In his heart of hearts the boy knew himself for what he was. But his good looks, his youth--most valuable a.s.set of all!--and the fact that he would some day have some sort of settled position, enabled him to rub along pretty well for the time.

Without much real harm in him--he was too lacking in temperament to be really wicked--he was as cunning as an ape and justified his good opinions of his cleverness by the fact that his laborious little tricks constantly succeeded. He was always achieving infinitesimal successes.

He had marked out Gilbert Lothian, for instance, and had succeeded in making a friend of him easily enough.

Lothian rarely thought ill of any one and any one could take him in. To do Ingworth justice he liked Lothian very much, and really admired him.

He did not understand him in the least. His poems were rather worse Greek to him than the Euripidean choruses he had learnt by heart at school. At the same time it was a great thing to be Fidus Achates to the poet of the moment, and it was extremely convenient--also--to have a delightful country house to retire to when one was hard up, and a patron who not only introduced one to editors, but would lend five pounds as a matter of course.

Perhaps there was really some Eastern taint in the young fellow"s blood. At any rate he was sly by nature, had a good deal of undeveloped capability for treachery latent within him, and, encouraged by success, was becoming a marked parasite.

Lazy by nature, he soon discovered how easy it was--to take one example--to look up the magazines of three years back, steal a situation or a plot, adapt it to the day, and sell it for a guinea or two. His small literary career had hitherto been just that. If he had been put upon the rack he could not have confessed to an original thought. And it was the same in many other aspects of his life. He made himself useful. He was always sympathetic and charming to some wife in Bohemia who bewailed the inconstancy of her husband, and earned the t.i.tle of a "nice, good-hearted boy." On the next evening he would gladly sup with the husband and the chorus girl who was the cause of the trouble, and flatter them both.

Master d.i.c.kson Ingworth, it will be seen, was by no means a person of fine nature. He was simply very young, without any sort of ideals save the gratification of the moment, and would, no doubt, become a decent member of society in time.

In a lower rank of life, and without the comfortable inheritance which awaited him, he would probably have become a sneak-thief or a blackmailer in a small way.

In the event, he was destined to live a happy and fairly popular life in the Wiltshire Grange, and to die a much better man than he was at two and twenty. He was not to repent of, but to forget, all the calculated meannesses of his youth, and at fifty he would have shown any one to the door with horror who suggested a single one of the tricks that he had himself been guilty of in his youth.

And, parasite always, he is displayed here because of the part he is destined to take in the drama of Gilbert Lothian"s life.

"I"ve been seeing a good deal of Toftrees lately, Gilbert," Ingworth said with a side glance.

Lothian looked up from his reverie.

"What? Oh, yes!--the Toftrees. Nice chap, Toftrees, I thought, when I met him the other night. Awfully clever, don"t you think, to get hold of such an enormous public? Mind you, d.i.c.ker, I wouldn"t give one of his books to any one if I could help it. But that"s because I want every one to care for real literature. That"s my own personal standpoint. Apart from that, I do think that Mr. and Mrs. Toftrees deserve all they get in the way of money and popularity and so on.

There must be such people under the modern conditions, and apart from their work they both seem most interesting."

This took the wind from the young man"s sails. He was sensitive enough to perceive--though not to appreciate--the largeness of such an att.i.tude as this. He felt baffled and rather small.

Then, something that had been instilled into him by his new and influential friends not only provided an antidote to his momentary discomfiture but became personal to himself.

A sense of envy, almost of hate, towards this man who had been so consistently kind to him, bloomed like some poisonous and swift-growing fungus in his unstable mind.

"I say," he said maliciously, though there was fear in his voice, too, "Herbert Toftrees has got his knife into you, Gilbert."

Lothian looked at the young man in surprise. "Got his _knife into me_?"

he said, genuinely perplexed.

"Well, yes. He"s going about town saying all sorts of unpleasant things about you."

Lothian laughed. "Yes!" he said, "I remember! Miss Wallace told me so not long ago. How intensely amusing!"

