They were of the colour--of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these people's, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him (11) as catching the echoes from his own thought while he loitered--what he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. "You Americans are almost incredibly romantic."
"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us."
"Everything?" He had wondered.
"Well, everything that's nice at all. The world, the beautiful world--or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much."
He had looked at her a moment--and he well knew how she had struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: "You see too much--that's what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don't, at least," he had amended with a further thought, "see too little." But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless. He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirs--nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad--that is as good--as herself.
"Oh he's better," the girl had freely declared--"that is he's worse.
His relation to the things he cares for--and I think it beautiful--is absolutely romantic. (12) So is his whole life over here--it's the most romantic thing I know."
"You mean his idea for his native place?"
"Yes--the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world. It's the work of his life and the motive of everything he does."
The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again--smiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her. "Has it been his motive in letting me have you?"
"Yes, my dear, positively--or in a manner," she had said. "American City is n't, by the way, his native town, for, though he's not old, it's a young thing compared with him--a younger one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity performance. You're at any rate a part of his collection," she had explained--"one of the things that can only be got over here. You're a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. You're not perhaps absolutely unique, but you're so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you--you belong to a class about which everything is known. You're what they call a morceau de musee."
"I see. I have the great sign of it," he had risked--"that I cost a lot of money."
"I haven't the least idea," she had gravely answered, "what you cost"--and he had quite adored for the moment her way of saying it. He had felt even for the moment vulgar. But he had made the best of that.
(13) "Would n't you find out if it were a question of parting with me?
My value would in that case be estimated."
She had covered him with her charming eyes, as if his value were well before her. "Yes, if you mean that I'd pay rather than lose you."
And then there came again what this had made him say. "Don't talk about ME--it's you who are not of this age. You're a creature of a braver and finer one, and the cinquecento, at its most golden hour, would n't have been ashamed of you. It would of me, and if I did n't know some of the pieces your father has acquired I should rather fear for American City the criticism of experts. Would it at all events be your idea," he had then just ruefully asked, "to send me there for safety?"
"Well, we may have to come to it."
"I'll go anywhere you want."
"We must see first--it will be only if we have to come to it. There are things," she had gone on, "that father puts away--the bigger and more cumbrous of course, which he stores, has already stored in masses, here and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in warehouses, vaults, banks, safes, wonderful secret places. We've been like a pair of pirates--positively stage pirates, the sort who wink at each other and say 'Hathaway-Hathaway!' when they come to where their treasure is buried. Ours is buried pretty well everywhere--except what we like to see, what we travel with and have about us. These, the smaller pieces, are the things we take out and arrange as we can, to make the hotels we stay at and the houses we hire a little less ugly. Of course it's (14) a danger, and we have to keep watch. But father loves a fine piece, loves, as he says, the good of it, and it's for the company of some of his things that he's willing to run his risks.
And we've had extraordinary luck"--Maggie had made that point; "we've never lost anything yet. And the finest objects are often the smallest. Values, in lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do with size. But there's nothing, however tiny," she had wound up, "that we've missed."
"I like the class," he had laughed for this, "in which you place me!
I shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels, or at the worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful one, and put out with the family photographs and the new magazines. But it's something not to be so big that I have to be buried."
"Oh," she had returned, "you shall not be buried, my dear, till you're dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American City."