‘Oh, you ought to,’ she answered. ‘It’s the best thing.’
‘I like that – from you!’ he returned.
‘Why not from me? I am very happy.’
‘That’s just why I can’t be. It’s cruel of you to praise your state. But I have had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of your husband. We had a good bit of talk in the other room.’
‘You must know him better – you must know him really well,’ said Mrs Capadose.
‘I am sure that the further you go the more you find. But he makes a fine show, too.’
She rested her good grey eyes on Lyon. ‘Don’t you think he’s handsome?’
‘Handsome and clever and entertaining. You see I’m generous.’
‘Yes; you must know him well,’ Mrs Capadose repeated.
‘He has seen a great deal of life,’ said her companion.
‘Yes, we have been in so many places. You must see my little girl. She is nine years old – she’s too beautiful.’
‘You must bring her to my studio some day – I should like to paint her.’
‘Ah, don’t speak of that,’ said Mrs Capadose. ‘It reminds me of something so distressing.’
‘I hope you don’t mean when you used to sit to me – though that may well have bored you.’
‘It’s not what you did – it’s what we have done. It’s a confession I must make – it’s a weight on my mind! I mean about that beautiful picture you gave me – it used to be so much admired. When you come to see me in London (I count on your doing that very soon) I shall see you looking all round. I can’t tell you I keep it in my own room because I love it so, for the simple reason—’ And she paused a moment.
‘Because you can’t tell wicked lies,’ said Lyon.
‘No, I can’t. So before you ask for it—’
‘Oh, I know you parted with it – the blow has already fallen,’ Lyon interrupted.
‘Ah then, you have heard? I was sure you would! But do you know what we got for it? Two hundred pounds.’
‘You might have got much more,’ said Lyon, smiling.
‘That seemed a great deal at the time. We were in want of the money – it was a good while ago, when we first married. Our means were very small then, but fortunately that has changed rather for the better. We had the chance; it really seemed a big sum, and I am afraid we jumped at it. My husband had expectations which have partly come into effect, so that now we do well enough. But meanwhile the picture went.’
‘Fortunately the original remained. But do you mean that two hundred was the value of the vase?’ Lyon asked.
‘Of the vase?’
‘The beautiful old Indian vase – the Grand Duke’s offering.’
‘The Grand Duke?’
‘What’s his name? – Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. Your husband mentioned the transaction.’
‘Oh, my husband,’ said Mrs Capadose; and Lyon saw that she coloured a little.
Not to add to her embarrassment, but to clear up the ambiguity, which he perceived the next moment he had better have left alone, he went on: ‘He tells me it’s now in his collection.’
‘In the Grand Duke’s? Ah, you know its reputation? I believe it contains treasures.’ She was bewildered, but she recovered herself, and Lyon made the mental reflection that for some reason which would seem good when he knew it the husband and the wife had prepared different versions of the same incident. It was true that he did not exactly see Everina Brant preparing a version; that was not her line of old, and indeed it was not in her eyes to-day. At any rate they both had the matter too much on their conscience. He changed the subject, said Mrs Capadose must really bring the little girl. He sat with her some time longer and thought – perhaps it was only a fancy – that she was rather absent, as if she were annoyed at their having been even for a moment at cross-purposes. This did not prevent him from saying to her at the last, just as the ladies began to gather themselves together to go to bed: ‘You seem much impressed, from what you say, with my renown and my prosperity, and you are so good as greatly to exaggerate them. Would you have married me if you had known that I was destined to success?’
‘I did know it.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘You were too modest.’
‘You didn’t think so when I proposed to you.’
‘Well, if I had married you I couldn’t have married him – and he’s so nice,’ Mrs Capadose said. Lyon knew she thought it – he had learned that at dinner – but it vexed him a little to hear her say it. The gentleman designated by the pronoun came up, amid the prolonged hand-shaking for good-night, and Mrs Capadose remarked to her husband as she turned away, ‘He wants to paint Amy.’
‘Ah, she’s a charming child, a most interesting little creature,’ the Colonel said to Lyon. ‘She does the most remarkable things.’
Mrs Capadose stopped, in the rustling procession that followed the hostess out of the room. ‘Don’t tell him, please don’t,’ she said.
‘Don’t tell him what?’
‘Why, what she does. Let him find out for himself.’ And she passed on.
‘She thinks I swagger about the child – that I bore people,’ said the Colonel. ‘I hope you smoke.’ He appeared ten minutes later in the smoking-room, in a brilliant equipment, a suit of crimson foulard covered with little white spots. He gratified Lyon’s eye, made him feel that the modern age has its splendour too and its opportunities for costume. If his wife was an antique he was a fine specimen of the period of colour: he might have passed for a Venetian of the sixteenth century. They were a remarkable couple, Lyon thought, and as he looked at the Colonel standing in bright erectness before the chimney-piece while he emitted great smoke-puffs he did not wonder that Everina could not regret she had not married him. All the gentlemen collected at Stayes were not smokers and some of them had gone to bed. Colonel Capadose remarked that there probably would be a smallish muster, they had had such a hard day’s work. That was the worst of a hunting house – the men were so sleepy after dinner; it was devilish stupid for the ladies, even for those who hunted themselves – for women were so extraordinary, they never showed it. But most fellows revived under the stimulating influences of the smoking-room, and some of them, in this confidence, would turn up yet. Some of the grounds of their confidence – not all of them – might have been seen in a cluster of glasses and bottles on a table near the fire, which made the great salver and its contents twinkle sociably. The others lurked as yet in various improper corners of the minds of the most loquacious. Lyon was alone with Colonel Capadose for some moments before their companions, in varied eccentricities of uniform, straggled in, and he perceived that this wonderful man had but little loss of vital tissue to repair.
