The Lee Shore Part 32

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 shall _not_ beg 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 a.s.s, 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.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BREAKING-POINT

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-editors.h.i.+p'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, pus.h.i.+ng 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, _I_ can'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 joint _menage_ has 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 trying _denouement_. 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 sc.r.a.p 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 Peter _wants_ to 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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."