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Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Great Possessions

M >> Mrs. Wilfrid Ward >> Great Possessions




There was no one to tell her aunt what new, strange instincts and
aspirations were struggling to the light in Molly. A passionate pity for
pain would seize on her and hold her in a grip until she had done some
definite act to relieve it. But pity was either not akin to love in
Molly, or her affections had been too starved to take root after the
immediate impulse of mercy was passed. The girl was not popular in the
village, although, unlike Mrs. Carteret, her poorer neighbours had a
great idea of Molly's cleverness. Needless to say that when, after some
unmeasured effort at relieving suffering, Molly would come home with a
sense of joy she rarely knew after any other act, it hurt her to the
quick and roused her deepest anger to find herself treated like a
naughty, inconsiderate child. The storms between Mrs. Carteret and
Molly were increasing in number and intensity, with outspoken wrath on
one side, and a white heat of dumb, indignant resistance on the other.
Then, happily, there came a change. Molly's education had been of the
very slightest until she was nearly sixteen, when Mrs. Carteret told her
to expect the arrival of a finishing governess. She also announced that
a music master from the cathedral town would, in future, come over twice
a week to give her lessons.

"It's not my doing," said Mrs. Carteret,--and meaning only to be candid
she sounded very ungracious; and although she did not pay for these
things, it was due to her urgent representations of their need that they
had been provided. Molly supposed that all such financial arrangements
were made for her by her father's lawyer, of whom she had heard Mrs.
Carteret speak.

Throughout these years it had never occurred to Mrs. Carteret to doubt
that Molly believed her mother to be dead, and she never for a moment
supposed the child's silence on the subject to be ominous. Such silence
did not show any special power of reserve; many children brought up like
Molly will carefully conceal knowledge which they believe that those in
authority over them suppose them not to possess. Perhaps in Molly's case
there was an instinctive shrinking from exposing an ideal to scorn.
Perhaps there was a wholly unconscious want of faith in the ideal
itself, an ideal which had been built up upon one phrase. Yet the notion
of the beautiful, exiled mother, so cruelly concealed from her child,
was very precious, however insecurely founded. It must be concealed from
other eyes by mists of incense, and honoured in the silence of the
sanctuary.

The new governess, Miss Carew, was a very fair teacher, and she soon
recognised the quality of her pupil's mind. Mrs. Carteret was possibly a
little disappointed on finding that Miss Carew considered Molly to be
very clever, as well as very ignorant. The widow was herself accustomed
to feel superior to her own circle in literary attainments,--a sensation
which she justified by an occasional reading of French memoirs and by
always getting through at least two articles in each _Nineteenth
Century_. It was a detail that she had never cared for poetry; Sir James
Stephen, she knew, had also never cared to have ideas expressed in
verse. But she felt a little dull when Miss Carew and Molly discussed
Browning and Tennyson and De Musset. Miss Carew fired Molly with new
thoughts and new ambitions in matters intellectual, but also in more
mundane affairs. If it is possible to be in the world and not of it we
have all of us also known people who are of the world though not in it;
and Miss Carew was undoubtedly one of the latter. Her tongue babbled of
beauties and courts, of manners, of wealth, and of chiffons, with the
free idealism of an amateur, and this without intending to do more than
enliven the dull daily walks through Malcot lanes.

Two years of this companionship rapidly developed Molly. She did not now
merely condemn her aunt and her friends from pure ignorant dislike; she
knew from other testimony that they were rather stupid, ignorant,
badly-dressed, and provincial. But the chief change in her state of mind
lay in her hopes for her own future. Miss Carew had pointed out that, if
such a very large salary could be given for the governess, there must
surely be plenty of money for Molly's disposal later on. Why should not
Molly have a splendid and delightful life before her? And then poor
Miss Carew would suppress a sigh at her own prospects in which the pupil
never showed the least interest. It was before Miss Carew's second year
of teaching had come to an end, and while Molly was rapidly enlarging
her mental horizon, that the girl came to a very serious crisis in her
life.

