In September Peter and Rhoda had a son, whom they called Thomas, because, Peter said, he had a sceptical look about the eyes and nose. Peter was pleased with him, and he with Peter. Rhoda wasn't much interested; she looked at him and said he was rather like Peter, and might be taken away now, please.
"Like me?" Peter wondered dubiously. "Well, I know I'm not handsome, but..."
Peggy, a born mother, took Thomas into her large heart at once, with her out-at-elbows infants, and was angry with Rhoda for not showing more interest.
"You'd think, from the way of her, that it was her thirteenth instead of her first," she complained to Hilary. "I've no patience with the silly, mooning child. She's nothing like good enough for Peter, and that's a fact, and she'd have a right to realise it and try to improve for very shame, instead of moping the way she does. It's my belief, Hilary, that her silly little heart's away after the Vyvian man, whatever haunt of wickedness he's adorning now. I don't want to believe it of her; but there's no end to the folly of the human heart, is there, now? I wish she was a Catholic and had a priest to make her take shame to herself; but there's no hold one has over her as it is, for she won't say a word to me beyond 'Yes' and 'No,' and 'Take him away, please, he tires me.' I nearly told her she'd a right not to be so easily tired by her own son now she's getting her health. But there, she's a poor frail thing and one can't speak roughly to her for fear she breaks in two."
Hilary said, "After all, there's no great cause for rejoicing in a man's being born into the world to trouble; I suppose she feels that. It will make it more difficult than ever for them and for us to make both ends meet."
"Oh, meet," groaned Peggy, "that's not what there's any thought of their doing in these days, my dear. If one can bring them within a mile of one another, one's thankful for small mercies."
Hilary rested his head on his hand and sighed.
"Have you spoken to Peter yet about appealing to the Urquharts?" he asked.
"Darling, I have not, and I'm not going to. Why should I annoy the poor child to no purpose? He'll not appeal to the Urquharts, we know that well, and I'm not going to waste my breath. I'd far rather—"
"What?" asked Hilary, as she paused.
"Oh well, I don't know. Don't you worry about ways and means; something will surely turn up before long." Peggy was an optimist.
"And anyhow," went on Peggy, to change the subject from ways and means, which was a depressing one, "isn't our little Peter a darling with his baby? I love to see them together. He washes it himself as often as not, you know; only he can't always catch it again when it slips through his hands, and that worries him. He's dreadfully afraid of its getting drowned or spoilt or lost or something."
"It probably will," said Hilary, who was a pessimist. "Peter is no hand at keeping things. We are not a fortunate family."
"Never mind, darling; we've kept three; and more by token Kittymusthave a new pair of boots this winter; she's positively indecent the way she goes about now. I can't help it, Hilary; you must pawn your ring again or something."
Peggy didn't want to say anything else depressing, so she didn't mention that Miss Matthews had that morning given notice of her departure. But in Peggy's own mind there was a growing realisation that something drastic must really be done soon.
October went by. When Peter knew that the Urquharts had come back to London, he wondered why Lucy didn't come to see Thomas. So he wrote and asked her to, and on that she came.
She came at tea-time, one day when Rhoda happened to have gone out. So Peter and Lucy had tea alone together, and Thomas lay in his crib and looked at them, and Algernon snored on Lucy's knee, and the November fog shut out the outer world like a blanket, and blurred the gas-light in the dingy room.
Peter thought Lucy was rather quiet and pale, and her chuckle was a little subdued. Her dominant aspect, of clear luminousness, was somehow dimmed and mystified, with all other lights, in this blurred afternoon. Her wide clear eyes, strange always with the world's gay wonder and mystery, had become eyes less gay, eyes that did not understand, that even shrank a little from what they could not understand. Lucy looked a touch puzzled, not so utterly the glad welcomer of all arriving things that she had always been.
But for Thomas, the latest arrived thing, she had a glad welcome. Like Peter, she loved all little funny weak things; and Thomas seemed certainly that, as he lay and blinked at the blurred gas and curled his fingers round one of Peter's. A happy, silent person, with doubts, one fancied, as to the object of the universe, but no doubts that there were to be found in it many desirable things.
When Lucy came in, Peter was reading aloud to him some of Traherne's "Divine Reflections on the Native Objects of an Infant-Eye," which he seemed rather to like.
"I that so long [Peter told him he was thinking,WasNothingfrom Eternity,Did little think such Joys as Ear and TongueTo celebrate or see:Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet,Such Eyes and Objects on the Ground to Meet."New burnisht Joys!Which finest Gold and Pearl excell!"
"I that so long [Peter told him he was thinking,WasNothingfrom Eternity,Did little think such Joys as Ear and TongueTo celebrate or see:Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet,Such Eyes and Objects on the Ground to Meet.
"New burnisht Joys!Which finest Gold and Pearl excell!"
"Oo," said Thomas expectantly.
"A Stranger here, [Peter told him further,Strange things doth meet, strange Glory see;Strange Treasures lodg'd in this fair World appear,Strange all and New to me:But that theymineshould be who Nothing was,Thatstrangest is of all; yet brought to pass."
"A Stranger here, [Peter told him further,Strange things doth meet, strange Glory see;Strange Treasures lodg'd in this fair World appear,Strange all and New to me:But that theymineshould be who Nothing was,Thatstrangest is of all; yet brought to pass."
"Ow," said Thomas, agreeing.
Peter turned over the pages. "Do you like it? Do you think so too? Here's another about you."
"But little did the Infant dreamThat all the Treasures of the World were by,And that himself was so the CreamAnd Crown of all which round about did ly.Yet thus it was!..."
"But little did the Infant dreamThat all the Treasures of the World were by,And that himself was so the CreamAnd Crown of all which round about did ly.Yet thus it was!..."
"I don't think you'd understand the rest of that verse, Thomas; it's rather more difficult. 'Yet thus it was!' We'll end there, and have our tea."
Turning his head he saw that Lucy had come in and was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at Thomas in his crib.
"Oh, Lucy," he said, "I'm reading to Thomas. Thomas is that. Do you like him? He is surprised at life, but quite pleased. He that wasNothingfrom Eternity did little think such Joys to celebrate or see. Yet thus it is. He is extraordinarily happy about it all, but he can't do anything yet, you know—not speak or sit up or anything. He can only make noises, and cry, and drink, and slither about in his bath like a piece of wet soap. Wasn't there a clergyman once who thought his baby ought to be baptised by immersion unless it was proved not well able to endure it, as it says in the rubric or somewhere, so he put it in a tub to try if it could endure it or not, and he let it loose by accident and couldn't catch it again, it was so slippery, just like a horrid little fish, and its mother only came in and got hold of it just in time to prevent its being drowned? So after that he felt he could honestly certify that the child couldn't well endure immersion. I'm getting better at catching Thomas, though. He isn't supposed to slip off my hand at all, but he kicks and slithers so I can't hold him, and swims away and gets lost. After tea will you come and help me wash him? Rhoda's out to tea; I'm so sorry. But there's tea, and Thomas and Algernon and me, and—and rather thick bread and butter only, apparently; but I shall have jam now you've come. First I must adjust Thomas's drinking-bottle; he always likes a drink while we have our tea. He's two months old. Is he good for that, do you think, or should he be a size larger? But I rather like them small, don't you? They're lighter so, for one thing. Is he nice? Do you like him?"
Lucy, kneeling by the crib, nodded.
"He's very old and wise, Peter; very old and gay. Look at his eyes. He's much—oh very much—older than you or me. That's as it should be."
"He'll rejuvenate with years, won't he?" said Peter. "At present he's too old to laugh when I make jokes; he thinks them silly; but he'll be sillier than anyone himself in about six months, I expect. Now we'll have tea."
Lucy left Thomas and came to the tea-table and poured out tea for both of them.
