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 pate 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 debutante. 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 debutante 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.

"No," he said, "suffering does not bore; discomfort does not bore; knowledge of your fellow-creatures does not bore. But, of course, I am tasting the pleasures of novelty. And I have not disappeared yet. I think a boarding-house in Bloomsbury may prove boring. How prettily our hostess will pity me, then. But I don't think I shall meet you here at dinner, and have the comfort of seeing for myself that you, too, are bored."

Molly felt that he was putting her hopelessly in the wrong. She was the one bitterly aggrieved and deeply injured. But he made her feel as if coldness on her part would be just the conduct of any rich heartless woman to a ruined man.

"I calculate," he said, "on about fifty more good dinners which I shall not pay for, and then, of course, I shall think myself well fed at my own expense in an Italian cafe somewhere. I think Italian, don't you? Dinner at two shillings! There is an air of spagghetti and onions that conceals the nature or age of the meat; and the coffee is amazingly good. One might be able to find one with a clean cloth."

Most of these remarks were made almost to himself.

"You know it isn't true," Molly said angrily; "you know you will get a good post. Men like you are always given things."

Edmund helped himself very carefully to exactly the right amount of melted butter. "Don't you eat asparagus?" he interjected, and, without waiting for an answer, went on:

"I thought so too, but I can't hear of a job. There are too many of the unemployed just now. However, no doubt, as you say, I shall soon be made absolute ruler of some province twice the size of England."

He laughed and smoothed his moustache with one hand.

"Down with dull care, Miss Dexter; let us make a pact never to be bored—in Bloomsbury, or West Africa, or Park Lane. I suppose you found a great deal to do to that dear old house?"

After that their other neighbours claimed them both; but during dessert Molly, against her will, lost hold of the talk on her right, and had to listen to Edmund again.

"I hear that you have got the old Florentine looking-glasses from my sale."

"I don't think they were from your sale," said Molly hastily.

"Well, Perks told me so."

"Perks never told me," muttered Molly.

"I should think they must suit the house to perfection. Where have you put them?"

"In the small dining-room."

"Yes; they must do admirably there. I should like to see them again." He looked at her with a faintly sarcastic smile. She knew what he intended her to say, and, against her will, she said hastily:

"Won't you come and see them?"

"With great pleasure."

Molly saw that Adela had risen, and sprang up and turned away in one sudden movement. She was very angry with him for forcing her to say that, and she could not conceive what had made her yield.

"'The teeth that bite; the claws that scratch,'" he thought to himself, "but safely chained up—and the movements are beautiful." He stood looking after her.

"I did as you told me," said the hostess, pausing for a moment as she followed her guests to the door. "If Molly blames me, shall I say that you asked to take her in?"

"Say just what you like; I trust you entirely." He did not attempt to speak to Molly after dinner, or when they met again at a ball that same night. All her burning wish to snub him could not be gratified. He seemed not to know shat she was still in the room. But she knew instinctively that he watched her, and she was not sorry he should see her in the crowd, and be witness, however unwillingly, to her position in the world he knew so well. It added to the sense of intoxication that often possessed her now. "Be drunken," says Baudelaire, "be drunken with wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken." And that Molly could be drunken with flattery, with luxury, with movement, with music, with a sense of danger that gave a strong and subtle flavour to her pleasures, was the explanation (and the only one) of how she bore the hours of reaction, of the nausea experienced by that spiritual nature of hers which she had been so surprised to discover. It was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now. That Molly was gone, and he regretted her.



CHAPTER XXVII

MOLLY'S APPEAL

Edmund, it seemed, was in no hurry to see his Florentine looking-glasses again. Ten days passed before he called on Molly, and on the eleventh day Mr. Murray, Junior, wrote to say that he had some fresh and important intelligence to give him, and asked if Sir Edmund would call, not at his office, but at his own house.

Edmund flung the letter down impatiently. The situation was really a very trying one. He did not believe—he could not and would not believe—that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud. Murray was a lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and absurd. From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother's reply to her offer to go to Florence, Edmund had in his masculine way ranged her once for all among good and nice women. He had felt touched and guilty at a suspicion that he had been to blame in playing his paternal role too zealously. Until then he had at times had hard thoughts of her; after that time he was a little ashamed of himself, and he believed in her simplicity and goodness. He was sorry and disappointed now that she was making quite so much effect in this London world. There was something disquieting in Molly's success, and he could appraise better than any one what a remarkable success it was. But he felt that she was going the pace, and he would not have liked his daughter to go the pace, unmarried and at twenty-two. She needed friendship and advice. But the pinch came from the fact that the wealth he could have advised her to use wisely ought to be Rose's, and that he was resolved, in the depths of his soul, to regain that wealth for his cousin—for that "belle dame sans merci" who wrote him such pretty letters about his troubles.

Edmund put Murray's letter in his pocket, and immediately went out. He was living in a small, but clean, lodging in Fulham, kept by a former housemaid and a former footman of his own, now Mr. and Mrs. Tart, kindly souls who were proud to receive him. He gave no trouble, and the preparation of his coffee and boiled egg was all the cooking he had done for him. Mrs. Tart would have felt strangely upset had she known that the said coffee and egg were, on some days, his only food till tea-time; she was under the impression that he lunched at his club when not engaged to friends. Both she and Mr. Tart took immense pains with his clothes, and he would rather have been well valeted than eat luxurious luncheons every day.

He went out at once after getting Murray's letter, because he wanted to call on Molly before he heard any more of the important intelligence.

Molly was alone when he was announced. She had told the butler she was "not at home," but somehow the man decided to show Sir Edmund up because he saw that he wished to be shown up. Edmund had always had an odd influence below stairs, partly because he never forgot a servant's face.

Molly coloured deeply when she saw her visitor. She was annoyed to think that he would make her talk against her will—and they would not be interrupted. She could have used strong language to the butler, but she did not dare tell him that she would now see visitors. It would look to Edmund as if she were afraid of a tete-a-tete.

