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, a.s.siduously, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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."
"A dream with Jews at its back," said Tanqueray.
"And he wants--he told me--to secure you first, Miss Holland. And Mr.
Tanqueray. And he"s sure to want Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. You"ll all be in it. It"s the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all days."
In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.
A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It was one of the perfections of Nicky"s house that it had no jarring noises in it.
"That"s he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."
And he went out.
He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr.
Hugh Brodrick.
Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of Tanqueray, of Brodrick.
Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick"s face gained in its effect from the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes.
They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze, which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her in her corner.
This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky, as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate.
It was wonderful how in spite of Brodrick he got it all in.
Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her, pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.
"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.
"Not very often."
There was a pause, then Brodrick said something again, but in so low a voice that Jane had to ask him what he said.
"Only that it"s an easy run down from Marylebone."
"It is--very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation with Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning.
It was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. He was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes.
For Nina and Laura he had only a blank courtesy. Yet he talked to them, he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at Jane, and now at her portrait by Gisborne. He seemed to be wondering quietly what she was doing there, in Nicky"s house.
Nicky, as became him, devoted himself to Miss Bickersteth. She was on the reviewing staff of the "Morning Telegraph," and very valuable to Nicky. Besides, he liked her. She interested him, amused, amazed him. As a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. She had sharpened her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a bl.u.s.tering, full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth.
There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the spot. You found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely, with a look of having grown there.
Nicky, concealed beside Miss Bickersteth in a corner, had begun by trying to make her talk about Sh.e.l.ley (she had edited him). He hoped that thus he might be led on to talk about himself. To Nicky the transition was a natural one.
But Miss Bickersteth did not want to talk about Sh.e.l.ley. Sh.e.l.ley, she declared irreverently, was shop. She wanted to talk about people whom they knew, having reached the absolving age of forty, when you may say anything you please about anybody to an audience sufficiently discreet.
And she had just seen Jane and Tanqueray going out together through the long window on to the lawn.
"I suppose," said she, "if they liked, they could marry now."
"Now?" repeated poor Nicky vaguely.
"Now that one of them has got an income."
"I didn"t think he was a marrying man."
"No. And you wouldn"t think, would you, she was a marrying woman?"
"I--I don"t know. I haven"t thought about it. He _said_ he wasn"t going to marry."
"Oh." Two small eyes looked at him, two liquid, luminous spots in the pinkness of Miss Bickersteth"s face.
"It"s got as far as that, has it? That shows he"s been thinking of it."
"I should have thought it showed he wasn"t."
Miss Bickersteth"s mouth was decided in its set, and vague in its outline and its colouring. Her smile now appeared as a mere quiver of her face.
"How have you managed to preserve your beautiful innocence? Do you always go about with your head among the stars?"
"My head----?" He felt it. It was going round and round.