The Pupil, by Henry James

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Transcribed from the 1916 Le Roy Phillips edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE PUPIL

CHAPTER I

The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy.  Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some more conventional glance in that direction than he could find an opening for in the manner of the large affable lady who sat there drawing a pair of soiled gants de Suède through a fat jewelled hand and, at once pressing and gliding, repeated over and over everything but the thing he would have liked to hear.  He would have liked to hear the figure of his salary; but just as he was nervously about to sound that note the little boy came back—the little boy Mrs. Moreen had sent out of the room to fetch her fan.  He came back without the fan, only with the casual observation that he couldn’t find it.  As he dropped this cynical confession he looked straight and hard at the candidate for the honour of taking his education in hand.  This personage reflected somewhat grimly that the thing he should have to teach his little charge would be to appear to address himself to his mother when he spoke to her—especially not to make her such an improper answer as that.

When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid of their companion Pemberton supposed it was precisely to approach the delicate subject of his remuneration.  But it had been only to say some things about her son that it was better a boy of eleven shouldn’t catch.  They were extravagantly to his advantage save when she lowered her voice to sigh, tapping her left side familiarly, “And all overclouded by this, you know; all at the mercy of a weakness—!”  Pemberton gathered that the weakness was in the region of the heart.  He had known the poor child was not robust: this was the basis on which he had been invited to treat, through an English lady, an Oxford acquaintance, then at Nice, who happened to know both his needs and those of the amiable American family looking out for something really superior in the way of a resident tutor.

The young man’s impression of his prospective pupil, who had come into the room as if to see for himself the moment Pemberton was admitted, was not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken for granted.  Morgan Moreen was somehow sickly without being “delicate,” and that he looked intelligent—it is true Pemberton wouldn’t have enjoyed his being stupid—only added to the suggestion that, as with his big mouth and big ears he really couldn’t be called pretty, he might too utterly fail to please.  Pemberton was modest, was even timid; and the chance that his small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had quite figured, to his anxiety, among the dangers of an untried experiment.  He reflected, however, that these were risks one had to run when one accepted a position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one’s university honours had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren.  At any rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it was understood he would enter upon his duties within the week she would let him off now, he succeeded, in spite of the presence of the child, in squeezing out a phrase about the rate of payment.  It was not the fault of the conscious smile which seemed a reference to the lady’s expensive identity, it was not the fault of this demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if the allusion didn’t sound rather vulgar.  This was exactly because she became still more gracious to reply: “Oh I can assure you that all that will be quite regular.”

Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what “all that” was to amount to—people had such different ideas.  Mrs. Moreen’s words, however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the mocking foreign ejaculation “Oh la-la!”

Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to the window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the air in his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn’t play.  The young man wondered if he should be able to teach him to play, though his mother had said it would never do and that this was why school was impossible.  Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only continued blandly: “Mr. Moreen will be delighted to meet your wishes.  As I told you, he has been called to London for a week.  As soon as he comes back you shall have it out with him.”

This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply, laughing as his hostess laughed: “Oh I don’t imagine we shall have much of a battle.”

“They’ll give you anything you like,” the boy remarked unexpectedly, returning from the window.  “We don’t mind what anything costs—we live awfully well.”

“My darling, you’re too quaint!” his mother exclaimed, putting out to caress him a practised but ineffectual hand.  He slipped out of it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face seemed to change its time of life.  At this moment it was infantine, yet it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and knowledges.  Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed to find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his teens.  Nevertheless he divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn’t prove a bore.  He would prove on the contrary a source of agitation.  This idea held the young man, in spite of a certain repulsion.

“You pompous little person!  We’re not extravagant!”  Mrs. Moreen gaily protested, making another unsuccessful attempt to draw the boy to her side.  “You must know what to expect,” she went on to Pemberton.

“The less you expect the better!” her companion interposed.  “But we are people of fashion.”

“Only so far as you make us so!” Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked.  “Well then, on Friday—don’t tell me you’re superstitious—and mind you don’t fail us.  Then you’ll see us all.  I’m so sorry the girls are out.  I guess you’ll like the girls.  And, you know, I’ve another son, quite different from this one.”

“He tries to imitate me,” Morgan said to their friend.

“He tries?  Why he’s twenty years old!” cried Mrs. Moreen.

“You’re very witty,” Pemberton remarked to the child—a proposition his mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan’s sallies to be the delight of the house.

The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the visitor, who was surprised afterwards that he hadn’t struck him as offensively forward: “Do you want very much to come?”

“Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?” Pemberton replied.  Yet he didn’t want to come at all; he was coming because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune at the end of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant patrimony into a single full wave of experience.  He had had his full wave but couldn’t pay the score at his inn.  Moreover he had caught in the boy’s eyes the glimpse of a far-off appeal.

“Well, I’ll do the best I can for you,” said Morgan; with which he turned away again.  He passed out of one of the long windows; Pemberton saw him go and lean on the parapet of the terrace.  He remained there while the young man took leave of his mother, who, on Pemberton’s looking as if he expected a farewell from him, interposed with: “Leave him, leave him; he’s so strange!”  Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might say.  “He’s a genius—you’ll love him,” she added.  “He’s much the most interesting person in the family.”  And before he could invent some civility to oppose to this she wound up with: “But we’re all good, you know!”

“He’s a genius—you’ll love him!” were words that recurred to our aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses were not invariably loveable.  However, it was all the better if there was an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken too much for granted it would only disgust him.  As he left the villa after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning over it.  “We shall have great larks!” he called up.

Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: “By the time you come back I shall have thought of something witty!”

This made Pemberton say to himself “After all he’s rather nice.”

CHAPTER II

On the Friday he saw them all, as Mrs. Moreen had promised, for her husband had come back and the girls and the other son were at home.  Mr. Moreen had a white moustache, a confiding manner and, in his buttonhole, the ribbon of a foreign order—bestowed, as Pemberton eventually learned, for services.  For what services he never clearly ascertained: this was a point—one of a large number—that Mr. Moreen’s manner never confided.  What it emphatically did confide was that he was even more a man of the world than you might first make out.  Ulick, the firstborn, was in visible training for the same profession—under the disadvantage as yet, however, of a buttonhole but feebly floral and a moustache with no pretensions to type.  The girls had hair and figures and manners and small fat feet, but had never been out alone.  As for Mrs. Moreen Pemberton saw on a nearer view that her elegance was intermittent and her parts didn’t always match.  Her husband, as she had promised, met with enthusiasm Pemberton’s ideas in regard to a salary.  The young man had endeavoured to keep these stammerings modest, and Mr. Moreen made it no secret that he found them wanting in “style.”  He further mentioned that he aspired to be intimate with his children, to be their best friend, and that he was always looking out for them.  That was what he went off for, to London and other places—to look out; and this vigilance was the theory of life, as well as the real occupation, of the whole family.  They all looked out, for they were very frank on the subject of its being necessary.  They desired it to be understood that they were earnest people, and also that their fortune, though quite adequate for earnest people, required the most careful administration.  Mr. Moreen, as the parent bird, sought sustenance for the nest.  Ulick invoked support mainly at the club, where Pemberton guessed that it was usually served on green cloth.  The girls used to do up their hair and their frocks themselves, and our young man felt appealed to to be glad, in regard to Morgan’s education, that, though it must naturally be of the best, it didn’t cost too much.  After a little he was glad, forgetting at times his own needs in the interest inspired by the child’s character and culture and the pleasure of making easy terms for him.

During the first weeks of their acquaintance Morgan had been as puzzling as a page in an unknown language—altogether different from the obvious little Anglo-Saxons who had misrepresented childhood to Pemberton.  Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in translation.  To-day, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic reflexion or a serial novel, in Pemberton’s memory of the queerness of the Moreens.  If it were not for a few tangible tokens—a lock of Morgan’s hair cut by his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were disjoined—the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too inconsequent for anything but dreamland.  Their supreme quaintness was their success—as it appeared to him for a while at the time; since he had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure.  Wasn’t it success to have kept him so hatefully long?  Wasn’t it success to have drawn him in that first morning at déjeuner, the Friday he came—it was enough to make one superstitious—so that he utterly committed himself, and this not by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together?  They amused him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies.  He was still young and had not seen much of the world—his English years had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the Moreens—for they had their desperate proprieties—struck him as topsy-turvy.  He had encountered nothing like them at Oxford; still less had any such note been struck to his younger American ear during the four years at Yale in which he had richly supposed himself to be reacting against a Puritan strain.  The reaction of the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much further.  He had thought himself very sharp that first day in hitting them all off in his mind with the “cosmopolite” label.  Later it seemed feeble and colourless—confessedly helplessly provisional.

He yet when he first applied it felt a glow of joy—for an instructor he was still empirical—rise from the apprehension that living with them would really he to see life.  Their sociable strangeness was an intimation of that—their chatter of tongues, their gaiety and good humour, their infinite dawdling (they were always getting themselves up, but it took forever, and Pemberton had once found Mr. Moreen shaving in the drawing-room), their French, their Italian and, cropping up in the foreign fluencies, their cold tough slices of American.  They lived on macaroni and coffee—they had these articles prepared in perfection—but they knew recipes for a hundred other dishes.  They overflowed with music and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities.  They talked of “good places” as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players.  They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to official parties.  They were a perfect calendar of the “days” of their friends, which Pemberton knew them, when they were indisposed, to get out of bed to go to, and which made the week larger than life when Mrs. Moreen talked of them with Paula and Amy.  Their initiations gave their new inmate at first an almost dazzling sense of culture.  Mrs. Moreen had translated something at some former period—an author whom it made Pemberton feel borné never to have heard of.  They could imitate Venetian and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very particular communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some patois of one of their countries, but which he “caught on to” as he would not have grasped provincial development of Spanish or German.

