Volume I Part 3 (1/2)

”What will your lords.h.i.+p do with it?” said old Mr. Creeps.

”You shall see,” replied that eminent collector with a smile, as he advanced to the easel on which the doubtful picture stood. His lords.h.i.+p opened his penknife, carefully and quietly he cut the canvas out of the frame, he folded it in half; again he cut it, as though he were cutting up a sheet of brown paper; he repeated the process several times, then, handing the pieces to the German, he merely remarked, ”Oblige me by burning these, Wolff.”

”They shall make a vamous blaze,” said the philosopher, as he left the room to carry out the sentence.

”Would that all collectors could afford to do the same, Lord Pit Town,”

remarked John Buskin with a sigh.

”Your lords.h.i.+p has done a n.o.ble act,” cheerfully cried old Mr. Creeps, as he rubbed his hands. ”Of course you will trounce Abrahams. When the artistic world hears of this morning's work, Lord Pit Town, it will know what it owes to England's most distinguished amateur.”

”No, no, Mr. Creeps. I must ask you to keep this business a secret; no cheap popularity for me,” replied the old lord.

”Cheap!” echoed the critic, as he raised his eyes to the skylight. ”Good heavens! he calls it cheap,” whispered the old man to John Buskin.

”His lords.h.i.+p is right,” was the oracle's oracular reply.

Men said that Lord Pit Town was eccentric. Gossips said that he was mad.

Perhaps after all he was only honest according to his lights. Next day the handsome frame, carefully packed, was returned to Mr. Abrahams; it was duly deducted from his account. But he got his cheque for the price of the picture, and his very liberal commission.

In vain did the artists who frequented Walls End Park attempt to stalk the old n.o.bleman in his lonely walks. They never succeeded in selling him a picture from the easel. ”Capital, capital,” his lords.h.i.+p would remark with great alacrity, when there was no other way of escape. The eldest Miss Solomonson, the most talented member of that clever Hebrew family--she is great at animals--tried to shoot the wary old lord with her well-known picture of ”The Timid Fawn,” but she ignominiously failed.

”The old wretch called me 'my dear,' and said he liked my sky, when I hadn't even indicated the sky,” she indignantly remarked to her amused father.

Miss Solomonson's ma.s.ses of jetty hair, and the fire from the glances of her oriental eyes, were said to have melted the stony hearts even of dealers who were her co-religionists. But with all her advantages Miss Solomonson failed with the old lord, and she abuses him to this day. She had her revenge, however, for in her well-known Academy picture of the following year, ”Balaam and his a.s.s,” the angel was represented by a glorified portrait of Miss Solomonson herself, who glared down in an indignant manner upon the terrified and kneeling Balaam. Old Mr. Creeps and the other art-critics chuckled as they recognized the angelic portrait; but they chuckled still more, when they saw that the terrified Balaam was but an ill-natured caricature of John, Earl of Pit Town.

”I'd have done him as the a.s.s, you know, only he was too ugly. I hope he'll like the figures better than the sky this time,” snorted the indignant Hebrew maiden.

The curse of the Earl of Pit Town's life was the so-called gallery of old masters in Walls End Castle. He couldn't sell them; he couldn't burn them; he was even compelled to insure them, to his intense disgust. For when a former lord had inherited Walls End Castle from the Chudleighs, old masters had been the fas.h.i.+on; and the purchaser, delighted with his toy, had made the pictures heirlooms. But the present lord had shut up what to him was a mere chamber of horrors. He and Dr. Wolff had actually composed a catalogue _raisonne_ of the entire collection, in which the fict.i.tious nature of the claims to respect of each monstrous daub was triumphantly demonstrated. The sprawling Rubenses were shown to be but inferior copies, the Paul Veronese was proved a transparent sham, while the great Vandyck, representing the Martyr-King seated on a gigantic grey horse, was demonstrated to be but a wretched replica of a miserable original. There they hung, the old Pit Town heirlooms, grimy with dirt; for as the old lord used to say, ”To have cleaned them would have been only to make their natural hideousness still more apparent.” Each picture bore a label, giving a true description of the once-honoured gem. Alas! these veracious tablets cruelly contrasted with the flourishes of the old housekeeper's descriptions.

