Chapter 8

“Of course,” he went on earnestly, “your valuation is based on the fact that the picture isn’t signed--Mrs. Fontage explained that; and it does make a difference, certainly. But the thing is--if the picture’s really good--ought one to take advantage--? I mean--one can see that Mrs. Fontage is in a tight place, and I wouldn’t for the world--“

My astonished stare arrested him.

“_You_ wouldn’t--?”

“I mean--you see, it’s just this way”; he coughed and blushed: “I can’t give more than a thousand dollars myself--it’s as big a sum as I can manage to scrape together--but before I make the offer I want to be sure I’m not standing in the way of her getting more money.”

My astonishment lapsed to dismay. “You’re going to buy the picture for a thousand dollars?”

His blush deepened. “Why, yes. It sounds rather absurd, I suppose. It isn’t much in my line, of course. I can see the picture’s very beautiful, but I’m no judge--it isn’t the kind of thing, naturally, that I could afford to go in for; but in this case I’m very glad to do what I can; the circumstances are so distressing; and knowing what you think of the picture I feel it’s a pretty safe investment--“

“I don’t think!” I blurted out.

“You--?”

“I don’t think the picture’s worth a thousand dollars; I don’t think it’s worth ten cents; I simply lied about it, that’s all.”

Mr. Rose looked as frightened as though I had charged him with the offense.

“Hang it, man, can’t you see how it happened? I saw the poor woman’s pride and happiness hung on her faith in that picture. I tried to make her understand that it was worthless--but she wouldn’t; I tried to tell her so--but I couldn’t. I behaved like a maudlin ass, but you shan’t pay for my infernal bungling--you mustn’t buy the picture!”

Mr. Rose sat silent, tapping one glossy boot-tip with another. Suddenly he turned on me a glance of stored intelligence. “But you know,” he said good-humoredly, “I rather think I must.”

“You haven’t--already?”

“Oh, no; the offer’s not made.”

“Well, then--“

His look gathered a brighter significance.

“But if the picture’s worth nothing, nobody will buy it--“

I groaned.

“Except,” he continued, “some fellow like me, who doesn’t know anything. _I_ think it’s lovely, you know; I mean to hang it in my mother’s sitting-room.” He rose and clasped my hand in his adhesive pressure. “I’m awfully obliged to you for telling me this; but perhaps you won’t mind my asking you not to mention our talk to Miss Copt? It might bother her, you know, to think the picture isn’t exactly up to the mark; and it won’t make a rap of difference to me.”

IV

Mr. Rose left me to a sleepless night. The next morning my resolve was formed, and it carried me straight to Mrs. Fontage’s. She answered my knock by stepping out on the landing, and as she shut the door behind her I caught a glimpse of her devastated interior. She mentioned, with a careful avoidance of the note of pathos on which our last conversation had closed, that she was preparing to leave that afternoon; and the trunks obstructing the threshold showed that her preparations were nearly complete. They were, I felt certain, the same trunks that, strapped behind a rattling vettura, had accompanied the bride and groom on that memorable voyage of discovery of which the booty had till recently adorned her walls; and there was a dim consolation in the thought that those early “finds” in coral and Swiss wood-carving, in lava and alabaster, still lay behind the worn locks, in the security of worthlessness.

Mrs. Fontage, on the landing, among her strapped and corded treasures, maintained the same air of stability that made it impossible, even under such conditions, to regard her flight as anything less dignified than a departure. It was the moral support of what she tacitly assumed that enabled me to set forth with proper deliberation the object of my visit; and she received my announcement with an absence of surprise that struck me as the very flower of tact. Under cover of these mutual assumptions the transaction was rapidly concluded; and it was not till the canvas passed into my hands that, as though the physical contact had unnerved her, Mrs. Fontage suddenly faltered. “It’s the giving it up--“ she stammered, disguising herself to the last; and I hastened away from the collapse of her splendid effrontery.

