The next evening Morgan sat pretending to be reading a book, his feet
sedulously planted on a new Turkey rug, which struck a startling note
of colour and decoration amid the bleakness of the attic. At last he
closed the volume and let it fall wearily on his knee. The visit of
his father had tried him severely. He had been shaken by a storm of
emotion, and it had left him somewhat shattered. And now that
Archibald had departed, an aching sense of loneliness had come to him
such as only comes to the man who lives thus isolated. He had been
able to leave his work for an hour in the middle of the day, so that,
including his usual dinner interval, he had passed two hours in his
father's company and seen him to his train. The old man had been
miserable in town; he couldn't bear to be so near Morgan yet cut off
from him all day, and, since he was far from well and needed the
comforts of his own home, it was decided between them he should go at
once.
At last Morgan threw down the book impatiently. He walked round the
room for a time, but could not rid himself of his restlessness. "My
soul is sick," he repeated again and again. "I need my friends." He
poked the fire and threw more coal on; he looked for awhile through
the panes of the window into the vague blackness of the March night.
And at last he bethought himself of getting ready his evening meal,
merely for the sake of concentrating himself on something. Just as he
was on the point of opening the cupboard, into which his father had
pried so jocularly, there came a timid tap at the door.
"Come in!" he cried, not quite certain that there _was_ anybody there.
As his invitation seemed to be complied with, he instinctively turned
his head to view his visitor, who stood just within the door smiling
at him.
"What! Margaret!" he cried, as his head almost swam.
She closed the door softly and advanced into the room.
"I've just come to pay you a visit, Morgan," she said laughingly.
"Please say it was nice of me to come. What! Aren't you going to shake
hands with one of your oldest friends?"
He was not quite sure that his brain hadn't given way, and that her
presence was not a mere manifestation of the fact. He had never been
able to trust himself sufficiently to go near the Medhursts.
Sedulously keeping to the London south of the river and to the
immediate vicinity of his work--save on his rare visits to Belgrave
Square--he had run but little risk of encountering any of them or,
indeed, any other acquaintances. He was aware the Medhursts knew he
was in London and employed by a large firm, but they had never been
told the exact details of his whereabouts. However, he found himself
shaking hands with Margaret but too bewildered to say anything.
"What a strange expression in your face, Morgan! It seems to ask any
number of questions, but I can't make out whether it looks pleased or
angry. At least be polite enough to make me welcome. It's nice and
warm in here, so I think I'd better take my jacket off."
"You don't give me time to recover my breath, Margaret. Of course, you
are more than welcome, but I am not good enough for you to visit.
Come, take a chair by the fire."
"You not good enough! It is simply wicked of you to talk like that.
But why are you rubbing your eyes? I believe you think I'm a phantom."
She removed her jacket and also her hat, instinctively throwing them,
as Archibald had done the evening before, across the trunk. Then she
smiled at him again in lovely reassurance that she was real flesh and
blood. She had on a soft woollen dress of that favourite silver-blue
in which she always looked her best. She wore a bunch of
forget-me-nots at her waist, and a little knot of the same flowers at
her throat was fastened with a small, lyre-shaped brooch, set with
pearls. There was just a touch of creamy lace at her wrists and
throat, and what dainty little tendrils of golden hair lay on her
forehead!
"Your chair is very hard," she exclaimed, jumping up almost
immediately. "I think I'll sit on the bed instead."
"You won't find that much better," he said, drawn into good humour by
her briskness, and charmed that so exquisite a presence should grace
his attic.
"It's miles better," said Margaret. "But you still look puzzled. Isn't
your ingenuity equal to the task of guessing how I found you out?"
"I don't know, unless Diana's old sweetheart paid you a visit
yesterday," he answered smiling, as he spread the new rug under her
feet. "But he certainly said nothing to me about it this afternoon
when I saw him off."
"He was probably afraid to let you know he'd been weak enough to yield
to our blandishments. I had an idea you were living in a garret--the
garret always seems to put a sort of hall-mark on genius. It's a very
nice garret, too. I like mine better, though--it's a lump larger."
If the pure pleasure of being near her began to predominate, it was
certainly not unaccompanied by the pain that was always with him
because of his vain love for her; so that his entire feeling was a
rather mixed and undecided one. He could not quite abandon himself to
gladness at her coming, and perhaps the very unexpectedness of it
aided this emotional embarrassment.
"Have you been working much of late?" he asked, that being a natural
question to follow her reference to her studio. He was, indeed,
relieved that the conversation had got on so definite a tack and that
she had not alluded to his avoidance of her family or reproached him
for it.
