“Well——?”
“Well, she died intestate, and Netta Kent—Netta Cosby—turned out to be the next of kin. There wasn’t much to be got out of the estate (or so they thought) and, as the Cosbys are always hard up, the house in Tenth Street had to be sold, and the pictures were very nearly sent off to the auction room with all the rest of the stuff. But nobody supposed they would bring anything, and the auctioneer said that if you tried to sell pictures with carpets and bedding and kitchen furniture it always depreciated the whole thing; and so, as the Cosbys had some bare walls to cover, they sent for the lot—there were about thirty—and decided to have them cleaned and hang them up. ‘After all,’ Netta said, ‘as well as I can make out through the cobwebs, some of them look like rather jolly copies of early Italian things.’ But as she was short of cash she decided to clean them at home instead of sending them to an expert; and one day, while she was operating on this very one before you, with her sleeves rolled up, the man called who always does call on such occasions; the man who knows. In the given case, it was a quiet fellow connected with the Louvre, who’d brought her a letter from Paris, and whom she’d invited to one of her stupid dinners. He was announced, and she thought it would be a joke to let him see what she was doing; she has pretty arms, you may remember. So he was asked into the dining-room, where he found her with a pail of hot water and soap-suds, and this laid out on the table; and the first thing he did was to grab her pretty arm so tight that it was black and blue, while he shouted out: ‘God in heaven! Not hot water!’”
My friend leaned back with a sigh of mingled resentment and satisfaction, and we sat silently looking up at the lovely “Adoration” above the mantelpiece.
“That’s how I got it a little cheaper—most of the old varnish was gone for good. But luckily for her it was the first picture she had attacked; and as for the others—you must see them, that’s all I can say.... Wait; I’ve got the catalogue somewhere about....”
He began to rummage for it, and I asked, remembering how nearly I had married Netta Kent: “Do you mean to say she didn’t keep a single one of them?”
“Oh, yes—in the shape of pearls and Rolls-Royces. And you’ve seen their new house in Fifth Avenue?” He ended with a grin of irony: “The best of the joke is that Jim was just thinking of divorcing her when the pictures were discovered.”
“Poor little Louisa!” I sighed.
THE END
