Part 11

She gave a delicately amused attention to Flickey’s chatter of her father’s quest for the Lafayette bottom. The young girl naturally felt that her hostess’s interest was due, in part, to her own pleasing vivacity in telling the story of the child Lydia, the Fairlee porringer, Rover, and the evil Ellicksenders. At the mention of that name, _Ellicksender_, Mrs. Blakeney started, and even changed color; one would have said that a feeling of indignant protest surged over her when the “den of thieves” was blithely insisted upon by young Felicia; but the lady did not interrupt.

“And the fun of it is,” Felicia continued, stimulated by the fact that Jimmy was admiring her within an inch of his life, while even Mrs. Blakeney was spellbound, “the fun of it is, father still has the drawing his Grandma Bradford made when she was a little girl. You know she made a drawing of the Lafayette bowl just by laying it down on paper and tracing around it, as young things do!” One would have supposed that the speaker was a thousand years removed from such simplicities.

“But that isn’t all,” added Flickey, taking from her beaded bag a folded paper, and passing it to Mrs. Blakeney. “What must father do but go ahead and have half a dozen copies made of that old drawing, perfect in every detail; and he has given one to each of us children, mother included, so that wherever we are, we can always be prepared to find a porringer bottom that will fit exactly, if there is such a thing. Regular Bradford family identification tag, I call it. Of course father has the top; but we’ve never had any luck in finding the bottom, though mother and I have hunted and delved and dug. Sometimes the circle would be right, or almost right, but the handles—oh, dear! We’ve looked at _gorms_ of handles, all of them terribly wrong.”

She paused a moment to wonder whether she had been talking too much; she did not wish to appear the raw young feminine ignoramus in the eyes of a person so delightful as Aunt Amanda, who, as Felicia now saw, was studying that drawing, and with a kind of passionate earnestness, too. The expert’s face was itself a study; doubt, amazement, and recognition were to be seen struggling there. The polite interest had become acute.

Flickey, jubilantly aware that as usual she was making a success of her conversation, was inspired to further efforts. In imitation of her father’s most discriminating manner, she continued, “Of course, from the collector’s point of view, we don’t attach any undue importance to the Lafayette myth, and—”

“Neither do I,” observed Mrs. Blakeney, with unexpected decisiveness. “If you’d both care to come and look at some of my things, perhaps you’ll see why not.”

The boy and girl followed the lady into her gray-panelled drawing-room, fresh and delicately fragrant with the spice of July pinks nodding from crystal vases. It seemed to Felicia that she had never before entered a room that was at once so simple and so sophisticated, so withdrawn from the world, yet so inviting to a guest. Mrs. Blakeney, no less than Felicia, carried a beaded handbag; but Mrs. Blakeney’s, Felicia subsequently reported to an attentive father, made her own look like thirty cents.

Mrs. Blakeney’s bag held a key, with which she opened a highboy, gleaming discreetly from a nook just beyond the fireplace. Its shelves were laden with treasure; and Flickey, although long inured to the surprises that a collector can spring upon his family, exclaimed with joy before those marshalled riches. For Felicia, like her father before her, was fated to pursue beauty; even her girlish mistakes—her collection of athletic collegians, for example, her amethystine earrings, her overwrought, overworking dinner-ring in all its preposterousness—resulted from her thirst after loveliness rather than from her vanity. Jimmy himself was to her largely one last pure product of the beautiful. In Mrs. Blakeney’s drawing-room, before the highboy and its spoils, her eyes filled with tears of thankfulness for beauty. She felt that the ranks of silver vessels beaming and gleaming upon her had in some mysterious way gathered into themselves and greatly multiplied all over their surfaces all possible beauty from all known worlds, only to reflect it back upon those who were fortunate enough to be near. Not only the faded rose of the hangings and the dim gray of the panelling and the dusky orange outline of the spinet were reflected winkingly from those silver shapes; it seemed to her that the very fragrance of the pinks and the breath of summer itself were wafted to her by silver voices. Flickey sometimes passed for flippant; but this was not her flippant day. Indeed, she was startled out of a mood that was partly pleasure and partly prayer by Aunt Amanda’s matter-of-fact remark,—

“My French stuff, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I keep it locked because—oh, well, there are just a few trifles—Jimmy, reach me down that top piece, will you, please? The one at the right of the alms basin.”

