Complete weird tales of.., p.625
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 625
“There’s her husband as an asset.”
“Oh, my dear, don’t talk slush!”
“ — And — children — perhaps.”
“And no money to educate them! You dear boy, there is nothing to do — absolutely nothing — unless it’s based on money. You know it; I know it. People without it are intolerable — a nuisance to everybody and to themselves. What could Strelsa find in life without the means to enjoy it?”
“Nothing — perhaps.... But I believe I’ll ask her.”
“She’ll tell you the truth, Ricky. She’s an unusually truthful woman.... I must go downtown. Strelsa and I are lunching” — she reddened— “with Langly.... His aunt would kill me if she heard of it.... I positively do not dare ask Langly to Witch-Hollow because I’m so deadly afraid of that fat old woman!... Besides, I don’t want him there — although — if Strelsa has to marry him — —”
She fell silent and thoughtful, reflecting, perhaps, that if Strelsa was going to take Langly Sprowl, her own country house might as well have the benefit of any fashionable and social glamour incident to the announcement.
Then, glancing at Quarren, her heart smote her, and she flushed:
“Come up to Witch-Hollow, Ricky dear, and get her to elope with you if you can! Will you?”
“I’ll come to Witch-Hollow if you ask me.”
“That’s ducky of you. You are a good sport, Ricky — and always were! Go on and marry her if you can. Other women have stood it.... And, I know it’s vulgar and low and catty of me — but I’d love to see Mrs. Sprowl blow up — and see that hatchet-faced Langly disappointed — yes, I would, and I don’t care what you think! Their ancestors were common people, and Heaven knows why a Wycherly of Wycherly should be afraid of the descendants of Dutch rum smugglers!”
Quarren looked up with a weary smile.
“But you are afraid,” he said.
“I am,” admitted Molly, furiously; and marched out.
As he put her into her car he said:
“Write me if you don’t change your mind about asking me to Witch-Hollow.”
“No fear,” said the pretty little woman; “and,” she added, “I hope you make mischief and raise the very dickens all around. I sincerely hope you do!”
“I hope so, too,” he said with the ghost of a smile.
“A fortnight later Strelsa wrote to Quarren for the first time in nearly two months.”
* * *
CHAPTER VIII
A FORTNIGHT LATER Strelsa wrote to Quarren for the first time in nearly two months.
“Dear Mr. Quarren,
“Molly says that she saw you in town two weeks ago, and that she told you how unexpectedly my worldly affairs have altered since I last wrote to you.
“For me, somehow or other, life has been always a sequence of abrupt experiences — a series of extremes — one grotesque exaggeration after another, and all diametrically opposed. And it seems odd that such radically material transformations should so ruthlessly disturb and finally, now, end by completely altering the character of a girl whose real nature is — or was — unaccented and serene to the verge of indifference. For the woman writing this is very different from the one you knew as Strelsa Leeds.
“I am not yet sure what the outcome of this Adamant affair will be. Neither, apparently, are my attorneys. But it is absolutely certain that if I ever recover anything at all, it will not amount to very much — not nearly enough to live on.
“When they first brought the unpleasant news to me my instinct was to sit down and write you about it. I was horribly scared, and wanted you to know it.
“I didn’t yield to the impulse as you know — I cannot give you the reasons why. They were merely intuitions at first; later they became reasons as my financial situation developed in all its annoying proportions.
“I can tell you only this: before material disaster threatened me out of a clear sky, supposing that matters would always remain with me as they were — that I should never know any serious want, never apprehend actual necessity — I had made up my mind to a course of life which now has become impossible.
“It was not, perhaps, a very admirable plan of existence that I had conceived for myself, nothing radical or original. I meant, merely, not to marry, to live well within my income, to divide my time between my friends and myself — that is to give myself more leisure for self-development, tranquil cultivation, and a wider and more serious interest in things worthy.
“If by dividing my time between my friends and myself I was to lose touch more or less with the lively and rather exacting society in which I live, I had decided on the sacrifice.
“And that, Mr. Quarren, is how matters stood with me until a month ago.
“Now everything is altered — even my own character I think. There is in me very little courage — and, alas, much of that cowardice which shrinks from pain and privation of any kind — which cringes the more basely, perhaps, because there has been, in my life, so much of sorrow, so little of material ease and tranquility of mind.
“I had been dreaming of a balanced and secure life with leisure to develop mental resources hitherto neglected. And your friendship — our new understanding — meant much of that part of life for me — more than I realised — far more than you do. Can you understand how deep the hurt is? — deeper because now you will learn what a coward I really am and how selfishly I surrender to the menace of material destruction. I am in dire terror of it; I simply do not choose to endure it. That I need not submit to it, inspires in me the low type of equanimity that enables me to face the future with apparent courage. My world applauds it as pluck. I have confessed to you what it really is.
“Now you know me, Mr. Quarren — a preacher of lofty ideals while prosperous, a recreant in adversity.
“I thought once that the most ignoble sentiments ever entertained by man were those lesser and physical emotions which, in the world, masquerade as love — or as an essential part of it. To me they always seemed intolerable as any part of love, material, unworthy, base. To me love was intellectual — could be nothing less lofty — and should aspire to the spiritual.