“It’s the family language—Ultramoreen,” Morgan explained to him drolly enough; but the boy rarely condescended to use it himself, though he dealt in colloquial Latin as if he had been a little prelate.

Among all the “days” with which Mrs. Moreen’s memory was taxed she managed to squeeze in one of her own, which her friends sometimes forgot.  But the house drew a frequented air from the number of fine people who were freely named there and from several mysterious men with foreign titles and English clothes whom Morgan called the princes and who, on sofas with the girls, talked French very loud—though sometimes with some oddity of accent—as if to show they were saying nothing improper.  Pemberton wondered how the princes could ever propose in that tone and so publicly: he took for granted cynically that this was what was desired of them.  Then he recognised that even for the chance of such an advantage Mrs. Moreen would never allow Paula and Amy to receive alone.  These young ladies were not at all timid, but it was just the safeguards that made them so candidly free.  It was a houseful of Bohemians who wanted tremendously to be Philistines.

In one respect, however, certainly they achieved no rigour—they were wonderfully amiable and ecstatic about Morgan.  It was a genuine tenderness, an artless admiration, equally strong in each.  They even praised his beauty, which was small, and were as afraid of him as if they felt him of finer clay.  They spoke of him as a little angel and a prodigy—they touched on his want of health with long vague faces.  Pemberton feared at first an extravagance that might make him hate the boy, but before this happened he had become extravagant himself.  Later, when he had grown rather to hate the others, it was a bribe to patience for him that they were at any rate nice about Morgan, going on tiptoe if they fancied he was showing symptoms, and even giving up somebody’s “day” to procure him a pleasure.  Mixed with this too was the oddest wish to make him independent, as if they had felt themselves not good enough for him.  They passed him over to the new members of their circle very much as if wishing to force some charity of adoption on so free an agent and get rid of their own charge.  They were delighted when they saw Morgan take so to his kind playfellow, and could think of no higher praise for the young man.  It was strange how they contrived to reconcile the appearance, and indeed the essential fact, of adoring the child with their eagerness to wash their hands of him.  Did they want to get rid of him before he should find them out?  Pemberton was finding them out month by month.  The boy’s fond family, however this might be, turned their backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the reproach of interfering.  Seeing in time how little he had in common with them—it was by them he first observed it; they proclaimed it with complete humility—his companion was moved to speculate on the mysteries of transmission, the far jumps of heredity.  Where his detachment from most of the things they represented had come from was more than an observer could say—it certainly had burrowed under two or three generations.

As for Pemberton’s own estimate of his pupil, it was a good while before he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for it by the smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto revealed to him, had been adjusted.  Morgan was scrappy and surprising, deficient in many properties supposed common to the genus and abounding in others that were the portion only of the supernaturally clever.  One day his friend made a great stride: it cleared up the question to perceive that Morgan was supernaturally clever and that, though the formula was temporarily meagre, this would be the only assumption on which one could successfully deal with him.  He had the general quality of a child for whom life had not been simplified by school, a kind of homebred sensibility which might have been as bad for himself but was charming for others, and a whole range of refinement and perception—little musical vibrations as taking as picked-up airs—begotten by wandering about Europe at the tail of his migratory tribe.  This might not have been an education to recommend in advance, but its results with so special a subject were as appreciable as the marks on a piece of fine porcelain.  There was at the same time in him a small strain of stoicism, doubtless the fruit of having had to begin early to bear pain, which counted for pluck and made it of less consequence that he might have been thought at school rather a polyglot little beast.  Pemberton indeed quickly found himself rejoicing that school was out of the question: in any million of boys it was probably good for all but one, and Morgan was that millionth.  It would have made him comparative and superior—it might have made him really require kicking.  Pemberton would try to be school himself—a bigger seminary than five hundred grazing donkeys, so that, winning no prizes, the boy would remain unconscious and irresponsible and amusing—amusing, because, though life was already intense in his childish nature, freshness still made there a strong draught for jokes.  It turned out that even in the still air of Morgan’s various disabilities jokes flourished greatly.  He was a pale lean acute undeveloped little cosmopolite, who liked intellectual gymnastics and who also, as regards the behaviour of mankind, had noticed more things than you might suppose, but who nevertheless had his proper playroom of superstitions, where he smashed a dozen toys a day.

CHAPTER III

At Nice once, toward evening, as the pair rested in the open air after a walk, and looked over the sea at the pink western lights, he said suddenly to his comrade: “Do you like it, you know—being with us all in this intimate way?”

“My dear fellow, why should I stay if I didn’t?”

“How do I know you’ll stay?  I’m almost sure you won’t, very long.”

“I hope you don’t mean to dismiss me,” said Pemberton.

Morgan debated, looking at the sunset.  “I think if I did right I ought to.”

“Well, I know I’m supposed to instruct you in virtue; but in that case don’t do right.”

“’You’re very young—fortunately,” Morgan went on, turning to him again.

“Oh yes, compared with you!”

“Therefore it won’t matter so much if you do lose a lot of time.”

“That’s the way to look at it,” said Pemberton accommodatingly.

They were silent a minute; after which the boy asked: “Do you like my father and my mother very much?”

“Dear me, yes.  They’re charming people.”

Morgan received this with another silence; then unexpectedly, familiarly, but at the same time affectionately, he remarked: “You’re a jolly old humbug!”

For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour.  The boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance in which there was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation.  It produced for Pemberton an embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy form a question—this was the first glimpse of it—destined to play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to the altogether peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his intercourse with his little companion.  Later, when he found himself talking with the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened.  What had added to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to Morgan that he might abuse him, Pemberton, as much as he liked, but must never abuse his parents.  To this Morgan had the easy retort that he hadn’t dreamed of abusing them; which appeared to be true: it put Pemberton in the wrong.

“Then why am I a humbug for saying I think them charming?” the young man asked, conscious of a certain rashness.

“Well—they’re not your parents.”

“They love you better than anything in the world—never forget that,” said Pemberton.

“Is that why you like them so much?”

“They’re very kind to me,” Pemberton replied evasively.

“You are a humbug!” laughed Morgan, passing an arm into his tutor’s.  He leaned against him looking oft at the sea again and swinging his long thin legs.

“Don’t kick my shins,” said Pemberton while he reflected “Hang it, I can’t complain of them to the child!”

“There’s another reason, too,” Morgan went on, keeping his legs still.

“Another reason for what?”

“Besides their not being your parents.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Pemberton.

“Well, you will before long.  All right!”

He did understand fully before long, but he made a fight even with himself before he confessed it.  He thought it the oddest thing to have a struggle with the child about.  He wondered he didn’t hate the hope of the Moreens for bringing the struggle on.  But by the time it began any such sentiment for that scion was closed to him.  Morgan was a special case, and to know him was to accept him on his own odd terms.  Pemberton had spent his aversion to special cases before arriving at knowledge.  When at last he did arrive his quandary was great.  Against every interest he had attached himself.  They would have to meet things together.  Before they went home that evening at Nice the boy had said, clinging to his arm:

“Well, at any rate you’ll hang on to the last.”

“To the last?”

“Till you’re fairly beaten.”

“You ought to be fairly beaten!” cried the young man, drawing him closer.

CHAPTER IV

A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen suddenly gave up the villa at Nice.  Pemberton had got used to suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during two jerky little tours—one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late in the winter, when they all ran down to Florence and then, at the end of ten days, liking it much less than they had intended, straggled back in mysterious depression.  They had returned to Nice “for ever,” as they said; but this didn’t prevent their squeezing, one rainy muggy May night, into a second-class railway-carriage—you could never tell by which class they would travel—where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful collection of bundles and bags.  The explanation of this manoeuvre was that they had determined to spend the summer “in some bracing place”; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment—a fourth floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful—and passed the next four months in blank indigence.

The better part of this baffled sojourn was for the preceptor and his pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and Notre Dame, the Conciergerie and all the museums, took a hundred remunerative rambles.  They learned to know their Paris, which was useful, for they came back another year for a longer stay, the general character of which in Pemberton’s memory to-day mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of the first.  He sees Morgan’s shabby knickerbockers—the everlasting pair that didn’t match his blouse and that as he grew longer could only grow faded.  He remembers the particular holes in his three or four pair of coloured stockings.

Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than was absolutely necessary—partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for he was as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher.  “My dear fellow, you are coming to pieces,” Pemberton would say to him in sceptical remonstrance; to which the child would reply, looking at him serenely up and down: “My dear fellow, so are you!  I don’t want to cast you in the shade.”  Pemberton could have no rejoinder for this—the assertion so closely represented the fact.  If however the deficiencies of his own wardrobe were a chapter by themselves he didn’t like his little charge to look too poor.  Later he used to say “Well, if we’re poor, why, after all, shouldn’t we look it?” and he consoled himself with thinking there was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan’s disrepair—it differed from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and spoils his things.  He could trace perfectly the degrees by which, in proportion as her little son confined himself to his tutor for society, Mrs. Moreen shrewdly forbore to renew his garments.  She did nothing that didn’t show, neglected him because he escaped notice, and then, as he illustrated this clever policy, discouraged at home his public appearances.  Her position was logical enough—those members of her family who did show had to be showy.

