The Pupil

Transcribed from the 1916 Le Roy Phillips edition by David Price, email

ccx074@.org

THE PUPIL

BY HENRY JAMES

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LE ROY PHILLIPS

BOSTON

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This edition first published 1916

The text follows that of the

Definitive Edition

* * * * *

_Printed in Great Britain_

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 be 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 manœuvre 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 phœnix,” 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 dreadfully 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.