Two only of his heirlooms had stood the crucial inspections of Lord Pit Town and his experts. These were the great Raphael, and the celebrated portrait of Barbara Chudleigh, the well-known beauty of Charles the Second's time, by Sir Peter Lely. Wicked Bab Chudleigh, as a wood nymph, simpered upon the walls of the new gallery in which the Chudleigh Raphael occupied the post of honour.

We have seen what manner of man John, Earl of Pit Town, was. We have seen how his heirlooms troubled him not a little. We have seen how he pa.s.sed his life with the faithful Wolff at Walls End Castle, patiently waiting to fill the numerous blanks on the walls of the new galleries, in fact to accomplish his destiny. For if ever there was a born collector, a real collector, to whom the actual intrinsic value of a painting was absolutely of no importance, it was John, Earl of Pit Town.

And this indifference to the value at the hammer of their acquisitions, marks the distinction between the genuine collector or connoisseur and the ruck of the people who buy pictures; the bulk of whom are after all but amateur dealers. When the successful stock-jobber leaves off dealing in shares and takes to art, he merely deals in another more or less intangible security of very fluctuating value. With childlike confidence he follows the advice of some more or less honest dealer. He buys from the easel with a hope of a ”rapid rise.” Works are knocked down to him at Christie's simply because they are apparently cheap, and he is carrying out the old axiom of his trade, ”always buy rubbish.” In the same way he is perpetually buying and selling pictures upon the time honoured maxim of Capel Court, ”nail your profit, and cut your loss.” He will even go so far as to develop a taste for a particular master in the hope that he may succeed ultimately in making a ”corner” in that special security. And the sole dream of such a man is the result in pounds, s.h.i.+llings and pence of the auction that will inevitably take place at his death. The possession of a certain number of valuable works of art confers an amount of distinction upon their proprietor, and Brown, who as Brown is a n.o.body, becomes a somebody as the owner of the Brown collection. Of this fact Manchester ”men” and Liverpool ”gentlemen” are well aware. But, as has been seen, a deep gulf divided these amateur dealers from John, Earl of Pit Town.

The old earl's property, the source of his wealth, as from his t.i.tle the reader will have shrewdly guessed, was in collieries. With the management of these, however, the Earl of Pit Town did not trouble himself. His various agents paid yearly increasing sums into that aristocratic bank in the Strand, which never allows interest on deposits, which never advises any investment except Consols, and whose clerks from time immemorial have worn white chokers.

For many years it had been the old lord's habit to entertain those members of his family, never exceeding four in number, who were nearest to the t.i.tle. Twice a year the formal invitation was sent out by the old n.o.bleman to his only son, and to his two nephews. Once in the height of the summer and once at Christmas these invitations were issued. They were never refused, for their recipients looked upon them much in the light of a royal command.

Lord Hetton, the earl's only son, and his heir, was always one of the guests on these occasions; to him it was an exceedingly unpleasant time; for father and son had quarrelled years ago, the old lord having sternly declined to increase his son's very liberal allowance of five thousand a year. A man can do a great deal on five thousand a year, but not much is left for the annuitant when he is possessed by the idea that, some day or other, it will be his good fortune to win the Derby. In all other things but race-horses, Hetton was a man of frugal mind. For the sake of his stud he had remained a bachelor; for he felt that were he to marry, yet another obstacle would be raised to the attainment of his ambition.

Ever since his majority Lord Hetton had annually entered a colt in the great race. His nominations had on two occasions even run into places.

