The Lee Shore Part 10

"Not changed at all, as far as I can see," he said to Peter, with the same mincing, finicking p.r.o.nunciation that had pleased the boy Peter eight years ago. "Only my sight isn't what it was. _Are_ you changed at all? Do you still like Bow rose-bowls better than anything except Denis?

Denis is coming here soon, you know, so I shall be able to discover. Oh, I beg pardon--Mr. Peter Margerison, Mr. Cheriton."

Mr. Cheriton was a dark, st.u.r.dy young man with an aggressive jaw, who bowed without a smile and looked one rather hard in the face. Peter was a little frightened of him--these curt, brisk manners made him nervous always--and felt a desire to edge behind Hilary. He gathered that Hilary and Cheriton did not very much like one another. He knew what that slight nervous contraction of Hilary's forehead meant.

Dinner was interesting. Lord Evelyn told pleasant and funny stories in his high, t.i.ttering voice, addressing himself to all his guests, but looking at Peter when he came to his points. (People usually looked at Peter when they came to the points of their stories.) Hilary talked a good deal and drank a good deal and ate very little, and was obviously on very friendly terms with Lord Evelyn and on no terms at all with Mr.

Cheriton. Cheriton looked a good deal at Peter, with very bright and direct eyes, and flung into the conversation rather curt and spasmodic utterances in a slightly American accent. He seemed a very decided and very much alive young man, a little rude, thought Peter, but possibly that was only his trans-Atlantic way, if, as his voice hinted, he came from America. Once or twice Peter met the direct and vivid regard fixed upon him, and nearly was startled into "I beg your pardon," for there seemed to him an odd element of accusation in the look.

"But it isn't my fault," he told himself rea.s.suringly. "I've not done anything, I'm sure I haven't. It's just the way he's made, I expect. Or else people have done him badly once or twice, and he's always thinking it's going to happen again. Rough luck on him; poor chap."

After dinner they went into what Lord Evelyn called the saloon. "Where I keep my especial treasures," he remarked to Peter. "You'd like to walk round and look at some of them, I expect. These bronzes, now--," he indicated two statuettes on brackets by the door.

Peter looked at them, then swiftly up at Lord Evelyn, who swayed at his side, his gla.s.s screwed into one smiling eye.

Lord Evelyn touched the near statuette with his light, unsteady, beautifully-ringed hand.

"Rather lovely, isn't she," he said, caressing her. "We found her and the Actaeon in a dusty hole of a place in a miserable little _calle_ off the Campo delle Beccarie, kept by a German Jew. Quite a find, the old sinner.

What an extortioner, though! Eh, Margerison? How much has the old Schneller got out of my pocket? It was your brother who discovered him for me, young Peter. He took me there, and we found the Diana together.

Like her? Giacomo Treviso, a pupil of Verrocchio's. Heard of him? The Actaeon's not so good now. Same man, but not so happy."

He turned the Diana about; he posed her for Peter's edification. Peter looked from her to the Actaeon, from the Actaeon to Lord Evelyn's face. He opened his lips to say something, and closed them on silence. He looked past Lord Evelyn to Hilary, who stood in the background, leaning a little against a chair. It seemed to Peter that there was a certain tensity, a strain, in his face.

Then Peter met full the bright, hard, vivid gaze of the alert Cheriton.

It had an odd expression at this moment; unmistakably inimical, observantly curious, distinctly sardonic. A faint ironic smile just touched the corners of his determined mouth. Peter returned the look with his puzzled, enquiring eyes that sought to understand.

This much, anyhow, he seemed to understand: his role was silence. If Cheriton didn't speak (and Cheriton's expression showed that he knew) and if Hilary didn't speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn't speak either. He must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic, worn-out dilettante in a fool's paradise.

The pathos of it gripped Peter's heart. Lord Evelyn had once known so well. What havoc was this that one could apparently make of one's faculties? It wasn't only physical semi-blindness; it was a blindness of the mind, a paralysis of the powers of discrimination and appreciation, which, was pitiful. Peter was angry. He thought Hilary and Cheriton so abominably, unmitigatedly wrong. And yet he himself had said, "If it makes them happy"--and left that as the indubitable end. Ah, but one didn't lie to people, even for that.

Peter was brought up sharply, as he had often been before, against Hilary's strange Hilaryish, perverted views of the conduct of life's businesses. Then, as usual when he should have felt furthest from mirth, he abruptly collapsed into sudden helpless laughter.