I need hardly point out that I had acted impulsively, and that reaction from the most honorable impulses is sometimes attended by moral perturbation. My motives had indeed been mixed enough to justify some uneasiness, but this was allayed by the instinctive feeling that it is more venial to defraud an institution than a man. Since Mrs. Fontage had to be kept from starving by means not wholly defensible, it was better that the obligation should be borne by a rich institution than an impecunious youth. I doubt, in fact, if my scruples would have survived a night’s sleep, had they not been complicated by some uncertainty as to my own future. It was true that, subject to the purely formal assent of the committee, I had full power to buy for the Museum, and that the one member of the committee likely to dispute my decision was opportunely travelling in Europe; but the picture once in place I must face the risk of any expert criticism to which chance might expose it. I dismissed this contingency for future study, stored the Rembrandt in the cellar of the Museum, and thanked heaven that Crozier was abroad.

Six months later he strolled into my office. I had just concluded, under conditions of exceptional difficulty, and on terms unexpectedly benign, the purchase of the great Bartley Reynolds; and this circumstance, by relegating the matter of the Rembrandt to a lower stratum of consciousness, enabled me to welcome Crozier with unmixed pleasure. My security was enhanced by his appearance. His smile was charged with amiable reminiscences, and I inferred that his trip had put him in the humor to approve of everything, or at least to ignore what fell short of his approval. I had therefore no uneasiness in accepting his invitation to dine that evening. It is always pleasant to dine with Crozier and never more so than when he is just back from Europe. His conversation gives even the food a flavor of the Café Anglais.

The repast was delightful, and it was not till we had finished a Camembert which he must have brought over with him, that my host said, in a tone of after-dinner perfunctoriness: “I see you’ve picked up a picture or two since I left.”

I assented. “The Bartley Reynolds seemed too good an opportunity to miss, especially as the French government was after it. I think we got it cheap--“

“_Connu, connu_” said Crozier pleasantly. “I know all about the Reynolds. It was the biggest kind of a haul and I congratulate you. Best stroke of business we’ve done yet. But tell me about the other picture--the Rembrandt.”

“I never said it was a Rembrandt.” I could hardly have said why, but I felt distinctly annoyed with Crozier.

“Of course not. There’s ‘Rembrandt’ on the frame, but I saw you’d modified it to ‘Dutch School‘; I apologize.” He paused, but I offered no explanation. “What about it?” he went on. “Where did you pick it up?” As he leaned to the flame of the cigar-lighter his face seemed ruddy with enjoyment.

“I got it for a song,” I said.

“A thousand, I think?”

“Have you seen it?” I asked abruptly.

“Went over the place this afternoon and found it in the cellar. Why hasn’t it been hung, by the way?”

I paused a moment. “I’m waiting--“

“To--?”

“To have it varnished.”

“Ah!” He leaned back and poured himself a second glass of Chartreuse. The smile he confided to its golden depths provoked me to challenge him with--

“What do you think of it?”

“The Rembrandt?” He lifted his eyes from the glass. “Just what you do.”

“It isn’t a Rembrandt.”

“I apologize again. You call it, I believe, a picture of the same period?”

“I’m uncertain of the period.”

“H’m.” He glanced appreciatively along his cigar. “What are you certain of?”

“That it’s a damned bad picture,” I said savagely.

He nodded. “Just so. That’s all we wanted to know.”

“_We_?”

“We--I--the committee, in short. You see, my dear fellow, if you hadn’t been certain it was a damned bad picture our position would have been a little awkward. As it is, my remaining duty--I ought to explain that in this matter I’m acting for the committee--is as simple as it’s agreeable.”

“I’ll be hanged,” I burst out, “if I understand one word you’re saying!”

He fixed me with a kind of cruel joyousness. “You will--you will,” he assured me; “at least you’ll begin to, when you hear that I’ve seen Miss Copt.”

“Miss Copt?”

“And that she has told me under what conditions the picture was bought.”

“She doesn’t know anything about the conditions! That is,” I added, hastening to restrict the assertion, “she doesn’t know my opinion of the picture.” I thirsted for five minutes with Eleanor.

“Are you quite sure?” Crozier took me up. “Mr. Jefferson Rose does.”

“Ah--I see.”

“I thought you would,” he reminded me. “As soon as I’d laid eyes on the Rembrandt--I beg your pardon!--I saw that it--well, required some explanation.”

