The old order

PAUL HORGAN

When he set out to see old Mrs. Eustace for the last time, Otto Troutwine said to himself that he had a right to feel sentimental. Forty years ago his firm had helped to gather the Eustace art collection. Otto, an ambitious youth, had handled the Romneys, the Sullys, the Bouguereaus (taste of the time), the Corot and the blue Murillo madonna with reverence. It was years before he became a personality in the galleries of Messrs. Inman. Rut he never forgot a picture, or lost his love for a fine one and his scorn for a copy.

Old Mrs. Eustace had summoned him by mail—a stiff, gold-edged card with her wiry script running across it like veins. She must have remembered bis name from the auction a few years ago, after the death of Senator Eustace, and the sale of his railroad.

The Eustace money and power had gone far faster than it had come. The Senator had risen to a command from the silver mines of the West; and his wife was sometimes spoken of as a former seamstress. Their time in the sun was brilliant with authority (the Senator's) and grace (his wife's). Everybody made a legend of the Senator's vulgarity, and smiled affectionately about it as a clever trait for a millionaire. And if Mrs. Eustace was a dressmaker, she was a dressmaker in wonderful diamonds and with a growing assurance.

® Otto was surprised at how much he remembered of the Eustace history; the picture collection he knew in detail. He was sorry that poverty had come upon Mrs. Eustace in her very old age. He had heard that she was going back up-state to Canandaigua to live with her only sister, who must be another white-faced ancient with a concealed courage in her somewhere, and maybe a proper shame at the career of Mrs. Eustace, once so newly-rich, and now so reduced.

Otto left his cab at the Hotel Dunraven. Inquiring at the desk, he tapped his breast pocket and felt his long wallet. The cheque crackled against his ribs.

The clerk sent him up to Mrs. Eustace's rooms. The hotel was dead, with strange echoes of the last century in its hangings, its crystal and brass chandeliers, the elevator with the frayed rose silk armchairs in it. Mrs. Eustace had lived here for several years, and was now leaving it behind as an extravagance.

At her door, he knocked and waited. He could hear tentative sounds within, the noises of preparation. He thought of the picture he had come to buy.

It was the Thomas Sully Portrait of an Unknown Naval Officer, which Messrs. Inman bad sold to Philander Eustace in 1889. It had come to Inman from an English sale. Otto Troutwine had never forgotten that painting of a middle-aged man with brown hair, standing against rose-veined marble columns shadowed by green velvet curtains. The blue of the uniform was black in places, and in places was like the sky. Gold, full of light and dark, heavied the collar and showered on the shoulders. An ivory-handled sword leaned against the white-clad legs. One hand held a spy glass and a cocked hat together. The eyes were blue like water. A dim golden fleet of ships lingered beyond the painted figure on glazed green sea. Otto remembered the frame, an atrocity made of carved rose leaves in gold and insets of green plush. But he best remembered the sharp bones of the face, a falcon nose, clear, shallow temples and a sharp jaw. In life or art, he bad never seen another face so frank of its skull, or so beautiful.

He was about to knock again, anxious to see the portrait, when the door opened slowly, and he stepped into the drawing-room where a kind of brown light lingered. Mrs. Eustace held out her band, lie shook it carefully, altered by her new frailty. She laid her hands on her chest over the pale lace and faded black, and asked him to sit down.

Mr. Troutwine leaned forward, wondering what shocked him so. She was very old: he bad known that. The light here was confusing, late in the afternoon, and the Dunraven was darkened by the buildings that piled beside it. Mrs. Eustace supported her chin with one band where a dim little diamond ring refused what light there was from the lace-curtained windows. She sat in serenity, but her eyes were sad.

"Well. Mr. Troutwine," she said, "you are very kind."

"I am very glad to come, Mrs. Eustace. We have always been happy in serving you."

"Thank you," she declared vaguely, with a softened voice that enclosed something like memories. She bowed faintly in her chair. Otto still felt strange looking at her, though he couldn't think why.

"You are looking very well, if I may say so," he said.

"I shall be glad to go," she answered, and for a moment he thought she was referring to death, which be could see in her bony, pure articulation of cheek and hand. But she continued, "It is very lovely in Canandaigua. My sister has a beautiful old house on the lake. It is surrounded by trees. The house is white."

"I envy you."

She regarded him in silence, thinking it more polite to be quiet than help his foolish pretensions of encouragement. In the black cellars of the huge building next door, dynamos were turned on. The Dunraven trembled. Traffic sounded dimly, like diapason vibrations against the ear.

