Late one July afternoon, Amanda Alexander Blakeney had ensconced herself with Queen Victoria in a shady corner of the terrace, and was looking forward to an hour of tranquil enjoyment with Lehzen’s caraway seeds, and Lord M. To her vexation, the very first paragraph was punctuated for her by footsteps on the brick walk; and peering through the pine boughs, she spied a gay young pair who had evidently just descended from a car, left in quite the wrong place in her courtyard.
“I hope,” she said to herself, “it isn’t another brazen couple come to ask if this is a ‘gift-shop-’n’-tea-house,’ and can they have something wet. Well, they’ll hear from me, and—”
A brisk voice broke in, man-fashion.
“Hello, hello, Aunt Mandy! Anything wet for the weary prodigal nevvy?”
“Well, of all things,” replied the great Museum authority on silver, beaming with pleasure upon her favorite Alexander nephew. Lord M. was readily enough forgotten in the vivid presence of the young people, and the subject of silver readily enough approached with the arrival of a tea-tray laden with various products reflecting credit alike upon the collector and her cook. Mrs. Blakeney was a childless widow, distinctly pretty, with a young face framed by abundant white hair. In her fresh lilac gown with its touches of old lace, and in her daintily buckled slippers, of a Victorian slenderness, she was, as Felicia afterwards declared, a “regular story-book fairy-godmother person.” Old silver was her love, her life, her knowledge. Everybody’s silver was of interest to her; she was always ready to talk or even to hear others talk concerning caudle cups or apostle spoons or salt-cellars or tankards.
She gave a delicately amused attention to Flickey’s chatter of her father’s quest for the Lafayette bottom. The young girl naturally felt that her hostess’s interest was due, in part, to her own pleasing vivacity in telling the story of the child Lydia, the Fairlee porringer, Rover, and the evil Ellicksenders. At the mention of that name, Ellicksender, Mrs. Blakeney started, and even changed color; one would have said that a feeling of indignant protest surged over her when the “den of thieves” was blithely insisted upon by young Felicia; but the lady did not interrupt.
“And the fun of it is,” Felicia continued, stimulated by the fact that Jimmy was admiring her within an inch of his life, while even Mrs. Blakeney was spellbound, “the fun of it is, father still has the drawing his Grandma Bradford made when she was a little girl. You know she made a drawing of the Lafayette bowl just by laying it down on paper and tracing around it, as young things do!” One would have supposed that the speaker was a thousand years removed from such simplicities.
“But that isn’t all,” added Flickey, taking from her beaded bag a folded paper, and passing it to Mrs. Blakeney. “What must father do but go ahead and have half a dozen copies made of that old drawing, perfect in every detail; and he has given one to each of us children, mother included, so that wherever we are, we can always be prepared to find a porringer bottom that will fit exactly, if there is such a thing. Regular Bradford family identification tag, I call it. Of course father has the top; but we’ve never had any luck in finding the bottom, though mother and I have hunted and delved and dug. Sometimes the circle would be right, or almost right, but the handles—oh, dear! We’ve looked at gorms of handles, all of them terribly wrong.”
She paused a moment to wonder whether she had been talking too much; she did not wish to appear the raw young feminine ignoramus in the eyes of a person so delightful as Aunt Amanda, who, as Felicia now saw, was studying that drawing, and with a kind of passionate earnestness, too. The expert’s face was itself a study; doubt, amazement, and recognition were to be seen struggling there. The polite interest had become acute.
Flickey, jubilantly aware that as usual she was making a success of her conversation, was inspired to further efforts. In imitation of her father’s most discriminating manner, she continued, “Of course, from the collector’s point of view, we don’t attach any undue importance to the Lafayette myth, and—”