Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

M >> Mrs. Wilfrid Ward >> Great Possessions

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If Miss Carew had been in the room she would probably not have
understood that anything special was going on. Molly moved quietly
about, collecting together on a little table by the cupboard, rings,
brooches, buckles, watches--anything of much value. She sought and found
the key of the little safe in the wardrobe and put away these objects
with the large jewel cases already inside it. She also put with them her
cheque book and her banker's book. A very small cheque book on a
different bank where the interest of the L2000 had not been drawn on for
six months, she put down on her writing table. Then she looked round the
room. Was there nothing there really her own, and that she cared to keep
either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had
loved? An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round
and could think of nothing. Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that
she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged
to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money. There was not so much
as a letter which she cared ever to see again. She had burnt Edmund's
few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.

She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire. "I have
everything new," she wailed, "nothing that I ever had before--not a
photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter. I don't feel that I am
the same person." The words came back now. "Not the same person," and
suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.

"Alone to land upon that shore
With not one thing that we have known before."

Oh, the immensity of such a mercy! That hymn had made her shiver as a
child; how different it seemed now! Molly knelt down by the couch, and
her shoulders trembled as a tempest of feeling came over her. Criminals
hardened by long lives of fraud have been known to be happier after
being found out--simply because the strain was over. They had destroyed
their moral sense. Molly's conscience was alive, though torn, bleeding,
and debased. She could not be happy as they were, but yet there was the
lifting of the weight as of a great mountain rolled away. She was afraid
of the immense sense of relief that now seemed coming upon her. Could
she really become free of the horrible Molly of the last months--this
noxious, vile, lying, thieving woman? What an awful strain that woman
had lived in! She had told Mark that what frightened her was the thought
that she would still be herself. She longed now to cut away everything
that had belonged to her. Might she not by God's grace, in poverty and
hard work, with everything around her quite different from the past,
might she not quite do to death the Molly who had lived in Westmoreland
House? The cry was more passionate than spiritual perhaps, but the
longing had its power to help. She rose and again moved quietly about
the room of the dead, bad woman, which must be left in order for the new
owners. She put some things together--what was necessary for a night or
two--and felt almost glad that she had a comb and brush she had not yet
used. There was a bag with cheap fittings Mrs. Carteret had given her as
a girl, which would hold all she needed. And then she remembered that
she had something she would like to take away; it was a nurse's apron,
and in its pocket a nurse's case of small instruments. They were what
she used when nursing with the district nurse in the village at home.
Then she sat down and wrote a cheque and a note, and proceeded to take
them downstairs. The cheque was for L30 out of the little Dexter cheque
book, and the note was an abrupt little line to tell a friend that she
could not dine out that night. She "did not feel up to it" was the only
excuse given, and a furious hostess declared that Miss Dexter had become
perfectly insufferable. She seemed to think that she could do exactly as
she chose because she was absurdly rich.

The butler was able to give Molly L30 in notes and cash, and it was his
opinion that she wanted the money for playing cards that night. Molly
crept upstairs again with a foreign Bradshaw in her hand. She looked out
the train for the night boat to Dieppe. It left Charing Cross at 9.45.
She had chosen Dieppe for the first stage of her journey--of which she
knew not the further direction--for two reasons. The first was because
she knew that she ought to stay within reach if it were necessary for
her to do business with her own or Lady Rose's solicitors. She was
determined not to give any trouble she could avoid giving, in the
business of handing over that which had never belonged to her. At this
time of year the journey to Dieppe would be no difficulty, and she
wanted to go there rather than to Boulogne or any other French port,
because she had the address of a very cheap and clean _pension_ in which
Miss Carew had passed some weeks before coming to live with Molly in
London. From that _pension_ Molly could write the letters she felt
physically incapable of writing to-night. The only note she determined
to write at once was to Carey, asking her to remain at Westmoreland
House and to tell the servants that Miss Dexter had gone abroad. She
told her that she had gone to the _pension_ at Dieppe, but earnestly
insisted that she should not follow her. She begged her to do nothing
before getting a letter that she would write to her at once on arriving
at Dieppe. She also asked her to keep the key of the safe which she
enclosed in her letter. Molly sealed the letter, and then felt some
hesitation as to when and how to give it to Miss Carew. She finally
decided to send it by a messenger boy from the station when it would be
too late for Miss Carew to follow her, and when it would still be in
time to prevent any astonishment at her not returning home that night.

Miss Carew, thinking that Molly had gone out to dinner, came into her
bed-room to look for a book. The night was hot and oppressive, but no
one had raised the blinds since the sun had set, and the room was so
dark that she did not at once see Molly. She started nervously, half
expecting one of Molly's impatient and rude exclamations on being
disturbed, and, with an apology, was going away when Molly said gently:

"Stay a minute, Carey; I'm not going to dine out to-night."

