Felix sighed again, a sigh of yearning and disillusion. Somehow donkey-riding, even in Egypt, and with a body-servant, seemed to him rather tame work for Lafayette. He himself would have preferred for his hero something in more heroic vein. He knew from a picture in his geography that donkeys went with the Pyramids and the mouths of the Nile. Of course donkey-riding is well enough, in an everyday sort of way; but was Lafayette an everyday sort of man? In his heart Felix felt it a pity that the marquis hadn’t had a go at Pharaoh’s horses, or their descendants. Once in church the minister had read out in a great voice something about a Bible horse, whose neck was “clothed in thunder.” That Bible horse, Felix reasoned, would have been just the mount for Lafayette! For a moment, the little boy’s mind even harbored a doubt as to his great-grandmother’s French scholarship.
“Grammer, are you sure it was a donkey? Do you remember the ears?”
Madam Bradford replied with a majesty that withered all doubt, “I do. If I was a drawer, I could draw those ears for you. Lafayette in Egypt.”
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.