Occupied with her first joy in knowledge, and with dreams of future
delights in the great world, she had not broken out into any very
freakish act of benevolence for a long time. One night, when Mrs.
Carteret and Miss Carew met at dinner time, they continued to wait in
vain for Molly. The servants hunted for her, Mrs. Carteret called up the
front stairs, and Miss Carew went as far as the little carpenter's shop
opening from the greenhouse to find her. It was a dark night, and there
was nothing that could have taken her out of doors, but that she was out
could not be doubted. The gardener and coachman were sent for, and
before ten o'clock the policeman in the village joined in the search,
and yet nothing was heard of Molly. Mrs. Carteret became really
frightened, and Miss Carew was surprised to see her betray so much
feeling as almost to lose her self-control. She kept walking up and
down, while odd spasmodic little sentences escaped from her every few
minutes.

"How could I answer for it to John if his girl came to any harm?" she
repeated several times.

She kept moving from room to room with a really scared expression. Once
the governess overheard her exclaim with an intensely bitter accent,
"Even her wretched mother would have taken more care of her!"

At that moment the door opened; Molly came quietly in, looking at them
both with bright, defiant eyes. From her hat to the edge of her skirt
she appeared to be one mass of light, brown mud; her right cheek was
bleeding from a scratch, and the sleeve of her coat was torn open.

"Where have you been to?" demanded Mrs. Carteret, in a voice that
trembled from the reaction of fear to anger.

"I went for a walk, and I found a man lying half in the water in
Brown-rushes pond; he had evidently fallen in drunk. I got him out after
nearly falling in myself, and then I had to get some one to look after
him. They took him in at Brown-rushes farm, and I found out who he was
and went to tell his wife, who is ill, that he was quite safe. I stayed
a little while with her, and then I came home. I have walked about
twenty miles, and, as you can see, I have had several tumbles, and I am
very tired."

Molly's voice had been very quiet, but very distinct, and her look and
bearing were full of an unspoken defiance.

"And you never thought whether I should be frightened meanwhile?" said
Mrs. Carteret.

"Frightened about me?" said Molly in astonishment.

"You had no thought for _my_ anxiety--the strain on _my_ nerves," her
aunt went on.

"I thought you might be angry, but I never for a moment thought you
would be frightened."

Miss Carew looked from one to the other in alarm and perplexity. She
felt for them both, for the woman who had been startled by the extent of
her fears, and was the more angry in consequence, and for Molly, who
betrayed her utter want of belief in any kind of feeling on Mrs.
Carteret's part.

"If you do not care for my feelings, or, indeed, believe in them, I wish
you would have some care for your own good name." A moment's pause
followed these words, and then in a low voice, but quite distinct, came
the conclusion, "You must remember that your mother's daughter must be
more careful than other girls."

Molly's cheeks, just now bright from the battle with the autumn wind,
became as white as marble. There was no concealment possible; both women
saw that the child realised the full import of the words, and that she
knew they could read what was written on her face. There could be no
possibility of keeping up appearances after such a moment. But Miss
Carew moved forward, and flung her arms round Molly with a gesture of
simple but complete womanliness. "You must have a hot bath at once," she
cried, "or you will catch your death of cold."

"Perhaps it would be better if I did," cried Molly in a voice fearful to
her hearers in its stony hardness and hopelessness. "What does it
matter?"

Miss Carew would have been less unhappy if the child had burst into any
reproaches, however angry or unseemly; she wanted to hear her say that
something was a lie, that some one was a liar, but what was so awful to
the ordinary little woman was to realise that Molly believed what had
been said, or rather the awful implication of what had been said. The
real horror was that Molly should come to such knowledge in such a way.

The girl made no effort to shake her off, and not the least response to
her caress. With perfect dignity she went quietly up-stairs. With
perfect dignity she let the governess and the housemaid do to her
whatever they liked. They bathed Molly, rubbed her with lotions,
poulticed her with mustard, gave her a hot drink, and all the time Miss
Carew's heart ached at the impossibility of helping her in the very
least.

"Can I leave the door open between our rooms, in case you want anything
in the night?" she faltered.

"Oh, yes; certainly."

"May I kiss you?"

"Yes, of course."




CHAPTER VI

MOLLY COMES OF AGE


For some time after that terrible night Molly never spoke to Mrs.
Carteret unless it were absolutely necessary. It may be difficult to
believe that no explanation was sought or given and after a time things
seemed to be much as before. The silence of a brooding nature is a
terrible thing; and it is more common in narrow, dull lives than in any
other. Uneducated men and women in villages, or servants cramped
together in one house, I have known to brood over some injury in an
awful silence for twenty or thirty years. If Molly's future life had
been in Mrs. Carteret's hands, the sense of wrong would have burrowed
deeper and been even better hidden, but Molly, aided by Miss Carew, had
convinced herself that liberty would come, without any fight for it, at
twenty-one; so her view of the present was that it was a tiresome but
inevitable waiting for real life.

