As Edmund Grosse was shown up-stairs to Lady Rose Bright, he passed a
young clergyman coming down. He found Rose standing with a worried look
in the middle of the room.
"Edmund! how nice," she said gently.
"What has that fellow been worrying you about?"
"It isn't his fault, poor man," said Rose, "only it's so sad. He has had
at last to close his little orphanage. You see, we used to give him £100
a year, and after David died I had to write and tell him that I couldn't
go on, and it has been a hard struggle for him since that. I don't think
he meant it, but when he came and saw this house"--she waved her hands
round the very striking furniture of the room--"I think he wondered, or
perhaps it was my fancy. You see, Edmund, I don't know how it is, but
I've overdrawn again. What do you think it can be? The housekeeping
comes to so little; I have only four servants, and----"
She paused, and there were tears in her eyes. She was wondering where
the orphans would go to. It was not like Rose to give way like this and
to have out her troubles at once. The fact was that she was finding how
much harder it is to help in good works without money than with. If she
had started without money it would have been different, but to try to
work with people who used to find her large subscriptions a very great
help and now had to do without them, was depressing. She had to make
constant efforts to believe that they were all just the same to her as
they had been in the past.
"How much did you give that youth instead of the £100?"
"Only ten, Edmund." There was a note of pleading in her voice.
"And you will have dinner up here on a tray as there is no fire in the
dining-room?"
"Well, what does it matter?"
"And how much will there be to eat on the tray?"
"Oh! much more than I can possibly eat."
"Because it will be some nasty warmed-up stuff washed down by tea. It's
of no use trying to deceive me: I've heard that the cook is seventeen,
and an orphan herself."
"But what will those other orphans have for dinner?"
"Now, Rose, will you listen to common sense. How many orphans has that
sandy-faced cleric on his hands?"
"There were only four left."
"Then I'll get those four disposed of somehow, if you will do something
I want you to do."
"What is it? But, Edmund, you know you have done too much for my poor
works already; I can't let you."
"Never mind, if you will do what I want."
"What is it?"
"Come right away in the yacht, you and your mother, and we'll go
wherever you like."
Joy sprang into her face, but then he saw doubt, and he knew with a deep
pang what the doubt meant. He wished to move, oh! so carefully now, or
he would lose all the ground he had lately gained.
"What scruples have you now?" he asked laughing. "What a genius you have
for them! Look here, Rose, it's common sense; you want a change, you can
let the house up to Easter. Besides, you know what it would do for your
mother; see what she thinks."
"It's all so quick," gasped Rose, laughing.
"Well, then, don't settle at once if you like; but not one penny for
those poor dear little orphans if you don't come. And now, I want to say
something else quick, because the tray with the chops and the cheese and
the tea will all be getting greasy if I don't get out of the way. Do you
know I think I was very hard on that Miss Dexter. I remember I solemnly
warned you not to have to do with her. You were quite right: it is not
healthy to think so much of that will; it poisons the mind. I am quite
sure that poor thing is not to blame."
His tone was curiously eager, it seemed to Rose; and then he began
discussing Miss Dexter, and said he thought that at moments she was
beautiful. Presently he remembered the tray that was coming, and saw
that the hour was half-past seven, and hurried away. She fancied that
she missed in his "Good-night" the sort of gentle affectionateness he
had shown her so freely of late.
She went up to her room to prepare for the meal he had disparaged so
much, looking tired. She smiled rather sadly when she had to own to
herself that the tray of supper was almost exactly what Edmund had
foretold. She dismissed it as soon as she could, and then drew a chair
up to the fire and took up a book. But it soon dropped on to her knee.
She had been trying not to give way to depression all that day. But it
was very difficult. There seemed to be so little object in life. She
felt as if everything had got into a fog; there was no one at home to
whom her going and coming mattered any more than the meals mattered.
And, meanwhile, she was being sucked into a world of committees and
sub-committees. She had thought that, as she could no longer give money,
she would give her time and her work; so, when asked, she had joined
many things just because she was asked, and she was a little hazy as to
the objects of some of them. Having been afraid that she would not have
enough to do, she found now that she had already more than she could
manage. And everything seemed so difficult. During the past week she had
twice taken the wrong bus, and come home very wet and tired. Another day
she had taken the wrong train when coming back from South London, and
had found herself at Baker Street instead of Sloane Square. These things
tried her beyond reason with the sense of loneliness, of incapacity, of
uncertainty. Then she had thought that, with very quiet black clothes,
she could go anywhere, but her mother had discovered that she sometimes
came back from the Girls' Club in Bermondsey as late as ten o'clock at
night, and there had been a fuss. Rose had forgotten the fact that she
was very fair and very good to look at; she found, half-consciously,
that her beauty had its drawbacks. There did not seem to be any reason
why she should spare her strength in any way. So, a little wan and
tremulous, she appeared at the early morning service, and then, after
walking back in any weather, there was a dull little breakfast, and soon
after that she got to work. Every post brought begging letters in
crowds, and these hurt her dreadfully. It was her wish to live for God
and the poor, and every day she had to write: "Lady Rose Bright much
regrets that she is quite unable," etc., etc. Then, after those, she
would begin another trial--begging letters to her rich friends to help
her poor ones, or letters trying to get interest and influence. The
difficulties and the confusion of life in the modern Babylon weighed on
Rose in something of the same way that they tried Mark Molyneux. It
seemed to her that it must be safe and right to be doing so many
disagreeable things and to be very tired, too tired to enjoy pleasures
when they came her way. Constantly, one person was trying to throw
pleasures in her way; one person reminded old friends that Rose was in
town; one person suggested that Rose Bright, although she did not go to
parties, might come in to hear some great musician at a friend's house;
one person wanted to know her opinion on the last book; one person tried
to find out when he could take her anywhere in his motor. And this very
morning Rose had asked herself if this one friend ought to be allowed to
do all these things? Was she sure that she was quite fair to Edmund
Grosse?
It had been a day of fears and scruples. She had been unnerved when the
clergyman had called just to let her realise that the withdrawal of her
subscription had, in the end, meant the collapse of his little
orphanage; and when she was breaking down under this, Edmund had come
in, and how soothed and comforted she had felt by his presence! And
then the joy of his proposal as to the yacht! Her pulses beat with
delight; she felt a positive hunger for blue skies, blue water, blue
shores; a longing to get away from cares and muddles and badly-done jobs
and being misunderstood. Was it not horribly selfish, horribly cowardly?
Was it not the longing to stifle the sounds of pain, to shut her eyes to
the gloom of the misery about her, to shut her mind to the effort to
understand what was of practical good, and what was merely quack in the
remedies offered? Still, she realised to-night that she must get some
sort of rest; that part of all this gloom was physical. She would
understand and feel things more rightly if she went away for a bit.
But could she, ought she, to go away on Edmund's yacht?
Could Rose honestly feel quite sure that all his kindness meant nothing
more? She had never since she was eighteen, and wearing her first long
skirt, heard from him any word that need mean more than cousinly
affection. He had contrived after that Easter visit to Groombridge to
make her feel that she had been foolish and self-conscious in trying not
to be alone with him. For many months now she had felt absolutely at her
ease in his company. It seemed to be only to-day that this thought had
come back to trouble her. She did not want to be disturbed with such
notions; they would spoil their friendship. And he could not be feeling
like that; he was always so cool, so untroubled. Why to-night, just as
he was waiting to know if she would come on the yacht or not, he had
talked much more warmly of Miss Dexter than seemed quite natural!
Faintly she felt that it might be good for him if they went on the
yacht, she and her mother. They would be better for Edmund than some of
the people he might otherwise ask; he was not always wise as to his lady
friends. And it would be so good for Lady Charlton, and so good, too,
for those four orphans. And where should they go? It did not matter much
where they went if they only gained light and colour and rest. The
artist was strong in Rose at that moment. She looked at one or two old
guide-books till it was bed-time. Then, the last thing at night, a
strange gust of thought came upon her just after her prayers.
Could she, would she, ever marry again? She knelt on at the _priedieu_
with her fair head bowed, and then there came over her a strong sense of
the impossibility of it. The shock she had had was too great, too
lasting in its effects. She did not know it was that, she did not tell
herself that once humiliated, once misled, she could not trust again.
She did not say that the past married life which she had made so full of
duty, so full of reverence as almost to deceive herself while she lived
it, had been desecrated, polluted and had made her shrink unutterably
from another married life.
A young widow, sometimes, when drawing near to a second marriage,
suddenly realises it to be impossible because the past asserts its
tyrannous claim upon her heart. What had appeared to be a dead past is
found to be both alive and powerful. But with Rose it was not simply her
heart; it was her nature as a woman that refused. That nature had been
hurt to the very quick, humbled and brought low once. Surely it was
enough!
CHAPTER XX
THE HEIRESS OF MADAME DANTERRE
For about a week after the evening on which she had received her
mother's letter and Edmund Grosse had been to see her, Molly Dexter
stayed at home from four o'clock till seven o'clock and wore beautiful
tea-gowns. She had a very small list of people to whom she was always at
home written on a slate, but one by one they had been reduced in number.
Now there were five--Father Molyneux, who never came except by
appointment; Sir Edmund Grosse; and three ladies who happened to be
abroad for the winter.
The week was from a Friday to a Thursday, and on the Thursday several
things happened to Molly. It was a brilliant day, and although those
evenings from four till seven when nobody came were sorely trying, she
was in very good spirits. A friend coming out of church the day before
had told her that she had met Sir Edmund Grosse at a country house.
"He said such pretty things about you," purred the speaker, a nice newly
"come out" girl who admired Molly very much.
But the main point to Molly had been the fact that Edmund had been away
from London. Surely he would come directly now! She seemed to hear,
constantly ringing in her ears, the voice in which he had asked if he
might "come again very soon."
Thursday had been a good day altogether, for Molly had skated at
Prince's and come home with a beautiful complexion to be "At Home" to
the privileged from four till seven. She got out of her motor, and was
walking to the lift when it came whizzing down from above, and the
little friend who had said the nice things yesterday stepped out of it,
looking very bright.
"Oh, Miss Dexter," she said, "may I come up again and tell you my good
news?" Molly took her kindly by the arm and drew her into the lift
again, and they went up. But she hoped the girl would not stay. She
wanted to be quite alone, so that if anybody came who mattered very much
they would not be disturbed.