Almost as soon as he was in the room she had an impression that he was quite at home, curiously at his ease.

"I am glad the house is so little changed. I came to my first dance here. You have done wonderfully well, and all on the old lines. A friend told me it was the hugest success."

A remembrance of past jokes as to Edmund's second-hand compliments and his friend "Mr. Harris" came into Molly's mind, but she only felt angry at the remembrance.

He talked on about the pictures and the furniture until she became more natural. It was impossible not to be interested in her work, and the decoration and furnishing of the whole house was her own doing, not that of any hireling adviser. Then, too, he knew its history, and she became keenly interested. She had at times a strong feeling of the past life still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated life had intruded. She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty secret was a desecration or only a continuance of something that had gone before.

Suddenly she leant forward with the crude simplicity he was glad to see again.

"Have there been any wicked people here?" Her voice was low and young.

"'All houses in which men have lived and died are haunted houses,'" he quoted. "It's not very cynical to suppose that there has been sin and sorrow here before now."

"I think," said Molly quickly, "there was a wicked woman who used the little dining-room; perhaps she was only a guest. I don't think she went upstairs often."

"Perhaps she came in with my looking-glasses," suggested Edmund. "I have often wished I could see what they have seen."

Molly was now quite off her guard.

Edmund rose and examined some china on a table near him.

"Why are you so displeased with me?" he said, without any change of voice.

Molly sprang to her feet, careless whether her unguarded vehemence might betray her to his observation.

"I shall not answer that question," she said; but he knew that she would answer it.

"You cut me at the Court; you were displeased at having to sit by me at dinner; you have pretended not to see me at least four times since then, and your butler showed me up by mistake."

Molly had moved away from him to the window. She knew she must speak or her conduct would look too like wounded love—a thing quite unbearable. She knew, too, that his influence would make her speak, and, besides that, something in her cried for the relief of speech. She needed a fight although she did not know it; an open fight with an enemy she could see would distract her from the incessant fight with an enemy she did not see.

"You are a strange man!" she cried, holding the curtain behind her lightly as she turned towards him. "You could make friends with me so that all the world might see you, and meanwhile, at the very same time, you were paying a low Italian scoundrel to produce lies against my sick and lonely mother! You could watch me and get out of me all you wanted to know because I was ignorant of the world. You could use the horrible influence you had gained over me by your experience of many women, to manage me as you liked. You told me not to marry Edgar Tonmore for some reason of your own; you told me to go and stay with my aunt; you came to see me one night in London, and wormed out of me my relations with my unfortunate mother. With all your knowledge of the world, with all your experience, did you never think I might come to find you out?"

Molly paused for a moment. She held herself erect, her white gown crushed against the rich, dark curtain, her great eyes searching the trees in the park below as if she sought there for the soul of her enemy. She did not know that she pulled hard at the curtain behind her with both hands; it could not have held out much longer, strong though it was.

"No; you knew life too well not to know that you might be found out, but the truth was that you did not care. It was so little a thing to you that, when you saw that I knew the truth, you could go on just the same, quite unabashed. You could force yourself on me by playing on your poverty; you, who had tried to ruin my mother! Well, she is out of your reach, and perhaps you have shifted your foul suspicions on to me. Perhaps it is from me you hope to get the fortune that you mean to share. You drive me mad! I say things I don't want to say; you force me to lower myself, but——" She turned now and faced Edmund, who watched her, himself absolutely motionless. "Now that you have forced yourself on me again you shall answer me. Do you believe that I, Molly Dexter, have concealed or abetted in concealing or destroying any will in favour of Lady Rose Bright?"

There is a moment when passion is astonishingly inventive. Molly had had no intention of saying anything of the kind, but the heat of passion had produced a stroke of policy that no colder moment could have produced. She was suddenly dumb with astonishment at her own words, and she dimly recognised that this represented a distinct crisis in her own mind. Passion and excitement had dissipated the last mists of self-deception.

Edmund waited till there could be no faint suspicion of his trying to interrupt her, and then said from his heart, in a voice she had never heard from him before:

"No, I swear to you I don't."

Molly had been deeply flushed. At these words she turned very white, and her hands let go the curtains. She put them out before her and seemed to grope her way to a stiff, high-backed chair near to her. She sat down in it and clasped her hands to her forehead.

"Now you must hear me," said Edmund. "I don't say I am blameless: in part of this I have done wrong, but not as wrong as you think. I must tell you my story; although perhaps it may seem blacker as I tell it, even to myself."

He sat down and bent forward a little.

"When I was young I fell in love with my cousin. She has been and always will be the one woman in the world to me. She did not, does not, never will, return my feelings. She married, and before very long I was convinced she was not happy, although she only half realised it herself. She is capable of stifling her powers of perception. Then David Bright died and left her in poverty. His will was a scandal, and the horror did not only smirch his good name, it reached to hers. I can't and won't try to tell you what I suffered, or how I determined to fight this hideous wrong. I went to Florence; I tried to see Madame Danterre; I engaged the detective—all before I knew of your existence. I came back to London and discovered that your father, John Dexter, had divorced his wife on account of David Bright. Still I did not know anything of you. Then, through Lady Dawning I found you out, and I made friends with Mrs. Delaport Green in order to see more of you. Was there anything wrong in that? You did not know your mother; you did not, presumably, care very deeply about her. It was doubtful if you knew of her existence. Soon the detective in Florence faded in my mind; he discovered nothing, but I retained him in case of any change. Was I obliged, because I liked you, to give up the cause? I never found out, I never tried to find out from you anything that bore on the case. You must remember that I stopped you once in the wood at Groombridge when you wanted to tell me more about yourself, and that I again warned you when you wished to tell me about your mother's letter to you. As to Edgar Tonmore, I knew that he was penniless, and I thought it quite possible that you might, in the end, be penniless too. It was for your own sake I wished you to make a richer marriage. For I believed—I still believe—that David Bright made a last will when going out to Africa; I believed, and still believe, that by an accident that will was not sent to Lady Rose. I thought then that your mother had, in some way, become possessed of the will, and I thought it more than likely that, when dying, she would make reparation by leaving the money where it ought to be. I meant—may I say so?—to prove myself your friend, then, if you should allow it. I know I kept in touch with you partly from curiosity as well as from natural attraction. But, if I acted for the sake of another, I acted for you also. Would it have been better or worse for you to have been friends with us if my suspicions of your mother's conduct had proved true? But believe me, Miss Dexter, I never for one moment could have thought of you with any taint of suspicion. It is horrible to me to have it suggested."

