At first he had not allowed Father Marny to take any of his now painful work among the people he was so soon to leave, but, after a week or two, he acquiesced. What was the use when he was to leave them for good and all? It were better they should learn at once to get on without him. Father Marny, in passionate sympathy, was ready to work himself to death and acknowledge no fatigue. It was easy to conceal fatigue or anything else from Mark in his preoccupied state of mind. He showed no interest when Lord Lofton wrote him a most warmly and tactfully expressed letter of welcome, in which he told the coming chaplain that he must not suppose there was not work in plenty to be done for souls in the country.
"Humbugging old men and women who want pensions and soup and blankets!" Mark said with unusual irritation, as he flung the letter to his friend.
But to the curate Mark was as much above criticism as a martyr at the foot of the gallows.
Strangely enough, the first break into this moral fog that was settling down in his spiritual world was, of all unlikely things, the letter from Edmund Grosse.
When he got Edmund's letter Mark was sulking—there is no other word for it—over his answer to Lord Lofton, which ought to have gone several days ago. Of course he was bound by his mission oath to go where he was placed, but the authorities might at least have waited to hear from him before handing him over as if he were a parcel or a Jesuit. He read Edmund's cramped writing with a little difficulty, and then threw the three sheets it covered on to the table with a bang, and jumped up.
"Dash it!" he cried, "this is rather too much."
He did not stop to think that Edmund could not have been so idiotic as to write that letter if he had known of the state of the case between him and Miss Dexter. It only seemed at the moment that it was another instance of cruelty and utter unfairness, part of the same treatment he was receiving, which expected a man to be a plaster saint with no thought for himself, no natural feelings, no sense of his own reputation! First of all he was to be buried, torn from his friends, from his work for souls, from the joy of the Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep. He was to lose all he loved and for which he had given up his life, his career, his position, and, for the first time, he enumerated among his sacrifices the possession of Groombridge. Then he blushed for shame—also for the first time. How littlethathad been, compared to what he had to do now! What had he to do now? And here the Little Master made his great mistake. He came out of the fog and shadow, he came into the light because he thought it was safe now.
What had Mark to do that was so much harder? To submit to authority and forgive its blunders. He hesitated for a moment; he almost thought it wasthat. Then came the light, and he saw the real crux. What he had to do was to forgive Molly Dexter. He was startled by the revelation, as men are startled who have been in love without knowing it. He had been nursing hatred and revenge without knowing it, for, until he had become bitter at the treatment of the authorities, he had felt no anger against Molly. She had simply been the patient who would scratch out the eyes of the surgeon. He was surprised into a quiet analysis of the discovery, and then his thoughts stood quite still. It was only necessary for a noble soul toseesuch a temptation for him tofightit. But he passed back from that to the whole of the wrath and hurt feeling that he recognised too. He was angry with those in authority who expected him to behave like a saint; he had been angry vaguely with Sir Edmund Grosse, but more with circumstances that also demanded of him that he should behave like a saint and do the very worst thing for himself and confirm the calumny against him by acting as Molly's confidential friend! But he could not be equally angry at the same time with Miss Dexter, with his own authorities, with Edmund Grosse, and with circumstances. One injury alone might have been different, but taken together they suggested a plot and intention. Whose plot? Whose intention?
And the answer was thundered and yet whispered through his consciousness. Is was God's plot, God's Will, God's demand, that he should do the impossible and behave like a saint!
Mark had said easily enough in the first noble instinct of bearing his blow well: "We are God's slaves." But that first light had gradually been obscured. He had not felt then that the impossiblewas demanded of him. He had come to feel it, and to feel it without remembering that man's helplessness was God's opportunity. Had he forgotten, erased from the tablets of his mind and heart, all he had loved and trusted most? Now all was terribly clear. Augustine, in a decadent, delicate age, had not minced matters, and had insisted that all hope must be placed in Him Who would not spare the scourge. "Oftentimes," he had cried, "does our Tamer bring forth His scourge too." Mark took down the old, worn book.
"In Him let us place our hope, and until we are tamed and tamed thoroughly—that is, are perfected—let us bear our Tamer.... Whereas, when thou art tamed, God reserveth for thee an inheritance which is God Himself.... For God will then beall in all; neither will there be any unhappiness to exercise us, but happiness alone to feed us.... What multiplicity of things soever thou seekest here, He alone will be Himself all these things to thee.
"Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall his Tamer then be deemed intolerable? Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall he murmur against his beneficient Tamer, if He chance to use the scourge?...
"Whether, therefore, Thou dealest softly with us that we be not wearied in the way, or chastisest us that we wander not from the way,Thou art become our refuge, O Lord."
As Mark read, the pain of too great light was softened to him. What had been hard, white light, glowed more rosy until it flushed his horizon with full glory.
It wanted a small space in time, but a mighty change in the spirit, before Mark read Edmund's letter with a keen wish to enter into its full meaning, andjudge it wisely. Having come to himself, he was, as ever, ready to give that self away. He was full of a strange energy; he smiled to feel that the strokes of the lash were unfelt, while consciousness was lost in love. This was God's anæsthetic. But it thrilled the soul with vitality, and in no sense but the absence of pain did it suspend the faculties. He had no doubt, no hesitation, as to what he must do. He would go to Molly, he must see her at once, but not a word should pass his lips of what Edmund wanted him to say. Not a moment must be lost. Who might not betray her danger and destroy her opportunity? Molly must be brought to do this thing of herself without any admixture of fear, without any aim or object but to sacrifice all for what was right. He yearned with utter simplicity that this might be her way out. Let her do it for herself. Let her do it of herself, thought Mark—not because she is afraid, not because her vast possessions appear the least insecure. And the action would be far more noble just because, at the moment of renunciation, the world would, for the first time, suspect her guilt. To Mark it seemed now the crowning touch of mercy that the criminal should be allowed to drink deep of the chalice. "Her own affair"—that was what the dying mother had said of the unfortunate child to whom she offered so gross a temptation.
