To batter this simple question into Cousin Alethea’s brain was the affair of ten laborious minutes; and when the job was done, and Miss Raycie, with an air of mysterious displeasure, had dropped a deep “Eleven,” my mother was too exhausted to continue. So she turned to me to add, with one of the private smiles we kept for each other: “It was the poor child who would have inherited the Raycie Gallery.” But to a little boy of my age this item of information lacked interest, nor did I understand my mother’s surreptitious amusement.
This far-off scene suddenly came back to me last year, when, on one of my infrequent visits to New York, I went to dine with my old friend, the banker, John Selwyn, and came to an astonished stand before the mantelpiece in his new library.
“Hallo!” I said, looking up at the picture above the chimney.
My host squared his shoulders, thrust his hands into his pockets, and affected the air of modesty which people think it proper to assume when their possessions are admired. “The Macrino d’Alba? Y—yes ... it was the only thing I managed to capture out of the Raycie collection.”
“The only thing? Well——”
“Ah, but you should have seen the Mantegna; and the Giotto; and the Piero della Francesca—hang it, one of the most beautiful Piero della Francescas in the world.... A girl in profile, with her hair in a pearl net, against a background of columbines; that went back to Europe—the National Gallery, I believe. And the Carpaccio, the most exquisite little St. George ... that went to California ... Lord!” He sat down with the sigh of a hungry man turned away from a groaning board. “Well, it nearly broke me buying this!” he murmured, as if at least that fact were some consolation.
I was turning over my early memories in quest of a clue to what he spoke of as the Raycie collection, in a tone which implied that he was alluding to objects familiar to all art-lovers.
Suddenly: “They weren’t poor little Louisa’s pictures, by any chance?” I asked, remembering my mother’s cryptic smile.
Selwyn looked at me perplexedly. “Who the deuce is poor little Louisa?” And, without waiting for my answer, he went on: “They were that fool Netta Cosby’s until a year ago—and she never even knew it.”
We looked at each other interrogatively, my friend perplexed at my ignorance, and I now absorbed in trying to run down the genealogy of Netta Cosby. I did so finally. “Netta Cosby—you don’t mean Netta Kent, the one who married Jim Cosby?”