He rose as he finished speaking, and came nearer to her.

"That you, with your youth and your innocence and your candour!—child, the very idea is impossible. I have known men and women too well to fall into such an absurdity. Send me away, if you like; I won't intrude my friendship upon you, but look up now and let me see that you do not think this gross thing of me."

Molly raised a white face and looked into his—looked into eyes that had not at all times and in all places been sincere, but were sincere now. A great rush of warm feeling came over her; a great sore seemed healed, and then she looked at him with hungry entreaty, as if a soul, shorn of all beauty, hungry, ragged, filthy, were asking help from another. But the moment of danger, the moment of salvation passed away.

We confess our sins to God because He knows them already, and we ask for forgiveness where we know we shall be forgiven.

Indeed, Molly knew almost at once that she had gained another motive for silence. She could not risk the loss of Edmund's good thought of her; she cared for him too much—he had defended himself too well.

Edmund saw that she could not speak. He left her, let himself out of the house, and, forgetful of the fact that he could not possibly afford a hansom, jumped into one and drove to Mr. Murray's house.

He had recovered his usual calmness by the time he had to speak.

"I have your note," he said, "and I came in consequence."

"Yes," said the lawyer; "I wanted to tell you——"

"Wait a moment. Do you think you need tell me? You see, my share in the thing really came to an end when I could not finance it. I have several reasons now why I should like to let it alone."

Murray was astonished. It was Sir Edmund who had started the whole thing, whose wild guess at the outset was becoming more and more likely to be proved true. It was he who had spent a quantity of money over the investigation for years past. The man of business knew how to provoke speech by silence, and so he remained silent.

"Does further action depend in any way on me?" asked Edmund at last, without, however, offering the explanation the other wanted.

"No," said Murray quite civilly, but his manner was dry. "I don't see that it does. I think we can get on for the present."

As he spoke the door opened, and the parlourmaid showed in a tall, handsome woman in a nurse's dress.

Murray looked from her to Sir Edmund.

"I had wanted you to hear what Nurse Edith had to tell us, but after what you have said——"

"Yes," said Edmund; "I will leave you and I will write to you to-night."



CHAPTER XXVIII

DINNER AT TWO SHILLINGS

Edmund Grosse was in great moral and great physical discomfort that evening. He dined, actually for the first time, in just such an Italian cafe as he had described to Molly. After climbing up a very narrow, dirty staircase, the hot air heavy with smells, he had emerged into a small back and front room holding some half-dozen tables, at each of which four people could be seated. Through the open windows the noises of the street below came into collision with the clatter of plates and knives and forks. The heat was intense, the cloths were not clean, neither were the hands of the two waiters who rushed about with a certain litheness and facility of motion unlike any Englishman.

Edmund sat down wearily at a table as near the window as possible, and at which several people had been dining, perhaps well, but certainly not tidily.

"Hunger alone," he thought, "could make this possible," when, looking up, he caught the face of a young man at a further table, full of enjoyment, ordering "spargetty" and half a bottle of "grayves," with a cockney twang, and an unutterable air of latter-day culture.

"Mutton chops, cheese, and ale fed your forefathers," reflected Grosse.

"What will you have, sir?" in a foreign accent.

"Oh! anything; just what comes for the two shilling dinner—no, not hors d'oeuvres; yes, soup."

Edmund had turned with ill-restrained disgust from the sardines, tomatoes, and other oily horrors. But there was no denying the qualities of the soup: the most experienced and cultivated palate and stomach must be soothed by it, and in a moment of greater cheerfulness Edmund turned his attention to three young men close to him who were talking French. Their hands were clean and their collars, but poverty was writ large on their spare faces and well-brushed clothes. One was olive-complexioned, one quite fair, but with olive tints in the shadows round the eyes, and the third grey, old, and purple-cheeked from shaving. They ate little, but they talked much. The talked of literature and art with fierce dogmatism, and they seemed frequently on the verge of a quarrel, but the storm each time sank quite suddenly without the least consciousness of the danger passed. They looked at the food as critics, and acknowledged it to be eatable, with the faint air of an exile's sadness.

Edmund wished to think that he was amused by their talk, but the distraction did not last. His thoughts would have their way, and he was soon trying to defend his defence of himself to Molly. All he said had seemed so obviously true as the words poured out, but there had been fatal reservations. He had spoken as if all suspicions, all proceedings as to discovering the will were past. He had felt he had no right to give away secrets that were not his own. But had he not produced a false impression? What would Molly have thought of him as he passionately rejected the notion of suspecting her if she had seen the letter from Murray in his pocket? It was true that he no longer financed any of the proceedings against her, but they had all been set on foot by him. He was in the plot that was thickening, and he had won the confidence of the victim! He had no doubt that Molly was innocent, and he was ashamed of the pitiful confidence he had read in her eyes when he left her. But he still believed that her mother had been guilty, and that Molly's wealth was the result of that guilt. It was true that he wanted to be her friend, but it was also true that he would rejoice if Rose came into her own and the gross injustice were righted. But, after all, what absolute evidence had they got, as yet, as to the contents of this last will, or what proof even of its existence? He felt almost glad for the fraction of a moment that Molly might remain the gorgeous mistress of the old house in Park Lane uninjured by anything he had done against her. "How absurd," he thought, "how drivelling! The fact is that girl impressed me enough to-day, to make me see myself from her point of view, or what would be her point of view if she knew all!"

