Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

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He refused coffee--the cab fare had prevented that. He quite emptied his
pocket, gave the waiter sixpence, and, rising, strolled across the floor
of the small room exactly the same man to the outward eye he had been
for years past. But before he reached the door he caught the glance of a
little, round, elderly woman at a table close to him, and he stopped.
She had a faded, showy bonnet, and she carried her worn clothes with an
air. He recognised the companion and friend of a famous prima donna
whom he had not seen for years.

"You've forgotten me, but I've not forgotten you."

It was a cherry, Irish voice.

"I get coffee and a roll, and you have the _diner a prix fixe_. And you
have given me a champagne supper in your day! Well! and how are you?"

"Nicely, thank you, Miss O'Meara; you see I have not forgotten!" Then in
a lower voice, "But I thought the Signora left you money?"

"She did, bless her; but it was here one day and gone the next!
Good-night, and good luck to you," she laughed.

The little duenna of a dead genius evidently did not want him to stay,
and he felt his way down the pitch dark stairs, and emerged on the
street. A very small, brown hand was held out for a penny, and for the
first time in his life he refused a street beggar with real regret.

"'Here one moment, and gone the next,'" he muttered, looking down the
brilliantly lighted street to where the motors, carriages, and cabs
crowded round the doors of a great theatre. "It's the history of the
whole show in a nutshell."

If Sir Edmund was troubled at the thought that Molly believed in him,
Molly was infinitely more troubled at his belief in her.

After he left her she went to her room. She had to dine out and she must
get some rest first. As in most of the late eighteenth century houses in
London, the bedrooms had been sacrificed to the rooms below. But Molly
had the one very large room that looked over the park. She threw
herself down on a wide sofa close to the silk-curtained bed. The sun
glinted still on the silver backs of the brushes and teased her eyes,
and she got up and drew down the blinds. The dressing-table was large
and its glass top was covered with a great weight of old gilt bottles
and boxes.

Miss Carew had once been amused by the comment of a young manicurist
who, after expressing enthusiastic admiration of the table, had
concluded with the words:

"But what I often say to myself is that it's only so much more to leave
in the end."

But Molly had not laughed when the words were repeated; they gave
expression to a feeling with which she sometimes looked at many things
besides her dressing-table--they might all prove only so much more to
leave in the end!

She sank exhausted again onto the sofa. Why had he come? Why could he
not leave her alone? Did she want his friendship, his pity, his
confidence? Why look at her so kindly when he must know how he hurt her?
She had felt such joy when she saw that he believed in her. The idea
that she was still innocent and unblemished in his eyes was just for the
moment an unutterable relief. An unutterable relief, too, it had felt at
the moment, to be able to accept his defence of himself. That he was
still lovable, and that he had no dark thoughts of her, had been such
joy, but only a passing joy. Had he not told her in horribly plain
speech that he loved Lady Rose, and would love her to the end? All this,
which was so vital to Molly, was but an episode in a friendship that was
a detail in his life!

But now, alone, trying to see clearly through the confusion, how
unbearable it had been to hear him say, "That you with your youth and
your innocence and your candour...." He had thought it too horrible to
suspect her, and by that confidence he made her load of guilt almost
unendurable.

She could not go on like this, could not live like this. The silence was
far more unbearable now that a human voice had broken into it, a voice
she loved repudiating with indignant scorn the possibility of suspecting
her! She must go somewhere, she must speak to some one. But at this
moment it was also evident that she must dress for dinner.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE RELIEF OF SPEECH

There is quite commonly a peculiar glow of sunshine just before a storm,
a brightness so obviously unreliable that we are torn between enjoyment
and anxiety. I have known no greater revelation of Nature's glories,
even in a sunset hour, than in one of these moments of glow before the
darkness of storm. And in a man's life there is sometimes an episode so
bright, so full of promise, that we feel its perfection to be the
measure of its instability.

Such a moment had come to Mark Molyneux. The time of depression and
trial, the time when a vague sense of danger and a vague sense of
aspiration had made him turn his eyes towards the cloister, had ended in
his taking his work more and more earnestly and becoming surprisingly
successful in his dealings with both rich and poor.