During this period and several others Pemberton was quite aware of how he and his comrade might strike people; wandering languidly through the Jardin des Plantes as if they had nowhere to go, sitting on the winter days in the galleries of the Louvre, so splendidly ironical to the homeless, as if for the advantage of the calorifère.  They joked about it sometimes: it was the sort of joke that was perfectly within the boy’s compass.  They figured themselves as part of the vast vague hand-to-mouth multitude of the enormous city and pretended they were proud of their position in it—it showed them “such a lot of life” and made them conscious of a democratic brotherhood.  If Pemberton couldn’t feel a sympathy in destitution with his small companion—for after all Morgan’s fond parents would never have let him really suffer—the boy would at least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing.  He used sometimes to wonder what people would think they were—to fancy they were looked askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping.  Morgan wouldn’t be taken for a young patrician with a preceptor—he wasn’t smart enough; though he might pass for his companion’s sickly little brother.  Now and then he had a five-franc piece, and except once, when they bought a couple of lovely neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they laid it out scientifically in old books.  This was sure to be a great day, always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that garnish the parapets.  Such occasions helped them to live, for their books ran low very soon after the beginning of their acquaintance.  Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was obliged to write to a friend and ask him kindly to get some fellow to give him something for them.

If they had to relinquish that summer the advantage of the bracing climate the young man couldn’t but suspect this failure of the cup when at their very lips to have been the effect of a rude jostle of his own.  This had represented his first blow-out, as he called it, with his patrons; his first successful attempt—though there was little other success about it—to bring them to a consideration of his impossible position.  As the ostensible eve of a costly journey the moment had struck him as favourable to an earnest protest, the presentation of an ultimatum.  Ridiculous as it sounded, he had never yet been able to compass an uninterrupted private interview with the elder pair or with either of them singly.  They were always flanked by their elder children, and poor Pemberton usually had his own little charge at his side.  He was conscious of its being a house in which the surface of one’s delicacy got rather smudged; nevertheless he had preserved the bloom of his scruple against announcing to Mr. and Mrs. Moreen with publicity that he shouldn’t be able to go on longer without a little money.  He was still simple enough to suppose Ulick and Paula and Amy might not know that since his arrival he had only had a hundred and forty francs; and he was magnanimous enough to wish not to compromise their parents in their eyes.  Mr. Moreen now listened to him, as he listened to every one and to every thing, like a man of the world, and seemed to appeal to him—though not of course too grossly—to try and be a little more of one himself.  Pemberton recognised in fact the importance of the character—from the advantage it gave Mr. Moreen.  He was not even confused or embarrassed, whereas the young man in his service was more so than there was any reason for.  Neither was he surprised—at least any more than a gentleman had to be who freely confessed himself a little shocked—though not perhaps strictly at Pemberton.

“We must go into this, mustn’t we, dear?” he said to his wife.  He assured his young friend that the matter should have his very best attention; and he melted into space as elusively as if, at the door, he were taking an inevitable but deprecatory precedence.  When, the next moment, Pemberton found himself alone with Mrs. Moreen it was to hear her say “I see, I see”—stroking the roundness of her chin and looking as if she were only hesitating between a dozen easy remedies.  If they didn’t make their push Mr. Moreen could at least disappear for several days.  During his absence his wife took up the subject again spontaneously, but her contribution to it was merely that she had thought all the while they were getting on so beautifully.  Pemberton’s reply to this revelation was that unless they immediately put down something on account he would leave them on the spot and for ever.  He knew she would wonder how he would get away, and for a moment expected her to enquire.  She didn’t, for which he was almost grateful to her, so little was he in a position to tell.

“You won’t, you know you won’t—you’re too interested,” she said.  “You are interested, you know you are, you dear kind man!”  She laughed with almost condemnatory archness, as if it were a reproach—though she wouldn’t insist; and flirted a soiled pocket-handkerchief at him.

Pemberton’s mind was fully made up to take his step the following week.  This would give him time to get an answer to a letter he had despatched to England.  If he did in the event nothing of the sort—that is if he stayed another year and then went away only for three months—it was not merely because before the answer to his letter came (most unsatisfactory when it did arrive) Mr. Moreen generously counted out to him, and again with the sacrifice to “form” of a marked man of the world, three hundred francs in elegant ringing gold.  He was irritated to find that Mrs. Moreen was right, that he couldn’t at the pinch bear to leave the child.  This stood out clearer for the very reason that, the night of his desperate appeal to his patrons, he had seen fully for the first time where he was.  Wasn’t it another proof of the success with which those patrons practised their arts that they had managed to avert for so long the illuminating flash?  It descended on our friend with a breadth of effect which perhaps would have struck a spectator as comical, after he had returned to his little servile room, which looked into a close court where a bare dirty opposite wall took, with the sound of shrill clatter, the reflexion of lighted back windows.  He had simply given himself away to a band of adventurers.  The idea, the word itself, wore a romantic horror for him—he had always lived on such safe lines.  Later it assumed a more interesting, almost a soothing, sense: it pointed a moral, and Pemberton could enjoy a moral.  The Moreens were adventurers not merely because they didn’t pay their debts, because they lived on society, but because their whole view of life, dim and confused and instinctive, like that of clever colour-blind animals, was speculative and rapacious and mean.  Oh they were “respectable,” and that only made them more immondes.  The young man’s analysis, while he brooded, put it at last very simply—they were adventurers because they were toadies and snobs.  That was the completest account of them—it was the law of their being.  Even when this truth became vivid to their ingenious inmate he remained unconscious of how much his mind had been prepared for it by the extraordinary little boy who had now become such a complication in his life.  Much less could he then calculate on the information he was still to owe the extraordinary little boy.

CHAPTER V

But it was during the ensuing time that the real problem came up—the problem of how far it was excusable to discuss the turpitude of parents with a child of twelve, of thirteen, of fourteen.  Absolutely inexcusable and quite impossible it of course at first appeared; and indeed the question didn’t press for some time after Pemberton had received his three hundred francs.  They produced a temporary lull, a relief from the sharpest pressure.  The young man frugally amended his wardrobe and even had a few francs in his pocket.  He thought the Moreens looked at him as if he were almost too smart, as if they ought to take care not to spoil him.  If Mr. Moreen hadn’t been such a man of the world he would perhaps have spoken of the freedom of such neckties on the part of a subordinate.  But Mr. Moreen was always enough a man of the world to let things pass—he had certainly shown that.  It was singular how Pemberton guessed that Morgan, though saying nothing about it, knew something had happened.  But three hundred francs, especially when one owed money, couldn’t last for ever; and when the treasure was gone—the boy knew when it had failed—Morgan did break ground.  The party had returned to Nice at the beginning of the winter, but not to the charming villa.  They went to an hotel, where they stayed three months, and then moved to another establishment, explaining that they had left the first because, after waiting and waiting, they couldn’t get the rooms they wanted.  These apartments, the rooms they wanted, were generally very splendid; but fortunately they never could get them—fortunately, I mean, for Pemberton, who reflected always that if they had got them there would have been a still scantier educational fund.  What Morgan said at last was said suddenly, irrelevantly, when the moment came, in the middle of a lesson, and consisted of the apparently unfeeling words: “You ought to filer, you know—you really ought.”

Pemberton stared.  He had learnt enough French slang from Morgan to know that to filer meant to cut sticks.  “Ah my dear fellow, don’t turn me off!”

Morgan pulled a Greek lexicon toward him—he used a Greek-German—to look out a word, instead of asking it of Pemberton.  “You can’t go on like this, you know.”

“Like what, my boy?”

“You know they don’t pay you up,” said Morgan, blushing and turning his leaves.

“Don’t pay me?” Pemberton stared again and feigned amazement.  “What on earth put that into your head?”

“It has been there a long time,” the boy replied rummaging his book.

Pemberton was silent, then he went on: “I say, what are you hunting for?  They pay me beautifully.”

“I’m hunting for the Greek for awful whopper,” Morgan dropped.

“Find that rather for gross impertinence and disabuse your mind.  What do I want of money?”

“Oh that’s another question!”

Pemberton wavered—he was drawn in different ways.  The severely correct thing would have been to tell the boy that such a matter was none of his business and bid him go on with his lines.  But they were really too intimate for that; it was not the way he was in the habit of treating him; there had been no reason it should be.  On the other hand Morgan had quite lighted on the truth—he really shouldn’t be able to keep it up much longer; therefore why not let him know one’s real motive for forsaking him?  At the same time it wasn’t decent to abuse to one’s pupil the family of one’s pupil; it was better to misrepresent than to do that.  So in reply to his comrade’s last exclamation he just declared, to dismiss the subject, that he had received several payments.

“I say—I say!” the boy ejaculated, laughing.

“That’s all right,” Pemberton insisted.  “Give me your written rendering.”

Morgan pushed a copybook across the table, and he began to read the page, but with something running in his head that made it no sense.  Looking up after a minute or two he found the child’s eyes fixed on him and felt in them something strange.  Then Morgan said: “I’m not afraid of the stern reality.”

“I haven’t yet seen the thing you are afraid of—I’ll do you that justice!”

This came out with a jump—it was perfectly true—and evidently gave Morgan pleasure.  “I’ve thought of it a long time,” he presently resumed.

“Well, don’t think of it any more.”

