II

Lyon found Sir David Ashmore a capital subject and a very comfortable

sitter into the bargain. Moreover he was a very agreeable old man,

tremendously puckered but not in the least dim; and he wore exactly the

furred dressing-gown that Lyon would have chosen. He was proud of his

age but ashamed of his infirmities, which however he greatly exaggerated

and which did not prevent him from sitting there as submissive as if

portraiture in oils had been a branch of surgery. He demolished the

legend of his having feared the operation would be fatal, giving an

explanation which pleased our friend much better. He held that a

gentleman should be painted but once in his life--that it was eager and

fatuous to be hung up all over the place. That was good for women, who

made a pretty wall-pattern; but the male face didn't lend itself to

decorative repetition. The proper time for the likeness was at the last,

when the whole man was there--you got the totality of his experience.

Lyon could not reply that that period was not a real compendium--you had

to allow so for leakage; for there had been no crack in Sir David's

crystallisation. He spoke of his portrait as a plain map of the

country, to be consulted by his children in a case of uncertainty. A

proper map could be drawn up only when the country had been travelled.

He gave Lyon his mornings, till luncheon, and they talked of many

things, not neglecting, as a stimulus to gossip, the people in the

house. Now that he did not 'go out,' as he said, he saw much less of the

visitors at Stayes: people came and went whom he knew nothing about, and

he liked to hear Lyon describe them. The artist sketched with a fine

point and did not caricature, and it usually befell that when Sir David

did not know the sons and daughters he had known the fathers and

mothers. He was one of those terrible old gentlemen who are a repository

of antecedents. But in the case of the Capadose family, at whom they

arrived by an easy stage, his knowledge embraced two, or even three,

generations. General Capadose was an old crony, and he remembered his

father before him. The general was rather a smart soldier, but in

private life of too speculative a turn--always sneaking into the City to

put his money into some rotten thing. He married a girl who brought him

something and they had half a dozen children. He scarcely knew what had

become of the rest of them, except that one was in the Church and had

found preferment--wasn't he Dean of Rockingham? Clement, the fellow who

was at Stayes, had some military talent; he had served in the East, he

had married a pretty girl. He had been at Eton with his son, and he used

to come to Stayes in his holidays. Lately, coming back to England, he

had turned up with his wife again; that was before he--the old man--had

been put to grass. He was a taking dog, but he had a monstrous foible.

'A monstrous foible?' said Lyon.

'He's a thumping liar.'

Lyon's brush stopped short, while he repeated, for somehow the formula

startled him, 'A thumping liar?'

'You are very lucky not to have found it out.'

'Well, I confess I have noticed a romantic tinge----'

'Oh, it isn't always romantic. He'll lie about the time of day, about

the name of his hatter. It appears there are people like that.'

'Well, they are precious scoundrels,' Lyon declared, his voice trembling

a little with the thought of what Everina Brant had done with herself.

'Oh, not always,' said the old man. 'This fellow isn't in the least a

scoundrel. There is no harm in him and no bad intention; he doesn't

steal nor cheat nor gamble nor drink; he's very kind--he sticks to his

wife, is fond of his children. He simply can't give you a straight

answer.'

'Then everything he told me last night, I suppose, was mendacious: he

delivered himself of a series of the stiffest statements. They stuck,

when I tried to swallow them, but I never thought of so simple an

explanation.'

'No doubt he was in the vein,' Sir David went on. 'It's a natural

peculiarity--as you might limp or stutter or be left-handed. I believe

it comes and goes, like intermittent fever. My son tells me that his

friends usually understand it and don't haul him up--for the sake of his

wife.'

'Oh, his wife--his wife!' Lyon murmured, painting fast.

'I daresay she's used to it.'

'Never in the world, Sir David. How can she be used to it?'

'Why, my dear sir, when a woman's fond!--And don't they mostly handle

the long bow themselves? They are connoisseurs--they have a sympathy for

a fellow-performer.'

Lyon was silent a moment; he had no ground for denying that Mrs.

Capadose was attached to her husband. But after a little he rejoined:

'Oh, not this one! I knew her years ago--before her marriage; knew her

well and admired her. She was as clear as a bell.'

