Chapter 39

The next evening Morgan sat pretending to be reading a book, his feet sedulously planted on a new Turkey rug, which struck a startling note of colour and decoration amid the bleakness of the attic. At last he closed the volume and let it fall wearily on his knee. The visit of his father had tried him severely. He had been shaken by a storm of emotion, and it had left him somewhat shattered. And now that Archibald had departed, an aching sense of loneliness had come to him such as only comes to the man who lives thus isolated. He had been able to leave his work for an hour in the middle of the day, so that, including his usual dinner interval, he had passed two hours in his father's company and seen him to his train. The old man had been miserable in town; he couldn't bear to be so near Morgan yet cut off from him all day, and, since he was far from well and needed the comforts of his own home, it was decided between them he should go at once.

At last Morgan threw down the book impatiently. He walked round the room for a time, but could not rid himself of his restlessness. "My soul is sick," he repeated again and again. "I need my friends." He poked the fire and threw more coal on; he looked for awhile through the panes of the window into the vague blackness of the March night. And at last he bethought himself of getting ready his evening meal, merely for the sake of concentrating himself on something. Just as he was on the point of opening the cupboard, into which his father had pried so jocularly, there came a timid tap at the door.

"Come in!" he cried, not quite certain that there _was_ anybody there.

As his invitation seemed to be complied with, he instinctively turned his head to view his visitor, who stood just within the door smiling at him.

"What! Margaret!" he cried, as his head almost swam.

She closed the door softly and advanced into the room.

"I've just come to pay you a visit, Morgan," she said laughingly. "Please say it was nice of me to come. What! Aren't you going to shake hands with one of your oldest friends?"

He was not quite sure that his brain hadn't given way, and that her presence was not a mere manifestation of the fact. He had never been able to trust himself sufficiently to go near the Medhursts. Sedulously keeping to the London south of the river and to the immediate vicinity of his work--save on his rare visits to Belgrave Square--he had run but little risk of encountering any of them or, indeed, any other acquaintances. He was aware the Medhursts knew he was in London and employed by a large firm, but they had never been told the exact details of his whereabouts. However, he found himself shaking hands with Margaret but too bewildered to say anything.

"What a strange expression in your face, Morgan! It seems to ask any number of questions, but I can't make out whether it looks pleased or angry. At least be polite enough to make me welcome. It's nice and warm in here, so I think I'd better take my jacket off."

"You don't give me time to recover my breath, Margaret. Of course, you are more than welcome, but I am not good enough for you to visit. Come, take a chair by the fire."

"You not good enough! It is simply wicked of you to talk like that. But why are you rubbing your eyes? I believe you think I'm a phantom."

She removed her jacket and also her hat, instinctively throwing them, as Archibald had done the evening before, across the trunk. Then she smiled at him again in lovely reassurance that she was real flesh and blood. She had on a soft woollen dress of that favourite silver-blue in which she always looked her best. She wore a bunch of forget-me-nots at her waist, and a little knot of the same flowers at her throat was fastened with a small, lyre-shaped brooch, set with pearls. There was just a touch of creamy lace at her wrists and throat, and what dainty little tendrils of golden hair lay on her forehead!

"Your chair is very hard," she exclaimed, jumping up almost immediately. "I think I'll sit on the bed instead."

"You won't find that much better," he said, drawn into good humour by her briskness, and charmed that so exquisite a presence should grace his attic.

"It's miles better," said Margaret. "But you still look puzzled. Isn't your ingenuity equal to the task of guessing how I found you out?"

"I don't know, unless Diana's old sweetheart paid you a visit yesterday," he answered smiling, as he spread the new rug under her feet. "But he certainly said nothing to me about it this afternoon when I saw him off."

"He was probably afraid to let you know he'd been weak enough to yield to our blandishments. I had an idea you were living in a garret--the garret always seems to put a sort of hall-mark on genius. It's a very nice garret, too. I like mine better, though--it's a lump larger."

If the pure pleasure of being near her began to predominate, it was certainly not unaccompanied by the pain that was always with him because of his vain love for her; so that his entire feeling was a rather mixed and undecided one. He could not quite abandon himself to gladness at her coming, and perhaps the very unexpectedness of it aided this emotional embarrassment.

"Have you been working much of late?" he asked, that being a natural question to follow her reference to her studio. He was, indeed, relieved that the conversation had got on so definite a tack and that she had not alluded to his avoidance of her family or reproached him for it.