"Well, what's the good news?"
Molly looked brilliant as she stood smiling in the middle of the room.
"Well, it isn't a bit settled yet, but I met Sir Edmund Grosse at
luncheon, and he asked me if mother would let me go on his yacht to
Cairo. Lady Rose Bright is going and Lady Charlton, and he said they all
wanted something very young indeed to go with them, so they thought I'd
better come, and his nephew Jimmy, too. Wasn't it _awfully_ kind of
him?"
Molly turned and poked the fire.
"When do they go?" she asked.
"Sir Edmund starts to-morrow, but Lady Rose and Lady Charlton will
follow in about ten days. They will join the yacht at Marseilles, and I
should go with them. Do you think mother will let me go, Miss Dexter?"
Miss Dexter looked down.
"Why should your mother object?" she said.
"But it's so sudden."
"Yes, it's very sudden," said Molly, in a low voice.
"I can hardly keep quiet; I don't know how to get through the time till
six o'clock, and mother can't be at home till then."
Molly turned back into the room; her face was very white. There were
white dents in her nostrils, and there was a bitter smile on her lips.
Whatever she might have said was stopped in the utterance. The
parlourmaid had come into the room, and now, coming up to Molly, said in
a low voice:
"There is a gentleman asking if Miss Dexter will see him on important
business; he says he is a doctor, and that he has come from Italy."
Molly frowned.
"What is his name?"
"It sounded like Laccaroni, ma'am."
"Show him up."
"Well, I'm off," said the young visitor, and, still entirely absorbed in
her own affairs, she took Molly's limp hand and left the room.
A spare man with a pale face and rather good eyes was announced as "Dr.
Laccaroni." "Larrone," he corrected gently. He carried a small old tin
despatch box, and looked extremely dusty.
"I am the bearer of sad tidings," he said in English, with a fair
accent, in a dry staccato voice. "It was better not to telegraph, as I
was to come at once."
"You attended my mother?"
"Yes, until two nights ago. That was the end."
"Did she suffer?"
"For a few hours, yes; and there was also some brain
excitement--delirium. In an interval that appeared to be lucid (but I
was not quite sure) she told me to come to you, mademoiselle, quite as
soon as she was dead, and she gave me money and this little box to bring
to you. She said more than once, 'It shall be her own affair.' The key
is in this sealed envelope. Afterwards twice she spoke to me: 'Don't
forget,' and then the rest was raving. But the last two hours were
peace."
"And where is my mother to be buried?"
"Madame will be cremated, and her ashes placed in an urn in the garden,
mademoiselle, in a fine mausoleum, with just her name, 'Justine,' and
the dates--no more. Madame told me that these were her wishes."
"Do you know what is in this box?"
"Not at all, and I incline to think there may be nothing: the mind was
quite confused. And yet I could only calm her by promising to come at
once, and so I came, and if mademoiselle will permit I should like to
retire to my hotel."
"Can I be of any use to you?"
"Not at all: the money for the journey was more than enough."
Molly was left alone, and she gave orders that no one, without
exception, was to be admitted. Then she walked up and down the room in a
condition of semi-conscious pain.
At first it seemed as if Dr. Larrone's intelligence had not reached her
brain at all. The only clear thing in her mind at that moment was the
thought that Edmund was going away at once with Lady Rose Bright. The
disappointment was in proportion to the wild hopes of the last week,
only Molly had not quite owned to herself how intensely she had looked
forward to his next coming. It was true he might still come and see her
before he started, but if he came it could not be what she had meant it
to be. If he had meant what Molly dreamed of, could he have gone off
suddenly on this yachting expedition? She knew the yachting was not
thought of when she had seen him, for he told her then that he meant to
stay in London for some weeks. But as her thoughts grew clearer, what
was most horrible to Molly was a gradual dawning of common daylight into
the romance she had been living in for months. For, looking back now,
she could not feel sure that any of her views of Edmund's feelings
towards herself had been true. It was a tearing at her heart's most
precious feelings to be forced to common sense, to see the past in the
matter-of-fact way in which it might appear to other people. And yet,
Adela Delaport Green had expected him to propose even in the season, but
then, what might not the Adela Delaport Greens of life suspect and
expect without the slightest foundation? Could Molly herself say firmly
and without delusion that Edmund had treated her badly? How she wished
she could! She would rather think that he had been charmed away by
hostile influence, or even that he had deliberately played with her than
feel it all to have been her own vain fancy! It was agony to her to feel
that she had without any excuse, set up an idol in her sacred places,
and woven about him all the dreams and loves of her youth. It must be
remembered not only that it was the first time that Molly had loved in
the ordinary sense of the word, but it was absolutely the first time
that she had ever felt any deep affection for any human being whatever.
And now a great sense of abandonment was on her; the old feeling of
isolation, of being cast out, that she had had all her life, was
frightfully strong. Edmund had left her; he had deceived her, played
with her, she told herself, deluded her; and now her mother's death
brought home all the horror, the disgrace, which that mother's life had
been for Molly. An outcast whom no one cared for, no one loved, no one
wanted. The new gentleness of the past weeks, the new softness, all the
high and sacred thoughts that had seemed to have taken possession of her
inner life, were gone at this moment. Her feeling now was that, if she
were made to suffer, she could at least make others suffer too.
She had thrown off her furs in walking up and down, and they had fallen
on to the box which Dr. Larrone had brought. Presently they slipped to
the floor, and showed the small, black tin despatch box.
Molly broke the seal of the envelope, took out the key, and opened the
box, half mechanically and half as seeking a distraction.
Inside she found two or three packets of old yellow letters, a few faded
photographs, and a tiny gold watch and chain; and underneath these
things a large registered envelope addressed to Madame Danterre.
Molly was not acutely excited about this box. She knew that her mother's
will would be at the lawyer's. She had no anxiety on this point, but
there is always a strange thrill in touching such things as the dead
have kept secret. Even if they have bid us do it, it seems too bold.
Molly shrank from what that box might contain, what history of the past
it might have to tell, but she did not think it would touch her own
life. Therefore, thinking more of her own sorrow than anything else,
Molly drew two papers out of the registered envelope, and then shrank
back helplessly in her chair. She had just seen that the larger of the
two enclosures was a long letter beginning: "Dearest Rose." She
hesitated, but only for a moment, and then went on reading.
"I trust and hope that if I die in to-morrow's battle this will reach
you safely. I have really no fear whatever of the battle, and after it
is over I shall have a good opportunity of putting this paper into a
lawyer's hands at Capetown."
Then she hastily dropped the letter and took up a small paper that had
been in the same envelope. A glance at this showed that it was the "last
will and testament of Sir David Bright."
It was evidently not drawn up by a lawyer, but it seemed complete and
had the two signatures of witnesses; Lord Groombridge and Sir Edmund
Grosse were named as executors. It was dated on board ship only a few
weeks before Sir David Bright died.
At first Molly was simply bewildered. She read, as if stupefied, the
perfectly simple language in which Sir David had bequeathed all and
everything he possessed to his wife, Lady Rose Bright, subject to an
annual allowance of £1000 to Madame Danterre during her life-time. It
was so brief and simple that, if Molly had not known how simple a will
could be, she might have half doubted its legality. As it was she was
not aware of the special facilities in the matter of will-making that
are allowed to soldiers and sailors when on active service. The
absolutely amazing thing was that the paper should have been in Madame
Danterre's possession.
Molly turned to the letter, and read it with absorbed attention.
The General wrote on the eve of the battle, without the least anxiety as
to the next day. But he already surmised the vast proportions that the
war might assume, and he intended to send the enclosed will with this
letter to the care of a lawyer in Capetown for fear of eventualities.
Then, next day, as Molly knew, he had been killed.
But Molly did not know that to the brother officer who had been with him
in his last moments Sir David had confided two plain envelopes, and had
told him to send the first--a blue one--to his wife, and the second--a
white one--to Madame Danterre, faintly murmuring the names and addresses
in his dying voice. The same officer was himself killed a week later. If
he had lived and had learned the disposal of Sir David's fortune, it
might possibly have occurred to him that he had put the addresses on the
wrong letters. But he was sure at the time that Sir David's last words
had been: "Remember, the white one for my wife." And perhaps he was
right, for it is not uncommon for a man even in the full possession of
all his faculties (which Sir David was not) to make a mistake just
because of his intense anxiety to avoid making it. As it was, knowing
nothing whatever of the circumstances, the will and the letter seemed to
Molly to come out of a mysterious void.
To any one with an unbiassed mind who was able to study it as a human
document, the letter would have been pathetic enough. It was the
revelation, the outpouring of what a man had suffered in silence for
many long years. It seemed at moments hardly rational. The sort of
unreasonable nervous terror in it was extraordinary. Molly read most of
the real story in the letter, but not quite all. There had been a
terrible sense of a spoilt life and of a horrible weakness always coming
between him and happiness. The shadow of Madame Danterre had darkened
his youth; a time of folly--and so little pleasure in that folly, he
moaned--had been succeeded by an actual tyranny. The claim that she was
his wife had begun early after her divorce from Mr. Dexter, and it
seemed extraordinary that he had not denied it at once. David Bright had
been taken ill with acute fever in Mrs. Dexter's house almost
immediately after that event. Mrs. Dexter declared that he had gone
through the form of marriage with her before witnesses, and she declared
also that she had in her possession the certificate of marriage. The
date she gave for the marriage was during the days when he had been down
with the fever, and he never could remember what had happened.
"God knows," he wrote, "how I searched my memory hour by hour, day by
day, but the blank was absolute. I don't to this hour know what passed
during those days."
While still feeble from illness he had given her all the money he could
spare, and for years the blackmail had continued. Then, at last, after
he had been a year in England, the worm had turned.
"I dared her to do her worst. I declared, what I am absolutely convinced
to have been the case, that the marriage certificate she had shown me
was a forgery, and I concluded that if she proved the marriage by
forgery and perjury, I should institute proceedings for divorce on the
grounds of her subsequent life. I got no answer, and for three years
there was total silence. Then came a letter from a friend saying that
Madame Danterre, who had taken her maiden name, was dying and wished me
to know that she forgave me." With this note had been sent to him a
diamond ring he had given her in the first days of her influence over
him. He sent it back, but months later he got it again, returned by the
Post Office authorities, as no one of the name he had written to could
be found.