It seemed during the past winter that Mark would carry all before him;
he had come into close contact with the poor, and in the circle in which
his personal influence could be felt there was a real movement of
religious earnestness and moral reform. There was a noticeable glow of
zeal in the other curates and in the parish workers, who, with one or
two exceptions, were enthusiastic in their devotion to him personally
and to his notions of work. Even after Easter several of the
recently-cured drunkards were persevering, and other notoriously bad
characters seemed determined to show that the first shoots of their
awakened moral life were not merely what gardeners call "flowering
shoots," but steady growths giving promise of sound wood.

Mark's sermons were becoming more and more the rage, and people were
heard to say that he was the only Catholic preacher in London, excepting
perhaps one or two Jesuit Fathers; while he had also the tribute of
attention from the press, which he particularly disliked.

Meanwhile, the old rector was still gruff and still proffered snubs
which were gratefully received, for Mark was genuinely anxious not to be
misled by the atmosphere of praise and affection in which he was living.

Nothing warned him of impending danger (to use a phrase of old-fashioned
romance) when he was told that Miss Dexter was asking to see him. He had
not seen her for a long time, and was quite glad that she should come.

He looked young, eager, and happy as he came quickly into the parlour,
but after a few minutes the simple warmth of his manner changed into a
more negative politeness. There was something so gorgeous in Molly's
appearance, and so very strange in her face, that even a man who had
seen less of the world than is obtained in a year on the mission in
London, could not fail to be somewhat puzzled.

Molly hardly spoke for some moments, and silence was apparently
inevitable. Then she burst out, without preparation, in a wild,
incoherent way, with her whole life's story. The story of a child
deserted by her mother, neglected by her father, taken from the ayah who
was the only person who had ever loved her, and sent like a parcel to
the care of a hard and selfish aunt who was ashamed of her. It might
have been horribly pathetic only that it was impossible that so much
egotism and bitterness should not choke the sympathy of the listener.
But as the story came to Molly's twenty-first year, the strange, bitter
self-defence (she had not yet explained why she should defend herself at
all to Father Molyneux), all the unpleasing moral side of the story
became merged in the sense of its dramatic qualities.

Molly had never told it to anyone before now, and, indeed, she had not
realised several features of the case until quite lately. She told well
the disillusion as to her mother, her own single-handed fight with life,
the double sense of shame as to her mother's past, and her own ambiguous
position. She told him how she felt at first meeting Rose Bright, of her
own sense of sailing under false colours, and she actually explained, in
her strange pleading for a favourable judgment, how everything that
happened had naturally hardened her heart and made her feel as if she
had been born an outcast. Lastly, she told how Sir Edmund Grosse had
pursued her mother with detectives, and, as she had for a time believed,
had pursued herself with the hypocritical appearance of friendship. She
had been wrong, it seemed now, in judging him so harshly, but it had
hurt terribly at the time.

Through all this Mark was struggling against the repulsion that
threatened to drown the sympathy he wanted to give her. But he had,
naturally, not the faintest suspicion as to what was coming or that
Molly was confiding in him a story of her own wrong-doing. He was
absolutely confounded when she went on, still in the tone of passionate
self-defence, to tell how she had found the will leaving the whole of
Sir David's fortune to Lady Rose. He simply stared at Molly when she
said:

"Who could suppose for a single moment that I should be obliged, on
account of a scrap of paper which was evidently sent to my mother for
her to dispose of as she liked, to become a pauper and to give a fortune
to Lady Rose Bright?"

But although he was too astounded for speech, and his face showed
strange, stern lines, it was now that there awoke in his heart the
passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most
pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the
woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome
temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to
save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it
entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into
crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen for his own portion.

"It's a hard, hard case," he murmured, to Molly's surprise.

She had been so occupied in her own outpouring that she had hardly
thought of him at first, except as a human outlet for her story made
safe by the fact that he was a priest. But when he had betrayed his
silent but most eloquent amazement, she had suddenly realised what the
effect of her confidences might be on such a man, and half expected
anathemas to thunder over her head.

Then he tried to find out whether there was any kind of hope that the
will had, in fact, been sent to her mother to be at her disposal. But
suddenly Molly, who had herself suggested this idea, rent it to pieces
and brought out the whole case against her mother (and, consequently,
against herself) with a fierce logic of attack.

