CHAPTER TWO
Conkling went back. It was, indeed, rather a habit with him, this going back to authenticate the questionable, this returning to appraise the survivals of undecipherable civilizations. But before going back the technique of his calling as a collector, of his activities as an antiquarian, prompted him to assemble what data he could concerning the occupants of the old Kent County manor-house on the Lake Road.
He did not discover a great deal, and much of this, in the end, proved contradictory. But once he had tapped the rock of rural reticence he found a copious enough flow of the waters of hostility. The countryside apparently had very little that was good to say of the Keswicks. They were "queer" and felt themselves above their neighbors. They had even shot off an old blunderbuss at certain youths of Weston who had raided the row of oxheart cherries in their orchard, and had allowed a horse to die of distemper without calling in a veterinary surgeon. As for the girl, Julia Keswick, she wasn't so bad as the two old she-dragons, but she was reputed to be a spitfire and hard to hold down. This, however, Conkling found neutralized by later information to the effect that the girl was as shy as a rabbit, and no one ever knew what she was up to. But she gave herself airs, chiefly, apparently, because she had been at a convent school in Quebec.
"And there was them as called her a beauty, and them as preferred a woman with more meat'n a sparrow on her bones!"
Yet the data concerning her two aunts, Georgina and Lavinia Keswick, was less ambiguous in coloring. These two antique maiden ladies were variously described as "a couple of old crows," "a pair o' bloodless old hardheads," and "a team o' skinflints who put pennies in the collection plate of a Sunday." There had been a brother once, a rolling stone who wasted the family substance and went off to Europe once a year to buy marble lions and tombstones and paint little pictures on pieces of canvas. He had been a poor sort, this brother, and it couldn't have been much loss when he died of Roman fever somewhere in Italy, for he had always preferred daubing a picture of a field to driving a plow up and down its landsides. And you can't farm in a country like Canada with a camel's-hair brush! Not by a long shot! The two old crows still tried to run that farm, for they would endure no man about the place, but they couldn't even pay the interest on the mortgage, and year by year things were only getting worse. They'd be foreclosing on 'em any time now.
It would make great tobacco land, the upper half of the farm, once it was worked right. They could get five or six hundred a year out of it, easy, growing Burley on shares, but the two elderly Keswick women had religious scruples about surrendering land for the cultivation of the filthy weed.
Yet Belinda Brittner, who had been in service with them in the old days, claimed their religion to be a pretense and a mockery, remembering as she did how Miss Lavinia had turned the clock back on Saturday night so as to finish her strawberry jam without breaking the Sabbath, as she put it. And their believing themselves to be better than other folks was likewise a deception and a mockery before the Lord, for Belinda wasn't so blind that she didn't know they dined on dog-fish discarded on the beach by the pound-net fisherman, and frugally bought cat-meat which went to no cats, but was frugally stewed with sour-dock for their own parsimonious table. And when the Annie Huff missed the harbor mouth at Rond-Eau and pounded to pieces in a south-easter on the beach just below the Keswick farm the two old vultures had been discovered by certain midnight wanderers frugally salvaging everything washed up from the wreck.
Just why this was held against them Conkling could not quite define, just as he could not actively share in the rural indignation against Kendal Keswick's fifteen-year-old crime of importing a figure model from New York. A justice of the peace had taken a hand in that affair and there had been high words in the attic studio of the old manor-house, where the model had been ordered in the name of the law to put on her clothes and take her departure by the first train to the States. And Kendal Keswick, after roundly cursing the country, had also taken his departure. That eccentric dilettante went morosely off to Italy, for a chance, as he put it, to breathe again. But there, ironically enough, he breathed his last before the end of the year.
All this, piled up before Conkling in a garrulous campaign of discouragement, only added a razor edge to that cool-eyed connoisseur's determination to revisit the Keswick manor-house. There was, he kept reminding himself, every reason to assume that this old house might be rich in the things he was most eager to obtain. But that purely antiquarian curiosity became perplexingly involved with the memory of an intense-eyed girl with mahogany-tinted hair.