Then came a solemn declaration that he had never doubted of Madame
Danterre's death.
"I thought that to have spoilt my youth was enough; but she was yet to
destroy my best years. Ah! Rose," he wrote, "if I had loved you less it
would have been more bearable. I met you; I worshipped you; won you.
Then, after a brief dream of joy, the cloud came down, and my evil
genius was upon me. I don't think you were in love with me, my beloved,
but it would have come even after you had found out what a commonplace
fellow it was whom you thought a hero; it would have come. You must have
loved me out of the full flow of your own nature if I had not been
driven to cowardice and deception."
Evidently Madame Danterre had had a kind of almost uncanny power of
terrifying the soldier. He had been a good man when she first met him,
and he had been a good man after that short time of mad infatuation. He
was by nature and training almost passionately respectable; he was at
length happily married; but this horror of an evil incident in the past
had got such a hold on his nerves that when he met Madame Danterre (whom
he had believed to be dead) coming out of a theatre in London, the hero
of the Victoria Cross, of three other campaigns, perhaps the bravest
man in England, fainted when he saw her. Without doubt it was the
publication of Mr. John Steele's will leaving his enormous fortune to
Sir David Bright that had resuscitated Madame Danterre.
From the moment of that shock David Bright had probably never been
entirely sane on the subject. The resurrection of Madame Danterre had
seemed to him preternatural and fateful. The woman had become to him
something more or something less than human, something impervious to
attack that could not be dealt with in any ordinary way.
From that time there had grown up an invisible barrier between him and
his wife. He found himself making silly excuses for being out at quite
natural times. He found himself getting afraid of her, and building up
defences, growing reserved and absurdly dignified, trying to cling to
the pedestal of the elderly soldier as he could not be a companion.
Madame Danterre had gone back to Florence, fat with blackmail, and then
had begun a steady course of persecution.
Step by step he had sunk lower down, knowing that he was weakening his
own case most miserably if it should ever become public. Nothing
satisfied her, although she received two thousand a year regularly,
until the will was drawn up, which left everything to her except an
allowance of £800 a year to Rose.
Once a year for three years Madame Danterre had visited London, and had
generally contrived that Sir David should be conscious of the look in
her astonishing eyes, which Sir Edmund had likened to extinct volcanoes,
at some theatre, or in the park, once at least every season. Evidently
that look had never failed. It touched the exposed nerve in his
mind--exposed ever since the time of illness and strain when he was
young and helpless in India. It was evident that he had felt that any
agony was bearable to shield Rose from the suffering of a public
scandal. If he could only have brought himself to consult one of the
Murrays something might have been done. As it was, he had recourse to
subterfuge. He assured Madame Danterre annually, in answer to her
insisting on the point, that no other will had ever been signed by him,
but he always carried a will with him ready to be signed. There was much
of self-pity perhaps in the letter, there was the plaint of a wrecked
life, but there was still more of real delicate feeling for Rose, of
intense anxiety to shield her, of poignant regret for "what might have
been" in their home life. The man had been of a wholesome nature; his
great physical courage was part of a good fellow's construction. But he
had been taught to worship a good name, an unsullied reputation, and to
love things of good repute too much, perhaps, for the sake of their
repute, as he could not venture to risk the shadow for the reality. The
effect of reading Sir David's last letter to Rose on an unbiassed reader
of a humane turn of mind would have been an intensity of pity, and a
sigh at the sadness of life on this planet.
Molly was passionately biassed, and as much of Sir David's story as
reached her through the letter was to her simply a sickening revelation
from a cowardly traitor of his own treason through life, and even up to
the hour of death. Her mother had been basely deceived; for his sake she
had been divorced, and he had denied the marriage that followed. Of
course, it was a marriage, or he would never have been so frightened.
Then her mother, thus deserted, young and weak, had gone astray, and he
had defended himself by threatening divorce if she proclaimed herself
his wife. Every word of the history was interpreted on the same lines.
And then, last of all, this will was sent to her mother. Was it a tardy
repentance? Had he, perhaps when too weak for more, asked some one to
send it to Madame Danterre that she might destroy it? If so, why had she
not destroyed it? Why, if it might honourably have been destroyed, send
to Molly now a will that, if proved, would make her an absolute pauper?
In plain figures Molly's fortune could not be less than £20,000 a year
if that paper did not exist, and would be under £80 a year if it were
valid.
Molly next seized on one of the old packets of letters in trembling hope
of some further light being thrown on the situation, but in them was
evidence impossible to deny that her mother had invented the whole story
of the marriage. Why Madame Danterre had not destroyed these letters was
a further mystery, except that, time after time, it has been proved that
people have carefully preserved evidence of their own crimes. Fighting
against it, almost crying out in agonised protest, Molly was forced to
realise the slow persevering cunning and unflinching cruelty with which
her mother had pursued her victim. It was an ugly story for any girl to
read if the woman had had no connection with her. It seemed to cut away
from Molly all shreds of self-respect as she read it. She felt that the
daughter of such a woman must have a heritage of evil in her nature.
The packet of old letters finished, there was yet something more to
find. Next came a packet of prescriptions and some receipts from shops.
Under these were the faded photographs of several men and women of whom
she knew nothing. Lastly, there was half a letter written to Molly dated
in August and left unfinished and without a signature:
"CARISSIMA:
"I am far from well, but I believe Dr. Larrone has found out the
cause and will soon put things right again. If you ever hear
anything about me from Dr. Larrone you can put entire confidence in
him. I have found out now why Sir Edmund Grosse has tried to see
me. He is possessed with the absurd idea that I have no right to
Sir David Bright's fortune, although he does not venture to call in
question the validity of the will which left that fortune to me.
Dr. Larrone has certain proof that Grosse employs a detective here
to watch this house. I have also heard that he is in love with poor
David's widow, and hence I suppose this _trop de zèle_ on her
behalf. As he cannot get at me he is likely to try to become
intimate with you, so I warn you to avoid him now and in future."
That was all.
Molly sat staring vacantly in front of her, almost unconscious of her
surroundings from the intensity of pain. Each item in the horror of the
situation told on her separately, but in no sequence--with no coherence.
Shame, "hopes early blighted, love scorned," kindness proved treason,
the prospect of complete and dishonourable poverty, a poverty which
would enrich her foes. And all this was mixed in her mind with the
dreadful words from the old letters that seemed to be shouted at her.
Miss Carew, coming in at dinner-time, was horror-struck by what she saw.
Molly was sitting on the floor surrounded by letters and papers, moaning
and biting her hand. The gong sounded, the parlourmaid announced dinner,
and Molly gathered up her papers, locked them in the box, fastened the
key on to her chain--all in complete silence--and got up from the floor.
She then walked straight into the dining-room in her large hat and
outdoor clothes without speaking.
And without a word the terrified Miss Carew went with her, and tried to
eat her dinner.
Molly ate a very little of each thing that was offered to her, taking a
few mouthfuls voraciously, and then quite suddenly, as she was offered a
dish of forced asparagus, she went into peal after peal of ringing,
resounding laughter. "I should like you to have asparagus at every
meal," she said, and then again came peal after peal--each a quite
distinct sound. It was dreadful to hear, and Miss Carew and the servant
were terrified. It was the laughter, not of a maniac, not of pure
unreasoning hysteria, not quite of a lost soul. It suggested these
elements, perhaps, but it was chiefly a nervous convulsion at an
overpowering perception of the irony in the heart of things.
The hysterical fit lasted long enough for Miss Carew to insist on a
doctor, and Molly did not resist. When he came she implored him to give
her a strong sleeping-draught. She kept Miss Carew and the maid fussing
about her, in a terror of being alone, until the draught was at last
sent in by a dilatory chemist. She then hurried them away, drank the
medicine, and set herself to go to sleep. The draught acted soon, as
Miss Carew learnt by listening at the door and hearing the deep, regular
breathing. But the effects passed off, and Molly sat up absolutely
awake at one o'clock in the morning. She lay down again and tried to
force herself to sleep by sheer will power, but she soon realised the
awful impotence of desire in forcing sleep.
At last, horror of her own intensely alert faculties, blinded by
darkness, made her turn up the light. Instantly the sight of the
familiar room seemed unbearable, and she turned it down again. But again
the darkness was quite intolerable, and seemed to have a hideous life of
its own which held in it presences of evil. At one moment she breathed
in the air of the winter's night, shivering with cold; at the next she
was stifled for want of breath. So the light by the bed was turned on
again, and to get a little further from it Molly got up and slowly and
carefully put on her stockings and fur slippers, then opened a cupboard
and took out a magnificent fur cloak and wrapped herself in it. Then
suddenly one aspect of the position became concrete to her imagination.
She knew that the cloak was bought with ill-gotten money. Her enormous
allowance after she came of age, even the expenses of her
education--Miss Carew's salary among other things--had been won by
fraud. And now, oh! why, why had not her miserable mother spoken the
truth when she got the will, or why had she not destroyed it? Why had
she left it to Molly to put right all this long, long imposture, and to
reveal to the world the story of her mother's crime? It seemed to Molly
as if she were looking on at some other girl's life, and as if she were
considering it from an external point of view. The sleeping-draught had,
no doubt, excited still further the terrible agitation of her nerves,
and ideas came to her as if they had no connection with her own
personality.
Wicked old woman, dying in Florence! How cruel those words were: "Let it
be her own affair"! Her last act to send those papers to the poor girl
she had deserted as a baby, and refused even to see as a woman. "Let it
be her own affair." Her own affair to choose actual poverty and a
terrible publicity as to the past instead of a great fortune and silence
as to her mother's guilt. "Let it be her own affair" to enrich her
enemies, to give a fortune to the woman who would scorn her! Would the
man who had pretended to be her friend, and who had been pursuing her
mother with detectives all the time, would he some day talk pityingly of
her with his wife, and say she "had really behaved very well, poor
thing"?
Suddenly Molly stopped, full of horror at a new thought. Oh! she must
make things safe and sure, or--good God!--what might not her mother's
daughter be tempted to do? A deep blush spread over her face and neck.
She moved hastily to the door, and in a moment she was in Miss Carew's
room.
"I want to speak to you; I want to tell you something," said Molly,
turning up the electric light as she spoke.