The boy appeared to comply, and they had a comfortable and even an amusing hour.  They had a theory that they were very thorough, and yet they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, the intervals between the dull dark tunnels, where there were waysides and jolly views.  Yet the morning was brought to a violent as end by Morgan’s suddenly leaning his arms on the table, burying his head in them and bursting into tears: at which Pemberton was the more startled that, as it then came over him, it was the first time he had ever seen the boy cry and that the impression was consequently quite awful.

The next day, after much thought, he took a decision and, believing it to be just, immediately acted on it.  He cornered Mr. and Mrs. Moreen again and let them know that if on the spot they didn’t pay him all they owed him he wouldn’t only leave their house but would tell Morgan exactly what had brought him to it.

“Oh you haven’t told him?” cried Mrs. Moreen with a pacifying hand on her well-dressed bosom.

“Without warning you?  For what do you take me?” the young man returned.

Mr. and Mrs. Moreen looked at each other; he could see that they appreciated, as tending to their security, his superstition of delicacy, and yet that there was a certain alarm in their relief.  “My dear fellow,” Mr. Moreen demanded, “what use can you have, leading the quiet life we all do, for such a lot of money?”—a question to which Pemberton made no answer, occupied as he was in noting that what passed in the mind of his patrons was something like: “Oh then, if we’ve felt that the child, dear little angel, has judged us and how he regards us, and we haven’t been betrayed, he must have guessed—and in short it’s general!” an inference that rather stirred up Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, as Pemberton had desired it should.  At the same time, if he had supposed his threat would do something towards bringing them round, he was disappointed to find them taking for granted—how vulgar their perception had been!—that he had already given them away.  There was a mystic uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that had been the inferior sense of it.  None the less however, his threat did touch them; for if they had escaped it was only to meet a new danger.  Mr. Moreen appealed to him, on every precedent, as a man of the world; but his wife had recourse, for the first time since his domestication with them, to a fine hauteur, reminding him that a devoted mother, with her child, had arts that protected her against gross misrepresentation.

“I should misrepresent you grossly if I accused you of common honesty!” our friend replied; but as he closed the door behind him sharply, thinking he had not done himself much good, while Mr. Moreen lighted another cigarette, he heard his hostess shout after him more touchingly:

“Oh you do, you do, put the knife to one’s throat!”

The next morning, very early, she came to his  room.  He recognised her knock, but had no hope she brought him money; as to which he was wrong, for she had fifty francs in her hand.  She squeezed forward in her dressing-gown, and he received her in his own, between his bath-tub and his bed.  He had been tolerably schooled by this time to the “foreign ways” of his hosts.  Mrs. Moreen was ardent, and when she was ardent she didn’t care what she did; so she now sat down on his bed, his clothes being on the chairs, and, in her preoccupation, forgot, as she glanced round, to be ashamed of giving him such a horrid room.  What Mrs. Moreen’s ardour now bore upon was the design of persuading him that in the first place she was very good-natured to bring him fifty francs, and that in the second, if he would only see it, he was really too absurd to expect to be paid.  Wasn’t he paid enough without perpetual money—wasn’t he paid by the comfortable luxurious home he enjoyed with them all, without a care, an anxiety, a solitary want?  Wasn’t he sure of his position, and wasn’t that everything to a young man like him, quite unknown, with singularly little to show, the ground of whose exorbitant pretensions it had never been easy to discover?  Wasn’t he paid above all by the sweet relation he had established with Morgan—quite ideal as from master to pupil—and by the simple privilege of knowing and living with so amazingly gifted a child; than whom really (and she meant literally what she said) there was no better company in Europe?  Mrs. Moreen herself took to appealing to him as a man of the world; she said “Voyons, mon cher,” and “My dear man, look here now”; and urged him to be reasonable, putting it before him that it was truly a chance for him.  She spoke as if, according as he should be reasonable, he would prove himself worthy to be her son’s tutor and of the extraordinary confidence they had placed in him.

After all, Pemberton reflected, it was only a difference of theory and the theory didn’t matter much.  They had hitherto gone on that of remunerated, as now they would go on that of gratuitous, service; but why should they have so many words about it?  Mrs. Moreen at all events continued to be convincing; sitting there with her fifty francs she talked and reiterated, as women reiterate, and bored and irritated him, while he leaned against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his wrapper, drawing it together round his legs and looking over the head of his visitor at the grey negations of his window.  She wound up with saying: “You see I bring you a definite proposal.”

“A definite proposal?”

“To make our relations regular, as it were—to put them on a comfortable footing.”

“I see—it’s a system,” said Pemberton.  “A kind of organised blackmail.”

Mrs. Moreen bounded up, which was exactly what he wanted.  “What do you mean by that?”

“You practise on one’s fears—one’s fears about the child if one should go away.”

“And pray what would happen to him in that event?” she demanded, with majesty.

“Why he’d be alone with you.”

“And pray with whom should a child be but with those whom he loves most?”

“If you think that, why don’t you dismiss me?”

“Do you pretend he loves you more than he loves us?” cried Mrs. Moreen.

“I think he ought to.  I make sacrifices for him.  Though I’ve heard of those you make I don’t see them.”

Mrs. Moreen stared a moment; then with emotion she grasped her inmate’s hand.  “Will you make it—the sacrifice?”

He burst out laughing.  “I’ll see.  I’ll do what I can.  I’ll stay a little longer.  Your calculation’s just—I do hate intensely to give him up; I’m fond of him and he thoroughly interests me, in spite of the inconvenience I suffer.  You know my situation perfectly.  I haven’t a penny in the world and, occupied as you see me with Morgan, am unable to earn money.”

Mrs. Moreen tapped her undressed arm with her folded bank-note.  “Can’t you write articles?  Can’t you translate as I do?”

“I don’t know about translating; it’s wretchedly paid.”

“I’m glad to earn what I can,” said Mrs. Moreen with prodigious virtue.

“You ought to tell me who you do it for.”  Pemberton paused a moment, and she said nothing; so he added: “I’ve tried to turn off some little sketches, but the magazines won’t have them—they’re declined with thanks.”

“You see then you’re not such a phoenix,” his visitor pointedly smiled—“to pretend to abilities you’re sacrificing for our sake.”

“I haven’t time to do things properly,” he ruefully went on.  Then as it came over him that he was almost abjectly good-natured to give these explanations he added: “If I stay on longer it must be on one condition—that Morgan shall know distinctly on what footing I am.”

Mrs. Moreen demurred.  “Surely you don’t want to show off to a child?”

“To show you off, do you mean?”

Again she cast about, but this time it was to produce a still finer flower.  “And you talk of blackmail!”

“You can easily prevent it,” said Pemberton.

“And you talk of practising on fears,” she bravely pushed on.

“Yes, there’s no doubt I’m a great scoundrel.”

His patroness met his eyes—it was clear she was in straits.  Then she thrust out her money at him.  “Mr. Moreen desired me to give you this on account.”

“I’m much obliged to Mr. Moreen, but we have no account.”

“You won’t take it?”

“That leaves me more free,” said Pemberton.

“To poison my darling’s mind?” groaned Mrs. Moreen.

“Oh your darling’s mind—!” the young man laughed.

She fixed him a moment, and he thought she was going to break out tormentedly, pleadingly: “For God’s sake, tell me what is in it!”  But she checked this impulse—another was stronger.  She pocketed the money—the crudity of the alternative was comical—and swept out of the room with the desperate concession: “You may tell him any horror you like!”

CHAPTER VI

A couple of days after this, during which he had failed to profit by so free a permission, he had been for a quarter of an hour walking with his charge in silence when the boy became sociable again with the remark: “I’ll tell you how I know it; I know it through Zénobie.”

“Zénobie?  Who in the world is she?”

“A nurse I used to have—ever so many years ago.  A charming woman.  I liked her awfully, and she liked me.”

“There’s no accounting for tastes.  What is it you know through her?”

“Why what their idea is.  She went away because they didn’t fork out.  She did like me awfully, and she stayed two years.  She told me all about it—that at last she could never get her wages.  As soon as they saw how much she liked me they stopped giving her anything.  They thought she’d stay for nothing—just because, don’t you know?”  And Morgan had a queer little conscious lucid look.  “She did stay ever so long—as long an she could.  She was only a poor girl.  She used to send money to her mother.  At last she couldn’t afford it any longer, and went away in a fearful rage one night—I mean of course in a rage against them.  She cried over me tremendously, she hugged me nearly to death.  She told me all about it,” the boy repeated.  “She told me it was their idea.  So I guessed, ever so long ago, that they have had the same idea with you.”

“Zénobie was very sharp,” said Pemberton.  “And she made you so.”

“Oh that wasn’t Zénobie; that was nature.  And experience!” Morgan laughed.

“Well, Zénobie was a part of your experience.”

“Certainly I was a part of hers, poor dear!” the boy wisely sighed.  “And I’m part of yours.”

“A very important part.  But I don’t see how you know that I’ve been treated like Zénobie.”

“Do you take me for the biggest dunce you’ve known?” Morgan asked.  “Haven’t I been conscious of what we’ve been through together?”

“What we’ve been through?”

“Our privations—our dark days.”

“Oh our days have been bright enough.”

Morgan went on in silence for a moment.  Then he said: “My dear chap, you’re a hero!”

“Well, you’re another!” Pemberton retorted.

“No I’m not, but I ain’t a baby.  I won’t stand it any longer.  You must get some occupation that pays.  I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed!” quavered the boy with a ring of passion, like some high silver note from a small cathedral cloister, that deeply touched his friend.

“We ought to go off and live somewhere together,” the young man said.

“I’ll go like a shot if you’ll take me.”

