The Moving Finger - Page 2

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