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Page 73
"Never! Never!" she assured him. "Art has done too much for me.
I shall not try to live my life without it. Already I feel I
could not."
"What have you seen to-day?" he asked.
"I was at the Pitti all the morning. I liked best Fra Bartolommeo's
great altar piece and Titian's portrait of Cardinal Ippolito dei
Medici. You must see him--a strange, unhappy spirit only
twenty-three years old. Two years afterwards he was poisoned, and
his haunted, discontented eyes closed for ever. And the 'Concert'--
so wonderful, with such a hunger-starved expression in the soul
of the player. And Andrea del Sarto--how gracious and noble; but
Henry James says he's second-rate, because his mind was second-rate,
so I suppose he is, but not to me. He never will be to me.
To-morrow you must come and see some of the things I specially love.
I won't bore you. I don't know enough to bore you yet. Oh, and
Allori's 'Judith'--so lovely, but I wonder if Allori did justice
to her? Certainly his 'Judith' could never have done what the real
Judith did. And there's a landscape by Rubens--dark and old--yet
it reminded me of our woods where they open out above the valley."
He devoted the next morning to Mary, and wandered among the pictures
with her. He strove to share her enthusiasm, and, indeed, did so
sometimes. Then occurred a little incident, so trivial that they
forgot all about it within an hour, yet were reminded of it at a
very startling moment now fast approaching.
They had separated, and Sir Walter's eye was caught by a portrait.
But he forgot it a moment later in passing interest of a blazoned
coat of arms upon the frame--a golden bull's head on a red ground.
The heraldic emblem was tarnished and inconspicuous, yet the
spectator felt curiously conscious that it was not unfamiliar. It
seemed that he had seen it already somewhere. He challenged Mary
with it presently; but she had never observed it before to her
recollection.
Sir Walter enjoyed his daughter's interest, and finding that his
company among the pictures added to Mary's pleasure, while his
comments caused her no apparent pain, he declared his intention
of seeing more.
"You must tell me what you know," he said.
"It will be the blind leading the blind, dearest," she answered,
"but my delight must be in finding things I think you'll like.
The truth is that neither of us knows anything about what we ought
to like."
"That's a very small matter," he declared. "We must begin by
learning to like pictures at all. When Ernest comes, he will want
us to live in his great touring car and fly about, so we should
use our present time to the best advantage. Pictures do not attract
him, and he will be very much surprised to hear that I have been
looking at them."
"We must interest him, too, if we can."
"That would be impossible. Ernest does not understand pictures,
and music gives him no pleasure. He regards art with suspicion,
as a somewhat unmanly thing."
"Poor Mr. Travers!"
"Do not pity him, Mary. His life is sufficiently full without it."
"But I've lived to find out that no life can be." In due course
Ernest and Nelly arrived, and, as Sir Walter had prophesied, their
pleasure consisted in long motor drives to neighboring places and
scenes of interest and beauty. His daughter, in the new light that
was glimmering for her, found her father's friends had shrunk a
little. She could speak with them and share their interests less
whole-heartedly than of old; but they set it down to her tribulation
and tried to "rouse" her. Ernest Travers even lamented her
new-found interests and hoped they were "only a passing phase."
"She appears to escape from reality into a world of pictures and
music," he said. "You must guard against that, my dear Walter.
These things can be of no permanent interest to a healthy mind."
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