This was more like the Molly whom he had known before, and Mark felt the
atmosphere a little clearer. Having left not the faintest shadow of a
defence for her own action, she suddenly became silent. After some
moments she leant forward.

"Do you know," she said, in a tone so low that he only just caught the
words, "I see now what must have happened. It is strange that I never
thought of it before. I see it now quite clearly. Of course the will and
the letter were wrongly addressed, and probably some letter to my mother
was sent to Lady Rose."

"That does not follow," said Father Molyneux.

"But it's not unlikely," argued Molly. "It is more probable that the two
letters should be put into the wrong envelopes than that one should be
addressed to the wrong person. It's a mistake that is made every day,
only the results are usually of less consequence. It must have been
curious reading for my mother--that letter about herself to Lady Rose
Bright."

"It is so difficult," said Mark, feeling his way cautiously, "to be sure
of not acting on fancied facts when there are so few to go upon. Do you
suppose that the detective in Florence had any definite plan of action
given to him by his employer? For just supposing that your guess is
right, they may have got some clue to what happened in the letter that
was sent by mistake to Lady Rose. Have you no notion at all whether
they may not now have got some evidence to prove that there was another
will?"

Molly shook her head.

"Do you think," she said, "they would have been quiet all this time if
there had been any real evidence at all? It is three years since Sir
David died, and six months since my mother died."

She did not notice how Mark started at this information. Had Miss
Dexter, then, been in possession of this letter to Lady Rose and the
last will for six months?

"You were not sent these papers at once?" he ventured to ask.

"Yes; Dr. Larrone, who attended my mother, brought them to me. He left
Florence two hours after she died."

Another silence followed.

"It seems to me that a great deal might be done by a private
arrangement. Probably their case is not strong enough, or likely to be
strong enough, for them to push it through. It should be arranged that
you should receive the L1000 a year that Sir David intended to give your
mother."

Molly laughed scornfully.

"I'd rather beg my bread than be their pensioner. No, no; you entirely
mistake the situation. I shall have no dealings with them at all--no
nonsense about arbitration or private arrangements. I won't give them
any opportunity of feeling generous. It must"--she spoke very slowly and
looked at him fiercely--"with me it must be all or nothing, and"--she
got up suddenly and began smoothing her gloves over her wrists--"and as
I don't choose to starve it must be all. But if I can't go through with
it (which is quite possible) I shall throw up the sponge and get out of
this world as quickly as possible."

"If you have made up your mind," said Mark sternly, "to defy God, in
Whom I know that you believe, to defy the laws of man, whose punishment
_may_ come, whereas His punishment must come, why have you told me all
this?"

"I had to tell some one; I was suffocating. You don't know"--she stood
looking out of the window a strange expression of hunger and loneliness
succeeding the fierceness of a few moments before--"you don't know what
it is to have in your own mind a long, long story about yourself that
has never been told. To have been lonely and hardly treated and deceived
and spurned, and never to have put your own case to any one human being!
To have cried from childhood till twenty-two, knowing that nobody really
cared! There comes a time when you would rather say the worst of
yourself than keep silence. To accuse yourself is the natural thing;
silence is the unnatural thing."

"Good God!" said Mark, rising, "don't stop there. If you must accuse
yourself, pass judgment also. Class yourself where you have chosen with
your eyes open to stand. Would you allow any amount of provocation and
unhappiness to excuse a systematic fraud? Do you think that the thief
brought up to sin has less or more excuse than you have? Are you the
only person who has known a lonely childhood? Can you tell me here in
this room that God never showed you what love really is? He has never
left you alone, and you wish in vain now that He would leave you alone.
For your present life is so unbearable that you feel that you may
choose death rather than go on with it."

"I shall pay heavily for the relief of speech if I am to have a sermon
preached all to myself," said Molly insolently. "I was speaking of the
need of human love; I was speaking of all I had suffered, and it is easy
for you to retort upon me that I might have had Divine Love only that I
chose to reject it. Tell me, were you brought up without a mother's
love?"

"No; I had--I have a mother who loves me almost too much."

"Have you known real loneliness?"

"I believe every man and woman has known that the soul is alone."

Molly shook her head.

"That is a mood; mine was a permanent state. Have you ever known what it
is to see God's will on one side, and all possibilities of human
happiness, glory, success, and pleasure, opposed to it?"

