For the first time, in this complicated connection, Pemberton felt sore and exasperated. It was, as he had said to Mrs Moreen in Venice, trop fort – everything was trop fort. He could neither really throw off his blighting burden nor find in it the benefit of a pacified conscience or of a rewarded affection. He had spent all the money that he had earned in England, and he felt that his youth was going and that he was getting nothing back for it. It was all very well for Morgan to seem to consider that he would make up to him for all inconveniences by settling himself upon him permanently – there was an irritating flaw in such a view. He saw what the boy had in his mind; the conception that as his friend had had the generosity to come back to him he must show his gratitude by giving him his life. But the poor friend didn’t desire the gift – what could he do with Morgan’s life? Of course at the same time that Pemberton was irritated he remembered the reason, which was very honourable to Morgan and which consisted simply of the fact that he was perpetually making one forget that he was after all only a child. If one dealt with him on a different basis one’s misadventures were one’s own fault. So Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm for the catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much in what form it would come.
Perhaps it would take the form of dispersal – a frightened sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they didn’t find. The Dorringtons hadn’t reappeared, the princes had scattered; wasn’t that the beginning of the end? Mrs Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous ‘days’; her social calendar was blurred – it had turned its face to the wall. Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel, discomfiture had been the extraordinary behaviour of Mr Granger, who seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they wanted. He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his retreat, which was never the path of return. Flowers were all very well, but – Pemberton could complete the proposition. It was now positively conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a failure; so that the young man was almost grateful the run had not been short. Mr Moreen, indeed, was still occasionally able to get away on business, and, what was more surprising, he was also able to get back. Ulick had no club, but you could not have discovered it from his appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking at life from the window of such an institution; therefore Pemberton was doubly astonished at an answer he once heard him make to his mother, in the desperate tone of a man familiar with the worst privations. Her question Pemberton had not quite caught; it appeared to be an appeal for a suggestion as to whom they could get to take Amy. ‘Let the devil take her!’ Ulick snapped; so that Pemberton could see that not only they had lost their amiability, but had ceased to believe in themselves. He could also see that if Mrs Moreen was trying to get people to take her children she might be regarded as closing the hatches for the storm. But Morgan would be the last she would part with.
One winter afternoon – it was a Sunday – he and the boy walked far together in the Bois de Boulogne. The evening was so splendid, the cold lemon-coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and pedestrians so amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they would have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner. They hurried accordingly, arm-in-arm, good-humoured and hungry, agreeing that there was nothing like Paris after all and that after all, too, that had come and gone they were not yet sated with innocent pleasures. When they reached the hotel they found that, though scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were likely to sit down to. Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens (very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house), and before the interrupted service of the table (with objects displaced almost as if there had been a scuffle, and a great wine stain from an overturned bottle), Pemberton could not blink the fact that there had been a scene of proprietary mutiny. The storm had come – they were all seeking refuge. The hatches were down – Paula and Amy were invisible (they had never tried the most casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt that they had enough of an eye to him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose frocks had been confiscated), and Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard. In a word, the host and his staff had ceased to ‘go on’ at the pace of their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a pile of gaping trunks in the passage, was strangely commingled with the air of indignant withdrawal.
When Morgan took in all this – and he took it in very quickly – he blushed to the roots of his hair. He had walked, from his infancy, among difficulties and dangers, but he had never seen a public exposure. Pemberton noticed, in a second glance at him, that the tears had rushed into his eyes and that they were tears of bitter shame. He wondered for an instant, for the boy’s sake, whether he might successfully pretend not to understand. Not successfully, he felt, as Mr and Mrs Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth, rose before him in their little dishonoured salon, considering apparently with much intensity what lively capital would be next on their list. They were not prostrate, but they were very pale, and Mrs Moreen had evidently been crying. Pemberton quickly learned however that her grief was not for the loss of her dinner, much as she usually enjoyed it, but on account of a necessity much more tragic. She lost no time in laying this necessity bare, in telling him how the change had come, the bolt had fallen, and how they would all have to turn themselves about. Therefore, cruel as it was to them to part with their darling, she must look to him to carry a little further the influence he had so fortunately acquired with the boy – to induce his young charge to follow him into some modest retreat. They depended upon him, in a word, to take their delightful child temporarily under his protection – it would leave Mr Moreen and herself so much more free to give the proper attention (too little, alas! had been given), to the readjustment of their affairs.
‘We trust you – we feel that we can,’ said Mrs Moreen, slowly rubbing her plump white hands and looking, with compunction, hard at Morgan, whose chin, not to take liberties, her husband stroked with a tentative paternal forefinger.
‘Oh, yes; we feel that we can. We trust Mr Pemberton fully, Morgan,’ Mr Moreen conceded.
Pemberton wondered again if he might pretend not to understand; but the idea was painfully complicated by the immediate perception that Morgan had understood.
‘Do you mean that he may take me to live with him – for ever and ever?’ cried the boy. ‘Away, away, anywhere he likes?’
