Crucial Instances

Mr. Rose left me to a sleepless night.  The next morning my resolve was formed, and it carried me straight to Mrs. Fontage’s.  She answered my knock by stepping out on the landing, and as she shut the door behind her I caught a glimpse of her devastated interior.  She mentioned, with a careful avoidance of the note of pathos on which our last conversation had closed, that she was preparing to leave that afternoon; and the trunks obstructing the threshold showed that her preparations were nearly complete.  They were, I felt certain, the same trunks that, strapped behind a rattling vettura, had accompanied the bride and groom on that memorable voyage of discovery of which the booty had till recently adorned her walls; and there was a dim consolation in the thought that those early “finds” in coral and Swiss wood-carving, in lava and alabaster, still lay behind the worn locks, in the security of worthlessness.

Mrs. Fontage, on the landing, among her strapped and corded treasures, maintained the same air of stability that made it impossible, even under such conditions, to regard her flight as anything less dignified than a departure.  It was the moral support of what she tacitly assumed that enabled me to set forth with proper deliberation the object of my visit; and she received my announcement with an absence of surprise that struck me as the very flower of tact.  Under cover of these mutual assumptions the transaction was rapidly concluded; and it was not till the canvas passed into my hands that, as though the physical contact had unnerved her, Mrs. Fontage suddenly faltered.  “It’s the giving it up—­” she stammered, disguising herself to the last; and I hastened away from the collapse of her splendid effrontery.

I need hardly point out that I had acted impulsively, and that reaction from the most honorable impulses is sometimes attended by moral perturbation.  My motives had indeed been mixed enough to justify some uneasiness, but this was allayed by the instinctive feeling that it is more venial to defraud an institution than a man.  Since Mrs. Fontage had to be kept from starving by means not wholly defensible, it was better that the obligation should be borne by a rich institution than an impecunious youth.  I doubt, in fact, if my scruples would have survived a night’s sleep, had they not been complicated by some uncertainty as to my own future.  It was true that, subject to the purely formal assent of the committee, I had full power to buy for the Museum, and that the one member of the committee likely to dispute my decision was opportunely travelling in Europe; but the picture once in place I must face the risk of any expert criticism to which chance might expose it.  I dismissed this contingency for future study, stored the Rembrandt in the cellar of the Museum, and thanked heaven that Crozier was abroad.

Six months later he strolled into my office.  I had just concluded, under conditions of exceptional difficulty, and on terms unexpectedly benign, the purchase of the great Bartley Reynolds; and this circumstance, by relegating the matter of the Rembrandt to a lower stratum of consciousness, enabled me to welcome Crozier with unmixed pleasure.  My security was enhanced by his appearance.  His smile was charged with amiable reminiscences, and I inferred that his trip had put him in the humor to approve of everything, or at least to ignore what fell short of his approval.  I had therefore no uneasiness in accepting his invitation to dine that evening.  It is always pleasant to dine with Crozier and never more so than when he is just back from Europe.  His conversation gives even the food a flavor of the Café Anglais.

The repast was delightful, and it was not till we had finished a Camembert which he must have brought over with him, that my host said, in a tone of after-dinner perfunctoriness:  “I see you’ve picked up a picture or two since I left.”

I assented.  “The Bartley Reynolds seemed too good an opportunity to miss, especially as the French government was after it.  I think we got it cheap—­”

“Connu, connu” said Crozier pleasantly.  “I know all about the Reynolds.  It was the biggest kind of a haul and I congratulate you.  Best stroke of business we’ve done yet.  But tell me about the other picture—­the Rembrandt.”

“I never said it was a Rembrandt.”  I could hardly have said why, but I felt distinctly annoyed with Crozier.

“Of course not.  There’s ‘Rembrandt’ on the frame, but I saw you’d modified it to ‘Dutch School’; I apologize.”  He paused, but I offered no explanation.  “What about it?” he went on.  “Where did you pick it up?” As he leaned to the flame of the cigar-lighter his face seemed ruddy with enjoyment.

“I got it for a song,” I said.

“A thousand, I think?”

“Have you seen it?” I asked abruptly.

“Went over the place this afternoon and found it in the cellar.  Why hasn’t it been hung, by the way?”

I paused a moment.  “I’m waiting—­”

“To—?”

“To have it varnished.”

“Ah!” He leaned back and poured himself a second glass of Chartreuse.  The smile he confided to its golden depths provoked me to challenge him with—­

“What do you think of it?”