"I'm trying to learn to do without three lumps," said Peter, as Lucy put them in. "I expect it's extravagant to have three, really. But then Rhoda and Thomas don't take any, so it's only the same as if we each had one, isn't it. Thomas shan't be allowed more than one in each cup when he grows young enough to want any; Rhoda and I mean him to be a refined person."
"I don't think he will be," said Lucy, looking thoughtfully into the future. "I expect he'll be as vulgar as you and me. He's awfully like you to look at, Peter."
"So I am informed. Well, I'm not vain, and I don't claim to be an Adonis, like Denis. Is Denis flourishing? The birds were splendid; they came so thick and fast that I gathered it was being a remarkable season. But as you only answered my numerous letters by one, and that àpropos merely of Thomas's arrival, I could only surmise and speculate on your doings. I suppose you thought the grouse were instead of letters."
"They were Denis's letters.Ididn't shoot the grouse, dear darlings, nor send them."
"What were your letters, then?"
"Well, I sent rowan berries, didn't I? Weren't they red?"
"Yes. Even Thomas read them. We're being rather funny, aren't we? Is Denis going on with Parliament again this autumn, or has he begun to get tired of it?"
"Not a bit tired of it. He doesn't bother about it particularly, you know; not enough to tire himself; he sort of takes it for granted, like going up to Scotland in August."
Peter nodded. "I know. He would take it just like that if he was Prime Minister, or Archbishop of Canterbury. I daresay he will be one day; isn't it nice the way things drop into his hands without his bothering to get them."
He didn't see the queer, silent look Lucy turned on him as he spread his thick bread and butter with blackberry jam.
"Thomas," she said after a moment, "has dropped into your hands, Peter." It was as if she was protesting against something, beating herself against some invisible, eternal barrier that divided the world into two unequal parts.
Peter said, "Rather, he has. I do hope he'll never drop out. I'm getting very handy about holding him, though. Oh, let's take him upstairs and tub him now; do you mind?"
So they took him upstairs and tubbed him, and Lucy managed to hold him so firmly that he didn't once swim away and get lost.
As they were drying him (Lucy dried him with a firmer and more effective hand than Peter, who always wiped him very gingerly lest he should squash) Rhoda came in. She was strange-eyed and pale in the blurred light, and greeted Lucy in a dreamy, absent way.
"I've had tea out.... Oh, have you bathed baby? How good of you. I meant to be in earlier, but I was late.... The fog's awful; it's getting thicker and thicker."
She sat down by the fire and loosened her coat, and took off her hat and rubbed the fog from her wet hair, and coughed. Rhoda had grown prettier lately; she looked less tired and listless, and her eyes were brighter, and the fire flushed her thin cheek to rose-colour as she bent over it.
Peter took her wet things from her and took off her shoes and put slippers on her feet, and she gave him an absent smile. Rhoda had had a dreamy way with her since Thomas's birth; moony, as Peggy, who didn't approve, called it.
A little later, when Thomas was clean and warm and asleep in his bed, they were told that Mrs. Urquhart's carriage had come.
Lucy bent over Thomas and kissed him, then over Rhoda. Rhoda whispered in her ear, without emotion, "Baby ought to have been yours, not mine," and Lucy whispered back:
"Oh hush, hush!"
Rhoda still held her, still whispered, "Will you love him? Will you be good to him, always?"
And Lucy answered, opening wide eyes, "Why, of course. No one could help it, could they?" and on that Rhoda let her go.
Peter thought that Lucy must have infected Rhoda with some of her own appreciation of Thomas, opened her eyes to his true worth; for during the next week she was newly tender to him. She bathed him every evening herself, only letting Peter help a little; she held him in her arms without wearying of his weight, and wasn't really annoyed even when he was sick upon her shoulder, an unfortunate habit of Thomas's.
But a habit, Peter thought, that Thomas employed with some discrimination; for the one and only one time that Guy Vyvian took him in his arms—or rather submitted to his being put there by Rhoda—Thomas was sicker than he had ever been before, with an immense completeness.
"Just what I always feel myself," commented Peter in his own mind, as Thomas was hastily removed. "I'm glad someone has shown him at last what the best people feel about him."
Vyvian had come to call. It was the first time Peter had met him since his marriage; he hoped it would be the last. The object of the call was to inspect Thomas, Rhoda said. Thomas was inspected, produced the impression indicated above, and was relegated to the region of things for which Vyvian had no use. He detested infants; children of any sort, in fact; and particularly Thomas, who had Peter's physiognomy and expressed Peter's sentiments in a violently ill-bred way.
Peter, a little later, was very glad that Thomas had revealed himself thus openly on this occasion. For it quite sealed Thomas's fate, if anything more was needed to seal it than the fact that Thomas would be an impossible burden, and also belonged by right to Peter. Anyhow, they left Thomas behind them when they went.
Rhoda wrote a scrawled note for Peter one foggy Monday morning, and hugged Thomas close and cried a little, and slipped out into the misty city with a handbag. Peter, coming in at tea-time, found the note on the sitting-room chimney-piece. It said:—
Don't try to follow me, Peter, for I can't come back. Ihavetried to care for you more than him and be a good wife, but I can't. You know I told you when we got engaged that I cared for him, and I tried so hard to stop, and I thought I would be able, with you to help me, but I couldn't do it. For the first few months I thought I could, but all the time it was there, like a fire in me, eating me up; and later on he began writing to me, but for a long time I wouldn't answer, and then he came to see me, and I said he mustn't, but he's been meeting me out and I couldn't stop him, and at last it grew that I knew I loved him so that it was no use pretending any more. I'd better go, Peter, for what's the use of trying to be a good wife to you when all I care for is him. I know he's not good, and you are, but I love him, and I must go when he wants me. It was all a mistake; you and I ought never to have married. You meant it kindly, I know; you meant to help me and make me happy, but it was no use. You and I never properly belonged. When I saw you and Lucy together, I knew we didn't belong, not like that; we didn't properly understand each other's ways and thoughts, like you two did. I love Lucy, too. You and she are so like. And she'll be good to Baby; she said she would. I hate to leave Baby, but Guy won't let me bring him, and anyhow I suppose I couldn't, because he's yours. I've written a list of his feeds, and it's on the chimney-piece behind the clock; please make whoever sees to him go by it or he gets a pain. Please be careful when you bath him; I think Mrs. Adams had better do it usually. She'll take care of him for you, or Peggy will, perhaps. You'll think I never cared for him, but I do, I love him, only I must love Guy most of all. I don't know if I shall be happy or miserable, but I expect miserable, only I must go with Guy. Please, dear Peter, try and understand this, and forgive me. I think you will, because you always do understand things, and forgive them too; I think you are the kindest person I ever knew. If I thought you loved me really, I don't think I'd go, even for Guy; but I know you've only felt kindly to me all along, so I think it is best for you too that I should go, and you will be thankful in the end. Good-bye. You promised mother to see after me, I know, for she told me before she died; well, you've done your best, and mother'd be grateful to you if she could know. I suppose some would say she does know, perhaps; but I don't believe those stories; I believe it's all darkness beyond, and silence. And if it is, we must try and get all the light and warmth here that we can. So I'm going.Good-bye, Peter.Rhoda.
