FullReads

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Ah, how could you?” I cried, turning on him.

“How could I?” he retorted. “How could I not? Doesn’t she belong to me now?”

I moved away impatiently.

“Wait a moment,” he said with a detaining gesture. “The others have gone and I want to say a word to you.–Oh, I know what you’ve thought of me–I can guess! You think I killed Grancy, I suppose?”

I was startled by his sudden vehemence. “I think you tried to do a cruel thing,” I said.

“Ah–what a little way you others see into life!” he murmured. “Sit down a moment–here, where we can look at her–and I’ll tell you.”

He threw himself on the ottoman beside me and sat gazing up at the picture, with his hands clasped about his knee.

“Pygmalion,” he began slowly, “turned his statue into a real woman; I turned my real woman into a picture. Small compensation, you think–but you don’t know how much of a woman belongs to you after you’ve painted her!–Well, I made the best of it, at any rate–I gave her the best I had in me; and she gave me in return what such a woman gives by merely being. And after all she rewarded me enough by making me paint as I shall never paint again! There was one side of her, though, that was mine alone, and that was her beauty; for no one else understood it. To Grancy even it was the mere expression of herself–what language is to thought. Even when he saw the picture he didn’t guess my secret–he was so sure she was all his! As though a man should think he owned the moon because it was reflected in the pool at his door–

“Well–when he came home and sent for me to change the picture it was like asking me to commit murder. He wanted me to make an old woman of her–of her who had been so divinely, unchangeably young! As if any man who really loved a woman would ask her to sacrifice her youth and beauty for his sake! At first I told him I couldn’t do it–but afterward, when he left me alone with the picture, something queer happened. I suppose it was because I was always so confoundedly fond of Grancy that it went against me to refuse what he asked. Anyhow, as I sat looking up at her, she seemed to say, ‘I’m not yours but his, and I want you to make me what he wishes.” And so I did it. I could have cut my hand off when the work was done–I daresay he told you I never would go back and look at it. He thought I was too busy–he never understood….

“Well–and then last year he sent for me again–you remember. It was after his illness, and he told me he’d grown twenty years older and that he wanted her to grow older too–he didn’t want her to be left behind. The doctors all thought he was going to get well at that time, and he thought so too; and so did I when I first looked at him. But when I turned to the picture–ah, now I don’t ask you to believe me; but I swear it was her face that told me he was dying, and that she wanted him to know it! She had a message for him and she made me deliver it.”

He rose abruptly and walked toward the portrait; then he sat down beside me again.

“Cruel? Yes, it seemed so to me at first; and this time, if I resisted, it was for his sake and not for mine. But all the while I felt her eyes drawing me, and gradually she made me understand. If she’d been there in the flesh (she seemed to say) wouldn’t she have seen before any of us that he was dying? Wouldn’t he have read the news first in her face? And wouldn’t it be horrible if now he should discover it instead in strange eyes?–Well–that was what she wanted of me and I did it–I kept them together to the last!” He looked up at the picture again. “But now she belongs to me,” he repeated….