Henry James

The Tone Of Time

Henry James

(1843–1916)

The Tone Of Time

(1903)

Table of Contents

I

II

I

I was too pleased with what it struck me that, as an old, old friend, I had done for her, not to go to her that very afternoon with the news. I knew she worked late, as in general I also did; but I sacrificed for her sake a good hour of the February daylight. She was in her studio, as I had believed she would be, where her card (‘Mary J. Tredick’—not Mary Jane, but Mary Juliana) was manfully on the door; a little tired, a little old and a good deal spotted, but with her ugly spectacles taken off, as soon as I appeared, to greet me. She kept on, while she scraped her palette and wiped her brushes, the big stained apron that covered her from head to foot and that I have often enough before seen her retain in conditions giving the measure of her renunciation of her desire to dazzle. Every fresh reminder of this brought home to me that she had given up everything but her work, and that there had been in her history some reason. But I was as far from the reason as ever. She had given up too much; this was just why one wanted to lend her a hand. I told her, at any rate, that I had a lovely job for her.

“To copy something I do like?”

Her complaint, I knew, was that people only gave orders, if they gave them at all, for things she did not like. But this wasn’t a case of copying—not at all, at least, in the common sense. “It’s for a portrait—quite in the air.”

“Ah, you do portraits yourself!”

“Yes, and you know how. My trick won’t serve for this. What’s wanted is a pretty picture.”

“Then of whom?”

“Of nobody. That is of anybody. Anybody you like.”

She naturally wondered. “Do you mean I’m myself to choose my sitter?”

“Well, the oddity is that there is to be no sitter.”

“Whom then is the picture to represent?”

“Why, a handsome, distinguished, agreeable man, of not more than forty, clean-shaven, thoroughly well-dressed, and a perfect gentleman.”

She continued to stare. “And I’m to find him myself?”

I laughed at the term she used. “Yes, as you ‘find’ the canvas, the colours and the frame.” After which I immediately explained. “I’ve just had the ‘rummest’ visit, the effect of which was to make me think of you. A lady, unknown to me and unintroduced, turned up at my place at three o’clock. She had come straight, she let me know, without preliminaries, on account of one’s high reputation—the usual thing—and of her having admired one’s work. Of course I instantly saw—I mean I saw it as soon as she named her affair—that she hadn’t understood my work at all. What am I good for in the world but just the impression of the given, the presented case? I can do but the face I see.”

“And do you think I can do the face I don’t?”

“No, but you see so many more. You see them in fancy and memory, and they come out, for you, from all the museums you’ve haunted and all the great things you’ve studied. I know you’ll be able to see the one my visitor wants and to give it—what’s the crux of the business—the tone of time.”

She turned the question over. “What does she want it for?”

“Just for that—for the tone of time. And, except that it’s to hang over her chimney, she didn’t tell me. I’ve only my idea that it’s to represent, to symbolise, as it were, her husband, who’s not alive and who perhaps never was. This is exactly what will give you a free hand.”

“With nothing to go by—no photographs or other portraits?”

“Nothing.”

“She only proposes to describe him?”

“Not even; she wants the picture itself to do that. Her only condition is that he be a très-bel homme.”

She had begun at last, a little thoughtfully, to remove her apron. “Is she French?”

“I don’t know. I give it up. She calls herself Mrs Bridgenorth.”

Mary wondered. “Connais pas! I never heard of her.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You mean it’s not her real name?

I hesitated. “I mean that she’s a very downright fact, full of the implication that she’ll pay a downright price. It’s clear to me that you can ask what you like; and it’s therefore a chance that I can’t consent to your missing.” My friend gave no sign either way, and I told my story. “She’s a woman of fifty, perhaps of more, who has been pretty, and who still presents herself, with her grey hair a good deal powdered, as I judge, to carry it off, extraordinarily well. She was a little frightened and a little free; the latter because of the former. But she did uncommonly well, I thought, considering the oddity of her wish. This oddity she quite admits; she began indeed by insisting on it so in advance that I found myself expecting I didn’t know what. She broke at moments into French, which was perfect, but no better than her English, which isn’t vulgar; not more at least than that of everybody else. The things people do say, and the way they say them, to artists! She wanted immensely, I could see, not to fail of her errand, not to be treated as absurd; and she was extremely grateful to me for meeting her so far as I did. She was beautifully dressed and she came in a brougham.”

My listener took it in; then, very quietly, “Is she respectable?” she inquired.