"I'm just doing a little group of greyhounds. I'm going to exhibit them at the Academy. It's such a bother and such fun, too! I've got over the worst part now. The big mother and two little ones playing at the side of her make twelve legs and three tails--quite a forest of them. I had no end of trouble to get a good composition. But the chief bother was with the models. The dog would never keep still, and I had to keep on moving my wax figure just as it moved. Sometimes it would turn upside down, and then I had to turn my work upside down as well. Do you know what I should like to do, Morgan?"

"I don't, but I should like to."

"I wonder if you'd let me make a bust of you! I want to very much."

"Why?" he asked, without meaning that exactly, but only by way of surprised exclamation.

"Well," she smiled, "I just want to. I could have an old bench brought up here and a lot of clay. If you sat to me, say, for a couple of hours every Sunday morning, you'd begin to recognise yourself after a time."

He was powerless to refuse. With her speaking to him, he became as passive as the clay she moulded. He knew her power; perhaps that was why his instinct had led him to elude it.

"That is really good of you, dear Morgan," she exclaimed, while her eyes sparkled with honest delight.

Time was, perhaps, when seeing her thus he might have taken her hand.

"But don't look as if you already regretted making the promise," she went on to protest. "I assure you it won't hurt a bit; not any more than having your hair cut. By the way, why do you wear your hair so short? Oughtn't a poet to have long, noble locks? They come out very effectively in clay, those long, noble locks. I hope I'm not making your bed too hard. Come now, Morgan, are you still so heavy-hearted? What can I do to make you merry?"

"Take supper with me," he responded quickly, with an atoning flash of briskness, the while he upbraided himself for oppressing her with his dejection. "It will be a real Bohemian supper."

"How nice! I'm dying with hunger."

"In here, I mean," he explained. "I make my own supper."

"I know. We heard all about the inside of that cupboard."

"You won't mind sitting on the hard chair?"

"No. What's the menu?"

"Bread and cheese and----"

"Not beer, I hope," she interrupted hastily.

"And cocoa," he finished. "Do you mind keeping house here for two minutes whilst I run down to get the milk. We have a dairy two doors away."

He returned in a moment and she helped him to set out the table, for which there was no cloth.

"This chair _is_ hard," she said again later, when she had been seated on it some little time. "I must send you a soft chair, Morgan. I haven't given you a birthday present this year."

"Indeed, you must not. Such luxuries are out of place here, and you ought not to try to spoil me."

"But, dear Morgan, you've a lovely rug, and I'm sure you ought to have a nice chair to keep it company. You've your guests to think of now. I must have something to sit on when I come and so must your papa. I'm willing to admit my suggestion was not quite a disinterested one; in fact, I'm prepared to be perfectly unscrupulous so long as I carry my point."

"I'd better yield before you get so far as that. Only, of course, the chair shall be used exclusively for my visitors."

"Oh, you must sit on it sometimes, as well."

"Well, let us not quarrel about it."

"Of course we're not going to quarrel about it. We're going to be the best of friends now, aren't we?"

"I never dared dream----" he began.

"Dreaming hasn't anything to do with it. It really isn't at all necessary, so the omission need not count. All along I've had the feeling as if you were thrusting me back away from your life, and I have always wanted to count for something in it, if ever so little. Won't you let me now be of some help to you? It is wicked of you to continue in this terrible solitude. I feel that you've promised to let me come here and model you really against your will; don't deny it, Morgan--your face spoke only too plainly. I should be standing here and talking to you, but you would be as solitary as if I had never come. I want to break down that stupid barrier between us; I want you to believe in me, to trust me and to show me you trust me."

"It is myself I dare not trust. Such a friendship needs strength, and I am not strong enough, Margaret."

"Then you must find the strength, Morgan. Weakness is an unmanly excuse, and you are a man."

"You talk like that because you still do not realise what it means for me to--to----"

He hesitated.

"Go on," she said. "I am strong enough to listen."

There was a silence, but she knew he was collecting his scattered forces.

"To be friends with you," he went on determinedly. "You say that I kept you at arm's length. That is true. But then you don't know what my life has been--you never did really know even when we were close together."

"Tell me then, Morgan. Make me understand why you kept me at arm's length. I do not know how you came to marry so suddenly, what woman you married, or why she left you. I want to know all about her. Tell me, if it doesn't hurt you too much. Perhaps it will hurt you less after you have told me."

"I have kept you at arm's length, Margaret, because I loved you. I am struggling now to keep you at arm's length because I still love you. Dare you stay here and listen to me after that?"

She looked him straight in the face.

