Julia Keswick stooped low as she stepped in under the sloping roof, coming to a stop before a large canvas, covered with faded blue-and-white ticking, which leaned against the wall. Conkling watched her, with a revived impression of the epochal close about him, as she drew away this ticking and swung the framed picture about so that it faced him.
Yet his next impression was one of sharp disappointment, for all he saw was a mediocre landscape of muddy and mediocre colors. It struck him as a climax of disillusionment, and his heart went down like a lift. And like a lift, having reached bottom, it began to ascend again, for he could see the stooping girl oddly intent on turning the metal latches on the back of the heavy frame. When the inclosed canvas was released she let it fall back a little from its confining ledges, and then drew it sidewise out of the frame. The movement reminded him of a photographer withdrawing the slide from a plate holder.
But he had no chance to let his mind dwell on that movement, for a moment later his eyes were startled by a sudden impression of gold and ivory merging into a flow of soft and melting line and re-emerging into vivid and gracious contours which brought a catch in his throat. He stood staring at this second canvas which had been hidden under the first, stood staring at it with that faint tingling of the nerve ends with which the astonished senses sometimes dizzily capitulate to sheer bewilderment.
“Great God!” he gasped. And there was reverence in that ejaculation, for all its sharpness.
“What is it?” whispered the girl, catching an echo of his amazement.
“Great God!” he repeated in his own whisper of awe. “It’s a Titian!”
He saw before him the figure of a woman holding an apple. The apple was golden, but not more golden than the soft ivory glow of the woman’s body, bathed in its wash of purifying color. That body made Conkling’s mind flash back to the Borghese with its Sacred and Profane Love and a moment later revert to the Magdalen in the Pitti. There was the same divine fullness of throat and breast, the same wealth of red-gold hair, the unmistakable mellowness of color and melting loveliness of line. There was a largeness and power in the conception of the figure, a stubborn yet exalted animality, which convinced Conkling the canvas before him belonged to Titian’s later days. Yet as he studied it he objected to the word “animality.” He preferred to substitute the phrase “spiritualized paganism” as he deciphered subtler effects which made him think of the National Gallery Magdalen and remember the abundant glow of bosom in the Flora of the Uffizi, the machinery of human life made adorable to human eyes.
“It’s a Titian!” he repeated in a shocked and half incredulous whisper as he stepped still closer to the canvas.
That canvas, he could see, had suffered somewhat through the vicissitudes of its history. Extremes of heat and cold obviously had imposed a slight rimple of fine lines on its surface. But this did not greatly trouble Conkling. He even found in it, in fact, an accidental and subsidiary delight, for it added eloquence to its tone of time and enriched its note of history with an accentuation of age. But the miracle that it could have been carried unknown and unheralded across the Atlantic, that it could lie for years in the attic of a dilapidated Ontario manor-house, tended to take his breath away. He knew enough of Titian to remember that much of that great Venetian’s work had been lost. He had Vasari to back him up in that. More had been lost, in fact, than had survived, but behind the possession of that painting, he knew, lay a history which would not be easy to unravel. It impressed him as something which kings might have intrigued over. He recalled how nearly two centuries ago, when the Flora was unearthed to Florence, a nation practically ceased warfare to come and stare at the canvas—and it would soon be America’s time to stop and stare.
The girl moved closer to his side, but he remained unconscious of her presence there. He did not see the rapt light in her eyes. The look of vague triumph on her face was lost to him. It was, in fact, several minutes before he even remembered her. Then it came home to him what the picture meant, not to the America which was to stop and stare, but to the impoverished household where it lay like a jewel hidden away in a straw mattress. He remembered what it would mean to that haughty and broken pair so in need of sustenance. It was their release—their salvation. That benignant golden figure with the apple of desire in her clustered fingers stood the goddess who was to work the miracle, who in a day might transform their penury into plenty. And this thought took his attention back to Julia Keswick.