INGWORTH REDUX: TOFTREES COMPLACENS
"Les absents ont toujours tort."
--_Proverb._
Mr. Herbert Toftrees was at work in the splendidly furnished library of
his luxuriously appointed flat at Lancaster Gate--or at least that is
how he would have put it in one of his stories, while, before _her_
Remington in the breakfast room Mrs. Herbert Toftrees would have rapped
out a detailed description of the furniture.
The morning was dark and foggy. The London pavements had that
disgustingly cold-greasy feeling beneath the feet that pedestrians in
town know well at this time of year.
Within the library, with its double windows that shut out all noise, a
bright fire of logs burned in the wide tiled hearth. One electric
pendant lit the room and another burned in a silver lamp upon the huge
writing table covered with crimson leather at which the author sat.
The library was a luxurious place. The walls were covered with
books--mostly in series. The Complete Scott, the Complete Dickens, the
Complete Thackeray reposed in gilded fatness upon the shelves. Between
the door and one of the windows one saw every known encyclopedia, upon
another wall-space were the shelves containing those classical French
novels with which "culture" is supposed to have a nodding
acquaintance--in translations.
Toftrees threw away his cigarette and sank into his padded chair. The
outside world was raw and cold. Here, the fire of logs was red, the
lamps threw a soft radiance throughout the room, and the keyboard of
the writing-machine had a dapper invitation.
"Confound it, I _must_ work," Toftrees said aloud, and at once
proceeded to do so.
To his left, upon the table, in something like an exaggerated menu
holder was a large piece of white cardboard. At the moment Toftrees and
his wife were engaged in tossing off "Claire" which went into its fifth
hundred thousand, at six-pence, within the year.
The sheet of cardboard bore the names of the principal characters in
the story, and what they looked like, in case the prolific author
should forget. There was also marked upon the card, in red ink, exactly
how far Toftrees had got with the plot--which was copied out in large
round hand, for instant reference, by his secretary upon another card.
Clipped on to the typewriter was a note which ran as follows:
Chapter VII. Book V. Love scene between Claire and Lord Quinton. To
run, say, 2,000 words. Find Biblical chapter caption. Mrs. T. at
work on Chapter 145 in epilogue--discovery by Addie that Lord Q is
really John Boone.
With experienced eyes, Toftrees surveyed the morning's work-menu as
arranged by Miss Jones from painstaking scrutiny and dovetailing of the
husband and wife's work on the preceding day.
"Biblical chapter caption"--that should be done at once.
Toftrees stretched out his hand and took down a "Cruden's Concordance."
It was nearly two years ago now that he had discovered the Bible as an
almost unworked mine for chapter headings.
"Love! hm, hm, hm,--why not 'Love one another'--? Yes, that would do.
It was simple, direct, and expressed the sentiment of chapter VII. If
there were any reason against it Miss Jones would spot it at once. She
would find another quotation and so make it right."
Now then, to work!
"Claire, I am leaving here the day after to-morrow."
"Yes?"
"Have you no idea, cannot you guess what it is that I have come to
say to you?" He moved nearer to her and for a moment rested his
hand on her arm.
"I have no idea," she told him with great gravity of manner.
"I have come to ask you to be my wife. Ah, wait before you bid me
be silent. I love you--you surely cannot have failed to see
that?--I love you, Claire!"
"Do not," she interrupted, putting up a warning hand. "I cannot
hear you."
"But you must. Forgive me, you shall. I love you as I never loved
any woman in my life, and I am asking you to be my wife."
"You do me much honour, Lord Quinton," she returned--and was it his
fancy that made it seem to him that her lips curled a little?--"but
the offer you make me I must refuse."
"Refuse!" There was almost amusing wonder and a good deal of anger
in his tone and look.
"You force me to repeat the word--refuse."
"And why?"
"I do not want to marry you."
"You do not love me?"--incredulously.
"I do not love you,"--colouring slightly.
"But I would teach you, Claire"--catching her arm firmly in his
hold now and drawing her to him,--"I would teach you. I can give
you all and more of wealth and luxury than----"
"Hush! And please let go my arm. If you could give me the world it
would make no difference."
"Claire, reconsider it! During the whole of my life I have never
really wanted to marry any other woman. I will own that I have
flirted and played at love."
"No passport to my favour, I assure you, Lord Quinton."
"Pshaw! I tell you women were all alike to me, all to be amusing
and amused with, all so many butterflies till I met you. I won't
mind admitting"--making his most fatal step--"that even when I
first saw you--and it was not easy to do considering Warwick Howard
kept you well in the background--I only thought of your sweet eyes
and lovely face. But after--after--Oh, Claire, I learned to love
you!"