With a certain grave excitement, Mrs. Blakeney had already placed Felicia’s drawing upon a little table; she smoothed out the folds of the paper, especially those that crossed the lacelike handles. Then, with but a casual glance at the delicately wrought bowl that Jimmy put into her hands, she set it, with dramatic exactness, over the outline traced by the child Lydia.

Each one of the trio felt for a moment the touch of a bygone day. There could be no doubt whatever that the lost piece of silver was found. Unless, indeed, as the young lawyer’s mind profanely suggested, those old boys made such things by the gross, like the green spectacles that Moses bought! But the surmise was too grotesque for utterance. Even with his slender knowledge of the silversmith’s art, he could discern that the Fairlee porringer was no machine-made product. It had been created by many touches, but by few hands; perhaps by only one pair of hands, and that a master’s. Felicia’s eyes (not wholly untrained, however subject to occasional error) rested admiringly, even reverently, on a master-craftsman’s work.

She turned toward Mrs. Blakeney. “I feel just as if you had taken down a receiver, and asked me to listen into it, and that I heard a voice say, oh, ever so long-distance! ‘This is little Lydia speaking.’”

Jimmy, too, was thoughtful. “But where does Lafayette come in, I wonder? Lafayette in Egypt?”

Aunt Amanda smiled, picked up the bowl, and pointed out, just below the rim, a tiny engraving of a long-eared beast, bearing a cloaked figure, while another personage trudged at the side. Palm trees and a pyramid completed the scene. How strange that any one, above all a God-fearing Fairlee, could ever have failed to recognize the Bible story of Mary and Joseph, fleeing with the Child! Many curves and scrolls enclosed this specimen of the graver’s art, and among these could be discerned, in the flourishy French writing of which Grandma Bradford had often spoken, the legend—

_La Fuite en Egypte_

For a collector, Mrs. Blakeney was certainly sportsmanlike, yes, magnanimous. We called it broad-minded when she gave to Jimmy Alexander’s bride, as a wedding-gift, her “Flight into Egypt” piece; an object so tenderly cherished by her that she had never even made mention of it in any of her monographs, but had kept it unspotted from the world, in her own collection. She had always, and with reason, considered it an Alexander heirloom to which she was justly entitled, through the bequest of her grand-uncle, Judge Alexander. She knew, however, that the Alexanders, like most of us, had had ups and downs; she knew that one branch of the family, had been prolific in good-for-nothings, some of whom had fallen so low as to misspell the family name for a whole generation, writing it Ellicksender, when they wrote it at all. Though she doubted the justice of calling the humble Ellicksender home a “den of thieves,” she nevertheless believed it probable that Judge Alexander’s “_La Fuite en Egypte_” porringer had come into his family’s possession in some vague, unexplained way, rather than by purchase. For Judge Alexander’s father, Dr. Phineas Alexander, that pillar of the Presbyterian faith, had originally been a mere Ellicksender, so-called; he it was who had “turned out real good,” and so had failed to win the interest of either Felix or myself, in our childish days. As Mrs. Blakeney said, “The ironies of Time certainly do iron out everything, if you wait long enough”; and it was Dr. Alexander, _alias_ Ellicksender, who had lifted up the fallen fortunes of his family to their former lofty place in American history.

Felicia is really a kindly little soul. When I went to see Cousin Felix after the wedding, I was not surprised to find that on the ground of safety first, she insists that the Lafayette bottom shall remain, during her father’s lifetime, remarried to its fluted, flame-topped cover. The _écuelle_ is easily the pride of the collector’s heart. “Of course I have costlier pieces,” quoth Felix, “but none so dear to me as this.”

