“Is Morgan no help to you? he’s something young about the house.”
“I don’t speak to him much, he’s always in his books. I wish you lived in the house, Mr. Calthorpe.”
“I wish I did, Nan.” But on the whole, he thought, he was glad he didn’t.
IV
Morgan, whom Nan represented as being always in his books, was by inclination a scientist, but for the moment, until he had the means to devote himself to his profession, he managed that branch of the factory concerned with scents and powders.
He worked among shining alembics and great-bellied bottles of dark green glass, standing round his room in rows.
The latticed window was hung with cobwebs. The table was littered with bottles, saucepans, test-tubes, and little flames burning. Of all things in the room, the alembics alone were kept clean, gleaming bright brass globes, pair by pair, connected by twisting pipes, and ever dripping the distilled, overpowering scent into dishes put ready to receive it. They shone out from the disorder of the room. Canisters ranged round the walls on shelves: benzoin, civet, frankincense, ambergris,—the names on the labels smouldered as a group of Asiatics among ordinary people.
Nan was sent up with a message to him in this room.
She appeared in the doorway, continuing to knock as she pushed open the door, in the bright blue overall she wore when at her work. She was smiling shyly, as though she expected a welcome. But he did not immediately see her. He was bending with great absorption over a little pair of scales, weighing a quantity of grains, and when he had done this he poured the grains very carefully into a kind of box, which he set above a small lamp to heat. Then as he wiped his hands on a piece of linen, he caught sight of her.
“Mrs. Dene! What brings you here? what bit of luck? What extraordinary bit of luck?”