Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

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"Vous pleurez et vous etes roi?" He hardly knew that he had muttered the
words as he so often muttered a quotation to himself. But Rose did not
hear them. She was too preoccupied with her own thoughts and feelings to
notice him closely. Ah! if she had but known before what it would be to
lose him! She was horrified as she felt her self-control failing her,
and an enormous agony entering into possession of all her faculties. She
was so startled, so amazed at this revelation of herself. If she had
felt less, she would have thought more for him. She did not think for a
moment what that silent standing by her side meant for him. She knew at
last the selfishness of passion. She wanted him as she had never wanted
anyone or anything before. She could only think of the craving of her
own heart, the extraordinary trouble that possessed it. Those who have
had a passing acquaintance with love, those who have sown brief passages
of love thoughts over their early youth, can form no notion of what
that first surrender meant to Rose. "Too late!" cried the tyrant love,
the only tyrant that can carry conviction by its mere fiat to the
innermost recesses of a nature. "Too late!--it might have been, but not
now; it is all your own doing; you made him suffer once; you are the
only one to suffer now. You are crying now the easy tears of a child,
but there are years and years before you when the tears will not come,
call for them as you may; they cannot go on coming from a broken heart.
They flow away out of the fissures, and then the dryness and barrenness
of daily misery will not let them come again."

"He never cared as I do," thought Rose; "he does not know what it is!"

She called her persecutor "it"; she shrank from its name even now with
an unutterable embarrassment. When she did turn to Edmund it was more as
if to confide to him what she was suffering from someone else; it was so
habitual to her to turn to him. What was the use? what was the use? How
could she use him against himself? No, no; she must, she must control
herself. She must not tell him; she must let him go quite quietly now;
she must make no appeal to the past; he was too generous--she did not
want his generosity. She put her hands to her forehead and pushed the
hair backwards.

"I'm not well, I think," she said; "the room at the meeting was stuffy.
I--I didn't quite understand what you said--I'm glad."

She sank on to a chair, and then got up again.

"I'm glad you've got what you wanted, but I'm startled--no, I mean I'm
not quite well. I don't think I can talk to-day--I don't
understand--I----"

She stood almost with her back to him then.

He was so amazed at her words that he could not speak at all. This was
not sweetness, kindness, pity; this was something else, something
different; it was almost a shock!

"I am so silly," she said, with a most absurd attempt at a natural
voice, "I think I must----" Her figure swayed a little.

Edmund watched her with utter amazement. All his knowledge of women was
at fault, and that child in the white frock--where was she? Where was
that sense of his soul's history and its failure, its mystic tragedy,
just now? Gone, quite gone, for he knew now that that long tragedy was
ended. But Rose did not know it.

He moved, half consciously, a few feet towards the door.

"Rose," he said, in a very low voice, "if it has come at last, don't
deny it! I have waited patiently, God knows! but I don't want it now
unless it is true. For Heaven's sake do nothing in mere pity!"

"But it has come, Edmund; it has come!" she interrupted him, so quickly
that he had barely time to reach her before she came to him.

And yet it had been many years in coming--so many years that he could
hardly believe it now; could hardly believe that the white hands he had
watched so often trembled with delight as they caressed him; could
hardly believe that the fair face was radiant with joy when he, Edmund,
ventured to kiss her; could hardly believe that it was of her own wish
and will that she leant against him now!

"I ought not to have said it was the stuffy room, ought I?"

It was the sweetest, youngest laugh she had ever given. Then she looked
up at the ceiling where the sun flickered a little.

"Edmund, it is better than if I had known under the mulberry tree. Tell
me you forgive me all I have done wrong. I could not," she gasped a
little, "have loved you then as I do now, because I had known no sorrow
then."

And Edmund told her that she was forgiven. But one sin she confessed
gave him, I fear, unmixed delight; she was so dreadfully afraid that she
had lately been a little jealous!

Strange--very strange and unfathomable--is the heart of man. It did not
even occur to him as the wildest scruple to be at all afraid that he had
been lately a little, ever so little, less occupied with the thought of
her. No shadow of a cloud rested on the great output of a strong man's
deep affection.