“Ah, there you are!” I laughed; “and how you always pick the point right out, even when one has endeavoured to diffuse a specious glamour! She’s extraordinary,” I pursued after an instant; “and just what she wants of the picture, I think, is to make her a little less so.”

“Who is she, then? What is she?” my companion simply went on.

It threw me straightway back on one of my hobbies. “Ah, my dear, what is so interesting as life? What is, above all, so stupendous as London? There’s everything in it, everything in the world, and nothing too amazing not some day to pop out at you. What is a woman, faded, preserved, pretty, powdered, vague, odd, dropping on one without credentials, but with a carriage and very good lace? What is such a person but a person who may have had adventures, and have made them, in one way or another, pay? They’re, however, none of one’s business; it’s scarcely on the cards that one should ask her. I should like, with Mrs Bridgenorth, to see a fellow ask! She goes in for propriety, the real thing. If I suspect her of being the creation of her own talents, she has clearly, on the other hand, seen a lot of life. Will you meet her?” I next demanded.

My hostess waited. “No.”

“Then you won’t try?”

“Need I meet her to try?” And the question made me guess that, so far as she had understood, she began to feel herself a little taken. “It seems strange,” she none the less mused, “to attempt to please her on such a basis. To attempt,” she presently added, “to please her at all. It’s your idea that she’s not married?” she, with this, a trifle inconsequently asked.

“Well,” I replied, “I’ve only had an hour to think of it, but I somehow already see the scene. Not immediately, not the day after, or even perhaps the year after the thing she desires is set up there, but in due process of time and on convenient opportunity, the transfiguration will occur. ‘Who is that awfully handsome man?’ ‘That? Oh, that’s an old sketch of my dear dead husband.’ Because I told her—insidiously sounding her—that she would want it to look old, and that the tone of time is exactly what you’re full of.”

“I believe I am,” Mary sighed at last.

“Then put on your hat.” I had proposed to her on my arrival to come out to tea with me, and it was when left alone in the studio while she went to her room that I began to feel sure of the success of my errand. The vision that had an hour before determined me grew deeper and brighter for her while I moved about and looked at her things. There were more of them there on her hands than one liked to see; but at least they sharpened my confidence, which was pleasant for me in view of that of my visitor, who had accepted without reserve my plea for Miss Tredick. Four or five of her copies of famous portraits—ornaments of great public and private collections—were on the walls, and to see them again together was to feel at ease about my guarantee. The mellow manner of them was what I had had in my mind in saying, to excuse myself to Mrs Bridgenorth, “Oh, my things, you know, look as if they had been painted to-morrow!” It made no difference that Mary’s Vandykes and Gainsboroughs were reproductions and replicas, for I had known her more than once to amuse herself with doing the thing quite, as she called it, off her own bat. She had copied so bravely so many brave things that she had at the end of her brush an extraordinary bag of tricks. She had always replied to me that such things were mere clever humbug, but mere clever humbug was what our client happened to want. The thing was to let her have it—one could trust her for the rest. And at the same time that I mused in this way I observed to myself that there was already something more than, as the phrase is, met the eye in such response as I felt my friend had made. I had touched, without intention, more than one spring; I had set in motion more than one impulse. I found myself indeed quite certain of this after she had come back in her hat and her jacket. She was different—her idea had flowered; and she smiled at me from under her tense veil, while she drew over her firm, narrow hands a pair of fresh gloves, with a light distinctly new. “Please tell your friend that I’m greatly obliged to both of you and that I take the order.”

“Good. And to give him all his good looks?”

“It’s just to do that that I accept. I shall make him supremely beautiful—and supremely base.”

“Base?” I just demurred.

“The finest gentleman you’ll ever have seen, and the worst friend.”

I wondered, as I was startled; but after an instant I laughed for joy. “Ah well, so long as he’s not mine! I see we shall have him,” I said as we went, for truly I had touched a spring. In fact I had touched the spring.

It rang, more or less, I was presently to find, all over the place. I went, as I had promised, to report to Mrs Bridgenorth on my mission, and though she declared herself much gratified at the success of it I could see she a little resented the apparent absence of any desire on Miss Tredick’s part for a preliminary conference. “I only thought she might have liked just to see me, and have imagined I might like to see her.”

But I was full of comfort. “You’ll see her when it’s finished. You’ll see her in time to thank her.”

“And to pay her, I suppose,” my hostess laughed, with an asperity that was, after all, not excessive. “Will she take very long?”

