The Pupil | Page 6

this Morgan had the easy retort that he hadn't dreamed of abusing them;
which appeared to be true: it put Pemberton in the wrong.
"Then why am I a humbug for saying I think them charming?" the
young man asked, conscious of a certain rashness.
"Well--they're not your parents."
"They love you better than anything in the world--never forget that,"
said Pemberton.
"Is that why you like them so much?"
"They're very kind to me," Pemberton replied evasively.
"You are a humbug!" laughed Morgan, passing an arm into his tutor's.
He leaned against him looking oft at the sea again and swinging his
long thin legs.
"Don't kick my shins," said Pemberton while he reflected "Hang it, I
can't complain of them to the child!"
"There's another reason, too," Morgan went on, keeping his legs still.
"Another reason for what?"
"Besides their not being your parents."
"I don't understand you," said Pemberton.
"Well, you will before long. All right!"
He did understand fully before long, but he made a fight even with
himself before he confessed it. He thought it the oddest thing to have a
struggle with the child about. He wondered he didn't hate the hope of
the Moreens for bringing the struggle on. But by the time it began any

such sentiment for that scion was closed to him. Morgan was a special
case, and to know him was to accept him on his own odd terms.
Pemberton had spent his aversion to special cases before arriving at
knowledge. When at last he did arrive his quandary was great. Against
every interest he had attached himself. They would have to meet things
together. Before they went home that evening at Nice the boy had said,
clinging to his arm:
"Well, at any rate you'll hang on to the last."
"To the last?"
"Till you're fairly beaten."
"You ought to be fairly beaten!" cried the young man, drawing him
closer.

CHAPTER IV
A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen
suddenly gave up the villa at Nice. Pemberton had got used to
suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during two
jerky little tours--one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late
in the winter, when they all ran down to Florence and then, at the end
of ten days, liking it much less than they had intended, straggled back
in mysterious depression. They had returned to Nice "for ever," as they
said; but this didn't prevent their squeezing, one rainy muggy May
night, into a second-class railway-carriage--you could never tell by
which class they would travel--where Pemberton helped them to stow
away a wonderful collection of bundles and bags. The explanation of
this manoeuvre was that they had determined to spend the summer "in
some bracing place"; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished
apartment--a fourth floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a
smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful--and passed the next
four months in blank indigence.

The better part of this baffled sojourn was for the preceptor and his
pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and Notre Dame, the Conciergerie
and all the museums, took a hundred remunerative rambles. They
learned to know their Paris, which was useful, for they came back
another year for a longer stay, the general character of which in
Pemberton's memory to-day mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of
the first. He sees Morgan's shabby knickerbockers--the everlasting pair
that didn't match his blouse and that as he grew longer could only grow
faded. He remembers the particular holes in his three or four pair of
coloured stockings.
Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than
was absolutely necessary--partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for he was
as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher. "My dear
fellow, you are coming to pieces," Pemberton would say to him in
sceptical remonstrance; to which the child would reply, looking at him
serenely up and down: "My dear fellow, so are you! I don't want to cast
you in the shade." Pemberton could have no rejoinder for this--the
assertion so closely represented the fact. If however the deficiencies of
his own wardrobe were a chapter by themselves he didn't like his little
charge to look too poor. Later he used to say "Well, if we're poor, why,
after all, shouldn't we look it?" and he consoled himself with thinking
there was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan's
disrepair--it differed from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and
spoils his things. He could trace perfectly the degrees by which, in
proportion as her little son confined himself to his tutor for society, Mrs.
Moreen shrewdly forbore to renew his garments. She did