CHAPTER XXXIX

"WITHOUT CONDITION OR COMPROMISE"

It was on the same evening that Mark succeeded in seeing Molly. He had
failed the day before, but at the second attempt he succeeded.

It was the first time he had entered Westmoreland House, and he had
never, even in the autumn weeks when Miss Dexter had been most cordial
to him, tried to see her except by her own invitation. Altogether the
position now was as embarrassing as it is possible to conceive. He had
been her confidant as to a crime for which the law sees no kind of
palliative, no possible grounds for mercy. As he greeted her it wanted
little imaginative power to feel the dramatic elements in the picture.
Molly was standing in the middle of the great drawing-room dressed in
something very white and very beautiful. At any other moment he must
have been impressed by the subdued splendour of the room, and the grace
and youth of the dominating figure in the midst. Mark was too absorbed
to-day in the spiritual drama which he must now force to its conclusion
to realise that he had also come to threaten the destruction of Molly's
material world and all the glory thereof. He had, too, so far forgotten
himself, that the mischief Molly had wrought against him had faded into
the background of his consciousness. His absorbing anxiety lay in the
extreme difficulty of his task. It would need an angel from Heaven,
gifted too with great knowledge of human nature, to accomplish what he
meant to attempt. First he would throw everything into the desperate
endeavour to make her give up the will simply and entirely from the
highest motives. But what possibility was there of success? Why should
he hope that, just because he called and asked her for it, she would
give up all that for which she had sold her soul? He could not feel that
he was a prophet sent by God from whose lips would fall such inspired
words that the iron frost would thaw and the great depths of her nature
be broken up. In fact, he felt singularly uninspired, and very much
embarrassed. And when he had tried the impossible (he said to himself),
and had given her the last chance of going back on this ugly fraud from
nobler motives than that of fear, and had failed--he must then enter on
the next stage and must merge the priest's office in that of the
ambassador. He must bring home to her that what she clung to was already
lost, and that nothing but shame and disgrace lay before her. He had the
case, as presented by Sir Edmund's letter in all its convicting
simplicity, clearly in his mind--quite as clearly as the facts of
Molly's own confession to himself. It would not be difficult to crush
the criminal, to make her see the hopeless horror of the trial that must
follow unless she consented to a compromise. But it was the completeness
of her defeat that he dreaded the most; it was for that last stage of
his plan that he was gathering unconsciously all his nerve-power
together. He seemed to hear with ominous distinctness her words at their
last meeting: "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 soon as I can."
That had been spoken without any sort of fear of detection, without the
least suspicion that she would have no choice in the matter of giving up
her ill-gotten wealth. What he dreaded unutterably was the despair that
must overpower her as he developed the long chain of evidence against
her. As he came into her presence, overwhelmed with these thoughts, he
was also anxiously recalling two mental notes. He must make her clearly
understand that he had not betrayed her by one word or hint to Sir
Edmund Grosse or any living human being; and secondly, he thought it
very important to impress upon her that Sir Edmund and Lady Rose were of
opinion that Larrone had suppressed the will or that Molly had never
opened the box which contained it--were, in fact, of any or every
opinion except that Molly was guilty of crime. For the rest he could, at
this eleventh hour, hardly see anything clearly, and as he shook hands
with Miss Dexter an unutterable longing to escape came over him. Molly's
greeting was haughty--almost rude--but that seemed to him natural and
inevitable. He made some comment on a political event which she did not
pretend to answer, and then as if speech were almost impossible, he
actually murmured that the weather was very hot.

Then he became silent and remained so. For quite a minute neither spoke.

Molly was not naturally silent, naturally restrained. She moved uneasily
about the room; she lit a cigarette, and threw it away again. At last
she stood in front of him.

"What made you come to-day?" she asked.

Her large restless eyes looked full of anger as she spoke.

"I came to-day partly because I am going away very soon, so I thought
that it might be----" He hesitated.

"But where are you going?" Molly asked abruptly.

"I am to take a chaplaincy at Lord Lofton's."

"And your preaching?" cried Molly in astonishment.

"Is not wanted," said Mark.

"And your poor?"

"Can get on without me."

