“It has _not_ been recovered,” I wrote early the next day, “and I’m
moreover much troubled about our friend. He came back from Bigwood with
a chill and, being allowed to have a fire in his room, lay down a while
before dinner. I tried to send him to bed and indeed thought I had put
him in the way of it; but after I had gone to dress Mrs. Wimbush came up
to see him, with the inevitable result that when I returned I found him
under arms and flushed and feverish, though decorated with the rare
flower she had brought him for his button-hole. He came down to dinner,
but Lady Augusta Minch was very shy of him. To-day he’s in great pain,
and the advent of ces dames—I mean of Guy Walsingham and Dora
Forbes—doesn’t at all console me. It does Mrs. Wimbush, however, for she
has consented to his remaining in bed so that he may be all right
to-morrow for the listening circle. Guy Walsingham’s already on the
scene, and the Doctor for Paraday also arrived early. I haven’t yet seen
the author of ‘Obsessions,’ but of course I’ve had a moment by myself
with the Doctor. I tried to get him to say that our invalid must go
straight home—I mean to-morrow or next day; but he quite refuses to talk
about the future. Absolute quiet and warmth and the regular
administration of an important remedy are the points he mainly insists
on. He returns this afternoon, and I’m to go back to see the patient at
one o’clock, when he next takes his medicine. It consoles me a little
that he certainly won’t be able to read—an exertion he was already more
than unfit for. Lady Augusta went off after breakfast, assuring me her
first care would be to follow up the lost manuscript. I can see she
thinks me a shocking busybody and doesn’t understand my alarm, but she’ll
do what she can, for she’s a good-natured woman. ‘So are they all
honourable men.’ That was precisely what made her give the thing to Lord
Dorimont and made Lord Dorimont bag it. What use _he_ has for it God
only knows. I’ve the worst forebodings, but somehow I’m strangely
without passion—desperately calm. As I consider the unconscious, the
well-meaning ravages of our appreciative circle I bow my head in
submission to some great natural, some universal accident; I’m rendered
almost indifferent, in fact quite gay (ha-ha!) by the sense of
immitigable fate. Lady Augusta promises me to trace the precious object
and let me have it through the post by the time Paraday’s well enough to
play his part with it. The last evidence is that her maid did give it to
his lordship’s valet. One would suppose it some thrilling number of _The
Family Budget_. Mrs. Wimbush, who’s aware of the accident, is much less
agitated by it than she would doubtless be were she not for the hour
inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham.”
Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I kept a
loose diary of the situation, that I had made the acquaintance of this
celebrity and that she was a pretty little girl who wore her hair in what
used to be called a crop. She looked so juvenile and so innocent that
if, as Mr. Morrow had announced, she was resigned to the larger latitude,
her superiority to prejudice must have come to her early. I spent most
of the day hovering about Neil Paraday’s room, but it was communicated to
me from below that Guy Walsingham, at Prestidge, was a success. Toward
evening I became conscious somehow that her superiority was contagious,
and by the time the company separated for the night I was sure the larger
latitude had been generally accepted. I thought of Dora Forbes and felt
that he had no time to lose. Before dinner I received a telegram from
Lady Augusta Minch. “Lord Dorimont thinks he must have left bundle in
train—enquire.” How could I enquire—if I was to take the word as a
command? I was too worried and now too alarmed about Neil Paraday. The
Doctor came back, and it was an immense satisfaction to me to be sure he
was wise and interested. He was proud of being called to so
distinguished a patient, but he admitted to me that night that my friend
was gravely ill. It was really a relapse, a recrudescence of his old
malady. There could be no question of moving him: we must at any rate
see first, on the spot, what turn his condition would take. Meanwhile,
on the morrow, he was to have a nurse. On the morrow the dear man was
easier, and my spirits rose to such cheerfulness that I could almost
laugh over Lady Augusta’s second telegram: “Lord Dorimont’s servant been
to station—nothing found. Push enquiries.” I did laugh, I’m sure, as I
remembered this to be the mystic scroll I had scarcely allowed poor Mr.
Morrow to point his umbrella at. Fool that I had been: the thirty-seven
influential journals wouldn’t have destroyed it, they’d only have printed
it. Of course I said nothing to Paraday.
When the nurse arrived she turned me out of the room, on which I went
downstairs. I should premise that at breakfast the news that our
brilliant friend was doing well excited universal complacency, and the
Princess graciously remarked that he was only to be commiserated for
missing the society of Miss Collop. Mrs. Wimbush, whose social gift
never shone brighter than in the dry decorum with which she accepted this
fizzle in her fireworks, mentioned to me that Guy Walsingham had made a
very favourable impression on her Imperial Highness. Indeed I think
every one did so, and that, like the money-market or the national honour,
her Imperial Highness was constitutionally sensitive. There was a
certain gladness, a perceptible bustle in the air, however, which I
thought slightly anomalous in a house where a great author lay critically
ill. “Le roy est mort—vive le roy”: I was reminded that another great
author had already stepped into his shoes. When I came down again after
the nurse had taken possession I found a strange gentleman hanging about
the hall and pacing to and fro by the closed door of the drawing-room.