'I like her very much,' Sir David said, 'but I have seen her back him

up.'

Lyon considered Sir David for a moment, not in the light of a model.

'Are you very sure?'

The old man hesitated; then he answered, smiling, 'You're in love with

her.'

'Very likely. God knows I used to be!'

'She must help him out--she can't expose him.'

'She can hold her tongue,' Lyon remarked.

'Well, before you probably she will.'

'That's what I am curious to see.' And Lyon added, privately, 'Mercy on

us, what he must have made of her!' He kept this reflection to himself,

for he considered that he had sufficiently betrayed his state of mind

with regard to Mrs. Capadose. None the less it occupied him now

immensely, the question of how such a woman would arrange herself in

such a predicament. He watched her with an interest deeply quickened

when he mingled with the company; he had had his own troubles in life,

but he had rarely been so anxious about anything as he was now to see

what the loyalty of a wife and the infection of an example would have

made of an absolutely truthful mind. Oh, he held it as immutably

established that whatever other women might be prone to do she, of old,

had been perfectly incapable of a deviation. Even if she had not been

too simple to deceive she would have been too proud; and if she had not

had too much conscience she would have had too little eagerness. It was

the last thing she would have endured or condoned--the particular thing

she would not have forgiven. Did she sit in torment while her husband

turned his somersaults, or was she now too so perverse that she thought

it a fine thing to be striking at the expense of one's honour? It would

have taken a wondrous alchemy--working backwards, as it were--to produce

this latter result. Besides these two alternatives (that she suffered

tortures in silence and that she was so much in love that her husband's

humiliating idiosyncrasy seemed to her only an added richness--a proof

of life and talent), there was still the possibility that she had not

found him out, that she took his false pieces at his own valuation. A

little reflection rendered this hypothesis untenable; it was too evident

that the account he gave of things must repeatedly have contradicted her

own knowledge. Within an hour or two of his meeting them Lyon had seen

her confronted with that perfectly gratuitous invention about the profit

they had made off his early picture. Even then indeed she had not, so

far as he could see, smarted, and--but for the present he could only

contemplate the case.

Even if it had not been interfused, through his uneradicated tenderness

for Mrs. Capadose, with an element of suspense, the question would still

have presented itself to him as a very curious problem, for he had not

painted portraits during so many years without becoming something of a

psychologist. His inquiry was limited for the moment to the opportunity

that the following three days might yield, as the Colonel and his wife

were going on to another house. It fixed itself largely of course upon

the Colonel too--this gentleman was such a rare anomaly. Moreover it had

to go on very quickly. Lyon was too scrupulous to ask other people what

they thought of the business--he was too afraid of exposing the woman he

once had loved. It was probable also that light would come to him from

the talk of the rest of the company: the Colonel's queer habit, both as

it affected his own situation and as it affected his wife, would be a

familiar theme in any house in which he was in the habit of staying.

Lyon had not observed in the circles in which he visited any marked

abstention from comment on the singularities of their members. It

interfered with his progress that the Colonel hunted all day, while he

plied his brushes and chatted with Sir David; but a Sunday intervened

and that partly made it up. Mrs. Capadose fortunately did not hunt, and

when his work was over she was not inaccessible. He took a couple of

longish walks with her (she was fond of that), and beguiled her at tea

into a friendly nook in the hall. Regard her as he might he could not

make out to himself that she was consumed by a hidden shame; the sense

of being married to a man whose word had no worth was not, in her

spirit, so far as he could guess, the canker within the rose. Her mind

appeared to have nothing on it but its own placid frankness, and when he

looked into her eyes (deeply, as he occasionally permitted himself to

do), they had no uncomfortable consciousness. He talked to her again and

still again of the dear old days--reminded her of things that he had not

(before this reunion) the least idea that he remembered. Then he spoke

to her of her husband, praised his appearance, his talent for

conversation, professed to have felt a quick friendship for him and

asked (with an inward audacity at which he trembled a little) what

manner of man he was. 'What manner?' said Mrs. Capadose. 'Dear me, how

can one describe one's husband? I like him very much.'