I thought. “She’s so full of it that my impression would be that she’ll do it off at a heat.”

“She is full of it then?” she asked; and on hearing to what tune, though I told her but half, she broke out with admiration. “You artists are the most extraordinary people!” It was almost with a bad conscience that I confessed we indeed were, and while she said that what she meant was that we seemed to understand everything, and I rejoined that this was also what I meant, she took me into another room to see the place for the picture—a proceeding of which the effect was singularly to confirm the truth in question. The place for the picture—in her own room, as she called it, a boudoir at the back, overlooking the general garden of the approved modern row and, as she said, only just wanting that touch—proved exactly the place (the space of a large panel in the white woodwork over the mantel) that I had spoken of to my friend. She put it quite candidly, “Don’t you see what it will do?” and looked at me, wonderfully, as for a sign that I could sympathetically take from her what she didn’t literally say. She said it, poor woman, so very nearly that I had no difficulty whatever. The portrait, tastefully enshrined there, of the finest gentleman one should ever have seen, would do even more for herself than it would do for the room.

I may as well mention at once that my observation of Mrs Bridgenorth was not in the least of a nature to unseat me from the hobby I have already named. In the light of the impression she made on me life seemed quite as prodigious and London quite as amazing as I had ever contended, and nothing could have been more in the key of that experience than the manner in which everything was vivid between us and nothing expressed. We remained on the surface with the tenacity of shipwrecked persons clinging to a plank. Our plank was our concentrated gaze at Mrs Bridgenorth’s mere present. We allowed her past to exist for us only in the form of the prettiness that she had gallantly rescued from it and to which a few scraps of its identity still adhered. She was amiable, gentle, consistently proper. She gave me more than anything else the sense, simply, of waiting. She was like a house so freshly and successfully ‘done up’ that you were surprised it wasn’t occupied. She was waiting for something to happen—for somebody to come. She was waiting, above all, for Mary Tredick’s work. She clearly counted that it would help her.

I had foreseen the fact—the picture was produced at a heat; rapidly, directly, at all events, for the sort of thing it proved to be. I left my friend alone at first, left the ferment to work, troubling her with no questions and asking her for no news; two or three weeks passed, and I never went near her. Then at last, one afternoon as the light was failing, I looked in. She immediately knew what I wanted. “Oh yes, I’m doing him.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve respected your intensity, but I have felt curious.”

I may not perhaps say that she was never so sad as when she laughed, but it’s certain that she always laughed when she was sad. When, however, poor dear, for that matter, was she, secretly, not? Her little gasps of mirth were the mark of her worst moments. But why should she have one of these just now? “Oh, I know your curiosity!” she replied to me; and the small chill of her amusement scarcely met it. “He’s coming out, but I can’t show him to you yet. I must muddle it through in my own way. It has insisted on being, after all, a ‘likeness’,” she added. “But nobody will ever know.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody she sees.”

“Ah, she doesn’t, poor thing,” I returned, “seem to see anybody!”

“So much the better. I’ll risk it.” On which I felt I should have to wait, though I had suddenly grown impatient. But I still hung about, and while I did so she explained. “If what I’ve done is really a portrait, the conditions itself prescribed it. If I was to do the most beautiful man in the world I could do but one.”

We looked at each other; then I laughed. “It can scarcely be me! But you’re getting,” I asked, “the great thing?”

“The infamy? Oh yes, please God.”

It took away my breath a little, and I even for the moment scarce felt at liberty to press. But one could always be cheerful. “What I meant is the tone of time.”

“Getting it, my dear man? Didn’t I get it long ago? Don’t I show it—the tone of time?” she suddenly, strangely sighed at me, with something in her face I had never yet seen. “I can’t give it to him more than—for all these years—he was to have given it to me.”

I scarce knew what smothered passion, what remembered wrong, what mixture of joy and pain my words had accidentally quickened. Such an effect of them could only become, for me, an instant pity, which, however, I brought out but indirectly. “It’s the tone,” I smiled, “in which you’re speaking now.”

This served, unfortunately, as something of a check. “I didn’t mean to speak now.” Then with her eyes on the picture, “I’ve said everything there. Come back,” she added, “in three days. He’ll be all right.”

