Crucial Instances

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread.  When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment:  a trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios.  Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism.  It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it.  Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor’s line.  The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets:  the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever had fitted her:  they all pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re so artistic.” emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers:  the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly.  “A picture—­a Rembrandt!”

“Good Lord!  Why not a Leonardo?”

“Well”—­she smiled—­“that, of course, depends on you.”

“On me?”

“On your attribution.  I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the change—­though she’s very conservative.”

A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced:  “One can’t judge of a picture in this weather.”

“Of course not.  I’m coming for you to-morrow.”

“I’ve an engagement to-morrow.”

“I’ll come before or after your engagement.”

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation of the weather-report.  It said “Rain to-morrow,” and I answered briskly:  “All right, then; come at ten”—­rapidly calculating that the clouds on which I counted might lift by noon.

My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.

I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor’s hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case.  I guessed beforehand that the lady we were about to visit had lapsed by the most distressful degrees from opulence to a “hall-bedroom”; that her grandfather, if he had not been Minister to France, had signed the Declaration of Independence; that the Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic obliquity.

Previous experience had taught me that all Eleanor’s “cases” presented a harrowing similarity of detail.  No circumstance tending to excite the spectator’s sympathy and involve his action was omitted from the history of her beneficiaries; the lights and shades were indeed so skilfully adjusted that any impartial expression of opinion took on the hue of cruelty.  I could have produced closetfuls of “heirlooms” in attestation of this fact; for it is one more mark of Eleanor’s competence that her friends usually pay the interest on her philanthropy.  My one hope was that in this case the object, being a picture, might reasonably be rated beyond my means; and as our cab drew up before a blistered brown-stone door-step I formed the self-defensive resolve to place an extreme valuation on Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt.  It is Eleanor’s fault if she is sometimes fought with her own weapons.

The house stood in one of those shabby provisional-looking New York streets that seem resignedly awaiting demolition.  It was the kind of house that, in its high days, must have had a bow-window with a bronze in it.  The bow-window had been replaced by a plumber’s devanture, and one might conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next aesthetic reaction.

Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to a bare slit of a room.  “And she must leave this in a month!” she whispered across her knock.

I had prepared myself for the limp widow’s weed of a woman that one figures in such a setting; and confronted abruptly with Mrs. Fontage’s white-haired erectness I had the disconcerting sense that I was somehow in her presence at my own solicitation.  I instinctively charged Eleanor with this reversal of the situation; but a moment later I saw it must be ascribed to a something about Mrs. Fontage that precluded the possibility of her asking any one a favor.  It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic, demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings.  The room was unconcealably poor:  the little faded “relics,” the high-stocked ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio, grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the wall-paper, served only to accentuate the contrast of a past evidently diversified by foreign travel and the enjoyment of the arts.  Even Mrs. Fontage’s dress had the air of being a last expedient, the ultimate outcome of a much-taxed ingenuity in darning and turning.  One felt that all the poor lady’s barriers were falling save that of her impregnable manner.

To this manner I found myself conveying my appreciation of being admitted to a view of the Rembrandt.

Mrs. Fontage’s smile took my homage for granted.  “It is always,” she conceded, “a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters.”  Her slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.

“It’s so interesting, dear Mrs. Fontage,” I heard Eleanor exclaiming, “and my cousin will be able to tell you exactly—­” Eleanor, in my presence, always admits that she knows nothing about art; but she gives the impression that this is merely because she hasn’t had time to look into the matter—­and has had me to do it for her.

Mrs. Fontage seated herself without speaking, as though fearful that a breath might disturb my communion with the masterpiece.  I felt that she thought Eleanor’s reassuring ejaculations ill-timed; and in this I was of one mind with her; for the impossibility of telling her exactly what I thought of her Rembrandt had become clear to me at a glance.

My cousin’s vivacities began to languish and the silence seemed to shape itself into a receptacle for my verdict.  I stepped back, affecting a more distant scrutiny; and as I did so my eye caught Mrs. Fontage’s profile.  Her lids trembled slightly.  I took refuge in the familiar expedient of asking the history of the picture, and she waved me brightly to a seat.

This was indeed a topic on which she could dilate.  The Rembrandt, it appeared, had come into Mr. Fontage’s possession many years ago, while the young couple were on their wedding-tour, and under circumstances so romantic that she made no excuse for relating them in all their parenthetic fulness.  The picture belonged to an old Belgian Countess of redundant quarterings, whom the extravagances of an ungovernable nephew had compelled to part with her possessions (in the most private manner) about the time of the Fontages’ arrival.  By a really remarkable coincidence, it happened that their courier (an exceptionally intelligent and superior man) was an old servant of the Countess’s, and had thus been able to put them in the way of securing the Rembrandt under the very nose of an English Duke, whose agent had been sent to Brussels to negotiate for its purchase.  Mrs. Fontage could not recall the Duke’s name, but he was a great collector and had a famous Highland castle, where somebody had been murdered, and which she herself had visited (by moonlight) when she had travelled in Scotland as a girl.  The episode had in short been one of the most interesting “experiences” of a tour almost chromo-lithographic in vivacity of impression; and they had always meant to go back to Brussels for the sake of reliving so picturesque a moment.  Circumstances (of which the narrator’s surroundings declared the nature) had persistently interfered with the projected return to Europe, and the picture had grown doubly valuable as representing the high-water mark of their artistic emotions.  Mrs. Fontage’s moist eye caressed the canvas.  “There is only,” she added with a perceptible effort, “one slight drawback:  the picture is not signed.  But for that the Countess, of course, would have sold it to a museum.  All the connoisseurs who have seen it pronounce it an undoubted Rembrandt, in the artist’s best manner; but the museums”—­she arched her brows in smiling recognition of a well-known weakness—­“give the preference to signed examples—­”

