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Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

M >> Mrs. Wilfrid Ward >> Great Possessions




Sir Edmund could not say that Billy was a fool or a snob, because Billy
did nothing but lead a perfectly useless life as expensively as
possible; and he did the same himself. He could not even say that Billy
lived among fools and snobs, because many of Billy's friends were his
own friends too. He could not say that Billy had been a coward because
he had not volunteered to fight in the Boer war, because Sir Edmund had
not volunteered himself. He could not say that Billy employed the wrong
tailor; it would show only gross ignorance or temper to say so. But just
the things in which he felt himself superior, utterly different in fact
from Billy, were the stupid, priggish things that no one boasts of. He
read a good deal; he thought a good deal; he knew he might have had a
future, and the bitterness of his heart lay in the fact that at fifteen
years later in life than Billy he was still so completely a slave to all
that Billy loved. Every detail of their lives seemed to add to the
irritation. It was only the day he left London that he had discovered
that Billy's new motor was from the same maker as his own; in fact,
except in colour, the motors were twins. This was the latest, and not
even the least, cause of annoyance. For it betrayed what he was always
trying to conceal from himself, that there appeared to be an actual
rivalry between him and Billy, a petty, social, silly rivalry. Billy, of
simpler make, a fresher, younger, more contented animal, thought little
of all this, and was irritated by Sir Edmund's assumption of
superiority.

But he had never found Grosse so bearish and difficult before this visit
to Como. As a rule Edmund was suavity itself, but this time even his
gift of gently, almost imperceptibly, making every woman feel him to be
her admirer was failing. How often he had been the life of any party in
any class of society, and that not by starting amusements, not by any
power of initiation, but by a gift for making others feel pleased, first
with themselves, and consequently with life. He could bring the gift to
good use on a royal yacht, at a Bohemian supper party, at a schoolroom
tea, or at a parish mothers' meeting. But now--and he owned that his
liver was out of order--he was suffering from a general disgust with
things. When still a young man in the Foreign Office he had succeeded to
a large fortune, and it had seemed then thoroughly worth while to employ
it for social ends and social joys. Long ago he had attained those ends,
and long ago he had become bored with those joys; and yet he could not
shake himself free from any of the habits of body or mind he had got
into during those years. He could not be indifferent to any shades of
failure or success. He watched the temperature of his popularity as
acutely as many men watch their bodily symptoms. Even during those days
at Como, though despising his company, he knew that he felt a distinct
irritation in a preference for Billy on the part of a lady whom he had
at one time honoured with his notice. In arriving where he was in the
English social world, he had increased, not only the need for luxury of
body, but the sensitiveness and acuteness of certain perceptions as to
his fellow creatures, and these perceptions were not likely to slumber
again.

Edmund was oppressed by several unpleasant thoughts as well as by the
heat of the night on which he arrived in Florence. He decided to sleep
out in the wide brick _loggia_ of the flat, which was nearly at the top
of the great building. There was nothing to distract his gloomy thoughts
from himself, not even a defect in the dinner or in the broad couch of a
bed from which he could look up between the brick pillars of the
_loggia_ at the naked stars. If he had been younger he would, in his
sleepless hours, have owned to himself that he was suffering from "what
men call love," but he could not believe easily that Edmund Grosse at
forty was as silly as any boy of twenty. He pished and pshawed at the
absurdity. He could not accept anything so simple and goody as his own
story. That ever since Rose married he had put her out of his thought
from very love and reverence for her seemed an absurd thing to say of a
man of his record. Yet it was true; and all the more in consequence did
the thought of Rose as a free woman derange his whole inner life now,
while the thought of Rose insulted by the dead hand of the man she had
married was gall and wormwood. What must Rose think of men? She had been
so anxious to find a great and good man; and she had found David Bright,
whose mistress was now enjoying his great wealth somewhere below in the
old Tuscan capital. And how could Edmund venture to be the next man
offered to her?--Edmund who had done nothing all these years, who had
sunk with the opportunity of wealth; whose talents had been lost or
misused. He seemed to see Rose kneeling at her prayers--the golden head
bowed, the girlish figure bent. He could think of nothing in himself to
distract her back to earth, poor beautiful child! Yet he had not nursed
or petted or even welcomed the old passion of his boyhood. He wanted to
be without it and its discomforting reproaches. It was too late to
change anything or anybody. At forty how could he have a career, and
what good would come of it? Yet his love for Rose was insistent on the
necessity of making Rose's lover into a different man from the present
Edmund Grosse. It was absurd and medieval to suppose that if he did some
great or even moderately great work he could win her by doing it. It
might be absurd, yet contrariwise he felt convinced that she would never
take him as he was now.

