Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (7 page)

 
          
How
could Lewis say: “If I had, I knew you’d have refused to let me buy the
pictures?” He could only stammer: “I
did
allude to the revolution in taste…new names coming up…you may remember…”

 
          
“Revolution!
New names! Who says so? I had a letter last
week from the London dealers to whom I especially recommended you, telling me
that an undoubted Guido Reni was coming into the market this summer.”

 
          
“Oh,
the dealers—
they
don’t know!”

 
          
“The
dealers…don’t
?…
Who does…except yourself?” Mr. Raycie
pronounced in a white sneer.

 
          
Lewis,
as white, still held his ground. “I wrote you, sir, about my friends; in Italy,
and afterward in England.”

 
          
“Well,
God damn it, I never heard of one of
their
names before, either; no more’n of these painters of yours here. I supplied you
with the names of all the advisers you needed, and all the painters, too; I all
but made the collection for you myself, before you started…I was explicit
enough, in all conscience, wasn’t I?”

 
          
Lewis
smiled faintly. “That’s what I hoped the pictures would be…”

 
          
“What?
Be what? What’d you mean?”

 
          
“Be
explicit…Speak for
themselves…
make you see that their
painters are already superseding some of the better known…”

 
          
Mr.
Raycie gave an awful laugh. “They are, are they?”
In whose
estimation?
Your friends’, I suppose. What’s the name, again, of that
fellow you met in Italy, who picked ’em out for you?”

 
          
“Ruskin—John
Ruskin,” said Lewis.

 
          
Mr.
Raycie’s laugh, prolonged, gathered up into itself a fresh shower of
expletives.
“Ruskin—Ruskin—just plain John Ruskin, eh?
And who
is
this great John Ruskin,
who sets God A’mighty right in his judgments? Who’d you say John Ruskin’s
father was, now?”

 
          
“A respected wine-merchant in London, sir.”

 
          
Mr.
Raycie ceased to laugh: he looked at his son with an expression of unutterable
disgust.

 
          
“Retail?”

 
          
“I…believe
so…”

 
          
“Faugh!”
said Mr. Raycie.

 
          
“It
wasn’t only Ruskin, father…I told you of those other friends in London, whom I
met on the way home. They inspected the pictures, and all of them agreed
that…that the collection would some day be very valuable.”

 
          
“
Some day
—did they give you a date…the
month and the year? Ah, those other friends; yes. You said there
was
a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Hunt and a Mr. Rossiter, was it?
Well, I never heard of any of those names either—except perhaps in a trades’
directory.”

 
          
“It’s
not Rossiter, father: Dante Rossetti.”

 
          
“Excuse
me: Rossetti. And what does Mr. Dante Rossetti’s father do? Sell macaroni, I
presume?”

 
          
Lewis
was silent, and Mr. Raycie went on, speaking now with a deadly steadiness: “The
friends I sent you to were judges of art, sir; men who know what a picture’s
worth; not one of ’em but could pick out a genuine Raphael. Couldn’t you find
’em when you got to England? Or hadn’t they the time to spare for you? You’d
better not,” Mr. Raycie added, “tell me
that
,
for I know how they’d have received your father’s son.”

 
          
“Oh,
most kindly…they did indeed, sir…”

 
          
“Ay;
but that didn’t suit you. You didn’t
want
to be advised. You wanted to show off before a lot of ignoramuses like
yourself. You wanted—how’d I know what you wanted? It’s as if I’d never given
you an instruction or laid a charge on you! And the money—God! Where’d it go
to? Buying
this
?
Nonsense—.”
Mr. Raycie raised himself heavily on his stick and fixed his angry eyes on his
son. “Own up, Lewis; tell me they got it out of you at cards. Professional
gamblers the lot, I make no doubt; your Ruskin and your Morris and your
Rossiter. Make a business to pick up young American greenhorns on their
travels, I daresay…No? Not that, you say?
Then—women?
God A’mighty, Lewis,” gasped Mr. Raycie, tottering toward his son with
outstretched stick, “I’m no blue-nosed Puritan, sir, and I’d a damn sight
rather you told me you’d spent it on a woman, every penny of it, than let
yourself be fleeced like a simpleton, buying these things that look more like
cuts out o’ Foxe’s book of Martyrs than Originals of the Old Masters for a
Gentleman’s Gallery…Youth’s youth…Gad, sir, I’ve been young myself…a fellow’s
got to go through his apprenticeship…Own up now: women?”

 
          
“Oh,
not women—”

 
          
“Not
even!” Mr. Raycie groaned.
“All in pictures, then?
Well, say no more to me now…I’ll get home, I’ll get home…” He cast a last
apoplectic glance about the room.
“The Raycie Gallery!
That pack of bones and mummers’ finery
!…
Why, let alone
the rest, there’s not a full-bodied female among ’em…Do you know what those
Madonna’s of yours are like, my son? Why, there ain’t one of ’em that don’t
remind me of a bad likeness of poor Treeshy Kent…I should say you’d hired half
the sign-painters of Europe to do her portrait for you—if you could imagine
your wanting it…No, sir! I don’t need your arm,” Mr. Raycie snarled, heaving
his great bulk painfully across the hall. He withered Lewis with a last look
from the doorstep. “And to buy
that
you overdrew your account?—No, I’ll drive home alone.”

 
          
  

 
          
Mr.
Raycie did not die till nearly a year later; but New York agreed it was the
affair of the pictures that had killed him.

