The Lee Shore Part 30

"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't_ you, 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, "People _must_ drift 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 it _is_ inevitable," 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 pa.s.sed him in the doorway at Astleys, that it had taken his breath away.

CHAPTER XVII

QUARRELS IN THE RAIN

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 you _have_ got 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 gla.s.s, 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 embarra.s.sed. 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 gla.s.s 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 grat.i.tude 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, pa.s.sing 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."