So he wearied as he turned on the couch that became less and less
comfortable, till he rose and, with a rug thrown over him, leant on the
brick balustrade of the _loggia_. He stood looking at the stars in the
dimness, not wholly unlike the figure of some old Roman noble in his
toga, nor perhaps wholly unlike the figure of the unconverted Augustine,
weary of himself and of all things.

But this remark only shows how the stars and the deep blue openings into
the heavens, and the manifold suggestions of the towers of Dante's city,
and the neighbourhood of Savonarola's cell, affect the imagination and
call up comparisons by far too mighty. Edmund Grosse's weariness of evil
is nothing but a sickly shadow of the weariness of the great imprisoned
soul to whom an angel cried to take up and read aright the book of life.
Grosse is in fact only a middle-aged man in pajamas with a travelling
rug about his shoulders, with a sallow face, a sickly body, and a rather
shallow soul. He will not go quite straight even in his love quest, and
he cannot bring himself to believe how strongly that love has hold of
him. He is cynical about the best part of himself and to-night only
wishes that it would trouble him less.

"Damn it," he muttered at last, "I wish I had slept indoors--I am bored
to death by those stars!"

Next day Grosse set about the work for which he had come to Florence. He
called on two men whom he knew slightly, and found them at home, but
neither of them had ever heard of Madame Danterre. Dawkins, his
much-travelled servant, of course, was more successful, and by the
evening was able to take Edmund in a carriage to see some fine old iron
gates, and to drive round some enormous brick walls--enormous in height
and in thickness.

The Villa was in a magnificent position, and the gardens, Dawkins told
his master, were said to be beautiful. Madame Danterre had only just
moved into it from a much smaller house in the same quarter.

Edmund next drove to the nearest chemist, and there found out that Dr.
Larrone was the name of Madame Danterre's medical man. He already knew
the name of her lawyer from Mr. Murray, who had been in perfunctory
communication with him during the years in which Sir David had paid a
large allowance to Madame Danterre. But he knew that any direct attempt
to see these men would probably be worse than useless. What he wished to
do was to come across Madame Danterre socially, and with all the
appearance of an accidental meeting. His two friends in Florence did
their best for him, but they were before long driven to recommend
Pietrino, a well-known detective, as the only person who could find out
for Grosse in what houses it might be possible to meet Madame Danterre.

Grosse soon recognised the remarkable gifts of the Italian detective,
and confided to him the whole case in all its apparent hopelessness.
There was, indeed, a touch of kindred feeling between them, for both men
had a certain pleasure in dealing with human beings--humanity was the
material they loved to work upon. The detective was too wise to let his
zeal for the wealthy Englishman outrun discretion. He did very little in
the case, and brought back a distinct opinion that Grosse could, at
present, do nothing but mischief by interference. Madame Danterre had
always lived a very retired life, and was either a real invalid or a
valetudinarian. Her great, her enormous accession of wealth had only
been used apparently in the sacred cause of bodily health. She saw at
most six people, including two doctors and her lawyer; and on rare
occasions, some elderly man visiting Florence--a Frenchman maybe, or an
Englishman--would seek her out. She never paid any visits, although she
kept a splendid stable and took long drives almost daily. The detective
was depressed, for he had really been fired by Grosse's view as to the
will, and he had come to so favourable an opinion of Grosse's ability
that he had wished greatly for an interview between the latter and
Madame Danterre to come off.