Lord Evelyn turned the eye-gla.s.s on him.

"Eh?" he queried. "Why so? But never mind; you always suffered in that way, I remember. Get it from your mother, I think; she did, too. Never explain jokes; they lose so in the telling. Now I want to show you something over here."

Peter crossed the room, his laughter dead. After all, funny wasn't what it really was. Mainly, it was perplexing. Till he could have it out with Hilary, he couldn't understand it at all.

He saw more of Lord Evelyn's treasures, and perplexity grew. He did not laugh again; he was very solemn and very silent and very polite where he could not admire. Where he could he did; but even here his admiration was weighed down to soberness by the burden of the things beyond the pale.

Lord Evelyn found him lukewarm, changed and dulled from the vivid devotee of old, who had coloured up all over his pale face at the sight of a Bow rose-bowl. He coloured indeed now, when Lord Evelyn said "Like it?"--coloured and murmured indistinguishable comments into his collar.

He coloured most when Lord Evelyn said, as he frequently did, "Your brother's find. A delicious little man in some _sotto-portico_ or other--quite an admirable person. Eh, Margerison?"

Hilary in the background would vaguely a.s.sent. Peter, who looked at him no more, felt the indefinable challenge of his tone. It meant either, "I've as much right to my artistic taste as you have, Peter, and I'm not ashamed of it," or, "Speak out, if you want to shatter the illusions that make the happiness of his ridiculous life; if not, be silent."

And all the time the vivid stare of Jim Cheriton was turned like a search-light on Peter's face, and his odd smile grew and grew. Cheriton was watching, observing, taking in something new, trying to solve some problem.

At the end of half an hour Lord Evelyn said, "Peter Margerison, you've lost some of the religious fervour of your youth. The deceitfulness of riches and the cares of this world--is that it? What's come to you that you're so tepid about this Siena chalice? Don't be tepid, young Peter; it's the symptom of a ruined soul."

He polished his gla.s.s, screwed it into his left eye, and looked down on Peter with his whimsical, kindly scrutiny. Peter did not return the look; he stood with bent head, looking vaguely down at the Sienese chalice.

That too was one of Hilary's finds. Hilary it seemed, had approved its seller in an article in the Gem.

"Damme," said Lord Evelyn suddenly, with unusual explosiveness, "if I didn't like you better when you were fifteen! Now, you _blase_ and soulless generation, I suppose you want to play bridge. Do you play as badly as ever, Peter? A remarkable player you were, I remember--quite remarkable. Denis always told you so. Now Cheriton will tell you so, because he's rude."

Bridge was a relief to Peter, though he was still a rather remarkable player. He played with Cheriton, who was not rude, because he was absolutely silent. It was an absurd game. Cheriton was a brilliant player, even when he was only giving half his mind to it, as he seemingly was to-night. Lord Evelyn had been a brilliant player once, and was now brilliant with alternations of eccentricity; he talked most of the time, making the game the centre of his remarks, from which he struck out along innumerable paths of irrelevancy. The Margerisons too were irrelevant; Hilary thought bridge a bore, and Peter, who thought nothing a bore, was always a little alarmed by anything so grown-up. But to-night he didn't much mind what he did, so long as he stopped looking at Lord Evelyn's things. Peter only wanted to get away; he was ashamed and perplexed and sorry and angry, and stabbed through with pity. He wanted to get out of Lord Evelyn's house, out of the range of his kindly, whimsical smile and Cheriton's curious hostile stare; he wanted to be alone with Hilary, and to understand.

The irony of Cheriton's look increased during bridge; it was certainly justified by the abstraction of Peter's play.

Lord Evelyn laughed at him. "You need Denis to keep you in order, young Peter. Lord, how frightened you used to be when Denis was stern. Smiled and pretended you weren't, but I knew...." He chuckled at the painted ceiling. "Knew a man at Oxford, Peter ... well, never mind that story now, you're too young for it.... Anyhow I make it no trumps."

At eleven o'clock Hilary and Peter went home. Lord Evelyn shook hands with Peter rather affectionately, and said, "Come and see me again soon, dear boy. Lunch with me at Florian's to-morrow--you and your wealthy friend. Busy sight-seeing, are you? How ba.n.a.l of you. Morning in the Duomo, afternoon on the Lido, and the Accademia to fill the spare hours; I know the dear old round. Never could be worried with it myself; too much else to do. But one manages to enjoy life even without it, so don't overwork. And come and see my toys again by daylight, and try to enthuse a little more over them next time. You're too young to be _blase_.