Don't try to follow me, Peter, for I can't come back. Ihavetried to care for you more than him and be a good wife, but I can't. You know I told you when we got engaged that I cared for him, and I tried so hard to stop, and I thought I would be able, with you to help me, but I couldn't do it. For the first few months I thought I could, but all the time it was there, like a fire in me, eating me up; and later on he began writing to me, but for a long time I wouldn't answer, and then he came to see me, and I said he mustn't, but he's been meeting me out and I couldn't stop him, and at last it grew that I knew I loved him so that it was no use pretending any more. I'd better go, Peter, for what's the use of trying to be a good wife to you when all I care for is him. I know he's not good, and you are, but I love him, and I must go when he wants me. It was all a mistake; you and I ought never to have married. You meant it kindly, I know; you meant to help me and make me happy, but it was no use. You and I never properly belonged. When I saw you and Lucy together, I knew we didn't belong, not like that; we didn't properly understand each other's ways and thoughts, like you two did. I love Lucy, too. You and she are so like. And she'll be good to Baby; she said she would. I hate to leave Baby, but Guy won't let me bring him, and anyhow I suppose I couldn't, because he's yours. I've written a list of his feeds, and it's on the chimney-piece behind the clock; please make whoever sees to him go by it or he gets a pain. Please be careful when you bath him; I think Mrs. Adams had better do it usually. She'll take care of him for you, or Peggy will, perhaps. You'll think I never cared for him, but I do, I love him, only I must love Guy most of all. I don't know if I shall be happy or miserable, but I expect miserable, only I must go with Guy. Please, dear Peter, try and understand this, and forgive me. I think you will, because you always do understand things, and forgive them too; I think you are the kindest person I ever knew. If I thought you loved me really, I don't think I'd go, even for Guy; but I know you've only felt kindly to me all along, so I think it is best for you too that I should go, and you will be thankful in the end. Good-bye. You promised mother to see after me, I know, for she told me before she died; well, you've done your best, and mother'd be grateful to you if she could know. I suppose some would say she does know, perhaps; but I don't believe those stories; I believe it's all darkness beyond, and silence. And if it is, we must try and get all the light and warmth here that we can. So I'm going.
Good-bye, Peter.
Rhoda.
Peter read it through, sitting on the rug by the fire. When he had finished it, he put it into the fire and watched it burn. Then he sighed, and sat very still for a while, his hands clasped round one knee.
Presently he got up and looked behind the clock, and saw that the next feeding-time was due now. So he rang for Mrs. Adams, the landlady, and asked her if she would mind bringing Thomas's bottle.
When Thomas had it, Peter stood and looked down upon him as he drank with ill-bred noises.
"Gently, Thomas: you'll choke. You'll choke and die, I know you will. Then you'll be gone too. Everything goes, Thomas. Everything I touch breaks; everything I try to do fails. That's because I'm such an ass, I suppose. I did think I could perhaps make one little unlucky girl decently happy; but I couldn't, you see. So she's gone after light and warmth, and she'll—she'll break her heart in a year, and it'll be my fault. Follow her? No, I shan't do that. I shouldn't find her, and if I did what would be the use? If she must go, she must; she was only eating her heart out here; and perhaps it's better to break one's heart on something than eat it out in emptiness. No, it isn't better in this case. Anything in the world would have been better than this; that she should have gone with that—that person. Yet thus it is. And they'll all set on her and speak against her, and I shall have to bear it. You and I will have to bear it together, Thomas.... I suppose I ought to be angry. I ought to want to go after them, to the end of the world or wherever they've gone and kill him and bring her back. But I can't. I should fail in that too. I'm tired of trying to do things; simply horribly tired of it, Thomas." He sat down on the rug with Thomas in his arms; and there, an hour later, Peggy found them. She swung in breezily, crying, "Oh, Peter, all alone in the dark? Where's Rhoda? Why, the silly children haven't had their tea!" she added, looking at the unused cups on the tea-table.
Peter looked up vaguely. "Oh, tea. I forgot. I don't think I want any tea to-day. And Thomas has had his. And Rhoda's gone. It's no good not telling you—is it?—because you'll find out. She's gone away. It's been my fault entirely; I didn't make her happy, you see. And she's written out a list of the times Thomas has to feed at. I suppose Mrs. Adams will do that if I ask her, and generally look after him when I'm out."
Peggy stood aghast before him for a moment, staring, then collapsed, breathless, on the sofa, crying, with even more r's than usual.
"Peter!... Why, she's gone and rrun off with that toad, that rreptile man! Oh, I know it, so it's not a bit of use your trying to keep it from me."
"Very well," said Peter; "I suppose it's not."
"Oh, the little fool, the little, silly, wicked fool! But if ever a little fool got her rich deserts without needing to wait for purgatory, that one'll be Rhoda.... Oh, Peter, be more excited and angry! Why aren't you stamping up and down and vowing vengeance, instead of sitting on the hearth saying, 'Rhoda's gone,' as if it was the kitten?"
"I'm sorry, Peggy." Peter sighed a little. "I'm nursing Thomas, you see."
Peggy at that was on her knees on the floor, taking both of them into her large embrace.
"Oh, you two poor little darling boys, what's to become of you both? That child has a heart of stone, to leave you to yourselves the way she's done. Don't defend her, Peter; I won't hear a word said for her again as long as I live; she deserves Guy Vyvian, and I couldn't say a worse word for her than that. You poor little Tommy; come to me then, babykins. You must come back to us now, Peter, and I'll look after you both."
She cuddled Thomas to her breast with one arm, and put the other round Peter's shoulders as he sat huddled up, his chin resting on his knees. At the moment it was difficult to say which of the two looked the most forsaken, the most left to himself. Only Thomas hadn't yet learnt to laugh, and Peter had. He laughed now, softly and not happily.
"Ithasbeen rather a ghastly fiasco, hasn't it," he said. "Absurd, you know, too, in a way. I thought it was all working out so nicely, Thomas coming and everything. But no. It wasn't working out nicely at all. Things don't as a rule, do they?"
There was a new note of dreariness in his voice; a note that had perhaps been kept out of it of set purpose for a long time. Now there seemed at the moment no particular reason to keep it out any more, though fresh reasons would arrive, no doubt, very soon; and Thomas when waking was a reason in himself. But in this dim hour between two roads, this hour of relaxation of tension in the shadowy firelight, when Thomas slept and only Peggy listened, Peter, having fallen crashing through floor after floor of his pleasant house of life, till he was nearly at the bottom, looked up at all the broken floors and sighed.
Peggy's arm was comfortingly about him. To her he was always a little, brittle, unlucky boy, as she had first seen him long ago.
"Never you mind, Peterkin. There's a good time coming, I do believe. She'll come back, perhaps; who knows? Vyvian wouldn't do for long, not even for Rhoda. Besides, you may be sure he'll throw her off soon, and then she'll want to come back to you and Tommy. I wouldn't say that to any other man, because, of course, no other man would have her back; but I do believe, Peterkin, that you would, wouldn't you now? I expect you'd smile and say, 'Oh, come in, you're just in time for tea and to see me bath Thomas,' and not another word about it."
"Probably," said Peter. "There wouldn't be much to say, would there? But she won't come back; I know that. Even if she leaves him she won't. Rhoda's horribly proud really, you know. She'd sooner sweep a crossing, or trim hats or something, than come near us again. I don't know what to hope about it. I suppose one must hope they'll go on together, as Rhoda seems to like him as he is; but it's an awful thought.... She's right that we never understood each other. I couldn't, you know, bear to think of spending even one day alone with Vyvian. I should be sick, like Thomas. The mere sight of his hair is enough, and his hand with that awful ring on it. I—I simply draw the line at him.Whydoes Rhoda care for him? How can she?" Peter frowned over it in bewilderment.
Peggy said, "Girls are silly things. And I suppose the way one's been brought up counts, and what one's inherited, and all that."
"Well, if Rhoda'd taken after Mrs. Johnson she wouldn't have liked Vyvian. He used to give her the creeps, like a toad. She told me so. She disliked him more than I did.... Well, I shall never understand. I suppose if I could Rhoda would have found me more sympathetic, and might have stayed."
"Now, darling, you're not to sit up and brood any more; that won't help. You're coming straight back with me to dinner, and Tommy's coming too, to sleep. I shall ask Mrs. Adams to help me get his things together."
