They were cousins of the Raycies’, and she inherited the pictures.”
I
continued to ponder. “I wanted awfully to marry her, the year I left Harvard,”
I said presently, more to myself than to my hearer.
“Well,
if you had you’d have annexed a prize fool; and
one of the most beautiful collections of Italian Primitives in the world.”
“In the world?”
“Well—you
wait till you see them; if you haven’t already. And I seem to make out that you
haven’t?—that you can’t have. How long have you been in Japan? Four years? I
thought so. Well, it was only last winter that Netta found out.
“Found
out what?”
“What
there was in old Alethea Raycie’s attic. You must
remember the old Miss Raycie who lived in that hideous house in Tenth Street
when we were children. She was a cousin of your mother’s, wasn’t she? Well, the
old fool lived there for nearly half a century, with five millions’ worth of
pictures shut up in the attic over her head. It seems they’d been there ever
since the death of a poor young Raycie who collected them in Italy years and
years ago. I don’t know much about the story; I never was strong on genealogy,
and the Raycies have always been rather dim to me. They were everybody’s
cousins, of course; but as far as one can make out that seems to have been
their principal if not their only function. Oh—and I suppose the Raycie
Building was called after them; only they
didn’t build it!
“But
there was this one young fellow—I wish I could find out more about him. All
that Netta seems to know (or to care, for that matter) is that when he was very
young—barely out of college—he was sent to Italy by his father to buy Old
Masters—in the ‘forties, it must have been—and came back with this
extraordinary, this unbelievable collection…a boy of that age!…and was
disinherited by the old gentleman for bringing home such rubbish. The young
fellow and his wife died ever so many years ago, both of them. It seems he was
so laughed at for buying such pictures that they went away and lived like
hermits in the depths of the country. There were some funny spectral portraits
of them that old Alethea had up in her bedroom. Netta showed me one of them the
last time I went to see her: a pathetic drawing of the only child, an anaemic
little girl with a big forehead. Jove, but that must have been your little
Louisa!”
I
nodded. “In a plaid frock and embroidered pantalettes?”
“Yes,
something of the sort. Well, when Louisa and her parents died, I suppose the
pictures went to old Miss Raycie. At any rate, at some time or other—and it
must have been longer ago than you or I can remember—the old lady inherited
them with the Tenth Street house; and when she
died, three or four years ago, her relations found she’d never even been
upstairs to look at them.”
“Well—?”
“Well,
she died intestate, and Netta Kent—Netta Cosby—turned out to be the next of
kin. There wasn’t much to be got out of the estate (or so they thought) and, as
the Cosby’s are always hard up, the house in Tenth Street had to be sold, and
the pictures were very nearly sent off to the auction room with all the rest of
the stuff. But nobody supposed they would bring anything, and the auctioneer said
that if you tried to sell pictures with carpets and bedding and kitchen
furniture it always depreciated the whole thing; and so, as the Cosbys had some
bare walls to cover, they sent for the whole lot—there were about thirty—and
decided to have them cleaned and hang them up. ‘After all,’ Netta said, ‘as
well as I can make out through the cobwebs, some of them look like rather jolly
copies of early Italian things.’ But as she was short of cash she decided to
clean them at home instead of sending them to an expert; and one day, while she
was operating on this very one before you, with her sleeves rolled up, the man
called, who always does call on such
occasions; the man who knows. In the given case, it was a quiet fellow
connected with the Louvre, who’d brought her a letter from Paris, and whom
she’d invited to one of her stupid dinners. He was announced, and she thought
it would be a joke to let him see what she was doing; she has pretty arms, you
may remember. So he was asked into the dining-room, where he found her with a
pail of hot water and soap-suds, and this
laid out on the table; and the first thing he did was to grab her pretty arm so
tight that it was black and blue, while he shouted out: ‘God in heaven! Not hot water!’”
My
friend leaned back with a sigh of mingled resentment and satisfaction, and we
sat silently looking up at the lovely “Adoration” above the mantelpiece.
“That’s
how I got it a little cheaper—most of the old varnish was gone for good. But
luckily for her it was the first picture she had attacked; and as for the
others—you must see them, that’s all I can say…Wait; I’ve got the catalogue
somewhere about…”
He
began to rummage for it, and I asked, remembering how nearly I had married
Netta Kent: “Do you mean to say she didn’t keep a single one of them?”
“Oh,
yes—in the shape of pearls and Rolls–Royces. And you’ve seen their new house in
Fifth Avenue?” He ended with a grin of irony: “The best joke is that Jim was
just thinking of divorcing her when the pictures were discovered.”
“Poor
little Louisa!” I sighed.
The Old Maid.
The ’Fifties.
In
the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity and
affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.
The
sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous,
prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a
fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of
bankers, India merchants, ship-builders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed
slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only
because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and
strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the
surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground.
Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played
without a sound.
In
this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas
was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications.
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