Chapter 8 - Page 2

of
answer she simply looked at me in charged silence, letting me see
that tears had gathered in her eyes. These tears, I may remark,
produced an effect on me of which the end is not yet. There was a
moment when I felt it my duty to mention them to Neil Paraday, but
I was deterred by the reflexion that there were questions more
relevant to his happiness.

These question indeed, by the end of the season, were reduced to a
single one - the question of reconstituting so far as might be
possible the conditions under which he had produced his best work.
Such conditions could never all come back, for there was a new one
that took up too much place; but some perhaps were not beyond
recall. I wanted above all things to see him sit down to the
subject he had, on my making his acquaintance, read me that
admirable sketch of. Something told me there was no security but
in his doing so before the new factor, as we used to say at Mr.
Pinhorn's, should render the problem incalculable. It only half-
reassured me that the sketch itself was so copious and so eloquent
that even at the worst there would be the making of a small but
complete book, a tiny volume which, for the faithful, might well
become an object of adoration. There would even not be wanting
critics to declare, I foresaw, that the plan was a thing to be more
thankful for than the structure to have been reared on it. My
impatience for the structure, none the less, grew and grew with the
interruptions. He had on coming up to town begun to sit for his
portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble, whose little game, as we
also used to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, was to be the first to perch on
the shoulders of renown. Mr. Rumble's studio was a circus in which
the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the
hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they burst into
telegrams and "specials." He pranced into the exhibitions on their
back; he was the reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and
there was one roaring year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby,
Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same
pictured walls that no one had yet got ahead of him.

Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with
characteristic good-humour his confidential hint that to figure in
his show was not so much a consequence as a cause of immortality.
From Mrs. Wimbush to the last "representative" who called to
ascertain his twelve favourite dishes, it was the same ingenuous
assumption that he would rejoice in the repercussion. There were
moments when I fancied I might have had more patience with them if
they hadn't been so fatally benevolent. I hated at all events Mr.
Rumble's picture, and had my bottled