The young man blushed deeply.

"Yes, I have."

Molly was checked.

"I forgot," she answered; "but still you don't understand. You were an
intimate friend of God when He asked you for the sacrifice, whereas I--I
had only an inkling, a suspicion of that Love. Besides, you were not
asked to give all your possessions to your enemies! No; too much has
been asked of me."

"Can too much be asked where all has been given?" asked Father Molyneux.

"That is an old point for a sermon," said Molly wearily. "You don't
understand; you are of no use to me. Good-bye! I don't think I shall
come again."

CHAPTER XXX

THE BIRTH OF A SLANDER

After that visit to Father Molyneux the devil seems to have entered into
Molly. It was a devil of fear and, consequently, of cruelty. What she
did to harm him was at first unpremeditated, and it must be allowed that
she had not at the moment the means of knowing how fearful a harm such
words as hers could do. She said them too when terror had driven her to
any distraction, and when wine had further excited her imagination.
Still it would not be surprising to find that many who might have
forgiven her for a long, protracted fraud, would blot her out of their
own private book of life for the mean cruelty of one sentence.

Not many hours had passed after the visit before Molly was furious with
herself for her consummate folly in giving herself away to the young
priest, who might even think it a duty to reveal what she said.

She had once told Mark that she might soon come to hate him, as hatred
came most easily to her. There was now quite cause enough for this
hatred to come into being. Molly had two chief reasons for it. First,
she was in his power to a dangerous extent and he might ruin her if he
chose; secondly, she was afraid of his influence--chiefly of the
influence of his prayers--and she dreaded still more that he should
persuade her to ruin herself.

One evening Molly had been with Mrs. Delaport Green and two young men to
a play. It was a play that represented a kind of female "Raffles"--a
thief in the highest ranks of society, and the lady Raffles had black
hair. The lady stole diamonds, and fascinated detectives, and even
beguiled the ruffianly burglar who had wanted the diamonds for himself.
It was a far-fetched comparison indeed, but it worried and excited Molly
to the last degree. They went back to supper at Miss Dexter's house, and
there one more lady and another man joined them. They sat at a gorgeous
little supper at a round table in the small dining-room, Mrs. Delaport
Green opposite Molly, and Lady Sophia Snaggs, a spirited, cheery
Irishwoman, separated from the hostess by Billy, with whom the latter
had always, in the past weeks, been ready to discuss the poverty and the
failings of Sir Edmund Grosse. Of the other two men, one was elderly,
bald, greedy, fat and witty, and the other was a soldier, spare, red and
rather silent but extremely popular for some happy combination of
qualities and excellent manners. It would seem hardly worth while to say
even this little about them, only that it proved of some importance that
the few people who heard Molly's words that night, and certainly
repeated them afterwards, had unfortunately rather different and rather
wide opportunities of making them known.

The Florentine looking-glasses that once belonged to Sir Edmund Grosse,
with their wondrous wreaths of painted flowers, looked down from three
sides of the room and reflected the pretty women and their gowns, the
old silver, the rare glass, and the flowers. They were probably
refreshed by the exquisite taste of the little banquet that might recall
the first reflection of their youth. Morally there was a rift within the
lute among the guests, for Molly betrayed that Adela had got on her
nerves. Lady Sophia Snaggs poured easy conversation on the troubled
waters, but at last the catastrophe could not be averted.

At a moment when the others were silent Adela was talking.

"Yes; I went to hear him preach, and it is so beautiful, you know.
Crowds; the church was packed, and many people cried. You _should_ go.
And then one feels how real it is for him to preach against the world,
because he gave up so much."

Molly drained her glass of champagne and leant across.

"Whom are you talking about?"

"Father Molyneux."

"I thought so."

"Have you heard him preach?" asked Lady Sophy.

"I used to, but I never go now." She again leant forward and spoke this
time with unconcealed irritation. "Adela, I don't go now because I know
too much about him."

There was immediate sensation.

Molly slowly lit a cigarette. Even then she did not know what she was
going to say, but she had determined on the spur of the moment, and
chiefly from sheer terror, to put Mark out of court if she possibly
could.

"He is a humbug," she proclaimed in her low, incisive tone.

