The Streets of Ascalon Part 65

"Those are representatives of various first-cla.s.s dealers--confidential buyers, sons--even dealers themselves--like that handsome gray-haired young-looking man who is Max Von Ebers, head of that great house."

"But they didn't buy one single thing!" said Jessie.

Quarren laughed: "People don't buy off-hand. Our triumph is to get them here at all. I wrote to each of them personally."

n.o.body else came for a long while; then one or two of the lesser dealers appeared, and now and then a man who might be an agent or a prowling and wealthy amateur or perhaps one of those curious haunters of all art marts who never buy but who never miss a.s.sisting at all inaugurations in person--like an ubiquitous and silent dog who turns up wherever more than two people a.s.semble with any purpose in view--or without any.

During the forenoon and early afternoon several women came into the galleries; and they seemed to be a little different from ordinary women, although it would be hard to say wherein they were different except in one instance--a tall, darkly handsome girl whose jewellery was as conspicuously oriental as her brilliant colour.

Later Quarren told Jessie Vining that they were expert buyers on commission or brokers having clients among those very wealthy people who bought pictures now and then because it was fashionable to do so. Also, these same women-brokers represented a number of those unhappy old families who, incognito, were being forced by straitened circ.u.mstances to part secretly with heirlooms--family plate, portraits, miniatures, furniture--even with the antique mirrors on the walls and the very fire-dogs on the hearth amid the ashes of a burnt-out race almost extinct.

A few Jews came--representing the extreme types of the most wonderful race of people in the world--one tall, handsome, immaculate young man whose cultivated accent, charming manners, and quiet bearing challenged exception--and one or two representing the other extreme, loud, restless, aggressive, and as impertinent as they dared be, discussing the canvases in noisy voices and with callous manners verging always on the offensive.

These evinced a disposition for cash deals and bargain-wrangling, discouraged good-naturedly by Quarren who referred them to the catalogue; and presently they took themselves off.

Dankmere sidled up to Quarren rather timidly toward the close of the afternoon.

"I don't see what bally good _I_ am in this business," he said. "I don't mean to shirk, Quarren, but there doesn't seem to be anything for me to do. I think that all these beggars spot me for an ignoramus the moment they lay eyes on me, and the whole thing falls on you."

Quarren said laughingly: "Well, didn't you furnish the stock?"

"We ought to go halves," muttered Dankmere, shyly skirting Jessie Vining's domain where she was writing letters with the Social Register at her elbow.

The last days of June and the first of July were repet.i.tions in a measure of the opening day at the Dankmere Galleries; people came and were received and entertained by Quarren; Dankmere sat about in various chairs or retired furtively to the backyard to smoke at intervals; Jessie Vining with more colour in her pale, oval face, ruled her corner of the room in a sort of sweet and silent dignity.

Dankmere, who, innately, possessed the effrontery of a born comedian, for some reason utterly unknown to himself, was inclined to be afraid of her--afraid of the clear brown eyes indifferently lifted to his when he entered--afraid of the quiet "Good-morning, Lord Dankmere," with which she responded to his morning greeting--afraid of her cool skilful little hands busy with pencil, pen, or lettered key--afraid of everything about her from her rippling brown hair and snowy collar to the tips of her little tan shoes--even afraid of the back of her head when it presented only a slender neck and two little rosy, close-set ears. But he didn't mention his state of abas.e.m.e.nt to Quarren.

A curious thing occurred, too: Jessie had evidently been gay on Sunday; and, Monday noon, while out for lunch, she had left on her desk two Coney Island postal cards decorated with her own photograph. When she returned, one card had vanished; and she searched quietly but thoroughly before she left for home that evening, but she did not find the card.

But she said nothing about it.

The dreadful part of the affair was that it was theft--the Earl of Dankmere's first crime.

Why he had taken it he did not know. The awful impulse of kleptomania alone seemed to explain but scarcely palliate his first offence against society.

It was only after he realised that the picture and Jessie Vining vaguely resembled his dead Countess that his lordship began to understand why he had committed a felony before he actually knew what he was doing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jessie Vining.]

And one day when Quarren was still out for lunch and Jessie had returned to her correspondence, the terrified Earl suddenly appeared before her holding out the photograph: and she took it, astonished, her lifted eyes mutely inquiring concerning the inwardness of this extraordinary episode.

But Dankmere merely fled to the backyard and remained there all the afternoon smoking his head off; and it was several days before Jessie had an opportunity to find herself alone in his vicinity and to ask him with almost perfect self-possession where he had found the photograph.

"I stole it," said Dankmere, turning bright red to his ear-tips.

"All she could think of to say was: 'Why?'

"It resembles my wife. So do you."

"Really," she said coldly.

Several days later she learned by the skilfully careless questioning of Quarren that the Countess of Dankmere had not existed on earth for the last ten years.

This news extenuated the Earl's guilt in her eyes to a degree which permitted a slight emotion resembling pity to pervade her. And one day she said to him, casually pleasant--"Would you care for that post-card, Lord Dankmere? If it resembles your wife I would be very glad to return it to you."

Dankmere, painfully red again, thanked her so nicely that the slight, instinctive distrust and aversion which, in the beginning, she had entertained for his lordship, suddenly disappeared so entirely that it surprised her when she had leisure to think it over afterward.

