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PAGE 2

The Artist
by [?]

"You shall—" her eyes commanded, adjured him. There was a silence. "I will understand," she said under her breath.

"You will not understand," he said in the same tone; but aloud he began: "I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here scraping up a mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire. He wanted to get my judgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought in to him by a cousin of his children’s governess. I was to be sure to see it when I went to New York— you knew, did you not, that I had been called to New York to testify in the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?"

"Did you really go?" asked the doctor. "I thought you swore that nothing could take you to America. "

"I went," said the old man grimly. "Paullsen did me a bad turn once, thirty years ago. And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas. The dealer half apologized for taking my time— said he did not as a rule pay any attention to freak things brought in from country holes by amateurs, but —I remember his wording— this thing, some ways he looked at it, didn’t seem bad somehow. "

The collector paused, passed his tongue over his lips, and said briefly: "Then he showed it to me. It was the young girl and kitten in there. "

"By Jove!" cried the doctor.

"You have too exciting a profession, my good old dear," said the actress. "Some day you will die of a heart failure. "

"Not after living through that!"

"What did you tell him?"

"I asked for the address of the cousin of his childrens’ governess. When I had it I bought a ticket to the place, and when I reached there I found myself at the end of all things— an abomination of desolation. Do you know America, either of you?"

The doctor shook his head.

"I have toured there three times," said the actress.

"Did you ever hear of a place called Pennsylvania?"

Madame Orloff smiled. "It is as large as five Englands. "

"It is inhabited by an insufferable sect of fanatics called Quakers, who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness, who will not swear, who have no priests and no doctrine, apparently, but the blasphemous one that color, sacred, holy color is an evil thing, and that gray is the only virtuous—"

The actress laughed. "There are other people in Pennsylvania," she protested.

Vieyra ignored her. "In a wretched huddle of little houses they call a village I found the cousin, a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos, who knew nothing of the picture except that it was brought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him butter. I found the address of the butter-maker, and drove endless miles over execrable roads to his house, and encountered his mother, a stolid, middle-aged woman, who looked at me out of the most uncanny quiet eyes—all the fanatics there have the extraordinary eyes—from under a strange, gray head-dress, and asked: ‘Is it about the picture? For you don’t want to let on to anybody but me. Nobody but the family knows he paints ’em!’"

At this the doctor burst out: "Gracious powers! You don’t mean he is a living man!"

"Let him alone!" The actress turned with a lithe petulance on the big Briton.

"And there I had it all," the narrator went on; "the old woman could tell me what I wished to know, she said. He was her uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her and her brothers and sisters. She knew—oh, she knew with good reason, all of his life. All, that is, but the beginning. She had heard from older Quakers that he had been wild in his youth (he had always been, she told me gravely, queer) and she knew that he had travelled far in his young days, very, very far.

"’To New York?’ I ventured.

"’Oh, no, beyond that. Across the water.’

"’To Paris?’

"That she didn’t know. It was a foreign country at least, and he had stayed there two, three years, until he was called back by her father’s death—his brother-in-law’s—to take care of his mother, and his sister and the children. Here her mind went back to my question, and she said she had something perhaps I could tell from, where he had been. She kept it in her Bible. He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the day she had kept her little brother from falling in the fire. She brought it out. It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as the original itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne.