“All this reminds me of what brought me here under your roof,” he went on, doing his best to key down to her own quietness of tone. “You’ve asked me to tell you what your pictures are worth. But all I’m going to do is to try to give you an idea of what this one is worth. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I’d say this one canvas is worth your farm, and your neighbors’ farms, and every farm and all they hold between here and Weston!”
“You mean to an artist?” she ventured, with the color once more slipping away from her face.
“No, I mean to a dealer, to a collector, to any one with the brains to recognize what it is. As I say, I don’t want to exaggerate. In one way it’s not easy to figure out—in dollars and cents, I mean. But I’m being as reasonable as a man who says a loaf of bread is worth ten cents when I say this Titian is to-day, as it stands there, worth at least three or four hundred thousand dollars.”
It was bewilderment, more than elation, that showed on her face. He even detected a touch of incredulity there as she turned back to the mellow glow of light reflected from the canvas.
“That sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but I know about such things. It has been my business to know. For instance, there was the Panshanger Raphael, sometimes spoken of as the Small Cowper Madonna, which Widener paid seven hundred thousand dollars for. And the same collector, when he bought Rembrandt’s Mill, paid a cool half million for it, just as he paid a half million for a Vandyke from the Cattaneo collection. And Huntington paid four hundred thousand dollars for Velasquez’s Duke of Olivares, and Frick paid the same amount for a Gainsborough portrait, and a quarter of a million for a small Rembrandt. And I could go on that way until you got tired listening to me. But that’s not the important thing. All you’ve got to do is look at it. You’d know——”
He broke off with a sense of inadequacy. Then wakening to the extent to which he had overlooked her in his excitement, he linked his arm fraternally through hers as she stood studying the canvas.
“Yes, it’s lovely,” she murmured, without responding to the pressure on her arm. She seemed suddenly small and fragile there under the shadow of his shoulder.
“There’s only one thing in all the world lovelier,” he told her as he smiled down into her face, grown pitiful with its shadows of fatigue.
“One thing lovelier?” she echoed absently, clinging to him with a touch of forlornness. That morning of tangled emotions had plainly been a little too much for her.
“I mean you,” he said.