PAGE 17
The Liar
by
‘How will it do you a lot of good?’ Mrs. Capadose asked.
‘Why, he’s such a rare model–such an interesting subject. He has such an expressive face. It will teach me no end of things.’
‘Expressive of what?’ said Mrs. Capadose.
‘Why, of his nature.’
‘And do you want to paint his nature?’
‘Of course I do. That’s what a great portrait gives you, and I shall make the Colonel’s a great one. It will put me up high. So you see my request is eminently interested.’
‘How can you be higher than you are?’
‘Oh, I’m insatiable! Do consent,’ said Lyon.
‘Well, his nature is very noble,’ Mrs. Capadose remarked.
‘Ah, trust me, I shall bring it out!’ Lyon exclaimed, feeling a little ashamed of himself.
Mrs. Capadose said before she went away that her husband would probably comply with his invitation, but she added, ‘Nothing would induce me to let you pry into me that way!’
‘Oh, you,’ Lyon laughed–‘I could do you in the dark!’
The Colonel shortly afterwards placed his leisure at the painter’s disposal and by the end of July had paid him several visits. Lyon was disappointed neither in the quality of his sitter nor in the degree to which he himself rose to the occasion; he felt really confident that he should produce a fine thing. He was in the humour; he was charmed with his motif and deeply interested in his problem. The only point that troubled him was the idea that when he should send his picture to the Academy he should not be able to give the title, for the catalogue, simply as ‘The Liar.’ However, it little mattered, for he had now determined that this character should be perceptible even to the meanest intelligence–as overtopping as it had become to his own sense in the living man. As he saw nothing else in the Colonel to-day, so he gave himself up to the joy of painting nothing else. How he did it he could not have told you, but it seemed to him that the mystery of how to do it was revealed to him afresh every time he sat down to his work. It was in the eyes and it was in the mouth, it was in every line of the face and every fact of the attitude, in the indentation of the chin, in the way the hair was planted, the moustache was twisted, the smile came and went, the breath rose and fell. It was in the way he looked out at a bamboozled world in short–the way he would look out for ever. There were half a dozen portraits in Europe that Lyon rated as supreme; he regarded them as immortal, for they were as perfectly preserved as they were consummately painted. It was to this small exemplary group that he aspired to annex the canvas on which he was now engaged. One of the productions that helped to compose it was the magnificent Moroni of the National Gallery–the young tailor, in the white jacket, at his board with his shears. The Colonel was not a tailor, nor was Moroni’s model, unlike many tailors, a liar; but as regards the masterly clearness with which the individual should be rendered his work would be on the same line as that. He had to a degree in which he had rarely had it before the satisfaction of feeling life grow and grow under his brush. The Colonel, as it turned out, liked to sit and he liked to talk while he was sitting: which was very fortunate, as his talk largely constituted Lyon’s inspiration. Lyon put into practice that idea of drawing him out which he had been nursing for so many weeks: he could not possibly have been in a better relation to him for the purpose. He encouraged, beguiled, excited him, manifested an unfathomable credulity, and his only interruptions were when the Colonel did not respond to it. He had his intermissions, his hours of sterility, and then Lyon felt that the picture also languished. The higher his companion soared, the more gyrations he executed, in the blue, the better he painted; he couldn’t make his flights long enough. He lashed him on when he flagged; his apprehension became great at moments that the Colonel would discover his game. But he never did, apparently; he basked and expanded in the fine steady light of the painter’s attention. In this way the picture grew very fast; it was astonishing what a short business it was, compared with the little girl’s. By the fifth of August it was pretty well finished: that was the date of the last sitting the Colonel was for the present able to give, as he was leaving town the next day with his wife. Lyon was amply content–he saw his way so clear: he should be able to do at his convenience what remained, with or without his friend’s attendance. At any rate, as there was no hurry, he would let the thing stand over till his own return to London, in November, when he would come back to it with a fresh eye. On the Colonel’s asking him if his wife might come and see it the next day, if she should find a minute–this was so greatly her desire–Lyon begged as a special favour that she would wait: he was so far from satisfied as yet. This was the repetition of a proposal Mrs. Capadose had made on the occasion of his last visit to her, and he had then asked for a delay–declared that he was by no means content. He was really delighted, and he was again a little ashamed of himself.