Part 10

Naturally his delight in what he had merely whetted his longing for what he had not. Whenever his birthdays impended, as they continued to do with annoying annual precision, his wife and the elder children (especially young Felicia) would once more set out hunting for “the Lafayette bottom,” and failing always in their search, would in despair purchase some costly and inadequate substitute for the thing they sought. Indeed, “Father’s feeling for antique silver, you know!” had made him no niggard with modern gold, and his offspring, even in their early youth, had their many-leaved, rigorously inspected check-books. Nor could I ever see that they were in any way the worse for this indulgence.

Felix smiled happily enough when, on the morning of his fifty-first birthday, young Felicia bounded into his study, and plumped down upon his table an ill-favored bulbous tankard of somewhat baroque design; a piece which she jubilantly declared was “a genuine John Cony,” but which was really, as our wise expert whispered to himself in the midst of his outspoken praise and thanksgiving, “no more a Cony than I am a king.”

“No use, dad,” said young Felicia, shaking a wise blonde head, in her funny little perpetual morning-glory way. “Mother and I have given up the Lafayette bottom for keeps. We’ve searched high and low for the old thing, from Salem, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, and so have you. Nothing doing. _I_ don’t believe there ever _was_ a Lafayette bottom, anyway!” This last with the air of uttering a superb and daring heresy, possibly epoch-making in the annals of silver-collecting in America.

“As for that,” replied Felix, whose self-imposed rôle it was never to turn a hair at the opinions of youth, “I haven’t believed it myself, this long time.”

Felicia started indignantly. “Why, Payrent, Payrent! What do you mean by such—recalcitrating? I thought you staked your life on that Lafayette business!”

“I’m afraid you haven’t been keeping up with the times,” retorted the parent. “For the past ten years, at least, I’ve discounted the tale. I’ve been putting two and two together, and I really don’t see the sense in trying to make a baker’s dozen out of it, do you?”

“Oh, well, if you’re bringing it down to cold mathematics, father, I rather think you’re going to miss some of the joys of your job!”

“On the contrary, my dear Flickey, the joys will be all the keener.”

“Well, I wish you’d explain your change of base.”

“I haven’t made any change of base. And haven’t I told you a hundred times that the true collector should never venture out of doors without being armored in doubt? Why, from the time of dear Grammer Bradford’s maunderings about Lafayette in Egypt, when I was a little boy in a wine-colored plaid shirt, I had my misgivings about the tale. It’s the doubt that makes the chase interesting. Of course, all of us Bradfords know that our Fairlee ancestor was with Paul Jones on the ship Ranger in the harbor of Quiberon in 1779 when that ship received the first national salute ever given to the American flag in Europe.”

Flickey stifled a yawn behind her preposterous dinner-ring.

“So far, so good. Next, we have reason to believe that our seafaring grandsire got up to Paris that same year, and there ordered the Fairlee porringer, the cover of which I now possess, the bowl being mysteriously dog-lost.”

“Yes, dog-gone lost, forever and a day.”

Felix fingered the scrolled thumb-piece of the supposed John Cony. “But didn’t you ever stop to think, my dear, just what Lafayette was up to, those days? He was only twenty when he came over to us, in 1777. Is it at all likely that he’d ever been in Egypt before that time? Not enough to notice, I’ll be bound! No, I can’t think he was celebrated enough in 1779 to warrant having his exploits, real or imaginary, engraved on the side of a porringer, to make a household word of himself.”

“Another illusion overboard,” cried Felicia hopefully, as if pleased with a parent’s progress. But she departed, thoughtful.

“Do you know,” she announced to her mother, afterwards, “dad doesn’t really swallow that Lafayette stuff, any more than you and I do?”

“Of course not, dearie!”

“Well, of all the gay parental deceivers, you two are the limit! You’ll be saying there’s no Santa Claus, next!” Flickey flounced off in a dudgeon not wholly pretended. She was thoughtful, too. As her parents’ interest in the quest waned, her own waxed stronger.

“The old dears got a rise out of _me_, all right,” she confided to Jimmy Alexander, a Princeton boy who had succeeded in wresting forever from Yale Felicia’s sworn allegiance, originally granted to Harvard, and for a brief hour wavering between Amherst and Columbia.

“So much depends upon where you spend your summers,” Felicia had once ingenuously remarked; and not without some anxiety, her parents had made a similar observation. However, it was with a certain feeling of relief that Felix and his wife had compared notes upon the subject of Jimmy Alexander. Weighed in the balance with every other collegian in Flickey’s career, the young man triumphed conspicuously. Incidentally, he had an interest in old silver, an interest which even the skeptical Felix believed was genuine.

