Crucial Instances

Grancy’s will named me as one of his executors; and my associate, having other duties on his hands, begged me to assume the task of carrying out our friend’s wishes.  This placed me under the necessity of informing Claydon that the portrait of Mrs. Grancy had been bequeathed to him; and he replied by the next post that he would send for the picture at once.  I was staying in the deserted house when the portrait was taken away; and as the door closed on it I felt that Grancy’s presence had vanished too.  Was it his turn to follow her now, and could one ghost haunt another?

After that, for a year or two, I heard nothing more of the picture, and though I met Claydon from time to time we had little to say to each other.  I had no definable grievance against the man and I tried to remember that he had done a fine thing in sacrificing his best picture to a friend; but my resentment had all the tenacity of unreason.

One day, however, a lady whose portrait he had just finished begged me to go with her to see it.  To refuse was impossible, and I went with the less reluctance that I knew I was not the only friend she had invited.  The others were all grouped around the easel when I entered, and after contributing my share to the chorus of approval I turned away and began to stroll about the studio.  Claydon was something of a collector and his things were generally worth looking at.  The studio was a long tapestried room with a curtained archway at one end.  The curtains were looped back, showing a smaller apartment, with books and flowers and a few fine bits of bronze and porcelain.  The tea-table standing in this inner room proclaimed that it was open to inspection, and I wandered in.  A bleu poudré vase first attracted me; then I turned to examine a slender bronze Ganymede, and in so doing found myself face to face with Mrs. Grancy’s portrait.  I stared up at her blankly and she smiled back at me in all the recovered radiance of youth.  The artist had effaced every trace of his later touches and the original picture had reappeared.  It throned alone on the panelled wall, asserting a brilliant supremacy over its carefully-chosen surroundings.  I felt in an instant that the whole room was tributary to it:  that Claydon had heaped his treasures at the feet of the woman he loved.  Yes—­it was the woman he had loved and not the picture; and my instinctive resentment was explained.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Ah, how could you?” I cried, turning on him.

“How could I?” he retorted.  “How could I not?  Doesn’t she belong to me now?”

I moved away impatiently.

“Wait a moment,” he said with a detaining gesture.  “The others have gone and I want to say a word to you.—­Oh, I know what you’ve thought of me—­I can guess!  You think I killed Grancy, I suppose?”

I was startled by his sudden vehemence.  “I think you tried to do a cruel thing,” I said.

“Ah—­what a little way you others see into life!” he murmured.  “Sit down a moment—­here, where we can look at her—­and I’ll tell you.”

He threw himself on the ottoman beside me and sat gazing up at the picture, with his hands clasped about his knee.

“Pygmalion,” he began slowly, “turned his statue into a real woman; I turned my real woman into a picture.  Small compensation, you think—­but you don’t know how much of a woman belongs to you after you’ve painted her!—­Well, I made the best of it, at any rate—­I gave her the best I had in me; and she gave me in return what such a woman gives by merely being.  And after all she rewarded me enough by making me paint as I shall never paint again!  There was one side of her, though, that was mine alone, and that was her beauty; for no one else understood it.  To Grancy even it was the mere expression of herself—­what language is to thought.  Even when he saw the picture he didn’t guess my secret—­he was so sure she was all his!  As though a man should think he owned the moon because it was reflected in the pool at his door—­

“Well—­when he came home and sent for me to change the picture it was like asking me to commit murder.  He wanted me to make an old woman of her—­of her who had been so divinely, unchangeably young!  As if any man who really loved a woman would ask her to sacrifice her youth and beauty for his sake!  At first I told him I couldn’t do it—­but afterward, when he left me alone with the picture, something queer happened.  I suppose it was because I was always so confoundedly fond of Grancy that it went against me to refuse what he asked.  Anyhow, as I sat looking up at her, she seemed to say, ’I’m not yours but his, and I want you to make me what he wishes.”  And so I did it.  I could have cut my hand off when the work was done—­I daresay he told you I never would go back and look at it.  He thought I was too busy—­he never understood….

“Well—­and then last year he sent for me again—­you remember.  It was after his illness, and he told me he’d grown twenty years older and that he wanted her to grow older too—­he didn’t want her to be left behind.  The doctors all thought he was going to get well at that time, and he thought so too; and so did I when I first looked at him.  But when I turned to the picture—­ah, now I don’t ask you to believe me; but I swear it was her face that told me he was dying, and that she wanted him to know it!  She had a message for him and she made me deliver it.”

He rose abruptly and walked toward the portrait; then he sat down beside me again.

“Cruel?  Yes, it seemed so to me at first; and this time, if I resisted, it was for his sake and not for mine.  But all the while I felt her eyes drawing me, and gradually she made me understand.  If she’d been there in the flesh (she seemed to say) wouldn’t she have seen before any of us that he was dying?  Wouldn’t he have read the news first in her face?  And wouldn’t it be horrible if now he should discover it instead in strange eyes?—­Well—­that was what she wanted of me and I did it—­I kept them together to the last!” He looked up at the picture again.  “But now she belongs to me,” he repeated….