"You are to be buried in the country?" she cried in indignation; "you
are to leave all the people you are helping? But what a horrible shame!
What,"--she suddenly turned away as a thought struck her--"what can be
the reason?"

"It seems," he said very quietly, "that I have been foolish; people are
talking, things are said against me, and things should not be said
against a priest. But I did not come here to talk about myself. I came
here----" He paused.

Molly sat down close to the empty fireplace, and was bending over it,
her very thin figure curiously twisted, and one foot twitching
nervously.

"You are going away," she said suddenly, "and it is my doing. I did not
know I was doing that; it felt as if hitting at you were the only way to
defend myself. Good God! I shall have a lot to answer for!"

She did not turn round; she crouched lower on the low chair and
shuddered.

"And you," she went on in a low voice, "you want to save my soul! I have
always been afraid you would get the best of it, and now I have
destroyed your life's work. Did you know it was I who was talking
against you?"

"I did."

"And that I have said everything I dared to say against you ever since I
told you my secret?"

"Yes; more or less I knew."

"Why didn't you tell your authorities the truth long ago?"

"How could I?"

Molly made no answer. She got up in silence and took a key from her
pocket and moved toward a small bureau between the windows. She unlocked
the lower drawer and took out a packet of papers, and in the middle of
this packet was an envelope in which lay the key of the room upstairs.
Her movements were slow but unhesitating, and when she left the room
Mark had not the slightest idea of what she would do. If he had seen her
face as she slowly mounted the great well staircase he might have
understood.

How simple it all was. She reached the top of the many steps with little
loss of breath; she turned to the right into the dark passage that led
to her own room, passed her own door, and put the key in the lock of the
one next to it. She knew so exactly which box she sought, though she had
never seen it since the day when Dr. Larrone brought it to her. Although
she had actually come in the cab that brought the small boxes from the
flat, she had succeeded in not recognising that one among the number
heaped up together. She knew exactly where it stood now, and how many
things had been piled above the boxes from the flat with seeming
carelessness, but by her orders.

The shutters were closed, but she could have found that box in inky
darkness, and now a ray from between the chinks fell upon it. She did
not think now of how often she had told herself that she did not know
what the box was like. Now it seemed to have been the only box she had
ever known in her life. The cases on the top of it were heavy, and Molly
had to strain herself to move them, but she was very strong, and every
reserve of muscular power was called out unconsciously to meet her need.
She did not know that her hands were covered with dust, and that blood
was breaking through a scratch over the right thumb made by a jagged
nail.

When she came back into the drawing-room, Father Molyneux was sitting
with his back towards her, looking with unseeing eyes into the trees of
the park. She moved towards him and held out a long envelope.

"Take it away," she said, "If I have ruined your life, you have ruined
mine."

She moved with uncertain steps to the chimney-piece, leant upon it, and,
turning round, looked wildly at the envelope in his hands.

"Why didn't you come for it before?" she asked him.

Mark could not answer. He was absolutely astonished at what had
happened. He could hardly believe that he held in his hand a thing of
such momentous importance. He had nerved himself for a great fight, but
he had not known what he should say, how he should act, and
then--amazing fact--a few minutes after he came into the room, and
without his having even asked for it, the will was put into his hands!
Nothing had been said of conditions or compromise; she only asked the
amazing question why he had not come for it _before_!

"You were right," she mused, "right to leave me alone. I wonder, do you
remember the words that have haunted me this summer?--Browning's words
about the guilty man in the duel:

'Let him live his life out,
Life will try his nerves.'

It has tried my nerves unbearably; I could not go on, I have not the
strength. I might have had a glorious time if I had been a little
stronger. As it is, it's not worth while."

It is impossible to convey the heavy dreariness of outlook conveyed by
her voice and manner. There seemed no higher moral quality in it all.

"Half a dozen times I have nearly sent for you. But"--she did not
shudder now, or make the restless movements he had noticed when he first
came in: Molly had regained the stillness which follows after
storms--"as soon as you are gone I shall be longing to have it back
again. Men have done worse things than I have for thirty thousand a
year! It won't be easy to be a pauper; I think it would be easier to
kill myself."

