The Drunkard. Thorne Guy
for you, isn't it? Is the boy a genius then?"
Amberley shook his head. He hated everything the worthy Toftrees wrote – he had never been able to read more than ten lines of any of the half-dozen books he had published for them. But the Hanover Square side of him had a vast respect for the large sums the couple charmed from the pockets of the public no less than the handsome percentage they put into his own. And a confidential word on business matters with a pretty and pleasant little woman was not without allurement even under the Waggon-roof itself.
"Not at all. Not at all," he murmured into a pretty ear. "We are not paying the lad any advance upon royalties!" He laughed a well-fed laugh. "Ince and Amberley's list," he continued, "is accepted for itself!"
Mrs. Toftrees smiled back at him. "Of course," she murmured. "But I wasn't thinking of the financial side of it. Why? .. why are you departing from your usual traditions and throwing the shadow of your cloak over this fortunate boy? – if I may ask, of course!"
"Well," Amberley answered, and her keen ear detected – or thought that she detected – a slight reluctance in his voice… "Well, Lothian brought him to me, you know."
Mrs. Toftrees' face changed and Amberley saw it.
She was looking down the table to where Lothian was sitting. Her face was a little flushed, and the expression upon it – though not allowed to be explicit – was by no means agreeable. "Lothian's work is very wonderful," she said – and there was a question in her voice " – you think so, Mr. Amberley?"
Bryanstone Square, the Dining Room, asserted itself. Truth to tell, Amberley felt a little uncomfortable and displeased with himself. The fun of the dinner table – the cigarette moment – had rather escaped him. He had got young people round him to-night. He wanted them to be jolly. He had meant to be a good host, to forget his dignities, to unbend and be jolly with them – this fiction-mongering woman was becoming annoying.
"I certainly do, Mrs. Toftrees," he replied, with dignity, and a distinct tone of reproof in his voice.
Mrs. Toftrees, the cool tradeswoman, gave the great man a soothing smile of complete understanding and agreement.
Mr. Amberley turned to a girl upon his left who had been taken in by Dickson Ingworth and who had been carrying on a laughing conversation with him during dinner.
She was a pretty girl, a friend of his daughter Muriel. He liked pretty girls, and he smiled half paternally, half gallantly at her.
"Won't you have another cigarette, Miss Wallace?" he said, pushing a silver box towards her. "They are supposed to be rather wonderful. My cousin Eustace Amberley is in the Egyptian Army and an aide-de-camp to the Khedive. The Khedive receives the officers every month and every one takes away a box of five hundred when they leave the palace – His Highness' own peculiar brand. These are some of them, which Eustace sent me."
"May I?" she answered, a rounded, white arm stretched out to the box. "They certainly are wonderful. I have to be content with Virginian at home. I buy fifty at a time, and a tin costs one and threepence."
She lit it delicately from the little methyl lamp he passed her, and the big man's kind eyes rested on her with appreciation.
She was, he thought, very like a Madonna of Donatello, which he had seen and liked in Florence. The abundant hair was a dark nut-brown, almost chocolate in certain lights. The eyes were brown also, the complexion the true Italian morbidezza, pale, but not pallid, like a furled magnolia bud. And the girl's mouth was charming – "delicious" was the word in the mind of this connoisseur. It was as clear-cut as that of a girl's face in a Grecian frieze of honey-coloured travertine, there was a serene sweetness about it. But when she smiled the whole face was changed. The young brown eyes lit up and visited others with their own, as a bee visits flowers. The smile was radiant and had a conscious provocation in it. The paleness of the cheeks showed such tints of pearl and rose that they seemed carved from the under surface of a sea-shell.
And, as Amberley looked, wishing that he had talked more to her during dinner, startled suddenly to discover such loveliness, he saw her lips suddenly glow out into colour in an extraordinary way. It wasn't scarlet – unpainted lips are never really that – but of the veiled blood-colour that is warm and throbs with life; a colour that hardly any of the names we give to pigment can properly describe or fix.
What did he know about her? he asked himself as she was lighting her second cigarette. Hardly anything! She was a girl friend of his daughter's – they had been to the same school together at Bath – an orphan he thought, without any people. She earned her own living – assistant Librarian, he remembered, at old Podley's library. Yes, Podley the millionaire nonconformist who was always endowing and inventing fads! And Muriel had told him that she wrote a little, short stories in some of the women's papers..
"At any rate," he said, while these thoughts were flashing through his mind "you smoke as if you liked it! All the girls smoke now, Muriel is inveterate, but I often have a suspicion that many of them do it because it's the fashion."
Rita Wallace gave a wise little shake of her head.
"Oh, no," she answered. "Men know so little about girls! You think we're so different from you in lots of things, but we aren't really. Muriel and I always used to smoke at school – it doesn't matter about telling now, does it?"
Mr. Amberley made a mock expression of horror.
"Good heavens!" he said, "what appalling revelations for a father to endure! I wish I had had an inkling of it at the time!"
"You couldn't have, Mr. Amberley," she answered, and her smile was more provocative than ever, and delightfully naughty. "We used to do it in the bathroom. The hot vapour from the bath took all the smell of tobacco away. I discovered that!"
"Tell me some more, my dear. What other iniquities did you all perpetrate – and I thought Muriel such a pattern girl."
"Oh, we did lots of things, Mr. Amberley, but it wouldn't be fair to give them away. We were little devils, nearly all of us!"
She gave him a little Parisian salute from the ends of her eyelids, instinct with a kind of impish innocence, the sort of thing that has an irresistible appeal to a middle-aged man of the world.
"Muriel!" Mr. Amberley said to his daughter, "Miss Wallace has been telling me dreadful things about your schooldays. I am grieved and pained!"
Muriel Amberley was a slim girl with dark smouldering eyes and a faint enigmatic smile. Her voice was very clear and fresh and there was a vibrant note in it like the clash of silver bells. She had been talking to Mrs. Toftrees, but she looked up as her father spoke.
"Don't be a wretch, Cupid!" she said, to Rita Wallace over the table.
"Cupid? Why Cupid?" Herbert Toftrees asked, in his deep voice.
"Oh, it's a name we gave her at school," Muriel answered, looking at her friend, and both girls began to laugh.
Mr. Amberley re-engaged the girl in talk.
"You have done some literary work, have you not?" he asked kindly, and in a lower voice.
Again her face changed. Its first virginal demureness, the sudden flashing splendour of her smile, had gone alike. It became eager and wistful too.
"You can't call it that, Mr. Amberley," she replied in a voice pitched to his own key. "I've written a few stories which have been published and I've had three articles in the Saturday edition of the Westminster– that's nearly everything. But I can't say how I love it all! It is delightful to have my work among books – at the Podley Library you know. I learned typewriting and shorthand and was afraid that I should have to go into a city office – and then this turned up."
She hesitated for a moment, and then stopped shyly. He could see that the girl was afraid of boring him. A moment before, she had been perfectly collected and aware – a girl in his own rank of life responsive to his chaff. Now she realised that she was speaking of things very near and dear to her – and speaking of them to a high-priest of those Mysteries she loved – one holding keys to unlock all doors.
He took her in a moment, understood the change of mood and expression, and it was