“That’s it. They were cousins of the Raycies’, and she inherited the pictures.”
I continued to ponder. “I wanted awfully to marry her, the year I left Harvard,” I said presently, more to myself than to my hearer.
“Well, if you had you’d have annexed a prize fool; and one of the most beautiful collections of Italian Primitives in the world.”
“In the world?”
“Well—you wait till you see them; if you haven’t already. And I seem to make out that you haven’t—that you can’t have. How long have you been in Japan? Four years? I thought so. Well, it was only last winter that Netta found out.”
“Found out what?”
“What there was in old Alethea Raycie’s attic. You must remember the old Miss Raycie who lived in that hideous house in Tenth Street when we were children. She was a cousin of your mother’s, wasn’t she? Well, the old fool lived there for nearly half a century, with five millions’ worth of pictures shut up in the attic over her head. It seems they’d been there ever since the death of a poor young Raycie who collected them in Italy years and years ago. I don’t know much about the story; I never was strong on genealogy, and the Raycies have always been rather dim to me. They were everybody’s cousins, of course; but as far as one can make out that seems to have been their principal if not their only function. Oh—and I suppose the Raycie Building was called after them; only they didn’t build it!
“But there was this one young fellow—I wish I could find out more about him. All that Netta seems to know (or to care, for that matter) is that when he was very young—barely out of college—he was sent to Italy by his father to buy Old Masters—in the ’forties, it must have been—and came back with this extraordinary, this unbelievable collection ... a boy of that age!... and was disinherited by the old gentleman for bringing home such rubbish. The young fellow and his wife died ever so many years ago, both of them. It seems he was so laughed at for buying such pictures that they went away and lived like hermits in the depths of the country. There were some funny spectral portraits of them that old Alethea had up in her bedroom. Netta showed me one of them the last time I went to see her: a pathetic drawing of the only child, an anæmic little girl with a big forehead. Jove, but that must have been your little Louisa!”
I nodded. “In a plaid frock and embroidered pantalettes?”
“Yes, something of the sort. Well, when Louisa and her parents died, I suppose the pictures went to old Miss Raycie. At any rate, at some time or other—and it must have been longer ago than you or I can remember—the old lady inherited them with the Tenth Street house; and when she died, three or four years ago, her relations found she’d never even been upstairs to look at them.”