"But there is no dinner ordered, and I have just had supper. I am going
out this evening to see a friend."

"Never mind," Molly interrupted, "I can't eat anything. I am going out
for a drive in a hansom in the cool. Would you mind saying that I shall
not want the motor?"

"My dear! are you not well?"

"Not very." And suddenly Miss Carew began to read the great change in
her face. "It has none of it been very good for me, Carey; you have been
quite right. This house and all was a mistake. You have never said it,
but I have seen it in your eyes. And it has not even been in quite good
taste for me to make such a splash--you thought that too. I'm going to
stop it all now, dear, and probably the house will be sold; it's been an
unblest sort of thing."

Miss Carew stared. The tone was so different from any she had ever heard
in Molly's voice; it was very gentle, but exhausted, as if she had been
through an acute crisis in an illness.

"Carey dear, you have always been so kind to me, and I have been very
unkind to you. You will have to know things that will make you hate and
despise me to-morrow. But would you mind giving me one kiss to-night?"

Miss Carew was very nervous at this request, but happily all the best
side of her was roused by something in Molly that, in spite of a vast
difference, recalled the Molly of seven years ago when she had first
seen her. It was a real kiss--a kind of pact between them.

"I wonder if she will ever wish to do the same again!" thought Molly.

Then Miss Carew left her and she called the maid, who brought at her
bidding a long black cloak and a small black toque--insignificant
compared to anything else of Molly's.

The mistress of Westmoreland House drove away in a hansom, with a bag in
her hand, at twenty minutes past seven.

There is a small house with a little chapel attached to it in a road in
Chelsea where some Frenchwomen, who were exiled from their own country,
have come to dwell. It is built on Sir Thomas More's garden, and it
possesses within its boundaries the mulberry tree under which the
chancellor was sitting when they came to fetch him to the Tower. It is a
poor little house with very poor inmates, and a poor little chapel. But
in that chapel night and day, without a moment's break, are to be found
two figures (when there are not more) dressed in plain brown habits and
black veils. And on the altar there is always a crowd of lighted
candles, in spite of the poverty of the chapel. It is a very small
chapel and oddly shaped. The length of the little building is from north
to south, and the altar is to the east. There are but few benches, but
they run the full length of the building. Strange things are known by
these women, who never go farther than the small garden at the back, of
the life of the town about them. Some men and more women get accustomed
to coming daily into the chapel with its unceasing exposition, and to
love its silence and its atmosphere of rest and peace. Some never make
themselves known; others sometimes ask to see a nun, and thus gradually
these recluses come to know memorable secrets in human lives.

Molly had often been there in the weeks which she had afterwards called
"my short fit of religious emotion." She chose to go there to-night, to
spend there her last hour in London.

The little chapel was fairly cool, and through a door very near the
altar, open to the garden, came the scent of mignonette on the air.
Besides the motionless figures at the altar-rail there was no one else
in the chapel.

At eight o'clock two small brown figures came in and knelt bowed down in
the middle of the sanctuary. The two who had finished their watch rose
and knelt by the side of those who relieved guard. Then the four rose
together, and the two newcomers took up their station, and the others
left them. And the incessant oblation of those lives went on. What a
vast moral space lay between their lives and Molly's! What a contrast!

Molly had had no home, but they had given up their homes for this. Molly
had pined in vain for human love; they had turned away from it. Molly
had rebelled against all restraints; they had chosen these bonds. Molly
had sinned, against even the world's code, for love of the world; and
they had rejected even the best the world could give.

Was it unjust, unfair that the boon they asked for in return was given
to them?

If, on the one hand, Molly had inherited evil tendencies and had fallen
on evil circumstances, does it seem strange that she could share in good
as well as in evil?

It is easy to take scandal at Molly's inherited legacy of evil
tendencies. It is easy to take scandal at the facility of her
forgiveness. The two stumbling-blocks are in reality the two aspects of
one truth, that no human being stands alone and that each gains or
suffers with or by his fellows.

The sinless women pleaded for sinners in a glorious human imitation of
the Divine pleading. And the exuberant vitality poured by the Conqueror
of death into the human race, flowing strongly through that tiny chapel,
had carried the little, thin, stagnant stream of Molly's soul into the
great flood of grace that purifies by sorrow and by love.

Molly knelt in one of the back benches with her eyes fixed on the
monstrance, in a very agony of sorrow and self-abasement. I would not if
I could analyse that penitence. Happily as life goes on we shrink more,
not less, from raising even the most reverent gaze on the secret places
of the soul. We do not know in what form, if in any form at all, and not
rather, in a light without words, the Divine Peace reached her. Was it,
"Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee?" Or was it perhaps, "This day
shalt thou be with Me in Paradise?" We cannot tell. Only the lay-sister
who saw Molly go out with the little black bag in her hand said
afterwards that the lady had seemed happy.

THE END.

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