"Enough!" cried the girl--
And enough also said the Remington, for the page was at an end.
Toftrees withdrew it with a satisfied smile and glanced down it.
"Yes!" he thought to himself, "the short paragraph, the quick
conversation, that's what they really want. A paragraph of ten
consecutive lines would frighten them out of their lives. Their minds
wouldn't carry from the beginning to the end. We know!"
At that moment there was a knock at the door and the butler entered.
Smithers was a good servant and he enjoyed an excellent place, but it
was the effort of his life to conceal from his master and mistress that
he read Shakespeare in secret, and, in that household, his sense of
guilt induced an almost furtive manner which Toftrees could never quite
understand.
"Mr. Dickson Ingworth has called, sir," said Smithers.
"Ask him to come in," Toftrees said in his deep voice, and with a glint
of interest in his eye.
Young Dickson Ingworth had been back from his journalistic mission to
Italy for two or three weeks. His articles in the "Daily Wire" had
attracted a good deal of attention. They were exceedingly well done,
and Herbert Toftrees was proud of his protégé. He did not know--no one
knew--that the Denstone master on the committee was a young man with a
vivid and picturesque style who had early realised Ingworth's
incompetence as mouthpiece of the expedition and representative of the
Press. The young gentleman in question, anxious only for the success of
the mission, had written nearly all Ingworth's stuff for him, and that
complacent parasite was now reaping the reward.
But there was another, and greater, reason for Toftrees' welcome. Old
Mr. Ingworth had died while his nephew was in Rome. The young man was
now a squire in Wiltshire, owner of a pleasant country house, a
personage.
"Ask Mr. Dickson Ingworth in here," Toftrees said again.
Ingworth came into the library.
He wore a morning coat and carried a silk hat--the tweeds and bowler of
bohemia discarded now. An unobtrusive watch chain of gold had taken the
place of the old silver-buckled lip-strap, and a largish black pearl
nestled in the folds of his dark tie.
He seemed, in some subtle way, to have expanded and become less boyish.
A certain gravity and dignity sat well upon his fresh good looks and
the slight hint of alien blood in his features was less noticeable than
ever.
Toftrees shook his young friend warmly by the hand. The worthy author
was genuinely pleased to see the youth. He had done him a good service
recently, pleased to exercise patronage of course, but out of pure
kindness. Ingworth would not require any more help now, and Toftrees
was glad to welcome him in a new relation.
Toftrees murmured a word or two of sorrow at Ingworth's recent
bereavement and the bereaved one replied with suitable gravity. His
uncle's sudden death had been a great grief to him. He would have given
much to have been in England at the time.
"And the end?" asked Toftrees in a low voice of sympathy.
"Quite peaceful, I am glad to say, quite peaceful."
"That must be a great consolation!"
This polite humbug disposed of, both men fell immediately into bright,
cheerful talk.
The new young squire was bubbling over with exhilaration, plans for the
future, the sense of power, the unaccustomed and delightful feeling of
solidity and _security_.
He told his host, over their cigars, that the estate would bring him in
about fifteen or sixteen hundred a year; that the house was a fine old
Caroline building--who his neighbours were, and so on.
"Then I suppose you'll give up literature?" Toftrees asked.
Dickson Ingworth was about to assent in the most positive fashion to
this question, when he remembered in whose presence he was, and his
native cunning--"diplomacy" is the better word for a man with a
Caroline mansion and sixteen hundred a year--came to his aid.
"Oh, no," he said, "not entirely. I couldn't, you know. But I shall be
in a position now only to do my best work!"
Toftrees assented with pleasure. The trait interested him.
"I'm glad of that," he said. "To the artist, life without expression is
impossible." Toftrees spoke quite sincerely. Although his own
production was not of a high order he was quite capable of genuine
appreciation of greater and more serious writers. It does not
follow--as shallow thinkers tell us--that because a man does not follow
his ideal that he is without one at all.
They smoked cigars and talked. As a matter of form the host offered
Ingworth a drink, which was refused; they were neither of them men who
took alcohol between meals from choice.
They chatted upon general matters for a time.
"And what of our friend the Poet?" Toftrees asked at length, with a
slight sneer in his voice.