Mrs. Fontage’s words evoked so touching a vision of the young tourists of fifty years ago, entrusting to an accomplished and versatile courier the direction of their helpless zeal for art, that I lost sight for a moment of the point at issue.  The old Belgian Countess, the wealthy Duke with a feudal castle in Scotland, Mrs. Fontage’s own maiden pilgrimage to Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood, all the accessories of the naïf transaction, seemed a part of that vanished Europe to which our young race carried its indiscriminate ardors, its tender romantic credulity:  the legendary castellated Europe of keepsakes, brigands and old masters, that compensated, by one such “experience” as Mrs. Fontage’s, for an after-life of aesthetic privation.

I was restored to the present by Eleanor’s looking at her watch.  The action mutely conveyed that something was expected of me.  I risked the temporizing statement that the picture was very interesting; but Mrs. Fontage’s polite assent revealed the poverty of the expedient.  Eleanor’s impatience overflowed.

“You would like my cousin to give you an idea of its value?” she suggested.

Mrs. Fontage grew more erect.  “No one,” she corrected with great gentleness, “can know its value quite as well as I, who live with it—­”

We murmured our hasty concurrence.

“But it might be interesting to hear”—­she addressed herself to me—­“as a mere matter of curiosity—­what estimate would be put on it from the purely commercial point of view—­if such a term may be used in speaking of a work of art.”

I sounded a note of deprecation.

“Oh, I understand, of course,” she delicately anticipated me, “that that could never be your view, your personal view; but since occasions may arise—­do arise—­when it becomes necessary to—­to put a price on the priceless, as it were—­I have thought—­Miss Copt has suggested—­”

“Some day,” Eleanor encouraged her, “you might feel that the picture ought to belong to some one who has more—­more opportunity of showing it—­letting it be seen by the public—­for educational reasons—­”

“I have tried,” Mrs. Fontage admitted, “to see it in that light.”

The crucial moment was upon me.  To escape the challenge of Mrs. Fontage’s brilliant composure I turned once more to the picture.  If my courage needed reinforcement, the picture amply furnished it.  Looking at that lamentable canvas seemed the surest way of gathering strength to denounce it; but behind me, all the while, I felt Mrs. Fontage’s shuddering pride drawn up in a final effort of self-defense.  I hated myself for my sentimental perversion of the situation.  Reason argued that it was more cruel to deceive Mrs. Fontage than to tell her the truth; but that merely proved the inferiority of reason to instinct in situations involving any concession to the emotions.  Along with her faith in the Rembrandt I must destroy not only the whole fabric of Mrs. Fontage’s past, but even that lifelong habit of acquiescence in untested formulas that makes the best part of the average feminine strength.  I guessed the episode of the picture to be inextricably interwoven with the traditions and convictions which served to veil Mrs. Fontage’s destitution not only from others but from herself.  Viewed in that light the Rembrandt had perhaps been worth its purchase-money; and I regretted that works of art do not commonly sell on the merit of the moral support they may have rendered.

From this unavailing flight I was recalled by the sense that something must be done.  To place a fictitious value on the picture was at best a provisional measure; while the brutal alternative of advising Mrs. Fontage to sell it for a hundred dollars at least afforded an opening to the charitably disposed purchaser.  I intended, if other resources failed, to put myself forward in that light; but delicacy of course forbade my coupling my unflattering estimate of the Rembrandt with an immediate offer to buy it.  All I could do was to inflict the wound:  the healing unguent must be withheld for later application.

I turned to Mrs. Fontage, who sat motionless, her finely-lined cheeks touched with an expectant color, her eyes averted from the picture which was so evidently the one object they beheld.

“My dear madam—­” I began.  Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.  It shrouded every alternative in darkness and I had the flurried sense of having lost my way among the intricacies of my contention.  Of a sudden I felt the hopelessness of finding a crack in her impenetrable conviction.  My words slipped from me like broken weapons.  “The picture,” I faltered, “would of course be worth more if it were signed.  As it is, I—­I hardly think—­on a conservative estimate—­it can be valued at—­at more—­than—­a thousand dollars, say—­”

My deflected argument ran on somewhat aimlessly till it found itself plunging full tilt against the barrier of Mrs. Fontage’s silence.  She sat as impassive as though I had not spoken.  Eleanor loosed a few fluttering words of congratulation and encouragement, but their flight was suddenly cut short.  Mrs. Fontage had risen with a certain solemnity.

“I could never,” she said gently—­her gentleness was adamantine—­“under any circumstances whatever, consider, for a moment even, the possibility of parting with the picture at such a price.”