She was studying him, he saw, with troubled eyes in which some new anxiety seemed to be formulating itself.
“You needn’t worry,” he told her, though he smiled the next moment at the inadequacy of his phrasing. “That canvas is a Titian. There’s not a shadow of doubt about it. There’s no chance of a mistake. No copyist could ever turn the trick like that—not in a thousand years! The only thing that leaves me stumped is how it ever got here.”
“I’ve never been told about it, of course,” she explained, with a slight tremolo of excitement in her voice. “I don’t think there was anybody to tell about it after my father died. But in a letter to a French artist named Branchaud, which must have been returned undelivered after he went to Italy for the last time and was among his papers, father wrote that he’d live on acorns and sleep in a dog kennel before he’d part with the T. ‘T,’ I remember, was all he had written. He said it had cost him too much—too much in blood and tears and worry and work. There was something about a monk at Parma, a monk who had sinned against both God and man, as the letter put it, to whom father had first gone to buy one of West’s portraits of Shelley.”
“Where is that letter?” asked Conkling.
“My aunts burned it four or five years ago. They saw nothing in it but what was discreditable, and destroyed it along with the other things of father’s which they wanted out of existence.”
“The fools!” he cried with a sudden hot resentment.
“What father wrote about it costing him so much in worry and work used to make me wonder if he had copied it at some time with his own hand. I tried to believe that, and it made me prouder of him.”
Conkling shook his head.
“You were wrong there,” he said. “That canvas has got what you can’t copy. The secret of it slipped away from the world over three centuries ago. And no one has ever got within speaking distance of it again.”
Slowly she moved her head up and down, as though consoled by some final confirmation of a long doubtful issue. A faint tinge of color even crept back into her face, and Conkling stood arrested by the miraculous echo of loveliness which the living face seemed to catch from the painted face so close above it. It made him think of a woodland pool overhung by an April twilight. Then his eye wandered on to the Quaker gray of her gown. It made a frame too dull for the buoyant ardencies of her thin young body. And it came home to him how soon, now, that dullness could be done away with.