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The Death of the Lion
by
CHAPTER IV.
When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary enterprise.
“This is Mr. Morrow,” said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white: “he wants to publish heaven knows what about me.”
I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had wanted. “Already?” I cried with a sort of sense that my friend had fled to me for protection.
Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modem ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw his momentum was irresistible. “I was confident that I should be the first in the field. A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday’s surroundings,” he heavily observed.
“I hadn’t the least idea of it,” said Paraday, as if he had been told he had been snoring.
“I find he hasn’t read the article in The Empire,” Mr. Morrow remarked to me. “That’s so very interesting–it’s something to start with,” he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little garden. As a “surrounding” I felt how I myself had already been taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. “I represent,” our visitor continued, “a syndicate of influential journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public–whose publics, I may say–are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday’s line of thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of the art he so nobly exemplifies. In addition to my connexion with the syndicate just mentioned I hold a particular commission from The Tatler, whose most prominent department, ‘Smatter and Chatter’–I dare say you’ve often enjoyed it–attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a representative of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the brilliant author of ‘Obsessions.’ She pronounced herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible even to herself.”
Neil Paraday had dropped on the garden-bench and sat there at once detached and confounded; he looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn, as if with an anxiety that had suddenly made him grave. His movement had been interpreted by his visitor as an invitation to sink sympathetically into a wicker chair that stood hard by, and while Mr. Morrow so settled himself I felt he had taken official possession and that there was no undoing it. One had heard of unfortunate people’s having “a man in the house,” and this was just what we had. There was a silence of a moment, during which we seemed to acknowledge in the only way that was possible the presence of universal fate; the sunny stillness took no pity, and my thought, as I was sure Paraday’s was doing, performed within the minute a great distant revolution. I saw just how emphatic I should make my rejoinder to Mr. Pinhorn, and that having come, like Mr. Morrow, to betray, I must remain as long as possible to save. Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitors last words were in my ear, I presently enquired with gloomy irrelevance if Guy Walsingham were a woman.
“Oh yes, a mere pseudonym–rather pretty, isn’t it?–and convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude. ‘Obsessions, by Miss So-and-so,’ would look a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into ‘Obsessions’?” Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.