Mr. Troutwine thought, "She has discarded all pretensions. She falls not only toward death, but to poverty also. She can accept both." He absently felt emotions of schmerz.

"I have the portrait here," she said at last, as if to summon words from her thought took time. "I will get it."

"May I?" he said, blushing to bis smooth white hair.

She said (Continued on following page)

"Thank you," and went through a doorway hung with striped cloth. He sat thinking of the huge frame, and tried to imagine himself following to help her in spite of her refusal. But in a moment she was back, holding the Sully portrait without its frame. She leaned it against the table. It was deadened by dust, lie turned on the lights with her permission. He knelt before it, touching the dust away with his handkerchief. The gold came through, the pale blue eyes, and he recognized a detail he had forgotten: the studdings of the brush upon the sword knot of gold and black.

"It is so beautiful," he said.

"You will buy it, I believe?" said Mrs. Eustace, shrugging slightly. "It is my last . . .'

He coughed pompously, covering her words. He took his wallet from his breast pocket. Removing his right glove from his pink fingers, he took out the cheque drawn by Messrs. Inman Galleries per Otto Troutwine, vice-president. He laid the cheque on the table, setting on it as a paper weight a small filigree clock, one of the few personal objects in the room. The price was fair, he thought. Less than Philander Eustace had paid Inman for it in 1889, but more than his widow could have got elsewhere.

■ He looked again at the officer's painted head, palisaded by the high blue and gold collar. He felt nervous about looking at Mrs. Eustace after studying the painted face on the canvas.

"Well, it is the end," said Mrs. Eustace. "I hope you will be considerate, Mr. Troutwine, when you resell it."

"We have very enlightened clients, Mrs. Eustace. This will be appreciated, I promise you faithfully."

He looked almost shyly at her, as if to test a comparison that he was afraid of.

"After all," she said, sitting down and taking the cheque in her hands, which were trembling a little, "The Commodore belongs in my family."

Otto smiled politely.

"He was my great-grandfather," she said, looking without emotion at the painting. Otto looked too.

"Senator Eustace, my husband, often commented upon the likeness. Commodore Whittington," she said. "My sister with whom I am going to live is Miss Mercy Whittington. You can see why I have held on to the portrait until now. It has been in our family since 1799."

She said it with graciousness. Otto bit the inside of his mouth.

"I beg your pardon?" he said. He remembered how she had looked in 1889 when Philander Eustace had bought her the painting— a whole bird with trailing feathers on her hat, carriage boots, furs and violets and a sharp, assertive smile. He remembered thinking her then intrinsically cheap, like a fair copy of a good picture.

"The portrait," said Mrs. Eustace. "I was saying that it came to me through four generations."

She leaned a little forward and smiled gently. almost with fortitude. He saw a flash come into her eye, and for a second was afraid of her mind, and his own eye, which was betraying his good sense.

"I suppose you will now sell the portrait to some person of the new rich." she said. "Some member of the new order who needs an ancestor. Perhaps they will buy it with my own money? Who knows? Where has it gone? Into whose hands will it finally fall?"

She spoke quietly, as if noting a mystery that had no solution, like the superiority of certain persons, or the track of the clock. She smiled at Otto Troutwine to relieve his face of the extreme sadness he showed. Then she stood up and held her hand to him again.

"Goodbye, Mr. Troutwine."

He looked at the milky shadows of her temples, and the sharp bone of her jaw, and the proud nose, like a rare bird's bill. Age showed her skull under the delicate tired mask. He could hardly talk with his proper suavity, for it upset him to see a copy with such authentic touches as she displayed.

"Goodbye, Mrs. Eustace. You were very good to give us the opportunity to acquire this picture."

She shrugged again, and ran her hand past her thin white hair. There was no explanation. There was also no doubt that, as she stood in the gold electric light, she bore an amazing likeness to the portrait. Mr. Troutwine gathered his picture and his hat and gloves. He wished a little wildly that he had made the cheque for more money; yet there was nothing cheap about her shabby imposture. Rather, he thought, it had the strange confidence of martyrdom behind it, the nourishment of belief.

■ He never saw Mrs. Eustace again. But in the following season, when the Sully portrait was sold, it was no longer catalogued as Portrait of an Unknown Naval Officer, but as Commodore Whittington; and noted, in Otto Troutwine's respect for an extraordinary half hour, as "great-grandfather of the late Mrs. Philander Eustace, the last previous owner of the painting."