'I'm afraid I can't hold out hopes, I'm so busy with portraits,' Lyon
continued.
'Yes; I see you are. I wish I was in the gentleman's place.'
'I'm afraid in that case it wouldn't look like me,' said the Colonel,
laughing.
'Oh, of course it couldn't compare--it wouldn't be so 'andsome! But I do
hate them portraits!' Miss Geraldine declared. 'It's so much bread out
of our mouths.'
'Well, there are many who can't paint them,' Lyon suggested,
comfortingly.
'Oh, I've sat to the very first--and only to the first! There's many
that couldn't do anything without me.'
'I'm glad you're in such demand.' Lyon was beginning to be bored and he
added that he wouldn't detain her--he would send for her in case of
need.
'Very well; remember it's the Mews--more's the pity! You don't sit so
well as _us_!' Miss Geraldine pursued, looking at the Colonel. 'If _you_
should require me, sir----'
'You put him out; you embarrass him,' said Lyon.
'Embarrass him, oh gracious!' the visitor cried, with a laugh which
diffused a fragrance. 'Perhaps _you_ send postcards, eh?' she went on to
the Colonel; and then she retreated with a wavering step. She passed out
into the garden as she had come.
'How very dreadful--she's drunk!' said Lyon. He was painting hard, but
he looked up, checking himself: Miss Geraldine, in the open doorway, had
thrust back her head.
'Yes, I do hate it--that sort of thing!' she cried with an explosion of
mirth which confirmed Lyon's declaration. And then she disappeared.
'What sort of thing--what does she mean?' the Colonel asked.
'Oh, my painting you, when I might be painting her.'
'And have you ever painted her?'
'Never in the world; I have never seen her. She is quite mistaken.'
The Colonel was silent a moment; then he remarked, 'She was very
pretty--ten years ago.'
'I daresay, but she's quite ruined. For me the least drop too much
spoils them; I shouldn't care for her at all.'
'My dear fellow, she's not a model,' said the Colonel, laughing.
'To-day, no doubt, she's not worthy of the name; but she has been one.'
'_Jamais de la vie!_ That's all a pretext.'
'A pretext?' Lyon pricked up his ears--he began to wonder what was
coming now.
'She didn't want you--she wanted me.'
'I noticed she paid you some attention. What does she want of you?'
'Oh, to do me an ill turn. She hates me--lots of women do. She's
watching me--she follows me.'
Lyon leaned back in his chair--he didn't believe a word of this. He was
all the more delighted with it and with the Colonel's bright, candid
manner. The story had bloomed, fragrant, on the spot. 'My dear Colonel!'
he murmured, with friendly interest and commiseration.
'I was annoyed when she came in--but I wasn't startled,' his sitter
continued.
'You concealed it very well, if you were.'
'Ah, when one has been through what I have! To-day however I confess I
was half prepared. I have seen her hanging about--she knows my
movements. She was near my house this morning--she must have followed
me.'
'But who is she then--with such a _toupet_?'
'Yes, she has that,' said the Colonel; 'but as you observe she was
primed. Still, there was a cheek, as they say, in her coming in. Oh,
she's a bad one! She isn't a model and she never was; no doubt she has
known some of those women and picked up their form. She had hold of a
friend of mine ten years ago--a stupid young gander who might have been
left to be plucked but whom I was obliged to take an interest in for
family reasons. It's a long story--I had really forgotten all about it.
She's thirty-seven if she's a day. I cut in and made him get rid of
her--I sent her about her business. She knew it was me she had to thank.
She has never forgiven me--I think she's off her head. Her name isn't
Geraldine at all and I doubt very much if that's her address.'
'Ah, what is her name?' Lyon asked, most attentive. The details always
began to multiply, to abound, when once his companion was well
launched--they flowed forth in battalions.
'It's Pearson--Harriet Pearson; but she used to call herself
Grenadine--wasn't that a rum appellation? Grenadine--Geraldine--the jump
was easy.' Lyon was charmed with the promptitude of this response, and
his interlocutor went on: 'I hadn't thought of her for years--I had
quite lost sight of her. I don't know what her idea is, but practically
she's harmless. As I came in I thought I saw her a little way up the
road. She must have found out I come here and have arrived before me. I
daresay--or rather I'm sure--she is waiting for me there now.'
'Hadn't you better have protection?' Lyon asked, laughing.
'The best protection is five shillings--I'm willing to go that length.
Unless indeed she has a bottle of vitriol. But they only throw vitriol
on the men who have deceived them, and I never deceived her--I told her
the first time I saw her that it wouldn't do. Oh, if she's there we'll
walk a little way together and talk it over and, as I say, I'll go as
far as five shillings.'
'Well,' said Lyon, 'I'll contribute another five.' He felt that this was
little to pay for his entertainment.
That entertainment was interrupted however for the time by the Colonel's
departure. Lyon hoped for a letter recounting the fictive sequel; but
apparently his brilliant sitter did not operate with the pen. At any
rate he left town without writing; they had taken a rendezvous for three
months later. Oliver Lyon always passed the holidays in the same way;
during the first weeks he paid a visit to his elder brother, the happy
possessor, in the south of England, of a rambling old house with formal
gardens, in which he delighted, and then he went abroad--usually to
Italy or Spain. This year he carried out his custom after taking a last
look at his all but finished work and feeling as nearly pleased with it
as he ever felt with the translation of the idea by the hand--always, as
it seemed to him, a pitiful compromise. One yellow afternoon, in the
country, as he was smoking his pipe on one of the old terraces he was
seized with the desire to see it again and do two or three things more
to it: he had thought of it so often while he lounged there. The impulse
was too strong to be dismissed, and though he expected to return to town
in the course of another week he was unable to face the delay. To look
at the picture for five minutes would be enough--it would clear up
certain questions which hummed in his brain; so that the next morning,
to give himself this luxury, he took the train for London. He sent no
word in advance; he would lunch at his club and probably return into
Sussex by the 5.45.