Miss Carew was startled out of a sweet sleep, and her first thought was
the one which haunted her whenever she was awakened at an untimely hour.
Her carefully-curled fringe was lying in the dressing-table drawer, and
Molly had never seen her without it!
"Yes, yes; in one moment," she answered fussily. "I will come to your
room in one minute."
Molly felt checked, and there had been something strange and unfamiliar
in Miss Carew's face. Suddenly she felt what it would be to tell Miss
Carew the truth--Miss Carew, who was now her dependent, receiving from
her £100 a year, would be shocked and startled out of her senses, and
might not take these horrible revelations at all kindly. It would,
anyhow, be such a reversal of their mutual positions as Molly could not
face. And by the time the chestnut hair tinged with grey had been pinned
a little crooked on Miss Carew's head, and she had knocked timidly at
Molly's door, she was startled and offended by the impatient,
overbearing tone of the voice that asked her to "go back to bed and not
to bother; it was nothing that mattered."
The night had got on further than Molly knew by that time, and she was
relieved to hear it strike four o'clock. She was astonished at noticing
that, while she had been walking up and down, up and down her room, she
had never heard the clock strike two or three. The fact of having spoken
to Miss Carew had brought her for the moment out of the inferno of the
last few hours, and the time from four o'clock to six was less utterly
miserable because worse had gone before it.
At six she called the housemaid, and kept her fussing about the room,
lighting the fire, and getting tea, so as not to be alone again. At
eight o'clock she sent for coffee and eggs, and the coffee had to be
made twice before she was satisfied with it. Then she suddenly said she
felt much better, and, having dressed much more quickly than usual, she
went out.
Molly had determined to confide the position to Father Molyneux. When
she got to the church in Kensington it was only to find that Father
Molyneux had gone away for some days.
That evening the doctor was again summoned, and told Miss Carew that he
had now no doubt that Miss Dexter was suffering from influenza, with
acute cerebral excitement, and the case was decidedly anxious.
"He might have found out that it was influenza last night," said Miss
Carew indignantly, "and I even told him the housemaid had just had
influenza! Molly simply caught it from her, as I always thought she
would."
BOOK III
CHAPTER XXI
AN INTERLUDE OF HAPPINESS
An interlude of happiness, six weeks of almost uninterrupted enjoyment,
followed for Rose after she went on board Sir Edmund's yacht.
Edmund Grosse had most distinctly made up his mind that during those
weeks he would not betray any ulterior motive whatever. They were all to
be amused and to be happy. There is no knowing when an interlude of
happiness will come in life; it is not enough to make out perfect plans,
the best fail us. But sometimes, quite unforeseen, when all the weather
signs are contrary, there come intervals of sunshine in our hearts, in
spite of any circumstances and the most uninteresting surroundings.
Harmony is proclaimed for a little while, and we wonder why things were
black before, and have to remember that they will be black again. But
when such a truce to pain falls in the happiest setting, and the most
glorious scenery, then rejoice and be glad, it is a real truce of God.
So did Rose night by night rejoice without trembling. It wanted much
skill on Edmund's part to ward off any scruples, any moments of
consciousness. He showed great self-command, surprising self-discipline
in carrying out his tactics. There were moments when their talk had
slid into great intimacy, when they were close together in heart and in
mind, and he slipped back into the commonplace only just in time. There
were moments, especially on the return journey, when he could hardly
hide his sense of how gracious and delicious was her presence, how acute
her instincts, how quaintly and attractively simple her mind, how big
her spiritual outlook. But before she could have more than a suspicion
of his thoughts Edmund would make any consciousness seem absurd by a
comment on the doings of the very young people on board.
"The child does look happy," he said in his laziest voice one evening
when he knew his look had been bent for a rashly long moment on Rose.
"Happy and pretty," he murmured to himself, and he watched his youngest
guest with earnestness. Then he sat down near Rose on a low deck-chair,
and put away the glasses he held in his pocket. "I'm not sure I don't
get as much pleasure out of the hazy world I see about me as you
long-sighted people do; the colours are marvellous." Rose looked at him
in surprise.
"But Edmund, don't you see more than haze?"
"Oh, yes, I can see a foreground, and then the rest melts away. I don't
know what is meant by a middle distance--that's why I can't shoot."
Rose sat up with an eager look on her face. "I never knew that; I only
thought you did not care for shooting."
There was a silence of several minutes, and neither looked at the other.
At last Edmund rose and went to the side of the boat and looked over at
the water, and then, turning half-way towards her, said: "Why does it
startle you so much?"
"Oh, I don't know."
"But you do know perfectly well."
"Indeed, Edmund." Her face was flushed and her voice a little tremulous.
"You shall tell me." He spoke more imperiously than he knew.
"I can't, indeed I can't."
"No," he said; "it would be a difficult thing to say, I admit."
"Couldn't we read something?" said Rose.
"No, no use at all. I am going to tell you why you are so glad I am
short-sighted."
"But I am not glad."
"I repeat that you are, and this is the reason why."
"You shall not say it," said Rose, now more and more distressed and
embarrassed.
"It's because you never knew before why I did not volunteer for the war,
that is why you are so glad." "Yes," he thought in anger, "she has had
this thing against me all the time; it is one of the defences she has
set up." But he was hurt all the same--hurt and angry; he wanted to
punish her. "So all the time you have thought this of me?"
"No, indeed, indeed, Edmund, it wasn't that. I never meant that; I knew
you were never that, do believe me."
"Well, if I do believe you so far, what did you think?"
Rose let her book lie on her knee and leant over it with her hands
clasped. "I thought that perhaps," she faltered, "you had been too long
in the habit of doing nothing much, and that you had grown a little
lazy--at least, I didn't really think so, but that idea has struck me."
She came and stood by him. "Oh, Edmund, why do you make me say things
when I don't want to, when I hate saying them, when they are not really
true at all." She was deeply moved, and he felt that in one sense she
was in his power. He gave a bitter sigh.
"Can I make you say whatever I like?" Her face flushed and a different
look, one of fear he thought, came into her troubled eyes. "Then say
after me, 'I am very sorry I did not understand by intuition that you
were too blind to shoot the Boers, and that I was so silly as to think
for a moment that you had ever wasted your time or been the least little
bit lazy.'"
"No, I won't say anything at all"--she held out both hands to
him--"except what the children say, 'let us just go on with the game and
pretend that that part never happened.'"
And though Rose was still embarrassed, still inclined to fear she had
hurt him, what might have been a little cloud was pierced by sunshine.
"How ridiculously glad she is that I'm not a coward!" He, too, in spite
of annoyance, felt more hopeful than he had been for a long time.
At Genoa they got long delayed letters and papers. In one of these a
short paragraph announced the death of Madame Danterre. "It is
believed," were the concluding words, "that she has left her large
fortune to her daughter, Miss Mary Dexter." That was the first reminder
to Rose that the interlude of mere enjoyment was almost over. She was
not going to repine; it had been very good. Coming on board after
reading this with a quiet patient look, a look habitual to her during
the last two years, but which had faded under the sunshine of happy
days, Rose saw Edmund Grosse standing alone in the stern of the boat
with a number of letters in his left hand pressed against his leg,
looking fixedly at the water. The yacht was already standing out to sea,
but Edmund had not glanced a farewell at beautiful and yet prosperous
Genoa, a city that no modern materialism can degrade. Like a young bride
of the sea, she is decked by things old and things new, and her marble
palaces do not appear to be insulted by the jostling of modern commerce.
All things are kept fresh and pure on that wonderful coast. Something
had happened, of that Rose was sure; but what?
Edmund did not look puzzled; he was deciding no knotty question at this
moment. Nor did he look simply unhappy: she knew his expression when in
sorrow and when in physical pain or mere disgust. He looked intensely
preoccupied and very firm. Perhaps, she fancied, he too had a deep sense
of that passing of life, of something akin in the swift movement of the
water passing the yacht and the swift movement of life passing by the
individual man. Was he, perhaps, feeling how life was going for him and
for Rose, and by the simple fact of its passing on while they were
standing passive their lives would be fixed apart?--passing, apart from
what might have been of joy, of peace, of company along the road? There
are moments when, even without the stimulus of passion, human beings
have a sort of guess at the possibilities of helping one another, of
giving strength, and gaining sweetness, that are slipping by. There are
many degrees of regret, between that of ships that pass in the night,
and that of those who have voyaged long together. There are passages of
pleasure sympathy, and passages of sympathy in fight, and passages of
mutual succour, and passages of intercourse when incapacity to help has
in itself revealed the intensity of good-will in the watcher. But
whenever the heart has been fuller than its words, and the will has been
deeper than its actions, there is this beauty of regret. There has been
a wealth of love greater than could be given or received--not the love
of passion, but the love of the little children of the human race for
one another. This regret is too grave to belong to comedy, and too happy
to belong to tragedy. Rose's heart was full with this sorrow, if it be a
real sorrow. These are the sorrows of hearts that are too great for the
occasions of life, whereas the pain is far more common of the hearts
that are not big enough for what life gives them of opportunity.
Rose was oppressed by feelings she could not analyse, a sense of
possibilities of what might have been after these perfect weeks
together. But her feelings were dreamy; she had no sense of concrete
alternative; she did not now--he had been too skilful--expect Edmund to
ask her, nor did she wish him to ask her, to draw quite close to him.
She only felt at the end of this interlude they had spent together a
suspicion of the infinite reach of the soul, and the soul not rebelling
against its bonds, but conscious of them while awaiting freedom.
"Only I discern infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
Such were the moments when a man might be pardoned if he called Rose's
beauty angelic--angelic of the type of Perugino's pictured angels, a
figure just treading on the earth enough to keep up appearances, but
whose very skirts float buoyantly in the fresh atmosphere of eternity.
They stood a few paces apart, Rose with her look bent vaguely towards
the shore, Edmund, still reading his letters, apparently unaware of her
presence. He was thus able to take a long exposure sun-picture of the
white figure on a sensitive memory that would prove but too retentive of
the impression.
But he had to speak at last. "Is it you?"
