Part 3 (2/2)

”No I'm not, but I ain't a baby. I won't stand it any longer. You must get some occupation that pays. I'm ashamed, I'm ashamed!” quavered the boy with a ring of pa.s.sion, like some high silver note from a small cathedral cloister, that deeply touched his friend.

”We ought to go off and live somewhere together,” the young man said.

”I'll go like a shot if you'll take me.”

”I'd get some work that would keep us both afloat,” Pemberton continued.

”So would I. Why shouldn't I work? I ain't such a beastly little m.u.f.f as that comes to.”

”The difficulty is that your parents wouldn't hear of it. They'd never part with you; they wors.h.i.+p the ground you tread on. Don't you see the proof of it?” Pemberton developed. ”They don't dislike me; they wish me no harm; they're very amiable people; but they're perfectly ready to expose me to any awkwardness in life for your sake.”

The silence in which Morgan received his fond sophistry struck Pemberton somehow as expressive. After a moment the child repeated: ”You are a hero!” Then he added: ”They leave me with you altogether. You've all the responsibility. They put me off on you from morning till night. Why then should they object to my taking up with you completely? I'd help you.”

”They're not particularly keen about my being helped, and they delight in thinking of you as _theirs_. They're tremendously proud of you.”

”I'm not proud of _them_. But you know that,” Morgan returned.

”Except for the little matter we speak of they're charming people,” said Pemberton, not taking up the point made for his intelligence, but wondering greatly at the boy's own, and especially at this fresh reminder of something he had been conscious of from the first-the strangest thing in his friend's large little composition, a temper, a sensibility, even a private ideal, which made him as privately disown the stuff his people were made of. Morgan had in secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed meanness; as well as a critical sense for the manners immediately surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this nature ”old-fas.h.i.+oned,” as the word is of children-quaint or wizened or offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had paid the penalty by discovering that he was the only such person in his family.

This comparison didn't make him vain, but it could make him melancholy and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things, shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was already flus.h.i.+ng faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn't know. It seemed to him that he himself knew too much to imagine Morgan's simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.

The boy paid no heed to his last remark; he only went on: ”I'd have spoken to them about their idea, as I call it, long ago, if I hadn't been sure what they'd say.”

”And what would they say?”

”Just what they said about what poor Zen.o.bie told me-that it was a horrid dreadful story, that they had paid her every penny they owed her.”

”Well, perhaps they had,” said Pemberton.

”Perhaps they've paid you!”

”Let us pretend they have, and n'en parlons plus.”

”They accused her of lying and cheating”-Morgan stuck to historic truth.

”That's why I don't want to speak to them.”

”Lest they should accuse me, too?” To this Morgan made no answer, and his companion, looking down at him-the boy turned away his eyes, which had filled-saw what he couldn't have trusted himself to utter. ”You're right. Don't worry them,” Pemberton pursued. ”Except for that, they _are_ charming people.”

”Except for _their_ lying and _their_ cheating?”

”I say-I say!” cried Pemberton, imitating a little tone of the lad's which was itself an imitation.

”We must be frank, at the last; we _must_ come to an understanding,” said Morgan with the importance of the small boy who lets himself think he is arranging great affairs-almost playing at s.h.i.+pwreck or at Indians. ”I know all about everything.”

”I dare say your father has his reasons,” Pemberton replied, but too vaguely, as he was aware.

”For lying and cheating?”

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