Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (9 page)

 
          
“I’m
very glad to see you here, Sarah Anne,” Mary Adeline answered with simplicity.

 
          
“Ah,
it’s not for want of wishing that I haven’t come before! Treeshy knows that, I
hope. But the cares of a household like mine…”

 
          
“Yes,
and it’s been so difficult to get about in the bad weather,” Treeshy suggested
sympathetically.

 
          
Mrs.
Huzzard lifted the Raycie eyebrows. “Has it really? With two pairs of horses
one hardly notices the weather…Oh, the pretty, pretty,
pretty
, baby
!…
Mary Adeline,” Sarah Anne
continued, turning severely to her sister, “I shall be happy to offer you a
seat in my carriage if you’re thinking of leaving.”

 
          
But
Mary Adeline was a married woman too. She raised her mild head and her glance
crossed her sister’s quietly. “My own carriage is at the door, thank you
kindly, Sarah Anne,” she said; and the baffled Sarah Anne withdrew on Lewis’s
arm. But a moment later the old habit of subordination reasserted itself. Mary
Adeline’s gentle countenance grew as timorous as a child’s, and she gathered up
her cloak in haste.

 
          
“Perhaps
I was too quick…I’m sure she meant it kindly,” she exclaimed, overtaking Lewis
as he turned to come up the stairs; and with a smile he stood watching his two
sisters drive off together in the Huzzard coach.

 
          
He
returned to the nursery, where Treeshy was still crooning over her daughter.

 
          
“Well,
my dear,” he said, “what do you suppose Sarah Anne came for?” And, in reply to
her wondering gaze: “To buy me off from showing the pictures!”

 
          
His
wife’s indignation took just the form he could have wished. She simply went on
with her rich cooing laugh and hugged the baby tighter. But Lewis felt the
perverse desire to lay a still greater strain upon her loyalty.

 
          
“Offered to double my allowance, she and John, if only I’ll take
down the sign!”

 
          
“No
one shall touch the sign!” Treeshy flamed.

 
          
“Not
till I do,” said her husband grimly.

 
          
She
turned about and scanned him with anxious eyes.
“Lewis…
you
?”

 
          
“Oh,
my dear…they’re right…it can’t go on forever…” He went up to her, and put his
arm about her and the child. “You’ve been braver than an army of heroes; but it
won’t do. The expenses have been a good deal heavier than I was led to expect.
And I…I can’t raise a mortgage on the pictures. Nobody will touch them.”

 
          
She
met this quickly. “No; I know. That was what Mary Adeline came about.”

 
          
The
blood rushed angrily to Lewis’s temples. “Mary Adeline—how the devil did
she
hear of it?”

 
          
“Through
Mr. Reedy, I suppose. But you must not be angry. She was kindness itself: she
doesn’t want you to close the gallery, Lewis…that is, not as long as you really
continue to believe in it…She and Donald Kent will lend us enough to go on with
for a year longer. That is what she came to say.”

 
          
For
the first time since the struggle had begun, Lewis Raycie’s throat was choked
with tears. His faithful Mary Adeline! He had a sudden vision of her, stealing
out of the house at High Point before daylight to carry a basket of scraps to
the poor Mrs. Edgar Poe who was dying of a decline down the lane…He laughed
aloud in his joy.

 
          
“Dear
old Mary Adeline! How magnificent of her! Enough to give me a whole year more…”
He pressed his wet cheek against his wife’s in a long silence. “Well, dear,” he
said at length, “it’s for you to say—do we accept?”

 
          
He
held her off, questioningly, at arm’s length, and her wan little smile met his
own and mingled with it.

 
          
“Of
course we accept!”

 
          
  

 
          
Of
the Raycie family,
which prevailed so powerfully in the New
York of the ‘forties, only one of the name survived in my boyhood, half a
century later.
Like so many of the descendants of the proud little
Colonial society, the Raycies had totally vanished, forgotten by everyone but a
few old ladies, one or two genealogists and the sexton of Trinity Church, who
kept the record of their graves.

 
          
The
Raycie blood was of course still to be traced in various allied families:
Kents, Huzzards, Cosbys and many others, proud to claim cousinship with a
“Signer,” but already indifferent or incurious as to the fate of his progeny.
These old New
Yorkers
who lived so well and spent
their money so liberally, vanished like a pinch of dust when they disappeared
from their pews and their dinner-tables.