“I say this because you once tried to make me understand that you loved me.
“Marriage of two minds with nothing material to sully an ideal union was what I had dreamed of. I might have cared for you that way when a marriage tainted with lesser emotions repelled me. And now, like all iconoclasts, I end by shattering my own complacent image, and the fragments have fallen to the lowest depth of all.
“For I contemplate a mariage de convenance — and I scarcely care whom I marry as long as he removes from me this terror of a sordid and needy future.
“All ideals, all desire for higher and better things — for a noble leisure and the quiet pleasures of self-development, have gone — vanished utterly. Fear sickens me night and day — the same dull dread that I have known so many, many years in my life — a blind horror of more unhappiness and pain after two years of silence — that breathless stillness which frightened wounded things know while they lie, panting, dazed listening for the coming footsteps of that remorseless Fate which struck them down from afar.
“I tell you this, Mr. Quarren, because it is due to you if you really love me — or if you once did love me — because when you have read this you will no longer care for me.
“One evening you made me understand that you cared for me; and I replied to you only by a dazed silence that neither you nor I entirely understood at the time. It was not contempt for you — yet, perhaps, I could not really have cared very deeply for such a man as you then seemed to be. It was not intellectual indifference that silenced me.... And I can say no more about it — except that — something — changed me radically from that moment — and ever since I have been trying to understand myself — to learn something about myself — and of the world I live in — and of men.
“When a crisis arrives self-revelation comes in a single flash. My financial crisis arrived as you know; I suddenly saw myself as I am — a woman astonishingly undeveloped and ignorant in many ways, crude, unawakened, stupid — a woman half-blinded with an unreasoning dread of more pain — pain which she thought had at last been left behind her — and a coward all through; and selfish from head to heel.
“This is what I really am. And I shall prove it by marrying for reasons entirely material, because I have no courage to ever again face adversity and unhappiness.
“‘I say, Quarren — does this old lady hang next to the battered party in black?’”
“You will not care to write to me; and you will not care to see me again.
“I am glad you once cared for me. If you should ever reply to this letter, don’t be very unkind to me. I know what I am — and I vaguely surmise what I shall lose by being so. But I have no courage for anything else.
“Strelsa Leeds.”
That was the letter she wrote to Quarren; and he read it standing by his desk while several noisy workmen were covering every available inch of his walls with Dankmere’s family pictures, and the little Earl himself, whistling a lively air, trotted about superintending everything with all the cheerful self-confidence of a family dog regulating everything that goes on in his vicinity.
“I say, Quarren — does this old lady hang next to the battered party in black?” he demanded briskly.
Quarren looked around; “Yes,” he said, “they’re both by Nicholas Maas according to your list.”
“I think they’re bally fakes,” remarked the Earl, “don’t you?”
“We’ll try to find out,” said Quarren, absently.
Dankmere puffed away on his cigar and consulted his list: “Reynolds (Sir Joshua). Portrait of Lady Dankmere,” he read; “portrait of Sir Boggs Dankmere! — string ’em up aloft over that jolly little lady with no frock on! — Rembrandt (Van Rijn). Born near Leyden, July 15th, 1607 — Oh, who cares as long as it is a Rembrandt! — Is it, Quarren? It isn’t a copy, is it?”
“I hope not,” said the young fellow absently.
“Egad! So do I.” And to the workmen— “Philemon and Baucis by Rembrandt! Hang ’em up next to that Romney — over the Jan Steen ... Quarren?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think that St. Michael’s Mount is a real Turner?”
“It looks like it. I can’t express opinions off-hand, Dankmere.”
“I can,” said the little Earl; “and I say that if that is a Turner I can beat it myself working with tomato catsup, an underdone omelette, and a clothes-brush.... Hello! I like this picture. The list calls it a Watteau— ‘The Fête Champêtre.’ What do you know about it, Quarren?”
“Nothing yet. It seems to be genuine enough.”
“And this pretty girl by Boucher?”
“I tell you, Dankmere, that I don’t know. They all appear to be genuine, after a superficial examination. It takes time to be sure about any picture — and if we’re going to be certain it will require confabs with authorities — restorers, dealers, experts, curators from various museums — all sorts and conditions of people must be approached and warily consulted — and paid,” he added smiling. “And that has to be done with circumspection because some are not honest and we don’t want anybody to get the impression that we are attempting to bribe anybody for a favourable verdict.”
A few minutes later he went across the street and telegraphed to Molly Wycherly:
“May I remind you that you asked me to Witch-Hollow?
Quarren.”
The following morning after the workmen had departed, he and Dankmere stood contemplating the transformations wrought in the office, back parlour, and extension of Quarren’s floor in the shabby old Lexington Avenue house.
The transformation was complete; all woodwork had been painted white, a gray-green paper hung on the walls, the floor stained dark brown and covered with several antique rugs which had come with the pictures — a Fereghan, a Ladik, and an ancient Herez with rose and sapphire lights in it.
