The Drunkard. Thorne Guy

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СКАЧАТЬ at all before, certainly never any one who mattered. Muriel told me that Mr. Lothian was coming; she loves his poems as much as I do. And when she wrote and asked me I was terribly excited. It's so good of you to have me, Mr. Amberley."

      Her voice was touching in its gratitude, and he was touched at this damsel, so pretty, courageous and forlorn.

      "I hope, my dear," he said, "that you will give us all the pleasure of seeing you here very often."

      At that moment Mrs. Amberley looked up and her fine, shrewd eyes swept round the table. She was a handsome, hook-nosed dame, with a lavish coronet of grey hair, stately and kindly in expression, obviously capable of many tolerances, but with moments when "ne louche pas à La Reine" could be very plainly written on her face.

      As she gathered up the three women and rose, Mr. Amberley knew in a moment that all was not quite well. No one else could have even guessed at it, but he knew. The years that had dealt so prosperously with him; Fate which had linked arms and was ever debonnair, had greatly blessed him in this also. He worshipped this stately madam, as she him, and always watched her face as some poor fisherman strives to read the Western sky.

      The door of the Dining Room was towards Mrs. Amberley's end of the table, and, as the ladies rose and moved towards it, Gilbert Lothian had gone to it and held it open.

      His table-napkin was in his right hand, his left was on the handle of the door, and as the women swept out, he bowed.

      Herbert Toftrees thought that there was something rather theatrical, a little over-emphasised, in the bow – as he regarded the poet, whom he had met for the first time that night, from beneath watchful eye-lids.

      And did one bow? Wasn't it rather like a scene upon the stage? Toftrees, a quite well-bred man, was a little puzzled by Gilbert Lothian. Then he concluded – and his whole thoughts upon the matter passed idly through his mind within the duration of a single second – that the poet was an intimate friend of the house.

      Lothian was closing the door, and Toftrees was sinking back into his chair, when the latter happened to glance at his host.

      Amberley, still standing, was watching Lothian – there was no other word which would correctly describe the big man's attitude – and Toftrees felt strangely uneasy. Something seemed tapping nervously at the door of his mind. He heard the furtive knocking, half realised the name of the thought that timidly essayed an entrance, and then resolutely crushed it.

      Such a thing was quite impossible, of course.

      The four men sat down, more closely grouped together than before.

      The coffee, which had been served by a footman, before the ladies had disappeared, was a pretence in cups no bigger than plovers' eggs. Amberley liked the modern affectation of his women guests remaining at the table and sharing the joys of the after-dinner-hour. But now, the butler entered with larger cups and a tray of liqueurs, while the host himself poured out a glass of port and handed the old-fashioned cradle in which the bottle lay to young Dickson Ingworth on his right.

      That curly-headed youth, who was a Pembroke man and knew the ritual of the Johnsonian Common Room at Oxford, gravely filled his own glass and pushed the bottle to Herbert Toftrees, who was in the vacated seat of his hostess, and pouring a little Perrier water into a tumbler.

      The butler lifted the wicker-work cradle with care, passed behind Toftrees, and set it before Gilbert Lothian.

      Lothian looked at it for a moment and then made a decisive movement of his head.

      "Thank you, no," he said, after a second's consideration, and in a voice that was slightly high-pitched but instinct with personality – it could never have been mistaken for any one else's voice, for instance – "I think I will have a whiskey and soda."

      Toftrees, at the end of the table, within two feet of Lothian, gave a mental start. The popular novelist was rather confused.

      A year ago no one had heard of Gilbert Lothian – that was not a name that counted in any way. He had been a sort of semi-obscure journalist who signed what he wrote in such papers as would print him. There were a couple of novels to his name which had obtained a sort of cult among minor people, and, certainly, some really eminent weeklies had published very occasional but signed reviews.

      As far as Herbert Toftrees could remember – and his jealous memory was good – Lothian had always been rather small beer until a year or so back.

      And then "Surgit Amari" – the first book of poems had been published.

      In a single month Lothian had become famous.

      For the ringing splendour of his words echoed in every heart. In this book, and in a subsequent volume, he had touched the very springs of tears. Not with sentiment – with the very highest and most electric literary art – he had tried and succeeded in irradiating the happenings of domestic life in the light that streamed from the Cross.

      ".. Thank you, no. I think I will have a whiskey and soda."

      CHAPTER II

      GRAVELY UNFORTUNATE OCCURRENCE IN MRS. AMBERLEY'S DRAWING ROOM

      "Μιοω μνημονα ουμποτην, Procille."

– Martial.

      – "One should not always take after-dinner amenities au pied de la lettre."

– Free Translation.

      Toftrees, at the head of the table, shifted his chair a little so that he was almost facing Gilbert Lothian.

      Lothian's arresting voice was quite clear as he spoke to the butler. "That's not the voice of a man who's done himself too well," the novelist thought. But he was puzzled, nevertheless. People like Lothian behaved pretty much as they liked, of course. Convention didn't restrain them. But the sudden request was odd.

      And there was that flourishing bow as the women left the room, and certainly Amberley had seemed to look rather strangely at his guest. Toftrees disposed himself to watch events. He had wanted to meet the poet for some time. There was a certain reason. No one knew much about him in London. He lived in the country and was not seen in the usual places despite his celebrity. There had been a good deal of surmise about this new star.

      Lothian was like the photographs which had appeared of him in the newspapers, but with a great deal more "personality" than these were able to suggest. Certainly no one looked less like a poet, though this did not surprise the popular novelist, in an age when literary men looked exactly like every one else. But there was not the slightest trace of idealism, of the "thoughts high and hard" that were ever the clear watchwords of his song. "A man who wears a mask," thought Herbert Toftrees with interest and a certain half-conscious fellow-feeling.

      The poet was of medium height and about thirty-five years of age. He was fat, with a broad-shouldered corpulence which would have been far less noticeable in a man who was a few inches taller. The clean-shaven face was fattish also, but there was, nevertheless, a curious suggestion of contour about it. It should have been a pure oval, and in certain lights it almost seemed that, while the fatness appeared to dissolve and fall away from it. It was a contour veiled by something that was, but ought not to have been, there.

      The eyes were grey and capable of infinite expression – a fact which always became apparent to any one who had been half an hour in his company. But this feature also was enigmatic. For the most part the eyes seemed to be working at half-power, not quite doing or being what one would have expected of them.

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