Edmund thought he spoke as usual, but there was a depth of pain and of
tenderness revealed in the face that usually betrayed so little. He held
out his hand unconsciously and then drew it back half closed, and looked
again at the flowing water. It was a moment of temptation, when love was
fighting against itself. Then, with the same half movement of the hand
towards her:
"I have had a bolt from the blue, Rose. That man, Hewitt, whom I trusted
as I would myself, has absconded. It is thought he has been playing
wildly with my money, and that this crisis in South America has been the
last blow. I shan't know yet if I am ruined completely or not."
"Oh, Edmund, how dreadful!"
"Don't pity me, dear, it's not worth while. It only means that one of
the unemployed will get to work at last. That is, if he can find a job.
But I must hurry home at once and leave you to follow. If I put back
into Genoa now I can leave by the night express. And you and your mother
had better go on to Marseilles in the yacht after you have dropped me."
CHAPTER XXII
SOMETHING LIKE EVIDENCE
Mr. Murray Junior's step sounded heavy, and his head was a little more
bent than usual, as he passed down the passage into his sanctum. The
snow, turning to rain and then reasserting itself and insisting that it
would be snow, was dreary enough already when the fog set in firmly and
without compromise. There was a good fire in the sanctum; the electric
light was on, and the clean sheet of blotting-paper, fresh every
morning, lay on the table.
But Mr. Murray, Junior, was struggling for a few moments to realize
where he was, for his mind was in such different surroundings. In his
thoughts it was June--not June sweltering in London, but June gone mad
with roses in a tiny Surrey garden; and with true realism his memory
chose just one rose-tree out of them all, which best implied the glory
of the others. And one branch of this tree was bent down by a girl's
hand; her arm, from which a cotton sleeve had fallen back, was
wonderfully white, and the roses wonderfully red.
And the office boy, slowly pulling off one damp, well-made boot and then
the other over the gouty toes, was the only person who noticed that "the
governor" was awfully down in the mouth.
But no one knew that in Mr. Murray Junior's pocket was a letter from a
great specialist, who had seen Mr. Murray Junior's wife the day
before,--and what that letter said has nothing to do with this story.
Sir Edmund called about mid-day, and noticed nothing unusual in the
heavy face; only it struck him that Murray was looking old, and he
wondered on which side of seventy the lawyer might be.
Grosse's visit was the first real distraction the older man had that
day. It was impossible for the solicitor not to be interested in the
probability that Edmund Grosse had lost a great fortune. The affair
teemed with professional interest, and then he liked the man himself. He
had a taste for the type, for the man who knows how to cut a figure in
the great world without being vulgar or ostentatious. He liked Edmund's
manner, his tact, his gift for putting people at their ease. Rumour said
that the baronet had shown pluck since the news had come, and had
behaved handsomely to underlings. Most men become agitated, irritable,
and even cruel when driven into such a position.
It never entered into Murray's imagination to appear to know that Edmund
had any cause for care: he was not his solicitor, and he knew that his
visitor had not come about his own affairs. But he could not conceal an
added degree of respect, and liking even, under the impenetrable manner
which hid his own aching sense of close personal suffering. Grosse
answered the firm hand-grip with a kindly smile.
"I only heard of Madame Danterre's death when I got to Genoa on our
return journey."
"And she died just before you left London," said Murray.
"Yes; I must have overlooked the paper in which it was announced,
although I thought I read up all arrears of news whenever we went into
port. I wonder no one mentioned it in Cairo; there were several people
there who seemed posted up in Lady Rose's affairs. What do you know
about Madame Danterre's will?"
"Very little but rumour; nothing is published. Miss Dexter was too ill
to attend to business until about two weeks ago; she only saw her lawyer
at the end of January. Anyhow, Madame Danterre having died abroad makes
delays in this sort of business. But I have been wanting to see you," he
said.
Something in his manner made Grosse ask him if he had news.
"Nothing very definite, but things are moving in your direction; and
something small, but solid, is the fact that old Akers's son, and the
other private, Stock, who witnessed some deed or other for Sir David,
are coming home. The regiment is on its way back in the _Jumna_."
Edmund, watching the strong, heavy face, could see that this interested
him less than something else as yet unexpressed.
Murray leant back in the round office chair, and crossed his legs in the
well of the massive table before him. Edmund bent forward, his face
sunburnt and healthy after the weeks on the yacht, but the eyes seemed
tired.
"I don't know that it comes to much," Murray went on slowly, "but three
days after Madame Danterre's death a foreigner asked to see me who
refused to give his name to my clerk. I had him shown in, and thought
him a superior man--not, perhaps, a gentleman, but a man with brains.
He asked in rather queer English whether I would object to giving him
all the information I could, without betraying confidence, as to Sir
David Bright and his wife. I thought for a moment that he was your
Florentine detective, but then I reflected that the detective would have
no object in disguising himself from me as he knew that you trusted me
entirely. I told my visitor that he might ask me any questions he liked,
and I can assure you he placed his shots with great skill. He wanted
first to know if there had been any scandal connected with their married
life, in order, of course, to find out why Sir David had not left his
money to Lady Rose; and whether no one had been disposed to dispute the
will. I let him see that the affair had been a nine days' wonder here,
and I gave him some notion of my own opinion of Madame Danterre. He did
not give himself away, and I thought he had some honest reason for
anxiety in the matter. Well! he left without letting me know his name or
address, but there is no doubt that he is Dr. Larrone. I wrote at once
to your detective, Pietrino, in Florence, and a letter from him crossed
mine saying that Dr. Larrone had left Florence within a few hours of
Madame Danterre's death, and that, by her desire, he had taken a small
box to Miss Dexter. There was evidently a certain sense of mystery and
excitement among the nurses and servants as to the box and the sudden
journey. It seems that Madame Larrone was angry at his taking this
sudden journey, and said to a friend that she only 'hoped he wouldn't
get his fingers burnt by meddling in other people's affairs.'
"Then Pietrino, in answering my letter, said that my description was
certainly the description of Larrone. He says the doctor is exceedingly
upright and sensitive as to his professional honour, and has been known
to refuse a legacy from a patient because he thought it ought not to
have been left out of the family. Since that, Pietrino has written that
Larrone is taking a long holiday, and that people are wondering if he
will have any scruples as to the large legacy that is said to have been
left to him by Madame Danterre. So it is pretty clear who my reticent
visitor was. Now, I don't know that we gain much from that so far, but I
think it may mean that Larrone could, if he would, tell some interesting
details. I will give you all Pietrino's letters, but I should just like
to run on with my own impressions from them first. It seems that, since
Madame Danterre's death, there has been a good deal of wild talk against
her in Florence, which was kept down by self-interest as long as she was
living and an excellent paying-machine. You will see, when you read the
gossip, that very little is to the point. But, on the other hand,
Pietrino has valuable information from one of the nurses. She is a young
woman who is disappointed, as she has had no legacy; evidently Madame
Danterre intended to add her name in the last codicil, but somehow
failed to do so. This woman is sure that Madame Danterre had an evil
conscience as to her wealth. She also said that she was always morbidly
anxious as to a small box. Once, when the nurse had reassured her by
showing her the box, which was kept in a little bureau by the bed, she
said, with an odd smile: 'If I believed in the devil I should be very
glad that I can pay him back all he lent me when I don't want it any
more.' At another time she asked for the box and took out some papers,
and told the nurse to light a candle close to her as she was going to
burn some old letters. Then she began to read a long, long letter, and
as she read, she became more and more angry until she had a sudden
attack of the heart. The nurse swept the papers into the box and locked
it up, knowing that she could do nothing to soothe the patient while
they were lying about. That night the doctors thought Madame Danterre
would die, but she rallied. She did not speak of the papers again until
some days later. The nurse described how, one evening, when she thought
her sleeping, she was surprised to find her great eyes fixed on the
candle in a sconce near the bed. 'The candle was burnt half way down,
but the paper was not burnt at all,' the nurse heard her whisper; 'I
shall not do it now. I cannot be expected to settle such questions while
I am ill. After all, I have always given her a full share; she can
destroy it herself if she likes, or she can give it all up to that
woman--it shall be her own affair.'
"She did not seem to know that she had been speaking aloud, and she
muttered a little more to herself and then slept.
"The nurse heard no further allusion to the box for weeks. She said the
old woman was using all her fine vitality and her iron will in fighting
death. Then came the last change, and her torpid calm turned into
violent excitement. While she thought herself alone with Dr. Larrone she
implored him to take the box to England the moment she died, and put it
into her daughter's hands. 'No one knows it matters,' she said more than
once. But when she found that he did not wish to go, and said it was
impossible for him to go at once, her entreaties were terrible. 'She had
always had her own way, and she had it to the end,' was the nurse's
comment.
"Dr Larrone, coming out of the room, realised that the nurse must have
known what passed, and told her he was glad she was there. He put a box
on a table with a little bang of impatience.
"'It's delirium, delusion, madness!' he said, 'but I've given my word. I
never hated a job more; she wouldn't have the morphia till I had taken
my oath I would go as soon as she was dead.'"
Grosse was absorbed by the pictures feebly conveyed through the nurse's
words, through the detective's letters, through the English lawyer's
translation and summary. He could supply what was missing. He had seen
Madame Danterre. He could so well imagine the frightful force of the
woman, a tyrant to the very last moment. He could guess, too, at the
reaction of those about her when once she was dead, and they were quite
out of her reach. There is always a reaction when feebler personalities
have to fill the space left by a tyrant. He could realise the buzz of
gossip, and the sense of courage with which servants and tradesmen would
make wild, impossible stories of her wicked life. He came back from
these thoughts with a certain shock when he found Murray saying:
"I can't say there is anything approaching to proof. But supposing, just
for the sake of supposing, that you were right in your wild guess as to
the will, then we should next go on to suppose that the real will was in
the box conveyed by Dr. Larrone to Miss Dexter."
Edmund's face was very dark, but he did not speak for some moments.
"No," he said, "she is incapable of such a crime. She would have given
it up at once."
"At once?" Murray said. "Miss Dexter was too ill to do anything at once.
She was down with influenza, of which she very nearly died, but she
pulled through, and then went away for a month. She only got back to
London two weeks ago. Her affairs are in the hands of a very respectable
firm. We know them, and they began this business with her a very short
time before she came up. Now Sir Edmund, think it well over. You may be
right in your opinion of this young lady, but just fancy the position.
