Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

M >> Mrs. Wilfrid Ward >> Great Possessions

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Love is not the whole life of a man, but, in spite of new activities, in
spite of a renewed sense of self-respect, Edmund had time and space
enough for much pain in his heart.

Rose was still in Paris taking care of her mother, who was very unwell.
Edmund had hinted at the possibility of going over to see them at
Easter, but the suggestion had met with no encouragement. He had felt
rebuffed, and was in no mood to be smoothed or melted by Rose's written
sympathy. He was, no doubt, harder as well as stronger than before his
financial troubles. He let Rose see that he could stand on his feet, and
was not disposed to whine. Meanwhile Molly had provoked him to single
combat. The decided cut she gave him at the Court was not to be
permitted; he was too old a hand to allow anything so crude. He meant to
be at her parties; he meant to keep in touch; indeed he meant to see
this thing out.

"Sir Edmund, will you take Miss Dexter in to dinner?"

Edmund looked fairly surprised and very respectful as Mrs. Delaport
Green spoke to him. Molly's bearing was, he could see, defiant, but she
was clearly quite conscious of having to submit and anxious to do
nothing absurd.

They ate their soup in silence, for Molly's other neighbour had shown an
unflattering eagerness to be absorbed by the lady he had taken down.
Edmund turned to her with exactly his old shade of manner, very
paternal, intimate and gentle.

"And you are not bored yet?"

Molly could have sworn deep and long had it been possible.

"No; why should I be?"

She stared at him for a moment indifferently, as at a stranger, but he
could see the nervous movement of her fingers as she crumbed her bread.

"It is more likely," he answered, "that I should remember what I allude
to than that you should. We once had a talk about being bored. I said I
had never been bored while I was poor. Now I am poor again, so I
naturally remember, and, as you are trying the experience of being very
rich, I should really like to know if you are bored yet."

Molly might have kept silent, but she did not want Adela, who was
certainly watching them, to think her embarrassed.

"I suppose every one has moments of being bored."

Edmund leant back and turned round so as to allow of his looking fully
at her. He muttered to himself: "Young, beautiful, wealthy beyond the
dreams of avarice--and bored! What flattering unction that is to the
soul of a ruined man."

In spite of her anger, her indignation, her hurt pride, Molly was
softened. She writhed under the caress of his voice; it had power
still.

"Are you not bored any more?" She spoke unwillingly.

"No," he said, "suffering does not bore; discomfort does not bore;
knowledge of your fellow-creatures does not bore. But, of course, I am
tasting the pleasures of novelty. And I have not disappeared yet. I
think a boarding-house in Bloomsbury may prove boring. How prettily our
hostess will pity me, then. But I don't think I shall meet you here at
dinner, and have the comfort of seeing for myself that you, too, are
bored."

Molly felt that he was putting her hopelessly in the wrong. She was the
one bitterly aggrieved and deeply injured. But he made her feel as if
coldness on her part would be just the conduct of any rich heartless
woman to a ruined man.

"I calculate," he said, "on about fifty more good dinners which I shall
not pay for, and then, of course, I shall think myself well fed at my
own expense in an Italian cafe somewhere. I think Italian, don't you?
Dinner at two shillings! There is an air of _spagghetti_ and onions that
conceals the nature or age of the meat; and the coffee is amazingly
good. One might be able to find one with a clean cloth."

Most of these remarks were made almost to himself.

"You know it isn't true," Molly said angrily; "you know you will get a
good post. Men like you are always given things."

Edmund helped himself very carefully to exactly the right amount of
melted butter. "Don't you eat asparagus?" he interjected, and, without
waiting for an answer, went on:

"I thought so too, but I can't hear of a job. There are too many of the
unemployed just now. However, no doubt, as you say, I shall soon be
made absolute ruler of some province twice the size of England."

He laughed and smoothed his moustache with one hand.

"Down with dull care, Miss Dexter; let us make a pact never to be
bored--in Bloomsbury, or West Africa, or Park Lane. I suppose you found
a great deal to do to that dear old house?"

After that their other neighbours claimed them both; but during dessert
Molly, against her will, lost hold of the talk on her right, and had to
listen to Edmund again.

"I hear that you have got the old Florentine looking-glasses from my
sale."

