Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

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The evening passed into night, and Edmund was walking alone under the
wall, dreaming of Rose.

All this foolish gambling, quarrelsome, small world of men and women
made such a foil to her image. Molly and her mother, the Delaport
Greens, and many others were grouped in his mind as he purled the smoke
disdainfully from his cigar. Something in Molly's walk by his side just
now had made him see again the old woman with her quick, alert movements
in the garden at Florence; after all they were cut from the same piece,
the old wicked woman and the slight, dark girl with the curious eyes.
Molly must not be trusted; she must be suspected all the more because of
her attractions in the moments of dangerous gentleness. And with a
certain simplicity Edmund looked again at the moon above him, all the
more glorious because secret and dark things were moving stealthily
under the trees in the lower world.

And Molly was kneeling on her low window-seat, looking out at the same
moon in a mood of joy that was transmuted half consciously into prayer
by the alchemy of pure love.

CHAPTER XV

A POOR MAN'S DEATH

Early in October, Molly and Miss Carew took up their abode in a flat
with quite large rooms and a pleasing view of Hyde Park.

August and September had been two of the healthiest and most normal
months that Molly had ever spent or was likely ever to spend again. The
weeks between the rupture with the Delaport Greens and the journey to
Switzerland had been trying, although it was undoubtedly much pleasanter
to be Mrs. Carteret's guest than it had ever been to be a permanent
inmate of her house.

Molly--thought Mrs. Carteret--was restless, not inclined to morbid
thoughts, and more gentle than of yore, but more nervous and fanciful.

It was not until after a fortnight abroad, after the revelation of
mountains realised for the first time, that Molly had the courage to say
to herself that she had been a fool during the visit to Aunt Anne. Was
it in the least likely that a man of Edmund Grosse's kind would act
romantically or hastily? Of course not. She had been as foolish as Mrs.
Browning's little Effie in dreaming that a lover might come riding over
the Malcot hills on a July evening.

The girls with whom Molly had travelled were of a healthy, intellectual
type, and Molly, under their influence, had grown to feel the worth of
the higher side of Nature's gifts. And so, vigorous in mind and body,
she had come to London in October, so she said, to study music.

Miss Carew was a little disappointed when Molly expressed lofty
indifference as to who had yet come to London. But that indifference did
not last long when her friends of the season began to find her out. Then
Miss Carew surprised Molly by her excessive nervousness and shyness of
new acquaintances. "Carey" had always professed to love society, and had
always been very carefully dressed in the fashion of the moment. But, as
a civilian may idealise warfare and be well read in tactics, and yet be
unequal to the emergency when war actually raises its grisly head, so it
was with poor Miss Carew. She simply collapsed when Molly's worldly
friends, as she called them with envious admiration, swept into the
room, garnished with wonderful hats and fashionable furs. She had none
of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the
uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste
for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more
stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly--

"My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way. It is just too late
in my life, you see, after all the years of governess work. Of course,
if my beloved father had lived, I should never have been a governess.
But as it is, I think I need not appear when you have visitors, except
now and then."

Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to
wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional _tete-a-tete_
with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire
gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in
London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew
where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport
Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season
to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she
more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's
daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine
how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry
suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a
new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss
Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen's buildings in West
Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying. He and his wife had been thriftless
and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work,
and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a
good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old
country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their
ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of
three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and
women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to
speak of anything distinctly. Three years ago he had fallen from a
ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had
been supported by his wife, who "didn't hold" with those institutions. A
kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing
pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first. Pat kept
about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and
drifted more and more into public houses. He had never been a thorough
drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and
self-indulgent. But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants
that were poison in his condition. At last a chill mercifully hastened
matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was
nearing his end in semi-consciousness. Molly Dexter then descended on
the Moloneys in one of her almost irresistible cravings to relieve
suffering.

Ordinary human nature when not in pain was often too repugnant to Molly
for her to be able to do good works in company with other people. She
was, as she had told Edmund Grosse, a born anti-clerical, and she
scorned philanthropists; so her best moods had to work themselves out
alone and without direction. Nor was she likely to spoil the recipients
of her attentions, partly from the strength of her character, partly
because the poor know instinctively whether they are merely the objects
on which to vent a restless longing to relieve pain, or whether they are
loved for themselves.

Molly, in the village at home, had always made the expression of
gratitude impossible, but she constantly added ingratitude as a large
item in the account she kept running, in her darker hours, against the
human race.

Late on a wet and windy October evening she went to undertake the
nursing of Pat Moloney for the first part of the night. She had been
visiting him constantly for several weeks, and actually nursing him for
three days.