'Ah, you have told me that already!' Lyon exclaimed, with exaggerated

ruefulness.

'Then why do you ask me again?' She added in a moment, as if she were so

happy that she could afford to take pity on him, 'He is everything

that's good and kind. He's a soldier--and a gentleman--and a dear! He

hasn't a fault. And he has great ability.'

'Yes; he strikes one as having great ability. But of course I can't

think him a dear.'

'I don't care what you think him!' said Mrs. Capadose, looking, it

seemed to him, as she smiled, handsomer than he had ever seen her. She

was either deeply cynical or still more deeply impenetrable, and he had

little prospect of winning from her the intimation that he longed

for--some hint that it had come over her that after all she had better

have married a man who was not a by-word for the most contemptible, the

least heroic, of vices. Had she not seen--had she not felt--the smile go

round when her husband executed some especially characteristic

conversational caper? How could a woman of her quality endure that day

after day, year after year, except by her quality's altering? But he

would believe in the alteration only when he should have heard _her_

lie. He was fascinated by his problem and yet half exasperated, and he

asked himself all kinds of questions. Did she not lie, after all, when

she let his falsehoods pass without a protest? Was not her life a

perpetual complicity, and did she not aid and abet him by the simple

fact that she was not disgusted with him? Then again perhaps she _was_

disgusted and it was the mere desperation of her pride that had given

her an inscrutable mask. Perhaps she protested in private, passionately;

perhaps every night, in their own apartments, after the day's hideous

performance, she made him the most scorching scene. But if such scenes

were of no avail and he took no more trouble to cure himself, how could

she regard him, and after so many years of marriage too, with the

perfectly artless complacency that Lyon had surprised in her in the

course of the first day's dinner? If our friend had not been in love

with her he could have taken the diverting view of the Colonel's

delinquencies; but as it was they turned to the tragical in his mind,

even while he had a sense that his solicitude might also have been

laughed at.

The observation of these three days showed him that if Capadose was an

abundant he was not a malignant liar and that his fine faculty exercised

itself mainly on subjects of small direct importance. 'He is the liar

platonic,' he said to himself; 'he is disinterested, he doesn't operate

with a hope of gain or with a desire to injure. It is art for art and he

is prompted by the love of beauty. He has an inner vision of what might

have been, of what ought to be, and he helps on the good cause by the

simple substitution of a _nuance_. He paints, as it were, and so do I!'

His manifestations had a considerable variety, but a family likeness ran

through them, which consisted mainly of their singular futility. It was

this that made them offensive; they encumbered the field of

conversation, took up valuable space, converted it into a sort of

brilliant sun-shot fog. For a fib told under pressure a convenient place

can usually be found, as for a person who presents himself with an

author's order at the first night of a play. But the supererogatory lie

is the gentleman without a voucher or a ticket who accommodates himself

with a stool in the passage.

In one particular Lyon acquitted his successful rival; it had puzzled

him that irrepressible as he was he had not got into a mess in the

service. But he perceived that he respected the service--that august

institution was sacred from his depredations. Moreover though there was

a great deal of swagger in his talk it was, oddly enough, rarely swagger

about his military exploits. He had a passion for the chase, he had

followed it in far countries and some of his finest flowers were

reminiscences of lonely danger and escape. The more solitary the scene

the bigger of course the flower. A new acquaintance, with the Colonel,

always received the tribute of a bouquet: that generalisation Lyon very

promptly made. And this extraordinary man had inconsistencies and

unexpected lapses--lapses into flat veracity. Lyon recognised what Sir

David had told him, that his aberrations came in fits or periods--that

he would sometimes keep the truce of God for a month at a time. The

muse breathed upon him at her pleasure; she often left him alone. He

would neglect the finest openings and then set sail in the teeth of the

breeze. As a general thing he affirmed the false rather than denied the

true; yet this proportion was sometimes strikingly reversed. Very often

he joined in the laugh against himself--he admitted that he was trying

it on and that a good many of his anecdotes had an experimental

character. Still he never completely retracted nor retreated--he dived

and came up in another place. Lyon divined that he was capable at

intervals of defending his position with violence, but only when it was

a very bad one. Then he might easily be dangerous--then he would hit out

and become calumnious. Such occasions would test his wife's

equanimity--Lyon would have liked to see her there. In the smoking-room

and elsewhere the company, so far as it was composed of his familiars,

had an hilarious protest always at hand; but among the men who had known

him long his rich tone was an old story, so old that they had ceased to

talk about it, and Lyon did not care, as I have said, to elicit the

judgment of those who might have shared his own surprise.