"I don't think they were from your sale," said Molly hastily.

"Well, Perks told me so."

"Perks never told me," muttered Molly.

"I should think they must suit the house to perfection. Where have you
put them?"

"In the small dining-room."

"Yes; they must do admirably there. I should like to see them again." He
looked at her with a faintly sarcastic smile. She knew what he intended
her to say, and, against her will, she said hastily:

"Won't you come and see them?"

"With great pleasure."

Molly saw that Adela had risen, and sprang up and turned away in one
sudden movement. She was very angry with him for forcing her to say
that, and she could not conceive what had made her yield.

"'The teeth that bite; the claws that scratch,'" he thought to himself,
"but safely chained up--and the movements are beautiful." He stood
looking after her.

"I did as you told me," said the hostess, pausing for a moment as she
followed her guests to the door. "If Molly blames me, shall I say that
you asked to take her in?"

"Say just what you like; I trust you entirely." He did not attempt to
speak to Molly after dinner, or when they met again at a ball that same
night. All her burning wish to snub him could not be gratified. He
seemed not to know shat she was still in the room. But she knew
instinctively that he watched her, and she was not sorry he should see
her in the crowd, and be witness, however unwillingly, to her position
in the world he knew so well. It added to the sense of intoxication that
often possessed her now. "Be drunken," says Baudelaire, "be drunken with
wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken."
And that Molly could be drunken with flattery, with luxury, with
movement, with music, with a sense of danger that gave a strong and
subtle flavour to her pleasures, was the explanation (and the only one)
of how she bore the hours of reaction, of the nausea experienced by that
spiritual nature of hers which she had been so surprised to discover. It
was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in
the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now. That Molly was gone, and
he regretted her.

CHAPTER XXVII

MOLLY'S APPEAL

Edmund, it seemed, was in no hurry to see his Florentine looking-glasses
again. Ten days passed before he called on Molly, and on the eleventh
day Mr. Murray, Junior, wrote to say that he had some fresh and
important intelligence to give him, and asked if Sir Edmund would call,
not at his office, but at his own house.

Edmund flung the letter down impatiently. The situation was really a
very trying one. He did not believe--he could not and would not
believe--that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud. Murray was a
lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and
absurd. From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother's
reply to her offer to go to Florence, Edmund had in his masculine way
ranged her once for all among good and nice women. He had felt touched
and guilty at a suspicion that he had been to blame in playing his
paternal _role_ too zealously. Until then he had at times had hard
thoughts of her; after that time he was a little ashamed of himself, and
he believed in her simplicity and goodness. He was sorry and
disappointed now that she was making quite so much effect in this London
world. There was something disquieting in Molly's success, and he could
appraise better than any one what a remarkable success it was. But he
felt that she was going the pace, and he would not have liked his
daughter to go the pace, unmarried and at twenty-two. She needed
friendship and advice. But the pinch came from the fact that the wealth
he could have advised her to use wisely ought to be Rose's, and that he
was resolved, in the depths of his soul, to regain that wealth for his
cousin--for that "_belle dame sans merci_" who wrote him such pretty
letters about his troubles.

Edmund put Murray's letter in his pocket, and immediately went out. He
was living in a small, but clean, lodging in Fulham, kept by a former
housemaid and a former footman of his own, now Mr. and Mrs. Tart, kindly
souls who were proud to receive him. He gave no trouble, and the
preparation of his coffee and boiled egg was all the cooking he had done
for him. Mrs. Tart would have felt strangely upset had she known that
the said coffee and egg were, on some days, his only food till tea-time;
she was under the impression that he lunched at his club when not
engaged to friends. Both she and Mr. Tart took immense pains with his
clothes, and he would rather have been well valeted than eat luxurious
luncheons every day.

He went out at once after getting Murray's letter, because he wanted to
call on Molly before he heard any more of the important intelligence.

Molly was alone when he was announced. She had told the butler she was
"not at home," but somehow the man decided to show Sir Edmund up because
he saw that he wished to be shown up. Edmund had always had an odd
influence below stairs, partly because he never forgot a servant's
face.