He refused coffee—the cab fare had prevented that. He quite emptied his pocket, gave the waiter sixpence, and, rising, strolled across the floor of the small room exactly the same man to the outward eye he had been for years past. But before he reached the door he caught the glance of a little, round, elderly woman at a table close to him, and he stopped. She had a faded, showy bonnet, and she carried her worn clothes with an air. He recognised the companion and friend of a famous prima donna whom he had not seen for years.

"You've forgotten me, but I've not forgotten you."

It was a cherry, Irish voice.

"I get coffee and a roll, and you have the diner a prix fixe. And you have given me a champagne supper in your day! Well! and how are you?"

"Nicely, thank you, Miss O'Meara; you see I have not forgotten!" Then in a lower voice, "But I thought the Signora left you money?"

"She did, bless her; but it was here one day and gone the next! Good-night, and good luck to you," she laughed.

The little duenna of a dead genius evidently did not want him to stay, and he felt his way down the pitch dark stairs, and emerged on the street. A very small, brown hand was held out for a penny, and for the first time in his life he refused a street beggar with real regret.

"'Here one moment, and gone the next,'" he muttered, looking down the brilliantly lighted street to where the motors, carriages, and cabs crowded round the doors of a great theatre. "It's the history of the whole show in a nutshell."

If Sir Edmund was troubled at the thought that Molly believed in him, Molly was infinitely more troubled at his belief in her.

After he left her she went to her room. She had to dine out and she must get some rest first. As in most of the late eighteenth century houses in London, the bedrooms had been sacrificed to the rooms below. But Molly had the one very large room that looked over the park. She threw herself down on a wide sofa close to the silk-curtained bed. The sun glinted still on the silver backs of the brushes and teased her eyes, and she got up and drew down the blinds. The dressing-table was large and its glass top was covered with a great weight of old gilt bottles and boxes.

Miss Carew had once been amused by the comment of a young manicurist who, after expressing enthusiastic admiration of the table, had concluded with the words:

"But what I often say to myself is that it's only so much more to leave in the end."

But Molly had not laughed when the words were repeated; they gave expression to a feeling with which she sometimes looked at many things besides her dressing-table—they might all prove only so much more to leave in the end!

She sank exhausted again onto the sofa. Why had he come? Why could he not leave her alone? Did she want his friendship, his pity, his confidence? Why look at her so kindly when he must know how he hurt her? She had felt such joy when she saw that he believed in her. The idea that she was still innocent and unblemished in his eyes was just for the moment an unutterable relief. An unutterable relief, too, it had felt at the moment, to be able to accept his defence of himself. That he was still lovable, and that he had no dark thoughts of her, had been such joy, but only a passing joy. Had he not told her in horribly plain speech that he loved Lady Rose, and would love her to the end? All this, which was so vital to Molly, was but an episode in a friendship that was a detail in his life!

But now, alone, trying to see clearly through the confusion, how unbearable it had been to hear him say, "That you with your youth and your innocence and your candour...." He had thought it too horrible to suspect her, and by that confidence he made her load of guilt almost unendurable.

She could not go on like this, could not live like this. The silence was far more unbearable now that a human voice had broken into it, a voice she loved repudiating with indignant scorn the possibility of suspecting her! She must go somewhere, she must speak to some one. But at this moment it was also evident that she must dress for dinner.



CHAPTER XXIX

THE RELIEF OF SPEECH

There is quite commonly a peculiar glow of sunshine just before a storm, a brightness so obviously unreliable that we are torn between enjoyment and anxiety. I have known no greater revelation of Nature's glories, even in a sunset hour, than in one of these moments of glow before the darkness of storm. And in a man's life there is sometimes an episode so bright, so full of promise, that we feel its perfection to be the measure of its instability.

Such a moment had come to Mark Molyneux. The time of depression and trial, the time when a vague sense of danger and a vague sense of aspiration had made him turn his eyes towards the cloister, had ended in his taking his work more and more earnestly and becoming surprisingly successful in his dealings with both rich and poor.

It seemed during the past winter that Mark would carry all before him; he had come into close contact with the poor, and in the circle in which his personal influence could be felt there was a real movement of religious earnestness and moral reform. There was a noticeable glow of zeal in the other curates and in the parish workers, who, with one or two exceptions, were enthusiastic in their devotion to him personally and to his notions of work. Even after Easter several of the recently-cured drunkards were persevering, and other notoriously bad characters seemed determined to show that the first shoots of their awakened moral life were not merely what gardeners call "flowering shoots," but steady growths giving promise of sound wood.

Mark's sermons were becoming more and more the rage, and people were heard to say that he was the only Catholic preacher in London, excepting perhaps one or two Jesuit Fathers; while he had also the tribute of attention from the press, which he particularly disliked.

Meanwhile, the old rector was still gruff and still proffered snubs which were gratefully received, for Mark was genuinely anxious not to be misled by the atmosphere of praise and affection in which he was living.

Nothing warned him of impending danger (to use a phrase of old-fashioned romance) when he was told that Miss Dexter was asking to see him. He had not seen her for a long time, and was quite glad that she should come.

He looked young, eager, and happy as he came quickly into the parlour, but after a few minutes the simple warmth of his manner changed into a more negative politeness. There was something so gorgeous in Molly's appearance, and so very strange in her face, that even a man who had seen less of the world than is obtained in a year on the mission in London, could not fail to be somewhat puzzled.