She was silent again, and Mark could not find one word that he was not
afraid to say--one word that might not quench the smoking flax.

"I had to give it to you without waiting to talk of the future, or I
might not have given it at all. But I should be glad if the case could
be so arranged that my mother's name and my own should not be dragged in
the mud. It is only an appeal for mercy--nothing else." Her voice
trembled almost into silence.

"I think that is all safe," said Mark. "I think if you will leave it all
in my hands I can get better conditions for you than you suppose now.
They will be only too glad."

"But I gave it to you without conditions." Her manner for the moment was
that of a child seeking reassurance.

"Thank God! you did," he cried, with an irrepressible burst of sympathy.

"It's not much for a thief to have done, is it? But now I should like to
do it all properly. Tell me; ought I to come away from here to-day, and
give everything I have here to Lady Rose? If I ought, I will!"

"No, certainly not," said Mark. "I have been asked to offer you liberal
conditions if you would agree to a compromise. I said they had come to
quite the wrong person. No, no, don't think I told them. They have fresh
evidence that there was a will, and they believe they know that
important papers were brought to you by Dr. Larrone when your mother
died."

"And you came to frighten me with this?" There was a touch of reproach
in her tone.

"No, I came, hoping you would give me the paper, as you have done,
without knowing this."

Evidently this news impressed Molly deeply, but she did not want to
discuss it. Presently she said:

"I am glad you came in time before I was frightened. How you have wanted
to make me save my soul! You have helped me very much, but I cannot save
my soul."

"But God can," said Mark.

"You see," she went on, "I never know what I am going to do--going to
be--next. Imagine my being a thief! It seems now almost incredible. And
I don't know what may come next."

For a second she looked at him with wild terror in her eyes.

"Think how many years I have before me. How can I hope that I----?"

"You will do great, great good," said Mark, with emotion.

She shook her head.

"David committed a worse sin than yours."

Molly smiled, a little, incredulous, grey smile, for a moment.

"I may be good to-day. I may be full of peace and joy even to-night--but
to-morrow? You told me once that I should only know true joy if I had
been humbled in the dust. I am low enough now, but the comfort has not
come yet, and, even if God comforts me, it won't last. I shall still be
I, and life is so long."

"You must trust Him--you must indeed. He will find a solution. You are
exhausted now with the victory you have gained. Rest now, and then do
the good things you have done before. Trust in the higher side of your
character; God gave it to you. Believe me, He has called you to great
things."

As he spoke she covered her face with her hands, and a deep blush of
shame rose from her neck to her forehead, visible through the thin,
white fingers.

"I suppose He will find a way out. As I can't understand how you have
cared so much to save my soul, I suppose I can understand His love still
less. Must you go? You will pray for me, I know."

She held out her hand with a look of generous appeal to his forgiveness.

"God bless you!" he said, with complete sympathy, and then he went away
to seek an interview with Sir Edmund Grosse.

Molly sank down on a low seat by the window. Then she went slowly
upstairs, dragging her feet a little from fatigue, and took out of the
tin box the packet of very old letters. She burned them one by one, with
a match for each, kneeling in front of the empty fireplace in her
bed-room. They told the story of her mother's attempt to persuade Sir
David of their marriage during his illness in India. It was not a pretty
story--one of deceit and intrigue. It should disappear now.

Then she sat down in a deep chair in the window. She stayed very still,
curled up against the cushion behind her, her eyes fixed on the ground.
She was hardly conscious of thought; she was trying to recall things
Mark had said, murmuring them over to herself. She was trying not to
sink into the depths of humiliation and despair. It was a blind clinging
to a vague hope for better things, with a certain torpor of all her
faculties.

Then gradually things in the vague gloom became definite to her. "No,"
she said to them with entreaty, "not to-night. My life is only just
dead. I am tired by the shock--it was so sudden--only let me rest till
morning, and in the morning I will try to face it."

