His body was big. One has to be keen physically as well as mentally to
make a real success of anything. His score might have tallied sixty. He
was at the peak of life, but hanging there, you might say. To-morrow
Anthony Cleigh might begin the quick downward journey.
He had made his money in mines, rails, ships; and now he was spending it
prodigally. Prodigally, yes, but with caution and foresight. There was
always a ready market for what he bought. If he paid a hundred thousand
for a Rembrandt, rest assured he knew where he could dispose of it for the
same amount. Cleigh was a collector by instinct. With him it was no fad;
it was a passion, sometimes absurd. This artistic love of rare and
beautiful creations was innate, not acquired. Dealers had long since
learned their lesson, and no more sought to impose upon him.
He was not always scrupulous. In the dollar war he had been sternly
honest, harshly just. In pursuit of objects of art he argued with his
conscience that he was not injuring the future of widows and orphans when
he bought some purloined masterpiece. Without being in the least aware of
it, he was now the victim, not the master, of the passion. He would have
purchased Raphael's Adoration of the Magi had some rogue been able to
steal it from the Vatican.
Hanging from the ceiling and almost touching the floor, forward between
the entrance to the dining salon and the owner's cabin, was a rug eight
and a half by six. It was the first object that struck your eye as you
came down the companionway. It was an animal rug, a museum piece; rubies
and sapphires and emeralds and topaz melted into wool. It was under glass
to fend off the sea damp. Fit to hang beside the Ardebil Carpet.
You never saw the rug except in this salon. Cleigh dared not hang it in
his gallery at home in New York for the particular reason that the British
Government, urged by the Viceroy of India, had been hunting high and low
for the rug since 1911, when it had been the rightful property of a
certain influential maharaja whose Ai, ai! had reverberated from Hind to
Albion over the loss. Thus it will not be difficult to understand why
Cleigh was lonely rather than lonesome.
Queer lot. To be a true collector is to be as the opium eater: you keep
getting in deeper and deeper, careless that the way back closes. After a
while you cannot feel any kick in the stuff you find in the open marts, so
you step outside the pale, where they sell the unadulterated. That's the
true, dyed-in-the-wool collector. He no longer acquires a Vandyke merely
to show to his friends; that he possesses it for his own delectation is
enough. He becomes brother to Gaspard, miser; and like Gaspard he cannot
be fooled by spurious gold.