At the end of the suite hung another relic of Dankmere Tarns — a Gobelins tapestry about ten by twelve, signed by Audran, the subject of which was Boucher’s “Venus, Mars, and Vulcan” from the picture in the Wallace Collection. Opposite it was suspended an old Persian carpet of the sixteenth century — a magnificent Dankmere heirloom woven in the golden age of ancient Eastern art and displaying amid the soft splendour of its matchless hues the strange and exquisitely arched cloud-forms traced in forgotten dyes amid a wilderness of delicate flowers and vines.
Between these two fabrics, filling the walls from base-board to ceiling, were ranged Dankmere’s pictures. Few traces of the real-estate office remained — merely a desk, letter-file, a shelf piled up with maps, and Quarren’s shingle outside; but this was now overshadowed by the severely magnificent sign:
THE DANKMERE GALLERY
OF
OLD MASTERS
Algernon Fayre, R. S. Quarren & Co.
For Lord Dankmere, otherwise Algernon Cecil Clarence Fayre, Earl of Dankmere, had decided to dedicate to trade only a portion of his aristocratic appellations. As for the company, it consisted of Quarren’s cat, Daisy, and her litter of unweaned kittens.
“Do you realise,” said Quarren, dropping into the depths of a new easy-chair, “that you have almost put me out of business?”
“Well, you weren’t in very deeply, you know,” commented Dankmere.
“No; but last week I went to bed a broker in real estate; and this week I wake up a picture dealer and your partner. It’s going to take most of my time. I can’t sell a picture unless I know what it is. I’ve got to find out — or try to. Do you know what that means?”
“I fancy it means chucking your real estate,” said Dankmere, imperturbably. “Why not? This is a better gamble. And if we make anything we ought to make something worth while.”
“Do you propose that I shall simply drop my entire business — close up everything and go into this thing permanently?” demanded Quarren.
“It will come to that, ultimately. Don’t you want to?”
From the beginning Quarren had felt, vaguely, that it would come to that — realised instinctively that in such an enterprise he would be on solid ground — that the idea was pleasant to him — that his tastes fitted him for such an occupation. Experience was lacking, but, somehow, his ignorance did not dismay him.
All his life he had cared for such things, been familiar with them, been curious to learn more, had read enough to understand something of the fascinating problems now confronting him, had, in his hours of leisure, familiarised himself with the best of art in the public and private galleries of the city.
More than that a natural inclination and curiosity had led him among dealers, restorers, brokers of pictures. He knew them all from Fifth Avenue to Lexington, the celebrated and the obscure; he had heard them talk, heard the gossip and scandal of their curious world, watched them buying, selling, restoring, relining, reframing; listened to their discussions concerning their art and the art in which they dealt. And it had always fascinated him although, until Dankmere arrived, it had never occurred to him to make a living out of a heterogeneous mass of partly assimilated knowledge acquired from the sheer love of the subject.
Fortunate the man whose means of livelihood is also his pleasure! Deep in his heart lies the unconscious contentment of certainty.
And somehow, with the advent of Dankmere’s pictures, into Quarren’s troubled heart had come a vague sensation of ease — a cessation of the old anxiety and unrest — a quiet that he had never before known.
To learn what his wares really were seemed no formidable task; to appreciate and appraise each one only little labours of love. Every problem appeared to him as a separate attraction; the disposal of his stock a delightful and leisurely certainty because he himself would be certain of what he dealt in.
Then, too, his mind had long since invaded a future which day by day grew more alluring in its suggestions. He himself would learn the practical and manual art of restoration — learn how to clean, reline, revarnish; how to identify, how to dissect. Every thread of an ancient canvas should tell him a true story; every grain in an old panel. He would be chief surgeon in his hospital for old and decrepit masterpieces; he would “cradle” with his own hands — clear the opacity from time-dimmed beauty with savant touch, knit up tenderly the wounds of ages ——
“Dankmere,” he said, throwing away his cigarette, “I’m going into this business from this minute; and I would like to die in harness, at the end, the companion, surgeon, and friend of old-time pictures. Do you think I can make a living at it?”
“God knows. Do you mean that you’re really keen on it?”
“Dead keen.”
Dankmere puffed on his cigar: “A chap usually makes out pretty well when he’s a bit keen on anything of sorts. You’ll be owning the gallery, next, you infernal Yankee!”
Quarren laughed: “I won’t forget that you gave me my first real chance in the world. You’ve done it, too; do you realise it, Dankmere?”
“Very glad I’m sure.”
“So am I!” said Quarren with sudden emphasis. “I believe I’m on the right track now. I believe it’s in me — in my heart — to work — to work!” — he laughed— “as the old chronicles say, ‘To the glory of God and the happiness of self and mankind.’ ... I’m grateful to you; do you understand?”
“Awf’lly glad, old chap.”
“You funny Englishman — I believe you are.... And we’ll make this thing go. Down comes my real-estate shingle; I’m a part of the Dankmere Galleries now. I’ll rent the basement after our first sale and there you and I will fuss and tinker and doctor and nurse any poor old derelict of a picture back to its pristine beauty. What?”
“Not I,” said the little Earl. “All I’m good for is to furnish the initial stock. You may do what you please with it, and we’ll share profits according to contract. Further than that, Quarren, you’ll have to count me out.”