“I’d get some work that would keep us both afloat,” Pemberton continued.

“So would I.  Why shouldn’t I work?  I ain’t such a beastly little muff as that comes to.”

“The difficulty is that your parents wouldn’t hear of it.  They’d never part with you; they worship the ground you tread on.  Don’t you see the proof of it?” Pemberton developed.  “They don’t dislike me; they wish me no harm; they’re very amiable people; but they’re perfectly ready to expose me to any awkwardness in life for your sake.”

The silence in which Morgan received his fond sophistry struck Pemberton somehow as expressive.  After a moment the child repeated: “You are a hero!”  Then he added: “They leave me with you altogether.  You’ve all the responsibility.  They put me off on you from morning till night.  Why then should they object to my taking up with you completely?  I’d help you.”

“They’re not particularly keen about my being helped, and they delight in thinking of you as theirs.  They’re tremendously proud of you.”

“I’m not proud of them.  But you know that,” Morgan returned.

“Except for the little matter we speak of they’re charming people,” said Pemberton, not taking up the point made for his intelligence, but wondering greatly at the boy’s own, and especially at this fresh reminder of something he had been conscious of from the first—the strangest thing in his friend’s large little composition, a temper, a sensibility, even a private ideal, which made him as privately disown the stuff his people were made of.  Morgan had in secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed meanness; as well as a critical sense for the manners immediately surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this nature “old-fashioned,” as the word is of children—quaint or wizened or offensive.  It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had paid the penalty by discovering that he was the only such person in his family.  This comparison didn’t make him vain, but it could make him melancholy and a trifle austere.  While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things, shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper.  When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn’t know.  It seemed to him that he himself knew too much to imagine Morgan’s simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.

The boy paid no heed to his last remark; he only went on: “I’d have spoken to them about their idea, as I call it, long ago, if I hadn’t been sure what they’d say.”

“And what would they say?”

“Just what they said about what poor Zénobie told me—that it was a horrid dreadful story, that they had paid her every penny they owed her.”

“Well, perhaps they had,” said Pemberton.

“Perhaps they’ve paid you!”

“Let us pretend they have, and n’en parlons plus.”

“They accused her of lying and cheating”—Morgan stuck to historic truth.  “That’s why I don’t want to speak to them.”

“Lest they should accuse me, too?”  To this Morgan made no answer, and his companion, looking down at him—the boy turned away his eyes, which had filled—saw what he couldn’t have trusted himself to utter.  “You’re right.  Don’t worry them,” Pemberton pursued.  “Except for that, they are charming people.”

“Except for their lying and their cheating?”

“I say—I say!” cried Pemberton, imitating a little tone of the lad’s which was itself an imitation.

“We must be frank, at the last; we must come to an understanding,” said Morgan with the importance of the small boy who lets himself think he is arranging great affairs—almost playing at shipwreck or at Indians.  “I know all about everything.”

“I dare say your father has his reasons,’’ Pemberton replied, but too vaguely, as he was aware.

“For lying and cheating?”

“For saving and managing and turning his means to the best account.  He has plenty to do with his money.  You’re an expensive family.”

“Yes, I’m very expensive,” Morgan concurred in a manner that made his preceptor burst out laughing.

“He’s saving for you,” said Pemberton.  “They think of you in everything they do.”

“He might, while he’s about it, save a little—”  The boy paused, and his friend waited to hear what.  Then Morgan brought out oddly: “A little reputation.”

“Oh there’s plenty of that.  That’s all right!”

“Enough of it for the people they know, no doubt.  The people they know are awful.”

“Do you mean the princes?  We mustn’t abuse the princes.”

“Why not?  They haven’t married Paula—they haven’t married Amy.  They only clean out Ulick.”

“You do know everything!” Pemberton declared.

“No, I don’t, after all.  I don’t know what they live on, or how they live, or why they live!  What have they got and how did they get it?  Are they rich, are they poor, or have they a modeste aisance?  Why are they always chiveying me about—living one year like ambassadors and the next like paupers?  Who are they, any way, and what are they?  I’ve thought of all that—I’ve thought of a lot of things.  They’re so beastly worldly.  That’s what I hate most—oh, I’ve seen it!  All they care about is to make an appearance and to pass for something or other.  What the dickens do they want to pass for?  What do they, Mr. Pemberton?”

“You pause for a reply,” said Pemberton, treating the question as a joke, yet wondering too and greatly struck with his mate’s intense if imperfect vision.  “I haven’t the least idea.”

“And what good does it do?  Haven’t I seen the way people treat them—the ‘nice’ people, the ones they want to know?  They’ll take anything from them—they’ll lie down and be trampled on.  The nice ones hate that—they just sicken them.  You’re the only really nice person we know.”

“Are you sure?  They don’t lie down for me!”

“Well, you shan’t lie down for them.  You’ve got to go—that’s what you’ve got to do,” said Morgan.

“And what will become of you?”

“Oh I’m growing up.  I shall get off before long.  I’ll see you later.”

“You had better let me finish you,” Pemberton urged, lending himself to the child’s strange superiority.

Morgan stopped in their walk, looking up at him.  He had to look up much less than a couple of years before—he had grown, in his loose leanness, so long and high.  “Finish me?” he echoed.

“There are such a lot of jolly things we can do together yet.  I want to turn you out—I want you to do me credit.”

Morgan continued to look at him.  “To give you credit—do you mean?”

“My dear fellow, you’re too clever to live.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid you think.  No, no; it isn’t fair—I can’t endure it.  We’ll separate next week.  The sooner it’s over the sooner to sleep.”

“If I hear of anything—any other chance—I promise to go,” Pemberton said.

Morgan consented to consider this.  “But you’ll be honest,” he demanded; “you won’t pretend you haven’t heard?”

“I’m much more likely to pretend I have.”

“But what can you hear of, this way, stuck in a hole with us?  You ought to be on the spot, to go to England—you ought to go to America.”

“One would think you were my tutor!” said Pemberton.

Morgan walked on and after a little had begun again: “Well, now that you know I know and that we look at the facts and keep nothing back—it’s much more comfortable, isn’t it?”

“My dear boy, it’s so amusing, so interesting, that it will surely be quite impossible for me to forego such hours as these.”

This made Morgan stop once more.  “You do keep something back.  Oh you’re not straight—I am!”

“How am I not straight?”

“Oh you’ve got your idea!”

“My idea?”

“Why that I probably shan’t make old—make older—bones, and that you can stick it out till I’m removed.”

“You are too clever to live!” Pemberton repeated.

“I call it a mean idea,” Morgan pursued.  “But I shall punish you by the way I hang on.”

“Look out or I’ll poison you!” Pemberton laughed.

“I’m stronger and better every year.  Haven’t you noticed that there hasn’t been a doctor near me since you came?”

“I’m your doctor,” said the young man, taking his arm and drawing him tenderly on again.

Morgan proceeded and after a few steps gave a sigh of mingled weariness and relief.  “Ah now that we look at the facts it’s all right!”

CHAPTER VII

They looked at the facts a good deal after this and one of the first consequences of their doing so was that Pemberton stuck it out, in his friend’s parlance, for the purpose.  Morgan made the facts so vivid and so droll, and at the same time so bald and so ugly, that there was fascination in talking them over with him, just as there would have been heartlessness in leaving him alone with them.  Now that the pair had such perceptions in common it was useless for them to pretend they didn’t judge such people; but the very judgement and the exchange of perceptions created another tie.  Morgan had never been so interesting as now that he himself was made plainer by the sidelight of these confidences.  What came out in it most was the small fine passion of his pride.  He had plenty of that, Pemberton felt—so much that one might perhaps wisely wish for it some early bruises.  He would have liked his people to have a spirit and had waked up to the sense of their perpetually eating humble-pie.  His mother would consume any amount, and his father would consume even more than his mother.  He had a theory that Ulick had wriggled out of an “affair” at Nice: there had once been a flurry at home, a regular panic, after which they all went to bed and took medicine, not to be accounted for on any other supposition.  Morgan had a romantic imagination, led by poetry and history, and he would have liked those who “bore his name”—as he used to say to Pemberton with the humour that made his queer delicacies manly—to carry themselves with an air.  But their one idea was to get in with people who didn’t want them and to take snubs as it they were honourable scars.  Why people didn’t want them more he didn’t know—that was people’s own affair; after all they weren’t superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times cleverer than most of the dreary grandees, the “poor swells” they rushed about Europe to catch up with.  “After all they are amusing—they are!” he used to pronounce with the wisdom of the ages.  To which Pemberton always replied: “Amusing—the great Moreen troupe?  Why they’re altogether delightful; and if it weren’t for the hitch that you and I (feeble performers!) make in the ensemble they’d carry everything before them.”