Molly hardly spoke for some moments, and silence was apparently inevitable. Then she burst out, without preparation, in a wild, incoherent way, with her whole life's story. The story of a child deserted by her mother, neglected by her father, taken from the ayah who was the only person who had ever loved her, and sent like a parcel to the care of a hard and selfish aunt who was ashamed of her. It might have been horribly pathetic only that it was impossible that so much egotism and bitterness should not choke the sympathy of the listener. But as the story came to Molly's twenty-first year, the strange, bitter self-defence (she had not yet explained why she should defend herself at all to Father Molyneux), all the unpleasing moral side of the story became merged in the sense of its dramatic qualities.

Molly had never told it to anyone before now, and, indeed, she had not realised several features of the case until quite lately. She told well the disillusion as to her mother, her own single-handed fight with life, the double sense of shame as to her mother's past, and her own ambiguous position. She told him how she felt at first meeting Rose Bright, of her own sense of sailing under false colours, and she actually explained, in her strange pleading for a favourable judgment, how everything that happened had naturally hardened her heart and made her feel as if she had been born an outcast. Lastly, she told how Sir Edmund Grosse had pursued her mother with detectives, and, as she had for a time believed, had pursued herself with the hypocritical appearance of friendship. She had been wrong, it seemed now, in judging him so harshly, but it had hurt terribly at the time.

Through all this Mark was struggling against the repulsion that threatened to drown the sympathy he wanted to give her. But he had, naturally, not the faintest suspicion as to what was coming or that Molly was confiding in him a story of her own wrong-doing. He was absolutely confounded when she went on, still in the tone of passionate self-defence, to tell how she had found the will leaving the whole of Sir David's fortune to Lady Rose. He simply stared at Molly when she said:

"Who could suppose for a single moment that I should be obliged, on account of a scrap of paper which was evidently sent to my mother for her to dispose of as she liked, to become a pauper and to give a fortune to Lady Rose Bright?"

But although he was too astounded for speech, and his face showed strange, stern lines, it was now that there awoke in his heart the passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen for his own portion.

"It's a hard, hard case," he murmured, to Molly's surprise.

She had been so occupied in her own outpouring that she had hardly thought of him at first, except as a human outlet for her story made safe by the fact that he was a priest. But when he had betrayed his silent but most eloquent amazement, she had suddenly realised what the effect of her confidences might be on such a man, and half expected anathemas to thunder over her head.

Then he tried to find out whether there was any kind of hope that the will had, in fact, been sent to her mother to be at her disposal. But suddenly Molly, who had herself suggested this idea, rent it to pieces and brought out the whole case against her mother (and, consequently, against herself) with a fierce logic of attack.

This was more like the Molly whom he had known before, and Mark felt the atmosphere a little clearer. Having left not the faintest shadow of a defence for her own action, she suddenly became silent. After some moments she leant forward.

"Do you know," she said, in a tone so low that he only just caught the words, "I see now what must have happened. It is strange that I never thought of it before. I see it now quite clearly. Of course the will and the letter were wrongly addressed, and probably some letter to my mother was sent to Lady Rose."

"That does not follow," said Father Molyneux.

"But it's not unlikely," argued Molly. "It is more probable that the two letters should be put into the wrong envelopes than that one should be addressed to the wrong person. It's a mistake that is made every day, only the results are usually of less consequence. It must have been curious reading for my mother—that letter about herself to Lady Rose Bright."

"It is so difficult," said Mark, feeling his way cautiously, "to be sure of not acting on fancied facts when there are so few to go upon. Do you suppose that the detective in Florence had any definite plan of action given to him by his employer? For just supposing that your guess is right, they may have got some clue to what happened in the letter that was sent by mistake to Lady Rose. Have you no notion at all whether they may not now have got some evidence to prove that there was another will?"

Molly shook her head.

"Do you think," she said, "they would have been quiet all this time if there had been any real evidence at all? It is three years since Sir David died, and six months since my mother died."

She did not notice how Mark started at this information. Had Miss Dexter, then, been in possession of this letter to Lady Rose and the last will for six months?

"You were not sent these papers at once?" he ventured to ask.

"Yes; Dr. Larrone, who attended my mother, brought them to me. He left Florence two hours after she died."

Another silence followed.

"It seems to me that a great deal might be done by a private arrangement. Probably their case is not strong enough, or likely to be strong enough, for them to push it through. It should be arranged that you should receive the L1000 a year that Sir David intended to give your mother."

Molly laughed scornfully.

"I'd rather beg my bread than be their pensioner. No, no; you entirely mistake the situation. I shall have no dealings with them at all—no nonsense about arbitration or private arrangements. I won't give them any opportunity of feeling generous. It must"—she spoke very slowly and looked at him fiercely—"with me it must be all or nothing, and"—she got up suddenly and began smoothing her gloves over her wrists—"and as I don't choose to starve it must be all. But if I can't go through with it (which is quite possible) I shall throw up the sponge and get out of this world as quickly as possible."

"If you have made up your mind," said Mark sternly, "to defy God, in Whom I know that you believe, to defy the laws of man, whose punishment may come, whereas His punishment must come, why have you told me all this?"

"I had to tell some one; I was suffocating. You don't know"—she stood looking out of the window a strange expression of hunger and loneliness succeeding the fierceness of a few moments before—"you don't know what it is to have in your own mind a long, long story about yourself that has never been told. To have been lonely and hardly treated and deceived and spurned, and never to have put your own case to any one human being! To have cried from childhood till twenty-two, knowing that nobody really cared! There comes a time when you would rather say the worst of yourself than keep silence. To accuse yourself is the natural thing; silence is the unnatural thing."

"Good God!" said Mark, rising, "don't stop there. If you must accuse yourself, pass judgment also. Class yourself where you have chosen with your eyes open to stand. Would you allow any amount of provocation and unhappiness to excuse a systematic fraud? Do you think that the thief brought up to sin has less or more excuse than you have? Are you the only person who has known a lonely childhood? Can you tell me here in this room that God never showed you what love really is? He has never left you alone, and you wish in vain now that He would leave you alone. For your present life is so unbearable that you feel that you may choose death rather than go on with it."

