The Beldonald Holbein

It was at any rate strictly impossible to me to make an appointment for the day as to which I have just recorded Nina’s proposal; and the turn of events since then has not quickened my eagerness.  Mrs. Munden remained in correspondence with Mrs. Brash—to the extent, that is, of three letters, each of which she showed me.  They so told to our imagination her terrible little story that we were quite prepared—or thought we were—for her going out like a snuffed candle.  She resisted, on her return to her original conditions, less than a year; the taste of the tree, as I had called it, had been fatal to her; what she had contentedly enough lived without before for half a century she couldn’t now live without for a day.  I know nothing of her original conditions—some minor American city—save that for her to have gone back to them was clearly to have stepped out of her frame.  We performed, Mrs. Munden and I, a small funeral service for her by talking it all over and making it all out.  It wasn’t—the minor American city—a market for Holbeins, and what had occurred was that the poor old picture, banished from its museum and refreshed by the rise of no new movement to hang it, was capable of the miracle of a silent revolution; of itself turning, in its dire dishonour, its face to the wall.  So it stood, without the intervention of the ghost of a critic, till they happened to pull it round again and find it mere dead paint.  Well, it had had, if that’s anything, its season of fame, its name on a thousand tongues and printed in capitals in the catalogue.  We hadn’t been at fault.  I haven’t, all the same, the least note of her—not a scratch.  And I did her so in intention!  Mrs. Munden continues to remind me, however, that this is not the sort of rendering with which, on the other side, after all, Lady Beldonald proposes to content herself.  She has come back to the question of her own portrait.  Let me settle it then at last.  Since she will have the real thing—well, hang it, she shall!