Molly coloured deeply when she saw her visitor. She was annoyed to think
that he would make her talk against her will--and they would not be
interrupted. She could have used strong language to the butler, but she
did not dare tell him that she would now see visitors. It would look to
Edmund as if she were afraid of a _tete-a-tete_.

Almost as soon as he was in the room she had an impression that he was
quite at home, curiously at his ease.

"I am glad the house is so little changed. I came to my first dance
here. You have done wonderfully well, and all on the old lines. A friend
told me it was the hugest success."

A remembrance of past jokes as to Edmund's second-hand compliments and
his friend "Mr. Harris" came into Molly's mind, but she only felt angry
at the remembrance.

He talked on about the pictures and the furniture until she became more
natural. It was impossible not to be interested in her work, and the
decoration and furnishing of the whole house was her own doing, not that
of any hireling adviser. Then, too, he knew its history, and she became
keenly interested. She had at times a strong feeling of the past life
still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated
life had intruded. She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty
secret was a desecration or only a continuance of something that had
gone before.

Suddenly she leant forward with the crude simplicity he was glad to see
again.

"Have there been any wicked people here?" Her voice was low and young.

"'All houses in which men have lived and died are haunted houses,'" he
quoted. "It's not very cynical to suppose that there has been sin and
sorrow here before now."

"I think," said Molly quickly, "there was a wicked woman who used the
little dining-room; perhaps she was only a guest. I don't think she went
upstairs often."

"Perhaps she came in with my looking-glasses," suggested Edmund. "I have
often wished I could see what they have seen."

Molly was now quite off her guard.

Edmund rose and examined some china on a table near him.

"Why are you so displeased with me?" he said, without any change of
voice.

Molly sprang to her feet, careless whether her unguarded vehemence might
betray her to his observation.

"I shall not answer that question," she said; but he knew that she would
answer it.

"You cut me at the Court; you were displeased at having to sit by me at
dinner; you have pretended not to see me at least four times since then,
and your butler showed me up by mistake."

Molly had moved away from him to the window. She knew she must speak or
her conduct would look too like wounded love--a thing quite unbearable.
She knew, too, that his influence would make her speak, and, besides
that, something in her cried for the relief of speech. She needed a
fight although she did not know it; an open fight with an enemy she
could see would distract her from the incessant fight with an enemy she
did not see.

"You are a strange man!" she cried, holding the curtain behind her
lightly as she turned towards him. "You could make friends with me so
that all the world might see you, and meanwhile, at the very same time,
you were paying a low Italian scoundrel to produce lies against my sick
and lonely mother! You could watch me and get out of me all you wanted
to know because I was ignorant of the world. You could use the horrible
influence you had gained over me by your experience of many women, to
manage me as you liked. You told me not to marry Edgar Tonmore for some
reason of your own; you told me to go and stay with my aunt; you came to
see me one night in London, and wormed out of me my relations with my
unfortunate mother. With all your knowledge of the world, with all your
experience, did you never think I might come to find you out?"

Molly paused for a moment. She held herself erect, her white gown
crushed against the rich, dark curtain, her great eyes searching the
trees in the park below as if she sought there for the soul of her
enemy. She did not know that she pulled hard at the curtain behind her
with both hands; it could not have held out much longer, strong though
it was.

"No; you knew life too well not to know that you might be found out, but
the truth was that you did not care. It was so little a thing to you
that, when you saw that I knew the truth, you could go on just the same,
quite unabashed. You could force yourself on me by playing on your
poverty; you, who had tried to ruin my mother! Well, she is out of your
reach, and perhaps you have shifted your foul suspicions on to me.
Perhaps it is from me you hope to get the fortune that you mean to
share. You drive me mad! I say things I don't want to say; you force me
to lower myself, but----" She turned now and faced Edmund, who watched
her, himself absolutely motionless. "Now that you have forced yourself
on me again you shall answer me. Do you believe that I, Molly Dexter,
have concealed or abetted in concealing or destroying any will in favour
of Lady Rose Bright?"

There is a moment when passion is astonishingly inventive. Molly had had
no intention of saying anything of the kind, but the heat of passion had
produced a stroke of policy that no colder moment could have produced.
She was suddenly dumb with astonishment at her own words, and she dimly
recognised that this represented a distinct crisis in her own mind.
Passion and excitement had dissipated the last mists of self-deception.