So she gave him the post-card, and next day she found a rose in a gla.s.s of water on her desk; and that ended the incident for them both except that Dankmere was shyer of her than ever and she was beginning to realise that his aloof and expressionless deportment was due to shyness--which seemed to be inexplicable because otherwise timidity was scarcely the word to characterise his lively little lordship.

Once, looking out of the rear windows, through the lace curtains she saw the Earl of Dankmere in the backyard, gravely turning handsprings on the gra.s.s while still smoking his pipe. Once, entering the gallery unexpectedly, she discovered the Earl standing at the piano, playing a rattling breakdown while his nimble little feet performed the same with miraculous agility and professional precision. She withdrew to the front door, hastily, and waited until the piano ceased from rumbling and the Oxfords were at rest, then returned with heightened colour and a stifled desire to laugh which she disguised under an absent-minded nod of greeting.

Meanwhile one or two pictures had been sold to dealers--not important ones--but the sales were significant enough to justify the leasing of the bas.e.m.e.nt. And here Quarren installed himself from morning to noon as apprentice to an old Englishman who, before the failure of his eyesight, had ama.s.sed a little fortune as surgeon, physician, and trained nurse to old and decrepit pictures.

Not entirely unequipped in the beginning, Quarren now learned more about his trade--the guarded secrets of mediums and solvents, the composition of ancient and modern canvases, how old and modern colours were ground and prepared, how mixed, how applied.

He learned how the old masters of the various schools of painting prepared a canvas or panel--how the snowy "veil" was spread and dried, how the under painting was executed in earth-red and bone-black, how the glaze was used and why, what was the medium, what the varnish.

He learned about the "baths of sunlight," too--those clarifying immersions practised so openly yet until recently not understood. He comprehended the mechanics, physics, and simple chemistry of that splendid, mysterious "inward glow" which seemed to slumber under the colours of the old masters like the exquisite warmth in the heart of a gem.

To him, little by little, was revealed the only real wonder of the old masters--their astonishing honesty. He began to understand that, first of all, they were self-respecting artisans, practising their trade of making pictures and painting each picture as well as they knew how; that, like other artisans, their pride was in knowing their trade, in a mastery of their tools, and in executing commissions as honestly as they knew how and leaving the "art" to take care of itself.

Also he learned--for he was obliged to learn in self-protection--the tricks and deceptions and forgeries of the trade--all that was unworthy about it, all its shabby disguises and imitations and crude artifices and cunning falsehoods.

He examined old canvases painted over with old-new pictures and then relined; canvases showing portions of original colour; old canvases and panels repainted and artificially darkened and cleverly covered with both paint and varnish cracks; canvases that almost defied detection by needle-point or gla.s.s or thumb friction or solvent, so ingenious was the forgery simulating age.

Every known adjunct was provided to carry out deception--genuinely old canvases or panels, old stretchers really worm-eaten, aged frames of the period, half-obliterated seals bearing sometimes even the cross-keys of the Vatican. Even, in some cases, pretence that the pictures had been cut from the frame and presumably stolen was carried out by a knife-slashed and irregular ridge where the canvas had actually been so cut and then sewed to a modern _toile_.

For forgery of art is as old as the Greeks and as new as to-day--the one sinister art that perhaps will never become a lost art; and Quarren and his aged mentor in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Dankmere Galleries discovered more than enough frauds among the Dankmere family pictures showing how the little Earl's forebears had once been gulled before his present lordship lay in his cradle.

To Quarren the work was fascinating and, except for his increasing worry over Strelsa Leeds, would have been all-absorbing to the degree of happiness--or that interested contentment which pa.s.ses for it on earth.

To see the dull encasing armour of varnish disappear from some ancient masterpiece under the thumb, as the delicate thumb of the Orient polishes lacquer; to dare a solvent when needed, timing its strength to the second lest disaster tarnish forever the exquisite bloom of the shrouded glazing; to cautiously explore for suspected signatures, to brood and ponder over ancient records and alleged pedigrees; to compare prints and mezzotints, photographs and engravings in search for ident.i.ties; to study threads of canvas, flakes of varnish, flinty globules of paint under the microscope; to learn, little by little, the technical manners and capricious mannerisms significant of the progress periods of each dead master; to pore over endless volumes, monographs, ill.u.s.trated foreign catalogues of public and private collections--in these things and through them happiness came to Quarren.

Never a summer sun rose over the streets of Ascalon arousing the Philistine to another day of toil but it awoke Quarren to the subdued excitement of another day. Eager, interested, content in his self-respect, he went forth to a daily business which he cared about for its own sake, and was fast learning to care about to the point of infatuation.

He was never tired these days; but the summer heat and lack of air and exercise made him rather thin and pale. Close work with the magnifying gla.s.s had left his features slightly careworn, and had begun little converging lines at the outer corners of his eyes. Only one line in his face expressed anything less happy--the commencement of a short perpendicular crease between his eyebrows. Anxious pondering over old canvases was not deepening that faint signature of perplexity--or the forerunner of Care's signs manual nervously etched from the wing of either nostril.

CHAPTER XII