II
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.
