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!”