"Has the doctor been?"

"Yes, miss" (in a very loud whisper); "he says Pat is awful bad; he left
a paper for you."

Molly Dexter walked across the small, bare room and took a paper of
directions from the chimney-piece, and then stood looking at the old
man's heavy figure on the bed. He was lying on his side, his face turned
to the wall.

"You had better rest in the back room while I am here," she said.

"I couldn't, indeed I couldn't, miss, him being like that; you mustn't
ask me to. Besides, I've been round and asked the priest to come, and so
I couldn't take my things off. I'll just have some tea and a drop of
whisky in it, and I can keep going all the night, it's more than likely
he'll die at the dawn."

Molly eyed the woman with supreme contempt.

"It isn't at all certain that he's going to die, he'll make a good fight
yet if you will give him a chance."

Mrs. Moloney looked deeply offended. It had been all very well to be
guided by a lady at the beginning of the illness, but now it was very
different. She felt half consciously that science had done its worst,
and bigger questions than temperatures and drugs were at issue.

"A priest now," said Molly, in a whisper of intense scorn, "would kill
him at once."

Mrs. Moloney did not condescend to reply. She had propped a poor little
crucifix, a black cross, with a chipped white figure on it, against a
jam pot on a shelf under the window, and she had borrowed two
candlesticks with coloured candles from a labourer's wife on the floor
beneath. The window had been shut, so that the wind should not blow down
these objects.

Molly looked at the man on the bed and sniffed.

"He must have air--" the whisper was a snort.

At that moment there was a knock on the outer door. On the iron outer
stairs was standing the priest.

"It's just the curate," said Mrs. Moloney, looking out of the window;
and then she disappeared into the tiny passage.

Molly stood defiantly, her figure drawn to its full height. She felt
that she knew exactly the kind of Irish curate who was coming in to
disturb, and probably kill, the unhappy man on the bed. Well, she should
make a fight for this poor, crushed life; she would stand between the
horrible tyranny and superstition that lit those pink candles, and that
would rouse a man to make his poor wretched conscience unhappy and
frighten him to death. "If there is a hell," she muttered, "it must be
ready to punish such brutality as that."

Mrs. Moloney opened the door as wide as possible, and the priest came
in. Miss Dexter looked at him in amazement; how, and where had she seen
him before?

He went straight to the bed and looked at the man in silence, while
Molly looked at him. He was about middle height, with very dark hair and
eyes, a small, well-formed head, and a very good forehead. It was not
until he turned to Mrs. Moloney that Molly understood why she had
fancied that she had seen him before. She was sure now that she had
seen his photograph, but, although she was certain of having seen it,
she could not remember when or where she had done so.

"Can't you open the window, Mrs. Moloney?"

"It's the only place to make into an altar, father?"

"Oh, never mind that yet; I will manage."

Molly stepped forward; whatever he was going to do, it should not be
done without a protest.

"The doctor's orders are that he is not to be disturbed."

The priest did not seem aware of the exceedingly unpleasant expression
on Molly's countenance.

"It would be a great mistake to wake him, of course," he said; and then,
"Do you suppose he will sleep for long?"

"I haven't the faintest notion"; the uttermost degree of scorn was
conveyed in those few words.

Mrs. Moloney suppressed a sob.

"He's not been to the Sacraments for three years," she murmured.

The priest leant over the bed and looked intently at the dying man.

Mrs. Moloney opened the window and put the crucifix and candlesticks in
a corner on the dirty floor.

"It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly.

"Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to
himself than to her.

"Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!"

The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew
into the room. A sandy coloured cat came from under the bed, looked at
them, and then rubbed her arched back against the unsteady leg of the
only table, which was laden with bottles and basins, finally retired
into a further corner, and upset and broke one of the pink candles that
belonged to the neighbour.

But Mrs. Moloney never took her eyes off the priest's pale face.

"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else
I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room."

"That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed."

Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a
chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and
whispered to him--

"Father, you'll not let his soul slip through your fingers, will you,
father dear? Just because of the poor lady who knows no better!"

"Who is she? She is not like the district visitors I've seen about in
the parish."

"No, indeed; she is a lady, and I've done some work for her, and she
would not be satisfied when she heard Moloney was ill but she must come
herself, and yesterday, not to grudge her her due, father, the doctor
said if he pulled through that I owed her his life. Well, that's proved
a mistake, anyhow, but she's after spoiling his last chance, and he's
not been the good man he was once, father."

"Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there
is any change. I'm sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn't
let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?"