So two days later, when he parked his car in the deep shadow of a horse-chestnut beside the Lake Road, he felt that luck was with him when he caught sight of a lilac sunbonnet on the far side of the half-strangled cedar hedge. Yet his heart skipped a beat as he pushed open the broken gate, and in stepping though it seemed to step back a century in time.
The girl, who had a garden rake in her hand, paled a little as she caught sight of him.
"It was good of you to come back," she said quite simply. But that acknowledgment seemed enriched by the look of intensity on her face. It was a look, he was beginning to see, which was habitual with her, and had much to do with her persistent aura of childishness.
"I call it good of you to let me," he protested. Yet his eyes, as he spoke, were on the faded front of the old manor-house.
"They didn't understand," she said with her childlike immediacy.
"Understand what?" he asked.
"That you were an artist," she explained.
"But I'm not. I'm only a curio hound for a kindly old gentleman named Banning, who gives me a car and pays me money for wandering about and enjoying life."
"But you paint," she reminded him.
Conkling could afford to laugh at her solemnity.
"I thought I could paint once, but two years in Paris showed me I was barking up the wrong tree. About all I'm good for now is to size up other people's painting."
The girl's gaze became impersonal.
"They found that out," she admitted.
"Who did?"
"My aunts; and they're rather sorry now about Nero."
"Why?" he asked, with his eyes on her rapt young face. She was, after all, more of a child than he had imagined. But he had not missed the heat-lightning smile of humor that had played momentarily about her lips. And he was grateful for it. It humanized her; it tended to authenticate her reality. He wanted, above everything else, to establish her as real, through and through, very much as he might wish some find in old mahogany not to thin out into mere veneer.
"Because my Aunt Georgina is rather anxious to see you," the girl was saying.
"About what?"
"About the things you're interested in."
"But how does she know what I'm interested in?" he demanded, pondering the fact that the enemy had also been active in the fields of reconnaissance.
The faded lilac sunbonnet slowly turned until it faced the house front.
"I don't think I can talk to you any longer," said the girl, with her non-committal eyes once more on his. "But she'll probably come out when she sees you here."
"But it's you that I'm interested in," he protested, impressed by the latent tragedy in the face which a lilac sunbonnet tended to turn into a mockery. It made him think of columbines in a churchyard.
Her color deepened painfully, but she did not speak again. She left him there and crossed the sloping, parched lawn and entered the house.
Conkling, as he unfolded his camp stool and set up his easel, resented the passing of that slender and lightly swaying figure. The riot of color along the tangled garden paths seemed without meaning. The tones that had first caught his eyes became crude and uncoordinated under a hot afternoon sun. But he remembered what she had said, and he sat there, washing absurd colors together and wondering if she would come back. Then, as the shadows lengthened and time dragged on, he wondered if he was to be ignored even by the monitorial old aunts. But he daubed stubbornly on, and when his patience was all but exhausted he was rewarded by seeing a figure emerge from the house.
It was a remarkable figure, and as it bore down on him in silence he studied it with oblique intentness. For it was that of an extremely tall and an extremely angular woman, well past middle life, clad in rusty black silk. On the iron-gray hair, parted and drawn severely down across the pale and narrow forehead, reposed a small black satin cap edged with coffee-colored lace. Half mittens of knitted linen were on the lank hands clasped so fastidiously in front of a narrow waist elongated by its ruchings of rusty silk. On the scrawny throat hung a cameo brooch, oddly repeating the line of the pendulous dewlap under the yellow chin, where the neck, as long and lean as a turkey's, suggested a poised and persistent wariness. But once this was passed over, there was a general air of limpness, of deadness, about every line of the long body. It was something suggestive of starvation, of starved lives and starved souls, of empty years eked out in empty ways.
It was, Conkling had to admit, a striking enough face, with its long and narrow boniness and its high-bridged nose. But there was a promise of cruelty in the small mouth with its down-drawn corners, where the earlier lines of haughtiness had merged into a pursed-up network of little wrinkles. The eyes were deep-set and cold, of faded blue, with a touch of tragedy in the looseness of the skin-fold under the thin and high circling brows.