"I shall pay heavily for the relief of speech if I am to have a sermon preached all to myself," said Molly insolently. "I was speaking of the need of human love; I was speaking of all I had suffered, and it is easy for you to retort upon me that I might have had Divine Love only that I chose to reject it. Tell me, were you brought up without a mother's love?"

"No; I had—I have a mother who loves me almost too much."

"Have you known real loneliness?"

"I believe every man and woman has known that the soul is alone."

Molly shook her head.

"That is a mood; mine was a permanent state. Have you ever known what it is to see God's will on one side, and all possibilities of human happiness, glory, success, and pleasure, opposed to it?"

The young man blushed deeply.

"Yes, I have."

Molly was checked.

"I forgot," she answered; "but still you don't understand. You were an intimate friend of God when He asked you for the sacrifice, whereas I—I had only an inkling, a suspicion of that Love. Besides, you were not asked to give all your possessions to your enemies! No; too much has been asked of me."

"Can too much be asked where all has been given?" asked Father Molyneux.

"That is an old point for a sermon," said Molly wearily. "You don't understand; you are of no use to me. Good-bye! I don't think I shall come again."



CHAPTER XXX

THE BIRTH OF A SLANDER

After that visit to Father Molyneux the devil seems to have entered into Molly. It was a devil of fear and, consequently, of cruelty. What she did to harm him was at first unpremeditated, and it must be allowed that she had not at the moment the means of knowing how fearful a harm such words as hers could do. She said them too when terror had driven her to any distraction, and when wine had further excited her imagination. Still it would not be surprising to find that many who might have forgiven her for a long, protracted fraud, would blot her out of their own private book of life for the mean cruelty of one sentence.

Not many hours had passed after the visit before Molly was furious with herself for her consummate folly in giving herself away to the young priest, who might even think it a duty to reveal what she said.

She had once told Mark that she might soon come to hate him, as hatred came most easily to her. There was now quite cause enough for this hatred to come into being. Molly had two chief reasons for it. First, she was in his power to a dangerous extent and he might ruin her if he chose; secondly, she was afraid of his influence—chiefly of the influence of his prayers—and she dreaded still more that he should persuade her to ruin herself.

One evening Molly had been with Mrs. Delaport Green and two young men to a play. It was a play that represented a kind of female "Raffles"—a thief in the highest ranks of society, and the lady Raffles had black hair. The lady stole diamonds, and fascinated detectives, and even beguiled the ruffianly burglar who had wanted the diamonds for himself. It was a far-fetched comparison indeed, but it worried and excited Molly to the last degree. They went back to supper at Miss Dexter's house, and there one more lady and another man joined them. They sat at a gorgeous little supper at a round table in the small dining-room, Mrs. Delaport Green opposite Molly, and Lady Sophia Snaggs, a spirited, cheery Irishwoman, separated from the hostess by Billy, with whom the latter had always, in the past weeks, been ready to discuss the poverty and the failings of Sir Edmund Grosse. Of the other two men, one was elderly, bald, greedy, fat and witty, and the other was a soldier, spare, red and rather silent but extremely popular for some happy combination of qualities and excellent manners. It would seem hardly worth while to say even this little about them, only that it proved of some importance that the few people who heard Molly's words that night, and certainly repeated them afterwards, had unfortunately rather different and rather wide opportunities of making them known.

The Florentine looking-glasses that once belonged to Sir Edmund Grosse, with their wondrous wreaths of painted flowers, looked down from three sides of the room and reflected the pretty women and their gowns, the old silver, the rare glass, and the flowers. They were probably refreshed by the exquisite taste of the little banquet that might recall the first reflection of their youth. Morally there was a rift within the lute among the guests, for Molly betrayed that Adela had got on her nerves. Lady Sophia Snaggs poured easy conversation on the troubled waters, but at last the catastrophe could not be averted.

At a moment when the others were silent Adela was talking.

"Yes; I went to hear him preach, and it is so beautiful, you know. Crowds; the church was packed, and many people cried. You should go. And then one feels how real it is for him to preach against the world, because he gave up so much."

Molly drained her glass of champagne and leant across.

"Whom are you talking about?"

"Father Molyneux."

"I thought so."

"Have you heard him preach?" asked Lady Sophy.

"I used to, but I never go now." She again leant forward and spoke this time with unconcealed irritation. "Adela, I don't go now because I know too much about him."

There was immediate sensation.

Molly slowly lit a cigarette. Even then she did not know what she was going to say, but she had determined on the spur of the moment, and chiefly from sheer terror, to put Mark out of court if she possibly could.

"He is a humbug," she proclaimed in her low, incisive tone.

"Oh! come now," said Billy. "A man who gave up Groombridge—extraordinary silly thing to do, but he is not a humbug!"

Molly turned on him.

"Yes, he is. He knows he made a great mistake and he would undo it if he could."

"Molly, it can't be true!" cried Adela almost tearfully. "If you had only heard him preach last Sunday you couldn't say such hasty, unkind, horrid things!"

"It is true," said Molly.

"Our hostess is pleased to be mysterious," said the fat man, and "you know," turning to Mrs. Delaport Green, "it's very likely that he is sorry he made such a sacrifice, but I don't think that prevents its having been a noble action at the time."

"Or makes him a humbug now," said the soldier. "I believe he is an uncommonly nice fellow."

"Oh! she means something else," said Lady Sophia, looking at Molly with curiosity. "What is it you have against him?"

Molly felt the table to be against her, and it added to her nervous irritability. She was not in any sense drunk, and the drugs she took were in safe doses at present; yet she was to a certain degree influenced both by the champagne she had just taken, and the injection she had given herself when she came in from the theatre.

"You will none of you repeat what I am going to say?"

"I probably shall," said the big guest, "unless it is excessively interesting; otherwise I never remember what is a secret and what isn't."

But Molly did not heed him.

