PAGE 17
The Pupil
by
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.