“You might have come to me.”

“I meant to; but I happened to meet Miss Copt, whose encyclopædic information has often before been of service to me. I always go to Miss Copt when I want to look up anything; and I found she knew all about the Rembrandt.”

“_All_?”

“Precisely. The knowledge was in fact causing her sleepless nights. Mr. Rose, who was suffering from the same form of insomnia, had taken her into his confidence, and she--ultimately--took me into hers.”

“Of course!”

“I must ask you to do your cousin justice. She didn’t speak till it became evident to her uncommonly quick perceptions that your buying the picture on its merits would have been infinitely worse for--for everybody--than your diverting a small portion of the Museum’s funds to philanthropic uses. Then she told me the moving incident of Mr. Rose. Good fellow, Rose. And the old lady’s case was desperate. Somebody had to buy that picture.” I moved uneasily in my seat “Wait a moment, will you? I haven’t finished my cigar. There’s a little head of Il Fiammingo’s that you haven’t seen, by the way; I picked it up the other day in Parma. We’ll go in and have a look at it presently. But meanwhile what I want to say is that I’ve been charged--in the most informal way--to express to you the committee’s appreciation of your admirable promptness and energy in capturing the Bartley Reynolds. We shouldn’t have got it at all if you hadn’t been uncommonly wide-awake, and to get it at such a price is a double triumph. We’d have thought nothing of a few more thousands--“

“I don’t see,” I impatiently interposed, “that, as far as I’m concerned, that alters the case.”

“The case--?”

“Of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. I bought the picture because, as you say, the situation was desperate, and I couldn’t raise a thousand myself. What I did was of course indefensible; but the money shall be refunded tomorrow--“

Crozier raised a protesting hand. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking ex cathedra. The money’s been refunded already. The fact is, the Museum has sold the Rembrandt.”

I stared at him wildly. “Sold it? To whom?”

“Why--to the committee.--Hold on a bit, please.--Won’t you take another cigar? Then perhaps I can finish what I’ve got to say.--Why, my dear fellow, the committee’s under an obligation to you--that’s the way we look at it. I’ve investigated Mrs. Fontage’s case, and--well, the picture had to be bought. She’s eating meat now, I believe, for the first time in a year. And they’d have turned her out into the street that very day, your cousin tells me. Something had to be done at once, and you’ve simply given a number of well-to-do and self-indulgent gentlemen the opportunity of performing, at very small individual expense, a meritorious action in the nick of time. That’s the first thing I’ve got to thank you for. And then--you’ll remember, please, that I have the floor--that I’m still speaking for the committee--and secondly, as a slight recognition of your services in securing the Bartley Reynolds at a very much lower figure than we were prepared to pay, we beg you--the committee begs you--to accept the gift of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. Now we’ll go in and look at that little head....”

THE MOVING FINGER

The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder--one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. So many people are like badly-composed statues, over-lapping their niches at one point and leaving them vacant at another. Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. Ralph Grancy’s was in short a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those constructive influences that, instead of crystallizing into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own dusty patch of life, and the fruitful moisture stole far beyond his boundaries. If, to carry on the metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously-cultivated enclosure, his wife was the flower he had planted in its midst--the embowering tree, rather, which gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.

We had all--his small but devoted band of followers--known a moment when it seemed likely that Grancy would fail us. We had watched him pitted against one stupid obstacle after another--ill-health, poverty, misunderstanding and, worst of all for a man of his texture, his first wife’s soft insidious egotism. We had seen him sinking under the leaden embrace of her affection like a swimmer in a drowning clutch; but just as we despaired he had always come to the surface again, blinded, panting, but striking out fiercely for the shore. When at last her death released him it became a question as to how much of the man she had carried with her. Left alone, he revealed numb withered patches, like a tree from which a parasite has been stripped. But gradually he began to put out new leaves; and when he met the lady who was to become his second wife--his one _real_ wife, as his friends reckoned--the whole man burst into flower.

