CHAPTER THREE
Conkling found himself in a faded room with faded damask curtains. It was a somber and musty-smelling room, but two walls of it were lined with open bookshelves edged with pinked morocco and surmounted by three Tanagra figurines which momentarily made him forget the mustiness about him. He caught sight of a carved leggio that must have come from the choir of an Italian church, and a mahogany pedestal table with dragon-claw feet on which stood a brass candelabrum with a square marble base. Yet the next moment he was shuddering inwardly at the sight of a handworked fire screen. On this screen, with thread and needle, patient fingers had fabricated a foolish landscape of waterfall and woodland and strolling ladies in hoop-skirts. It impressed him as not so much a monument of wasted effort as it was a betrayal of a childish and impoverished outlook on life. And the house began to depress him, for even the black horsehair furniture so in need of repair became significant of a mean discomfort heroically endured.
His feeling of depression increased when the second sister entered the room. She came austere and silent and arrayed in plum-colored moiré. She impressed him as having hurriedly changed for the occasion and as still chafing under the necessity for that change. She seemed bonier and more muscular than her sister Georgina, and when Conkling saw her hands, calloused and toil-hardened and bloodless as bird claws, he was persuaded that she had been called away from labor in some neighboring field. Even her bow of greeting was a hostile one. And the young man in the stiff-backed horsehair chair fell to wondering why she had been so resolutely commandeered from her agrarian activities; and why, also, he was being so laboriously introduced into that house of sinister antiquities. He expected, until he saw tea actually being served, that the girl, Julia Keswick, would be included in the gathering. But in this he was disappointed.
He thought about her a great deal as he sat drinking his tea. It was not good tea. It was weak and watery, just as a slight aroma of mustiness clung to the solitary biscuit which was served with it. The skimmed milk which was soberly spoken of as cream, the loaf of sugar which was doled out so sparingly, the old Coalport so pathetically chipped and cracked, all united to confirm his earlier impressions of a genteel poverty grimly accepted.
He wondered how the girl could stand it, and he could foretell what it would do to her. She would get like the other two in time. The years would pinch her in body and soul alike. Her color would fade and the fuller line of lip and throat would wither. Yet in her face he had detected something unawakened and anticipatory, something which made that grim house oppress him afresh with its sheathed claws of cruelty.
He was surprised to see Lavinia Keswick, having drunk her cup of tea and eaten her wafer, rise grimly from her chair and as grimly leave their presence. Conkling surmised that she was already resolutely removing the plum-colored moire and making ready for a delayed return to her scuffle hoe.
It was not until Georgina Keswick was alone with her guest that she returned to the matter uppermost in her mind.
"You have doubtless heard of my brother, Kendal Keswick, in the art world?"
She paused, as though waiting for the name to strike home. But to Conkling it meant nothing. For a moment the tragic pale eyes in the tragic old face took on a deeper pathos.
"He was an artist himself in his time," she stiffly acknowledged. "But he was also a collector."
"He would be before my time," mercifully explained the young man, puzzled by the air of hesitancy which had overtaken the rusty old crow confronting him.
"I presume so," acknowledged the woman in black, contriving to make her survey of Conkling's still youthful figure a slightly contemptuous one.
"You spoke of him as a collector," Conkling found the heart to remind her, out of the ensuing silence. "And that naturally prompts me to ask what became of his collection."
The pallid old eyes grew less abstracted.
"Some of it he sold a year or two before his death."
"And the rest of it?"
"The rest of it has remained ever since in the possession of the family. They are, in fact, held in trust here by me and my sister."
"Paintings, you mean?"
"Yes, paintings," she admitted.
"Then they're the property, I take it, of your niece, Julia?" suggested the young man, only too glad to direct the line of talk into more congenial channels.
"Nominally, but not altogether," was the somewhat acidulated reply. "Julia's father, at his death, left many obligations behind him."
Conkling, vaguely chilled, waited for the woman in rusty black to speak again.