Edmund was loth to leave Florence until one evening when he despaired,
for the first time, of doing any good. It was the evening on which he
succeeded in seeing Madame Danterre without the knowledge of that lady.
The garden of the villa into which he so much wished to penetrate was
walled about with those amazing masses of brickwork which point to a
date when labour was cheap indeed. Edmund had more than once dawdled
under the deep shadow of these shapeless masses of wall at the hour of
the general siesta.

He felt more alert while most of the world was asleep, and he could
study the defences of Madame Danterre undisturbed. A lost joy of boyhood
was in his heart when he discovered a corner where the brickwork was
partly crumbled away, and partly, evidently, broken by use. It looked as
if a tiny loophole in the wall some fifteen feet from the ground had
been used as an entrance to the forbidden garden by some small human
body. That evening, an hour before sunset, he came back and looked
longingly at the wall. The narrow road was as empty as it had been
earlier in the day. Twice he tried in vain to climb as far as the
loophole, but the third time, with trousers ruined and one hand
bleeding, he succeeded in crawling on to the ledge below the opening so
that he could look inside. He almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of
his own pleasure in doing so. Some rich, heavy scent met him as he
looked down, but, fresh from the gardens of Como, this garden looked to
him both heavy and desolate--heavy in its great hedges broken by
statuary in alcoves cut in the green, and desolate in its burnt turf and
its trailing rose trees loaded with dead roses. His first glance had
been downwards, then his look went further afield, and he knew why
Madame Danterre had chosen the villa, for the view of Florence was
superb. He had not enjoyed it for half a moment when he heard a slight
noise in the garden. Yes, down the alley opposite to him there were
approaching a lady and two men servants. He held his breath with
surprise. Was this Madame Danterre? the rival of Rose, the real love of
David Bright? What he saw was an incredibly wizened old woman who yet
held herself with considerable grace and walked with quick, long steps
on the burnt grass a little ahead of the attendants, one of whom carried
a deck chair, while the other was laden with cushions and books. It was
evident to the onlooker at the installation of Madame Danterre in the
shady, open space where three alleys met, that everything to do with her
person was carried out with the care and reverence befitting a religious
ceremony; and there was almost a ludicrous degree of pride in her
bearing and gestures. Edmund felt how amazingly some women have the
power of making others accept them as a higher product of creation,
until their most minute bodily wants seem to themselves and those about
them to have a sacred importance. At last, when chair and mat and
cushions and books had been carefully adjusted after much consideration,
she was left alone.

For a few moments she read a paper-covered volume, and Edmund determined
to creep away at once, when she suddenly got up and began walking again
with long, quick steps, her train sweeping the grass as she came towards
the great wall; and he drew back a little, although it was almost
impossible that she should see him. Her gown, of a dark dove colour,
floated softly; it had much lace about the throat on which shone a
string of enormous pearls; and she wore long, grey gloves. Edmund, who
was an authority on the subject, thought her exquisitely dressed, as a
woman who feels herself of great importance will dress even when there
is no one to see her. In the midst of the extraordinarily wizened face
were great dark eyes full of expression, with a fierce brightness in
them. It was as if an internal fire were burning up the dried and
wizened features, and could only find an outlet through the eyes.
Rapidly she had passed up and down, and sometimes as she came nearer the
wall Edmund saw her flash angry glances, and sometimes sarcastic
glances, while her lips moved rapidly, and her very small gloved hand
clenched and unclenched.

At last a noise in the deserted road behind him, the growing rumbling of
a cart, made him think it safer to move, even at the risk of a little
sound in doing so. He reached the ground safely before he could be seen,
and proceeded to brush the brick-dust off the torn knees of his grey
trousers.

He walked down the hill into the town with an air of finality, for he
had determined to go back to England. He could not have analysed his
impressions; he could not have accounted for his sense of impotence and
defeat, but so it was. He had come across the personality of Madame
Danterre, and he thereupon left her in possession of the field. But at
the same time, before leaving Florence, he gave largely of the sinews of
war to that able spy, the Italian detective, Pietrino.




CHAPTER V

"YOUR MOTHER'S DAUGHTER"


The surprising disposal of Sir David Bright's fortune was to have very
important consequences in a quiet household among the Malcot hills, of
the existence of which Sir Edmund Grosse and Lady Rose Bright were
entirely unaware.