He was indeed when at last I saw him. She had produced an extraordinary thing—a thing wonderful, ideal, for the part it was to play. My only reserve, from the first, was that it was too fine for its part, that something much less ‘sincere’ would equally have served Mrs Bridgenorth’s purpose, an that relegation to that lady’s ‘own room’—whatever charm it was to work there—might only mean for it cruel obscurity. The picture is before me now, so that I could describe it if description availed. It represents a man of about five-and-thirty, seen only as to the head and shoulders, but dressed, the observer gathers, in a fashion now almost antique and which was far from contemporaneous with the date of the work. His high, slightly narrow face, which would be perhaps too aquiline but for the beauty of the forehead and the sweetness of the mouth, has a charm that even, after all these years, still stirs my imagination. His type has altogether a distinction that you feel to have been firmly caught and yet not vulgarly emphasised. The eyes are just too near together, but they are, in a wondrous way, both careless and intense, while lip, cheek, and chin, smooth and clear, are admirably drawn. Youth is still, you see, in all his presence, the joy and pride of life, the perfection of a high spirit and the expectation of a great fortune, which he takes for granted with unconscious insolence. Nothing has ever happened to humiliate or disappoint him, and if my fancy doesn’t run away with me the whole presentation of him is a guarantee that he will die without having suffered. He is so handsome, in short, that you can scarcely say what he means, and so happy that you can scarcely guess what he feels.

It is of course, I hasten to add, an appreciably feminine rendering, light, delicate, vague, imperfectly synthetic—insistent and evasive, above all, in the wrong places; but the composition, none the less, is beautiful and the suggestion infinite. The grandest air of the thing struck me in fact, when first I saw it, as coming from the high artistic impertinence with which it offered itself as painted about 1850. It would have been a rare flower of refinement for that dark day. The ‘tone’—that of such a past as it pretended to—was there almost to excess, a brown bloom into which the image seemed mysteriously to retreat. The subject of it looks at me now across more years and more knowledge, but what I felt at the moment was that he managed to be at once a triumphant trick and a plausible evocation. He hushed me, I remember, with so many kinds of awe that I shouldn’t have dreamt of asking who he was. All I said, after my first incoherences of wonder at my friend’s practised skill, was: “And you’ve arrived at this truth without documents?”

“It depends on what you call documents.”

“Without notes, sketches, studies?”

“I destroyed them years ago.”

“Then you once had them?”

She just hung fire. “I once had everything.”

It told me both more and less than I had asked; enough at all events to make my next question, as I uttered it, sound even to myself a little foolish. “So that it’s all memory?”

From where she stood she looked once more at her work; after which she jerked away and, taking several steps, came back to me with something new—whatever it was I had already seen—in her air and answer. “It’s all hate!” she threw at me, and then went out of the room. It was not till she had gone that I quite understood why. Extremely affected by the impression visibly made on me, she had burst into tears but had wished me not to see them. She left me alone for some time with her wonderful subject, and I again, in her absence, made things out. He was dead—he had been dead for years; the sole humiliation, as I have called it, that he was to know had come to him in that form. The canvas held and cherished him, in any case, as it only holds the dead. She had suffered from him, it came to me, the worst that a woman can suffer, and the wound he had dealt her, though hidden, had never effectually healed. It had bled again while she worked. Yet when she at last reappeared there was but one thing to say. “The beauty, heaven knows, I see. But I don’t see what you call the infamy.”

She gave him a last look—again she turned away. “Oh, he was like that.”

“Well, whatever he was like,” I remember replying, “I wonder you can bear to part with him. Isn’t it better to let her see the picture first here?”

As to this she doubted. “I don’t think I want her to come.”

I wondered. “You continue to object so to meet her?”

“What good will it do? It’s quite impossible I should alter him for her.”

“Oh, she won’t want that!” I laughed. “She’ll adore him as he is.”

“Are you quite sure of your idea?”

“That he’s to figure as Mr Bridgenorth? Well, if I hadn’t been from the first, my dear lady, I should be now. Fancy, with the chance, her not jumping at him! Yes, he’ll figure as Mr Bridgenorth.”

“Mr Bridgenorth!” she echoed, making the sound, with her small, cold laugh, grotesquely poor for him. He might really have been a prince, and I wondered if he hadn’t been. She had, at all events, a new notion. “Do you mind my having it taken to your place and letting her come to see it there?” Which—as I immediately embraced her proposal, deferring to her reasons, whatever they were—was what was speedily arranged.