She had, it seemed, quite settled this point; the present and the future
were to be left; a pause was absolutely necessary. Then followed quickly
the sharp pang of a fresh thought. It was not in her power to make
things pause. She could not make a truce by calling it a truce. If she
did not realise things now and act now herself, others would come upon
the scene. Even to-night Sir Edmund Grosse might know. She shivered.
Perhaps he was being told now. It would be insufferable to endure his
kindness prompted by Rose's generous forgiveness. But ought she to find
anything unbearable? Was she going to revolt at the very outset? She was
not trained in spiritual matters, but it seemed to her that any revolt
would betray a want of reality in her reparation, and in this great
change of feeling she wanted above all things to be real. She tried to
face what must come next. How could she hand over Westmoreland House? It
could not be done as quietly as she had handed that letter to Father
Mark. The house had been bought with the great lump sum Madame Danterre
had accumulated in Florence--much of that money had been put in the bank
before Sir David died. Perhaps if they were ready to come to terms, as
Father Mark had said, an arrangement would be suggested in which Molly
would not be expected to refund what she had spent, and would have the
possession of Westmoreland House and its contents. The sale would
realise enough to save her from actual want, and yet she would not be
receiving a pension from Lady Rose. Her mind got out of gear and flashed
through these thoughts until, unable to check it in any way, she burst
into tears. She felt the self-deception of such plans with physical
pain. What was that money in the bank at Florence but blackmail gathered
in during Sir David's life? "Why cannot I be straight even now?" she
whispered. She was still sitting on the couch with one leg drawn up
under her, gazing intently at the ground. No, the only money she
possessed was L2000 invested at 31/2 per cent. "L70 a year--that is
less than I have given Carey, or the cook, or the butler."

The fact was that while her heart and soul had gone forward in dumb pain
in utter darkness with the single aim of undoing the sin done, the mind
still lagged and reasoned. This is a peculiar agony, and Molly had to
drink of that agony.

Gradually and mercilessly her reason told her that an arrangement with
Lady Rose, the appearance of having the right of possession in
Westmoreland House, the readiness of all concerned to bury the story,
and the possession of a fair income, would make it possible to live in
her own class quietly but, if tactfully, with a good repute. Then the
thought of any kind of compromise became intolerable to her, and she
realised that it was a fancy picture, not a real temptation.

To pretend that Westmoreland House was her own she could not do, but
what was the alternative? Dragging poverty and shame, and with no
opportunity for hiding what had passed, for living it down. Even if she
did the impossible to her pride and consented to receive a good
allowance from Lady Rose, it would not be at all the same in the world's
view as the dignified income that could be raised from Westmoreland
House, and from her mother's jewels and furniture. Her fingers
unconsciously touched the pearls round her neck. Surely she need not
speculate as to how her mother obtained the magnificent jewels which she
had worn up to the end? Then more light came--hard and cold, but clear.
If Molly had been innocent these things might have been so, but Molly
had committed a fraud on a great scale. It would be by the mercy of the
injured that she would be spared the rigours of the law. It was by the
supreme mercy of God that she had had the chance of making the sacrifice
before it was forced from her. And could she shrink from mere ordinary
poverty, from a life such as the vast majority of men and women are
living on this earth? She did not really shrink in her will. It was only
a mechanical movement of thought from one point to another. Was it much
punishment for what she had done to be very poor? Would it not be better
to be unclassed--to live among people who help each other much because
they have little to give? Would it not be the way to do what Father Mark
had said she should try to do--those good things she had done before?
She could nurse, she could watch, she was able to do with little sleep.
She would be very humble with the sick and suffering now. And it would
not surely be wrong to go and find such a life far away from where she
had sinned? She began to wonder if she need stay and live through all
the complications of the coming days. Must it be the right thing to stay
because it was the most unbearable? She thought not. There are times
when recklessness is the only safety. If she did not burn her ships now
she could not tell what temptations might come. But she would not let it
be among her motives that thus she would thereby escape unbearable pity
from Lady Rose and the far sterner magnanimity of Edmund Grosse. She
would act simply; she would ask Rose a favour; she would ask her to
provide for Miss Carew.

Half consciously again her hands went to her throat. She unclasped the
pearl necklace that Edmund had seen on Madame Danterre's withered neck
in the garden at Florence. She slipped off four large rings, and then
gathered up a few jewels that lay about. "One ought not to leave
valuables about," she thought, and she did not know that she added
"after a death."

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