In a small wind-swept wood that appeared to be seeking shelter in the
hollow under the great massive curve of a green hill, there stood one of
those English country houses that must have been planned, built, and
finished with the sole object of obtaining coolness and shade. The
principal living rooms looked north, and the staircase and a minute
study were the only spots that ever received any direct rays of the sun.
All the rooms except this favoured little study had windows opening to
the ground, and immediately outside grew the rich mossy turf that
indicates a clay soil. The mistress of the house was not easily daunted
by her surroundings, and she had impressed her cheerful, comfortable,
and fairly cultured mind on all the rooms. Mrs. Carteret was the widow
of a Colonel Carteret, who had retired from the army to farm his own
acres, and take his place in local politics. It is needless to say that,
while the politics had gained from the help of an upright and
chivalrous, if narrow, mind, the acres had profited little from his
attentions. When he died he left all he possessed absolutely to his
widow, who was not prepared to find how very little that all had become.
Mrs. Carteret took up the burden of the acres, dairy, gardens, and
stable, with a sense of sanctified duty none the less heroic in
sensation because she was doing all these things for her own profit. Her
neighbours held her in proportionate respect; and, as she had a fine
person, pleasant manners, and good connections, she kept, without the
aid of wealth, a comfortable corner in the society of the county.

It was not long after Colonel Carteret's death, and some thirteen years
before the death of Sir David Bright, that the immediate neighbourhood
became gradually conscious of the fact that Mrs. Carteret had adopted a
little niece, the child of a soldier brother who had died in India. This
child, from the first, made as little effect on her surroundings as it
was possible for a child to do. Molly Dexter was small, thin, and
sallow; her dark hair did not curl; and her grey eyes had a curious look
that is not common, yet not very rare, in childhood. It is the look of
one who waits for other circumstances and other people than those now
present. I know nothing so discouraging in a child friend--or rather in
a child acquaintance, for friendship is warned off by such eyes--as this
particular look. Mrs. Carteret took her niece cheerfully in hand,
commended the quiet of her ways, and gave credit to herself and open
windows for a perceptible increase in the covering of flesh on the
little bones, and a certain promise of firmness in the calves of the
small legs. As to the rest: "Of course it was difficult at first," she
said, "but now Molly is perfectly at home with me. Nurses never do
understand children, and Mary used to excite her until she had fits of
passion. But that is all past. She is quite a healthy and normal child
now."

Molly was growing healthy, but whether she was normal or not is another
point. It does not tend to make a child normal to change everything in
life at the age of seven. Not one person, hardly one thing was the same
to Molly since her father's death. The language of her _ayah_ had until
then been more familiar to her than any other language. The ayah's
thoughts had been her thoughts. The East had had in charge the first
years of Molly's dawning intelligence, and there seemed impressed, even
on her tiny figure, something that told of patience, scorn, and reserve.
And yet Mrs. Carteret was quite satisfied.

Once, indeed, the widow was puzzled. Molly had strayed away by herself,
and could not be found for nearly two hours. Provided with two figs and
several bits of biscuit, a half-crown and a shilling, she had started to
walk through the deep, heavy lanes between the great hills, with the
firm intention of taking ship to France. Mrs. Carteret treated the
escapade kindly and firmly; not making too much of it, but giving such
sufficient punishment as to prevent anything so silly happening again.
But she had no suspicion of what really had happened. Molly had, in
fact, started with the intention of finding her mother. It was two years
since she had come to live with Mrs. Carteret, and, if the child had
spoken her secret thought, she would have told you that throughout those
two years she had been meaning to run away and find her mother. In that
she would have fallen into an exaggeration not uncommon with some
grown-up people. It had been only at moments far apart, or occasionally
for quite a succession of nights in bed, that she had spent a brief
space before falling asleep in dreaming of going to seek her mother. But
whole months had passed without any such thought; and during these long
interludes the healthy country scenes about her, and the common causes
for smiles and tears in a child's life, filled her consciousness. Still,
the undercurrent of the deeper life was there, and very small incidents
were strong enough to bring it to the surface. Molly had short daily
lessons from the clergyman's daughter, a young lady who also took a
cheerful, airy view of the child, and said she would grow out of her
little faults in time. In one of these lessons Molly learnt with
surprising eagerness how to find France for herself on the map. That
France was much nearer to England than to India, and how it was usual to
cross the Channel were facts easily acquired. Molly was amazingly
backward in her lessons, or she must have learnt these things before.
When lessons were over and she went out into the garden, instead of
running as usual she walked so slowly that Mrs. Carteret, while talking
to the gardener, actually wondered what was in that child's mind. Molly
was living through again the parting with the ayah. She could feel the
intensely familiar touch of the soft, dark hand; she could see the
adoring love of the dark eyes with their passionate anger at the
separation. The woman had to be revenged on her enemies who were tearing
the child from her. "They deceive you," she said. "The beautiful mother
is not dead; she lives in France, not England; they will try to keep you
from her, but the faithful child will find a way."

