PAGE 11
The Liar
by
‘Any ghosts?’
‘You ought to have some–in this fine old part.’
‘We do our best, but que voulez-vous?‘ said Mr. Ashmore. ‘I don’t think they like the hot-water pipes.’
‘They remind them too much of their own climate? But haven’t you a haunted room–at the end of my passage?’
‘Oh, there are stories–we try to keep them up.’
‘I should like very much to sleep there,’ Lyon said.
‘Well, you can move there to-morrow if you like.’
‘Perhaps I had better wait till I have done my work.’
‘Very good; but you won’t work there, you know. My father will sit to you in his own apartments.’
‘Oh, it isn’t that; it’s the fear of running away, like that gentleman three days ago.’
‘Three days ago? What gentleman?’ Mr. Ashmore asked.
‘The one who got urgent letters at breakfast and fled by the 10.20. Did he stand more than one night?’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about. There was no such gentleman–three days ago.’
‘Ah, so much the better,’ said Lyon, nodding good-night and departing. He took his course, as he remembered it, with his wavering candle, and, though he encountered a great many gruesome objects, safely reached the passage out of which his room opened. In the complete darkness it seemed to stretch away still further, but he followed it, for the curiosity of the thing, to the end. He passed several doors with the name of the room painted upon them, but he found nothing else. He was tempted to try the last door–to look into the room of evil fame; but he reflected that this would be indiscreet, since Colonel Capadose handled the brush–as a raconteur–with such freedom. There might be a ghost and there might not; but the Colonel himself, he inclined to think, was the most mystifying figure in the house.
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.