Ingworth flushed up suddenly and a look of hate came into his curious
eyes. The acute man of the world noticed it in a second. Before
Ingworth had left for his mission in Italy, he had been obviously
changing his views about Gilbert Lothian. He had talked him over with
Toftrees in a depreciating way. Even while he had been staying at
Mortland Royal he had made confidences about Lothian's habits and the
life of his house in letters to the popular author--while he was eating
the Poet's salt.
But Toftrees saw now that there was something deeper at work. Was it,
he wondered, the old story of benefits forgot, the natural instinct of
the baser type of humanity to bite the hand that feeds?
Toftrees knew how lavish with help and kindness Lothian had been to
Dickson Ingworth. For himself, he detested Lothian. The bitter epigrams
Lothian had made upon him in a moment of drunken unconsciousness were
by no means forgotten. The fact that Lothian had probably never meant
them was nothing. They had some truth in them. They were uttered by a
superior mind, they stung still.
"Oh, he's no friend of mine," Ingworth said in a bitter voice.
"Really? I know, of course, that you have disapproved of much that Mr.
Lothian seems to be doing just now, but I thought you were still
friends. It is a pity. Whatever he may do, there are elements of
greatness in the man."
"He is a blackguard, Toftrees, a thorough blackguard."
"I _am_ sorry to hear that. Well, you needn't have any more to do with
him, need you? He isn't necessary to your literary career any more. And
even if you had not come into your inheritance, your Italian work has
put you in quite a different position."
Ingworth nodded. He puffed quickly at his cigar. He was bursting with
something, as the elder and shrewder man saw, and if he was not
questioned he would come out with it in no time.
There was silence for a space, and, as Toftrees expected, it was broken
by Ingworth.
"Look here, Toftrees," he said, "you are discreet and I can trust you."
The other made a grave inclination of his head--it was coming now!
"Very well. I don't want to say anything about a man whom I have liked,
and who _has_ been kind to me. But there are times when one really must
speak, whatever the past may have been--aren't there?"
Toftrees saw the last hesitation and removed it.
"Oh, he'll get over that drinking habit," he said, though he knew well
that Ingworth was not bursting with that alone. "It's bad, of course,
that such a man should drink. I was horribly upset--and so was my
wife--at that dinner at the Amberleys'. But he'll get over it. And
after all you know--poets!"
"It isn't that, Toftrees. It's a good deal worse than that. In fact I
really do want your advice."
"My dear fellow you shall have it. We are friends, I hope, though not
of long standing. Fire away."
"Well, then, it's just this. Lothian's wife is one of the most perfect
women I have ever met. She adores him. She does everything for him,
she's clever and good looking, sympathetic and kind."
Toftrees made a slight, very slight, movement of repugnance. He was a
man who was temperamentally well-bred, born into a certain class of
life. He might make a huge income by writing for housemaids at
sixpence, but old training and habit became alive. One did not listen
to intimate talk about other men's wives.
But the impulse was only momentary, a result of heredity. His interest
was too keen for it to last.
"Yes?"
"Lothian doesn't care a bit for his wife--he can't. I know all about
it, and I've seen it. He's doing a most blackguardly thing. He's
running after a girl. Not any sort of girl, but a _lady_."--
Toftrees grinned mentally, he saw how it was at once with the lad.
"No?" he said.
"Indeed, yes. She's a sweet and innocent girl whom he's getting round
somehow or other by his infernal poetry and that. He's compromising her
horribly and she can't see it. I've, I've seen something of her lately
and I've tried to tell her as well as I could. But she doesn't take me
seriously enough. She's not really in love with Lothian--I don't see
how any young and pretty girl could really be in love with a man who
looks like he's beginning to look. But they write--they've been about
together in the most dreadfully compromising way. One never knows how
far it may go. For the sake of the nicest girl I have ever known it
ought to be put a stop to."
Toftrees smiled grimly. He knew who the girl was now, and he saw how
the land lay. Young Ingworth was in love and frightened to death of his
erstwhile friend's influence over the girl. That was natural enough.
"Suppose any harm were to come to her," Ingworth continued with
something very like a break in his voice. "She's quite alone and
unprotected. She is the daughter of a man who was in the Navy, and now
she has to earn her own living as an assistant librarian in Kensington.
A man like Lothian who can talk, and write beautiful letters--damned
scoundrel and blackguard!"
Toftrees was not much interested in his young friend's stormy
love-affairs. But he _was_ interested in the putting of a spoke
into Gilbert Lothian's wheel. And he had a genuine dislike and disgust
of intrigue. A faithful husband to a faithful wife whose interests were
identical with his, the fact of a married man of his acquaintance
running after some little typewriting girl whose people were not alive
to look after her, seemed abominable. Nice girls should not be used so.
