Crucial Instances

It was in Rome that, three years later, I heard of her death.  The notice said “suddenly”; I was glad of that.  I was glad too—­basely perhaps—­to be away from Grancy at a time when silence must have seemed obtuse and speech derisive.

I was still in Rome when, a few months afterward, he suddenly arrived there.  He had been appointed secretary of legation at Constantinople and was on the way to his post.  He had taken the place, he said frankly, “to get away.”  Our relations with the Porte held out a prospect of hard work, and that, he explained, was what he needed.  He could never be satisfied to sit down among the ruins.  I saw that, like most of us in moments of extreme moral tension, he was playing a part, behaving as he thought it became a man to behave in the eye of disaster.  The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.  Grancy, by nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the rôle of the man of action, who answers blow for blow and opposes a mailed front to the thrusts of destiny; and the completeness of the equipment testified to his inner weakness.  We talked only of what we were not thinking of, and parted, after a few days, with a sense of relief that proved the inadequacy of friendship to perform, in such cases, the office assigned to it by tradition.

Soon afterward my own work called me home, but Grancy remained several years in Europe.  International diplomacy kept its promise of giving him work to do, and during the year in which he acted as chargé d’affaires he acquitted himself, under trying conditions, with conspicuous zeal and discretion.  A political redistribution of matter removed him from office just as he had proved his usefulness to the government; and the following summer I heard that he had come home and was down at his place in the country.

On my return to town I wrote him and his reply came by the next post.  He answered as it were in his natural voice, urging me to spend the following Sunday with him, and suggesting that I should bring down any of the old set who could be persuaded to join me.  I thought this a good sign, and yet—­shall I own it?—­I was vaguely disappointed.  Perhaps we are apt to feel that our friends’ sorrows should be kept like those historic monuments from which the encroaching ivy is periodically removed.

That very evening at the club I ran across Claydon.  I told him of Grancy’s invitation and proposed that we should go down together; but he pleaded an engagement.  I was sorry, for I had always felt that he and I stood nearer Ralph than the others, and if the old Sundays were to be renewed I should have preferred that we two should spend the first alone with him.  I said as much to Claydon and offered to fit my time to his; but he met this by a general refusal.

“I don’t want to go to Grancy’s,” he said bluntly.  I waited a moment, but he appended no qualifying clause.

“You’ve seen him since he came back?” I finally ventured.

Claydon nodded.

“And is he so awfully bad?”

“Bad?  No:  he’s all right.”

“All right?  How can he be, unless he’s changed beyond all recognition?”

“Oh, you’ll recognize him,” said Claydon, with a puzzling deflection of emphasis.

His ambiguity was beginning to exasperate me, and I felt myself shut out from some knowledge to which I had as good a right as he.

“You’ve been down there already, I suppose?”

“Yes; I’ve been down there.”

“And you’ve done with each other—­the partnership is dissolved?”

“Done with each other?  I wish to God we had!” He rose nervously and tossed aside the review from which my approach had diverted him.  “Look here,” he said, standing before me, “Ralph’s the best fellow going and there’s nothing under heaven I wouldn’t do for him—­short of going down there again.”  And with that he walked out of the room.

Claydon was incalculable enough for me to read a dozen different meanings into his words; but none of my interpretations satisfied me.  I determined, at any rate, to seek no farther for a companion; and the next Sunday I travelled down to Grancy’s alone.  He met me at the station and I saw at once that he had changed since our last meeting.  Then he had been in fighting array, but now if he and grief still housed together it was no longer as enemies.  Physically the transformation was as marked but less reassuring.  If the spirit triumphed the body showed its scars.  At five-and-forty he was gray and stooping, with the tired gait of an old man.  His serenity, however, was not the resignation of age.  I saw that he did not mean to drop out of the game.  Almost immediately he began to speak of our old interests; not with an effort, as at our former meeting, but simply and naturally, in the tone of a man whose life has flowed back into its normal channels.  I remembered, with a touch of self-reproach, how I had distrusted his reconstructive powers; but my admiration for his reserved force was now tinged by the sense that, after all, such happiness as his ought to have been paid with his last coin.  The feeling grew as we neared the house and I found how inextricably his wife was interwoven with my remembrance of the place:  how the whole scene was but an extension of that vivid presence.

Within doors nothing was changed, and my hand would have dropped without surprise into her welcoming clasp.  It was luncheon-time, and Grancy led me at once to the dining-room, where the walls, the furniture, the very plate and porcelain, seemed a mirror in which a moment since her face had been reflected.  I wondered whether Grancy, under the recovered tranquillity of his smile, concealed the same sense of her nearness, saw perpetually between himself and the actual her bright unappeasable ghost.  He spoke of her once or twice, in an easy incidental way, and her name seemed to hang in the air after he had uttered it, like a chord that continues to vibrate.  If he felt her presence it was evidently as an enveloping medium, the moral atmosphere in which he breathed.  I had never before known how completely the dead may survive.

After luncheon we went for a long walk through the autumnal fields and woods, and dusk was falling when we re-entered the house.  Grancy led the way to the library, where, at this hour, his wife had always welcomed us back to a bright fire and a cup of tea.  The room faced the west, and held a clear light of its own after the rest of the house had grown dark.  I remembered how young she had looked in this pale gold light, which irradiated her eyes and hair, or silhouetted her girlish outline as she passed before the windows.  Of all the rooms the library was most peculiarly hers; and here I felt that her nearness might take visible shape.  Then, all in a moment, as Grancy opened the door, the feeling vanished and a kind of resistance met me on the threshold.  I looked about me.  Was the room changed?  Had some desecrating hand effaced the traces of her presence?  No; here too the setting was undisturbed.  My feet sank into the same deep-piled Daghestan; the bookshelves took the firelight on the same rows of rich subdued bindings; her armchair stood in its old place near the tea-table; and from the opposite wall her face confronted me.

Her face—­but was it hers?  I moved nearer and stood looking up at the portrait.  Grancy’s glance had followed mine and I heard him move to my side.

“You see a change in it?” he said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means—­that five years have passed.”

“Over her?”

“Why not?—­Look at me!” He pointed to his gray hair and furrowed temples.  “What do you think kept her so young?  It was happiness!  But now—­” he looked up at her with infinite tenderness.  “I like her better so,” he said.  “It’s what she would have wished.”

“Have wished?”

“That we should grow old together.  Do you think she would have wanted to be left behind?”

I stood speechless, my gaze travelling from his worn grief-beaten features to the painted face above.  It was not furrowed like his; but a veil of years seemed to have descended on it.  The bright hair had lost its elasticity, the cheek its clearness, the brow its light:  the whole woman had waned.

Grancy laid his hand on my arm.  “You don’t like it?” he said sadly.

“Like it?  I—­I’ve lost her!” I burst out.

“And I’ve found her,” he answered.

“In that?” I cried with a reproachful gesture.

“Yes; in that.”  He swung round on me almost defiantly.  “The other had become a sham, a lie!  This is the way she would have looked—­does look, I mean.  Claydon ought to know, oughtn’t he?”

I turned suddenly.  “Did Claydon do this for you?”

Grancy nodded.

“Since your return?”

“Yes.  I sent for him after I’d been back a week—.”  He turned away and gave a thrust to the smouldering fire.  I followed, glad to leave the picture behind me.  Grancy threw himself into a chair near the hearth, so that the light fell on his sensitive variable face.  He leaned his head back, shading his eyes with his hand, and began to speak.