There is a fortune of at least £20,000 a year on the one hand, and on
the other, absolute poverty. For do you suppose that, if it were in the
last will which Akers and Stock witnessed on board ship, and there were
any provision in it for Madame Danterre, Sir David Bright would have
left capital absolutely in her possession? No: the probability is--I am,
of course, always supposing your original notion to be true--that the
girl has this choice of immense wealth practically unquestioned by the
world which has settled down to the fact that Sir David left his money
to Madame Danterre; or, on the other hand, extreme poverty (she
inherited some £2,000 from her father) and public disgrace. Mind you,
she would have to announce that her mother was a criminal, and she
would, in this just and high-minded world of ours, pass under a cloud
herself. A few, only a very few, would in the least appreciate her
conduct."
Sir Edmund was miserably uncomfortable, intensely averse to the results
of what he had done. In drawing his mesh of righteous intrigue round the
mother he had never realised this situation. For the moment he wished
himself well out of it all.
"There is one other point," he said. "Are we quite sure that Dr. Larrone
did not know what was in the box? Is it not just possible that something
was taken out of it before it was given to Miss Dexter? He must have
known there was a large legacy to himself; it was against his interests
that Madame Danterre's will should be set aside. Also, it would not be a
very comfortable situation for him if it turned out that he had been the
intimate friend and highly-paid physician of a criminal."
"That last motive fits the character of the man, according to Pietrino,
better than the first," said Mr. Murray. "Well, we must see; we must
wait and see whether he accepts his legacy. But before that must come
the publication of Madame Danterre's will."
Edmund drove back from the city absorbed in the thought of Molly, in
comparing his different impressions of her at different stages of their
acquaintance. He had spoken so firmly and undoubtingly to Murray. His
first thought had been one of simple indignation, and yet--But no! he
remembered her simplicity in speaking of her mother's letter; he could
see her now with the gentle, pathetic look on her face as she told him
of her offering to go out to the wicked old woman, and how her poor
little advance had been rejected.
Edmund had thought it one of the advantages of the expedition on the
yacht that it would make it impossible for many weeks to call again at
Molly's flat. He had often before felt uncomfortable and annoyed with
himself when he had been too friendly with Molly. Not that he felt her
attraction to be a temptation to disloyalty to Rose. He knew he was
incurable in his devotion to his love. But he did feel it mean to enjoy
this pleasant, philosopher-and-guide attitude, towards the daughter of
Madame Danterre. That Molly could hold any delusion about his feelings
had never dawned on his imagination as a possibility until the night
when she confided in him her forlorn attempt at doing a daughter's duty.
He had never liked her so well; never so entirely dissociated her from
her mother, and from all possibilities of evil.
And now the situation was changed; now there was this hazy mass of
suspicion revealed in Florence, and this most detestable story of
Larrone and the box.
How differently things looked when it was a question of suspecting of a
crime the woman he had seen in the Florentine garden, and of that same
suspicion regarding poor little graceful, original, Molly Dexter!
Within two or three days Edmund became still more immersed in business.
He began to realise his own ignorance as to his own affairs, and he went
through the slow torture of understanding how blindly he had left
everything in his solicitor's hands. He was beginning to face actual
poverty as inevitable, when he heard from Mr. Murray that Madame
Danterre's will was proved in London, and that her daughter was her sole
heir.
"The income cannot be less than £20,000 a year, and the whole fortune is
entirely at Miss Dexter's disposal," wrote Mr. Murray without any
comment whatever.
Edmund was not sorry that Rose and her mother were staying on in Paris.
They would escape the first outburst of gossip as to the further
history of Sir David Bright's fortune. Nor was he sorry that they should
also miss the growing rumours as to the disappearance of the fortune of
Sir Edmund Grosse. Of Rose herself he dared not let himself think; but
every evil conclusion which he had to face as to his own future, every
undoubted loss that was discovered in the inquiry which was being
carried on, seemed as a heavy door shut between him and the hopes of
those last days on the yacht.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE USES OF DELIRIUM
"Don't you think I might get up and sit by the window and look at the
sea, Carey?"
Miss Carew hesitated, and then summoned the nurse.
"Miss Dexter was to have one whole day in bed after the journey."
The nurse, looking into Molly's eager eyes, compromised for one half
hour, in which Miss Dexter might lie on the sofa in a fur cloak.
It was a big sofa befitting the largest bedroom in the hotel, and Molly
lay back on its cushions with the peculiar physical satisfaction of
weakness, resting after very slight efforts. Yesterday she had been too
exhausted for enjoyment, but this afternoon her sensations were
delightful.
The short afternoon light was ruddy on the glorious brown sails of the
fishing-boats, and drew out all their magnificent contrast to the blue
water. But the sun still sparkled garishly on the crest of the waves,
and the milder glow of the sunset had not begun.
Weakness was sheltered and at rest within, while without was the immense
movement of wind and water, and the passing smile of the sun on the
great, unshackled forces of winter. Molly's rest was like a child's
security in the arms of a kindly giant. Her mind had been absorbed by
illness--an illness that had had her completely in grip, the first
serious illness she had ever known. There had been a struggle in the
depths of her life's forces such as she had never imagined; but now life
had conquered, and she was at rest. In that time there had been awful
delirium: horrible things, guilty and hideous, had clung about her, all
round her. One wicked presence especially had taken a strange form, a
face without a body, and yet it had hands--it must have had hands
because the horror of it was that it constantly opened the doors of the
different cupboards, but most often the door of the big wardrobe, and
looked out, and that although Molly had had the wardrobe locked and the
key put under her pillow. And this face was very like Molly's, and the
question she had to settle was whether this face was her mother's or her
own. At times she reasoned--and the logical process was so deadly
tiring--that it must be her mother, for she could not be Molly herself
being so unkind to herself; whereas, if the face had had any pity for
her it might have been herself looking at herself. But was that not
nonsense? There was surely a touch of hysteria in that. Did the face
really come out of her own brain? And if so, from what part of her
brain? She felt sure there was a sort of empty attic, a large one, in
the top part of her right brain, it felt hollow, quite terribly hollow.
Probably the face came out of that. But then, how did it get inside the
wardrobe? and once inside the wardrobe, how did it get out again when
Molly really had the key?
She longed to speak to Miss Carew about this, but Miss Carew never
could follow a chain of reasoning. The nurse was more sensible, but she
thought that reasoning was too tiring for Molly--so silly! If only she
could be allowed to explain it all quietly and reasonably! And oh! why
did they leave her alone? She hated to be left alone, and she was sure
she told them so; and yet they went away. And then she began to work her
brain again as soon as the was alone, and she would be happy for a few
minutes with a new plan for shutting the face into the large empty attic
in her right brain and locking the door, when quite suddenly the face
opened the door of the wardrobe with its loose hands and looked out
again and jeered at her.
Even now, lying resting, and looking at the sun, Molly was glad that
there was no hanging wardrobe in the room; only one full of shelves. She
would certainly not use the same room when she went back to London. She
would only be in that flat for a short time, as she must now take a big
house.
As her eyes rested on the sails and the water, and were filled with the
joy of colour, she had a sort of delicious idea of her new house. It
should be very beautiful, most exquisite, quite unlike anybody else's
house; it should be Molly's own special triumph. It must have the
glamour of an old London house, its dignity, its sense of a past. It
should have for decoration gloriously subdued gilding and colour, and
old pictures, which Molly could afford to buy.
"And"--she smiled to herself--"as long as it is a house in the air it
shall have a great outlook on the sea and the sunset." The fancy that
had been so cruel in her sickness was a sycophant now that life was
victorious; it flattered and caressed and soothed her now.
Within a few days two theories were growing in the background of her
consciousness, not acknowledged or questioned while they took
possession. They took turns to make themselves gradually, very
gradually, and imperceptibly familiar to her. The first was founded on
the idea that she had been very ill a little sooner than was supposed,
and that she had imagined a great deal that was torturing and absurd as
to her mother's papers. She had been delirious that evening, and, what
was still more important, she was actually very hazy now as to what she
had seen and read of the contents of that box.
"I can't remember if that's true," she could honestly say to herself
when some fact of the horrible story came forward and claimed attention.
Once she caught herself thinking how very common it was for people to
forget entirely what had happened just before or during an illness. For
instance, Sir David Bright had never been able to remember what happened
on the day on which Madame Danterre declared he had married her. But how
did Molly know that? And suddenly she said to herself that she could not
remember; perhaps she had fancied that, too.
At another time she began almost to think that she had imagined the
black box altogether. Was it square or oblong? and how shallow was it?
Sometimes while she was ill she had seen a black box as big as a house;
sometimes it was a little tiny cash box.
Meanwhile, under cover of so many uncertainties, the other theory was
getting a firm footing. It was simply that the fact of the will being
sent to her mother was undoubted proof of Sir David's having repented of
having made it. If Sir David had not sent her this will, who had? It was
absurd and romantic to suppose that her mother had carried on an
intrigue in South Africa in order to get possession of this will. That
might have done in a chapter of Dumas, or have been imagined in
delirium, but it was not possible in real life. The only puzzle was--and
the theory must be able to meet all the facts of the case--why had he
not destroyed the will himself? The probability was that he had not been
able to do so at the last moment. When dying he must have repented of
the last will just too late to destroy it. She could quite imagine his
asking a friend, almost with his last words, to send Madame Danterre the
papers. It would look more natural than his asking the friend to destroy
them. And then the officer would have addressed the papers, of course
not reading them. And thus the theory comfortably wrapped up another
fact, namely, that the registered envelope had not been addressed by the
hand that had written its contents. Finally, all that the theory did for
the will, it did also for the letter to Rose, for the two things
evidently stood or fell together. So the theories grew and prospered
without interfering with each other as Molly's health and strength
returned, except that the delirium theory insisted at times on the other
theory being purely hypothetical; as, for instance, it had to be "Even
supposing I was not delirious, and the will had been there, it is still
evident that----"
Molly's recovery did not get on without a drawback, and the day on which
the lawyer came down to see her she was genuinely very unwell. She
seemed hardly able to understand business. She was ready to leave all
responsibility to him in a way that certainly saved much trouble, but he
hardly liked to see her quite so passive.
After he left, Miss Carew found her looking faint and ill.
"He must think me a fool," she said, in a weak voice. "I have left
everything on his shoulders, poor man. I'm afraid if he is asked about
me, as he's a Scotchman he will say I am 'just an innocent'! I really
ought not to have seen him to-day."