"He hasn't many things," said Peter, looking vaguely round for them. "I got him a rattle and a ball, but he doesn't seem to care about them much; Lucy says he's not young enough yet. Here's his bottle. And his night clothes are upstairs, and his other day clothes, and his bath. Thomas leads the simple life, though; he really possesses very little; I think he's probably going to be a Franciscan later on. But he can sleep with me here all right; I should like to have him; only it would be awfully good of you if you'd have him to-morrow, while I'm out at work. But in the night he and I rather like each other's company."
"Rubbish," said Peggy. "You're both coming along to fifty-one this minute. You don't suppose I'm going to leave you two infants alone together like that. We've heaps of room at fifty-one"—she sighed a little—"people have been fading away like the flowers of the forest, and we should be thankful to have you back."
"Oh, we'll come then; thanks very much, Peggy." Peter's ready sympathy was turned on again, having temporarily been available only for himself and Rhoda and Thomas. He remembered now that Peggy and Hilary needed it too. He and Thomas would go and be boarders in the emptying boarding-house; it might amuse Thomas, perhaps, to see the other boarders.
"And we'll have him baptized," went on Peggy, thinking of further diversions for Thomas and Peter. "You'll let him be a Catholic, Peter, won't you?"
"Thomas," said Peter, "can be anything he likes that's nice. As long as he's not a bigot. I won't have him refusing to go into one sort of church because he prefers another; he mustn't ever acquire the rejecting habit. Short of that, he may enter any denomination or denominations he prefers."
They were collecting Thomas's belongings as they talked. Thomas lay and looked at them with the very blue slits that were like his father's eyes grown old. And suddenly Peggy, looking from son to father, saw that Peter's eyes had grown as old as Thomas's, looking wearily out of a pale, pinched face.
Peggy's own eyes brimmed over as she bent over Thomas's night-shirt.
Lord Evelyn Urquhart dined with his nephew on the last evening in February. It was a characteristic Urquhart dinner-party; the guests were mostly cheerful, well-bred young people of high spirits and of the worldly station that is not much concerned with any aspect of money but the spending of it. High living, plain thinking, agreeable manners and personal appearance, plenty of humour, enough ability to make a success of the business of living and not enough to agitate the brain, a light tread along a familiar and well-laid road, and a serene blindness to side-tracks and alleys not familiar nor well-laid and to those that walked thereon—these were the characteristics of the pleasant people who frequented Denis Urquhart's pleasant house in Park Lane.
Lucy was among them, small and pale, and rather silent, and intensely alive. She, of course, was a native not of Park Lane but of Chelsea; and the people who had frequented her home there were of a different sort. They had had, mostly, a different kind of brain, a kind more restless and troublesome and untidy, and a different type of wit, more pungent and ironic, less well-fed and hilarious, and they were less well-dressed and agreeable to look at, and had (perhaps) higher thoughts (though how shall one measure height?) and ate (certainly) plainer food, for lack of richer. These were the people Lucy knew. Her father himself had been of these. She now found her tent pitched among the prosperous; and the study of them touched her wide gaze with a new, pondering look. Denis hadn't any use for cranks. None of his set were socialists, vegetarians, Quakers, geniuses, anarchists, drunkards, poets, anti-breakfasters, or anti-hatters; none of them, in fine, the sort of person Lucy was used to. They never pawned their watches or walked down Bond Street in Norfolk coats. They had, no doubt, their hobbies; but they were suitable, well-bred hobbies, that did not obtrude vulgarly on other people's notice. Peter had once said that if he were a plutocrat he would begin to dream dreams. Lucy supposed that the seemingly undreaming people who were Denis's friends were not rich enough; they hadn't reached plutocracy, where romance resides, but merely prosperity, which has fewer possibilities. Lucy began in these days to ponder on the exceeding evil of Socialism, which the devil has put it into certain men's hearts to desire. For, thought Lucy, sweep away the romantic rich, sweep away the dreaming destitute, and what have you left? The prosperous; the comfortable; the serenely satisfied; the sanely reasonable. Dives, with his purple and fine linen, his sublime outlook over a world he may possess at a touch, goes to his own place; Lazarus, with his wallet for crusts and his place among the dogs and his sharp wonder at the world's black heart, is gathered to his fathers: there remain the sanitary dwellings of the comfortable, the monotonous external adequacy that touches no man's inner needs, the lifeless rigour of a superintended well-being. Decidedly, thought Lucy, siding with the Holy Roman Church, a scheme of the devil's. Denis and his friends also thought it was rot. So no doubt it was. Denis belonged to the Conservative party. Lucy thought parties funny things, and laughed. Though she had of late taken to wandering far into seas of thought, so that her wide forehead was often puckered as she sat silent, she still laughed at the world. Perhaps the more one thinks about it the more one laughs; the height and depth of its humour are certainly unfathomable.
On this last night of February, Lord Evelyn, when the other guests had gone, put his unsteady white hand under Lucy's chin and raised her small pale face and looked at it out of his near-sighted, scrutinising eyes, and said:
"Humph. You're thinner."
Lucy's eyes laughed up at him.
"Am I? I suppose I'm growing old."
"You're worrying. What's it about?" asked Lord Evelyn.
They were in the library. Lord Evelyn and Denis sat by the fire in leather chairs and smoked, and Lucy sat on a hassock between them, her chin in her hands.
She was silent for a moment. Then she looked up at Denis, who was reading Punch, and said, "I've had a letter from Peggy Margerison this morning."
Denis gave a sound between a grunt and a chuckle. The grunt element was presumably for Peggy Margerison, the chuckle for Punch.
Lord Evelyn, tapping his eye-glass on the arm of his chair, said, "Well? Well?" impatiently, nervously.
Lucy drew a note from her pocket (she was never pocketless) and spread it on her knees. It was a long letter on crinkly paper, written in a large, dashing, sprawling hand, full of curls, generosities, extravagances.
"She says," said Lucy, "(Please listen, Denis,) that—that they want money."
"I somehow thought that would be what she said," Denis murmured, still half preoccupied. "I'm sure she's right."
"A woman who writes a hand like that," put in Lord Evelyn, "will always spend more than she has. A hole in the purse; a hole in the purse."
"She says," went on Lucy, looking through the letter with wrinkled forehead, "that they're all very hard-up indeed. Of course, I knew that; I can see it whenever I go there; only Peter will never take more than silly little clothes and things for Thomas. And now Peggy says they're in great straits; Thomas is going to teethe or something, and wants better milk, all from one cow, and they're all awfully in debt."
"I should fancy that was chronic," remarked Denis, turning to Essence of Parliament.
"A hole in the purse, a hole in the purse," muttered Lord Evelyn, tapping with his eye-glass.
"Peggy says that Peter won't ask for help himself, but he's let her, it seems. And their boarders are nearly all gone, one of them quite suddenly, without paying a sixpence for all the time he was there."
"I suppose he didn't think he'd had sixpence worth," said Denis. "He was probably right."
"And Thomas is still very delicate after his bronchitis, and Peter's got a bad cold on the chest and wants more cough-mixture than they can afford to buy; and they owe money to the butcher and the fishmonger and the baker and the doctor and the tailor, and Hilary's lost his latest job and isn't earning anything at all. So I suppose Peter is keeping the family."
"Scamps; scamps all," muttered Lord Evelyn. "Deserve all they get, and more. People like the Margerisons an't worth helping. They'd best go under at once; best go under. Swindlers and scamps, the lot of them. I daresay the woman's stories are half lies; of course, they want money, but it's probably only to spend on nonsense. Why can't they keep themselves, like decent people?"
"Oh," said Lucy, dismissing that as absurd, "they can't. Of course they can't. They never could ... Denis."
"Lucy." Denis absently put out a hand to meet hers.
