Crucial Instances

“I should have thought it my duty.”

“Oh, by George—by George,” he repeated, subdued afresh by the inadequacy of speech.

She continued to watch him in silence. At length he jumped up and impulsively caught her by both hands.

“He’s bigger and bigger!” he almost shouted. “He simply leads the field! You’ll help me go to the bottom of this, won’t you? We must turn out all the papers—letters, journals, memoranda. He must have made notes. He must have left some record of what led up to this. We must leave nothing unexplored. By Jove,” he cried, looking up at her with his bright convincing smile, “do you know you’re the granddaughter of a Great Man?”

Her color flickered like a girl’s. “Are you—sure of him?” she whispered, as though putting him on his guard against a possible betrayal of trust.

“Sure! Sure! My dear lady—” he measured her again with his quick confident glance. “Don’t you believe in him?”

She drew back with a confused murmur. “I—used to.” She had left her hands in his: their pressure seemed to send a warm current to her heart. “It ruined my life!” she cried with sudden passion. He looked at her perplexedly.

“I gave up everything,” she went on wildly, “to keep him alive. I sacrificed myself—others—I nursed his glory in my bosom and it died—and left me—left me here alone.” She paused and gathered her courage with a gasp. “Don’t make the same mistake!” she warned him.

He shook his head, still smiling. “No danger of that! You’re not alone, my dear lady. He’s here with you—he’s come back to you to-day. Don’t you see what’s happened? Don’t you see that it’s your love that has kept him alive? If you’d abandoned your post for an instant—let things pass into other hands—if your wonderful tenderness hadn’t perpetually kept guard—this might have been—must have been—irretrievably lost.” He laid his hand on the pamphlet. “And then—then he would have been dead!”

“Oh,” she said, “don’t tell me too suddenly!” And she turned away and sank into a chair.

The young man stood watching her in an awed silence. For a long time she sat motionless, with her face hidden, and he thought she must be weeping.

At length he said, almost shyly: “You’ll let me come back, then? You’ll help me work this thing out?”

She rose calmly and held out her hand. “I’ll help you,” she declared.

“I’ll come tomorrow, then. Can we get to work early?”

“As early as you please.”

“At eight o’clock, then,” he said briskly. “You’ll have the papers ready?”

“I’ll have everything ready.” She added with a half-playful hesitancy: “And the fire shall be lit for you.”

He went out with his bright nod. She walked to the window and watched his buoyant figure hastening down the elm-shaded street. When she turned back into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.

THE RECOVERY

To the visiting stranger Hillbridge’s first question was, “Have you seen Keniston’s things?” Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House, the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.

Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to “know” Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its effect on “atmosphere,” on milieu. Hillbridge was Keniston’s milieu, and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without recognizing it. “It simply didn’t want to be seen in such surroundings; it was hiding itself under an incognito,” she declared.

It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the artist’s best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor Driffert, who had a reputation for “collecting,” had one day hung a sketch on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert’s visitors (always a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently subjected to the Professor’s off-hand inquiry, “By-the-way, have you seen my Keniston?” The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopaedia. The name was not in the Encyclopaedia; but, as a compensating fact, it became known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next year, on the occasion of the President’s golden jubilee, the Faculty, by unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly attempted to buy Professor Driffert’s sketch, which the art journals cited as a rare example of the painter’s first or silvery manner. Thus there gradually grew up a small circle of connoisseurs known in artistic, circles as men who collected Kenistons.

Professor Wildmarsh, of the chair of Fine Arts and Archaeology, was the first critic to publish a detailed analysis of the master’s methods and purpose. The article was illustrated by engravings which (though they had cost the magazine a fortune) were declared by Professor Wildmarsh to give but an imperfect suggestion of the esoteric significance of the originals. The Professor, with a tact that contrived to make each reader feel himself included among the exceptions, went on to say that Keniston’s work would never appeal to any but exceptional natures; and he closed with the usual assertion that to apprehend the full meaning of the master’s “message” it was necessary to see him in the surroundings of his own home at Hillbridge.

Professor Wildmarsh’s article was read one spring afternoon by a young lady just speeding eastward on her first visit to Hillbridge, and already flushed with anticipation of the intellectual opportunities awaiting her. In East Onondaigua, where she lived, Hillbridge was looked on as an Oxford. Magazine writers, with the easy American use of the superlative, designated it as “the venerable Alma Mater,” the “antique seat of learning,” and Claudia Day had been brought up to regard it as the fountain-head of knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the thin air of East