“I’m uncertain of the period.”
“H’m.” He glanced appreciatively along his cigar. “What are you certain of?”
“That it’s a damned bad picture,” I said savagely.
He nodded. “Just so. That’s all we wanted to know.”
“
“We—I—the committee, in short. You see, my dear fellow, if you hadn’t been certain it was a damned bad picture our position would have been a little awkward. As it is, my remaining duty—I ought to explain that in this matter I’m acting for the committee—is as simple as it’s agreeable.”
“I’ll be hanged,” I burst out, “if I understand one word you’re saying!”
He fixed me with a kind of cruel joyousness. “You will—you will,” he assured me; “at least you’ll begin to, when you hear that I’ve seen Miss Copt.”
“Miss Copt?”
“And that she has told me under what conditions the picture was bought.”
“She doesn’t know anything about the conditions! That is,” I added, hastening to restrict the assertion, “she doesn’t know my opinion of the picture.” I thirsted for five minutes with Eleanor.
“Are you quite sure?” Crozier took me up. “Mr. Jefferson Rose does.”
“Ah—I see.”
“I thought you would,” he reminded me. “As soon as I’d laid eyes on the Rembrandt—I beg your pardon!—I saw that it—well, required some explanation.”
“You might have come to me.”
“I meant to; but I happened to meet Miss Copt, whose encyclopaedic information has often before been of service to me. I always go to Miss Copt when I want to look up anything; and I found she knew all about the Rembrandt.”
“
“Precisely. The knowledge was in fact causing her sleepless nights. Mr. Rose, who was suffering from the same form of insomnia, had taken her into his confidence, and she—ultimately—took me into hers.”
“Of course!”
“I must ask you to do your cousin justice. She didn’t speak till it became evident to her uncommonly quick perceptions that your buying the picture on its merits would have been infinitely worse for—for everybody—than your diverting a small portion of the Museum’s funds to philanthropic uses. Then she told me the moving incident of Mr. Rose. Good fellow, Rose. And the old lady’s case was desperate. Somebody had to buy that picture.” I moved uneasily in my seat “Wait a moment, will you? I haven’t finished my cigar. There’s a little head of Il Fiammingo’s that you haven’t seen, by the way; I picked it up the other day in Parma. We’ll go in and have a look at it presently. But meanwhile what I want to say is that I’ve been charged—in the most informal way—to express to you the committee’s appreciation of your admirable promptness and energy in capturing the Bartley Reynolds. We shouldn’t have got it at all if you hadn’t been uncommonly wide-awake, and to get it at such a price is a double triumph. We’d have thought nothing of a few more thousands—”
“I don’t see,” I impatiently interposed, “that, as far as I’m concerned, that alters the case.”
“The case—?”
“Of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. I bought the picture because, as you say, the situation was desperate, and I couldn’t raise a thousand myself. What I did was of course indefensible; but the money shall be refunded tomorrow—”
Crozier raised a protesting hand. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking ex cathedra. The money’s been refunded already. The fact is, the Museum has sold the Rembrandt.”
I stared at him wildly. “Sold it? To whom?”
“Why—to the committee.—Hold on a bit, please.—Won’t you take another cigar? Then perhaps I can finish what I’ve got to say.—Why, my dear fellow, the committee’s under an obligation to you—that’s the way we look at it. I’ve investigated Mrs. Fontage’s case, and—well, the picture had to be bought. She’s eating meat now, I believe, for the first time in a year. And they’d have turned her out into the street that very day, your cousin tells me. Something had to be done at once, and you’ve simply given a number of well-to-do and self-indulgent gentlemen the opportunity of performing, at very small individual expense, a meritorious action in the nick of time. That’s the first thing I’ve got to thank you for. And then—you’ll remember, please, that I have the floor—that I’m still speaking for the committee—and secondly, as a slight recognition of your services in securing the Bartley Reynolds at a very much lower figure than we were prepared to pay, we beg you—the committee begs you—to accept the gift of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. Now we’ll go in and look at that little head….”
THE MOVING FINGER
The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder—one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. So many people are like badly-composed statues, over-lapping their niches at one point and leaving them vacant at another. Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. 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. 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. We had watched him pitted against one stupid obstacle after another—ill-health, poverty,