"Well," she said, "it is a fact that Father Molyneux would give up the Roman Church to-morrow if a very intimate friend of mine, who could give him as much wealth as he has lost, would agree to marry him after he ceased to be a priest!"

"Oh! how dreadfully disappointing!" cried Adela.

"Why shouldn't he?" said Billy.

"It seems a come-down," said the fat man; and the soldier said nothing.

"Stuff and nonsense," said Lady Sophia firmly. "Somebody has been humbugging you, Molly."

But being a lady who liked peace better than warfare, she now went on to say that she had had no notion how late it was until this moment, and that she really must be off. Her farewell was quite friendly, but Molly's was cold.

The departure of Lady Sophia made a welcome break, and, in spite of the hostess being silent and out of temper, the men managed to divert the conversation into less serious topics. But they were not likely to forget what Molly had impressed upon their minds by the strange vehemence with which she had emphasised her accusations.

"She meant herself, I suppose?" asked Billy, when leaving the house with his stout fellow guest. "Do you believe it?"

"It was very curious, very curious indeed. Do you know I rather doubt if she wholly and entirely believed it herself."

Billy was puzzled for a moment, thinking that some difficult mental problem had been offered for his digestion.

"Oh, I see," he said, as he opened his own door with his latch-key. "He only meant that she was telling a lie; I suspect he is right too."



CHAPTER XXXI

THE NURSING OF A SLANDER

Meanwhile, in shadowy corners of Westmoreland House, Miss Carew lived a monotonous but anxious life. For days together she hardly saw Molly, and then perhaps she would be called into the big bed-room for a long talk, or rather, to listen to a long monologue in which Molly gave vent to views and feelings on men and things.

Molly's cynicism was increasing constantly, and she now hardly ever allowed that anybody did anything for a good motive. She had moods in which she poured scandal into Miss Carew's half excited and curious mind, piling on her account of the wickedness and the baseness of the people she knew intimately, of the sharks who pursued her money, and, most of all, she showered her scorn on the men who wanted to marry her.

Listening to her Miss Carew almost believed that all the men Molly met were divorces, or notoriously lived bad lives, and hardly veiled their intention to continue to do the same after obtaining her hand and her money.

Molly would lie on a sofa, in a gorgeous kind of deshabille which cost almost as much as Miss Carew spent on her clothes in the whole year, and apparently take delight in scaring her by these hideous revelations. She was so strange in her wild kind of eloquence, and it was so impossible to believe all she said, that the doubt more than once occurred to Miss Carew whether it might be a case of the use of drugs. The extraordinary personal indulgence of luxury was unlike anything the older woman had ever come across. Then there was no system, nothing business-like about Molly as there often is in women of the modern world. Miss Carew dimly suspected that any society of human beings expects some self-discipline, and some sacrifice to ordinary rules. As it was she wondered how long Molly's neglect of small duties and her frequent insolence would be condoned.

All this, which had been coming on gradually, was positively nauseous to the middle-aged Englishwoman whose nerves were suffering from the strain, and she came to feel that it would be impossible to endure it much longer. It would be easier to drudge and trudge with girls in the schoolroom for a smaller salary than to endure life with Molly if she were to develop further this kind of temper.

For months now Miss Carew had lived under a great strain. From the evening when she had found Molly sitting on the floor with the tin box open before her, and old, yellow letters lying on the ground about it, she had been almost constantly uneasy. She could not forget the sight of Molly crouching like a tramp in the midst of the warm, comfortable room, biting her right hand in a horrible physical convulsion. It was of no use to try to think that Molly's condition that night was entirely the result of illness, or that the loss of her unknown mother had upset her to that degree or at all in that way. The character of Molly's mental state was quite, quite different from the qualities that come of grief or sickness. Then had followed the very anxious nursing, during which all other thoughts had been swallowed up in immediate anxiety and responsibility.

During Molly's convalescence, in the quiet days by the sea-side, Miss Carew began to reflect on a kind of coherent unity in the delirious talk she had listened to during the worst days of the illness. And she also noticed that Molly, by furtive little jokes and sudden, irrelevant questions, was trying to find out what Miss Carew had heard her say. Then it became evident that Molly attributed all the excitement of that night to her subsequent illness—only once, and that very calmly, alluding to the fact of her mother's death.

Miss Carew had no wish to penetrate the mystery of the black box and the faded letters. She had a sort of instinctive horror of the subject, but she could not but watch the fate of the box when they came back to the flat. Molly paid no attention to it whatever, and said in a natural tone:

"I shall send my father's dispatch box and sword-case and my own dispatch boxes in a cab. Would you mind taking them and having them put in the little room next to my bed-room?"

But in the end Molly had taken them herself, as she thought Miss Carew had a slight cold. Miss Carew always had a certain dislike to the door of the little room next to Molly's, which had evidently been once used for a powder closet. She did not even know if the door were locked or not, and she never touched the handle. She had an uncanny horror of passing the door, at least so she said afterwards; probably in retrospect she came to exaggerate her feelings as to these things.

She was puzzled and confused: her health was not good, and her faculties were dimmed. It was probably the strain of living with Molly whom she could no longer control or guide, and who was so evidently in dire need of some one to do both. She felt dreadfully burdened with responsibility, both as to the things she did understand and the things she did not understand. What she could not understand was a sense of moral darkness, like a great, looming grey cloud, sometimes simply dark and heavy, and at other times a cloud electric with coming danger. She felt as if burdened with a secret which she longed to impart, only that she did not know what it was. At times it was as if she carried some monstrous thing on her back, whilst she could only see its dark, shapeless shadow. Her self-confidence was going, and her culture was so useless. What good was it to her now to know really well the writings of Burke, or Macaulay—nay, of Racine and Pascal? She had never been religious since her childhood, but in these long, solitary days in the great house that grew more and more gloomy as she passed about it when Molly was out, she began to feel new needs and to seek for old helps.