The fount and origin of that interest would have been clear to our cousin the collector could he have overheard Flickey and Jimmy in the arbor, after a game of tennis. “I’ll beat you to it,” Flickey was saying. “You find me that Lafayette bottom, and your fortune’s made, with father. He tells us now, after all these years, that he doesn’t believe there _is_ such a thing. But all the same there’s a look of holy faith shining behind those shell rims of his. Say, Jimmy, did you ever notice how blue father’s eyes are? They’re the eyes of a believer, every time!”

Jimmy was too much engrossed with Felicia’s eyes to spare a thought for Felix’s. But the girl’s suggestion about the Lafayette bottom caught his fancy. An up-and-coming lawyer, such as he intended eventually to be, ought to be able to hunt down a silver bowl; or rather, what is more to the point with lawyers, to get some one else to do it.

“My Aunt Amanda at Lost River,” he mused aloud, “has quite a little collection of such trifles, and I’m sure she’d be glad to advise—”

“Your Aunt Amanda, at Lost River,” hooted Felicia, the morning-glory willingly assuming the rôle of owl. “Oh, Jimmy, you innocent, don’t you suppose father has been up hill and down dale, from Lost River to Newfoundland Bay, looking for that bowl? Don’t you know that half the dealers in New York are out with bloodhounds seeking stuff for father’s cabinets to devour? Your Aunt Amanda, indeed! And Lost River! Huh!”

Jimmy was nettled, but not defeated. “All the same,” he retorted stubbornly, “my Aunt Amanda is just as good as anybody else’s, and in fact a lot better than most; and there’s as good fish in Lost River as you can buy in all New York. And furthermore, if you don’t mind my mentioning it, my Aunt Amanda is an authority on Early American silver. You probably are not aware of the fact that it was she who wrote the famous Blakeney monograph! Amanda Alexander Blakeney is her name.”

Flickey was taken aback for a fraction of a second. “A. A. Blakeney? Why, we were brought up on her! I thought it was a him, I did, really! Dad swears by his Blakeney.”

“Then why shouldn’t we Dodge up to Lost River,” urged Jimmy, appeased, “and see auntie about it?”

Felicia’s eyes shone, but her words were circumspect. “Of course we could Dodge it in your car, or Ford it in mine; but hadn’t we better get father and mother to take us up in the family ark, with Priscilla and the children—?”

“Not on your blooming passport! Where do I come in, with a deal like that? If anything results, does little Jimmy draw the prestige? No, no, I want to perform the quest by myself—with you, of course. Can’t ask any one else, my runabout won’t stand for it. After all, I’m furnishing an aunt; and I think I ought to have something to say.”

“I’ll see how mother feels about it,” vouchsafed Flickey. She added to herself, “I’ll wear my pink-and-white stripe, with the rose blazer. But perhaps not the earrings—you never can tell about earrings—”

III

Late one July afternoon, Amanda Alexander Blakeney had ensconced herself with Queen Victoria in a shady corner of the terrace, and was looking forward to an hour of tranquil enjoyment with Lehzen’s caraway seeds, and Lord M. To her vexation, the very first paragraph was punctuated for her by footsteps on the brick walk; and peering through the pine boughs, she spied a gay young pair who had evidently just descended from a car, left in quite the wrong place in her courtyard.

“I hope,” she said to herself, “it isn’t another brazen couple come to ask if this is a ‘gift-shop-’n’-tea-house,’ and can they have something wet. Well, they’ll hear from me, and—”

A brisk voice broke in, man-fashion.

“Hello, hello, Aunt Mandy! Anything wet for the weary prodigal nevvy?”

“Well, of all things,” replied the great Museum authority on silver, beaming with pleasure upon her favorite Alexander nephew. Lord M. was readily enough forgotten in the vivid presence of the young people, and the subject of silver readily enough approached with the arrival of a tea-tray laden with various products reflecting credit alike upon the collector and her cook. Mrs. Blakeney was a childless widow, distinctly pretty, with a young face framed by abundant white hair. In her fresh lilac gown with its touches of old lace, and in her daintily buckled slippers, of a Victorian slenderness, she was, as Felicia afterwards declared, a “regular story-book fairy-godmother person.” Old silver was her love, her life, her knowledge. Everybody’s silver was of interest to her; she was always ready to talk or even to hear others talk concerning caudle cups or apostle spoons or salt-cellars or tankards.

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.