Part 28 (2/2)
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 cras.h.i.+ng 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. _Why_ does 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-s.h.i.+rt.
CHAPTER XVI
A LONG WAY
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 p.a.w.ned 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 dest.i.tute, 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.
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