 
          
If
I happen to have been familiar with the name since my youth, it is chiefly
because its one survivor was a distant cousin of my mother’s, whom she sometimes
took me to see on days when she thought I was likely to be good because I had
been promised a treat for the morrow.

 
          
Old
Miss Alethea Raycie lived in a house I had always heard spoken of as “Cousin
Ebenezer’s.” It had evidently, in its day, been an admired specimen of domestic
architecture; but was now regarded as the hideous though venerable relic of a
bygone age. Miss Raycie, being crippled by rheumatism, sat above stairs in a
large cold room, meagrely furnished with beadwork tables, rosewood etageres and
portraits of pale sad-looking people in odd clothes. She herself was large and
saturnine, with a battlemented black lace cap, and so deaf that she seemed a
survival of forgotten days, a Rosetta
Stone
to which
the clue was lost. Even to my mother, nursed in that vanished tradition, and
knowing instinctively to whom Miss Raycie
alluded
when
she spoke of Mary Adeline, Sarah Anne or Uncle Doctor, intercourse with her was
difficult and languishing, and my juvenile interruptions were oftener
encouraged than reproved.

 
          
In
the course of one of these visits my eye, listlessly roaming, singled out among
the pallid portraits a three-crayon drawing of a little girl with a large
forehead and dark eyes, dressed in a plaid frock and embroidered pantalettes,
and sitting on a grass-bank. I pulled my mother’s sleeve to ask who she was,
and my mother answered: “
Ah, that
was poor little
Louisa Raycie, who died of a decline. How old was little Louisa when she died,
Cousin Alethea?”

 
          
To
batter this simple question into Cousin Alethea’s brain was the affair of ten
laborious minutes; and when the job was done, and Miss Raycie, with an air of
mysterious displeasure, had dropped a deep, “Eleven,” my mother was too
exhausted to continue. So she turned to me to add, with one of the private
smiles we kept for each other: “It was the poor child who would have inherited
the Raycie Gallery.” But to a little boy of my age this item of information
lacked
interest, nor did I understand my mother’s
surreptitious amusement.

 
          
This
far-off scene suddenly came back to me last year, when, on one of my infrequent
visits to New York, I went to dine with my old friend, the banker, John Selwyn,
and came to an astonished stand before the mantelpiece in his new library.
“Hal-
lo
!”
I said,
looking up at the picture above the chimney.

 
          
My
host squared his shoulders, thrust his hands into his pockets, and affected the
air of modesty which people think it proper to assume when their possessions
are admired.
“The Macrino d’Alba?
Y-yes…it was the
only thing I managed to capture out of the Raycie collection.”

 
          
“The only thing?
Well—.”

 
          
“Ah,
but you should have seen the Mantegna;
and
the Giotto;
and
the Piero della
Francesca—hang it, one of the most beautiful Piero della Francescas in the
world…A girl in profile, with her hair in a pearl net, against a background of
columbines;
that
went back to
Europe—the National Gallery I believe. And the Carpaccio, the most exquisite
little St. George…that went to California…
Lord
!”
He sat down with the sigh of a hungry man turned away from a groaning board.
“Well, it nearly broke me buying
this
!”
he murmured, as if at least that fact were some consolation.

 
          
I
was turning over my early memories in quest of a clue to what he spoke of as
the Raycie collection, in a tone which implied that he was alluding to objects
familiar to all art-lovers.

 
          
Suddenly:
“They weren’t poor little Louisa’s pictures, by any chance?” I asked,
remembering my mother’s cryptic smile.

 
          
Selwyn
looked at me perplexedly.
“Who the deuce is poor little Louisa?”
And without waiting for my answer, he went on: “They were that fool Netta
Cosby’s until a year ago—and she never even knew it.”

 
          
We
looked at each other interrogatively, my friend perplexed at my ignorance, and
I now absorbed in trying to run down the genealogy of Netta Cosby. I did so
finally. “Netta Cosby—you don’t mean Netta Kent, the one who married Jim
Cosby?”

 
          
“That’s
it. 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!”