Edmund waited till there could be no faint suspicion of his trying to
interrupt her, and then said from his heart, in a voice she had never
heard from him before:

"No, I swear to you I don't."

Molly had been deeply flushed. At these words she turned very white, and
her hands let go the curtains. She put them out before her and seemed to
grope her way to a stiff, high-backed chair near to her. She sat down in
it and clasped her hands to her forehead.

"Now you must hear me," said Edmund. "I don't say I am blameless: in
part of this I have done wrong, but not as wrong as you think. I must
tell you my story; although perhaps it may seem blacker as I tell it,
even to myself."

He sat down and bent forward a little.

"When I was young I fell in love with my cousin. She has been and always
will be the one woman in the world to me. She did not, does not, never
will, return my feelings. She married, and before very long I was
convinced she was not happy, although she only half realised it herself.
She is capable of stifling her powers of perception. Then David Bright
died and left her in poverty. His will was a scandal, and the horror did
not only smirch his good name, it reached to hers. I can't and won't try
to tell you what I suffered, or how I determined to fight this hideous
wrong. I went to Florence; I tried to see Madame Danterre; I engaged the
detective--all before I knew of your existence. I came back to London
and discovered that your father, John Dexter, had divorced his wife on
account of David Bright. Still I did not know anything of you. Then,
through Lady Dawning I found you out, and I made friends with Mrs.
Delaport Green in order to see more of you. Was there anything wrong in
that? You did not know your mother; you did not, presumably, care very
deeply about her. It was doubtful if you knew of her existence. Soon the
detective in Florence faded in my mind; he discovered nothing, but I
retained him in case of any change. Was I obliged, because I liked you,
to give up the cause? I never found out, I never tried to find out from
you anything that bore on the case. You must remember that I stopped you
once in the wood at Groombridge when you wanted to tell me more about
yourself, and that I again warned you when you wished to tell me about
your mother's letter to you. As to Edgar Tonmore, I knew that he was
penniless, and I thought it quite possible that you might, in the end,
be penniless too. It was for your own sake I wished you to make a richer
marriage. For I believed--I still believe--that David Bright made a last
will when going out to Africa; I believed, and still believe, that by an
accident that will was not sent to Lady Rose. I thought then that your
mother had, in some way, become possessed of the will, and I thought it
more than likely that, when dying, she would make reparation by leaving
the money where it ought to be. I meant--may I say so?--to prove myself
your friend, then, if you should allow it. I know I kept in touch with
you partly from curiosity as well as from natural attraction. But, if I
acted for the sake of another, I acted for you also. Would it have been
better or worse for you to have been friends with us if my suspicions of
your mother's conduct had proved true? But believe me, Miss Dexter, I
never for one moment could have thought of you with any taint of
suspicion. It is horrible to me to have it suggested."

He rose as he finished speaking, and came nearer to her.

"That you, with your youth and your innocence and your candour!--child,
the very idea is impossible. I have known men and women too well to fall
into such an absurdity. Send me away, if you like; I won't intrude my
friendship upon you, but look up now and let me see that you do not
think this gross thing of me."

Molly raised a white face and looked into his--looked into eyes that had
not at all times and in all places been sincere, but were sincere now. A
great rush of warm feeling came over her; a great sore seemed healed,
and then she looked at him with hungry entreaty, as if a soul, shorn of
all beauty, hungry, ragged, filthy, were asking help from another. But
the moment of danger, the moment of salvation passed away.

We confess our sins to God because He knows them already, and we ask for
forgiveness where we know we shall be forgiven.

Indeed, Molly knew almost at once that she had gained another motive for
silence. She could not risk the loss of Edmund's good thought of her;
she cared for him too much--he had defended himself too well.

Edmund saw that she could not speak. He left her, let himself out of the
house, and, forgetful of the fact that he could not possibly afford a
hansom, jumped into one and drove to Mr. Murray's house.

He had recovered his usual calmness by the time he had to speak.

"I have your note," he said, "and I came in consequence."

"Yes," said the lawyer; "I wanted to tell you----"

"Wait a moment. Do you think you need tell me? You see, my share in the
thing really came to an end when I could not finance it. I have several
reasons now why I should like to let it alone."