Miss Carew, watching her anxiously, could never find out what she had
thought since the night of the alarm; and if she had seen into her mind
at any one moment alone, she would have been misled. For Molly's
imagination flew from one extreme to another. At first, indeed, that
sentence, "Your mother's daughter ought to be more careful than other
girls," had seemed simply a revelation of evil of which she could not
doubt the truth. She saw in a flash why her mother had gone out of her
life although still living. The whole possibility of shame and horror
appeared to fit in with the facts of her secluded life with Mrs.
Carteret. A morbid fear as to her own birth seized on the poor child's
mind, and might have destroyed the healthier aspect of life for her
entirely; but happily Mrs. Carteret and the governess did think of this
danger, and showed some skill in laying the phantom. Some photographs of
John Dexter as a young man were brought out and shown to the governess
in Molly's presence, and her comments on the likeness to Molly were true
and sounded spontaneous. Relieved of this horror the girl's mind reacted
to the hope that Mrs. Carteret had only spoken in temper and spite,
grossly exaggerating some grievance against Molly's mother. Then was the
ideal restored to its pedestal, and expiatory offerings of sentiment of
the most elaborate kind hung round the image of the ill-used and
misunderstood, the beautiful, unattainable mother. If Miss Carew had
seen into the reveries of her pupil at such a moment, she would hardly
have believed how they alternated with the coldest fits of doubt and
scepticism. Molly was dealing with a self-made ideal that she needed to
satisfy the hunger of her nature for love and worship. But it had no
foundations, no support, and it was apt to vanish with a terrible
completeness. Then she would feel quite alone and horribly ashamed; she
would at moments think of herself as something degraded and to be
shunned. Some natures would have simply sunk into a nervous state of
depression, but Molly had great vitality and natural ambition. In her
ideal moments she thought of devoting her life to her mother; and the
ayah's words were still a text, "The faithful child will find a way."
But in darker hours she defied the world that was against her.

Molly, having decided to make no effort at any change in her life until
the emancipating age of twenty-one, determined to prepare herself as
fully as possible for the future. Mrs. Carteret was quite willing to
keep Miss Carew until her niece was nearly twenty, and by that time the
girl had read a surprising amount, while her mind was not to be
despised. She had also "come out" as far as a very sleepy neighbourhood
made it possible for her to see any society. She had been to three
balls, and a good many garden parties. No one found her very attractive
in her manners, though her appearance had in it now something that
arrested attention. She took her position in the small Carteret circle
in virtue of a certain energy and force of will. Molly danced, and
played tennis, and rode as well as any girl in those parts, but she did
not hide a silent and, at present, rather childish scorn which was in
her nature. Miss Carew left her with regret and with more affection than
Molly gave her back, for the governess was proud of her, and felt in
watching her the pleasures of professional success. Perhaps she put down
too much of this success to her own skill, but it was true that, without
Miss Carew, Molly would have been a very undeveloped young person. There
was still one year after this parting before Molly would be free, and it
seemed longer and slower as each day passed. One interest helped to make
it endurable. A trained hospital nurse had been provided for the
village, and Molly spent a great deal of time learning her craft. The
nursing instinct was exceedingly strong and not easily put down, and,
if Molly _must_ interfere with sick people, it was as well, in Mrs.
Carteret's opinion, that she should learn how to do it properly.

But the slow months rolled by at length, and the last year of bondage
was finished.

The sun did its best to congratulate Molly on her twenty-first birthday.
It shone in full glory on the great, green hills, and the blue shadows
in the hollows were transparent with reflected gold. The sunlight
trembled in the bare branches of the beeches and turned their grey
trunks to silver.

Standing in the little study, Molly's whole figure seemed to expand in
the sunshine. Her eyes sparkled, her lips parted, and she at once drank
in and gave forth her delight.