The oddest thing of all was that neither surprise nor familiarity

prevented the Colonel's being liked; his largest drafts on a sceptical

attention passed for an overflow of life and gaiety--almost of good

looks. He was fond of portraying his bravery and used a very big brush,

and yet he was unmistakably brave. He was a capital rider and shot, in

spite of his fund of anecdote illustrating these accomplishments: in

short he was very nearly as clever and his career had been very nearly

as wonderful as he pretended. His best quality however remained that

indiscriminate sociability which took interest and credulity for granted

and about which he bragged least. It made him cheap, it made him even in

a manner vulgar; but it was so contagious that his listener was more or

less on his side as against the probabilities. It was a private

reflection of Oliver Lyon's that he not only lied but made one feel

one's self a bit of a liar, even (or especially) if one contradicted

him. In the evening, at dinner and afterwards, our friend watched his

wife's face to see if some faint shade or spasm never passed over it.

But she showed nothing, and the wonder was that when he spoke she almost

always listened. That was her pride: she wished not to be even suspected

of not facing the music. Lyon had none the less an importunate vision of

a veiled figure coming the next day in the dusk to certain places to

repair the Colonel's ravages, as the relatives of kleptomaniacs

punctually call at the shops that have suffered from their pilferings.

'I must apologise, of course it wasn't true, I hope no harm is done, it

is only his incorrigible----' Oh, to hear that woman's voice in that

deep abasement! Lyon had no nefarious plan, no conscious wish to

practise upon her shame or her loyalty; but he did say to himself that

he should like to bring her round to feel that there would have been

more dignity in a union with a certain other person. He even dreamed of

the hour when, with a burning face, she would ask _him_ not to take it

up. Then he should be almost consoled--he would be magnanimous.

Lyon finished his picture and took his departure, after having worked

in a glow of interest which made him believe in his success, until he

found he had pleased every one, especially Mr. and Mrs. Ashmore, when he

began to be sceptical. The party at any rate changed: Colonel and Mrs.

Capadose went their way. He was able to say to himself however that his

separation from the lady was not so much an end as a beginning, and he

called on her soon after his return to town. She had told him the hours

she was at home--she seemed to like him. If she liked him why had she

not married him or at any rate why was she not sorry she had not? If she

was sorry she concealed it too well. Lyon's curiosity on this point may

strike the reader as fatuous, but something must be allowed to a

disappointed man. He did not ask much after all; not that she should

love him to-day or that she should allow him to tell her that he loved

her, but only that she should give him some sign she was sorry. Instead

of this, for the present, she contented herself with exhibiting her

little daughter to him. The child was beautiful and had the prettiest

eyes of innocence he had ever seen: which did not prevent him from

wondering whether she told horrid fibs. This idea gave him much

entertainment--the picture of the anxiety with which her mother would

watch as she grew older for the symptoms of heredity. That was a nice

occupation for Everina Brant! Did she lie to the child herself, about

her father--was that necessary, when she pressed her daughter to her

bosom, to cover up his tracks? Did he control himself before the little

girl--so that she might not hear him say things she knew to be other

than he said? Lyon doubted this: his genius would be too strong for

him, and the only safety for the child would be in her being too stupid

to analyse. One couldn't judge yet--she was too young. If she should

grow up clever she would be sure to tread in his steps--a delightful

improvement in her mother's situation! Her little face was not shifty,

but neither was her father's big one: so that proved nothing.