Molly unconsciously in her own mind had already begun to put these
words into English, whereas a year before she would have kept to the
ayah's own language. But in either language those words came to her as
the last message from that other life of warmth and love and colour in
which she had once been a queen. Indeed, every English child brought
home from India is a sovereign dethroned. And the repetition of the
ayah's last words gave utterance to a sense of wrong that Molly
nourished against her present rulers and against the world in which she
was not understood.

That same day Mrs. Carteret spoke sharply and with indignation because
Molly had trodden purely by accident on the pug; and her aunt said that
the one thing with which she had no patience was cruelty to
animals--whereas the child was passionately fond of animals. Again, on
that same day, Molly fell into a very particularly dirty little pond
near the cowshed at the farm. Mary, the nurse, no doubt was the
sufferer, and she said that she did not suppose that black nurses minded
being covered with muck--how should they?--and she supposed she must be
treated as if she were a negro herself, but time would show whether she
were a black slave or an Englishwoman with a house of her own which she
could have now if she liked for the asking. While Mary spoke she pushed
and pulled, and, in general treated Molly's small person as something
unpleasant, and to be kept at a distance. Once clean and dressed again,
Molly sat down quite quietly to consider the ways and means of getting
to France, with the result already told.

Several years passed after that, in which Mrs. Carteret did by Molly, as
by every one else, all the duties that were quite obviously evident to
her, and did not go about seeking for any fanciful ones. And Molly grew
up, sometimes happy, and sometimes not, saying sometimes the things she
really meant when she was in a temper, and acquiescing in Mrs.
Carteret's explanation that she had not meant them when she had regained
her self-control.

Until Molly was between fifteen and sixteen, Mrs. Carteret was able to
keep to her optimism as to their mutual relations.

"The child is, of course, very backward. I tried to think it was want of
education, but I've come to see it's of no use to expect to make Molly
an interesting or agreeable woman; and very plain, of course, she must
be. But, you know, plenty of plain, uninteresting women have very fairly
happy lives, and under the circumstances"--but there Mrs. Carteret
stopped, and her guest, the wife of the vicar, knew no more of the
circumstances than did the world at large.

But when Molly was about the age of fifteen she began to display more
troublesome qualities, and a certain faculty for doing quite the wrong
thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is
nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in
the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to
the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by.
It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of
the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a
gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing
an old man of rather doubtful antecedents to be dying from exhaustion,
Molly had herself sought whisky from the nearest inn. She had bought a
whole bottle of whisky, though indeed, being seized with qualms, she had
poured half the contents of the bottle into a ditch before going back to
the cottage. And it was undoubtedly Mrs. Carteret's duty to protest when
she found that Molly had held a baby with diphtheria folded closely in
her arms while the mother fetched the doctor.

Can any one blame Mrs. Carteret for finding these doings a little
trying? And it showed how freakish and contradictory Molly was in all
her ways that she would never join nicely in school feasts, or harvest
homes, or anything pleasant or cheerful. Nor did she make friends even
with those she had worried over in times of sickness. She would risk
some serious infection, or meddle, with her odd notions, day after day
in a cottage; and then she would hardly nod to the convalescent boy or
girl when she met them again in the lanes.

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