V
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....
