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Updated: May 16, 2025
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.
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.
I was silent and we spoke no more of Grancy's illness; but when I took leave it seemed like shutting him in alone with his death-warrant. The next time I went down to see him he looked much better. It was a Sunday and he received me in the library, so that I did not see the portrait again.
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.
"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?"
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.
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.
Claydon was incalculable enough for me to read a dozen different meanings into his words; but none of my interpretations satisfied me. I determined, at any rate, to seek no farther for a companion; and the next Sunday I travelled down to Grancy's alone. He met me at the station and I saw at once that he had changed since our last meeting.
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