"How much shall we give them, Denis?"
Denis dropped Punch onto the floor, and lay back with his hands clasped behind his fair head. Lucy, looking at his up-turned, foreshortened, cleanly-modelled face, thought with half of her mind what a perfect thing it was. Sudden aspects of Denis's beauty sometimes struck her breathless, as they struck Peter.
"The Margerison family wants money, I understand," said Denis, who hadn't been listening attentively.
"Very badly, Denis."
Denis nodded. "They always do, of course.... Well, is it our business to fill the bottomless Margerison purse?"
Lucy sat very still, looking up at him with wide eyes.
"Our business? I don't know. But, of course, if Peter and Peter's people want anything, we shall give it them."
"But I gather it's not Peter that asks? Peter never asks, does he?"
"No," said Lucy. "Peter never asks. Not even for Thomas."
"Well, I should be inclined to trust Peter rather than his charming family. Peter's name seems to be dragged into that letter a good deal, but it doesn't follow that Peter sanctioned it. I'm not going to annoy Peter by sending him what he's never asked for. I should think probably Peter knows they can get on all right as they are, and that this letter must be taken with a good deal of salt. I expect the egregious Hilary only wants the money for some new enterprise of his own, that will fail, as usual. Anyhow, I really don't fancy having any further dealings with Hilary Margerison or his wife; I've had enough there. He's the most impossible cad and swindler."
"Swindlers all, swindlers all," said Lord Evelyn, getting up and pacing up and down the room, his hands behind his back.
Lucy, after a moment, said simply, "I shall give them something, Denis. I must. Don't you see? Whoever it was, I would. Because anyhow, they're poor and we're rich, and they want things we can give them. It's so obvious that when people ask one for things they must have them if one can give them. And when it's Peter who's in want, and Peter's baby, and Peter's people ..."
"You see," said Denis, "I doubt about Peter or the baby benefiting by anything we give them. It will all go down the drain where Hilary Margerison's money flows away. Give it to Peter or give it to his relations, it'll come to the same thing. Peter gives them every penny he gets, I don't doubt. You know what Peter is; he's as weak as a baby in his step-brother's hands; he lets himself be dragged into the most disgraceful transactions because he can't say no."
Lucy looked up at him, open-eyed, pale, quiet.
"You think of Peter like that?" she said, and her voice trembled a little.
Lord Evelyn stopped in his walk and listened.
"I'm sorry, Lucy," said Denis, throwing away his cigar-end. "I don't want to say anything against Peter to you. But ... one must judge by facts, you know. I don't mean that Peter means any harm; but, as I say, he's weak. I'm fond of Peter, you know; I wish to goodness he wouldn't play the fool as he does, mixing himself up with his precious relations and helping them in their idiotic schemes for swindling money out of people—but there it is; he will do it; and as long as he does it I don't feel moved to have much to do with him. I should send him money if he asked me personally, of course, even if I knew it would only go into his brother's pocket; but I'm not going to do it at his sister-in-law's command. If you ask me whether I feel inclined to help Hilary Margerison and his wife, my answer is simply no I don't. They're merely scum; and why should one have anything to do with scum?"
Lucy looked at him silently for a while. Then she said slowly, "I see. Yes, I see you wouldn't want to, of course. Theyarescum. And you're not. But I am, I think. I belong to the same sort of people they do. I could swindle and cheat too, I expect. It's the people at the bottom who do that. They're my relations, you see, not yours."
"My dear Lucy, only Peter is your relation."
"Peter and Thomas. And I count the rest too, because they're Peter's. So let me do all that is to be done, Denis. Don't you bother. I'll take them money."
"Let them alone, Lucy. You'd better, you know. What's the good?"
"I don't know," said Lucy. "None, I expect. None at all; because Peter wouldn't take it from me without you."
She came a little nearer him, and put her hand on his knee like a wistful puppy.
"Denis," she said, "I wishyouwould. They know already that I care. But I wishyouwould. Peter'd like you to. He'd be more pleased than if I did; much more. Peter cares for you and me and Thomas extraordinarily much; and you can't compare carings, but the way he cares for you is the most wonderful of all, I believe. If you went to him ... if you showed him you cared ... he'd take it from you. He wouldn't take it from me without you, because he'd suspect you weren't wanting him to have it. Denis, won't you go to Peter, as you used to do long ago, before he was in disgrace and poor, before he was scum? Can't you, Denis?"
Denis had coloured faintly. He always did when people were emotional. Lucy seldom was; she had a delicious morning freshness that was like the cool wind on the hills in spring.
"Peter never comes here, Lucy, does he. If he wanted to see me, I suppose he would."
Lucy was looking strangely at the beautiful face with the faint flush rising in it. She apparently thought no reply necessary to his words, but said again, "Can'tyou, Denis? Or is it too hard, too much bother, too much stepping out of the way?"
"Oh, it's not the bother, of course. But ... but I really don't see anything to be gained by it, that's the fact.... Our meetings, on the last few occasions when we have met, haven't been particularly comfortable. I don't think Peter likes them any better than I do.... One can't force intercourse, Lucy; if it doesn't run easily and smoothly, it had better be left alone. There have been things between us, between Peter's family and my family, that can't be forgotten or put aside by either of us, I suppose; and I don't think Peter wants to be reminded of them by seeing me any more than I do by seeing him. It's—it's so beastly uncomfortable, you know," he added boyishly, ruffling up his hair with his hand; and concluded didactically, "Peoplemustdrift apart if their ways lie in quite different spheres; it's inevitable."
Denis, who had a boyish reticence, had expanded and explained himself more than usual.
Lucy's hand dropped from his knee on to her own.
"I suppose itisinevitable," she said, beneath her breath. "I suppose the distance is too great. 'Tis such a long, long way from here to there ... such a long, long way.... Good-night, Denis; I'm going to bed."
She got up slowly, cramped and tired and pale. It was not till she was on her feet that she saw Lord Evelyn sitting in the background, and remembered his presence. She had forgotten him; she had been thinking only of Denis and Peter and herself. She didn't know if he had been listening much; he sat quietly, nursing his knee, saying nothing.
But when Lucy had gone he said to Denis, "You're right, Denis; you're utterly right, not to have anything to do with those swindlers," and, as if in a sudden fresh anger against them, he began again his quick, uneven pacing down the room.
"False through and through," he muttered. "False through and through."
Lucy's face, as she had risen to her feet and said "Good night, Uncle Evelyn," had been so like Peter's as he had last seen it, when Peter had passed him in the doorway at Astleys, that it had taken his breath away.
In Brook Street the rain fell. It fell straight and disconsolate, unutterably wet, splashing drearily on the paved street between the rows of wet houses. It fell all day, from the dim dawn, through the murky noon, to the dark evening, desolately weeping over a tired city.
Inside number fifty-one, Peggy mended clothes and sang a little song, with Thomas in her lap, and Peter, sitting in the window-seat, knitted Thomas a sweater of Cambridge blue. Peter was getting rather good at knitting. Hilary was there too, but not mending, or knitting, or singing; he was coughing, and complaining of the climate.
"I fancy it is going to be influenza," he observed at intervals, shivering. "I feel extraordinarily weak, and ache all up my back. I fancy I have a high temperature, only Peter has broken the thermometer. You were a hundred and four, I think, Peter, the day you went to bed. I rather expect I am a hundred and five. But I suppose I shall never know, as it is impossible to afford another thermometer. I feel certain it is influenza; and in that case I must give up all hope of getting that job from Pickering, as I cannot possibly go and see him to-morrow. Not but that it would be a detestable job, anyhow; but anything to keep our heads above water.... My headache is now like a hot metal band all round my head, Peggy."