We grinned at each other as he repeated his boyhood’s gesture, wetting a thumb and forefinger before he touched the flame.

THE FACE CALLED FORGIVENESS

The little dinner was a masterpiece. From hail to farewell, there had been no falling-off in quality; the crystal chalices of liquid topaz that heralded the feast (or shall I say plainly, the cocktail-glasses?) were not more graciously cut than the quips of the final speech of congratulation. Guests, viands, vintages, and starry flowers had been chosen by the law of hospitality wedded to the spirit of beauty. The purse they had between them was not unduly large, but it had been joyously and wisely spent.

It was an artist’s dinner given by an uncle to a nephew, a dinner in honor of an honor. Twenty years before, Steven Grant had received the coveted Gold Medal for Sculpture; to-day, a like mark of distinction had been awarded to his favorite nephew, Gerald Weldon. Steven was a bachelor, and nephews counted. What more natural than a dinner of reunion and rejoicing?

There were ladies present; and some of them had satisfied alike their decorative and their hero-worshipping instincts by sending in advance to the house of their host two lengths of wide ribbon of cloth-of-gold, with a command that both host and guest of honor should use them to bind about their necks the beautifully sculptured tokens of their greatness. Very ample and splendid is that famous gold medal. A little weighty for festal wearing, indeed; but to refuse would have been churlish, and uncle and nephew had adjusted their adornments with the air of men who do not mean to dodge any part of the day’s work. Having done that, they promptly forgot the big bright plaques on their chests, except when playfully reminded of them by the lady who had conceived the idea, and who basked gladly in the thought of her originality.

It was indeed an evening to remember; but, just like an evening to forget, it had to come to an end. The last and loveliest lady, revealing the exact amount of lacy stocking demanded by fashion, had with Gerald’s aid tucked up her slender glittering trail within her glass coach; the last and most uninteresting gentleman had been sped clubward. Uncle and nephew went up the broad stairs to talk it all over in Steven Grant’s den, a great orderly panelled room always very dear to young Gerald.

Steven Grant’s main studio, being a sculptor’s, was naturally doomed to the basement of his house. The second-floor den was not precisely a studio, though works of art had been created there. It was a room not quite like a library, yet with plenty of space for books, and books for the space; a room that was a bit larger than a smoking-room, and rather less elegant than a drawing-room; comfortable chairs abounded and cheerful tones prevailed, evidently in complete amity with a pair of dim, priceless tapestries that seemed to know all and pardon all in both furniture and folk. It was a room in which old memories and new conveniences were happy together; a bachelor had somehow managed it so. As years went by, Steven Grant became increasingly glad that the McKim, Mead and White panelling of the late eighties had piously respected the delicate acanthus cornice of the early forties. He often said that he was the only artist in New York whose career had begun and would end under the same roof.

You would have taken uncle and nephew for a pair of brothers, one silvery and one golden. Evening dress and the bright decorations emphasized the resemblance. Both men were tall, slender, clean-shaven. Steven Grant carried his sixty years lightly, as artists often do, while Gerald at thirty sometimes showed a seriousness in accord with his honors rather than with his years. His forehead was already higher than his uncle’s; both men chuckled over that, but naturally Uncle Steve’s chuckle was heartier. Gerald slouched a little, after the custom of his generation; this made him seem more _blasé_ than he really was. Steven Grant was straight as a pine tree; this gave him a challenging look that people liked. The ties of blood and their pursuits bound the two together in a harmony that would scarcely have borne out the theories of Shaw, Samuel Butler, and other dispraisers of the Family.

That night, they were like a pair of girls in their wish to live the dinner over again, with the added joy of uncensored comment. “We’ll get our golden halters off,” said Uncle Steve, “and browse at our ease.”

“Wasn’t Mrs. Storms the limit?” laughed Gerald. “Talk about the immodesty of our maidens! Strikes me, Uncle Steve, your generation is fully as mad as ours.”

“Don’t judge all dowagers by one,” urged the other, turning on the light.