Some people might still agree with Mrs. Carteret that Molly was not
beautiful. Still, it was an appearance that would always provoke
discussion. Molly could not be overlooked, and when her mind and
feelings were excited, then she gave a strange impression of intense
vitality--not the pleasant overflow of animal spirits, but a suppressed,
yet untamed, vitality of a more mental, more dangerous kind. Her
movements were usually sudden, swift, and abrupt, yet there was in them
all a singular amount of expression, and, if Molly's keen grey eyes and
sensitive mouth did not convey the impression of a simple, or even of a
kindly nature, they gave suggestions of light and longing, hunger and
resolution.

To-day, the twenty-first birthday, was to be the first day of freedom,
the last of shackles and dulness and commonplace. It was to be a day of
speech and a day of revenge.

Molly was waiting now for Mrs. Carteret to come in and stand before her
and hear all she meant to say about the long, unholy deception that had
been put upon her. She was going to say good-bye now and be free.
Molly's money would now be her own, she could take it away and share it
with the deserted, misjudged mother. Nothing in all this was
melodramatic; it would have been but natural if the facts had been as
she supposed, only Molly made the little mistake of treating as facts
her carefully built-up fancies, her long, childish story of her own
life.

She was so absorbed that she hardly saw Mrs. Carteret come in and sit
down in her square, substantial way in a large arm-chair. Molly,
standing by the window knocking the tassel of the blind to and fro, was
breathing quickly. The older woman looked through some papers in her
hand, put some notes of orders for groceries on a table by her side, and
flattened out a long letter on foreign paper on her knee. She looked at
Molly a little nervously, with cold blue eyes over gold-rimmed
spectacles reposing on her well-shaped nose, and began:

"Now that you are of age I must----"

But Molly interrupted her. In a very low voice, speaking quickly with
little gasps of impatience at any hesitation in her own utterance,--

"Before you talk to me about the arrangements, I want to tell you that I
have made up my mind to leave here at once. I know it will be a relief
to you as well as to me. Any promise you made to my father is satisfied
now, and you cannot wish to keep me here. You have always been ashamed
of me, you have always disliked me, and you have always deceived me. I
knew all this time that my mother was alive, and you never spoke of her
except once and then it was to insult me as deeply as a girl can be
insulted. If what you said were true--and I don't believe it"--her voice
shook as she spoke--"there would be all the more reason why I should go
to my poor mother. I want you to know, therefore, that with whatever
money comes to me from my father, I shall go to my mother and try to
make amends to her."

Mrs. Carteret stared over her spectacles at Molly in absolute amazement.
After fourteen years of very kind treatment, which had involved a great
deal of trouble, this uninteresting, silent niece had revealed herself
at last! Fourteen years devoted to the idealisation of the mother who
had deserted her, and to positive hatred of the relation who had
mothered her! Tears rose in the hard, blue eyes. Subtleties of feeling
Anne Carteret did not know, but some affection for those who are near in
blood and who live under the same roof had been a matter of course to
her, and Molly had hurt her to the quick. However, it was natural that
common-sense and justice should quickly assert themselves to show this
idiotic girl the criminal absurdity of what she said. Mrs. Carteret was
unconsciously hitting back as hard as she could as she answered in a
tone of cheerful common-sense:

"As a matter of fact, the money you will receive will not be your own,
but an allowance from your mother--a large allowance given on the
condition that you do not live with her. Happily, it is so large that
there will not be any necessity for you to live here."

Mrs. Carteret held up the letter of thin foreign paper in a trembling
hand, but she spoke in a perfectly calm voice:

"I was myself always against this mystery as to your mother, but I felt
obliged to act by her wish in the matter. She insists that she still
wishes it to be thought by the world at large that she is dead, but she
agrees at last that you should know something about her. I told her that
I could not allow you to come of age here and have a great deal of money
at your disposal without your knowing that from your father you have
only been left a fortune of two thousand pounds----"

Mrs. Carteret paused, and then, with a little snort, added, half to
herself:

"The rest was all squandered away, and certainly not by his own doing."

Then she resumed her business tone:

"More than this, I obtained from your mother leave to tell you that this
very large allowance comes out of a fortune left to her quite recently
by Sir David Bright. I have acted by the wishes of both your parents as
far as I possibly could. As to my disliking you or being ashamed of you,
such notions could only come out of a morbid imagination. In spite of
your feelings towards me, I still wish to be your friend. I want your
father's daughter to stand well with the world. So that I am left to
live here in peace undisturbed, I shall be glad to help you at any
time."

