Part 30

It was a room of old chintzes and old china, of fragile, distinguished furniture, of family portraits, of miniatures in medallions, and great bowls of roses everywhere. The whole house had a strange feminine atmosphere, a warm look as if a woman's hand had passed over it. Yet it was Nicky who was the soul of his house, a slender soul, three parts feminine.

Nicky was looking at Jane as she stooped over the roses. "Do you know," he said, "that you've come home? Come and see yourself."

He led the way into his library where her portrait looked down from its high place.

"You bought it?" said she.

"Rather. Gisborne painted it for me."

"Oh, Nicky!"

"It's your genius brooding over mine--I mean over me."

He looked at her again. When he looked at you Nicky's perfect clothes, his long chin, his nose that seemed all bridge, his fine little black moustache, Nicky himself retreated into insignificance beneath his enormous, prominent black eyes.

"I put you there," he said, "to inspire me."

Nicky's eyes gazed at you with a terrible solemnity whenever he talked about his inspiration.

"Do I?"

She did. They had caught him in the high act of creation. He'd been at it since ten o'clock; sitting there, with the blood, he said, beating so furiously in his brain that if he'd gone on like that he'd have destroyed himself. His head was burning now.

"We'll drag you, Nicky, to the top of Wendover Hill, and air you thoroughly. You reek," said Tanqueray.

His idea always was that they took Nicky out of doors to air him; he had so strongly the literary taint.

Nicky declared that he would have been willing to be dragged with them anywhere. Only, as it happened, he had to be at home. He was expecting Miss Bickersteth. They knew Miss Bickersteth?

They knew her. Nicky, for purposes of his own, was in the habit of cultivating, assiduously, the right people; and Miss Bickersteth was eminently right.

The lady, he said, might be upon them any minute.

"In that case," said Tanqueray, "we'll clear out."

"You clear out? But you're the very people he wants to see."

"He?"

Hugh Brodrick. Miss Bickersteth was bringing Hugh Brodrick.

They smiled. Miss Bickersteth was always bringing somebody or being brought.

Brodrick was the right man to bring. He implored them to stay and meet Brodrick.

"Who is Brodrick?"

Brodrick, said Nicky, was a man to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be clung to and never to be let go. Brodrick was on the "Morning Telegraph," and at the back of it, and everywhere about it. And the Jews were at the back of Brodrick. So much so that he was starting a monthly magazine--for the work of the great authors only. That was his, Brodrick's, dream. He didn't know whether he could carry it through. Nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. No, on the advertisements, Brodrick told him. That was where he had the pull. He could work the "Telegraph" agency for that. And he had the Jews at the back of him. He was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave the popular magazines behind him.

"He sounds too good to be true," said Jane.

"Or is he," said Tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?"

"He isn't true, in your sense, at all. That's the beauty of him. He's a gorgeous dream. But a dream that can afford to pay for itself."