Gerald stopped short in the midst of a jesting answer, forgetting both maidens and dowagers as he suddenly saw over his uncle’s familiar hearth something he had never seen there before; the cast of a beautiful head, palely tinted.

“Why, Uncle Steve,” he cried, “you have it too, that face called Forgiveness!”

“Is that its name?” asked Steven Grant quietly.

“I don’t really know, but it’s the only name I’ve heard given to it. I never saw any cast of it till yesterday, coming home from my trip West. I had an hour before my train left, so I ran in to take a look at the Museum. Say, those Middle-Westerners are alive, all right! Priceless, that Museum! And just as I was leaving, my eyes fell on this wonderful, wonderful thing. Seeing it was the big adventure of my whole trip. Its beauty has haunted me ever since.”

“Take down my copy, if you like,” said Grant.

“Oh, how exquisitely you’ve colored it, Stevedear! No one can beat you in such things. You’ve brought out every beauty, somehow. And it suggests both dawn and twilight.” Gerald passed his fingers with appreciative tenderness over the broad brow of the face called Forgiveness, and went on, with animation.

“At the Museum, there was a nice old cabinet-maker, German type, fitting a frame for their cast. Recent addition, it seems. He looked intelligent, so I asked him what it was. He said he didn’t know exactly; it hadn’t been ‘catalocked’ yet. But a poet friend of his had said it ought to be called the Rose of Pardon. Then he told me, musingly, that it made him think of the Virgin at Nuremberg.”

“That might well be,” observed Uncle Steve, pushing over the matches.

“Well, then, next a little Italian girl came along, with her sketch-book. She saw my interest, and showed me the astonishingly good pencil sketch she had made from the cast. So I asked her what it was, where it was from. She said she didn’t know; she understood that it was called Forgiveness. Then she looked me all over to see what manner of man I was, and shyly said that to her it was very beautiful, like the Madonna at Perugia.”

“I can see what she meant, of course.”

“But that isn’t the half, dearie! Just then a French painter, evidently a Friday lecturer or something of the sort, came in with a class of young boys. Lord, how they burbled, all over the place! One of the kids asked him the question that was trembling on my lips, and he answered that he wasn’t sure, but that he believed the cast was called Forgiveness. It was rather touching to hear him repeat very reverently, in his pronounced ‘Parrhisian’ accent, ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ The boys felt it, too, and they were very quiet for a moment. Then the Frenchman, with a bright glance at me (guessing no doubt that I too was an artist), added that for him, it was like the Virgin of the Visitation, so miraculously saved out of the destruction at Reims.”

“It seems to me more beautiful than that, even,” interposed the elder man, “but I can understand his feeling.”

“Exactly! And then, last of all, a real live American art student came hustling up, just the kind you see here at the League, only more so. He, too, said the face was called Forgiveness, adding briskly, ‘Perfect American type, don’t you think? Beats Gibson, what?’”

“They were all more or less right, you thought?” Steven Grant’s eyes were fixed curiously on Gerald’s face, still bent over the cast.

Gerald looked up. “Yes, they were right, each in his own way. You know, Stevedear, it all reminded me, in a beautifully wrong-side-out fashion, of the different witnesses in Poe’s murder story, you remember?”

“You mean the one where men of different nationalities all hear an ape chattering in the dark, and not knowing in the least what it is, each one is sure it’s some language not his own?”

“That’s right! The Frenchman, who doesn’t know Spanish, says it’s Spanish, the Englishman, who doesn’t understand German, says it’s German, while the Italian, who doesn’t know English, feels sure it’s English, and so on. But those people at the Museum were all so splendidly different from that! Each one wanted to guard and to claim for his own race the heritage of beauty breathing from the mask. The German, the little Italian girl, the French painter, the American art student—they were all alike in this. They found in that cast Nuremberg, Perugia, Reims, Chicago!”

“‘Beats Gibson, what?’” mocked Steven Grant.

“Do you think it’s a cast from nature?” asked Gerald, still intent on the face. “Perhaps a death-mask?”

The other nodded. “Without doubt, a death-mask.”