The second Mrs. Grancy was past thirty when he married her, and it was clear that she had harvested that crop of middle joy which is rooted in young despair. But if she had lost the surface of eighteen she had kept its inner light; if her cheek lacked the gloss of immaturity her eyes were young with the stored youth of half a life-time. Grancy had first known her somewhere in the East--I believe she was the sister of one of our consuls out there--and when he brought her home to New York she came among us as a stranger. The idea of Grancy’s remarriage had been a shock to us all. After one such calcining most men would have kept out of the fire; but we agreed that he was predestined to sentimental blunders, and we awaited with resignation the embodiment of his latest mistake. Then Mrs. Grancy came--and we understood. She was the most beautiful and the most complete of explanations. We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight and gave it hasty burial under a prodigality of welcome. For the first time in years we had Grancy off our minds. “He’ll do something great now!” the least sanguine of us prophesied; and our sentimentalist emended: “He _has_ done it--in marrying her!”

It was Claydon, the portrait-painter, who risked this hyperbole; and who soon afterward, at the happy husband’s request, prepared to defend it in a portrait of Mrs. Grancy. We were all--even Claydon--ready to concede that Mrs. Grancy’s unwontedness was in some degree a matter of environment. Her graces were complementary and it needed the mate’s call to reveal the flash of color beneath her neutral-tinted wings. But if she needed Grancy to interpret her, how much greater was the service she rendered him! Claydon professionally described her as the right frame for him; but if she defined she also enlarged, if she threw the whole into perspective she also cleared new ground, opened fresh vistas, reclaimed whole areas of activity that had run to waste under the harsh husbandry of privation. This interaction of sympathies was not without its visible expression. Claydon was not alone in maintaining that Grancy’s presence--or indeed the mere mention of his name--had a perceptible effect on his wife’s appearance. It was as though a light were shifted, a curtain drawn back, as though, to borrow another of Claydon’s metaphors, Love the indefatigable artist were perpetually seeking a happier “pose” for his model. In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women’s faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes. What Claydon read there--or at least such scattered hints of the ritual as reached him through the sanctuary doors--his portrait in due course declared to us. When the picture was exhibited it was at once acclaimed as his masterpiece; but the people who knew Mrs. Grancy smiled and said it was flattered. Claydon, however, had not set out to paint _their_ Mrs. Grancy--or ours even--but Ralph’s; and Ralph knew his own at a glance. At the first confrontation he saw that Claydon had understood. As for Mrs. Grancy, when the finished picture was shown to her she turned to the painter and said simply: “Ah, you’ve done me facing the east!”

The picture, then, for all its value, seemed a mere incident in the unfolding of their double destiny, a foot-note to the illuminated text of their lives. It was not till afterward that it acquired the significance of last words spoken on a threshold never to be recrossed. Grancy, a year after his marriage, had given up his town house and carried his bliss an hour’s journey away, to a little place among the hills. His various duties and interests brought him frequently to New York but we necessarily saw him less often than when his house had served as the rallying-point of kindred enthusiasms. It seemed a pity that such an influence should be withdrawn, but we all felt that his long arrears of happiness should be paid in whatever coin he chose. The distance from which the fortunate couple radiated warmth on us was not too great for friendship to traverse; and our conception of a glorified leisure took the form of Sundays spent in the Grancys’ library, with its sedative rural outlook, and the portrait of Mrs. Grancy illuminating its studious walls. The picture was at its best in that setting; and we used to accuse Claydon of visiting Mrs. Grancy in order to see her portrait. He met this by declaring that the portrait _was_ Mrs. Grancy; and there were moments when the statement seemed unanswerable. One of us, indeed--I think it must have been the novelist--said that Clayton had been saved from falling in love with Mrs. Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her; and it was noticeable that he, to whom his finished work was no more than the shed husk of future effort, showed a perennial tenderness for this one achievement. We smiled afterward to think how often, when Mrs. Grancy was in the room, her presence reflecting itself in our talk like a gleam of sky in a hurrying current, Claydon, averted from the real woman, would sit as it were listening to the picture. His attitude, at the time, seemed only a part of the unusualness of those picturesque afternoons, when the most familiar combinations of life underwent a magical change. Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and illimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room and to spare on those waters for all our separate ventures; and always beyond the sunset, a mirage of the fortunate isles toward which our prows bent.

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?”