Hillsboro People Part 26

"You think it very clever, my distinguished friends, to discuss me before my face," commented the old picture-dealer indifferently. He fingered the bright-colored decorations on his breast, looking down at them with absent eyes. After a moment he added, "and to show your in-ti-mate knowledge of my character." Only its careful correctness betrayed the foreignness of his speech.

There was a pause in which the three gazed idly at the fire's reflection in the bra.s.s of the superb old andirons Then, "Haven't you something new to show us?" asked the woman. "Some genuine Masaccio, picked up in a hill-town monastery--a real Ribera?"

The small old Jew drew a long breath. "Yes, I have something new." He hesitated, opened his lips, closed them again and, looking at the fire, "Oh yes, very new indeed--new to me."

"Is it here?" The great surgeon looked about the picture-covered walls.

"No; I have it in--you know what you call the inner sanctuary--the light here is not good enough."

The actress stood up, her glittering dress flashing a thousand eyes at the fire. "Let me see it," she commanded. "Certainly I would like to see anything that was new to _you_!"

"You shall amuse yourself by identifying the artist without my aid," said old Vieyra.

He opened a door, held back a portiere, let his guests pa.s.s through into a darkened room, turned on a softly brilliant light, and: "Whom do you make the artist?" he said. He did not look at the picture. He looked at the faces of his guests, and after a long silent pause, he smiled faintly into his beard. "Let us go back to the fire," he said, and clicked them into darkness again.

"And what do you say?" he asked as they sat down.

"By Jove!" cried the doctor. "By Jove!"

Madame Orloff turned on the collector the somber glow of her deep-set eyes. "I have dreamed it," she said.

"It is real," said Vieyra. "You are the first to see it. I wished to observe how----"

"It's an unknown Vermeer!" The doctor brought his big white hand down loudly on this discovery. "n.o.body but Vermeer could have done the plaster wall in the sunlight. And the girl's strange gray head-dress must be seventeenth-century Dutch of some province I don't----"

"I am a rich man, for a picture-dealer," said Vieyra, "but only national governments can afford to buy Vermeers nowadays."

"But you picked it up from some corner, some attic, some stable----"

"Yes, I picked it up from a stable," said the collector.

The actress laid her slender, burning fingers on his cool old hand. "Tell us--tell us," she urged. "There is something different here."

"Yes, there is something different," he stirred in his chair and thrust out his lips. "So different that I don't know if you----"

"Try me! try me!" she a.s.sured him ardently. "You have educated me well to your own hard standards all these years."

At this he looked at her, startled, frowning, attentive, and ended by shaking off her hand. "No, I will not tell you."

"You shall----" her eyes commanded, adjured him. There was a silence. "I will understand," she said under her breath.

"You will not understand," he said in the same tone; but aloud he began: "I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here sc.r.a.ping up a mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire. He wanted to get my judgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought to him by a cousin of his children's governess. I was to be sure to see it when I went to New York--you knew did you not, that I had been called to New York to testify in the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?"

"Did you really go?" asked the doctor. "I thought you swore that nothing could take you to America."

"I went," said the old man grimly. "Paullsen did me a bad turn once, thirty years ago. And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas.

The dealer half apologized for taking my time--said he did not as a rule pay any attention to freak things brought in from country holes by amateurs, but--I remember his wording--this thing, some ways he looked at it, didn't seem bad somehow."

The collector paused, pa.s.sed his tongue over his lips, and said briefly: "Then he showed it to me. It was the young girl and kitten in there."

"By Jove!" cried the doctor.

"You have too exciting a profession, my good old dear," said the actress.

"Some day you will die of a heart failure."

"Not after living through that!"

"What did you tell him?"

"I asked for the address of the cousin of his children's governess, of course. When I had it, I bought a ticket to the place, and when I reached there, I found myself at the end of all things--an abomination of desolation, a parched place in the wilderness. Do you know America, either of you?"

The doctor shook his head.

"I have toured there, three times," said the actress.

"Did you ever hear of a place called Vermont?"

Madame Orloff looked blank. "It sounds French, not English. Perhaps you do not p.r.o.nounce it as they do."

"Heaven forbid that I should do anything as 'they' do! This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent race who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness ... G.o.d of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of those huts where I finally found the cousin! He was a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos and he knew nothing of the picture except that it was brought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him b.u.t.ter. So I found the address of the b.u.t.ter-maker and drove endless miles over an execrable road to his house, and encountered at last a person who could tell me something of what I wanted to know. It was the b.u.t.ter-maker's mother, a stolid, middle-aged woman, who looked at me out of the most uncanny quiet eyes ... all the people in that valley have extraordinary piercing and quiet eyes ... and asked, 'Is it about the picture? For if it is, I don't want you should let on about it to anybody but me. n.o.body but the family knows he paints 'em!"

At this the doctor burst out, "Gracious powers! You don't mean to say that the man who painted that picture is alive now ... in 1915!"

The actress frowned at the interruption and turned with a lithe petulance on the big Briton. "If you want to know, let him alone!" she commanded.

"And soon I had it all," the narrator went on. "Almost more than I could bear. The old woman could tell me what I wished to know, she said. He was her uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her and her brothers and sisters. She knew... oh, she knew with good reason, all of his life. All, that is, but the beginning. She had heard from the older people in the valley that he had been wild in his youth (he has always been, she told me gravely, 'queer') and she knew that he had traveled far in his young days, very, very far."

"'To New York?' I ventured.

"'Oh, no, beyond that. Across the water.'

"'To Paris?'

"That she didn't know. It was a foreign country at least, and he had stayed there two, three years, until he was called back by her father's death--his brother-in-law's--to take care of his mother, and his sister and the children. Here her mind went back to my question, and she said she had something perhaps I could tell from, where he had been. She kept it in her Bible. He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the day she had kept her little brother from falling in the fire. She brought it out. It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as the original itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne.

"Yes, I told her, now I knew where he had been. And they had called him back from there--_here_?

"'When my father died,' she repeated, 'my uncle was all my grandmother and my mother had. We were five little children, and the oldest not seven, and we were all very poor,'

"'How old was your uncle then?' I asked.

"'A young man--he was younger than my mother. Perhaps he was twenty-five,'

"I looked at the sketch in my hand. Twenty-five, and called back from Paris--_here_!

"'When did he go back to Paris?'

"'Oh, he never went back,' She told me this quite placidly, as she said everything else. 'He never went back at all.'