Ingworth hated him at the moment. There was a disgusting sense of impotence and smallness, in that he could not sting Lothian.

"Toftrees is a very influential man in London," he said sententiously.

At that moment all the humour in Lothian awoke.

He leant back and laughed aloud.

"Oh, d.i.c.ker!" he said, "what a babe you are!"

Ingworth grew red. He was furious, but dared say nothing more. He felt as if he had been trying to bore a tunnel through the Alps with a boiled carrot and had wasted a franc in paying some one to hold his shadow while he made the attempt!

Lothian"s laughter was perfectly genuine. He cared absolutely nothing what Toftrees said or thought about him. But he did care about the young man at his side.

... The other Self, the new Ego, suddenly became awake and dominant.

Suspicion reared its head.

For days and days now he had drunk hardly anything. The anti-alcoholic medicines that Morton Sims had administered were gradually strengthening the enfeebled will and bringing back the real tenant of his soul. But now ...

Here was one whom he had thought his friend. It was not so then! An enemy sat by his side?--he would soon discover.

And then, with a skill which made the lad a plaything in his hands, with a cunning a hundred times deeper than Ingworth"s immature shiftiness, Lothian began his work.

But it was not the real Lothian. It was the adroit devil waked to life that set itself to the task as the dog-cart rattled into the little country town and drew up before the George Hotel in the Market Square.

"Thanks awfully, old chap," Lothian said cheerfully as they turned under the archway into the stable yard. "You"re a topping whip, you know, d.i.c.ker. I can"t drive a bit myself. But I like to see you."

For a moment Ingworth forgot his rancour at the praise. Unconscious of the dominant personality and the mental grin behind the words, he swallowed the compliment as a trout gulps a fly.

They descended from the trap and the stable-men began to unharness the cob. Lothian thrust his arm through the other"s. "Come along, Jehu!" he said. "I want a drink badly, and I"m sure you do, after the drive. I don"t care what you say, that cob is _not_ so easy to handle." ...

His voice was lost in the long pa.s.sage that led from the stable yard to the "saloon-lounge."

CHAPTER V

A QUARREL IN THE "MOST SELECT LOUNGE IN THE COUNTY"

"I strike quickly, being moved... . A dog of the house of Montague moves me."

--_Romeo and Juliet._

The George Hotel in Wordingham was a most important place in the life and economy of the little Norfolk town.

The town drank there.

In the handsome billiard room, any evening after dinner, one might find the solicitor, the lieutenant of the Coast-guards, in command of the district, a squire or two, Mr. Pashwhip and Mr. Moger the estate agents and auctioneers, Mr. Reeves the maltster and local J.P.--town, not county--and in fact all the local notabilities up to a certain point, including Mr. Helzephron, the landlord and Worshipful Master of the Wordingham Lodge of Freemasons for that year.

The Doctor, the Bank Manager and, naturally, the Rector, were the only people of consequence who did not "use the house" and make it their club. They were definitely upon the plane of gentlefolk and could not well do so. Accordingly they formed a little bridge playing coterie of their own, occasionally a.s.sisted by the Lieutenant, who preferred the Hotel, but made fugitive excursions into the somewhat politer society which was his _milieu_ by birth.

Who does not know them, these comfortable, respectable hotels in the High Streets or Market Places of small country towns? Yet who has pointed the discovering finger at them or drawn attention to the smug and _convenable_ curses that they are?

"There was a flaunting gin palace at the corner of the street,"--that is the sort of phrase you may read in half a hundred books. The holes and dens where working people get drunk, and issuing therefrom make night hideous at closing time, stink in the nostrils of every one. They form the texts and ill.u.s.trations of many earnest lectures, much fervent sermonizing. But nothing is said of the suave and well-conducted establishments where the prosperous inebriates of stagnant county towns meet to take their poison. When the doors of the George closed in Wordingham and its little coterie of patrons issued forth, gravely, pompously, a little unsteadily perhaps, to seek their homes, the Police Inspector touched his cap--"The gentlemen from the George, going home!"