The Lee Shore | Page 5

would much rather think that Urquhart had come to see him because he had put his arm out and Urquhart had put it in (really though, only temporarily in) than because his mother had once been Urquhart's stepmother.
Peter's arm did not recover so soon as Urquhart's sanguineness had predicted. Perhaps he began taking precautions against stiffness too soon; anyhow he did not that term make a decent three-quarter, or any sort of a three-quarter at all. It always took Peter a long time to get well of things; he was easy to break and hard to mend--made in Germany, as he was frequently told. So cheaply made was he that he could perform nothing. Defeated dreams lived in his eyes; but to light them there burned perpetually the blue and luminous lamps of undefeated mirth, and also an immense friendliness for life and mankind and the delightful world. Like the young knight Agenore, Peter the unlucky was of a mind having no limits of hope. Over the blue and friendly eyes that lit the small pale face, the half wistful brows were cocked with a kind of whimsical and gentle humour, the same humour that twitched constantly at the corners of his wide and flexible mouth. Peter was not a beautiful person, but one liked, somehow, to look at him and to meet his half-enquiring, half-amused, wholly friendly and sympathetic regard. By the end of his first term at school, he found himself unaccountably popular. Already he was called "Margery" and seldom seen by himself. He enjoyed life, because he liked people and they liked him, and things in general were rather jolly and very funny, even with a dislocated shoulder. Also the great Urquhart would, when he remembered, take a little notice of Peter--enough to inflate the young gentleman's spirit like a blown-out balloon and send him soaring skywards, to float gently down again at his leisure.
Towards the end of the term, Peter's half-brother Hilary came to visit him. Hilary was tall and slim and dark and rather beautiful, and he lived abroad and painted, and he told Peter that he was going to be married to a woman called Peggy Callaghan. Peter, who had always admired Hilary from afar, was rather sorry. The woman Peggy Callaghan would, he vaguely believed, come between Hilary and his family; and already there were more than enough of such obstacles to intercourse. But at tea-time he saw the woman, and she was large and fair and laughing, and called him, in her rich, amused voice "little brother dear," and he did not mind at all, but liked her and her laugh and her mirthful, lazy eyes.
Peter was a large-minded person; he did not mind that Hilary wore no collar and a floppy tie. He did not mind this even when they met Urquhart in the street. Peter whispered as he passed, "That's Urquhart," and Hilary suddenly stopped and held out his hand, and said pleasantly, "I am glad to meet you." Peter blushed at that, naturally (for Hilary's cheek, not for his tie), and hoped that Urquhart wasn't much offended, but that he understood what half-brothers who lived abroad and painted were, and didn't think it was Peter's fault. Urquhart shook hands quite pleasantly, and when Hilary added, "We shared a stepmother, you and I; I'm Peter's half-brother, you know," he amiably agreed. Peter hoped he didn't think that the Urquhart-Margerison connection was being strained beyond due bounds. Hilary said further, "You've been very good to my young brother, I know," and it was characteristic of Peter that, even while he listened to this embarrassing remark, he was free enough from self-consciousness to be thinking with a keen though undefined pleasure how extraordinarily nice to look at both Hilary and Urquhart, in their different ways, were. (Peter's love of the beautiful matured with his growth, but in intensity it could scarcely grow.) Urquhart was saying something about bad luck and shoulders; it was decent of Urquhart to say that. In fact, things were going really well till Hilary, after saying, "Good-bye, glad to have met you," added to it the afterthought, "You must come and stay at my uncle's place in Sussex some time. Mustn't he, Peter?" At the same time--fitting accompaniment 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