What the boy couldn’t get over was the fact that this particular blight seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so arbitrary.  No doubt people had a right to take the line they liked; but why should his people have liked the line of pushing and toadying and lying and cheating?  What had their forefathers—all decent folk, so far as he knew—done to them, or what had he done to them?  Who had poisoned their blood with the fifth-rate social ideal, the fixed idea of making smart acquaintances and getting into the monde chic, especially when it was foredoomed to failure and exposure?  They showed so what they were after; that was what made the people they wanted not want them.  And never a wince for dignity, never a throb of shame at looking each other in the face, never any independence or resentment or disgust.  If his father or his brother would only knock some one down once or twice a year!  Clever as they were they never guessed the impression they made.  They were good-natured, yes—as good-natured as Jews at the doors of clothing-shops!  But was that the model one wanted one’s family to follow?  Morgan had dim memories of an old grandfather, the maternal, in New York, whom he had been taken across the ocean at the age of five to see: a gentleman with a high neck-cloth and a good deal of pronunciation, who wore a dress-coat in the morning, which made one wonder what he wore in the evening, and had, or was supposed to have “property” and something to do with the Bible Society.  It couldn’t have been but that he was a good type.  Pemberton himself remembered Mrs. Clancy, a widowed sister of Mr. Moreen’s, who was as irritating as a moral tale and had paid a fortnight’s visit to the family at Nice shortly after he came to live with them.  She was “pure and refined,” as Amy said over the banjo, and had the air of not knowing what they meant when they talked, and of keeping something rather important back.  Pemberton judged that what she kept back was an approval of many of their ways; therefore it was to be supposed that she too was of a good type, and that Mr. and Mrs. Moreen and Ulick and Paula and Amy might easily have been of a better one if they would.

But that they wouldn’t was more and more perceptible from day to day.  They continued to “chivey,” as Morgan called it, and in due time became aware of a variety of reasons for proceeding to Venice.  They mentioned a great many of them—they were always strikingly frank and had the brightest friendly chatter, at the late foreign breakfast in especial, before the ladies had made up their faces, when they leaned their arms on the table, had something to follow the demitasse, and, in the heat of familiar discussion as to what they “really ought” to do, fell inevitably into the languages in which they could tutoyer.  Even Pemberton liked them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for the “sweet sea-city.”  That was what made him have a sneaking kindness for them—that they were so out of the workaday world and kept him so out of it.  The summer had waned when, with cries of ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand Canal.  The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived.  The Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn’t talked of at breakfast; but the reasons they didn’t talk of at breakfast always came out in the end.  The Dorringtons on the other hand came out very little; or else when they did they stayed—as was natural—for hours, during which periods Mrs. Moreen and the girls sometimes called at their hotel (to see if they had returned) as many as three times running.  The gondola was for the ladies, as in Venice too there were “days,” which Mrs. Moreen knew in their order an hour after she arrived.  She immediately took one herself, to which the Dorringtons never came, though on a certain occasion when Pemberton and his pupil were together at St. Mark’s—where, taking the best walks they had ever had and haunting a hundred churches, they spent a great deal of time—they saw the old lord turn up with Mr. Moreen and Ulick, who showed him the dim basilica as if it belonged to them.  Pemberton noted how much less, among its curiosities, Lord Dorrington carried himself as a man of the world; wondering too whether, for such services, his companions took a fee from him.  The autumn at any rate waned, the Dorringtons departed, and Lord Verschoyle, the eldest son, had proposed neither for Amy nor for Paula.

One sad November day, while the wind roared round the old palace and the rain lashed the lagoon, Pemberton, for exercise and even somewhat for warmth—the Moreens were horribly frugal about fires; it was a cause of suffering to their inmate—walked up and down the big bare sala with his pupil.  The scagliola floor was cold, the high battered casements shook in the storm, and the stately decay of the place was unrelieved by a particle of furniture.  Pemberton’s spirits were low, and it came over him that the fortune of the Moreens was now even lower.  A blast of desolation, a portent of disgrace and disaster, seemed to draw through the comfortless hall.  Mr. Moreen and Ulick were in the Piazza, looking out for something, strolling drearily, in mackintoshes, under the arcades; but still, in spite of mackintoshes, unmistakeable men of the world.  Paula and Amy were in bed—it might have been thought they were staying there to keep warm.  Pemberton looked askance at the boy at his side, to see to what extent he was conscious of these dark omens.  But Morgan, luckily for him, was now mainly conscious of growing taller and stronger and indeed of being in his fifteenth year.  This fact was intensely interesting to him and the basis of a private theory—which, however, he had imparted to his tutor—that in a little while he should stand on his own feet.  He considered that the situation would change—that in short he should be “finished,” grown up, producible in the world of affairs and ready to prove himself of sterling ability.  Sharply as he was capable at times of analysing, as he called it, his life, there were happy hours when he remained, as he also called it—and as the name, really, of their right ideal—“jolly” superficial; the proof of which was his fundamental assumption that he should presently go to Oxford, to Pemberton’s college, and, aided and abetted by Pemberton, do the most wonderful things.  It depressed the young man to see how little in such a project he took account of ways and means: in other connexions he mostly kept to the measure.  Pemberton tried to imagine the Moreens at Oxford and fortunately failed; yet unless they were to adopt it as a residence there would be no modus vivendi for Morgan.  How could he live without an allowance, and where was the allowance to come from?  He, Pemberton, might live on Morgan; but how could Morgan live on him?  What was to become of him anyhow?  Somehow the fact that he was a big boy now, with better prospects of health, made the question of his future more difficult.  So long as he was markedly frail the great consideration he inspired seemed enough of an answer to it.  But at the bottom of Pemberton’s heart was the recognition of his probably being strong enough to live and not yet strong enough to struggle or to thrive.  Morgan himself at any rate was in the first flush of the rosiest consciousness of adolescence, so that the beating of the tempest seemed to him after all but the voice of life and the challenge of fate.  He had on his shabby little overcoat, with the collar up, but was enjoying his walk.

It was interrupted at last by the appearance of his mother at the end of the sala.  She beckoned him to come to her, and while Pemberton saw him, complaisant, pass down the long vista and over the damp false marble, he wondered what was in the air.  Mrs. Moreen said a word to the boy and made him go into the room she had quitted.  Then, having closed the door after him, she directed her steps swiftly to Pemberton.  There was something in the air, but his wildest flight of fancy wouldn’t have suggested what it proved to be.  She signified that she had made a pretext to get Morgan out of the way, and then she enquired—without hesitation—if the young man could favour her with the loan of three louis.  While, before bursting into a laugh, he stared at her with surprise, she declared that she was awfully pressed for the money; she was desperate for it—it would save her life.

“Dear lady, c’est trop fort!”  Pemberton laughed in the manner and with the borrowed grace of idiom that marked the best colloquial, the best anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves.  “Where in the world do you suppose I should get three louis, du train dont vous allez?”

“I thought you worked—wrote things.  Don’t they pay you?”

“Not a penny.”

“Are you such a fool as to work for nothing?”

“You ought surely to know that.”

Mrs. Moreen stared, then she coloured a little.  Pemberton saw she had quite forgotten the terms—if “terms” they could be called—that he had ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her memory as little as her conscience.  “Oh yes, I see what you mean—you’ve been very nice about that; but why drag it in so often?”  She had been perfectly urbane with him ever since the rough scene of explanation in his room the morning he made her accept his “terms”—the necessity of his making his case known to Morgan.  She had felt no resentment after seeing there was no danger Morgan would take the matter up with her.  Indeed, attributing this immunity to the good taste of his influence with the boy, she had once said to Pemberton “My dear fellow, it’s an immense comfort you’re a gentleman.”  She repeated this in substance now.  “Of course you’re a gentleman—that’s a bother the less!”  Pemberton reminded her that he had not “dragged in” anything that wasn’t already in as much as his foot was in his shoe; and she also repeated her prayer that, somewhere and somehow, he would find her sixty francs.  He took the liberty of hinting that if he could find them it wouldn’t be to lend them to her—as to which he consciously did himself injustice, knowing that if he had them he would certainly put them at her disposal.  He accused himself, at bottom and not unveraciously, of a fantastic, a demoralised sympathy with her.  If misery made strange bedfellows it also made strange sympathies.  It was moreover a part of the abasement of living with such people that one had to make vulgar retorts, quite out of one’s own tradition of good manners.  “Morgan, Morgan, to what pass have I come for you?” he groaned while Mrs. Moreen floated voluminously down the sala again to liberate the boy, wailing as she went that everything was too odious.

Before their young friend was liberated there came a thump at the door communicating with the staircase, followed by the apparition of a dripping youth who poked in his head.  Pemberton recognised him as the bearer of a telegram and recognised the telegram as addressed to himself.  Morgan came back as, after glancing at the signature—that of a relative in London—he was reading the words: “Found a jolly job for you, engagement to coach opulent youth on own terms.  Come at once.”  The answer happily was paid and the messenger waited.  Morgan, who had drawn near, waited too and looked hard at Pemberton; and Pemberton, after a moment, having met his look, handed him the telegram.  It was really by wise looks—they knew each other so well now—that, while the telegraph-boy, in his waterproof cape, made a great puddle on the floor, the thing was settled between them.  Pemberton wrote the answer with a pencil against the frescoed wall, and the messenger departed.  When he had gone the young man explained himself.

“I’ll make a tremendous charge; I’ll earn a lot of money in a short time, and we’ll live on it.”

“Well, I hope the opulent youth will be a dismal dunce—he probably will—” Morgan parenthesised—“and keep you a long time a-hammering of it in.”

“Of course the longer he keeps me the more we shall have for our old age.”

“But suppose they don’t pay you!” Morgan awfully suggested.

“Oh there are not two such—!”  But Pemberton pulled up; he had been on the point of using too invidious a term.  Instead of this he said “Two such fatalities.”

Morgan flushed—the tears came to his eyes.  “Dites toujours two such rascally crews!”  Then in a different tone he added: “Happy opulent youth!”

“Not if he’s a dismal dunce.”

“Oh they’re happier then.  But you can’t have everything, can you?” the boy smiled.

Pemberton held him fast, hands on his shoulders—he had never loved him so.  “What will become of you, what will you do?”  He thought of Mrs. Moreen, desperate for sixty francs.