He thought of dodges and furtive meetings, sly telephone calls, and
anxious country expeditions with a shudder. And if he thanked God that
he was above these things, it was perhaps not a pharisaical gratitude
that animated him.
"Look here," he said suddenly. "You needn't go on, Ingworth. I know who
it is. It's Miss Wallace, of the Podley Library. She was at the
Amberleys' that night when Lothian made such a beast of himself. She
writes a little, too. Very pretty and charming girl!"
Ingworth assented eagerly. "Yes!" he cried, "that's just it! She's
clever. She's intrigued by Lothian. She doesn't _love_ him, she
told me so yesterday----"
He stopped, suddenly, realising what he had said.
Toftrees covered his confusion in a moment. Toftrees wanted to see this
to the end.
"No, no," he said with assumed impatience. "Of course, she knows that
Lothian is married, and, being a decent girl, she would never let her
feelings--whatever they may be--run away with her. She's dazzled.
That's what it is, and very natural, too! But it ought to be stopped.
As a matter of fact, Ingworth, I saw them together at the Metropole at
Brighton one night. They had motored down together. And I've heard that
they've been seen about a lot in London at night. Most people know
Lothian by sight, and such a lovely girl as Miss Wallace everyone looks
at. From what I saw, and from what I've heard, they are very much in
love with each other."
"It's a lie," Ingworth answered. "She's not in love with him. I know
it! She's been led away to compromise herself, poor dear girl, that's
all."
Now, Toftrees arose in his glory, so to speak.
"I'll put a stop to it," he said. The emperor of the sixpenny market
was once more upon his virtuous throne.
His deep voice was rich with promise and power.
"I know Mr. Podley," he said. "I have met him a good many times lately.
We are on the committee of the 'Pure Penny Literature Movement.' He is
a thoroughly good and fatherly man. He's quite without culture, but his
instincts are all fine. I will take him aside to-night and tell him of
the danger--you are right, Ingworth, it is a real and subtle danger for
that charming girl--that his young friend is in. Podley is her patron.
She has no friends, no people, I understand. She is dependent for her
livelihood upon her place at the Kensington Library. He will tell her,
and I am sure in the kindest way, that she must not have anything more
to do with our Christian poet, or she will lose her situation."
Ingworth thought for a moment. "Thanks awfully," he said, almost
throwing off all disguise now. Then he hesitated--"But that might
simply throw her into Lothian's arms," he said.
Toftrees shook his head. "I shall put it to Mr. Podley," he said, "and
he, being receptive of other people's ideas and having few of his own,
will repeat me, to point out the horrors of a divorce case, the utter
ruin if Mrs. Lothian were to take action."
Ingworth rose from his seat.
"To-night?" he said. "You're to see this Podley to-night?"
"Yes."
"Then when do you think he will talk to Rit--to Miss Wallace?"
"I think I can ensure that he will do so before lunch to-morrow
morning."
"You will be doing a kind and charitable thing, Toftrees," Ingworth
answered, making a calculation which brought him to the doors of the
Podley Institute at about four o'clock on the afternoon of the morrow.
Then he took his leave, congratulating himself that he had moved
Toftrees to his purpose. It was an achievement! Rita would be
frightened now, frightened from Gilbert for ever. The thing was already
half done.
"Mine!" said Mr. Dickson Ingworth to himself as he got into a taxi-cab
outside Lancaster Gate.
"I think I shall cook master Lothian's goose very well to-night,"
Herbert Toftrees thought to himself.
Mixed motives on both sides.
Half bad, perhaps, half good. Who shall weigh out the measures but God?
Ingworth was madly in love with Rita Wallace, who had become very fond
of him. He was young, handsome, was about to offer her advantageous and
honourable marriage.
Ingworth's passion was quite good and pure. Here he rose above himself.
"All's fair"--treacheries grow small when they assist one's own desire
and can be justified upon the score of morality as well.
Toftrees was outside the fierce burning of flames beyond his
comprehension.
He was a cog-wheel in the machinery of this so swiftly-weaving loom.
But he also paid himself both ways--as he felt instinctively.
He and his wife owed this upstart and privately disreputable poet a rap
upon the knuckles. He would administer it to-night.
And it was a _duty_, no less than a fortunate opportunity, to save
a good and charming girl from a scamp.
When Toftrees told his wife all about it at lunch that morning she
quite agreed, and, moreover, gave him valuable feminine advice as to
the conduct of the private conversation with Podley.