But in a few days she was better, and the house agent found her quite
business-like. The said house agent had come down with one secret object
in his heart. It was now nine months since the bankruptcy of a too
well-known nobleman had thrown a splendid old house on the market. It
had been in the hands of all the chief agents in London, and they had
hardly had a bite for it. Even millionaires were shy of it so far, the
fact being that the house was more beautiful than comfortable, the
bedrooms having been thought of less importance than the effectiveness
of the first floor. Then, perhaps, it was a little gloomy, though
artists maintained that its share of gloom only enhanced its charm.
After mentioning several uninteresting mansions, the agent observed
that, of course, there was Westmoreland House still going, and Molly's
eyes flashed. She had been at the great sale at Westmoreland House; she
had been absolutely fascinated by the great well staircase and by the
music-room, by the square reception-rooms, and above all by the gallery
with its perfection of light moulding, a room of glass and gold, but so
spiritualised, so subdued and reticent and dignified, that ghosts might
live there undisturbed.
Molly trembled with eagerness as she asked the vital questions of cost,
of repairs, of rates and taxes. Yes, it was possible--undoubtedly
possible. There was a very large sum of money in a bank in Florence
which possibly Madame Danterre had accumulated there with a view to a
sudden emergency. Molly's lawyer had not been certain of the amount, but
he had mentioned a sum larger than the price of Westmoreland House.
By the time Molly was fit to go back to London, and while the theories
just described were still in possession of her mind, Westmoreland House
was bought. Molly said it was a great relief to get it settled.
"One feels more settled altogether," she said to Miss Carew, "when a big
question like that is done with."
She strolled with Miss Carew on the smooth sand by the water's edge on
the last evening before leaving, and looked up at the white cliffs
growing bright in the light of the sunset.
"It has been very restful," she said. "I am almost sorry to go."
"Then why not stay a little longer, my dear?"
"Oh, no, Carey! it would soon become quite intolerable; it isn't real
life, only a pause; and now, Carey, I am going to live!"
The sun presently set lower and more grey than they had expected; the
wind felt sharper, and Molly shivered. Nature was unbearable without its
gilding.
CHAPTER XXIV
MRS. DELAPORT GREEN IN THE ASCENDANT
Mrs. Delaport Green had been to Egypt for the winter, and came back,
refreshed as a giant, for life in London. She was really glad to see
Tim, who was unfeignedly pleased to see her, and they spent quite an
hour in the pleasantest chat. Of course he had not much news to give of
his wife's acquaintances as he did not live among them, but one item of
information interested her extremely.
"Miss Dexter has bought Westmoreland House in Park Lane!"
Mrs. Delaport Green's eyes sparkled with excitement and the green light
of envy, and she determined to call on Molly at once. Happily there had
been no open quarrel, which only showed how wise it was to forget
injuries, for certainly the girl had been most disgracefully rude.
Molly's new abode stood back from the street, and had usually an
immensely dignified air of quiet, but there was a good deal of noise and
bustle going on when Adela reached the door. Several large pieces of
furniture, a picture, and a heavy clock, might have been obstacles
enough to keep out most visitors, but Adela persevered, and the dusty
and worried porter said that Molly was at home before he had a moment
for reflection.
Adela advanced with outstretched hands to greet her "dear friend" as she
was shown into a large drawing-room on the first floor.
Molly was standing in the middle of the room with an immense hat on, and
a long cloak that woke instant enthusiasm in the soul of her visitor.
There was perhaps, even to Adela something too emphatic, too striking,
too splendid altogether in the total effect of the tall, slim figure.
She had never thought that Molly would turn out half so handsome, but
she saw now that she had only needed a little making-up. While thinking
these things she was chattering eagerly.
"How are you? I was so sorry to hear you had been ill, but now you look
simply splendid! I have had a wonderful winter. I feel as if I had laid
in quite a stock of calm and rest from the desert, as if no little thing
could worry me after my long draught--of the desert, you know! Well! one
must get into harness again." She gave a little sigh. "But to think of
your having Westmoreland House! How everybody wondered last season what
was to become of it! and what furniture, oh! what an exquisite cabinet!
You certainly have wonderful taste." Molly did not interrupt her visitor
to explain that the said cabinet had belonged to Madame Danterre. "I
adore that style; I do so wish Tim would give me a cabinet like that for
my birthday. I really think he might."
She was so accustomed to Molly's silences that it was some time before
she realised that this one was ominous. She might have seen that that
young lady was looking over her head, or out of the window, or anywhere
but at her. Suddenly it struck her that not a sound interrupted her own
voice, and she began to perceive the absurd airs that Molly was giving
herself. Prompted by the devil she, therefore, instantly proceeded to
say:
"When we were at Cairo Sir Edmund Grosse came for a few days with Lady
Rose Bright."
"From the yacht?" said Molly, speaking for the first time.
"Yes; they said in Cairo that the engagement would be announced as soon
as they got back to England. And really my dear, everyone agreed that
without grudging you her money, one can't help being glad that that dear
woman should be rich again!"
It was about as sharp a two-edged thrust as could have been delivered,
and Molly's _distrait_ air and undue magnificence melted under it.
"No one could be more glad than I am," she said, with a quiet reserve of
manner; and after that she was quite friendly, and took Adela all over
the house, and pressed her to stay to tea, and that little lady felt
instinctively that Molly was afraid of her, and smacked her rosy lips
with the foretaste of the amusements she intended to enjoy in this
magnificent house.
While they were having tea, Molly, leaning back, said quietly:
"I see from what you said before we went over the house that you have
not heard that Sir Edmund Grosse is ruined?"
Mrs. Delaport Green gave a little shriek of excitement.
"He trusted all his affairs to a scoundrel, and this is the result."
Molly's tone was still negative.
"Well, that does seem a shame!"
"I don't know; if a man will neglect his affairs he must take the
consequence."
"Oh! but I do think it is hard; he used his money so well."
"Did he?" Molly raised her eyebrows.
"Well, he was a perfect host, and was so awfully good-natured, don't you
know?"
In the real interest in the news, Adela had, for the moment, forgotten
that Molly might be especially interested in anything concerning Edmund
Grosse. She was reminded by the low, thundery voice in which Molly began
to speak quite suddenly, as if her patience had been tried too far.
"You are just like all the others! It's enough to make one a radical to
listen to it. After all, what good has Sir Edmund Grosse done with his
money? He gave dinners that ruined people's livers--I suppose that was
good for the doctors! He gave diamonds to actresses, and I suppose that
was for the good of art. He has never done a stroke of work; he has
wallowed in luxury, and now his friends almost cry out against
Providence because he will have to earn his bread. Probably several
hundreds a year will be left, and many men would be thankful for that.
Then other people say it is such a pity that now he cannot marry Lady
Rose Bright. They have the effrontery to say that to me, as if £800 a
year were not enough for them to marry on if they cared for each other!"
All this tirade seemed to Adela the very natural outpouring of jealousy,
and, as she fully intended to be an intimate friend of Molly's she
sympathised and agreed, and agreed and sympathised till she fairly,
roused Molly's sense of the ludicrous.
"I don't mean," Molly said, half angry and half amused, "that I shall
spend my money so very much better;--I quite mean to have my fling. Only
I do so hate all this cant."
At last Adela departed, crying out that she had promised to be in Hoxton
an hour ago, and Molly was left alone. It was too late to go to the
shops, she reflected, and she sank back into a deep chair with a frown
on her white forehead.
What did it matter to her if they were engaged or not? It made no sort
of difference. She was not going to allow her peace of mind to be upset
on their account; she had done with that sentimental nonsense long ago.
Her illness had made a great space between her present self and the
Molly who had been so foolishly upset by the discovery of Edmund
Grosse's treachery. Curiously enough Molly had never doubted of that
treachery, although it was one of the horrors that had come out of the
doubtful, and probably mythical, tin box.
By the way, there was a little pile of tin boxes in a small unfurnished
room upstairs, next to Molly's bedroom, of which she kept the key. She
had had no time to look at them yet. Some of them came from Florence,
and two or three from her own flat. They were of all shapes and sizes,
and piled one on another. But from the moment when Molly turned that
very ordinary key in the lock of the unfurnished dressing-room she never
let her thoughts dwell for long on the possible delusions of delirium.
Her mind had entered into another phase in which it was of supreme
importance to think only of the details of each day as they came before
her.
CHAPTER XXV
MOLLY AT COURT
If any of us, going to dress quietly in an ordinary bedroom, were told:
"It is the last time you will have just that amount of comfort, that
degree of luxury, to which you have been accustomed; it is the last time
you will have your evening clothes put out for you; the last time your
things will be brushed; the last time hot water will be brought to your
room; the last time that your dressing-gown will have come out of the
cupboard without your taking it out"--we might have an odd mixture of
sensations. We might be very sad--ridiculously sad--and yet have a sense
of being braced, a whiff of open air in the mental atmosphere.
Edmund Grosse did not expect in future to draw his own hot water, or put
out his own dressing-gown, but he did know that he had come to the last
night of having a valet of his own, the last night in which the perfect
Dawkins, who had been with him ten years, would do him perfect bodily
service. Everything to-night was done in the most punctilious manner,
and it seemed appropriate that this last night should be a full-dress
affair.
Sir Edmund was going to Court (the first Court held in May), and his
deputy lieutenant's uniform was laid on the bed. Edmund might not have
taken the trouble to go, but a kindly message from a very high place as
to his troubles had made him feel it a more gracious response to do so.
The valet was a trifle distant, if any shade of manner could have been
detected in his deferential attitude towards his master. Dawkins was not
pleased with Sir Edmund; he felt that his ten years of service had been
based on a delusion; he had not intended to be valet to a ruined man.
Happily he had been careful. He had not trusted blindly to Providence,
and, with a rich result from enormous wages and perquisites, and an
excellent character, he could face the world with his head high, whereas
Sir Edmund--well, Sir Edmund's position was very different. Sir Edmund
had let himself be deceived outrageously, and what was the result?
Edmund was as particular as usual about every detail of his appearance.
It would have been an education to a young valet to have seen the ruined
man dressed that evening.