“The Rembrandt?” He lifted his eyes from the glass.  “Just what you do.”

“It isn’t a Rembrandt.”

“I apologize again.  You call it, I believe, a picture of the same period?”

“I’m uncertain of the period.”

“H’m.”  He glanced appreciatively along his cigar.  “What are you certain of?”

“That it’s a damned bad picture,” I said savagely.

He nodded.  “Just so.  That’s all we wanted to know.”

“We?”

“We—­I—­the committee, in short.  You see, my dear fellow, if you hadn’t been certain it was a damned bad picture our position would have been a little awkward.  As it is, my remaining duty—­I ought to explain that in this matter I’m acting for the committee—­is as simple as it’s agreeable.”

“I’ll be hanged,” I burst out, “if I understand one word you’re saying!”

He fixed me with a kind of cruel joyousness.  “You will—­you will,” he assured me; “at least you’ll begin to, when you hear that I’ve seen Miss Copt.”

“Miss Copt?”

“And that she has told me under what conditions the picture was bought.”

“She doesn’t know anything about the conditions!  That is,” I added, hastening to restrict the assertion, “she doesn’t know my opinion of the picture.”  I thirsted for five minutes with Eleanor.

“Are you quite sure?” Crozier took me up.  “Mr. Jefferson Rose does.”

“Ah—­I see.”

“I thought you would,” he reminded me.  “As soon as I’d laid eyes on the Rembrandt—­I beg your pardon!—­I saw that it—­well, required some explanation.”

“You might have come to me.”

“I meant to; but I happened to meet Miss Copt, whose encyclopædic information has often before been of service to me.  I always go to Miss Copt when I want to look up anything; and I found she knew all about the Rembrandt.”

“All?”

“Precisely.  The knowledge was in fact causing her sleepless nights.  Mr. Rose, who was suffering from the same form of insomnia, had taken her into his confidence, and she—­ultimately—­took me into hers.”

“Of course!”

“I must ask you to do your cousin justice.  She didn’t speak till it became evident to her uncommonly quick perceptions that your buying the picture on its merits would have been infinitely worse for—­for everybody—­than your diverting a small portion of the Museum’s funds to philanthropic uses.  Then she told me the moving incident of Mr. Rose.  Good fellow, Rose.  And the old lady’s case was desperate.  Somebody had to buy that picture.”  I moved uneasily in my seat “Wait a moment, will you?  I haven’t finished my cigar.  There’s a little head of Il Fiammingo’s that you haven’t seen, by the way; I picked it up the other day in Parma.  We’ll go in and have a look at it presently.  But meanwhile what I want to say is that I’ve been charged—­in the most informal way—­to express to you the committee’s appreciation of your admirable promptness and energy in capturing the Bartley Reynolds.  We shouldn’t have got it at all if you hadn’t been uncommonly wide-awake, and to get it at such a price is a double triumph.  We’d have thought nothing of a few more thousands—­”

“I don’t see,” I impatiently interposed, “that, as far as I’m concerned, that alters the case.”

“The case—?”

“Of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt.  I bought the picture because, as you say, the situation was desperate, and I couldn’t raise a thousand myself.  What I did was of course indefensible; but the money shall be refunded tomorrow—­”

Crozier raised a protesting hand.  “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking ex cathedra.  The money’s been refunded already.  The fact is, the Museum has sold the Rembrandt.”

I stared at him wildly.  “Sold it?  To whom?”

“Why—­to the committee.—­Hold on a bit, please.—­Won’t you take another cigar?  Then perhaps I can finish what I’ve got to say.—­Why, my dear fellow, the committee’s under an obligation to you—­that’s the way we look at it.  I’ve investigated Mrs. Fontage’s case, and—­well, the picture had to be bought.  She’s eating meat now, I believe, for the first time in a year.  And they’d have turned her out into the street that very day, your cousin tells me.  Something had to be done at once, and you’ve simply given a number of well-to-do and self-indulgent gentlemen the opportunity of performing, at very small individual expense, a meritorious action in the nick of time.  That’s the first thing I’ve got to thank you for.  And then—­you’ll remember, please, that I have the floor—­that I’m still speaking for the committee—­and secondly, as a slight recognition of your services in securing the Bartley Reynolds at a very much lower figure than we were prepared to pay, we beg you—­the committee begs you—­to accept the gift of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt.  Now we’ll go in and look at that little head….”