‘For ever and ever? Comme vous-y-allez!’ Mr Moreen laughed indulgently. ‘For as long as Mr Pemberton may be so good.’
‘We’ve struggled, we’ve suffered,’ his wife went on; ‘but you’ve made him so your own that we’ve already been through the worst of the sacrifice.’
Morgan had turned away from his father – he stood looking at Pemberton with a light in his face. His blush had died out, but something had come that was brighter and more vivid. He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the reflection that, with this unexpected consecration of his hope – too sudden and too violent; the thing was a good deal less like a boy’s book – the ‘escape’ was left on their hands. The boyish joy was there for an instant, and Pemberton was almost frightened at the revelation of gratitude and affection that shone through his humiliation. When Morgan stammered ‘My dear fellow, what do you say to that?’ he felt that he should say something enthusiastic. But he was still more frightened at something else that immediately followed and that made the lad sit down quickly on the nearest chair. He had turned very white and had raised his hand to his left side. They were all three looking at him, but Mrs Moreen was the first to bound forward. ‘Ah, his darling little heart!’ she broke out; and this time, on her knees before him and without respect for the idol, she caught him ardently in her arms. ‘You walked him too far, you hurr
ied him too fast!’ she tossed over her shoulder at Pemberton. The boy made no protest, and the next instant his mother, still holding him, sprang up with her face convulsed and with the terrified cry ‘Help, help! he’s going, he’s gone!’ Pemberton saw, with equal horror, by Morgan’s own stricken face, that he was gone. He pulled him half out of his mother’s hands, and for a moment, while they held him together, they looked, in their dismay, into each other’s eyes. ‘He couldn’t stand it, with his infirmity,’ said Pemberton – ‘the shock, the whole scene, the violent emotion.’
‘But I thought he wanted to go to you!’ wailed Mrs Moreen.
‘I told you he didn’t, my dear,’ argued Mr Moreen. He was trembling all over, and he was, in his way, as deeply affected as his wife. But, after the first, he took his bereavement like a man of the world.
THE MARRIAGES
I
‘WON’T you stay a little longer?’ the hostess said, holding the girl’s hand and smiling. ‘It’s too early for every one to go; it’s too absurd.’ Mrs Churchley inclined her head to one side and looked gracious; she held up to her face, in a vague, protecting, sheltering way, an enormous fan of red feathers. Everything about her, to Adela Chart, was enormous. She had big eyes, big teeth, big shoulders, big hands, big rings and bracelets, big jewels of every sort and many of them. The train of her crimson dress was longer than any other; her house was huge; her drawing-room, especially now that the company had left it, looked vast, and it offered to the girl’s eyes a collection of the largest sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors, and clocks that she had ever beheld. Was Mrs Churchley’s fortune also large, to account for so many immensities? Of this Adela could know nothing, but she reflected, while she smiled sweetly back at their entertainer, that she had better try to find out. Mrs Churchley had at least a high-hung carriage drawn by the tallest horses, and in the Row she was to be seen perched on a mighty hunter. She was high and expansive herself, though not exactly fat; her bones were big, her limbs were long, and she had a loud, hurrying voice, like the bell of a steamboat. While she spoke to his daughter she had the air of hiding from Colonel Chart, a little shyly, behind the wide ostrich fan. But Colonel Chart was not a man to be either ignored or eluded.
‘Of course every one is going on to something else,’ he said. ‘I believe there are a lot of things to-night.’
‘And where are you going?’ Mrs Churchley asked, dropping her fan and turning her bright, hard eyes on the Colonel.
‘Oh, I don’t do that sort of thing!’ he replied, in a tone of resentment just perceptible to his daughter. She saw in it that he thought Mrs Churchley might have done him a little more justice. But what made the honest soul think that she was a person to look to for a perception of fine shades? Indeed the shade was one that it might have been a little difficult to seize – the difference between ‘going on’ and coming to a dinner of twenty people. The pair were in mourning; the second year had not lightened it for Adela, but the Colonel had not objected to dining with Mrs Churchley, any more than he had objected, at Easter, to going down to the Millwards’, where he had met her, and where the girl had her reasons for believing him to have known he should meet her. Adela was not clear about the occasion of their original meeting, to which a certain mystery attached. In Mrs Churchley’s exclamation now there was the fullest concurrence in Colonel Chart’s idea; she didn’t say, ‘Ah, yes, dear friend, I understand!’ but this was the note of sympathy she plainly wished to sound. It immediately made Adela say to her, ‘Surely you must be going on somewhere yourself.’
‘Yes, you must have a lot of places,’ the Colonel observed, looking at her shining raiment with a sort of invidious directness. Adela could read the tacit implication: ‘You’re not in sorrow, in desolation.’
