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Updated: May 3, 2025
"Three years of it and then she died. It was so sudden that there was no change, no diminution. It was as if she had suddenly become fixed, immovable, like her own portrait: as if Time had ceased at its happiest hour, just as Claydon had thrown down his brush one day and said, 'I can't do better than that. "I went away, as you know, and stayed over there five years.
Sir Ralph Verney, while in exile in France in 1645, wrote to his brother at Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, concerning "the odd things in the room my mother kept herself the iron chest in the little room between her bed's-head and the back stairs."
Women and children were sitting upon sunny doorsteps, with their pillows on their knees and their bobbins moving quickly in dexterous fingers, busy at the lace-making which had been established in Buckinghamshire more than a century before by Catherine of Aragon, whose dowry was derived from the revenues of Steeple Claydon.
Without turning his thought into words, John divined that at Harrow it was bad form to ask questions. As he wanted to ask a question, a very important question, this enforced silence became exasperating. Presently Scaife said, "I suppose you are one of the Claydon lot." "No; my home is in the New Forest. My uncle is Verney of Verney Boscobel."
To sit in this room is to keep watch beside a corpse. As this feeling grew on me the portrait became like a beautiful mausoleum in which she had been buried alive: I could hear her beating against the painted walls and crying to me faintly for help.... "One day I found I couldn't stand it any longer and I sent for Claydon.
It had been built in the reign of Henry the Seventh, and was coeval with its distinguished neighbour, the house of the Verneys, at Middle Claydon, and it had never served any other purpose than to shelter Englishmen of good repute in the land.
I persisted. He shrugged his shoulders. "He hasn't sent for me yet!" A waiter came up with the cigars and Claydon rose and joined another group. It was just a fortnight later that Grancy's housekeeper telegraphed for me. She met me at the station with the news that he had been "taken bad" and that the doctors were with him.
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.
"If you're not too busy," I said at length, "you ought to make time to go down to Grancy's again." He looked up quickly. "Why?" he asked. "Because he's quite well again," I returned with a touch of cruelty. "His wife's prognostications were mistaken." Claydon stared at me a moment. "Oh, she knows," he affirmed with a smile that chilled me. "You mean to leave the portrait as it is then?"
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.
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