They talked about the house, Lyon having noticed an oddity of construction in the smoking-room; and the Colonel explained that it consisted of two distinct parts, one of which was of very great antiquity. They were two complete houses in short, the old one and the new, each of great extent and each very fine in its way. The two formed together an enormous structure – Lyon must make a point of going all over it. The modern portion had been erected by the old man when he bought the property; oh yes, he had bought it, forty years before – it hadn’t been in the family: there hadn’t been any particular family for it to be in. He had had the good taste not to spoil the original house – he had not touched it beyond what was just necessary for joining it on. It was very curious indeed – a most irregular, rambling, mysterious pile, where they every now and then discovered a walled-up room or a secret staircase. To his mind it was essentially gloomy, however; even the modern additions, splendid as they were, failed to make it cheerful. There was some story about a skeleton having been found years before, during some repairs under a stone slab of the floor of one of the passages; but the family were rather shy of its being talked about. The place they were in was of course in the old part, which contained after all some of the best rooms: he had an idea it had been the primiti
ve kitchen, half modernised at some intermediate period.
‘My room is in the old part too then – I’m very glad,’ Lyon said. ‘It’s very comfortable and contains all the latest conveniences, but I observed the depth of the recess of the door and the evident antiquity of the corridor and staircase – the first short one – after I came out. That panelled corridor is admirable; it looks as if it stretched away, in its brown dimness (the lamps didn’t seem to me to make much impression on it), for half a mile.’
‘Oh, don’t go to the end of it!’ exclaimed the Colonel, smiling.
‘Does it lead to the haunted room?’ Lyon asked.
His companion looked at him a moment. ‘Ah, you know about that?’
‘No, I don’t speak from knowledge, only from hope. I have never had any luck – I have never stayed in a dangerous house. The places I go to are always as safe as Charing Cross. I want to see – whatever there is, the regular thing. Is there a ghost here?’
‘Of course there is – a rattling good one.’
‘And have you seen him?’
‘Oh, don’t ask me what I’ve seen – I should tax your credulity. I don’t like to talk of these things. But there are two or three as bad – that is, as good! – rooms as you’ll find anywhere.’
‘Do you mean in my corridor?’ Lyon asked.
‘I believe the worst is at the far end. But you would be ill-advised to sleep there.’
‘Ill-advised?’
‘Until you’ve finished your job. You’ll get letters of importance the next morning, and you’ll take the 10.20.’
‘Do you mean I will invent a pretext for running away?’
‘Unless you are braver than almost any one has ever been. They don’t often put people to sleep there, but sometimes the house is so crowded that they have to. The same thing always happens – ill-concealed agitation at the breakfast-table and letters of the greatest importance. Of course it’s a bachelor’s room, and my wife and I are at the other end of the house. But we saw the comedy three days ago – the day after we got here. A young fellow had been put there – I forget his name – the house was so full; and the usual consequence followed. Letters at breakfast – an awfully queer face – an urgent call to town – so very sorry his visit was cut short. Ashmore and his wife looked at each other, and off the poor devil went.’
‘Ah, that wouldn’t suit me; I must paint my picture,’ said Lyon. ‘But do they mind your speaking of it? Some people who have a good ghost are very proud of it, you know.’
What answer Colonel Capadose was on the point of making to this inquiry our hero was not to learn, for at that moment their host had walked into the room accompanied by three or four gentlemen. Lyon was conscious that he was partly answered by the Colonel’s not going on with the subject. This however on the other hand was rendered natural by the fact that one of the gentlemen appealed to him for an opinion on a point under discussion, something to do with the everlasting history of the day’s run. To Lyon himself Mr Ashmore began to talk, expressing his regret at having had so little direct conversation with him as yet. The topic that suggested itself was naturally that most closely connected with the motive of the artist’s visit. Lyon remarked that it was a great disadvantage to him not to have had some preliminary acquaintance with Sir David – in most cases he found that so important. But the present sitter was so far advanced in life that there was doubtless no time to lose. ‘Oh, I can tell you all about him,’ said Mr Ashmore; and for half an hour he told him a good deal. It was very interesting as well as very eulogistic, and Lyon could see that he was a very nice old man, to have endeared himself so to a son who was evidently not a gusher. At last he got up – he said he must go to bed if he wished to be fresh for his work in the morning. To which his host replied, ‘Then you must take your candle; the lights are out; I don’t keep my servants up.’
In a moment Lyon had his glimmering taper in hand, and as he was leaving the room (he did not disturb the others with a good-night; they were absorbed in the lemon-squeezer and the soda-water cork) he remembered other occasions on which he had made his way to bed alone through a darkened country-house; such occasions had not been rare, for he was almost always the first to leave the smoking-room. If he had not stayed in houses conspicuously haunted he had, none the less (having the artistic temperament), sometimes found the great black halls and staircases rather ‘creepy’: there had been often a sinister effect, to his imagination, in the sound of his tread in the long passages or the way the winter moon peeped into tall windows on landings. It occurred to him that if houses without supernatural pretensions could look so wicked at night, the old corridors of Stayes would certainly give him a sensation. He didn’t know whether the proprietors were sensitive; very often, as he had said to Colonel Capadose, people enjoyed the impeachment. What determined him to speak, with a certain sense of the risk, was the impression that the Colonel told queer stories. As he had his hand on the door he said to Arthur Ashmore, ‘I hope I shan’t meet any ghosts.’
‘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 wallpattern; 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.’