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Grancy, by nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the role 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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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