And in the depths of his mind there was the conviction that it was a particular truth as to this individual soul, that not only would the heroic be the only antagonist to the base, but that some such moral revolution alone could be the beginning of cleansing of what had become foul, and the driving out of the noxious and the vile.
It was in the evening, and Edmund was waiting in Rose's drawing-room until she should come back from a meeting of one of her charitable committees.
He was walking up and down the room with a face at once very grave and very alert. Even his carriage during the last few weeks had seemed to Rose to have gained in firmness and dignity, and perhaps she was right. Nor had she failed to notice that one or two small, straight pieces of grey hair could now be seen near the temples. He looked a little older, a little more brisk, a little more firm, and distinctly more cheerful since his reverses. It is no paradox to speak of cheerfulness in sorrow, or to say that the whole nature may be happier in grief than in the days of apparent pleasure. It is not only in those who have acquired deep religious peace that this may be true, for even in gaining energy and a balance in natural action, there may be happiness amidst pain.
Rose came in without seeing that anyone was in the room, and gave a start when she saw the tall figure by the window. The evening light showed him a little grey, a little worn in appearance, a little more openly kindly in the dark eyes. Something that she had fancied dim and clouded lately—only once ortwice, not always—now shone in his face with its full brightness.
"Has anything happened, Edmund? Have you come to tell me anything?"
He came across the room to her and took her hand in silence, and then said:
"You look tired. Have you had tea?"
"Oh, never mind tea," she answered. "Do tell me! Seriously, something has happened?"
"It is nothing of any consequence—nothing that need disturb you in the least. It is only about my own stupid affairs, and, on the whole, it is very good news. I have just come from the Foreign Office, and they have told me there that I am to have that job in India, and that the sooner I am ready to start the better."
As he spoke he turned from her with a sudden, quick hurt in his heart. It was, after all, only of great importance to himself. He knew she would be kindly glad that he had got the post he wanted. Had she not always urged him to some real work? Had she not pressed him again and again during the last four years, consciously and unconsciously, to bring out all his talents and to do a man's work in a man's way? So she would be simply glad, and she would wave him "God speed," and would, no doubt, pray for him at those innumerable services she attended, and write to him long, gentle, feminine letters full of details about all sorts of matters, good or indifferent, and she would ask about his health and press him to take care of himself and tell him of any word that was spoken kindly of him here in England. And she would somehow manage to know, or think she knew, that he was doing great things in the East. And so,no doubt, in the two years in which he was away there would be no apparent break in this very dear intimacy. But what, in reality, would he know of her inmost feelings, of her loneliness, of her sufferings, of any repentance that might come to her, any softening towards himself? He seemed to see all of the two years that were to come in a flash as he stood silent on one side of the neglected tea-table, and Rose stood silent, turning away from him on the other.
When he raised his eyes, he almost felt a surprise that the figure, a little turned away from him, was not dressed in a plain, white frock, and that the shadows and the flickering sunlight making its way through the mulberry leaves were not still upon her; for that was how, through life and in eternity, Rose would be present in the mind of her lover.
Time had gone; it seemed now as nothing. Whatever changes had come between, he felt as if he saw in the averted face that same expression of sorrowful denial and gentle resistance that had baffled him now for over twelve years. It was still that his soul asked something of this other purer, gentler, more unworldly, more loving soul, which she, with all her beneficence would not give him. He did no think of the impracticability of any question of marriage; he did not think in any definite sense of their relations as man and woman. At other times he had known so frequently just the overpowering wish for the possession of the woman he loved best, but now she stood to him as the history of his moral existence here below, and he felt as if, in missing her, he should miss the object and crown of his life.
At last silence became intolerable. He moved asthough he wanted to speak and could not, and then he said huskily, almost gruffly:
"It is not 'good-bye' to-day, of course," and then he laughed at the feebleness of his own words.
Rose turned to him at that, and he was not really surprised to see that the tears were flowing rapidly over her cheeks—tears so large that they splashed like big raindrops on the white hands which were clasped as they hung before her. But that made it no easier. He thought very little of those tears; he felt even a little bitter at their apparent bitterness. He hardened at the sight of those tears; they made him feel that he could leave her with more dignity, more firmness in his own mind, than he had ever thought would be possible.
"Vous pleurez et vous êtes 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 nonotion 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.
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 backgroundof 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 quitepossible) 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 youwould 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 itbefore!
"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.'
'Let him live his life out,Life will try his nerves.'
'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 beinga 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 Grossemight 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 £2000 invested at 3½ per cent. "£70 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 couldshe 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."
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 £2000 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 shoreWith not one thing that we have known before."
"Alone to land upon that shoreWith not one thing that we have known before."
"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, andin 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 £30 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 £30 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 cleanpensionin which Miss Carew had passed some weeks before coming to live with Molly in London. From thatpensionMolly could write the letters she felt physically incapable of writing to-night. The only note she determined to write at once was toCarey, 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 thepensionat 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.
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