This personage was florid and bald; he had a big red moustache and wore
showy knickerbockers—characteristics all that fitted to my conception of
the identity of Dora Forbes. In a moment I saw what had happened: the
author of “The Other Way Round” had just alighted at the portals of
Prestidge, but had suffered a scruple to restrain him from penetrating
further. I recognised his scruple when, pausing to listen at his gesture
of caution, I heard a shrill voice lifted in a sort of rhythmic uncanny
chant. The famous reading had begun, only it was the author of
“Obsessions” who now furnished the sacrifice. The new visitor whispered
to me that he judged something was going on he oughtn’t to interrupt.
“Miss Collop arrived last night,” I smiled, “and the Princess has a
thirst for the inédit.”
Dora Forbes lifted his bushy brows. “Miss Collop?”
“Guy Walsingham, your distinguished confrère—or shall I say your
formidable rival?”
“Oh!” growled Dora Forbes. Then he added: “Shall I spoil it if I go in?”
“I should think nothing could spoil it!” I ambiguously laughed.
Dora Forbes evidently felt the dilemma; he gave an irritated crook to his
moustache. “_Shall_ I go in?” he presently asked.
We looked at each other hard a moment; then I expressed something bitter
that was in me, expressed it in an infernal “Do!” After this I got out
into the air, but not so fast as not to hear, when the door of the
drawing-room opened, the disconcerted drop of Miss Collop’s public
manner: she must have been in the midst of the larger latitude.
Producing with extreme rapidity, Guy Walsingham has just published a work
in which amiable people who are not initiated have been pained to see the
genius of a sister-novelist held up to unmistakeable ridicule; so fresh
an exhibition does it seem to them of the dreadful way men have always
treated women. Dora Forbes, it’s true, at the present hour, is immensely
pushed by Mrs. Wimbush and has sat for his portrait to the young artists
she protects, sat for it not only in oils but in monumental alabaster.
What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course contemporary
history. If the interruption I had whimsically sanctioned was almost a
scandal, what is to be said of that general scatter of the company which,
under the Doctor’s rule, began to take place in the evening? His rule
was soothing to behold, small comfort as I was to have at the end. He
decreed in the interest of his patient an absolutely soundless house and
a consequent break-up of the party. Little country practitioner as he
was, he literally packed off the Princess. She departed as promptly as
if a revolution had broken out, and Guy Walsingham emigrated with her. I
was kindly permitted to remain, and this was not denied even to Mrs.
Wimbush. The privilege was withheld indeed from Dora Forbes; so Mrs.
Wimbush kept her latest capture temporarily concealed. This was so
little, however, her usual way of dealing with her eminent friends that a
couple of days of it exhausted her patience, and she went up to town with
him in great publicity. The sudden turn for the worse her afflicted
guest had, after a brief improvement, taken on the third night raised an
obstacle to her seeing him before her retreat; a fortunate circumstance
doubtless, for she was fundamentally disappointed in him. This was not
the kind of performance for which she had invited him to Prestidge, let
alone invited the Princess. I must add that none of the generous acts
marking her patronage of intellectual and other merit have done so much
for her reputation as her lending Neil Paraday the most beautiful of her
numerous homes to die in. He took advantage to the utmost of the
singular favour. Day by day I saw him sink, and I roamed alone about the
empty terraces and gardens. His wife never came near him, but I scarcely
noticed it: as I paced there with rage in my heart I was too full of
another wrong. In the event of his death it would fall to me perhaps to
bring out in some charming form, with notes, with the tenderest editorial
care, that precious heritage of his written project. But where was that
precious heritage and were both the author and the book to have been
snatched from us? Lady Augusta wrote me that she had done all she could
and that poor Lord Dorimont, who had really been worried to death, was
extremely sorry. I couldn’t have the matter out with Mrs. Wimbush, for I
didn’t want to be taunted by her with desiring to aggrandise myself by a
public connexion with Mr. Paraday’s sweepings. She had signified her
willingness to meet the expense of all advertising, as indeed she was
always ready to do. The last night of the horrible series, the night
before he died, I put my ear closer to his pillow.
“That thing I read you that morning, you know.”
“In your garden that dreadful day? Yes!”
“Won’t it do as it is?”
“It would have been a glorious book.”
“It _is_ a glorious book,” Neil Paraday murmured. “Print it as it
stands—beautifully.”
“Beautifully!” I passionately promised.
It may be imagined whether, now that he’s gone, the promise seems to me
less sacred. I’m convinced that if such pages had appeared in his
lifetime the Abbey would hold him to-day. I’ve kept the advertising in
my own hands, but the manuscript has not been recovered. It’s
impossible, and at any rate intolerable, to suppose it can have been
wantonly destroyed. Perhaps some hazard of a blind hand, some brutal
fatal ignorance has lighted kitchen-fires with it. Every stupid and
hideous accident haunts my meditations. My undiscourageable search for
the lost treasure would make a long chapter. Fortunately I’ve a devoted
associate in the person of a young lady who has every day a fresh
indignation and a fresh idea, and who maintains with intensity that the
prize will still turn up. Sometimes I believe her, but I’ve quite ceased
to believe myself. The only thing for us at all events is to go on
seeking and hoping together; and we should be closely united by this firm
tie even were we not at present by another.