Morgan, whom Nan represented as being always in his books, was by
inclination a scientist, but for the moment, until he had the means to
devote himself to his profession, he managed that branch of the factory
concerned with scents and powders.
He worked among shining alembics and great-bellied bottles of dark green
glass, standing round his room in rows.
The latticed window was hung with cobwebs. The table was littered with
bottles, saucepans, test-tubes, and little flames burning. Of all things
in the room, the alembics alone were kept clean, gleaming bright brass
globes, pair by pair, connected by twisting pipes, and ever dripping the
distilled, overpowering scent into dishes put ready to receive it. They
shone out from the disorder of the room. Canisters ranged round the
walls on shelves: benzoin, civet, frankincense, ambergris,—the names on
the labels smouldered as a group of Asiatics among ordinary people.
Nan was sent up with a message to him in this room.
She appeared in the doorway, continuing to knock as she pushed open the
door, in the bright blue overall she wore when at her work. She was
smiling shyly, as though she expected a welcome. But he did not
immediately see her. He was bending with great absorption over a little
pair of scales, weighing a quantity of grains, and when he had done this
he poured the grains very carefully into a kind of box, which he set
above a small lamp to heat. Then as he wiped his hands on a piece of
linen, he caught sight of her.
“Mrs. Dene! What brings you here? what bit of luck? What extraordinary
bit of luck?”
He went to her, drew her into the room, and shut the door. He gazed at
her with incredulous delight. He wanted to touch her, to make sure that
she was real.
“Why don’t you tell me?” he queried, as she stood there smiling but not
speaking.
As she delivered her message, every word seemed to give birth to an
unspoken, irrelevant flight of words that fluttered round them with
ghostly rustle of wings, finding no resting-place. When she had
finished, she stood irresolute.
“I must go back.”
Her eyes roamed over the room, and every now and then swept over him in
passing. They caressed him in that quick, diffident, gentle way she had.
They rested with a mild dismay on all his disorder, and a pucker of
trouble appeared between her brows.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Dene?”
“Oh, your things want straightening,” she murmured in tones of distress.
“Doesn’t any one have charge of your room? The dust,—look at it! The
litter!”
She moved to his table as though her deft hands were yearning towards
it. She made little tentative touches at his things, while he watched
her. She looked at him to see whether she was annoying him.
“Oh, do you mind?”
“On the contrary, I like to see you doing it.”
She gained courage.
“You haven’t a duster, have you?”
He discovered a duster in the table drawer and gave it to her; like all
good workmen, she was heartened by the touch of an instrument, however
humble, of her natural work. She picked things up and set them down more
briskly, saying meanwhile, half in excuse for her briskness,—
“I must hurry, or they’ll be missing me downstairs.”
“You can say I kept you. I’ll find something for you to take to the
forewoman; that’ll be an excuse.”
“An excuse—is that right, do you think? But your room _is_ in a mess,
isn’t it? It can’t have been touched for months. Does no one clean up?”
“No, I won’t let them.”
“You ought to have told me,” she said, greatly distressed. “I am so
sorry ... I didn’t think. Some men are like that, I know. They think
they can find things better. But I haven’t tidied; look, nothing has
been moved.”
“I told you I liked to see you doing it.”
“You were civil,” she said, not comforted.
“No, I’m never civil.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Morgan; you can’t help it, if you’re civil in your heart.
It comes kindly, to folk who laugh as much as you do.”
“You laugh too; I’ve heard you laughing downstairs, in the workroom. You
and I laugh more than Silas and Gregory.”
“Gregory can’t laugh,” she said gravely.