will be too
lovely!" she ended in a self-consoling murmur.
But in the doorway a new doubt assailed her. "You won't fail me?" she said,
turning plaintively to Keniston. "You'll make him come, Mrs. Keniston?"
"I'll bring him!" Claudia promised.
IV
When, the next morning, she appeared equipped for their customary ramble,
her husband surprised her by announcing that he meant to stay at home.
"The fact is I'm rather surfeited," he said, smiling. "I suppose my
appetite isn't equal to such a plethora. I think I'll write some letters
and join you somewhere later."
She detected the wish to be alone and responded to it with her usual
readiness.
"I shall sink to my proper level and buy a bonnet, then," she said. "I
haven't had time to take the edge off that appetite."
They agreed to meet at the Hotel Cluny at mid-day, and she set out alone
with a vague sense of relief. Neither she nor Keniston had made any direct
reference to Mrs. Davant's visit; but its effect was implicit in their
eagerness to avoid each other.
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