"Oh! come now," said Billy. "A man who gave up
Groombridge--extraordinary silly thing to do, but he is not a humbug!"

Molly turned on him.

"Yes, he is. He knows he made a great mistake and he would undo it if he
could."

"Molly, it can't be true!" cried Adela almost tearfully. "If you had
only heard him preach last Sunday you couldn't say such hasty, unkind,
horrid things!"

"It is true," said Molly.

"Our hostess is pleased to be mysterious," said the fat man, and "you
know," turning to Mrs. Delaport Green, "it's very likely that he is
sorry he made such a sacrifice, but I don't think that prevents its
having been a noble action at the time."

"Or makes him a humbug now," said the soldier. "I believe he is an
uncommonly nice fellow."

"Oh! she means something else," said Lady Sophia, looking at Molly with
curiosity. "What is it you have against him?"

Molly felt the table to be against her, and it added to her nervous
irritability. She was not in any sense drunk, and the drugs she took
were in safe doses at present; yet she was to a certain degree
influenced both by the champagne she had just taken, and the injection
she had given herself when she came in from the theatre.

"You will none of you repeat what I am going to say?"

"I probably shall," said the big guest, "unless it is excessively
interesting; otherwise I never remember what is a secret and what
isn't."

But Molly did not heed him.

"Well," she said, "it is a fact that Father Molyneux would give up the
Roman Church to-morrow if a very intimate friend of mine, who could
give him as much wealth as he has lost, would agree to marry him after
he ceased to be a priest!"

"Oh! how dreadfully disappointing!" cried Adela.

"Why shouldn't he?" said Billy.

"It seems a come-down," said the fat man; and the soldier said nothing.

"Stuff and nonsense," said Lady Sophia firmly. "Somebody has been
humbugging you, Molly."

But being a lady who liked peace better than warfare, she now went on to
say that she had had no notion how late it was until this moment, and
that she really must be off. Her farewell was quite friendly, but
Molly's was cold.

The departure of Lady Sophia made a welcome break, and, in spite of the
hostess being silent and out of temper, the men managed to divert the
conversation into less serious topics. But they were not likely to
forget what Molly had impressed upon their minds by the strange
vehemence with which she had emphasised her accusations.

"She meant herself, I suppose?" asked Billy, when leaving the house with
his stout fellow guest. "Do you believe it?"

"It was very curious, very curious indeed. Do you know I rather doubt if
she wholly and entirely believed it herself."

Billy was puzzled for a moment, thinking that some difficult mental
problem had been offered for his digestion.

"Oh, I see," he said, as he opened his own door with his latch-key. "He
only meant that she was telling a lie; I suspect he is right too."

CHAPTER XXXI

THE NURSING OF A SLANDER

Meanwhile, in shadowy corners of Westmoreland House, Miss Carew lived a
monotonous but anxious life. For days together she hardly saw Molly, and
then perhaps she would be called into the big bed-room for a long talk,
or rather, to listen to a long monologue in which Molly gave vent to
views and feelings on men and things.

Molly's cynicism was increasing constantly, and she now hardly ever
allowed that anybody did anything for a good motive. She had moods in
which she poured scandal into Miss Carew's half excited and curious
mind, piling on her account of the wickedness and the baseness of the
people she knew intimately, of the sharks who pursued her money, and,
most of all, she showered her scorn on the men who wanted to marry her.

Listening to her Miss Carew almost believed that all the men Molly met
were _divorces_, or notoriously lived bad lives, and hardly veiled their
intention to continue to do the same after obtaining her hand and her
money.

Molly would lie on a sofa, in a gorgeous kind of _deshabille_ which cost
almost as much as Miss Carew spent on her clothes in the whole year, and
apparently take delight in scaring her by these hideous revelations.
She was so strange in her wild kind of eloquence, and it was so
impossible to believe all she said, that the doubt more than once
occurred to Miss Carew whether it might be a case of the use of drugs.
The extraordinary personal indulgence of luxury was unlike anything the
older woman had ever come across. Then there was no system, nothing
business-like about Molly as there often is in women of the modern
world. Miss Carew dimly suspected that any society of human beings
expects some self-discipline, and some sacrifice to ordinary rules. As
it was she wondered how long Molly's neglect of small duties and her
frequent insolence would be condoned.

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