LITMIR.BIZ

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      “IT has not been recovered,” I wrote early the next day, “and I am 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 buttonhole. He came down to dinner, but Lady Augusta Minch was very shy of him. Today 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 is 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 be 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 that 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 will do what she can, for she’s a good-natured woman. ‘So are they all honorable 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 have 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 is 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 think it was some thrilling number of The Family Budget. Mrs. Wimbush, who is 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 sort of 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 that 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 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 feel that 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 am 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 would 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 down stairs. 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 favorable impression on her Imperial Highness. Indeed I think every one did so, and that, like the money-market or the national honor, 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 mustache and wore showy knickerbockers—characteristics all that fitted into 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 recognized 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 that 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 mustache. “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 unmistakable ridicule; so fresh an exhibition does it seem to them of the dreadful way men have always treated women. Dora Forbes, it is true, at the present hour, is immensely pushed by Mrs. Wimbush, and has sat for his portrait to the young artist she protects, sat for it not only in oils, but in monumental alabaster.