"I'm just doing a little group of greyhounds. I'm going to exhibit
them at the Academy. It's such a bother and such fun, too! I've got
over the worst part now. The big mother and two little ones playing at
the side of her make twelve legs and three tails--quite a forest of
them. I had no end of trouble to get a good composition. But the chief
bother was with the models. The dog would never keep still, and I had
to keep on moving my wax figure just as it moved. Sometimes it would
turn upside down, and then I had to turn my work upside down as well.
Do you know what I should like to do, Morgan?"
"I don't, but I should like to."
"I wonder if you'd let me make a bust of you! I want to very much."
"Why?" he asked, without meaning that exactly, but only by way of
surprised exclamation.
"Well," she smiled, "I just want to. I could have an old bench brought
up here and a lot of clay. If you sat to me, say, for a couple of
hours every Sunday morning, you'd begin to recognise yourself after a
time."
He was powerless to refuse. With her speaking to him, he became as
passive as the clay she moulded. He knew her power; perhaps that was
why his instinct had led him to elude it.
"That is really good of you, dear Morgan," she exclaimed, while her
eyes sparkled with honest delight.
Time was, perhaps, when seeing her thus he might have taken her hand.
"But don't look as if you already regretted making the promise," she
went on to protest. "I assure you it won't hurt a bit; not any more
than having your hair cut. By the way, why do you wear your hair so
short? Oughtn't a poet to have long, noble locks? They come out very
effectively in clay, those long, noble locks. I hope I'm not making
your bed too hard. Come now, Morgan, are you still so heavy-hearted?
What can I do to make you merry?"
"Take supper with me," he responded quickly, with an atoning flash of
briskness, the while he upbraided himself for oppressing her with his
dejection. "It will be a real Bohemian supper."
"How nice! I'm dying with hunger."
"In here, I mean," he explained. "I make my own supper."
"I know. We heard all about the inside of that cupboard."
"You won't mind sitting on the hard chair?"
"No. What's the menu?"
"Bread and cheese and----"
"Not beer, I hope," she interrupted hastily.
"And cocoa," he finished. "Do you mind keeping house here for two
minutes whilst I run down to get the milk. We have a dairy two doors
away."
He returned in a moment and she helped him to set out the table, for
which there was no cloth.
"This chair _is_ hard," she said again later, when she had been seated
on it some little time. "I must send you a soft chair, Morgan. I
haven't given you a birthday present this year."
"Indeed, you must not. Such luxuries are out of place here, and you
ought not to try to spoil me."
"But, dear Morgan, you've a lovely rug, and I'm sure you ought to have
a nice chair to keep it company. You've your guests to think of now. I
must have something to sit on when I come and so must your papa. I'm
willing to admit my suggestion was not quite a disinterested one; in
fact, I'm prepared to be perfectly unscrupulous so long as I carry my
point."
"I'd better yield before you get so far as that. Only, of course, the
chair shall be used exclusively for my visitors."
"Oh, you must sit on it sometimes, as well."
"Well, let us not quarrel about it."
"Of course we're not going to quarrel about it. We're going to be the
best of friends now, aren't we?"
"I never dared dream----" he began.
"Dreaming hasn't anything to do with it. It really isn't at all
necessary, so the omission need not count. All along I've had the
feeling as if you were thrusting me back away from your life, and I
have always wanted to count for something in it, if ever so little.
Won't you let me now be of some help to you? It is wicked of you to
continue in this terrible solitude. I feel that you've promised to let
me come here and model you really against your will; don't deny it,
Morgan--your face spoke only too plainly. I should be standing here
and talking to you, but you would be as solitary as if I had never
come. I want to break down that stupid barrier between us; I want you
to believe in me, to trust me and to show me you trust me."
"It is myself I dare not trust. Such a friendship needs strength, and
I am not strong enough, Margaret."
"Then you must find the strength, Morgan. Weakness is an unmanly
excuse, and you are a man."
"You talk like that because you still do not realise what it means for
me to--to----"
He hesitated.
"Go on," she said. "I am strong enough to listen."
There was a silence, but she knew he was collecting his scattered
forces.
"To be friends with you," he went on determinedly. "You say that I
kept you at arm's length. That is true. But then you don't know what
my life has been--you never did really know even when we were close
together."
"Tell me then, Morgan. Make me understand why you kept me at arm's
length. I do not know how you came to marry so suddenly, what woman
you married, or why she left you. I want to know all about her. Tell
me, if it doesn't hurt you too much. Perhaps it will hurt you less
after you have told me."
"I have kept you at arm's length, Margaret, because I loved you. I am
struggling now to keep you at arm's length because I still love you.
Dare you stay here and listen to me after that?"
She looked him straight in the face.