"I dare, Morgan. I want you to know me as well as to love me. If you had understood me, you would neither have thrust me back nor would you be struggling to do so now. You no doubt always considered me just a pretty girl, who thought and acted always as becomes what it called a young lady; a colourless, conventional creature, without any judgment or emotions of her own; just a white sheet of paper with a name written across in beautiful lettering; a simpering thing in petticoats who must smile and blush just at the right moments and be perfectly proper at all times; who must never act unless she has a fixed rule to guide her; who is supposed to understand nothing at all of real life; for whom human beings are reduced to a strange uniformity, the men in their evening dress so simple, so nice, so attentive, so easy to understand, the women--but then such a young person is not supposed to concern herself with the women. That, I'm sure, is the sort of girl I appeared to you, Morgan. I am sorry that, so far, I cannot take your love for me as a compliment. You saw me as a painter might see a model, and perhaps you enshrined my image as a sort of poetic fancy. You loved me as an unreal spirit. But I am not what you thought me; I am a real person. I can think and judge for myself, and I can be myself. That is why I have had the courage to come here to you, and had I known earlier where you were I should have forced this interview on you long ago. And this despite the fact that you are married, that you love me and that I--love you. I have the courage to face the occasion, to outrage convention where convention makes no provision for the needs of the particular occasion. I know that, despite all, we can be very dear friends. Only trust me a little, Morgan, learn to know me better, and I am sure you will trust me altogether. Make an effort to be strong and perhaps I may help you."

And so Morgan poured himself out to her, told her all; and, if at times he faltered, she bade him go on, she would not blush.

The recital was a long one. Interruptions and discussions were frequent; they were also making pretence to sup. Neither remembered the flight of time.

"Of course, I have known the bare facts for a long time," said Margaret, "but only in a very vague way and in a very puzzling one. There was so much left to my imagination, and it bothered me so much to fill up the blanks. And so you are working to pay off her debts. I know it feels awfully nice to earn money for one's self. Do you know that I'm quite rich. Guess how much I made last year by my modelling?"

"How much?" he asked.

"Eighty-seven pounds, after paying all my expenses," she exclaimed. "I wanted to pay for my own frocks, but papa wouldn't let me. And so I've got it all and I don't know what to do with it; at least I know what I should like to do with it."

"But surely papa wouldn't disapprove of your doing what you liked with it?"

"Oh, papa wouldn't disapprove," she said, colouring a little, "but I'm afraid you would."

"I? You're not intending to buy me a silver chair with jewels set in it, are you?"

"I thought you might pay some of those debts with the money and let me be your creditor instead," she said hesitatingly. "Of course, you would pay me back as you saved enough, just as you are doing now with the others. And it would be a sort of symbol of the new footing on which we start from to-day."

"Dear Margaret," he said, "please don't try and press that on me. It won't help me in the least, as you see yourself. Besides, what need have we of a symbol? I want you to believe in the new footing just as much without it. And then," he added, in a gayer note, "there is another reason why I can't allow you to have such ideas. Heroines always do that sort of thing, and it's quite too conventional for you."

She laughed and did not persist, though she had coloured still more. And just then she bethought herself of the hour and drew forth her tiny watch.

"This is being wicked with a vengeance!" she exclaimed. "I really must be going back."

"You must let me come with you, else I shall be nervous all night and my hair may be grey by the morning."

"Part of the excitement of the adventure was to come alone and to go alone. But as I can't have your hair turning grey----"

"Do they know at home where you were going?" he asked, as he helped her on with her jacket.

"I didn't tell them, but I dare say they'll guess, and I mean to let them know anyway. I'm going to leave you these," and she unfastened the bunch of forget-me-nots and put them on the table.

He saw her to her own door; it was long since he had set foot in Wimpole street. She gave him a long comrade's hand-clasp, saying: "We had a charming Bohemian supper. You have made me happier to-night than I have been for years."

He turned away as she rang the bell and he walked all the way back to Southwark. Now that he had taken her into his life at last, he seemed to have unburdened himself of some overwhelming weight. Margaret knew everything at last, understood everything, and loved him through all. His self-distrust had made him keep himself hidden from the Medhursts, but she had helped him to find and know his own strength. She was right. He was strong enough to accept her friendship.

Though he would have to be at his desk at the usual hour in the morning, he could not go to bed at once. The flowers she had left seemed to fill the room with sweetness. And something of lightness and fragrance seemed to remain with him, to be flitting here and there with the silence of a phantom, to be hovering in the air, to be bending over him, to be nestling close to him. Then, as he closed his eyes dreamily, Margaret seemed to float before him. He was aware of her eyes, her hair, her voice; he saw her just as she had sat there with her face and hands showing exquisite against the silver-blue of her dress, and the forget-me-nots at her throat and waist.