"Poor old boy," said Peggy. "Take some more phenacetine. And do go to bed, Hilary. If youhavegot flu, you'll only make yourself as bad as Peter did by staying up too long. You've neither of you any more sense than Tommy here, nor so much, by a long way, have they, little man? No, Kitty, let him be; you'd only drop him on the floor if I let you, and then he'd break, you know."
Silvio was kneeling up on the window-seat by Peter's side, taking an interest in the doings of the street.
Peggy said, "Well, Larry, what's the news of the great world?"
"It's raining," said Silvio, who had something of the mournful timbre of Hilary's voice in his.
Peggy said, "Oh, darling, be more interesting! I'm horribly afraid you're going to grow up obvious, Larry, and that will never do. What else is it doing?"
"There's a cat in the rain," said Silvio, flattening his nose against the blurred glass, and manifestly inclined to select the sadder aspects of the world's news for retail. That tendency too, perhaps, he inherited from Hilary.
Presently he added, "There's a taxi coming up the street," and Peggy placed Thomas on Peter's knees and came to the window to look. When she had looked she said to Peter, "It must be nearly six o'clock" (the clock gained seventeen minutes a day, so that the time was always a matter for nicer calculation than Peggy could usually afford to give it); "and if Hilary's got flu, I should think Tommy'd be best out of the room.... I haven't easily the time to put him to bed this evening, really."
Peter accepted the suggestion and conveyed his son from the room. As he did so, someone knocked at the front door, and Peggy ran downstairs to open it.
She let in the unhappy noise of the rain and a tall, slim person in a fur coat.
Peggy was surprised, and (most rarely) a little embarrassed. It wasn't the person she had looked for. She even, in her unwonted confusion, let the visitor speak first.
He said, "Is Mr. Peter Margerison in?" frostily, giving her no sign of recognition.
"He is not, Lord Evelyn," said Peggy, hastily. "That is, he is busy with the baby upstairs. Will I take him a message?"
"I shall be glad if you will tell him I have called to see him."
"I will, Lord Evelyn. Will you come up to the drawing-room while I get him?"
Peggy led the way, drawing meanwhile on the resources of a picturesque imagination.
"He may be a little while before he can leave the baby, Lord Evelyn. Poor mite, it's starved with hunger, the way it cries and cries and won't leave off, and Peter has to cheer it."
Lord Evelyn grunted. The steep stairs made him a little short of breath, and not sympathetic.
"And even," went on Peggy, stopping outside the drawing-room door, "even when it does get a feed of milk, it's to-day from one kind of cow, to-morrow from another. Why, you'd think all the cows in England, turn and turn about, supplied that poor child with milk; and you know they get pains from changing. It's not right, poor baby; but what can we and his father do? The same with his scraps of clothes—this weather he'd a right to be having new warm ones—but there he lies crying for the cold in his little thin out-grown things; it brings the tears to one's eyes to see him. And he's not the only one, either. His father's just out of an illness, and keeps a cough on the chest because he can't afford a warm waistcoat or the only cough-mixture that cures him.... But Peter wouldn't like me to be telling you all this. Will you go in there, Lord Evelyn, and wait?"
She paused another moment, her hand on the handle.
"You'll not tell Peter I told you anything. He'd not be pleased. He'll not breathe a word to you of it himself—indeed, he'll probably say it's not so."
Lord Evelyn made no comment; he merely tapped his cane on the floor; he seemed impatient to have the door opened.
"And," added Peggy, "if ever you chanced to be offering him anything—I mean, you might be for giving him a birthday present, or a Xmas present or something sometime—you'd do best to put it as a gift to the baby, or he'll never take it."
Having concluded her diplomacy, she opened the door and ushered him into the room, where Hilary sat with his headache and the children played noisily at horses.
"Lord Evelyn Urquhart come to see Peter," called Peggy into the room. "Come along out of that, children, and keep yourselves quiet somewhere."
She bundled them out and shut the door on Lord Evelyn and Hilary.
Hilary rose dizzily to his feet and bowed. Lord Evelyn returned the courtesy distantly, and stood by the door, as far as possible from his host.
"This is good of you," said Hilary, "to come and see us in our fallen estate. Do sit down."
Lord Evelyn, putting his glass into his eye and turning it upon Hilary as if in astonishment at his impertinence in addressing him, said curtly, "I came to see your half-brother. I had not the least intention, nor the least desire, to see anyone else whatever; nor have I now."
"Quite so," said Hilary, his teeth chattering with fever. (His temperature, though he would never know, as Peter had broken the thermometer, must be anyhow a hundred and three, he was sure.) "Quite so. But that doesn't affect my gratitude to you. Peter's friends are mine. I must thank you for remembering Peter."
Lord Evelyn, presumably not seeing the necessity, was silent.
"We have not met," Hilary went on, passing his hot hand over his fevered brow, where the headache ran all round like a hot metal band, "for a very long time, Lord Evelyn; if we put aside that momentary encounter at Astleys last year." Hilary did put that aside, rather hastily, and went on, "Apart from that, we have not met since we were both in Venice, nearly two years ago. Lord Evelyn, I have often wished to tell you how very deeply I have regretted certain events that came between us there. I think there is a great deal that I might explain to you...."
Lord Evelyn, with averted face, said, "Be good enough to be silent, sir. I have no desire to hear any of your remarks. I have come merely to see your half-brother."
"Of course," said Hilary, who was sensitive, "if you take that line, there is nothing to be said between you and me."
Lord Evelyn acknowledged this admission with a slight inclination of the head.
"Nothing whatever, sir."
So there was silence, till Peter came in, pale and sickly and influenzaish, but with a smile for Lord Evelyn. It was extraordinarily nice of Lord Evelyn, he thought, to have come all the way to Brook Street in the rain to see him.
Lord Evelyn looked at him queerly, intently, out of his short-sighted eyes as they shook hands.
"I wish to talk to you," he remarked, with meaning.
Hilary took the hint, looked proud, said, "I see that my room is preferred to my company," and went away.
When he had gone, Peter said, "Do sit down," but Lord Evelyn took no notice of that. He had come to see Peter in his need, but he had not forgiven him, and he would remain standing in his house. Peter had once hurt him so badly that the mere sight of him quickened his breath and flushed his cheek. He tapped his cane impatiently against his grey spats.
"You're ill," he said, accusingly.
"Oh, I've only had flu," said Peter; "I'm all right now."
"You're ill," Lord Evelyn repeated. "Don't contradict me, sir. You're ill; you're in want; and you're bringing up a baby on insufficient diet. What?"
"Not a bit," said Peter. "I am not in want, nor is Thomas. Thomas' diet is so sufficient that I'm often afraid he'll burst with it."
Lord Evelyn said, "You're probably lying. But if you're not, why d'ye countenance your sister-in-law's begging letters? You're a hypocrite, sir. But that's nothing I didn't know before, you may say. Well, you're right there."
Lord Evelyn's anger was working up. He hadn't known it would be so difficult to talk to Peter and remain calm.
"You want to make a fool of me again," he broke out, "so you join in a lying letter and bring me here on false pretences. At least, I suppose it was really Lucy you thought to bring. You play on Lucy's soft heart, knowing you can squeeze money out of her—and so you can afford to say you've no use for mine. Is that it?"
Peter said, dully looking at his anger as at an ancient play re-staged, "I don't know what you're talking about. I know nothing of any letter. And you don't suppose I should take your money, or Lucy's either. Why should I? I don't want money."
Lord Evelyn was pacing petulantly up and down the shabby carpet, waving his cane as he walked.
"Oh, you know nothing of any letter, don't you. Well, ask your sister-in-law, then; ask that precious brother of yours. Haven't you always chosen to hang on to them and join in their dirty tricks? And now you turn round and say you know nothing of their doings; a pretty story.... Now look here, Mr. Peter Margerison, you've asked for money and you shall take it, d'ye see?"
