He was shyly, charmingly glad to see them. And delighted, of course, he said, to see Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. He insisted on their all staying to tea, to dinner, on their giving him, now that they had come, a day. He ordered whisky and soda and lemonade. He brought peaches and chocolates and cigarettes, and offered them diffidently, as things mortal and savouring of mortality.
He went to and fro, carrying himself humbly yet with triumph, like one aware that he entertained immortal guests. He couldn't get over it, he said, their dropping in on him like this, with a divine precipitance, out of their blue. Heavens! Supposing he had been out! He stood there glowing at them, the most perfect thing in his perfect drawing-room.
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."
"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.