The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (36 page)

“In Valerian Ludlow!” Aileen jumped up and ran into the gallery to the Wollaston painting. Sure enough, old Ludlow blinked at her with one black eye and one blue, the latter being the color of the wall on which he was hung. Aileen gave a little scream of panic.

“This was done within the hour!” she cried. “He had both eyes when I last went by!”

Tony Side was summoned, the alarm was rung and all guards were questioned. Nothing was discovered, and after an hour of futile excitement Aileen was back again at her desk, depleted and scared, with the irate Mrs. Sherry, who refused now to depart. Aileen felt nothing but antipathy as she listened to the old lady's animadversions. Obviously, Mrs. Sherry cared far more for the grudge than for the grievance. She had none of Aileen's nausea at the damage to a beautiful object or her despair for the soul of the perpetrator.

“Some black boy, of course,” Mrs. Sherry was grumbling. “Unless it was a Puerto Rican. They're always prating about the hard times they've had, always griping about how they've been deprived of education and opportunities. Is
this
what they want opportunities for? I'd like to see the cat-o'-nine-tails brought back. I'd like to see these boys lashed before the public in Times Square! What do they exist for but to tear our world apart? They don't care that they have nothing to put in its place! It's revenge, pure and simple.”

“Revenge,” Aileen murmured thoughtfully, glancing apprehensively through the doorway toward the iron grille. Could it be the revenge of a Yankee prisoner of war? But why? Revenge against whom?

“Everybody's too soft and sentimental with them,” Mrs. Sherry continued. “If it
is
softness. If it isn't just cowardice, as I suspect it is. Where have our guts gone to, Miss Post? Where are our men, that we are exposed to all this? I tell you one thing, young lady. Nobody would have poked an eye out of Valerian Ludlow's portrait in his day!”

“What would he have done?”

“Don't you know what he would have done? Haven't you read his journal?
He
knew how to handle insubordinates!”

As Aileen watched the terrible old woman, she had just for a second the same eerie sense of blackness that she had experienced in peering through the iron grille. Then, as it passed, she felt a sudden, odd detachment from the immediate scene. She found herself observing Mrs. Sherry as if the latter had been a monologist performing at a private party. She noted the protuberance of the front molars and the drops of saliva at the corners of the thin lips. She marked how the almost transparent, onion-skin eyelids snapped up and down and how hatefully dark were the merciless eyes. Except for the teeth, Mrs. Sherry might have been a bird, a big, dark bird of rich, subdued colors whose feathers only made more horrible its dark face and beak, a condor tearing at a carcass. Both of Aileen's hands went to her lips in horror as she saw her world in a sudden new light. The feathers, the feathers alone, were art. The head, the beak, the glazed eyes, the talons were—man!

“Oh, be quiet! Be quiet, please!”

Mrs. Sherry stared down at Aileen incredulously. “I beg your pardon?”

When Aileen, stunned, gathered that she must have actually uttered her reproach aloud, she desperately summoned up the courage to go on. “You're saying the most dreadful things, and you have no business to. You don't know who damaged that portrait. You have no idea. It might have been a guard. It might have been me. It might have been you, yourself!” Aileen rose as if propelled by two strong hands clutching her elbows, and she spoke with a passionate urgency, a wondering, bemused prisoner of her own new flow of eloquence. “How do I know that you're not just trying to get someone in trouble? Or a whole race of people in trouble? How do I know what mad, twisted motives you may have? Look at your umbrella. You might have done it with
that!
But, my God, there's something sticking to it!” She seized the umbrella and rushed out into the gallery crying, “Guard! Guard!” When the bewildered man hurried up to her she shouted, “I've got her! The vandal! She did it with this! Look!”

Here she held the umbrella up to the portrait, the tip toward the hole. Then she lowered it slowly, dumbly, apologetically, looking shamefaced at the shamefaced guard. For the round tip of the umbrella had a thick rubber cover. Mrs. Sherry must have made it do double duty as a walking stick. Pushed into a canvas, it would have made a much bigger hole than the one in Valerian Ludlow's left eye.

“And now, Miss Post, will you be so good as to return my property? And let me ask this gentleman to conduct me to the director of this institution that I may complain of your insane behavior.”