"In a country such as this there are few persons with a knowledge of art—of great art," she continued with an obvious effort. "And of late it has seemed advisable advisable—that these paintings, or at least a certain number of them, should be disposed of."
Conkling felt almost sorry for her. She was plainly not a woman who could easily ask a favor, yet behind that grim front, for all its momentary embarrassment, lurked an equally grim purpose.
"And you'd like me to look them over and tell you what I consider they're worth," suggested her visitor—"what they're worth from the New York dealer's standpoint?"
She blinked her eyes like an old eagle, plainly disturbed by his slightly impatient short cut to directness.
"It would be a great service," she said out of the silence.
"On the contrary, it would be a great pleasure," contended Conkling. "So what's the matter with getting at it while the light's still good?"
He was startled to see a ghost of a flush creep up into her faded cheeks.
"That would be impossible to-day," she told him with something oddly akin to terror in the eyes which evaded his.
"Why not to-day?" he asked, intent on his study of her mysterious abashment.
"They will have to be prepared," she replied, ill at ease.
"What do you mean by prepared?"
"They will have to be cleaned, for one thing."
"And how do you propose cleaning them?" he demanded.
"I have always regarded coal oil and turpentine as quite satisfactory," she retorted, plainly resenting his tone.
"Then if your canvases are of any value you've been using something which will very quickly take the value out of them. You'd kill their color in no time. We wash a picture with cheesecloth in warm water and soap, the same as you'd wash fine lace; and a part of the trick is to dry it quickly to keep it from warping. Then dissolve mastic tears in turpentine and put it on with a camel's hair brush, if you have to."
It was plain that she was as averse to criticism as she was unaccustomed to it.
"In that case perhaps the cleaning can be dispensed with," she replied with dignity.
"Then I suppose I can see 'em at once," he suggested. But her embarrassment returned to her.
"They will have to be arranged," she said with a solemnity which in some way went lame.
"How many canvases are there?" he asked.
"Between twenty and thirty," was the hesitating reply.
Conkling showed his surprise.
"It'll take time, of course, to go over a bunch like that."
"That," said Georgina Keswick with an air of escape, "is why I should prefer making an appointment for some other day."
"It all depends on the pictures, of course, just how long it'll take me."
"I don't think you'll find them altogether trivial."
He recalled the earlier allusion to old masters. But he had had experience with the bucolic conception of such things.
"Who are the artists?" he asked in his most matter-of-fact tone.
"I'm not sure," she said, after a moment's hesitation. "At least, not sure of all of them."
"But the ones you know?" he prompted. And again a period of silence reigned in the shadowy room before she spoke.
"There's a Decamps and two Corots and a Holbein," she said very quietly. "There is also a Constable—no, two Constables—and one Boldini, and what we were once led to believe was a copy of Correggio, though our late rector, who was in both Rome and Florence once, remained strongly persuaded that it was an original."
Conkling, as he sat staring at the faded face in the fading light, lost a little of his own color. It took his breath away. It was too much to believe.
"That's rather a formidable list," he murmured weakly enough, for the whole thing still seemed incredible.
Here, in the obscure corner of a Canadian colony, he was threatened with stumbling across a collection that might be the envy of a national gallery. They were claiming to have Corot and Correggio, Decamps and Holbein, housed in this decrepid old homestead hidden away in its ruinous old garden.
His bewildered eye rested for a moment on the Tanagra figurines. Yet they only added to his disturbance, for the man who had captured them, he knew, had been a good picker; and nothing, after all, was too preposterous for such a house.
"When shall I come back?" he asked, with rather an anxious face.
"Will to-morrow at two be convenient?" he heard his hostess in rusty black inquiring.
"I'll be here at two," he said with a belated effort at professional impersonality. But it was an abortive effort, for he had become too actively conscious that he stood on the threshold of some high adventure. And so sharp was that inner excitement that he even forgot about Julia Keswick until he saw her rose shears hanging on a cedar twig near the broken gate.