II

The next day therefore I had the picture in charge, and on the following Mrs Bridgenorth, whom I had notified, arrived. I had placed it, framed and on an easel, well in evidence, and I have never forgotten the look and the cry that, as she became aware of it, leaped into her face and from her lips. It was an extraordinary moment, all the more that it found me quite unprepared—so extraordinary that I scarce knew at first what had happened. By the time I really perceived, moreover, more things had happened than one, so that when I pulled myself together it was to face the situation as a whole. She had recognised on the instant the subject; that came first and was irrepressibly vivid in her. Her recognition had, for the length of a flash, lighted for her the possibility that the stroke had been directed. That came second, and she flushed with it as with a blow in the face. What came third—and it was what was really most wondrous—was the quick instinct of getting both her strange recognition and her blind suspicion well in hand. She couldn’t control, however, poor woman, the strong colour in her face and the quick tears in her eyes. She could only glare at the canvas, gasping, grimacing, and try to gain time. Whether in surprise or in resentment she intensely reflected, feeling more than anything else how little she might prudently show; and I was conscious even at the moment that nothing of its kind could have been finer than her effort to swallow her shock in ten seconds.

How many seconds she took I didn’t measure; enough, assuredly, for me also to profit. I gained more time than she, and the greatest oddity doubtless was my own private manoeuvre—the quickest calculation that, acting from a mere confused instinct, I had ever made. If she had known the great gentleman represented there and yet had determined on the spot to carry herself as ignorant, all my loyalty to Mary Tredick came to the surface in a prompt counter-move. What gave me opportunity was the red in her cheek. “Why, you’ve known him!”

I saw her ask herself for an instant if she mightn’t successfully make her startled state pass as the mere glow of pleasure—her natural greeting to her acquisition. She was pathetically, yet at the same time almost comically, divided. Her line was so to cover her tracks that every avowal of a past connection was a danger; but it also concerned her safety to learn, in the light of our astounding coincidence, how far she already stood exposed. She meanwhile begged the question. She smiled through her tears. “He’s too magnificent!”

But I gave her, as I say, all too little time. “Who is he? Who was he?”

It must have been my look still more than my words that determined her. She wavered but an instant longer, panted, laughed, cried again, and then, dropping into the nearest seat, gave herself up so completely that I was almost ashamed. “Do you think I’d tell you his name?” The burden of the backward years—all the effaced and ignored—lived again, almost like an accent unlearned but freshly breaking out at a touch, in the very sound of the words. These perceptions she, however, the next thing showed me, were a game at which two could play. She had to look at me but an instant. “Why, you really don’t know it!”

I judged best to be frank. “I don’t know it.”

“Then how does she?”

“How do you?” I laughed. “I’m a different matter.”

She sat a minute turning things round, staring at the picture. “The likeness, the likeness!” It was almost too much.

“It’s so true?”

“Beyond everything.”

I considered. “But a resemblance to a known individual—that wasn’t what you wanted.”

She sprang up at this in eager protest. “Ah, no one else would see it.”

I showed again, I fear, my amusement. “No one but you and she?”

“It’s her doing him!” She was held by her wonder. “Doesn’t she, on your honour, know?”

“That his is the very head you would have liked if you had dared? Not a bit. How should she? She knows nothing—on my honour.”

Mrs Bridgenorth continued to marvel. “She just painted him for the kind of face—?”

“That corresponds with my description of what you wished? Precisely.”

“But how—after so long? From memory? As a friend?”

“As a reminiscence—yes. Visual memory, you see, in our uncanny race, is wonderful. As the ideal thing, simply, for your purpose. You are then suited?” I after an instant added.

She had again been gazing, and at this turned her eyes on me; but I saw she couldn’t speak, couldn’t do more at least than sound, unutterably, ‘Suited!’ so that I was positively not surprised when suddenly—just as Mary had done, the power to produce this effect seeming a property of the model—she burst into tears. I feel no harsher in relating it, however I may appear, than I did at the moment, but it is a fact that while she just wept I literally had a fresh inspiration on behalf of Miss Tredick’s interests. I knew exactly, moreover, before my companion had recovered herself, what she would next ask me; and I consciously brought this appeal on in order to have it over. I explained that I had not the least idea of the identity of our artist’s sitter, to which she had given me no clue. I had nothing but my impression that she had known him—known him well; and, from whatever material she had worked, the fact of his having also been known to Mrs Bridgenorth was a coincidence pure and simple. It partook of the nature of prodigy, but such prodigies did occur. My visitor listened with avidity and credulity. She was so far reassured. Then I saw her question come. “Well, if she doesn’t dream he was ever anything to me—or what he will be now—I’m going to ask you, as a very particular favour, never to tell her. She will want to know of course exactly how I’ve been struck. You’ll naturally say that I’m delighted, but may I exact from you that you say nothing else?”