Mrs. Sherry was so carried away that, turning from the stricken Aileen after she had snatched back her umbrella, she made the mistake of taking the guard's arm. Her exit was comic rather than magnificent. But nothing could console Aileen.

Tony, when he came, was very kind. He said that the vandalism had obviously unnerved her. He regretted that so important a member of the museum as Mrs. Sherry should have been insulted, but he hoped that she could be placated. He suggested that Aileen would do well to take a few days off and get a good rest.

“No, I'm all right, I really am,” she insisted in a stony voice. “I promise, you won't have to worry about me.”

When Tony had left, obviously much concerned about her, Aileen sat for ten minutes, absolutely still. Then she rose and strode with a new resolution to the middle of the gallery. As she leaned slowly down and stared into the hated window, she whispered hoarsely:

“Who are you, in there? Why have you come back to haunt us? Are you the spirit of some poor boy who died in that black chamber?” As she listened, she felt her first impulse of sympathy for whatever might be behind those bars. She had a vision of a thin, undernourished face, that of some nineteen-year-old Yankee boy, with long light hair and eyes liquid with homesickness, pressed up against the bars. “Were you left behind in General Washington's retreat? Was that how the British caught you? But why do you hate the Ludlows? Wasn't their house requisitioned by the governor? Was that their fault?” In the silence, as she listened intently, she had again that eerie sense of a close malevolence. “Or do you know something about them that we don't know? Was Valerian Ludlow a secret Tory? Was he a traitor?”

The blackness that she imagined behind the bars seemed now to lift, and her eyes fell upon the great portrait in the corner of the gallery of General Cornwallis, his hand on a globe on which the eastern shoreline of the thirteen colonies was clearly visible. Aileen straightened up and returned to her office. There would be no further revelations that day.

The following morning she was greeted by the doorman with the news: “There's been another of them vandals in your gallery, Miss Post.” When she arrived at her floor, breathless, after running up two flights, she found Tony and three guards standing before the glass case of the silver tankards. He silently pointed to something as she hurried to his side. On the top tray one of the tankards lay toppled over. Its cover had been wrenched off the hinges and had fallen to the bottom of the case. The coat of arms had been gashed several times by a heavy instrument, possibly a stone. She did not have to look twice to recognize the Ludlow crest.

“Nobody's to touch it until the detective from the police department comes,” Tony explained. “This is a weird one. The glass, you see, has not been removed.” He put his arm around Aileen's shoulders and led her out of earshot of the guards. “It had to be an inside job,” he told her.

“Whoever did it must have got the key to the case from your office. But we've checked, and your key case is locked. He may have slipped into your office one day when it was open, taken the key, had it duplicated and put it back. It might have been the same guy who used your umbrella to poke the hole in the Ludlow portrait while you were out to lunch.”

“
My
umbrella!”

“Well, I didn't want to upset you, but we found a smitch of canvas by the rack in your office where you keep your pink umbrella. It has to be some nut, of course, with some fantastic grudge against the Ludlow family.”

“Oh, you've put that together, have you?” she murmured. “You've recognized the Ludlow tankard?”

“My dear Aileen. Even though I'm a museum director, I'm not a complete nincompoop.”

Aileen was seized with a fit of violent trembling. She felt the same fierce prosecuting excitement that she had experienced when she had denounced Mrs. Sherry to the guard. Pulling Tony further away down the gallery, she whispered desperately, “Maybe
I
did it! Maybe I poked the hole in the portrait and then tried to throw the blame on Mrs. Sherry! Maybe I came here last night and let myself into the gallery and scraped the tankard!”

Tony's little smile never failed him, but she could tell by the way it seemed just to flicker that he did not wholly dismiss the theory. “But assuming all this, my dear, what on earth would be your motive?”

“I had no motive.”

“Then why would you do it?”

“Because I'm the instrument of a fiend! The fiend that you brought in when you made me take
that!”

Tony took in the little barred window, and at last even his smile ceased. “I said before that you needed rest,” he replied in his kindest tone. “This time I insist upon it. I want you to take three weeks off, and I want you to see a doctor.”

