II
To-day, Cousin Felix himself hardly knows at what age he began to fit various facts together, with an accuracy damaging to the Lafayette myth. If, as family tradition had it, the porringer had been ordered in Paris by our seafaring ancestor, in the year 1779, was it really likely that at that date Lafayette’s exploits, either warlike or otherwise, either in Egypt or elsewhere, were already so noised abroad as to be stock subjects for the silversmith’s skill? Absurd! “Any sophomore would know better,” reasoned the youth Felix; “even a Harvard man.” But by the time Felix had taken his degree at Yale, and was beginning at the bottom round of the paint business, his interest in the vanished porringer had become dormant; for many years thereafter, his business career, his new home and growing family occupied his mind to the exclusion of childish trifles.
Nevertheless, at the destined hour, his collector’s passion overtook him, and was thenceforth to remain with him. He began to haunt auction rooms, private collections, museums. Pictures, books, furniture—he loved them all; but Colonial silver was his chief desire. He read much, studied much, and even wrote a little, now and then, upon this subject paramount. And though he scarcely owned it, even to himself, the missing part of the Fairlee porringer was the central object of his quest. As the years rushed on with gathering speed, the by-products of this pursuit became very considerable; his collection vied with that of Lockwood or of Halsey or of Clearwater. Silver tankards and platters were his; also silver braziers and caudle cups and chocolate pots, silver ladles and buckles and patchboxes. But porringers were really his long suit, he said. Of these, he possessed enough to lend a score to various museums, and yet to keep in his own cabinet a more than sufficient number (all of the middle period) to serve as soup-bowls for his famous dinners of twelve.
Naturally his delight in what he had merely whetted his longing for what he had not. Whenever his birthdays impended, as they continued to do with annoying annual precision, his wife and the elder children (especially young Felicia) would once more set out hunting for “the Lafayette bottom,” and failing always in their search, would in despair purchase some costly and inadequate substitute for the thing they sought. Indeed, “Father’s feeling for antique silver, you know!” had made him no niggard with modern gold, and his offspring, even in their early youth, had their many-leaved, rigorously inspected check-books. Nor could I ever see that they were in any way the worse for this indulgence.
Felix smiled happily enough when, on the morning of his fifty-first birthday, young Felicia bounded into his study, and plumped down upon his table an ill-favored bulbous tankard of somewhat baroque design; a piece which she jubilantly declared was “a genuine John Cony,” but which was really, as our wise expert whispered to himself in the midst of his outspoken praise and thanksgiving, “no more a Cony than I am a king.”
“No use, dad,” said young Felicia, shaking a wise blonde head, in her funny little perpetual morning-glory way. “Mother and I have given up the Lafayette bottom for keeps. We’ve searched high and low for the old thing, from Salem, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, and so have you. Nothing doing. I don’t believe there ever was a Lafayette bottom, anyway!” This last with the air of uttering a superb and daring heresy, possibly epoch-making in the annals of silver-collecting in America.
“As for that,” replied Felix, whose self-imposed rôle it was never to turn a hair at the opinions of youth, “I haven’t believed it myself, this long time.”
Felicia started indignantly. “Why, Payrent, Payrent! What do you mean by such—recalcitrating? I thought you staked your life on that Lafayette business!”
“I’m afraid you haven’t been keeping up with the times,” retorted the parent. “For the past ten years, at least, I’ve discounted the tale. I’ve been putting two and two together, and I really don’t see the sense in trying to make a baker’s dozen out of it, do you?”
“Oh, well, if you’re bringing it down to cold mathematics, father, I rather think you’re going to miss some of the joys of your job!”
“On the contrary, my dear Flickey, the joys will be all the keener.”
“Well, I wish you’d explain your change of base.”
“I haven’t made any change of base. And haven’t I told you a hundred times that the true collector should never venture out of doors without being armored in doubt? Why, from the time of dear Grammer Bradford’s maunderings about Lafayette in Egypt, when I was a little boy in a wine-colored plaid shirt, I had my misgivings about the tale. It’s the doubt that makes the chase interesting. Of course, all of us Bradfords know that our Fairlee ancestor was with Paul Jones on the ship Ranger in the harbor of Quiberon in 1779 when that ship received the first national salute ever given to the American flag in Europe.”
Flickey stifled a yawn behind her preposterous dinner-ring.
“So far, so good. Next, we have reason to believe that our seafaring grandsire got up to Paris that same year, and there ordered the Fairlee porringer, the cover of which I now possess, the bowl being mysteriously dog-lost.”