There was supplication in her face, but I had to think. “There are conditions I must put to you first, and one of them is also a question, only more frank than yours. Was this mysterious personage—frustrated by death—to have married you?”

She met it bravely. “Certainly, if he had lived.”

I was only amused at an artlessness in her ‘certainly’. “Very good. But why do you wish the coincidence—”

“Kept from her?” She knew exactly why. “Because if she suspects it she won’t let me have the picture. Therefore,” she added with decision, “you must let me pay for it on the spot.”

“What do you mean by on the spot?”

“I’ll send you a cheque as soon as I get home.”

“Oh,” I laughed, “let us understand. Why do you consider she won’t let you have the picture?”

She made me wait a little for this, but when it came it was perfectly lucid. “Because she’ll then see how much more I must want it.”

“How much less—wouldn’t it be rather, since the bargain was, as the more convenient thing, not for a likeness?”

“Oh,” said Mrs Bridgenorth with impatience, “the likeness will take care of itself. She’ll put this and that together.” Then she brought out her real apprehension. “She’ll be jealous.”

“Oh!” I laughed. But I was startled.

“She’ll hate me!”

I wondered. “But I don’t think she liked him.”

“Don’t think?” She stared at me, with her echo, over all that might be in it, then seemed to find little enough. “I say!”

It was almost comically the old Mrs Bridgenorth. “But I gather from her that he was bad.”

“Then what was she?”

I barely hesitated. “What were you?”

“That’s my own business.” And she turned again to the picture. “He was good enough for her to do that of him.”

I took it in once more. “Artistically speaking, for the way it’s done, it’s one of the most curious things I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s a grand treat!” said poor Mrs Bridgenorth more simply.

It was, it is really; which is exactly what made the case so interesting. “Yet I feel somehow that, as I say, it wasn’t done with love.”

It was wonderful how she understood. “It was done with rage.”

“Then what have you to fear?”

She knew again perfectly. “What happened when he made me jealous. So much,” she declared, “that if you’ll give me your word for silence—”

“Well?”

“Why, I’ll double the money.”

“Oh,” I replied, taking a turn about in the excitement of our concurrence, “that’s exactly what—to do a still better stroke for her—it had just come to me to propose.

“It’s understood then, on your oath as a gentleman?” She was so eager that practically this settled it, though I moved to and fro a little while she watched me in suspense. It vibrated all round us that she had gone out to the thing in a stifled flare, that a whole close relation had in the few minutes revived. We know it of the truly amiable person that he will strain a point for another that he wouldn’t strain for himself. The stroke to put in for Mary was positively prescribed. The work represented really much more than had been covenanted, and if the purchaser chose so to value it this was her own affair. I decided. “If it’s understood also on your word.”

We were so at one that we shook hands on it. “And when may I send?”

“Well, I shall see her this evening. Say early to-morrow.”

“Early to-morrow.” And I went with her to her brougham, into which, I remember, as she took leave, she expressed regret that she mightn’t then and there have introduced the canvas for removal. I consoled her with remarking that she couldn’t have got it in—which was not quite true.

I saw Mary Tredick before dinner, and though I was not quite ideally sure of my present ground with her I instantly brought out my news. “She’s so delighted that I felt I must in conscience do something still better for you. She’s not to have it on the original terms. I’ve put up the price.”

Mary wondered. “But to what?”

“Well, to four hundred. If you say so I’ll try even for five.”

“Oh, she’ll never give that.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“After the agreement?” She looked grave. “I don’t like such leaps and bounds.”

“But, my dear child, they’re yours. You contracted for a decorative trifle and you’ve produced a breathing masterpiece.”

She thought. “Is that what she calls it?” Then, as having to think too, I hesitated, “What does she know?” she pursued.

“She knows she wants it.”

“So much as that?”

At this I had to brace myself a little. “So much that she’ll send me the cheque this afternoon, and that you’ll have mine by the first post in the morning.”

“Before she has even received the picture?”