In St. John's Wood the tide of human life flows at no time very fast,
and in the first days of September Lyon found unmitigated emptiness in
the straight sunny roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with
their incommunicative doors, looked slightly Oriental. There was
definite stillness in his own house, to which he admitted himself by his
pass-key, having a theory that it was well sometimes to take servants
unprepared. The good woman who was mainly in charge and who cumulated
the functions of cook and housekeeper was, however, quickly summoned by
his step, and (he cultivated frankness of intercourse with his
domestics) received him without the confusion of surprise. He told her
that she needn't mind the place being not quite straight, he had only
come up for a few hours--he should be busy in the studio. To this she
replied that he was just in time to see a lady and a gentleman who were
there at the moment--they had arrived five minutes before. She had told
them he was away from home but they said it was all right; they only
wanted to look at a picture and would be very careful of everything. 'I
hope it is all right, sir,' the housekeeper concluded. 'The gentleman
says he's a sitter and he gave me his name--rather an odd name; I think
it's military. The lady's a very fine lady, sir; at any rate there they
are.'
'Oh, it's all right,' Lyon said, the identity of his visitors being
clear. The good woman couldn't know, for she usually had little to do
with the comings and goings; his man, who showed people in and out, had
accompanied him to the country. He was a good deal surprised at Mrs.
Capadose's having come to see her husband's portrait when she knew that
the artist himself wished her to forbear; but it was a familiar truth to
him that she was a woman of a high spirit. Besides, perhaps the lady was
not Mrs. Capadose; the Colonel might have brought some inquisitive
friend, a person who wanted a portrait of _her_ husband. What were they
doing in town, at any rate, at that moment? Lyon made his way to the
studio with a certain curiosity; he wondered vaguely what his friends
were 'up to.' He pushed aside the curtain that hung in the door of
communication--the door opening upon the gallery which it had been found
convenient to construct at the time the studio was added to the house.
When I say he pushed it aside I should amend my phrase; he laid his hand
upon it, but at that moment he was arrested by a very singular sound. It
came from the floor of the room beneath him and it startled him
extremely, consisting apparently as it did of a passionate wail--a sort
of smothered shriek--accompanied by a violent burst of tears. Oliver
Lyon listened intently a moment, and then he passed out upon the
balcony, which was covered with an old thick Moorish rug. His step was
noiseless, though he had not endeavoured to make it so, and after that
first instant he found himself profiting irresistibly by the accident of
his not having attracted the attention of the two persons in the studio,
who were some twenty feet below him. In truth they were so deeply and so
strangely engaged that their unconsciousness of observation was
explained. The scene that took place before Lyon's eyes was one of the
most extraordinary they had ever rested upon. Delicacy and the failure
to comprehend kept him at first from interrupting it--for what he saw
was a woman who had thrown herself in a flood of tears on her
companion's bosom--and these influences were succeeded after a minute
(the minutes were very few and very short) by a definite motive which
presently had the force to make him step back behind the curtain. I may
add that it also had the force to make him avail himself for further
contemplation of a crevice formed by his gathering together the two
halves of the _portiere_. He was perfectly aware of what he was
about--he was for the moment an eavesdropper, a spy; but he was also
aware that a very odd business, in which his confidence had been trifled
with, was going forward, and that if in a measure it didn't concern him,
in a measure it very definitely did. His observation, his reflections,
accomplished themselves in a flash.
His visitors were in the middle of the room; Mrs. Capadose clung to her
husband, weeping, sobbing as if her heart would break. Her distress was
horrible to Oliver Lyon but his astonishment was greater than his horror
when he heard the Colonel respond to it by the words, vehemently
uttered, 'Damn him, damn him, damn him!' What in the world had happened?
Why was she sobbing and whom was he damning? What had happened, Lyon saw
the next instant, was that the Colonel had finally rummaged out his
unfinished portrait (he knew the corner where the artist usually placed
it, out of the way, with its face to the wall) and had set it up before
his wife on an empty easel. She had looked at it a few moments and
then--apparently--what she saw in it had produced an explosion of dismay
and resentment. She was too busy sobbing and the Colonel was too busy
holding her and reiterating his objurgation, to look round or look up.
The scene was so unexpected to Lyon that he could not take it, on the
spot, as a proof of the triumph of his hand--of a tremendous hit: he
could only wonder what on earth was the matter. The idea of the triumph
came a little later. Yet he could see the portrait from where he stood;
he was startled with its look of life--he had not thought it so
masterly. Mrs. Capadose flung herself away from her husband--she dropped
into the nearest chair, buried her face in her arms, leaning on a table.
Her weeping suddenly ceased to be audible, but she shuddered there as if
she were overwhelmed with anguish and shame. Her husband remained a
moment staring at the picture; then he went to her, bent over her, took
hold of her again, soothed her. 'What is it, darling, what the devil is
it?' he demanded.