You'd better read the Gem, to encourage yourself in simple pleasures.

Good-night. Good-night, Margerison."

He shook hands with them both again, possibly to make up for Cheriton, who did not shake hands at all, but stood with his own in his pockets, leaning against the wall, his eyes still on Peter's face.

"Queer manners you have, dear Jim," was what they heard Lord Evelyn say as they stepped into the Ca' delle Gemme gondola, that was taking them back to the Rio delle Beccarie.

They swung out into the faintly-shining darkness of the water-road, into which the climbing moon could not look--a darkness crossed and flecked by the red gleamings of the few gondola and sandolo lights abroad at this hour in the quiet street. They sent their own red path before them as they softly travelled; and round it the stars flickered and swam, deep down. Peter could have sworn he heard their thin, tinkling, submerged, funny song, somewhere above or beneath the soft and melodious "Cherie Birri-Bim," that someone (not Lord Evelyn's beautifully trained and taciturn _poppe_) was crooning near at hand.

The velvet darkness of a bridge drowned the stars for a moment; then, with a musical, abrupt cry of "Sta--i!" they swung round a corner into a narrow way that was silver and green in the face of the climbing moon.

The musically lovely night, the peace of the dim water-ways, the shadowing mystery of the steep, shuttered houses, with here and there a lit door or window ajar, sending a slant of yellow light across the deep green lane full of stars and the moon, the faint crooning of music far off, made a cool marvel of peace for strung nerves. Peter sat by Hilary in silence, and no longer wanted to ask questions. In the strange, enveloping wonder of the night, minor wonders died. What did it matter, anyhow? Hilary and Venice--Venice and Hilary--give them time, and one would explain the other.

It was Hilary who began to talk, and he talked about Cheriton, his nervous voice pitched on a high note of complaint.

"I do intensely dislike that man. The sort of person I've no use for, you know. So horribly on the spot; such sharp, unsoftened manners. All the terrible bright braininess of the Yankee combined with the obstreperous energy of the Philistine Briton. His mother is a young American, about to be married for the third time. The sort of exciting career one would expect from a parent of the delightful Jim. I cannot imagine why Lord Evelyn, who is a person of refinement, encourages him. Really, you know!"

He grew very plaintive over it. Peter really did not wonder.

Peter's subconscious mind registered a dim impression that this was defensive talk, to fill the silence. Hilary was a nervous person, easily agitated. Probably the evening had agitated him. But he was no good at defence. His complaint of Jim Cheriton broke weakly on an unsteady laugh.

Peter nodded a.s.sent, and looked up the street of dim water, his chin propped in his hands, and thought how extraordinarily pleasant was the red light that slanted across the dark water from green doors ajar in steep house-walls.

Hilary tried to light a cigar, and flung broken matches into spluttering darkness. At last he succeeded; and then, when he had smoked in silence for two minutes, he turned abruptly on Peter and said, "Well?"

Peter, dreamily turning towards him, felt the nervous challenge of his tone, and read it in his pale, tired face.

Peter pulled himself together and collected his thoughts. After all, one might as well know.

"Oh, well ... what? Yes, what about those ghastly statuettes, and all the rest of them? Why, when, how ... and what on earth for?"

Hilary, after a moment of silence, said, with a rather elaborate carelessness, "I saw you didn't like them."

At that Peter started a little, and the dreaminess of the night fell away from him.

"You saw ... oh." For a moment he couldn't think of anything else to say.

Then he laughed a little. "Why, yes, I imagine you did.... But what's the object of it all? Have you and Cheriton (by the way, why does he glare at us both so?) come to the conclusion that it's worth while playing that sort of game? If you have, I can't tell you how utterly wrong I think you are. Make him happy--oh, I know--but what extraordinary cheek on your part! I as near as possible gave you away--I did really. Besides, what did he mean by saying you'd advised him to buy the things--praised them in the Gem, and all that? You can't have gone so far as that--did you?"

After a moment of silence, Hilary turned abruptly and looked Peter in the face, taking the long cigar out of his mouth and holding it between two white, nervous fingers.

"Upon my word," said Hilary, speaking rather slowly, "Talk of cheek!