Mrs Churchley turned away from her at this, waiting just a moment before answering. The red fan was up again, and this time it sheltered her from Adela. ‘I’ll give everything up – for you,’ were the words that issued from behind it. ‘Do stay a little. I always think this is such a nice hour. One can really talk,’ Mrs Churchley went on. The Colonel laughed; he said it wasn’t fair. But their hostess continued, to Adela, ‘Do sit down; it’s the only time to have any talk.’ The girl saw her father sit down, but she wandered away, turning her back and pretending to look at a picture. She was so far from agreeing with Mrs Churchley that it was an hour she particularly disliked. She was conscious of the queerness, the shyness, in London, of the gregarious flight of guests, after a dinner, the general sauve qui peut and panic fear of being left with the host and hostess. But personally she always felt the contagion, always conformed to the flurry. Besides, she felt herself turning red now, flushed with a conviction that had come over her and that she wished not to show.
Her father sat down on one of the big sofas with Mrs Churchley; fortunately he was also a person with a presence that could hold its own. Adela didn’t care to sit and watch them while they made love, as she crudely formulated it, and she cared still less to join in their conversation. She wandered further away, went into another of the bright, ‘handsome’, rather nude rooms – they were like women dressed for a ball – where the displaced chairs, at awkward angles to each other, seemed to retain the attitudes of bored talkers. Her heart beat strangely, but she continued to make a pretence of looking at the pictures on the walls and the ornaments on the tables, while she hoped that, as she preferred it, it would be also the course that her father would like best. She hoped ‘awfully’, as she would have said, that he wouldn’t think her rude. She was a person of courage, and he was a kind, an intensely good-natured man; nevertheless, she was a good deal afraid of him. At home it had always been a religion with them to be nice to the people he liked. How, in the old days, her mother, her incomparable mother, so clever, so unerring, so perfect – how in the precious days her mother had practised that art! Oh, her mother, her irrecoverable mother! One of the pictures that she was looking at swam before her eyes. Mrs Churchley, in the natural course, would have begun immediately to climb staircases. Adela could see the high bony shoulders and the long crimson tail and the universal coruscating nod wriggle their business-like way through the rest of the night. Therefore she must have had her reasons for detaining them. There were mothers who thought every one wanted to marry their eldest son, and the girl asked herself if she belonged to the class of daughters who thought every one wanted to marry their father. Her companions left her alone; and though she didn’t want to be near them, it angered her that Mrs Churchley didn’t call her. That proved that she was conscious of the situation. She would have called her, only Colonel Chart had probably murmured, ‘Don’t.’ That proved that he also was conscious. The time was really not long – ten minutes at the most elapsed – when he cried out, gaily, pleasantly, as if with a little jocular reproach, ‘I say, Adela, we must release this dear lady!’ He spoke, of course, as if it had been Adela’s fault that they lingered. When they took leave she gave Mrs Churchley, without intention and without defiance, but from the simple sincerity of her anxiety, a longer look into the eyes than she had ever given her before. Mrs Churchley’s onyx pupils reflected the question; they seemed to say: ‘Yes, I am, if that’s what you want to know!’
What made the case worse, what made the girl more sure, was the silence preserved by her companion in the brougham, on their way home. They rolled along in the June darkness from Prince’s Gate to Seymour Street, each looking out of a window in conscious dumbness; watching without seeing the hurry of the London night, the flash of lamps, the quick roll on the wood of hansoms and other broughams. Adela had expected that her father would say something about Mrs Churchley; but when he said nothing, it was, strangely, still more as if he had spoken. In Seymour Street he asked the footman if Mr Godfrey had come in, to which the servant replied that he had come in early and gone straight to his room. Adela had perceived as much, without saying so, by a lighted window in the third storey; but she contributed no remark to the question. At the foot of the stairs he
r father halted a moment, hesitating, as if he had something on his mind; but what it amounted to, apparently, was only the dry ‘Good-night’ with which he presently ascended. It was the first time since her mother’s death that he had bidden her good-night without kissing her. They were a kissing family, and after her mother’s death the habit had taken a fresh spring. She had left behind her such a general passion of regret that in kissing each other they seemed to themselves a little to be kissing her. Now, as, standing in the hall, with the stiff watching footman (she could have said to him angrily, ‘Go away!’) planted near her, she looked with unspeakable pain at her father’s back while he mounted, the effect was of his having withheld from other and still more sensitive lips the touch of his own.
He was going to his room, and after a moment she heard his door close. Then she said to the servant, ‘Shut up the house’ (she tried to do everything her mother had done, to be a little of what she had been, conscious only of mediocrity), and took her own way upstairs. After she had reached her room she waited, listening, shaken by the apprehension that she should hear her father come out again and go up to Godfrey. He would go up to tell him, to have it over without delay, precisely because it would be so difficult. She asked herself, indeed, why he should tell Godfrey when he had not taken the occasion – their drive home was an occasion – to tell herself. However, she wanted no announcing, no telling; there was such a horrible clearness in her mind that what she now waited for was only to be sure her father wouldn’t leave his room. At the end of ten minutes she saw that this particular danger was over, upon which she came out and made her way to Godfrey. Exactly what she wanted to say to him first, if her father counted on the boy’s greater indulgence, and before he could say anything, was, ‘Don’t forgive him; don’t, don’t!’