Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/176

158 flood. A poet and no man is a crushed worm endowed with understanding.

A tinkling hansom drew up at the door, and a moment after a well-dressed man came lightly up the stairs. He welcomed himself with a breezy confidence that suited well with his pleasant voice and handsome face, lighted all the candles he could find in his friend's store-cupboard and, finally, reclined upon the bed; while his host, without any remonstrance against these revolutionary proceedings, hastened to produce a bottle, a couple or tumblers, and a half-empty box of his visitor's own cigars.

The brave shine of seventeen candles (ingeniously fastened to the mantelboard with a drop of their own wax) revealed a notable contrast between the friends, suggesting the not uncommon circumstance of an intimacy cemented by contrasting traits. The new comer was a man of extremely advantageous exterior; his masculine beauty of a type that is familiar among Englishmen, but seldom so perfectly exampled. Longton, on the other side, was contemptibly plain; nor was his barbarous shapelessness of parts redeemed even by such ensign of superior intelligence as he might justly have claimed to distinguish him from the general man. His mean face was dingy with a three days growth; the opening of his coarse lips disclosed sparse fragments of discoloured teeth; his eyes shone with a distressful expression of diffidential self-esteem; the greasy skin was unpleasantly diversified with patches of unwholesome red. His accustomed bearing was characterised by a deference that was servile without being humble; but among the few with whom he was intimate he betrayed a self-assertive petulance which might not be confounded with courage. That Freddy Beaumont, in spite of these defects, had never ceased to revere and to befriend the solitary creature was the most amiable feature in his otherwise tolerably selfish and purposeless life.

Rh