Next day Dawkins was to leave, and the day after that the flat was to be
the scene of a small sale. The chief valuables, a few good pictures, and
some very rare china, had already gone to Christie's. The delicate
_pâte_ of his beloved vases had seemed to respond to the lingering
farewell touch of the connoisseur's fingers. Edmund was trying to secure
for some of them homes where he might sometimes visit them, and one or
two of his lady friends were persuading their husbands that these things
ought to be bought for love of poor Edmund Grosse. Edmund was quite
ready to press a little on friendship of this sort, being fully
conscious of its quality and its duration. For the next few weeks he
would be welcomed with enthusiasm--and next year?
But all the same there was that subconscious sense of bracing
air--something like the sense of climax in reaching a Northern station
on a very hot day. We may be very hot, perhaps, at Carlisle or
Edinburgh, but it is not the climate of Surrey.
Edmund mounted the stairs at Buckingham Palace with a certain
unconscious dignity which melted into genial amusement at the sight of a
pretty woman near him evidently whispering advice to a fair _débutante_.
The girl was not eighteen, and her whole figure expressed acute
discomfort.
"Keep your veil out of the way," her mother warned her.
"I've had two dreadful pulls already; I'm sure my feathers are quite
crooked. Oh! mother, there's Sir Edmund Grosse; he will tell me whether
they are crooked. You never know."
"I could see if you would let me get in front of you," murmured her
mother.
"But you can't possibly in this crowd. Oh! how d'ye do, Sir Edmund; have
I kept my veil straight?"
"Charming," said Edmund, with a low bow. The child really looked very
pretty, though rather like a little dairymaid dressed up for fun, and
her long gloves slipped far enough from the shoulders to show some
splendidly red arms.
"Charming," he said again in a half-teasing voice. "Only I don't approve
of such late hours for children."
It amused him that this was one of the presentations that would be most
noted in the papers, and this funny, jolly little girl would probably
gain a good deal of knowledge and lose a great deal more of charm in
the next three months.
Walking by the mother and daughter, he had come close to the open doors
of a long gallery, and stood for a moment to take in the picture. It was
not new to him, but perhaps he felt inclined to the attitude of an
onlooker to-night, and there was something in this attitude slightly
aloof and independent. Brilliant was the one word for the scene; a
little hard, perhaps, in colouring, and the women in their plumes and
veils were too uniform to be artistic. There was too much gold, too much
red silk, too many women in the long rows waiting with more or less
impatience or nervousness to get through with it. The scene had an
almost crude simplicity of insistence on fine feathers and gilding the
obvious pride of life. Yet he saw the little fair country girl near him
look awe-struck, and he understood it. For a fresh imagination, or for
one that has, for some reason, a fresh sensitiveness of perception, the
great gallery, the wealth of fair women, the scattered men in uniform,
the solemn waiting for entrance into the royal presence, were enough.
And there really is a certain force in the too gaudy setting. It blares
like a trumpet. It crushes the quiet and the repose of life. It shines
in the eye defiantly and suddenly, and at last it captures the mind and
makes the breath come quickly, for, like no other and more perfect
setting to life, it makes us think of death. It is too bald an assertion
of the world and all its works and all its pomps, not to challenge a
rebuke from the grisly tyrant.
Edmund had not analysed these impressions, but he was still under their
power when he turned to let others pass, for the crowd was thickening.
And as he did so, a little space was opened by three or four ladies
turning round to secure places for some friends on the long seats
against the walls.
Across this space he saw a woman, whom, for a moment only, he did not
recognise. It was a tall figure in white satin with a train of cloth of
silver thrown over her arm. There was nothing of the nervous _débutante_
in the attitude, nor was there the half-truculent self-assertion of the
modern girl. When people talked afterwards of her gown and her jewels,
Edmund only remembered the splendour of her pearls, and when he
mentioned them, a woman added that the train had been lined with lace of
untold value. What he felt at the time was the enormous triumph of the
eyes. Grey eyes, full of light, full of pride. He did not ask himself
what was the excuse for this "haughty bearing," and the old phrase,
which has now sunk from court manners into penny novelettes, was the
only phrase that seemed quite a true one.
Why did she stand so completely alone? It made no difference to this
sense of loneliness that she received warm greetings in the crowd, or
that Lady Dawning was fidgeting and maternal. Evidently (and he was
amused at the combination) she was going to present her cousin, John
Dexter's daughter. Did she remember now how she had advised Mrs.
Carteret to hide Molly from the public eye?
But Molly's figure was always to remain in his mind thus triumphant
without absurdity, and thus alone in a crowd. The blackness of her hair
had a strange force from the white transparent veil flowing over it, and
a flush of deep colour was in the dark skin. Edmund had several moments
in which to look at her and to realise that Molly was walking in a dream
of greatness. The little country girl he had seen just now had been
brought up to hear kindly jokes about Courts and their ways; not so
Molly. To her it was all intensely serious and intensely exciting. Could
he have known the chief cause of the intense emotion that filled Molly's
slight figure with a feverish vitality would he have believed that she
was happy? And yet she was, for no pirate king running his brig under
the very nose of a man-of-war ever had more of the quintessence of the
sense of adventure than Molly had, as Lady Dawning led her, the heiress
of the year, into the long gallery.
For one moment she saw Edmund Grosse, and she looked him full in the
face very gravely. She did not pretend not to know him; she let him see
the entirely genuine contempt she felt for him, and she meant him to
understand that she would never know him again.
CHAPTER XXVI
EDMUND IS NO LONGER BORED
As the season went on Edmund Grosse did not understand himself.
Everything had gone against him, his fortune had melted, his easy-going
luxurious life was at an end. He had no delusions; he knew perfectly
well the value of money in his world. His position in that world was
gone in fact, if not quite in seeming. The sort of conversation that
went on about him in his own circles had the sympathy, but would soon
have also the finality, of a funeral oration. There would soon be a tone
of reminiscence in those who spoke of him. It would be as if they said
gently: "Oh, yes! dear old Grosse, we knew him well at one time, don't
you know; it's a sad story." He could have told you not only the words,
but even the inflection of the voices of his friends in discussing his
affairs. He did not mean that there were no kindly faithful hearts among
them. Several might emerge as kind, as friendly as ever. But the monster
of human society would behave as it always does in self-defence. It
would shake itself, dislodge Edmund from its back, and then say quite
kindly that it was a sad pity that he had fallen off. Every organism
must reject what it can no longer assimilate, and a rich society by the
law of its being rejects a poor man.
And yet the idea that poor Grosse must be half crushed, horribly cut up
and done for, was not in the least true. This was what he did not
understand himself. It is well known that some people bear great trials
almost lightly who take small ones very heavily. Grosse certainly rose
to the occasion. But that a great trial had aroused great courage was
not the whole explanation by any means. Curiously enough ill-fortune
with drastic severity had done for him what he had impotently wished to
do for himself. It had made impossible the life which, in his heart, he
had despised; it absolutely forced him to use powers of which he was
perfectly conscious, and which had been rusting simply for want of
employment. It is doubtful whether he could have roused himself for any
other motive whatever. Certainly love of Rose had been unable to do it.
The will might seem to will what he wished to do, but the effort to will
strongly enough was absent. Now all the soft, padded things between him
and the depths of life had been struck away at one rude blow; he _must_
swim or sink. And so he began to swim, and the exercise restored his
circulation and braced his whole being.
It was not, perhaps, heroic exertion that he was roused into making. But
it wanted courage in a man of Edmund's age to begin to work for six
hours or more a day at journalism. He also produced two articles on
foreign politics for the reviews, which made a considerable impression.
It was important now that Edmund had read and watched, and, even more
important, listened very attentively to what busier men than himself had
to say during twenty years of life spent in the world. Years afterwards,
when Grosse had in the second half of his life done as much work as
many men would think a good record for their whole lives, people were
surprised to read his age in the obituary notices. They had rightly
dated the beginning of his career from his first appearance as an
authority on foreign politics, but they had not realised that Grosse had
begun to work only in the midstream of life. Many brilliant springs are
delusive in their promise, but rarely is there such achievement after an
unprofitable youth.
Love is not the whole life of a man, but, in spite of new activities, in
spite of a renewed sense of self-respect, Edmund had time and space
enough for much pain in his heart.
Rose was still in Paris taking care of her mother, who was very unwell.
Edmund had hinted at the possibility of going over to see them at
Easter, but the suggestion had met with no encouragement. He had felt
rebuffed, and was in no mood to be smoothed or melted by Rose's written
sympathy. He was, no doubt, harder as well as stronger than before his
financial troubles. He let Rose see that he could stand on his feet, and
was not disposed to whine. Meanwhile Molly had provoked him to single
combat. The decided cut she gave him at the Court was not to be
permitted; he was too old a hand to allow anything so crude. He meant to
be at her parties; he meant to keep in touch; indeed he meant to see
this thing out.
"Sir Edmund, will you take Miss Dexter in to dinner?"
Edmund looked fairly surprised and very respectful as Mrs. Delaport
Green spoke to him. Molly's bearing was, he could see, defiant, but she
was clearly quite conscious of having to submit and anxious to do
nothing absurd.
They ate their soup in silence, for Molly's other neighbour had shown an
unflattering eagerness to be absorbed by the lady he had taken down.
Edmund turned to her with exactly his old shade of manner, very
paternal, intimate and gentle.
"And you are not bored yet?"
Molly could have sworn deep and long had it been possible.
"No; why should I be?"
She stared at him for a moment indifferently, as at a stranger, but he
could see the nervous movement of her fingers as she crumbed her bread.
"It is more likely," he answered, "that I should remember what I allude
to than that you should. We once had a talk about being bored. I said I
had never been bored while I was poor. Now I am poor again, so I
naturally remember, and, as you are trying the experience of being very
rich, I should really like to know if you are bored yet."
Molly might have kept silent, but she did not want Adela, who was
certainly watching them, to think her embarrassed.
"I suppose every one has moments of being bored."
Edmund leant back and turned round so as to allow of his looking fully
at her. He muttered to himself: "Young, beautiful, wealthy beyond the
dreams of avarice--and bored! What flattering unction that is to the
soul of a ruined man."
In spite of her anger, her indignation, her hurt pride, Molly was
softened. She writhed under the caress of his voice; it had power
still.
"Are you not bored any more?" She spoke unwillingly.