“I shall become an homme fait.”  And then as if he recognised all the bearings of Pemberton’s allusion: “I shall get on with them better when you’re not here.”

“Ah don’t say that—it sounds as if I set you against them!”

“You do—the sight of you.  It’s all right; you know what I mean.  I shall be beautiful.  I’ll take their affairs in hand; I’ll marry my sisters.”

“You’ll marry yourself!” joked Pemberton; as high, rather tense pleasantry would evidently be the right, or the safest, tone for their separation.

It was, however, not purely in this strain that Morgan suddenly asked: “But I say—how will you get to your jolly job?  You’ll have to telegraph to the opulent youth for money to come on.”

Pemberton bethought himself.  “They won’t like that, will they?”

“Oh look out for them!”

Then Pemberton brought out his remedy.  “I’ll go to the American Consul; I’ll borrow some money of him—just for the few days, on the strength of the telegram.”

Morgan was hilarious.  “Show him the telegram—then collar the money and stay!”

Pemberton entered into the joke sufficiently to reply that for Morgan he was really capable of that; but the boy, growing more serious, and to prove he hadn’t meant what he said, not only hurried him off to the Consulate—since he was to start that evening, as he had wired to his friend—but made sure of their affair by going with him.  They splashed through the tortuous perforations and over the humpbacked bridges, and they passed through the Piazza, where they saw Mr. Moreen and Ulick go into a jeweller’s shop.  The Consul proved accommodating—Pemberton said it wasn’t the letter, but Morgan’s grand air—and on their way back they went into Saint Mark’s for a hushed ten minutes.  Later they took up and kept up the fun of it to the very end; and it seemed to Pemberton a part of that fun that Mrs. Moreen, who was very angry when he had announced her his intention, should charge him, grotesquely and vulgarly and in reference to the loan she had vainly endeavoured to effect, with bolting lest they should “get something out” of him.  On the other hand he had to do Mr. Moreen and Ulick the justice to recognise that when on coming in they heard the cruel news they took it like perfect men of the world.

CHAPTER VIII

When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in hand for Balliol, he found himself unable to say if this aspirant had really such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten of his own long association with an intensely living little mind.  From Morgan he heard half a dozen times: the boy wrote charming young letters, a patchwork of tongues, with indulgent postscripts in the family Volapuk and, in little squares and rounds and crannies of the text, the drollest illustrations—letters that he was divided between the impulse to show his present charge as a vain, a wasted incentive, and the sense of something in them that publicity would profane.  The opulent youth went up in due course and failed to pass; but it seemed to add to the presumption that brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his parents, condoning the lapse, which they good-naturedly treated as little as possible as if it were Pemberton’s, should have sounded the rally again, begged the young coach to renew the siege.

The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three louis, and he sent her a post-office order even for a larger amount.  In return for this favour he received a frantic scribbled line from her: “Implore you to come back instantly—Morgan dread fully ill.”  They were on there rebound, once more in Paris—often as Pemberton had seen them depressed he had never seen them crushed—and communication was therefore rapid.  He wrote to the boy to ascertain the state of his health, but awaited the answer in vain.  He accordingly, after three days, took an abrupt leave of the opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysées, of which Mrs. Moreen had given him the address.  A deep if dumb dissatisfaction with this lady and her companions bore him company: they couldn’t be vulgarly honest, but they could live at hotels, in velvety entresols, amid a smell of burnt pastilles, surrounded by the most expensive city in Europe.  When he had left them in Venice it was with an irrepressible suspicion that something was going to happen; but the only thing that could have taken place was again their masterly retreat.  “How is he? where is he?” he asked of Mrs. Moreen; but before she could speak these questions were answered by the pressure round hid neck of a pair of arms, in shrunken sleeves, which still were perfectly capable of an effusive young foreign squeeze.

“Dreadfully ill—I don’t see it!” the young man cried.  And then to Morgan: “Why on earth didn’t you relieve me?  Why didn’t you answer my letter?”

Mrs. Moreen declared that when she wrote he was very bad, and Pemberton learned at the same time from the boy that he had answered every letter he had received.  This led to the clear inference that Pemberton’s note had been kept from him so that the game practised should not be interfered with.  Mrs. Moreen was prepared to see the fact exposed, as Pemberton saw the moment he faced her that she was prepared for a good many other things.  She was prepared above all to maintain that she had acted from a sense of duty, that she was enchanted she had got him over, whatever they might say, and that it was useless of him to pretend he didn’t know in all his bones that his place at such a time was with Morgan.  He had taken the boy away from them and now had no right to abandon him.  He had created for himself the gravest responsibilities and must at least abide by what he had done.

“Taken him away from you?” Pemberton exclaimed indignantly.

“Do it—do it for pity’s sake; that’s just what I want.  I can’t stand this—and such scenes.  They’re awful frauds—poor dears!”  These words broke from Morgan, who had intermitted his embrace, in a key which made Pemberton turn quickly to him and see that he had suddenly seated himself, was breathing in great pain, and was very pale.

“Now do you say he’s not in a state, my precious pet?” shouted his mother, dropping on her knees before him with clasped hands, but touching him no more than if he had been a gilded idol.  “It will pass—it’s only for an instant; but don’t say such dreadful things!”

“I’m all right—all right,” Morgan panted to Pemberton, whom he sat looking up at with a strange smile, his hands resting on either side of the sofa.

“Now do you pretend I’ve been dishonest, that I’ve deceived?” Mrs. Moreen flashed at Pemberton as she got up.

“It isn’t he says it, it’s I!” the boy returned, apparently easier, but sinking back against the wall; while his restored friend, who had sat down beside him, took his hand and bent over him.

“Darling child, one does what one can; there are so many things to consider,” urged Mrs. Moreen.  “It’s his place—his only place.  You see you think it is now.”

“Take me away—take me away,” Morgan went on, smiling to Pemberton with his white face.

“Where shall I take you, and how—oh how, my boy?” the young man stammered, thinking of the rude way in which his friends in London held that, for his convenience, with no assurance of prompt return, he had thrown them over; of the just resentment with which they would already have called in a successor, and of the scant help to finding fresh employment that resided for him in the grossness of his having failed to pass his pupil.

“Oh we’ll settle that.  You used to talk about it,” said Morgan.  “If we can only go all the rest’s a detail.”

“Talk about it as much as you like, but don’t think you can attempt it.  Mr. Moreen would never consent—it would be so very hand-to-mouth,” Pemberton’s hostess beautifully explained to him.  Then to Morgan she made it clearer: “It would destroy our peace, it would break our hearts.  Now that he’s back it will be all the same again.  You’ll have your life, your work and your freedom, and we’ll all be happy as we used to be.  You’ll bloom and grow perfectly well, and we won’t have any more silly experiments, will we?  They’re too absurd.  It’s Mr. Pemberton’s place—every one in his place.  You in yours, your papa in his, me in mine—n’est-ce pas, chéri?  We’ll all forget how foolish we’ve been and have lovely times.”

She continued to talk and to surge vaguely about the little draped stuffy salon while Pemberton sat with the boy, whose colour gradually came back; and she mixed up her reasons, hinting that there were going to be changes, that the other children might scatter (who knew?—Paula had her ideas) and that then it might be fancied how much the poor old parent-birds would want the little nestling.  Morgan looked at Pemberton, who wouldn’t let him move; and Pemberton knew exactly how he felt at hearing himself called a little nestling.  He admitted that he had had one or two bad days, but he protested afresh against the wrong of his mother’s having made them the ground of an appeal to poor Pemberton.  Poor Pemberton could laugh now, apart from the comicality of Mrs. Moreen’s mustering so much philosophy for her defence—she seemed to shake it out of her agitated petticoats, which knocked over the light gilt chairs—so little did their young companion, marked, unmistakeably marked at the best, strike him as qualified to repudiate any advantage.

He himself was in for it at any rate.  He should have Morgan on his hands again indefinitely; though indeed he saw the lad had a private theory to produce which would be intended to smooth this down.  He was obliged to him for it in advance; but the suggested amendment didn’t keep his heart rather from sinking, any more than it prevented him from accepting the prospect on the spot, with some confidence moreover that he should do so even better if he could have a little supper.  Mrs. Moreen threw out more hints about the changes that were to be looked for, but she was such a mixture of smiles and shudders—she confessed she was very nervous—that he couldn’t tell if she were in high feather or only in hysterics.  If the family was really at last going to pieces why shouldn’t she recognise the necessity of pitching Morgan into some sort of lifeboat?  This presumption was fostered by the fact that they were established in luxurious quarters in the capital of pleasure; that was exactly where they naturally would be established in view of going to pieces.  Moreover didn’t she mention that Mr. Moreen and the others were enjoying themselves at the opera with Mr. Granger, and wasn’t that also precisely where one would look for them on the eve of a smash?  Pemberton gathered that Mr. Granger was a rich vacant American—a big bill with a flourishy heading and no items; so that one of Paula’s “ideas” was probably that this time she hadn’t missed fire—by which straight shot indeed she would have shattered the general cohesion.  And if the cohesion was to crumble what would become of poor Pemberton?  He felt quite enough bound up with them to figure to his alarm as a dislodged block in the edifice.

