The Lee Shore | Page 6

to the over-bold words--Peter saw a half-crown, a
round, solid, terrible half-crown, pressed into Urquhart's unsuspecting
hand. Oh, horror! Which was the worse, the invitation or the
half-crown? Peter could never determine. Which was the more flagrant
indecency--that he, young Margerison of the lower fourth, should,
without any encouragement whatever, have asked Urquhart of the sixth,

captain of the fifteen, head of his house, to come and stay with him; or
that his near relative should have pressed half-a-crown into the great
Urquhart's hand as if he expected him to go forthwith to the tuck-shop
at the corner and buy tarts? Peter wriggled, scarlet from his collar to his
hair.
Urquhart was a polite person. He took the half-crown. He murmured
something about being very glad. He even smiled his pleasant smile.
And Peter, entirely unexpectedly to himself, did what he always did in
the crises of his singularly disastrous life--he exploded into a giggle. So,
some years later, he laughed helplessly and suddenly, standing among
the broken fragments of his social reputation and his professional
career. He could not help it. When the worst had happened, there was
nothing else one could do. One laughed from a sheer sense of the
completeness of the disaster. Peter had a funny, extremely amused
laugh; hardly the laugh of a prosperous person; rather that of the
unhorsed knight who acknowledges the utterness of his defeat and finds
humour in the very fact. It was as if misfortune--and this misfortune of
the half-crown and the invitation is not to be
under-estimated--sharpened all the faculties, never blunt, by which he
apprehended humour. So he looked from Hilary to Urquhart, and,
mentally, from both to his cowering self, and exploded.
Urquhart had passed on. Hilary said, "What's the matter with you?" and
Peter recovered himself and said "Nothing." He might have cried, with
Miss Evelina Anvill, "Oh, my dear sir, I am shocked to death!" He did
not. He did not even say, "Why did you stamp us like that?" He would
not for the world have hurt Hilary's feelings, and vaguely he knew that
this splendid, unusual half-brother of his was in some ways a sensitive
person.
Hilary said, "The Urquharts ought to invite you to stay. The connection
is really close. I believe your mother was devoted to that boy as a baby.
You'd like to go and stay there, wouldn't you?"
Peter looked doubtful. He was nervous. Suppose Hilary met Urquhart
again.... Dire possibilities opened. Next time it might be "Peter must go
and stay at your uncle's place in Berkshire." That would be worse. Yes,

the worst had not happened, after all. Urquhart might have met Peggy.
Peggy would in that case have said, "You nice kind boy, you've been
such a dear to this little brother of ours, and I hear you and these boys
used to share a mamma, so you're really brothers, and so, of course, my
brother too; and what a nice face you've got!" There were in fact, no
limits to what Peggy might say. Peggy was outrageous. But it was
surprising how much one could bear from her. Presumably, Peter used
to reflect in after years, when he had to bear from her a very great deal
indeed, it was simply by virtue of her being Peggy. It was the same
with Hilary. They were Hilary and Peggy, and one took them as such.
Indeed, one had to, as there was certainly no altering them. And Peter
loved both of them very much indeed.
When Peter went home for the holidays, he found that Hilary's alliance
with the woman Peggy Callaghan was not smiled upon. But then none
of Hilary's projects were ever smiled upon by his uncle, who always
said, "Hilary must do as he likes. But he is acting with his usual lack of
judgment." For four years he had been saying so, and he said it again
now. To Hilary himself he further said, "You can't afford a wife at all.
You certainly can't afford Miss Callaghan. You have no right whatever
to marry until you are earning a settled livelihood. You are not of the
temperament to make any woman consistently happy. Miss Callaghan
is the daughter of an Irish doctor, and a Catholic."
"It is," said Hilary, "the most beautiful of all the religions. If I could
bring myself under the yoke of any creed at all ..."
"Just so," said his uncle, who was a disagreeable man; "but you can't,"
and Hilary tolerantly left it at that, merely adding, "There will be no
difficulty. We have arranged all that. Peggy is not a bigot. As to the rest,
I think we must judge for ourselves. I shall be earning more now, I
imagine."
Hilary always imagined that; imagination was his strong