Murray was astonished. It was Sir Edmund who had started the whole
thing, whose wild guess at the outset was becoming more and more likely
to be proved true. It was he who had spent a quantity of money over the
investigation for years past. The man of business knew how to provoke
speech by silence, and so he remained silent.

"Does further action depend in any way on me?" asked Edmund at last,
without, however, offering the explanation the other wanted.

"No," said Murray quite civilly, but his manner was dry. "I don't see
that it does. I think we can get on for the present."

As he spoke the door opened, and the parlourmaid showed in a tall,
handsome woman in a nurse's dress.

Murray looked from her to Sir Edmund.

"I had wanted you to hear what Nurse Edith had to tell us, but after
what you have said----"

"Yes," said Edmund; "I will leave you and I will write to you
to-night."

CHAPTER XXVIII

DINNER AT TWO SHILLINGS

Edmund Grosse was in great moral and great physical discomfort that
evening. He dined, actually for the first time, in just such an Italian
cafe as he had described to Molly. After climbing up a very narrow,
dirty staircase, the hot air heavy with smells, he had emerged into a
small back and front room holding some half-dozen tables, at each of
which four people could be seated. Through the open windows the noises
of the street below came into collision with the clatter of plates and
knives and forks. The heat was intense, the cloths were not clean,
neither were the hands of the two waiters who rushed about with a
certain litheness and facility of motion unlike any Englishman.

Edmund sat down wearily at a table as near the window as possible, and
at which several people had been dining, perhaps well, but certainly not
tidily.

"Hunger alone," he thought, "could make this possible," when, looking
up, he caught the face of a young man at a further table, full of
enjoyment, ordering "spargetty" and half a bottle of "grayves," with a
cockney twang, and an unutterable air of latter-day culture.

"Mutton chops, cheese, and ale fed your forefathers," reflected Grosse.

"What will you have, sir?" in a foreign accent.

"Oh! anything; just what comes for the two shilling dinner--no, not
_hors d'oeuvres_; yes, soup."

Edmund had turned with ill-restrained disgust from the sardines,
tomatoes, and other oily horrors. But there was no denying the qualities
of the soup: the most experienced and cultivated palate and stomach must
be soothed by it, and in a moment of greater cheerfulness Edmund turned
his attention to three young men close to him who were talking French.
Their hands were clean and their collars, but poverty was writ large on
their spare faces and well-brushed clothes. One was olive-complexioned,
one quite fair, but with olive tints in the shadows round the eyes, and
the third grey, old, and purple-cheeked from shaving. They ate little,
but they talked much. The talked of literature and art with fierce
dogmatism, and they seemed frequently on the verge of a quarrel, but the
storm each time sank quite suddenly without the least consciousness of
the danger passed. They looked at the food as critics, and acknowledged
it to be eatable, with the faint air of an exile's sadness.

Edmund wished to think that he was amused by their talk, but the
distraction did not last. His thoughts would have their way, and he was
soon trying to defend his defence of himself to Molly. All he said had
seemed so obviously true as the words poured out, but there had been
fatal reservations. He had spoken as if all suspicions, all proceedings
as to discovering the will were past. He had felt he had no right to
give away secrets that were not his own. But had he not produced a false
impression? What would Molly have thought of him as he passionately
rejected the notion of suspecting her if she had seen the letter from
Murray in his pocket? It was true that he no longer financed any of the
proceedings against her, but they had all been set on foot by him. He
was in the plot that was thickening, and he had won the confidence of
the victim! He had no doubt that Molly was innocent, and he was ashamed
of the pitiful confidence he had read in her eyes when he left her. But
he still believed that her mother had been guilty, and that Molly's
wealth was the result of that guilt. It was true that he wanted to be
her friend, but it was also true that he would rejoice if Rose came into
her own and the gross injustice were righted. But, after all, what
absolute evidence had they got, as yet, as to the contents of this last
will, or what proof even of its existence? He felt almost glad for the
fraction of a moment that Molly might remain the gorgeous mistress of
the old house in Park Lane uninjured by anything he had done against
her. "How absurd," he thought, "how drivelling! The fact is that girl
impressed me enough to-day, to make me see myself from her point of
view, or what would be her point of view if she knew all!"

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