Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories Part 17

"Give him five lire, Mr. Williams."

Poor Uncle Ezra fumbled in his pocket-book for the piece of money. He had never bribed in his life. It was a terrible moral fall, to see him tremblingly offer the piece of scrip. The man refused, "positive orders, _permesso_ necessary," etc., etc. The bell rang; there was a rush. Uncle Ezra looked unhappy.

"Here," Watkins shouted, grabbing the precious pictures in a manner far from reverent, "I'll send these on, Mr. Williams; run for your train."

Uncle Ezra gave one undecided glance, and then yielded. "You will look after them," he pleaded, "carefully."

"You shall have them safe enough," my wife promised.

"Blast the pasteboards," Watkins put in under his breath, "the best thing to do with them is to chop 'em up." He was swinging them back and forth under his arm. My wife took them firmly from him. "He shall have his pictures, and not from your ribald hands."

A week later Rome became suddenly oppressively warm. We started off for Venice, Watkins tagging on incorrigibly. "I want to see 'Maud,'" he explained. The pictures had been packed and sent ahead by express. "The storm must have burst, tears shed, tempers cooled, mortification set in," I remarked, as we were being shoved up the Grand Ca.n.a.l toward the Palazzo Palladio. "There they are in the balcony," my wife exclaimed, "waving to us. Something is up; Maudie is hanging back, with Aunt Mary, and Professor Painter is at the other end, with Uncle Ezra."

The first thing that caught the eye after the flurry of greetings was the impudent blue and red of Uncle Ezra's "Sancta Conversazione,"

Domenico Tintoretto, Savoldo, or what not; St. Agnes's leg and all, beaming at us from the wall. The other two were not there. My wife looked at me. Maudie was making herself very gracious with little Watkins. Painter's solemn face began to lower more and more. Aunt Mary and Uncle Ezra industriously poured oil by the bucket upon the social sea.

At last Maud rose: "You _must_ take me over there at once, Mr. Watkins.

It will be such an enjoyment to have someone who really knows about pictures and has taste." This shot at poor Painter; then to my wife, "Come, Jane, you will like to see your room."

Painter crossed to me and suggested, lugubriously, a cigar on the balcony. He smoked a few minutes in gloomy silence.

"Does that fellow know anything?" he emitted at last, jerking his head at Watkins, who was pouring out information at Uncle Ezra. I began gently to give Charles Henderson Watkins a fair reputation for intelligence. "I mean anything about art? Of course it doesn't matter what he says about my picture, whether it is a copy or not, but Miss Vantweekle takes it very hard about hers. She blames me for having been with her when she bought it, and having advised her and encouraged her to put six hundred dollars into it."

"Six hundred," I gasped.

"Cheap for a Bonifazio, or a _t.i.tian_, as we thought it."

"Too cheap," I murmured.

"Well, I got bitten for about the same on my own account. I sha'n't get that Rachel's library at Berlin, that's all. The next time you catch me fooling in a subject where I don't know my bearings--like fine art--You see Mr. Williams found my picture one day when he was nosing about at an _antichita's_, and thought it very fine. I admire Mr. Williams tremendously, and I valued his opinion about art subjects much more then than I do now. He and Mrs. Williams were wild over it. They had just bought their picture, and they wanted us each to have one. They have lots of sentiment, you know."

"Lots," I a.s.sented.

"Mrs. Williams got at me, and well, she made me feel that it would bring me nearer to Miss Vantweekle. You know she goes in for art, and she used to be impatient with me because I couldn't appreciate. I was dumb when she walked me up to some old Madonna, and the others would go on at a great rate. Well, in a word, I bought it for my education, and I guess I have got it!

"Then the man, he's an old Jew on the Grand Ca.n.a.l--Raffman, you know him? He got out another picture, the Bonifazio. The Williamses began to get up steam over that, too. They hung over that thing Mr. Williams bought, that Savoldo or Domenico Tintoretto, and prowled about the churches and the galleries finding traces of it here in the style of this picture and that; in short, we all got into a fever about pictures, and Miss Vantweekle invested all the money an aunt had given her before coming abroad, in that Bonifazio.

"I must say that Miss Vantweekle held off some time, was doubtful about the picture; didn't feel that she wanted to put all her money into it.

But she caught fire in the general excitement, and I may say"--here a sad sort of conscious smile crept over the young professor's face--"at that time I had a good deal of influence with her. She bought the picture, we brought it home, and put it up at the other end of the hall. We spent hours over that picture, studying out every line, placing every color. We made up our minds soon enough that it wasn't a Bonifazio, but we began to think--now don't laugh, or I'll pitch you over the balcony--it was an early work by t.i.tian. There was an attempt in it for great things, as Mr. Williams said: no small man could have planned it. One night we had been talking for hours about them, and we were all pretty well excited. Mr. Williams suggested getting Watkins's opinion. Maud--Miss Vantweekle said, loftily, 'Oh! it does not make any difference what the critics say about it, the picture means everything to me'; and I, like a fool, felt happier than ever before in my life.

The next morning Mr. Williams telegraphed you and set off."

He waited.

"And when he returned?"