“But there’s nothing of the sharpness of death about it, is there? It seems a face unprofaned by earthly suffering.”

Again Steven Grant gazed at his nephew, as if waiting for the eyes of young manhood to see more.

“Strange,” pursued Gerald, “that a mere death-mask can mean so much to living men. There’s Fraser’s Roosevelt, and the Lincoln, and the Dante that used to be in everybody’s library, and—”

A silence fell between the two. Surely Mrs. Storms, the lady who was the limit, was far from their thoughts. The dinner, that masterpiece, had faded from the foreground.

“I never told you,” said Gerald, abruptly, “how I longed to make a death-mask of father, when he died there in London, away from you all. I wanted to preserve—and to show to you yourself, Stevedear!—the look of peace that came upon him. As a sculptor, I knew how, of course. Every kid studying sculpture has made casts—from life, anyway. But when mother saw what I was about, she trembled so violently I couldn’t go on, in the presence of her suffering. And _I_ trembled, too. I’ve never told you about it, because I was ashamed of my weakness, or whatever it was! Well, since then, I’ve never even _tried_ to make a death-mask! People send for me, of course, and I often go, when they seem to need a friendly presence. But it’s some moulder who does the work, not I. I can’t seem to bring myself—”

He set the cast on the table beside him, still conning its planes and shadows. Again the silence of understanding enveloped uncle and nephew, until Steven Grant said, as if in answer to a question, “Well, yes; it was much the same with me. I never made but one death-mask. Just one. There was no way out.”

“How was that?”

“It happened when I was younger than you are, so I couldn’t be expected to have much sense, could I? You trembled, because it was your father. I trembled, because it was the girl I’d loved, and in a sense, lost.”

“Oh, I could understand!” And Gerald, thinking of that most lovely lady with the glittering train, stretched out a sympathetic hand.

“A very beautiful girl she was, Anita Vaughn! The pride of our young circle. I made the mistake, if it was a mistake, of introducing my best friend to her. After that, I had no show whatever. They fell in love.”

“Hard luck, for you, anyway!”

“Yes, and a shock to my conceit, too. In a way, it was one of the sacrifices I made to art. I’d been moving Heaven and Hell to get that Emancipation group of mine well along. I didn’t want to ask Anita to marry me until I had proved my earning power, and that group would have settled things. Your gramper, as you know, didn’t think much of sculpture, and I was shy about asking him to shell out. So I waited and worked, and in the meantime,—ah, well, it was all simple enough. She preferred my friend to me, as well she might—”

“I don’t know about that,” bristled Gerald.

“No, you don’t, but I do. You see, it was Janvier.”

The younger man started. “Not Janvier, the famous Dr. Janvier!”

“Yes, _the_ Dr. Janvier. And no finer fellow ever lived. I’ve been thankful ever since that I didn’t let his luck in love stand between us as friends. Oh, of course, I sulked in my studio a few weeks, and took on a deep cynicism about life and love. But nobody seemed to notice my airs, so I gave ’em up, and picked out the prettiest wedding-present I could find for Anita.”

“And of course you had your work—”

“Indeed I had! My career was very much on my mind, those days!” He smiled at young ambition, and dexterously flicked a lengthened cigar ash into the fireplace. “But I suffered, too, don’t think I didn’t suffer! And strange as you may find it, that pair comforted me. To be sure, it never works out so, in books; but it was so, with us. The Janviers had me with them often, after their marriage. As I look back on it, I see that it was all far more beautiful than I could know, then. They were rare souls, both.”

“Did Janvier’s fame come early in life?”

“Yes, but he was too busy and quixotic to take much note of it. I first met him when I was making my studies for that confounded Emancipation group, and we became friends at once, because of my subject. He was interested in the welfare of the negroes, and gave up a lot of his time to charitable work among them. He used to bring me different types of colored men as models; I’ve often told you how I studied thirty-five different darkies for those reliefs on the pedestal. In our leisure, when we had it, Janvier and I would discuss racial traits, and so on.”

“New Yorker?”