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Updated: May 3, 2025
Those who missed the portrait of course made no comment on its absence, and the few who were in his secret respected it. Gradually all his old friends had gathered about him and our Sunday afternoons regained something of their former character; but Claydon never reappeared among us. As I look back now I see that Grancy must have been failing from the time of his return home.
It was lately proposed to commemorate the event of the archbishop's visit by the erection of an obelisk on the spot where he had set up the red cross; and a tablet, with a suitable inscription, was provided for it by the Rev. Mr. Freemantle, of Claydon.
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.
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'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.
"You see she was right after all," he said. "She?" I repeated, perplexed for the moment. "My wife." He indicated the picture. "Of course I knew she had no hope from the first. I saw that" he lowered his voice "after Claydon had been here. But I wouldn't believe it at first!" I caught his hands in mine. "For God's sake don't believe it now!" I adjured him. He shook his head gently.
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.
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.
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