Mrs. Buckmaster will tell you too—if you work her up enough—of the Dutch girl, and the miles of veldt Sir John bought and gave her as a wedding present. But to get at all this you must first get her out of the library, for while she is there she can talk of little but the picture.
"I always do have the thought," she will very likely say, as she has said it to us, "that the picture can as good as hear us speak, for all the world as if it was a Christian, and not an inanimate object. Because its eyes keep looking—looking. Like reading into your mind, whatever Mr. Stebbings may say! We must all think otherwise, now and again, and Mr. Stebbings's qualifications as a butler none can doubt." Mrs. Buckmaster will then tell you of the three different Artists three separate eminent critics have ascribed it to. But there can be no doubt that the family incline to Boldrini, on the strength of Mr. Pelly's dream. To be sure, no such artist is known to have existed. But is not the same true of the nipote del fratello di latte del Bronzino, whom the Coryphæus of these Art Critics invented to father it on?
Anyhow, there hangs the picture, night and day. If it sees, it sees its owners growing older, year by year. It sees their new grandchildren appear mysteriously, and each one behave as if it was the first new child in human experience. It sees a one-armed soldier keen on organization of territorial forces, and a beautiful wife who thinks him the greatest of mankind. And it sees, too, now and again, a very old, old gentleman whom Death seems to overlook because he is so small and dry; whom you may see too, by-the-by, if you look out sharp at Sotheby's, or Wilkinson's, or Puttick's, or Simpson's, or Quaritch's, or the Museum Reading Room. Some believe Mr. Pelly immortal.
If it hears, it hears the few sounds the silent north has to show against the music and the voices of the south. It can listen to the endless torrent of song from its little brown-bird outside above the meadow, poised in the misty blue of a coming day, or the scanty measure of the pleading of the nightingale, heard from a thousand throats among the Apennines in years gone by, welcome now as a memory that brings them back. It can hear the great wind roar in the chimney at its back through the winter nights, and the avalanches in miniature that come falling from the roof above when the world awakes to fight against its shroud of snow. But there is one thing it heard in our story it may listen for in vain—the bark of the great dog Cæsar. For Cæsar died of old age at eighteen, the age at which many of us fancy we begin to live, and the great bark shakes the Universe no more. Other dogs eat small sweet biscuits now from the hand of the mistress who loved him, with precisely the same previous examination of them, with the identical appearance of condescension in taking them at all. But Cæsar lies—his mortal part—in a good-sized grave behind the lawn, where it can be pointed out from the library, and his hospis comesque corporis may be among the shades, may have met for anything we know the liberated soul of Marta's poodle, and they may have considered each other sententiously, and parted company on the worst of terms. Cæsar never could have stood that poodle, on this side.
But the picture is there still, for those who are curious to see it. Whether it would not hang more fitly in the little Castello in the hills, if it could be identified, is matter for discussion. If pictures could really speak, what would this one say?
THE END
AN APOLOGY IN CONFIDENCE
The present writer has a weight upon his conscience. But he has no desire to disburden himself at the expense of the future reader of his works. This is addressed solely to those whom he has acquired the right to apostrophize as "My readers"; and, indeed, properly speaking, only to such of them as were misled by a too generous appreciation of his first four novels, into purchasing his fifth. For he cannot free himself from a haunting sense that he was guilty of a gross neglect in not giving them fuller warning that the said fifth volume was not Early Victorian, either in style or substance.
It is well understood nowadays—and it is not for so humble an individual as the P. W. aforesaid to call in question the judgments of everybody else—that each living author, whether he be painter or writer, shall produce at suitable intervals, preferably of twelve months, a picture or volume on all fours with the work from his hand which has first attracted public attention. And the P. W. cannot conceal from himself that in publishing, without a solemn warning addressed to possible purchasers, such a novel as his last ("An Affair of Dishonour": Heinemann), he has run the risk of incurring the execration or forgiveness—the upshot is the same—of many of his most tolerant and patient readers, to remain on good terms with whom is, and always will be, his literary ambition.