Mrs. Carteret's feelings were concentrated on Molly's conduct towards
herself, but Molly's consciousness was filled with the greatness of the
blow that had just fallen. It seemed to her that she had only now for
the first time lost her mother--her only ideal, the object of all her
better thoughts. That her enemy was justified was, indeed, just then of
little importance. She turned a dazed face towards her aunt:

"I ought to beg your pardon: I am sorry."

"Oh, pray don't take the trouble."

Mrs. Carteret got out of the chair with emphatic dignity, and held out
some papers.

"You had better read these. I will speak to you about them afterwards."

She left the room absolutely satisfied with her own conduct. But, coming
to a pause in the drawing-room, she remembered that she had made one
mistake.

"How stupid of me to have left Jane Dawning's letter among those
papers."

But she did not go back to fetch the letter from her cousin Lady
Dawning; and she did not own to herself that that apparent negligence
was her real revenge. Yet from that moment her feelings of
self-satisfaction were uncomfortably disturbed.

Meanwhile, Molly was kneeling by the window in the study in floods of
tears. Everything in her mind had lost its balance; and baffled,
disheartened, and ashamed, she wept tears that brought no softness. She
did not know it, but while to herself it seemed as if she were absorbed
in weeping over her disillusionment, she was in fact deciding that, as
her ideal had failed her, she would in future live only for herself, and
get everything out of life that she could for her own satisfaction.

No one in the world cared for her, but she would not be defeated or
crushed or forlorn. With an effort she sprang to her feet with one agile
movement, and pushed her heavy hair back from her forehead with her
long, thin fingers.

The colour had gone from her clear, dark skin for the moment, and her
breathing was fast and uneven, but her face still showed her to be very
young and very healthy. How differently the troubles of the mind are
written in our faces when age has undermined the foundations and all
momentary failure is a presage of a sure defeat. Molly showed her
determination to be brave and calm by immediately setting herself to
read the papers left for her by Mrs. Carteret.

One was in French, a long letter from a lawyer in Florence communicating
Madame Danterre's wishes to Mrs. Carteret. It stated that, owing to the
painful circumstances of the case, his client chose to remain under her
maiden name, and to reside in Florence. Mrs. Carteret was at liberty to
inform Miss Dexter of this, but she did not wish it known to anybody
else. Madame Danterre further asked Mrs. Carteret to make such
arrangements as she thought fit for her daughter to see something of the
world, either in London or by travelling, but she did not wish her to
come to Florence. Otherwise the world was before her, and L3000 a year
was at her disposal. Molly could hardly, it was implied, ask for more
from a mother from whom she had been torn unjustly when she was an
infant. The rest of the letter was entirely about business, giving all
details as to how the quarterly allowance would be paid. In conclusion
was an enigmatic sentence to the effect that, by a tardy act of
repentance, Sir David Bright had left Madame Danterre his fortune, and
she wished her daughter to know that the large allowance she was able to
make her was in consequence of this act of justice. Molly would have had
no inkling of the meaning of this sentence if Mrs. Carteret had come
back to claim the letter from Lady Dawning which she had unintentionally
left among the lawyer's papers. But this last, a closely-written large
sheet of note-paper, lay between the letter from the lawyer in Florence,
and other papers from the family lawyer in London, anent the will of
the late Colonel Dexter and its taking effect on his daughter's coming
of age.

Molly turned carelessly from the question of L2000 and its interest at
three and a half per cent. to the letter surmounted by a black initial
and a coronet.

"My DEAR ANNE,--

"I am not coming to stay in your neighbourhood as I had hoped. I
should have been very glad to have had a talk with you about Molly,
if it had been possible, for her dear father's sake. Indeed, I
think you are far from exaggerating the difficulties of the case.
You are very reluctant to take a house in London, and you say that
if you did take one and gave up all your home duties you would not
now have a circle of friends there who could be of any use to a
girl of her age. I feel that very likely you would be glad if my
daughter would undertake her, and you are quite right in thinking
that she would like a girl to take into the world. But I must be
frank with you, as I want to save you from pitfalls which I may be
more able to foresee than you can in your secluded home. My dear, I
know that dear old John died without a penny: why if he had had any
fortune as a young man--but, alas! he had none--is it possible
that, in a soldier's life, with, for a few years, a madly
extravagant wife to help him, he could conceivably have saved a
capital that can produce L3000 a year!

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