It was not the sort of face to make Conkling feel altogether at ease. Yet it held him spellbound. It seemed to step from another century.
He sat behind the fragile shelter of his easel, studying that face as it came to a stop before him, as it towered above him with a frown of interrogation on its flinty brows.
"Might I make so bold as to inquire the nature of your visit here?" the woman demanded in a voice as austere and unconceding as her face.
"The young lady said I might make a sketch of the garden," he explained, exasperated by the meekness which had crept into his own voice.
The scorn on the lean old face confronting him did not add to Conkling's happiness.
"Gentlemen were once in the habit of rising, as I remember it, when accosted by a lady."
"I'm sorry," cried Conkling, nettling brick red as he rose to his feet with his hat in his hand. "I beg your pardon," he murmured again as he essayed a jackknife bow in which deference was not visibly shot through with mockery.
"I presume you are a stranger in this neighborhood," she said in an acridly condoning tone of voice.
"You are quite correct in that presumption," retorted Conkling, a little tired of being treated like an urchin caught in a cherry tree.
"Otherwise you would have respected the long-established wishes of the owner of this garden," concluded his enemy, with a glance at the No Trespassing sign.
"Undoubtedly, if I'd known in time," admitted the intruder.
The woman in the half mittens shifted her position a little.
"Since you paint, I suppose you are interested in paintings," she suggested.
Along that glacial frontier Conkling thought he detected certain surface meltings, certain vague trickles of surrendering austerities.
"That is my business," he admitted.
"What is?" she demanded, not unaware of the impatience in his tone.
"Paintings and old furniture and objets d'art in general," he told her. "That's what I go about appraising and buying up for the New York expert who is foolish enough to trust such matters to my judgment."
She was plainly puzzled by his ironic note of levity.
"Am I to accept this as an acknowledgment that you do not understand your own business?" she asked in her pointed, monitorial severity of tone.
"To err is human," he said as he folded up his camp stool. "And several times I've paid good money for mahogany that turned out to be dyed boxwood."
Her solemnity, however, was unshakable.
"But in the matter of paintings," she persisted. "You've had experience with them!"
"Some very disagreeable experiences," he evaded, consoled by the consciousness that his enemy was in some mysterious way on the defensive.
"But if it's your business," she went on, with the austere old eyes fixed on his face, "you must understand about their value; you must have a reasonable idea of what they are worth."
"Madam, nobody understands that nowadays."
"Apparently not," she admitted. "But it's at least possible to estimate the market value of such things, is it not? The value which the dealers in a big city such as yours would set on a collection of canvases?"
There was a note of concession, of unlooked-for hesitation, in her voice as she spoke. It caused Conkling to become serious again.
"It's possible in a way," he explained to her. "But there are cases, of course, where even experts differ."
"But when it's a matter of old masters?" she pursued, with her pale eyes fixed on his face.
"Oh, they're all pretty much evaluated," he told her, "provided they are old masters."
She was about to speak again, but an interruption came in the form of a slow and distant clangor. It was a dinner gong, Conkling suspected. There was, however, no note of blitheness in its summons. It fell on his ears as depressingly mournful as a bell-buoy tolling over a fog-bound reef. It made him think of bells that he had heard in the second act of Macbeth.
"We are about to take tea," announced Georgina Keswick with the utmost solemnity, "and I trust you will give us the honor of your company."
Conkling was tempted to smile at this ponderous unbending. But he became sober again as he caught sight of a slender young figure in organdie passing from one side of the old manor to the other.
"That's very kind of you," he said, with his gaze following the girl in organdie as she disappeared through one of the French windows. "I should like to very much."
He saw, as he started toward the house again, the solitary and stately peacock, perched motionless on the moldering upper bar of a grape trellis. He couldn't help wondering why it had no mate. He couldn't help wondering how it endured that decrepid grandeur of burnished crest and plume unshared by another. And he couldn't help wondering, as he meekly followed the gaunt and solemn woman in rusty black across the parched lawn-slopes, just what was ahead of him.