It was Morgan who eventually asked if no supper had been ordered for him; sitting with him below, later, at the dim delayed meal, in the presence of a great deal of corded green plush, a plate of ornamental biscuit and an aloofness marked on the part of the waiter.  Mrs. Moreen had explained that they had been obliged to secure a room for the visitor out of the house; and Morgan’s consolation—he offered it while Pemberton reflected on the nastiness of lukewarm sauces—proved to be, largely, that his circumstance would facilitate their escape.  He talked of their escape—recurring to it often afterwards—as if they were making up a “boy’s book” together.  But he likewise expressed his sense that there was something in the air, that the Moreens couldn’t keep it up much longer.  In point of fact, as Pemberton was to see, they kept it up for five or six months.  All the while, however, Morgan’s contention was designed to cheer him.  Mr. Moreen and Ulick, whom he had met the day after his return, accepted that return like perfect men of the world.  If Paula and Amy treated it even with less formality an allowance was to be made for them, inasmuch as Mr. Granger hadn’t come to the opera after all.  He had only placed his box at their service, with a bouquet for each of the party; there was even one apiece, embittering the thought of his profusion, for Mr. Moreen and Ulick.  “They’re all like that,” was Morgan’s comment; “at the very last, just when we think we’ve landed them they’re back in the deep sea!”

Morgan’s comments in these days were more and more free; they even included a large recognition of the extraordinary tenderness with which he had been treated while Pemberton was away.  Oh yes, they couldn’t do enough to be nice to him, to show him they had him on their mind and make up for his loss.  That was just what made the whole thing so sad and caused him to rejoice after all in Pemberton’s return—he had to keep thinking of their affection less, had less sense of obligation.  Pemberton laughed out at this last reason, and Morgan blushed and said: “Well, dash it, you know what I mean.”  Pemberton knew perfectly what he meant; but there were a good many things that—dash it too!—it didn’t make any clearer.  This episode of his second sojourn in Paris stretched itself out wearily, with their resumed readings and wanderings and maunderings, their potterings on the quays, their hauntings of the museums, their occasional lingerings in the Palais Royal when the first sharp weather came on and there was a comfort in warm emanations, before Chevet’s wonderful succulent window.  Morgan wanted to hear all about the opulent youth—he took an immense interest in him.  Some of the details of his opulence—Pemberton could spare him none of them—evidently fed the boy’s appreciation of all his friend had given up to come back to him; but in addition to the greater reciprocity established by that heroism he had always his little brooding theory, in which there was a frivolous gaiety too, that their long probation was drawing to a close.  Morgan’s conviction that the Moreens couldn’t go on much longer kept pace with the unexpended impetus with which, from month to month, they did go on.  Three weeks after Pemberton had rejoined them they went on to another hotel, a dingier one than the first; but Morgan rejoiced that his tutor had at least still not sacrificed the advantage of a room outside.  He clung to the romantic utility of this when the day, or rather the night, should arrive for their escape.

For the first time, in this complicated connexion, our friend felt his collar gall him.  It was, as he had said to Mrs. Moreen in Venice, trop fort—everything was trop fort.  He could neither really throw off his blighting burden nor find in it the benefit of a pacified conscience or of a rewarded affection.  He had spent all the money accruing to him in England, and he saw his youth going and that he was getting nothing back for it.  It was all very well of Morgan to count it for reparation that he should now settle on him permanently—there was an irritating flaw in such a view.  He saw what the boy had in his mind; the conception that as his friend had had the generosity to come back he must show his gratitude by giving him his life.  But the poor friend didn’t desire the gift—what could he do with Morgan’s dreadful little life?  Of course at the same time that Pemberton was irritated he remembered the reason, which was very honourable to Morgan and which dwelt simply in his making one so forget that he was no more than a patched urchin.  If one dealt with him on a different basis one’s misadventures were one’s own fault.  So Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm for the catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much in what form it would find its liveliest effect.

Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal—a frightened sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners.  Certainly they were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they didn’t find.  The Dorringtons hadn’t re-appeared, the princes had scattered; wasn’t that the beginning of the end?  Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous “days”; her social calendar was blurred—it had turned its face to the wall.  Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they wanted.  He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his retreat, which was never the path of a return.  Flowers were all very well, but—Pemberton could complete the proposition.  It was now positively conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a social failure; so that the young man was almost grateful the run had not been short.  Mr. Moreen indeed was still occasionally able to get away on business and, what was more surprising, was likewise able to get back.  Ulick had no club but you couldn’t have discovered it from his appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking at life from the window of such an institution; therefore Pemberton was doubly surprised at an answer he once heard him make his mother in the desperate tone of a man familiar with the worst privations.  Her question Pemberton had not quite caught; it appeared to be an appeal for a suggestion as to whom they might get to take Amy.  “Let the Devil take her!” Ulick snapped; so that Pemberton could see that they had not only lost their amiability but had ceased to believe in themselves.  He could also see that if Mrs. Moreen was trying to get people to take her children she might be regarded as closing the hatches for the storm.  But Morgan would be the last she would part with.

One winter afternoon—it was a Sunday—he and the boy walked far together in the Bois de Boulogne.  The evening was so splendid, the cold lemon-coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and pedestrians so amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they should have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner.  They hurried accordingly, arm-in-arm, good-humoured and hungry, agreeing that there was nothing like Paris after all and that after everything too that had come and gone they were not yet sated with innocent pleasures.  When they reached the hotel they found that, though scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were likely to sit down to.  Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens—very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house—and before the interrupted service of the table, with objects displaced almost as if there had been a scuffle and a great wine-stain from an overturned bottle, Pemberton couldn’t blink the fact that there had been a scene of the last proprietary firmness.  The storm had come—they were all seeking refuge.  The hatches were down, Paula and Amy were invisible—they had never tried the most casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt they had enough of an eye to him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose frocks had been confiscated—and Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard.  The host and his staff, in a word, had ceased to “go on” at the pace of their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a pile of gaping trunks in the passage, was strangely commingled with the air of indignant withdrawal.  When Morgan took all this in—and he took it in very quickly—he coloured to the roots of his hair.  He had walked from his infancy among difficulties and dangers, but he had never seen a public exposure.  Pemberton noticed in a second glance at him that the tears had rushed into his eyes and that they were tears of a new and untasted bitterness.  He wondered an instant, for the boy’s sake, whether he might successfully pretend not to understand.  Not successfully, he felt, as Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth, rose before him in their little dishonoured salon, casting about with glassy eyes for the nearest port in such a storm.  They were not prostrate but were horribly white, and Mrs. Moreen had evidently been crying.  Pemberton quickly learned however that her grief was not for the loss of her dinner, much as she usually enjoyed it, but the fruit of a blow that struck even deeper, as she made all haste to explain.  He would see for himself, so far as that went, how the great change had come, the dreadful bolt had fallen, and how they would now all have to turn themselves about.  Therefore cruel as it was to them to part with their darling she must look to him to carry a little further the influence he had so fortunately acquired with the boy—to induce his young charge to follow him into some modest retreat.  They depended on him—that was the fact—to take their delightful child temporarily under his protection; it would leave Mr. Moreen and herself so much more free to give the proper attention (too little, alas! had been given) to the readjustment of their affairs.

“We trust you—we feel we can,” said Mrs. Moreen, slowly rubbing her plump white hands and looking with compunction hard at Morgan, whose chin, not to take liberties, her husband stroked with a paternal forefinger.

“Oh yes—we feel that we can.  We trust Mr. Pemberton fully, Morgan,” Mr. Moreen pursued.

Pemberton wondered again if he might pretend not to understand; but everything good gave way to the intensity of Morgan’s understanding.  “Do you mean he may take me to live with him for ever and ever?” cried the boy.  “May take me away, away, anywhere he likes?”

“For ever and ever?  Comme vous-y-allez!” Mr. Moreen laughed indulgently.  “For as long as Mr. Pemberton may be so good.”

“We’ve struggled, we’ve suffered,” his wife went on; “but you’ve made him so your own that we’ve already been through the worst of the sacrifice.”

Morgan had turned away from his father—he stood looking at Pemberton with a light in his face.  His sense of shame for their common humiliated state had dropped; the case had another side—the thing was to clutch at that.  He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the reflexion that with this unexpected consecration of his hope—too sudden and too violent; the turn taken was away from a good boy’s book—the “escape” was left on their hands.  The boyish joy was there an instant, and Pemberton was almost scared at the rush of gratitude and affection that broke through his first abasement.  When he stammered “My dear fellow, what do you say to that?” how could one not say something enthusiastic?  But there was more need for courage at something else that immediately followed and that made the lad sit down quietly on the nearest chair.  He had turned quite livid and had raised his hand to his left side.  They were all three looking at him, but Mrs. Moreen suddenly bounded forward.  “Ah his darling little heart!” she broke out; and this time, on her knees before him and without respect for the idol, she caught him ardently in her arms.  “You walked him too far, you hurried him too fast!” she hurled over her shoulder at Pemberton.  Her son made no protest, and the next instant, still holding him, she sprang up with her face convulsed and with the terrified cry “Help, help! he’s going, he’s gone!”  Pemberton saw with equal horror, by Morgan’s own stricken face, that he was beyond their wildest recall.  He pulled him half out of his mother’s hands, and for a moment, while they held him together, they looked all their dismay into each other’s eyes, “He couldn’t stand it with his weak organ,” said Pemberton—“the shock, the whole scene, the violent emotion.”

“But I thought he wanted to go to you!”, wailed Mrs. Moreen.

“I told you he didn’t, my dear,” her husband made answer.  Mr. Moreen was trembling all over and was in his way as deeply affected as his wife.  But after the very first he took his bereavement as a man of the world.

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