A cunning murderer with a poisoned mind and body on one side, the brilliant young poet in the sunlight of success and high approbation upon the other!
Mystery of mysteries that G.o.d should allow so foul a thing to dominate and tangle the fair threads and delicate tissues of life!
"Well, that"s that!" said the doctor, in a phrase he was fond of using when he dosed an episode in his mind. "I"ll make my notes on Hanc.o.c.k"s case and forget it until I find it necessary to use them in my work.
And I"ll lock up the poems Moultrie has sent me and I won"t look at the book again for a month. Then I shall be able to read the verses for themselves and without any arriere-pensee.
"But, I wonder ... ?"
The brougham stopped at the doctor"s house in Russell Square.
BOOK ONE
LOTHIAN IN LONDON
"Myself, arch traitor to myself, My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe, My clog whatever road I go."
THE DRUNKARD
CHAPTER I
UNDER THE WAGGON-ROOF. A DINNER IN BRYANSTONE SQUARE
"Le veritable Amphitryon est l"Amphitryon ou l"on dine."
--_Moliere._
It was a warm night in July when Mr. Amberley, the publisher, entertained a few friends at dinner to meet Gilbert Lothian, the poet.
Although the evening was extremely sultry and the houses of the West End were radiating the heat which they had stored up from the sun-rays during the day, Mr. Amberley"s dining room was deliciously cool.
The house was one of those roomy old-fashioned places still to be found unspoiled in Bryanstone Square, and the dining room, especially, was notable. It was on the first floor, over-looking the square, a long and lofty room with a magnificent waggon-roof which was the envy of every one who saw it, and gave the place extraordinary distinction.
The walls were panelled with oak, which had been stained a curious green, that was not olive nor ash-green but partook of both--the veritable colour, indeed, of the grey-green olive trees that one sees on some terrace of the Italian Alps at dawn.
The pictures were very few, considering the size of the room, and they were all quite modern--"In the movement"--as shrewd Mr. Amberley was himself.
A portrait of Mrs. Amberley by William Nicholson, which was quite famous in its way, displayed all the severe pregnancy and almost solemn reserve of this painter. There was a pastel of Prydes" which showed--rather suggested--a squalid room in which a gentleman of 1800, with a flavour of Robert Macaire about him, stood in the full rays of the wine and honey-coloured light of an afternoon sun.
Upon yet another panel was a painting upon silk by Charles Conder, inspired of course, by Watteau, informed by that sad and haunting catching after a fairyland never quite reached, which is the distinctive note of Conder"s style, and which might well have served for an ill.u.s.tration to a grotesque fantasy of Heine.
Mrs. Amberley loved this painting. She had a Pater-like faculty of reading into--or from--a picture, something which the artist never thought about at all, and she used to call this little masterpiece "An Ode of Horace in Patch, Powder and Peruque!" She adored these perfectly painted little snuff-box deities who wandered through shadowy mists of amethyst and rouge-de-fer in a fantastic wood.
It is extremely interesting to discover, know of, or to sit at ease in a room which, in its way, is historic, and this is what the Amberleys"
guests always felt, and were meant to feel.
In its present form, and with its actual decorations, this celebrated room only dated from some fifteen years back. The Waggon-roof alone remained unaltered from its earlier periods.
The Publishing house of Ince and Amberley had been a bulwark of the Victorian era, and not without some growing celebrity in the earlier Georgian Period.
Lord Byron had spoken well of the young firm once, Rogers was believed to have advanced them money, and when that eminent Cornish pugilist "The Lamorna Cove" wrote his reminiscences they were published by Ince and Amberley, while old Lord Alvanley himself contributed a preface.
From small beginnings came great things. The firm grew and acquired a status, and about this time, or possibly a little later, the dining-room at Bryanstone Square had come into being.
Its walls were not panelled then in delicate green. They were covered with rich plum-coloured paper festooned by roses of high-gilt. In the pictures, with their heavy frames of gold, the dogs and stags of Landseer were let loose, or the sly sleek gipsies of Mr. Frith told rustic fortunes beneath the spreading chestnut trees.
But Browning had dined there--in the later times--an inextinguishable fire just covered with a sprinkling of grey ash. With solemn ritual, Charles d.i.c.kens had brewed milk punch in an old bowl of Lowestoft china, still preserved in the drawing-room. The young Robert Cecil, in his early _Sat.u.r.day Review_ days, had cracked his walnuts and sipped his "pint of port" with little thought of the high destiny to which he should come, and Alfred Tennyson, then Bohemian and unknown, had been allowed to vent that grim philosophy which is the reaction of all imaginative and sensitive natures against the seeming impossibility of success and being understood.
The traditions of Ince and Amberley--its dignified and quiet home was in Hanover Square--had always been preserved.
Its policy, at the same time, had continually altered with the pa.s.sage of years and the change of the public taste. Yet, so carefully, and indeed so genuinely, had this been accomplished that none of the historic prestige of the business had been lost. It still stood as a bulwark of the old dignified age. A young modern author, whatever his new celebrity, felt that to be published by Ince and Amberley hall-marked him as it were.
Younger firms, greedy of his momentary notoriety, might offer him better terms--and generally did--but Ince and Amberley conferred the Accolade!
He was admitted to the Dining Room.
John Amberley (the Inces had long since disappeared), at fifty was a great publisher, and a charming man of the world. He was one of the personalities of London, carrying out what heredity and natural apt.i.tude had fitted him to do, and was this evening entertaining some literary personages of the day in the famous Dining Room.
The Waggon-roof, which had looked down upon just such gatherings as these for generations, would, if it could have spoken, have discovered no very essential difference between this dinner party and others in the past. True, the walls were differently coloured and pictures which appealed to a different set of artistic conventions were hanging upon them.
The people who were accustomed to meet round the table in 19-- were not dressed as other gatherings had been. There was no huge silver epergne in the centre of that table now. Nor did the Amberley at one end of it display his mastery of ritual carving.
But the talk was the same. Words only were different. The guests"
vocabularies were wider and less restrained. It was the music of piano and the pizzicato plucking of strings--there was no pompous organ note, no ore rotundo any more. They all talked of what they had done, were doing, and hoped to do. There was a hurry of the mind, inherent in people of their craft and like a man running, in all of them. The eyes of some of them burned like restless ghosts as they tried to explain themselves, display their own genius, become prophets and acquire honour in the heart of their own country.
Yes! it had always been so!
The brightest and most lucent brains had flashed into winged words and illuminated that long handsome room.
And ever, at the head of the long table, there had been a bland, listening Amberley, catching, tasting and sifting the idea, a.n.a.lysing the const.i.tuents of the flash, balancing the brilliant theory against the momentary public taste. A kind, uncreative, managing Amberley! A fair and honest enough Amberley in the main. Serene, enthroned and necessary.
The publisher was a large man, broad in the shoulder and slightly corpulent. There was something Georgian about him--he cultivated it rather, and was delighted when pleated shirts became again fashionable for evening wear. He had a veritable face of the Regency, more especially in profile, sensual, fine, a thought gluttonous and markedly intelligent.
His voice was authoritative but bland, and frequently capable of a sympathetic interest which was almost musical. His love of letters was deep and genuine, his taste catholic and excellent, while many an author found real inspiration and intense pleasure in his personal praise.
This was the cultured and human side of him, and he had another--the shrewd business man of Hanover Square.
He was not, to use the slang of the literary agent, a "knifer." He paid die market price without being generous and he was perfectly honest in all his dealings.