“Yes, dog-gone lost, forever and a day.”
Felix fingered the scrolled thumb-piece of the supposed John Cony. “But didn’t you ever stop to think, my dear, just what Lafayette was up to, those days? He was only twenty when he came over to us, in 1777. Is it at all likely that he’d ever been in Egypt before that time? Not enough to notice, I’ll be bound! No, I can’t think he was celebrated enough in 1779 to warrant having his exploits, real or imaginary, engraved on the side of a porringer, to make a household word of himself.”
“Another illusion overboard,” cried Felicia hopefully, as if pleased with a parent’s progress. But she departed, thoughtful.
“Do you know,” she announced to her mother, afterwards, “dad doesn’t really swallow that Lafayette stuff, any more than you and I do?”
“Of course not, dearie!”
“Well, of all the gay parental deceivers, you two are the limit! You’ll be saying there’s no Santa Claus, next!” Flickey flounced off in a dudgeon not wholly pretended. She was thoughtful, too. As her parents’ interest in the quest waned, her own waxed stronger.
“The old dears got a rise out of me, all right,” she confided to Jimmy Alexander, a Princeton boy who had succeeded in wresting forever from Yale Felicia’s sworn allegiance, originally granted to Harvard, and for a brief hour wavering between Amherst and Columbia.
“So much depends upon where you spend your summers,” Felicia had once ingenuously remarked; and not without some anxiety, her parents had made a similar observation. However, it was with a certain feeling of relief that Felix and his wife had compared notes upon the subject of Jimmy Alexander. Weighed in the balance with every other collegian in Flickey’s career, the young man triumphed conspicuously. Incidentally, he had an interest in old silver, an interest which even the skeptical Felix believed was genuine.
The fount and origin of that interest would have been clear to our cousin the collector could he have overheard Flickey and Jimmy in the arbor, after a game of tennis. “I’ll beat you to it,” Flickey was saying. “You find me that Lafayette bottom, and your fortune’s made, with father. He tells us now, after all these years, that he doesn’t believe there is such a thing. But all the same there’s a look of holy faith shining behind those shell rims of his. Say, Jimmy, did you ever notice how blue father’s eyes are? They’re the eyes of a believer, every time!”
Jimmy was too much engrossed with Felicia’s eyes to spare a thought for Felix’s. But the girl’s suggestion about the Lafayette bottom caught his fancy. An up-and-coming lawyer, such as he intended eventually to be, ought to be able to hunt down a silver bowl; or rather, what is more to the point with lawyers, to get some one else to do it.
“My Aunt Amanda at Lost River,” he mused aloud, “has quite a little collection of such trifles, and I’m sure she’d be glad to advise—”
“Your Aunt Amanda, at Lost River,” hooted Felicia, the morning-glory willingly assuming the rôle of owl. “Oh, Jimmy, you innocent, don’t you suppose father has been up hill and down dale, from Lost River to Newfoundland Bay, looking for that bowl? Don’t you know that half the dealers in New York are out with bloodhounds seeking stuff for father’s cabinets to devour? Your Aunt Amanda, indeed! And Lost River! Huh!”
Jimmy was nettled, but not defeated. “All the same,” he retorted stubbornly, “my Aunt Amanda is just as good as anybody else’s, and in fact a lot better than most; and there’s as good fish in Lost River as you can buy in all New York. And furthermore, if you don’t mind my mentioning it, my Aunt Amanda is an authority on Early American silver. You probably are not aware of the fact that it was she who wrote the famous Blakeney monograph! Amanda Alexander Blakeney is her name.”
Flickey was taken aback for a fraction of a second. “A. A. Blakeney? Why, we were brought up on her! I thought it was a him, I did, really! Dad swears by his Blakeney.”
“Then why shouldn’t we Dodge up to Lost River,” urged Jimmy, appeased, “and see auntie about it?”
Felicia’s eyes shone, but her words were circumspect. “Of course we could Dodge it in your car, or Ford it in mine; but hadn’t we better get father and mother to take us up in the family ark, with Priscilla and the children—?”
“Not on your blooming passport! Where do I come in, with a deal like that? If anything results, does little Jimmy draw the prestige? No, no, I want to perform the quest by myself—with you, of course. Can’t ask any one else, my runabout won’t stand for it. After all, I’m furnishing an aunt; and I think I ought to have something to say.”
“I’ll see how mother feels about it,” vouchsafed Flickey. She added to herself, “I’ll wear my pink-and-white stripe, with the rose blazer. But perhaps not the earrings—you never can tell about earrings—”