“Oh, she’ll send for it to-morrow.” And as I was dining out and had still to dress, my time was up. Mary came with me to the door, where I repeated my assurance. “You shall receive my cheque by the first post.” To which I added: “If it’s little enough for a lady so much in need to pay for any husband, it isn’t worth mentioning as the price of such a one as you’ve given her!”

I was in a hurry, but she held me. “Then you’ve felt your idea confirmed?”

“My idea?”

“That that’s what I have given her?”

I suddenly fancied I had perhaps gone too far; but I had kept my cab and was already in it. “Well, put it,” I called with excess of humour over the front, “that you’ve, at any rate, given him a wife!”

When on my return from dinner that night I let myself in, my first care, in my dusky studio, was to make light for another look at Mary’s subject. I felt the impulse to bid him good night, but, to my astonishment, he was no longer there. His place was a void—he had already disappeared. I saw, however, after my first surprise, what had happened—saw it moreover, frankly, with some relief. As my servants were in bed I could ask no questions, but it was clear that Mrs Bridgenorth, whose note, containing its cheque, lay on my table, had been after all unable to wait. The note, I found, mentioned nothing but the enclosure; but it had come by hand, and it was her silence that told the tale. Her messenger had been instructed to ‘act’; he had come with a vehicle, he had transferred to it canvas and frame. The prize was now therefore landed and the incident closed. I didn’t altogether, the next morning, know why, but I had slept the better for the sense of these things, and as soon as my attendant came in I asked for details. It was on this that his answer surprised me. “No, sir, there was no man; she came herself. She had only a four-wheeler, but I helped her, and we got it in. It was a squeeze, sir, but she would take it.”

I wondered. “She had a four-wheeler? and not her servant?”

“No, no, sir. She came, as you may say, single-handed.”

“And not even in her brougham, which would have been larger?”

My man, with his habit, weighed it. “But have she a brougham, sir?”

“Why, the one she was here in yesterday.”

Then light broke. “Oh, that lady! It wasn’t her, sir. It was Miss Tredick.”

Light broke, but darkness a little followed it—a darkness that, after breakfast, guided my steps back to my friend. There, in its own first place, I met her creation; but I saw it would be a different thing meeting her. She immediately put down on a table, as if she had expected me, the cheque I had sent her overnight. “Yes, I’ve brought it away. And I can’t take the money.”

I found myself in despair. “You want to keep him?”

“I don’t understand what has happened.”

“You just back out?”

“I don’t understand,” she repeated, “what has happened.” But what I had already perceived was, on the contrary, that she very nearly, that she in fact quite remarkably, did understand. It was as if in my zeal I had given away my case, and I felt that my test was coming. She had been thinking all night with intensity, and Mrs Bridgenorth’s generosity, coupled with Mrs Bridgenorth’s promptitude, had kept her awake. Thence, for a woman nervous and critical, imaginations, visions, questions. “Why, in writing me last night, did you take for granted it was she who had swooped down? Why,” asked Mary Tredick, “should she swoop?”

Well, if I could drive a bargain for Mary I felt I could a fortiori lie for her. “Because it’s her way. She does swoop. She’s impatient and uncontrolled. And it’s affectation for you to pretend,” I said with diplomacy, “that you see no reason for her falling in love—”

“Falling in love?” She took me straight up.

“With that gentleman. Certainly. What woman wouldn’t? What woman didn’t? I really don’t see, you know, your right to back out.”

“I won’t back out,” she presently returned, “if you’ll answer me a question. Does she know the man represented?” Then as I hung fire: “It has come to me that she must. It would account for so much. For the strange way I feel,” she went on, “and for the extraordinary sum you’ve been able to extract from her.”

It was a pity, and I flushed with it, besides wincing at the word she used. But Mrs Bridgenorth and I, between us, had clearly made the figure too high. “You think that, if she had guessed, I would naturally work it to ‘extract’ more?”

She turned away from me on this and, looking blank in her trouble, moved vaguely about. Then she stopped. “I see him set up there. I hear her say it. What you said she would make him pass for.”

I believe I foolishly tried—though only for an instant—to look as if I didn’t remember what I had said. “Her husband?”

“He wasn’t.”

The next minute I had risked it. “Was he yours?”

I don’t know what I had expected, but I found myself surprised at her mere pacific head-shake. “No.”

“Then why mayn’t he have been—?”

“Another woman’s? Because he died, to my absolute knowledge, unmarried.” She spoke as quietly. “He had known many women, and there was one in particular with whom he became—and too long remained—ruinously intimate. She tried to make him marry her, and he was very near it. Death, however, saved him. But she was the reason—”

“Yes?” I feared again from her a wave of pain, and I went on while she kept it back. “Did you know her?”

