 | The Moving Finger |  |
IV
After that, for ten years or more, I watched the strange spectacle of a life of hopeful and productive effort based on the structure of a dream. There could be no doubt to those who saw Grancy during this period that he drew his strength and courage from the sense of his wife's mystic participation in his task. When I went back to see him a few months later I found the portrait had been removed from the library and placed in a small study upstairs, to which he had transferred his desk and a few books. He told me he always sat there when he was alone, keeping the library for his Sunday visitors. 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. His invincible spirit belied and disguised the signs of weakness that afterward asserted themselves in my remembrance of him. He seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of life to draw on, and more than one of us was a pensioner on his superfluity.
Nevertheless, when I came back one summer from my European holiday and heard that he had been at the point of death, I understood at once that we had believed him well only because he wished us to.
I hastened down to the country and found him midway in a slow convalescence. I felt then that he was lost to us and he read my thought at a glance.
"Ah," he said, "I'm an old man now and no mistake. I suppose we shall have to go half-speed after this; but we sha'n't need towing just yet!"
The plural pronoun struck me, and involuntarily I looked up at Mrs. Grancy's portrait. Line by line I saw my fear reflected in it. It was the face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying.
My heart stood still at the thought of what Claydon had done.
Grancy had followed my glance. "Yes, it's changed her," he said quietly. "For months, you know, it was touch and go with me— we had a long fight of it and it was worse for her than for me." After a pause he added "Claydon has been very kind; he's so busy nowadays that I seldom see him, but when I sent for him the other day he came down at once."
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. He continued to improve and toward spring we began to feel that, as he had said, he might yet travel a long way without being towed.
One evening, on returning to town after a visit which had confirmed my sense of reassurance, I found Claydon dining alone at the club. He asked me to join him, and over the coffee our talk turned to his work.
"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?" 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 had to wait for some time in the deserted library before the medical men appeared. They had the baffled manner of empirics who have been superseded by the great Healer, and I lingered only long enough to hear that Grancy was not suffering and that my presence could do him no harm.
I found him seated in his arm-chair in the little study. He held out his hand with a smile.
"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. "It's too late," he said. "I might have known that she knew."
"But, Grancy, listen to me," I began; and then I stopped. What could I say that would convince him! There was no common ground of argument on which we could meet; and after all it would be easier for him to die feeling that she had
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