第36章

"Certainly I should consider that a good bargain, simply for investment," said he."Falconer's name alone ought to be worth more than that, ten years from now.He is a rising man.""No, Mr.Pierrepont," replied the dealer, "the picture is worth what I ask for it, for I would not commit the impertinence of offering a present to you or your friend; but it is worth no more.Falconer's name will not increase in value.The catalogue of his works is too short for fame to take much notice of it; and this is the last.Did you not hear of his death last fall? I do not wonder, for it happened at some place down on Long Island--a name that I never saw before, and have forgotten now.There was not even an obituary in the newspapers.""And besides," he continued, after a pause, "I must not conceal from you that the painting has a blemish.It is not always visible, since you have failed to detect it; but it is more noticeable in some lights than in others; and, do what I will, I cannot remove it.

This alone would prevent the painting from being a good investment.

Its market value will never rise."

He turned the canvas sideways to the light, and the defect became apparent.

It was a dim, oblong, white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while it was wet, and bleached it.I knew little of the possible causes of such a blot, but enough to see that it could not be erased without painting over it, perhaps not even then.And yet it seemed rather to enhance than to weaken the attraction which the picture had for me.

"Your candour does you credit, Mr.Morgenstern," said I, "but you know me well enough to be sure that what you have said will hardly discourage me.For I have never been an admirer of 'cabinet finish'

in works of art.Nor have I been in the habit of buying them, as a Circassian father trains his daughters, with an eye to the market.

They come into my house for my own pleasure, and when the time arrives that I can see them no longer, it will not matter much to me what price they bring in the auction-room.This landscape pleases me so thoroughly that, if you will let us take it with us this evening, I will send you a check for the amount in the morning."So we carried off the painting in a cab; and all the way home I was in the pleasant excitement of a man who is about to make an addition to his house; while Pierrepont was conscious of the glow of virtue which comes of having done a favour to a friend and justified your own critical judgment at one stroke.

After dinner we hung the painting over the chimney-piece in the room called the study (because it was consecrated to idleness), and sat there far into the night, talking of the few times we had met Falconer at the club, and of his reticent manner, which was broken by curious flashes of impersonal confidence when he spoke not of himself but of his art.From this we drifted into memories of good comrades who had walked beside us but a few days in the path of life, and then disappeared, yet left us feeling as if we cared more for them than for the men whom we see every day; and of young geniuses who had never reached the goal; and of many other glimpses of "the light that failed," until the lamp was low and it was time to say good-night.

II

For several months I continued to advance in intimacy with my picture.It grew more familiar, more suggestive; the truth and beauty of it came home to me constantly.Yet there was something in it not quite apprehended; a sense of strangeness; a reserve which Ihad not yet penetrated.

One night in August I found myself practically alone, so far as human intercourse was concerned, in the populous, weary city.Acouple of hours of writing had produced nothing that would bear the test of sunlight, so I anticipated judgment by tearing up the spoiled sheets of paper, and threw myself upon the couch before the empty fireplace.It was a dense, sultry night, with electricity thickening the air, and a trouble of distant thunder rolling far away on the rim of the cloudy sky--one of those nights of restless dulness, when you wait and long for something to happen, and yet feel despondently that nothing ever will happen again.I passed through a region of aimless thoughts into one of migratory and unfinished dreams, and dropped from that into an empty gulf of sleep.

How late it was when I drifted back toward the shore of consciousness, I cannot tell.But the student-lamp on the table had burned out, and the light of the gibbous moon was creeping in through the open windows.Slowly the pale illumination crept up the eastern wall, like a tide rising as the moon declined.Now it reached the mantel-shelf and overflowed the bronze heads of Homer and the Indian Bacchus and the Egyptian image of Isis with the infant Horus.Now it touched the frame of the picture and lapped over the edge.Now it rose to the shadowy house and the dim garden, in the midst of which I saw the white blot more distinctly than ever before.

It seemed now to have taken a new shape, like the slender form of a woman, robed in flowing white.And as I watched it through half-closed eyes, the figure appeared to move and tremble and wave to and fro, as if it were a ghost.

A haunted picture! Why should it not be so? A haunted ruin, a haunted forest, a haunted ship,--all these have been seen, or imagined, and reported, and there are learned societies for investigating such things.Why should not a picture have a ghost in it?

My mind, in that curiously vivid state which lies between waking and sleeping, went through the form of careful reasoning over the question.If there may be some subtle connection between a house and the spirits of the people who have once lived in it,--and wise men have believed this,--why should there be any impassable gulf between a picture and the vanished lives out of which it has grown?