Four years ago Hetton's horse had been first favourite, but it was ignominiously beaten. This very year, that rank outsider, Dark Despair, who, starting at sixty to one, had just been beaten on the post, was the property of his persevering, but unlucky, lords.h.i.+p. Twice a year did Lord Hetton present himself at Walls End Castle. He used to walk through the park, and note with pleasure the care that his father bestowed on the gigantic property. It pleased him to see how well kept was everything about the place. It gratified him to find his opinions deferentially listened to by the steward, and to perceive that year by year the family solicitors treated him with a still greater obsequiousness. But in his heart, he cursed what he called his father's folly, as he looked at the new galleries; and he would have liked to stamp and swear, as at every visit he dutifully admired each new and costly acquisition of the old earl's. He would walk discontentedly up and down the old picture gallery where hung the worthless heirlooms that, in the ordinary course of nature, must one day be his own: and he wondered whether he should ever possess the Golconda contained in the new galleries. Perhaps it was only human nature that caused him to watch, and watch in vain, for any apparent sign of increasing infirmity in the old earl. But he never quarrelled with his father, for on the morning of his departure from the paternal roof, he was accustomed to receive a very considerable _solatium_ to his wounded feelings, in the shape of a heavy cheque on the bank in the Strand. The amount of this cheque was invariable; it kept Hetton on his good behaviour, and he had learned to look upon it as part of his allowance. On one memorable occasion he had presumed to remonstrate with his father on the enormous cost of his last artistic acquisitions; the earl had merely shrugged his shoulders. That visit had been indignantly remembered by Lord Hetton, for when the venerable connoisseur bade his lords.h.i.+p good-bye, there had been no cheque, though there was no change in his lords.h.i.+p's manner towards his son.

Mr. Haggard, of the Home Office, a faultlessly-dressed gentleman, whose princ.i.p.al characteristic was his brilliant whist, which it was said brought him in a certain but variable income, was the next heir in direct succession; he was the nephew of his lords.h.i.+p, and a childless bachelor. His presence, also, always graced Walls End Castle at the regulation periods.

Mr. John Haggard, of Ash Priory, the father of big Reginald, was always the third guest. John Haggard, the second nephew of Lord Pit Town, was a J.P. for his county, of the Shakespearian type. He was fond of good living, his eye was severe, and his beard of sober cut. He embodied the law, in his own immediate neighbourhood, to the intense terror of local delinquents. He had meted out stern justice to his own son, when he had banished big Reginald to South America; but he had his virtues. He lived within his means, he entertained his neighbours at rather heavy dinners, he gave his wife and daughters a fortnight in town during the season, and he habitually took the first prize at the county show for black pigs. He never forgot that he was third in succession to the t.i.tle. He never doubted his capacity, should he ever be called to occupy the position of a hereditary legislator; and now that his son had returned a considerably wealthier man than he himself was, he chuckled, when in his mind's eye he thought of him as some day bearing the courtesy t.i.tle of Lord Hetton.

The earl and the doctor of philosophy sat at breakfast in a little oak wainscoted room whose windows commanded a full view of the new galleries. In this little room the galleries had been designed; the windows had looked upon the commencement of the great work. An army of navvies had dug out the earth for the gigantic foundations. Then arose a very forest of scaffold-poles. Two huge steam engines had snorted and puffed for three whole years. A colossal steam ”traveller” had ceaselessly carried great blocks of stone and long steel girders from point to point. The clink of the stone-masons' chisels had resounded year after year from morning till night. Then came the carpenters, and the noise of their busy hammers had been deafening. When not actually on the works, Lord Pit Town had viewed them from the window of his favourite room. But scaffold poles, steam engines and labourers had disappeared; the rubbish had been cleared away, and the huge white block stood out in the clear air; dominating the grey weather-stained gables of Walls End Castle much as Aladdin's palace is said to have dominated the more ancient but less magnificent residence of his father-in-law the Emperor of China. There was an air of spick-and-spanness about the whole thing that annoyed the earl. The new galleries had been finished four whole years, but they still looked painfully fresh.

”I hear that I am to have the pleasure of welcoming another of your lords.h.i.+p's relatives this year,” said the doctor of philosophy to the earl.