 
          
The
day after his first and only sight of them he sent for his lawyer, and it
became known that he had made a new will. Then he took to his bed with a return
of the gout, and grew so rapidly worse that it was thought “only proper” to
postpone the party Mrs. Raycie was to have given that autumn to inaugurate the
gallery. This enabled the family to pass over in silence the question of the
works of art themselves; but outside of the Raycie house, where they were never
mentioned, they formed, that winter, a frequent and fruitful topic of
discussion.

 
          
Only
two persons besides Mr. Raycie were known to have seen them. One was Mr.
Donaldson Kent, who owed the privilege to the fact of having once been in
Italy; the other, Mr. Reedy, the agent, who had unpacked the pictures. Mr.
Reedy, beset by Raycie cousins and old family friends, had replied with genuine
humility: “Why, the truth is, I never was taught to see any difference between
one picture and another, except as regards the size of them; and these struck
me as smallish…on the small side, I would say…”

 
          
Mr.
Kent was known to have unbosomed himself to Mr. Raycie with considerable
frankness—he went so far, it was rumoured, as to declare that he had never seen
any pictures in Italy like those brought back by Lewis, and begged to doubt if
they really came from there. But in public he maintained that noncommittal
attitude which passed for prudence, but proceeded only from timidity; no one
ever got anything from him but the guarded statement: “The subjects are wholly
inoffensive.”

 
          
It
was believed that Mr. Raycie dared not consult the Huzzards. Young John Huzzard
had just brought home a Raphael; it would have been hard not to avoid
comparisons which would have been too galling. Neither to them, nor to anyone
else, did Mr. Raycie ever again allude to the Raycie Gallery. But when his will
was opened it was found that he had bequeathed the pictures to his son. The
rest of his property was left absolutely to his two daughters. The bulk of the
estate was Mrs. Raycie’s; but it was known that Mrs. Raycie had had her
instructions, and among them, perhaps, was the order to fade away in her turn
after six months of widowhood. When she had been laid beside her husband in
Trinity church-yard her will (made in the same week as Mr. Raycie’s, and
obviously at his dictation) was found to allow five thousand dollars a year to
Lewis during his life-time; the residue of the fortune, which Mr. Raycie’s
thrift and good management had made into one of the largest in New York, was
divided between the daughters. Of these, the one promptly married a Kent and
the other a Huzzard; and the latter, Sarah Ann (who had never been Lewis’s
favourite), was wont to say in later years: “Oh, no, I never grudged my poor
brother those funny old pictures. You see, we have a Raphael.”

 
          
The
house stood on the corner of Third Avenue and Tenth Street. It had lately come
to Lewis Raycie as his share in the property of a distant cousin, who had made
an “old New York will” under which all his kin benefited in proportion to their
consanguinity. The neighbourhood was unfashionable, and the house in bad
repair; but Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Raycie, who, since their marriage, had been
living in retirement at Tarrytown, immediately moved into it.

 
          
Their
arrival excited small attention. Within a year of his father’s death, Lewis had
married Treeshy Kent. The alliance had not been encouraged by Mr. and Mrs.
Kent, who went so far as to say that their niece might have done better; but as
that one of their sons who was still unmarried had always shown a lively
sympathy for Treeshy, they yielded to the prudent thought that, after all, it
was better than having her entangle Bill.

 
          
The
Lewis Raycies had been four years married, and during that time had dropped out
of the memory of New York as completely as if their exile had covered half a
century. Neither of them had ever cut a great figure there. Treeshy had been
nothing but the Kent’s Cinderella, and Lewis’s ephemeral importance, as heir to
the Raycie millions, had been effaced by the painful episode which resulted in
his being deprived of them.

 
          
So
secluded was their way of living, and so much had it come to be a habit, that
when Lewis announced that he had inherited Uncle Ebenezer’s house his wife
hardly looked up from the baby-blanket she was embroidering.

 
          
“Uncle Ebenezer’s house in New York?”

 
          
He
drew a deep breath. “Now I shall be able to show the pictures.”

 
          
“Oh,
Lewis—” She dropped the blanket. “Are we going to live there?”

 
          
“Certainly.
But the house is so large that I shall turn the
two corner rooms on the ground floor into a gallery. They are very suitably
lighted. It was there that Cousin Ebenezer was laid out.”

 
          
“Oh,
Lewis—”

 
          
If
anything could have made Lewis Raycie believe in his own strength of will it
was his wife’s attitude. Merely to hear that unquestioning murmur of submission
was to feel something of his father’s tyrannous strength arise in him; but with
the wish to use it more humanely.

 
          
“You’ll
like that, Treeshy? It’s been dull for you here, I know.”

 
          
She
flushed up. “Dull?
With
you
,
darling.
Besides, I like the country. But I shall like Tenth Street too.
Only—you said there were repairs?”

 
          
He
nodded sternly. “I shall borrow money to make them. If necessary—” he lowered
his voice—“I shall mortgage the pictures.”

 
          
He
saw her eyes fill. “Oh, but it won’t be! There are so many ways still in which
I can economize.”

 
          
He
laid his hand on hers and turned his profile toward her, because he knew it was
so much stronger than his full face. He did not feel sure that she quite
grasped his intention about the pictures; was not even certain that he wished
her to. He went in to New York every week now, occupying himself mysteriously
and importantly with plans, specifications and other business transactions with
long names; while Treeshy, through the hot summer months, sat in Tarrytown and
waited for the baby.