***

Aileen was surprised and heartened by her own reaction to this disaster. Instead of crumpling before circumstance, she discovered that her spirit was strong and her emotional state serene. When Tony told her that the police detective had said that the force used in rubbing the stone or other substance against the crest of the Ludlow tankard had been greater than that of a woman, she had merely nodded and taken her dignified leave of him. She had recovered faith in her own sanity and did not need the confirmation of a cop. She had promised that she would consult a psychiatrist, but she was already resolved that she would not. There was no use in a confrontation between the world of medicine and the occult. It could result only in her commitment to a lunatic asylum.

She was grateful for the solitude of her enforced vacation and of the time that it afforded her to deal with her ghostly opponent. For she knew now that she had one. No human being could help her. It was her grim and lonely task to track down and outwit the sinister spirit that was seeking to destroy her gallery.

She spent her days in the library of the New-York Historical Society, reading everything that there was to be read on the history of the Ludlow family. The material was rich. She found considerable evidence of a curious effeminate streak in the Ludlow males of the eighteenth century. The first Ludlow in New York, a royal governor, had insisted on wearing women's robes while presiding at the council, on the theory that he thus more appropriately represented his sovereign, Queen Anne. A generation later, his son had been criticized for making his more muscular African slaves wait on table half-naked, and this son's son, in turn, incurred the resentment of society by keeping exotic birds, expensively imported from Rio, loose in the house where they pecked his guests. The wives of all these gentlemen, on the other hand, had been big, blocky, plainly dressed women, such as one might expect in a community that was still, after all, almost the frontier.

Aileen, like many old-maid scholars, was as sophisticated about the past as she was timid about the present, and she perfectly understood that there might have been a streak of cruelty, or even sadism, in such eccentrics as the male Ludlows. But nowhere could she find the slightest evidence that any of them had been guilty of any public or private injustice, and the record of Valerian Ludlow in the Revolution seemed to repudiate the least imputation of Toryism. She had come almost to the end of her documents when a librarian asked her if she would like to see the microfilm of the manuscript of Valerian Ludlow's journal.

“I should like to look at it, of course,” she replied. “I've read it so often in print, I know it almost by heart.”

“You mean the DeLancey Tyler edition.”

“Well, yes. Isn't that the only one? It's supposed to be complete.”

“Supposed
to be.”

Aileen looked more closely at the young man. “You mean it isn't?”

He shrugged. “Tyler was a great-grandson of the journalist. He published his book in 1900. You know how prudish people were in those days.”

Aileen knew by the bound of her heart that her search was over. She spent the next two days tensely reading the diary of Valerian Ludlow on the microfilm machine. The librarian had been quite right. There were substantial sections omitted in the Tyler edition. Ludlow had been a vain and easily offended gentleman of exquisite tastes and domineering manner. He had entered in the journal every slight that he had imagined himself to have received, and he had carefully recorded every punishment meted out to a servant. His descendant and editor had left in all his purchases of artifacts, all his recorded dealings with architects and decorators, all his conversations with the great, but he had carefully suppressed the invidious details of the correction of his staff and family. Aileen read breathlessly as she cranked the machine, turning the pages of the neat, flowing, somehow merciless handwriting. The realization that she was on the threshold of her revelation was actually painful.

She found at last this entry, dated July 30, 1747:

 

I have neglected my journal for a week because of a disturbing episode which, through God's grace, has now ended happily for most but not all. A group of slaves last Tuesday seized a farm on Lydecker Street and held it against the bailiff and his men for twenty-four hours. What the purpose of these ignorant fellows was we do not know, and they all fled. One constable, however, was killed when his own rifle blew up in his face. Public feeling has been very passionate, and on Thursday morning a large mob called here to demand my Rolfe. I met the leaders at the doorstep, and, I must say, they were very civil. They explained their reasons for believing that Rolfe had been the leading insurrectionist. I found these reasons convincing, the more so as I had had to confine Rolfe to the storeroom only that morning for insubordination. I delivered him up for what I understood was to be a trial, but I doubt that he had one. What is sure is that the mob burnt him alive in Bowling Green. It was a slow fire, and they say the poor fellow's bellows could be heard for six hours. I have discussed this unfortunate matter with Attorney Reynolds, and he advises me that if no trial occurred, I may be able to demand the price of Rolfe from the City Council, as he was taken under a show of authority.