"I dare, Morgan. I want you to know me as well as to love me. If you
had understood me, you would neither have thrust me back nor would you
be struggling to do so now. You no doubt always considered me just a
pretty girl, who thought and acted always as becomes what it called a
young lady; a colourless, conventional creature, without any judgment
or emotions of her own; just a white sheet of paper with a name
written across in beautiful lettering; a simpering thing in petticoats
who must smile and blush just at the right moments and be perfectly
proper at all times; who must never act unless she has a fixed rule to
guide her; who is supposed to understand nothing at all of real life;
for whom human beings are reduced to a strange uniformity, the men in
their evening dress so simple, so nice, so attentive, so easy to
understand, the women--but then such a young person is not supposed to
concern herself with the women. That, I'm sure, is the sort of girl I
appeared to you, Morgan. I am sorry that, so far, I cannot take your
love for me as a compliment. You saw me as a painter might see a
model, and perhaps you enshrined my image as a sort of poetic fancy.
You loved me as an unreal spirit. But I am not what you thought me; I
am a real person. I can think and judge for myself, and I can be
myself. That is why I have had the courage to come here to you, and
had I known earlier where you were I should have forced this interview
on you long ago. And this despite the fact that you are married, that
you love me and that I--love you. I have the courage to face the
occasion, to outrage convention where convention makes no provision
for the needs of the particular occasion. I know that, despite all, we
can be very dear friends. Only trust me a little, Morgan, learn to
know me better, and I am sure you will trust me altogether. Make an
effort to be strong and perhaps I may help you."
And so Morgan poured himself out to her, told her all; and, if at
times he faltered, she bade him go on, she would not blush.
The recital was a long one. Interruptions and discussions were
frequent; they were also making pretence to sup. Neither remembered
the flight of time.
"Of course, I have known the bare facts for a long time," said
Margaret, "but only in a very vague way and in a very puzzling one.
There was so much left to my imagination, and it bothered me so much
to fill up the blanks. And so you are working to pay off her debts. I
know it feels awfully nice to earn money for one's self. Do you know
that I'm quite rich. Guess how much I made last year by my modelling?"
"How much?" he asked.
"Eighty-seven pounds, after paying all my expenses," she exclaimed. "I
wanted to pay for my own frocks, but papa wouldn't let me. And so
I've got it all and I don't know what to do with it; at least I know
what I should like to do with it."
"But surely papa wouldn't disapprove of your doing what you liked with
it?"
"Oh, papa wouldn't disapprove," she said, colouring a little, "but I'm
afraid you would."
"I? You're not intending to buy me a silver chair with jewels set in
it, are you?"
"I thought you might pay some of those debts with the money and let me
be your creditor instead," she said hesitatingly. "Of course, you
would pay me back as you saved enough, just as you are doing now with
the others. And it would be a sort of symbol of the new footing on
which we start from to-day."
"Dear Margaret," he said, "please don't try and press that on me. It
won't help me in the least, as you see yourself. Besides, what need
have we of a symbol? I want you to believe in the new footing just as
much without it. And then," he added, in a gayer note, "there is
another reason why I can't allow you to have such ideas. Heroines
always do that sort of thing, and it's quite too conventional for
you."
She laughed and did not persist, though she had coloured still more.
And just then she bethought herself of the hour and drew forth her
tiny watch.
"This is being wicked with a vengeance!" she exclaimed. "I really must
be going back."
"You must let me come with you, else I shall be nervous all night and
my hair may be grey by the morning."
"Part of the excitement of the adventure was to come alone and to go
alone. But as I can't have your hair turning grey----"
"Do they know at home where you were going?" he asked, as he helped
her on with her jacket.
"I didn't tell them, but I dare say they'll guess, and I mean to let
them know anyway. I'm going to leave you these," and she unfastened
the bunch of forget-me-nots and put them on the table.
He saw her to her own door; it was long since he had set foot in
Wimpole street. She gave him a long comrade's hand-clasp, saying: "We
had a charming Bohemian supper. You have made me happier to-night than
I have been for years."
He turned away as she rang the bell and he walked all the way back to
Southwark. Now that he had taken her into his life at last, he seemed
to have unburdened himself of some overwhelming weight. Margaret knew
everything at last, understood everything, and loved him through all.
His self-distrust had made him keep himself hidden from the Medhursts,
but she had helped him to find and know his own strength. She was
right. He was strong enough to accept her friendship.
Though he would have to be at his desk at the usual hour in the
morning, he could not go to bed at once. The flowers she had left
seemed to fill the room with sweetness. And something of lightness and
fragrance seemed to remain with him, to be flitting here and there
with the silence of a phantom, to be hovering in the air, to be
bending over him, to be nestling close to him. Then, as he closed his
eyes dreamily, Margaret seemed to float before him. He was aware of
her eyes, her hair, her voice; he saw her just as she had sat there
with her face and hands showing exquisite against the silver-blue of
her dress, and the forget-me-nots at her throat and waist.