“She was one I wouldn’t.” Then she brought it out. “She was the reason he failed me.” Her successful detachment somehow said all, reduced me to a flat, kind “Oh!” that marked my sense of her telling me, against my expectation, more than I knew what to do with. But it was just while I wondered how to turn her confidence that she repeated, in a changed voice, her challenge of a moment before. “Does she know the man represented?”

“I haven’t the least idea.” And having so acquitted myself I added, with what strikes me now as futility: “She certainly—yesterday—didn’t name him.”

“Only recognised him?”

“If she did she brilliantly concealed it.”

“So that you got nothing from her?”

It was a question that offered me a certain advantage. “I thought you accused me of getting too much.”

She gave me a long look, and I now saw everything in her face. “It’s very nice—what you’re doing for me, and you do it handsomely. It’s beautiful—beautiful, and I thank you with all my heart. But I know.”

“And what do you know?”

She went about now preparing her usual work. “What he must have been to her.”

“You mean she was the person?”

“Well,” she said, putting on her old spectacles, “she was one of them.”

“And you accept so easily the astounding coincidence—?”

“Of my finding myself, after years, in so extraordinary a relation with her? What do you call easily? I’ve passed a night of torment.”

“But what put it into your head—?”

“That I had so blindly and strangely given him back to her? You put it—yesterday.”

“And how?”

“I can’t tell you. You didn’t in the least mean to—on the contrary. But you dropped the seed. The plant, after you had gone,” she said with a business-like pull at her easel, “the plant began to grow. I saw them there—in your studio—face to face.”

“You were jealous?” I laughed.

She gave me through her glasses another look, and they seemed, from this moment, in their queerness, to have placed her quite on the other side of the gulf of time. She was firm there; she was settled; I couldn’t get at her now. “I see she told you I would be.” I doubtless kept down too little my start at it, and she immediately pursued. “You say I accept the coincidence, which is of course prodigious. But such things happen. Why shouldn’t I accept it if you do?”

“Do I?” I smiled.

She began her work in silence, but she presently exclaimed: “I’m glad I didn’t meet her!”

“I don’t yet see why you wouldn’t.”

“Neither do I. It was an instinct.”

“Your instincts”—I tried to be ironic—“are miraculous.”

“They have to be, to meet such accidents. I must ask you kindly to tell her, when you return her gift, that now I have done the picture I find I must after all keep it for myself.”

“Giving no reason?”

She painted away. “She’ll know the reason.”

Well, by this time I knew it too; I knew so many things that I fear my resistance was weak. If our wonderful client hadn’t been his wife in fact, she was not to be helped to become his wife in fiction. I knew almost more than I can say, more at any rate than I could then betray. He had been bound in common mercy to stand by my friend, and he had basely forsaken her. This indeed brought up the obscure, into which I shyly gazed. “Why, even granting your theory, should you grudge her the portrait? It was painted in bitterness.”

“Yes. Without that—!”

“It wouldn’t have come? Precisely. Is it in bitterness, then, you’ll keep it?”

She looked up from her canvas. “In what would you keep it?”

It made me jump. “Do you mean I may?” Then I had my idea. “I’d give you her price for it!”

Her smile through her glasses was beautiful. “And afterwards make it over to her? You shall have it when I die.” With which she came away from her easel, and I saw that I was staying her work and should properly go. So I put out my hand to her. “It took—whatever you will!—to paint it,” she said, “but I shall keep it in joy.” I could answer nothing now—had to cease to pretend; the thing was in her hands. For a moment we stood there, and I had again the sense, melancholy and final, of her being, as it were, remotely glazed and fixed into what she had done. “He’s taken from me, and for all those years he’s kept. Then she herself, by a prodigy—!” She lost herself again in the wonder of it.

“Unwittingly gives him back?”

She fairly, for an instant over the marvel, closed her eyes. “Gives him back.”

Then it was I saw how he would be kept! But it was the end of my vision. I could only write, ruefully enough, to Mrs Bridgenorth, whom I never met again, but of whose death—preceding by a couple of years Mary Tredick’s—I happened to hear. This is an old man’s tale. I have inherited the picture, in the deep beauty of which, however, darkness still lurks. No one, strange to say, has ever recognised the model, but everyone asks his name. I don’t even know it.

The End