The Pupil | Page 9

"You ought to filer, you know--you really ought."
Pemberton stared. He had learnt enough French slang from Morgan to know that to filer meant to cut sticks. "Ah my dear fellow, don't turn me off!"
Morgan pulled a Greek lexicon toward him--he used a Greek-German--to look out a word, instead of asking it of Pemberton. "You can't go on like this, you know."
"Like what, my boy?"
"You know they don't pay you up," said Morgan, blushing and turning his leaves.
"Don't pay me?" Pemberton stared again and feigned amazement. "What on earth put that into your head?"
"It has been there a long time," the boy replied rummaging his book.
Pemberton was silent, then he went on: "I say, what are you hunting for? They pay me beautifully."
"I'm hunting for the Greek for awful whopper," Morgan dropped.
"Find that rather for gross impertinence and disabuse your mind. What do I want of money?"
"Oh that's another question!"
Pemberton wavered--he was drawn in different ways. The severely correct thing would have been to tell the boy that such a matter was none of his business and bid him go on with his lines. But they were really too intimate for that; it was not the way he was in the habit of treating him; there had been no reason it should be. On the other hand Morgan had quite lighted on the truth--he really shouldn't be able to keep it up much longer; therefore why not let him know one's real motive for forsaking him? At the same time it wasn't decent to abuse to one's pupil the family of one's pupil; it was better to misrepresent than to do that. So in reply to his comrade's last exclamation he just declared, to dismiss the subject, that he had received several payments.
"I say--I say!" the boy ejaculated, laughing.
"That's all right," Pemberton insisted. "Give me your written rendering."
Morgan pushed a copybook across the table, and he began to read the page, but with something running in his head that made it no sense. Looking up after a minute or two he found the child's eyes fixed on him and felt in them something strange. Then Morgan said: "I'm not afraid of the stern reality."
"I haven't yet seen the thing you are afraid of--I'll do you that justice!"
This came out with a jump--it was perfectly true--and evidently gave Morgan pleasure. "I've thought of it a long time," he presently resumed.
"Well, don't think of it any more."
The boy appeared to comply, and they had a comfortable and even an amusing hour. They had a theory that they were very thorough, and yet they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, the intervals between the dull dark tunnels, where there were waysides and jolly views. Yet the morning was brought to a violent as end by Morgan's suddenly leaning his arms on the table, burying his head in them and bursting into tears: at which Pemberton was the more startled that, as it then came over him, it was the first time he had ever seen the boy cry and that the impression was consequently quite awful.
The next day, after much thought, he took a decision and, believing it to be just, immediately acted on it. He cornered Mr. and Mrs. Moreen again and let them know that if on the spot they didn't pay him all they owed him he wouldn't only leave their house but would tell Morgan exactly what had brought him to it.
"Oh you _haven't_ told him?" cried Mrs. Moreen with a pacifying hand on her well-dressed bosom.
"Without warning you? For what do you take me?" the young man returned.
Mr. and Mrs. Moreen looked at each other; he could see that they appreciated, as tending to their security, his superstition of delicacy, and yet that there was a certain alarm in their relief. "My dear fellow," Mr. Moreen demanded, "what use can you have, leading the quiet life we all do, for such a lot of money?"--a question to which Pemberton made no answer, occupied as he was in noting that what passed in the mind of his patrons was something like: "Oh then, if we've felt that the child, dear little angel, has judged us and how he regards us, and we haven't been betrayed, he must have guessed--and in short it's general!" an inference that rather stirred up Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, as Pemberton had desired it should. At the same time, if he had supposed his threat would do something towards bringing them round, he was disappointed to find them taking for granted--how vulgar their perception had been!--that he had already given them away. There was a mystic uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that had been the inferior sense of it. None the less however, his threat did touch them; for if they