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be
obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney's proceeding to make a
cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been
out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys' instead of eating his
dinner. He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and
read his Office by the light of the tallow candle. That finished, he sat
still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and
the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought
with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and
Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual
unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up;
the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse
him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again.
After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything
you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in
almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she
added abruptly--

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not
in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and
I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With
the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to
interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of
her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of
revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move
when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who
suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work
of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of
unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of
perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the
inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she
hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more
about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's
face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it.
But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of
feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no
longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no
great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of
reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed.
She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical
agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and
bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this
thing out. It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pass through,
she might be intruding at too sacred a moment. She believed that the
priest was hearing the dying man's confession. She had a half
contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy. She felt
she had been foolish not to go away at once. But she did not move for
nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man's wife came
in and started back.

"I'm sure I thought you had gone, miss." Her manner was much more
cordial than it had been before. She was tearful and excited. "I want to
raise him a bit higher, and there's a cloak here. He is going off fast
now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make
his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many
a year--and God Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years
to change him, poor soul."

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the
dying man. The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle
dimmer. Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body
laboured for breath. The flicker of light in the mind, that had been
roused, perhaps, by those rites which had passed in her absence, had
faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now;
the hands were cold and would never be warm again. The sandy cat had
crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive
again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer
to death. There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all
for Molly. But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole
face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father
Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in
the clear tones. At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust
themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless
face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words
spoken to him.

"I commend thee to Almighty God, dearest brother, and commend thee to
Him whose creature thou art; that, when thou shalt have paid the debt of
humanity by death, thou mayest return to the Maker, Who formed thee of
the dust of the earth. As thy soul goeth forth from the body, may the
bright company of angels meet thee; may the judicial senate of Apostles
greet thee; may the triumphant army of white-robed Martyrs come out to
welcome thee; may the band of glowing Confessors, crowned with lilies,
encircle thee; may the choir of Virgins, singing jubilees, receive thee;
and the embrace of a blessed repose fold thee in the bosom of the
Patriarchs; mild and festive may the aspect of Jesus Christ appear to
thee, and may He award thee a place among them that stand before Him for
ever."

And so it went on; some of it appealing to her more, some less; some
passages almost repulsive. But her imagination had caught on to the vast
outlines of the prayer--the enormous nature of the claims made on behalf
of the dying labourer.

Was it Pat Moloney who was to pass out of this darkness to "gaze with
blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous assertion made
with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so
magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command,
by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving
up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the
Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince
of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance.
Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any
attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord,
with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which,
through the violence of anger or the heat of evil passion, he hath at
any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the
Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a
zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence--this great drama? Was it a
mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the
priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the
voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the
bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given
by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook
their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted
half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It
seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her
consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the
voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she
could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality
that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come
forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the
redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.

CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was
the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was
astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead
of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational--a lower
part of her nature,--they now seemed quite curiously rational and
established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more
satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she
believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less
utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked
something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as
she intended, to make up for the short night. She wrote one or two brief
notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say
she was not at home. She could not keep quite still, and she did not
want to go out. Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into
more and more excitement. Her imagination pictured what might be the
outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of
her. In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such
were the symptoms of "conversion" in a revivalist. But now there was no
critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a
solemn kind of joy. Next there came, after some hours of a sort of
surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for
action and for sacrifice. Her mind returned to the concrete, and the
circumstances of her life. And then there came a most unwelcome thought.
If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real
good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty
quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child? Had she ever made any
attempt to help the forlorn woman in Florence? Perhaps Madame Danterre's
assertion, when Molly came of age, that she did not want to see Molly,
was only an attempt to find out whether Molly really wished to come to
her mother. From the day on which her ideal of her mother had been
completely shattered Molly had shrunk from even thinking of her. She now
shivered with repugnance, but she was almost glad to feel how repugnant
this duty might be, much as a medieval penitent might have rejoiced in
his own repugnance to the leprous wounds he was resolved to dress as an
expiation for sin. It did not strike her, as it never struck the noble
penitents in the Middle Ages, that it might be very trying to the object
of these expiatory actions. She felt at the moment that it must be a
comfort to her mother to receive all the love and devotion that she
would offer her. And there was real heroism in the letter that Molly
proceeded to write to Madame Danterre. For she knew that if her offer
were accepted she risked the loss of all that at present made life very
dear, both in what she already enjoyed, and in the hope that was hidden
in her heart.

Molly had pride enough to shrink utterly from the connection with her
mother, and her girl's innocence shrank, too, with quick sensitiveness
from what might be before her. How strange now appeared the dreams of
her childhood, the idealisation of the young and beautiful mother!

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