Lyon reminded his friends more than once of their promise that Amy

should sit to him, and it was only a question of his leisure. The desire

grew in him to paint the Colonel also--an operation from which he

promised himself a rich private satisfaction. He would draw him out, he

would set him up in that totality about which he had talked with Sir

David, and none but the initiated would know. They, however, would rank

the picture high, and it would be indeed six rows deep--a masterpiece of

subtle characterisation, of legitimate treachery. He had dreamed for

years of producing something which should bear the stamp of the

psychologist as well as of the painter, and here at last was his

subject. It was a pity it was not better, but that was not _his_ fault.

It was his impression that already no one drew the Colonel out more than

he, and he did it not only by instinct but on a plan. There were moments

when he was almost frightened at the success of his plan--the poor

gentleman went so terribly far. He would pull up some day, look at Lyon

between the eyes--guess he was being played upon--which would lead to

his wife's guessing it also. Not that Lyon cared much for that however,

so long as she failed to suppose (as she must) that she was a part of

his joke. He formed such a habit now of going to see her of a Sunday

afternoon that he was angry when she went out of town. This occurred

often, as the couple were great visitors and the Colonel was always

looking for sport, which he liked best when it could be had at other

people's expense. Lyon would have supposed that this sort of life was

particularly little to her taste, for he had an idea that it was in

country-houses that her husband came out strongest. To let him go off

without her, not to see him expose himself--that ought properly to have

been a relief and a luxury to her. She told Lyon in fact that she

preferred staying at home; but she neglected to say it was because in

other people's houses she was on the rack: the reason she gave was that

she liked so to be with the child. It was not perhaps criminal to draw

such a bow, but it was vulgar: poor Lyon was delighted when he arrived

at that formula. Certainly some day too he would cross the line--he

would become a noxious animal. Yes, in the meantime he was vulgar, in

spite of his talents, his fine person, his impunity. Twice, by

exception, toward the end of the winter, when he left town for a few

days' hunting, his wife remained at home. Lyon had not yet reached the

point of asking himself whether the desire not to miss two of his visits

had something to do with her immobility. That inquiry would perhaps have

been more in place later, when he began to paint the child and she

always came with her. But it was not in her to give the wrong name, to

pretend, and Lyon could see that she had the maternal passion, in spite

of the bad blood in the little girl's veins.

She came inveterately, though Lyon multiplied the sittings: Amy was

never entrusted to the governess or the maid. He had knocked off poor

old Sir David in ten days, but the portrait of the simple-faced child

bade fair to stretch over into the following year. He asked for sitting

after sitting, and it would have struck any one who might have witnessed

the affair that he was wearing the little girl out. He knew better

however and Mrs. Capadose also knew: they were present together at the

long intermissions he gave her, when she left her pose and roamed about

the great studio, amusing herself with its curiosities, playing with the

old draperies and costumes, having unlimited leave to handle. Then her

mother and Mr. Lyon sat and talked; he laid aside his brushes and leaned

back in his chair; he always gave her tea. What Mrs. Capadose did not

know was the way that during these weeks he neglected other orders:

women have no faculty of imagination with regard to a man's work beyond

a vague idea that it doesn't matter. In fact Lyon put off everything and

made several celebrities wait. There were half-hours of silence, when he

plied his brushes, during which he was mainly conscious that Everina was

sitting there. She easily fell into that if he did not insist on

talking, and she was not embarrassed nor bored by it. Sometimes she took

up a book--there were plenty of them about; sometimes, a little way off,

in her chair, she watched his progress (though without in the least

advising or correcting), as if she cared for every stroke that

represented her daughter. These strokes were occasionally a little wild;

he was thinking so much more of his heart than of his hand. He was not

more embarrassed than she was, but he was agitated: it was as if in the

sittings (for the child, too, was beautifully quiet) something was

growing between them or had already grown--a tacit confidence, an

inexpressible secret. He felt it that way; but after all he could not be

sure that she did. What he wanted her to do for him was very little; it

was not even to confess that she was unhappy. He would be

superabundantly gratified if she should simply let him know, even by a

silent sign, that she recognised that with him her life would have been

finer. Sometimes he guessed--his presumption went so far--that he might

see this sign in her contentedly sitting there.