It harmonized with the darkness of his mourning trousers, newly creased but not newly purchased; and of his soul.  He saw his worldly existence menaced—­tottering to its fall.  All these catastrophes, so crushing, so unexpected, filled him with a kind of primeval terror.  Mr. Parker was neither a devout believer nor the reverse.  He was a fool and liable, as such, under the stress of bodily or mental disturbance, to spasmodic fits of abject fright which he mistook for religion.  An attack of indigestion, the failure of some pecuniary speculation, the demise of a beloved stepsister—­these various happenings, so dissimilar to one another, had yet this feature in common, that they put the fear of God into the otherwise empty brain of Mr. Parker.

He had been in many tight corners, but never in so tight a corner as this.  Hardly ever.  He thought of the lady lying dead upstairs and all she had done towards establishing and consolidating their social position; how she had economized for him, yes, and lied for him—­better, far better, than he could ever hope to lie.  For she possessed that most priceless of all gifts:  she believed her own lies.  She looked people straight in the face and spoke from her heart; a falsehood, before it left her lips, had grown into a flaming truth.  She was a florid, improvident liar.  There was no classical parsimony about her misstatements.  They were copious baroque, and encrusted with pleasing and unexpected tricks of ornamentation.  That tropical redundancy for which her person was renowned reflected itself likewise in her temperament—­in nothing more than the exuberance of her untruths which were poured out in so torrential a flood, with such burning conviction at the opulence of detail that persons who knew her well used to stand aghast (Catholics had been known to cross themselves) at the fertility of her constructive imagination, while the most hardened sceptics protested that, even if her facts were wrong, there could be no doubt as to her sincerity, her ingenuousness.  Ah, she was a woman in a thousand!  Often had Mr. Parker sat at her feet, a respectful disciple, listening spellbound and striving to acquire that secret—­a secret which was, after all, not so much art as nature.  He could never hope to rival her technique.

That was because he could not look you in the face; because he disbelieved not only his own lies, but those of other people—­and not only their lies, but their truths; because he distrusted everything and everybody, and was duly distrusted in his turn.  Nobody believed a word he said, and some rude persons went so far as to tell him exactly what they thought of him.  They called him a liar in public and in private.  Such experiences are trying to one’s nerve; they end in giving you a shifty look.  People who knew him well never took his word for granted, and the more casual acquaintance would say that even if his facts were correct now and then he could not help being a fraud all the same.