“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 VIIII
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 dread fully 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 Elysees, 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.