"It's been h.e.l.l ever since."

He was in no condition to see the comic side of the affair. Nor was Miss Vantweekle. She was on my wife's bed in tears.

"All poor Aunt Higgins's present gone into that horrid thing," she moaned, "and all the dresses I was planning to get in Paris. I shall have to go home looking like a perfect dowd!"

"But think of the influence it has been in your life--the education you have received from that picture. How can you call all that color, those n.o.ble faces, 'that horrid thing?'" I said, reprovingly. She sat upright.

"See here, Jerome Parker, if you ever say anything like that again, I will never speak to you any more, or to Jane, though you are my cousins."

"They have tried to return the picture," my wife explained. "Professor Painter and Uncle Ezra took it over yesterday; but, of course, the Jew laughed at them."

"'A copy!' he said." Maud explained, "Why, it's no more a copy than t.i.tian's 'a.s.sumption.' He could show us the very place in a palace on the Grand Ca.n.a.l where it had hung for four hundred years. Of course, all the old masters used the same models, and grouped their pictures alike. Very probably t.i.tian had a picture something like it. What of that? He defied us to find the exact original."

"Well," I remarked, soothingly, "that ought to comfort you, I am sure.

Call your picture a new t.i.tian, and sell it when you get home."

"Mr. Watkins says that's an old trick," moaned Maud, "that story about the palace. He says old Raffman has a pal among the Italian n.o.bility, and works off copies through him all the time. I won't say anything about Uncle Ezra; he has been as kind and good as he can be, only a little too enthusiastic. But Professor Painter!"

She tossed her head.

The atmosphere in the Palazzo Palladio for the next few days was highly charged.

At dinner Uncle Ezra placidly made remarks about the Domenico Tintoretto, almost vaingloriously, I thought. "Such a piece of Venice to carry away. We missed it so much, those days you had it in Rome. It is so precious that I cannot bear to pack it up and lose sight of it for five months. Mary, just see that glorious piece of color over there."

Meantime some kind of conspiracy was on foot. Maud went off whole mornings with Watkins and Uncle Ezra. We were left out as unsympathetic. Painter wandered about like a sick ghost. He would sit glowering at Maud and Watkins while they held whispered conversations at the other end of the hall. Watkins was the hero. He had accepted Flugel's judgment with impudent grace.

"A copy of t.i.tian, of course," he said to me; "really, it is quite hard on poor Miss Vantweekle. People, even learned people, who don't know about such things, had better not advise. I have had the photographs of all t.i.tian's pictures sent on, and we have found the original of your cousin's picture. Isn't it very like?"

It was very like; a figure was left out in the copy, the light was changed, but still it was a happy guess of Flugel.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" I said to Maud, who had just joined us.

"Oh, Mr. Watkins has kindly consented to manage the matter for me; I believe he has a friend here, an artist, Mr. Hare, who will give expert judgment on it. Then the American vice-consul is a personal friend of Mr. Watkins, and also Count Corner, the adviser at the Academy. We shall frighten the old Jew, sha'n't we, Mr. Watkins?"

I walked over to the despised Madonna that was tipped up on its side, ready to be walked off on another expedition of defamation.

"Poor Bonifazio," I sighed, "Maud, how can you part with a work of fine art that has meant so much to you?"

"Do you think, Jerome, I would go home and have Uncle Higgins, with his authentic Rembrandt and all his other pictures, laugh at me and my t.i.tian? I'd burn it first."

I turned to Uncle Ezra. "Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened to this picture? The spiritual light from that color must s.h.i.+ne as brightly as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's soul; it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it's like sending back the girl you married because her pedigree proved defective, or because she had lost her fortune. It's positively brutal!"

Maud darted a venomous glance at me; however, I had put the judge in a hole.

"I cannot agree with you, Jerome." Uncle Ezra could never be put in a hole. "Maud's case is a very different one from Mr. Painter's or mine.

We can carry back what we like personally, but for Maud to carry home a doubtful picture into the atmosphere she has to live in--why, it would be intolerable--with her uncle a connoisseur, all her friends owners of masterpieces." Uncle Ezra had a flowing style. "It would expose her to annoyance, to mortification--constant, daily. Above all, to have taken a special gift, a fund of her aunt's, and to apply it in this mistaken fas.h.i.+on is cruel."

Painter remarked bitterly to me afterward, "He wants to crawl on his share of the responsibility. I'd buy the picture if I could raise the cash, and end the whole miserable business."

Indeed, Watkins seemed the only one blissfully in his element. As my wife remarked, Watkins had exchanged his interest in pictures for an interest in woman. Certainly he had planned his battle well. It came off the next day. They all left in a gondola at an early hour. Painter and I watched them from the balcony. After they were seated, Watkins tossed in carelessly the suspected picture. What went on at the _antichita's_ no one of the boat-load ever gave away. Watkins had a hold on the man somehow, and the evidence of the fraud was overwhelming. About noon they came back, Maud holding an enormous envelope in her hand.

"I can never, never thank you enough, Mr. Watkins," she beamed at him.

"You have saved me from such mortification and unhappiness, and you were so _clever_."