Peter flung at him, in a queer and quite new hot bitterness and anger (it was perhaps the result of influenza, which has strange after effects). "You've no right to come here and say these things to me. I didn't want you to come; I never asked you to; and now I never want to see you again. Please go, Lord Evelyn."
Lord Evelyn paused in his walk, and stood looking at him for a moment, his lips parted to speak, his hands clasped behind him over the gold head of his cane.
Then, into the ensuing silence, came Lucy, small and pale and wet in her grey furs, and stood like a startled kitten, her wide eyes turning from one angry face to the other.
Peter said to her, in a voice she had never heard from him before, "So you've come too."
Lord Evelyn tittered disagreeably. "Didn't expect her, of course, did you. So unlikely she'd come, after getting a letter like that.... I suppose you're wondering, Lucy, what I'm doingdans cette galère."
"No," said Lucy, "I wasn't. I know. You've come to see Peter, like me."
He laughed again. "Yes, that's it. Like you. And now he pretends he won't take the money he asked for, Lucy. Won't be beholden to me at any price. Perhaps he was waiting for you."
Lucy was looking at Peter, who looked so ill and so strange and new. Never before had he looked at her like that, with hard eyes. Peter was angry; the skies had fallen.
She said, and put out her hands to him, "What's the matter, Peter? Don't ... don't look like that.... Oh, you're ill; do sit down; it's so stupid to stand about."
Peter said, his own hands hanging at his sides, "Do you mind going away, both of you. I don't think I want to talk to either of you to-day.... I suppose you've brought money to give me too, Lucy, have you?"
Lucy coloured faintly over her small pale face.
"I won't give you anything you don't like, Peter. But I may give a present to Thomas, mayn't I?"
"No," said Peter, without interest or emotion.
So they stood in silence for a moment, facing each other, Lucy full-handed and impotent before Peter whose empty hands hung closed and unreceiving; Lucy and Peter, who had once been used to go shares and to give and take like two children, and who could give and take no more; and in the silence something oddly vibrated, so that Lord Evelyn, the onlooker, abruptly moved and spoke.
"Come home, Lucy. He's told us he'll have none of us."
Lucy still stood pleading, like a child; then, at Lord Evelyn's touch on her arm, she suddenly began to cry, again like a child, helpless and conquered.
At her tears Peter turned away sharply, and walked to the window.
"Please go," he said. "Please go."
They went, Lucy quietly crying, and Lord Evelyn, suddenly become oddly gentle, comforting her.
At the door he paused for a moment, looked round at Peter, hesitated, took a step back towards him, began to say something.
"Peter...."
Then Peggy came in, followed by Hilary. Lord Evelyn shut his lips lightly, bowed, and followed Lucy downstairs. Peggy went after them to let them out.
Hilary flung himself into a chair.
"Well, Peter? Well?"
Peter turned round from the window, and Hilary started at his face.
"My dear boy, what on earth is the matter?"
Then Peggy came in, her eyes full of dismayed vexation, but laughter twitching at her lips.
"Oh, my dears! What a mood they're in! Lord Evelyn looked at me to destroy me—and Lucy crying as if she'd never stop; I tried to make her take some sal volatile, but he wouldn't let her, but wisked her into her carriage and shut the door in my face. Mercy, what temper!"
The last words may not have had exclusive reference to Lord Evelyn, as Peggy was now looking at Peter in some astonishment and alarm. When Peter looked angry, everyone was so surprised that they wanted to take his temperature and send him to bed. Peggy would have liked to do that now, but really didn't dare.
What had come to the child, she wondered?
"What did they talk about, Peter? A funny thing their coming within half an hour of each other like that, wasn't it. And I never thought to see Lord Evelyn here, I must say. Now I wonder why was Lucy crying and he so cross?"
Peter left her to wonder that, and said merely, "Once for all, I won't have it. You shallnotbeg for money and bring my name into it. It's—it's horrid."
With a weak, childish word his anger seemed to explode and die away. After all, no anger of Peter's could last long. And somehow, illogically, his anger here was more with the Urquharts than with the Margerisons and most with Lucy. One is, of course, most angry, with those who have most power to hurt.
Suddenly feeling rather ill, Peter collapsed into a chair.
Peggy, coming and kneeling by him, half comforting, half reproaching, said, "Oh, Peter darling, you haven't been refusing money, when you know you and Tommy and all of us need it so much?"
Hilary said, "Peter has no regard whatever for what we all need. He simply doesn't care. I suppose now we shall never be able to afford even a new thermometer to replace the one Peter broke. Again, why should it matter to Peter? He took his own temperature all through his illness, and I suppose that is all he cares about. I wonder how much fever I have at this moment. Is my pulse very wild, Peggy?"
"It is not," said Peggy, soothingly, without feeling it. "And I daresay Peter's temperature is as high as yours now, if we knew; he looks like it. Well, Peter, it was stupid of you, my dear, wasn't it, to say no to a present and hurt their feelings that way when they'd been so good as to come in the rain and all. If they offer it again—"
Peter said, "They won't. They won't come here again, ever. They've done with us, I'm glad to say, and we with them. So you needn't write to them again; it will be no use."
Peter was certainly cross, Peggy and Hilary looked at him in surprised disapproval. How silly. Where was the use of having friends if one treated them in this unkind, proud way?
"Peter," said Hilary, "has obviously decided that we are not fit to have anything to do with his grand friends. No doubt he is well-advised—" he looked bitterly round the unkempt room—"and we will certainly take the hint."
Then Peter recovered himself and said, "Oh don't be an ass, Hilary," and laughed dejectedly, and went up to finish putting Thomas to bed.
In the carriage that rolled through the rain from Brook Street to Park Lane, Lord Evelyn Urquhart was saying, "This is the last time; the very last time. Never again do I try to help any Margerison. First I had to listen for full five minutes to the lies of that woman; then to the insufferable remarks of that cad, that swindler, Hilary Margerison, who I firmly believe had an infectious disease which I have no doubt caught," (he was right; he had caught it). "Then in comes Peter and insults me to my face and tells me to clear out of the house. By all means; I have done so, and it will be for good. What, Lucy? There, don't cry, child; they an't worth a tear between the lot of 'em."
But Lucy cried. She, like Peter, was oddly not herself to-day, and cried and cried.
The boarding-house suddenly ceased to be. Its long illness ended in natural death. There was a growing feeling among the boarders that no self-respecting person could remain with people whose financial affairs were in the precarious condition of the Margerisons'—people who couldn't pay the butcher, and lived on ill-founded expectations of subsidies. As two years ago the Margerisons had been thrown roughly out of the profession of artistic experts, so now the doors of the boarding-house world were shut upon them. Boarders are like that; intensely respectable.
All the loosed dogs of ill-fortune seemed to be yelping at the Margerisons' heels at once. Hilary, when he recovered from his influenza and went out to look for jobs, couldn't find one. Again and again he was curtly refused employment, by editors and others. Every night he came home a little more bitter than the day before. Peter too, while he lay mending of his breakages, received a letter from the place of business he adorned informing him that it would not trouble him further. He had never been much use to it; he had been taken on at Leslie's request and given a trial; but it could not last for ever, as Peter fair-mindedly admitted.
"Well," he commented, "I suppose one must do something else, eventually. But I shall put off reflecting on that till I can move about more easily."
Hilary said, "We are being hounded out of London as we were hounded out of Venice. It is unbearable. What remains?"
"Nothing, that I can see at the moment," said Peter, laughing weakly.
"Ireland," said Peggy suddenly. "Let's go there. Dublin's worth a dozen of this hideous old black dirty place. You could get work on 'The Nationalist,' Hilary, I do believe, for the sub-editorship's just been given to my cousin Larry Callaghan. Come along to the poor old country, and we'll try our luck again."
"Dublin I believe to be an unspeakable place to live in," said Hilary, but mainly from habit. "Still, I presume one must live somewhere, so ..."
He turned to Peter. "Where shall you and Thomas live?"
Peter flushed slightly. He had supposed that he and Thomas were also to live in the unspeakable Dublin.
"Oh, we haven't quite made up our minds. I must consult Thomas about it."
"But," broke in Peggy, "of course you're coming with us, my dear. What do you mean? You're not surely going to desert us now, Peter?"
Peter glanced at Hilary. Hilary said, pushing his hair, with his restless gesture, from his forehead, "Really, Peggy, we can't drag Peter about after us all our lives; it's hardly fair on him to involve him in all our disasters, when he has more than enough of his own."
"Indeed and he has. Peter's mischancier than you are, Hilary, on the whole, and I will not leave him and Tommy to get lost or broken by themselves. Don't be so silly, Peter; of course you're coming with us."
"I think," said Peter, "that Thomas and I will perhaps stay in London. You see,Ican't, probably, get work on 'The Nationalist' and it's doubtful what I could do in Dublin. I suppose I can get work of a sort in London; enough to provide Thomas with milk, though possibly not all from one cow."
"I daresay. And who'd look after the mite, I'd like to know, while you're earning his milk?"
"Oh, the landlady, I should think. Everyone likes Thomas; he's remarkably popular."
Afterwards Hilary said to Peggy, "Really, Peggy, I see no reason why Peter should be dragged about with us in the future. The jointménagehas not, in the past, been such a success that we need want to perpetuate it. In fact, though, of course, it is pleasant to have Peter in the house...."
"Indeed it is, the darling," put in Peggy.
"One can't deny that disasters have come upon us extraordinarily fast since he came to live with us in Venice two years ago. First he discovered things that annoyed him in my private affairs, which was extremely disagreeable for all of us, and really he was rather unnecessarily officious about that; in fact, I consider that it was owing largely to the line he took that things reached their final very tryingdénouement. Since then disaster upon disaster has come upon us; Peter's unfortunate marriage, and consequent serious expenses, including the child now left upon his hands (really, you know, that was an exceedingly stupid step that Peter took; I tried to dissuade him at the time, but of course it was no use). And he is so very frequently ill; so am I, you will say"—(Peggy didn't, because Hilary wasn't, as a matter of fact, ill quite so often as he believed)—"but two crocks in a household are twice as inconvenient as one. And now there has been this unpleasant jar with the Urquharts. Peter, by his rudeness to them, has finally severed the connection, and we can hope for nothing from that quarter in future. And I am not sure that I choose to have living with me a much younger brother who has influential friends of his own in whom he insists that we shall have neither part nor lot. I strongly object to the way Peter spoke to us on that occasion; it was extremely offensive."
"Oh, don't be such a goose, Hilary. The boy only lost his temper for a moment, and I'm sure that happens seldom enough. And as to the rest of it, I don't like the way you speak of him, as if he was the cause of our mischances, and as if his being so mischancey himself wasn't a reason why we should all stick together, and him with that scrap of a child, too; though I will say Peter's a handier creature with a child than anyone would think. I suppose it's the practice he's had handling other costly things that break easy.... Well, have it your own way, Hilary. Only mind, if Peterwantsto come with us, he surely shall. I'm not going to leave him behind like a left kitten. And I'd love to have him, for he makes sunshine in the house when things are blackest."
"Lately Peter has appeared to me to be rather depressed," said Hilary, and Peggy too had perceived that this was so. It was something so new in Peter that it called for notice.
There was needed no further dispute between Peggy and Hilary, for Peter said that he and Thomas preferred to stay in London.
"I can probably find a job of some sort to keep us. I might with luck get a place as shop-walker. That always looks a glorious life. You merely walk about and say, 'Yes, madam? This way for hose, madam.' Something to live on and nothing to do, as the poet says. But I expect they are difficult places to get, without previous experience. Short of that, I could be one of the men round stations that open people's cab doors and take the luggage out; or even a bus-conductor, who knows? Oh, there are lots of openings. But in Dublin I feel my talents might be lost.... Thomas and I will move into more modest apartments, and go in for plain living and high thinking."
"You poor little dears," said Peggy, and kissed both of them. "Well, it'll be plain living for the lot of us, that's obvious, and lucky too to get that.... I'd love to have you two children with us, but ..."
But Peter, to whom other people's minds were as books that who runs may read, had no intention of coming with them. That faculty of intuition of Peter's had drawbacks as well as advantages. He knew, as well as if Hilary had said so, that Hilary considered their life together a disastrous series of mishaps, largely owing to Peter, and that he did not desire to continue it. He knew precisely what was Denis Urquhart's point of view and state of feelings towards himself and his family, and how unbridgeable that gulf was. He knew why Lucy was stopping away, and would stop away (for if other people's thoughts were to him as pebbles in running water, hers were pebbles seen white and lucid in a still, clear pool). And he knew very well that he relieved Peggy's kind heart when he said he and Thomas would stop in London; for to Peggy anything was better than to worry her poor old Hilary more than need be.
So, before March was out, about St. Cuthbert's day, in fact, Hilary Margerison and his family left England for a more distressful country, to seek their fortunes fresh, and Peter and his family sought modest apartments in a little street behind St. Austin's Church, where the apartments are very modest indeed.
"Are they too modest for you, Thomas?" Peter asked dubiously. "And do you too much hate the Girl?"
The Girl was the landlady's daughter, and undertook for a small consideration to look after Thomas while Peter was out, and feed him at suitable intervals. Thomas and Peter did rather hate her, for she was a slatternly girl, matching her mother and her mother's apartments, and didn't always take her curlers off till the evening, and said "Boo" to Thomas, merely because he was young—a detestable habit, Peter and Thomas considered. Peter had to make a great deal of sensible conversation to Thomas, to make up.
"I'm sorry," Peter apologised, "but, you see, Thomas, it's all we can afford. You don't earn anything at all, and I only earn a pound a week, which is barely enough to keep you in drink. I don't deserve even that, for I don't address envelopes well; but I suppose they know it's such a detestable job that they haven't the face to give me less."
Peter was addressing envelopes because a Robinson relative had given him the job, and he hadn't the nerve to refuse it. He couldn't well refuse it, because of Thomas. Uncompanioned by Thomas he would probably have chosen instead to sweep a crossing or play a barrel-organ, or stand at a street corner with outstretched hat (though this last would only have done for a summer engagement, as Peter didn't like the winds that play round street corners in winter). But Thomas was very much there, and had to be provided for; so Peter copied letters and addressed envelopes and earned twenty shillings weekly, and out of it paid for Thomas's drink and Thomas's Girl and his own food, and beds and a sitting-room and fires and laundry for both, and occasional luxuries in the way of wooden animals for Thomas to play with. So they were not extremely poor; they were respectably well-to-do. For Thomas's sake, Peter supposed it was worth while not to be extremely poor, even though it meant addressing envelopes and living in a great grey prison-house of a city, where one only surmised the first early pushings of the spring beyond the encompassing gloom.
Peter used to tell Thomas about that, in order that he might know something of the joyous world beyond the walls. He told Thomas in March, taking time by the forelock, about the early violets that were going some time to open blue eyes in the ditches by the roads where the spring winds walk; about the blackthorn that would suddenly make a white glory of the woods; about the green, sticky budding of the larches, and the keen sweet smell of them, and the damp fragrance of the roaming wind that would blow over river-flooded fields, smelling of bonfires and wet earth. He took him through the seasons, telling him of the blown golden armies of the daffodils that marched out for Easter, and the fragrant white glory of the may; and the pale pink stars of the hedge-roses, and the yellow joy of buttercup fields wherein cows stand knee-deep and munch, in order to give Thomas sweet white milk.