Molly was sometimes struck by the change in her companion. Miss Carew seemed to have grown so futile, so incoherent and funny, unlike the Miss Carew who had been her finishing governess not many years ago.

The sight of Carey's troubled, mottled face began to irritate Molly to an unbearable degree.

"Why not have a treatment for eczema and have done with it? You used to have quite a clear skin," she cried, in brutal irritation one morning.

"Oh! it's nerves—merely nerves," said poor Miss Carew apologetically.

"Then have a treatment for nerves," cried Molly furiously. "It is too ridiculous to have blotches on your face because I have a bad temper!"

It was the night after the little supper party at which the slander was born that Molly said this rude thing, and then abruptly left the drawing-room to join a hairdresser who was waiting upstairs. Almost immediately afterwards Adela Delaport Green was standing over the stiff chair on which Miss Carew was sitting, very limp in figure, and holding a damp handkerchief to her face.

"How d'ye do? They told me Molly was here," she said in a disappointed voice, and her eyes ranged round the room with the alertness of a sportswoman.

Adela had come with a purpose; she had come there to right the wrong and to force Molly to tell the truth.

"She was here a moment ago. She has just gone up to the hairdresser," said Miss Carew as she got up, quickly restoring the damp handkerchief to her pocket and composing her countenance, not without a certain dignity. She liked Adela, who was always friendly and civil whenever they met.

That little lady threw herself pettishly into a deep chair.

"So tiresome when I haven't a minute to spare, and I suppose he will keep her nearly an hour?"

"Can I take a message?"

"Oh! no, thanks, dear Miss Carew, don't go up all those horrid steep steps. Do rest and entertain me a little. I am sure you feel these hot days terribly."

"I find it very cool and quiet here," said Miss Carew, a little sadly.

"I'm afraid it's lonely," cried Adela.

"Well! I oughtn't to grumble about that."

"No, you never do grumble, I know; but I feel sometimes that you must be tired and anxious, placed, as you are, as the only thing instead of a mother to poor, dear Molly!"

The fierce, quick envy betrayed in that "poor, dear Molly" did not reach Miss Carew's brain, and a little sympathy was very soothing.

"Now, could any fortune stand this sort of thing?" asked Adela.

The companion shook her head sadly, but would not speak.

"You know that she has bought Sir Edmund Grosse's old yacht? And that she is taking one of the best deer forests in the Highlands? And is it true that she is thinking of buying Portlands?"

"Oh, yes!" sighed Miss Carew. "There is some new scheme every day."

"She has everything the world can give," said Adela sharply. "But, you know," she went on, "people won't go on standing her manners as they do now, even if she can pay her amazing way! Do you know that her cousin, Lady Dawning, declares she won't have anything more to do with her? Not that that matters very much; old Lady Dawning hardly counts, now that Molly has really great people as her friends, only little leaks let in the water by degrees."

A pause, and then suddenly:

"Do you know Father Molyneux?"

"Yes," said Miss Carew, who was glad to change the subject. "He is very charming."

"I didn't know he was a friend of Molly's."

"Oh! didn't you? She took a great fancy to him last autumn; he used to come to luncheon."

"Did he come often?"

"Oh! I think so, but I don't remember exactly."

"And has he been coming here lately?"

"I really don't know. I have my meals by myself now; the hours were so irregular, and I am too old and dull for Molly's friends. I know she went to see him a few days ago, and she came back looking agitated. I was rather glad—I thought it would be good for her, but I fear it was not. She has been more excited, I think, these two or three days. Her nerves are really quite overwrought; she allows herself no quiet. Yes; she was very much excited after seeing Father Molyneux."

Miss Carew was talking more to herself than to Adela.

"I thought perhaps he had pressed her to become a Roman Catholic; certainly he upset her in some way."

Adela's small eyes were like sharp points as she looked at the older woman.

Then was it really true? Oh! no; surely not. But then, what else could he have said to upset Molly?

At that moment Molly's maid came into the room.

"Miss Dexter has only just heard that you were here, madam. She is very sorry you have been waiting. She wished me to say that she is obliged to go immediately to a sale at Christie's, and would you be able to go with her?"

Adela declined, perceiving that Molly was in no mind for a private talk, and having parted affectionately from Miss Carew, went her way to have a chat with Lady Dawning.

In the afternoon she met several of her Roman Catholic acquaintances at a charity performance in a well-known garden, and she pumped all those she could decoy in turn into a tete-a-tete as to Father Molyneux. She was in reality devoured with the wish to know the truth. She had her own thin but genuine share of ideality, and she had been more impressed by Mark's renouncement of Groombridge Castle than by anything she had met with before.

But gradually, as she hunted the story, she gave him up, not because of any evidence of any kind, but because she did not find him regarded as anything very wonderful. She had need of the enthusiasms of others to make an atmosphere for her own ideals, and almost by chance she had not met anyone much interested in the young preacher. Then she had dim backwaters of anti-Popery in her mind, and they helped the reaction. She had come out, lance in rest, to defend the victim of calumny; in a very few days she had thrown him over, and was explaining pathetically to anybody who would listen that she had had a shock to her faith in humanity. And the story, starting by describing her own state of mind and being almost entirely subjective, ended in bringing home to her listeners with peculiar force the objective facts as asserted by Molly. Catholics, she found, when she came to this advanced state of propagation, were aghast at her story. They did not believe it, but they were excessively annoyed, and were, for the most part, inclined to think that Mark could not have been entirely prudent. But non-Catholics were, naturally, more credulous.

A calumny is a quick and gross feeder. It has a thousand different ways of assimilating things "light as air," or things dull from the ennui which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated sensuality, or the bitter fruits of melancholia, or the foreshadowings of insanity, or the mere dislike of the lower moralities for the higher, or the uneasiness felt by the ordinary in the presence of the rare, or the revolt felt by the conventional against holier bonds, or the prattle of curiosity, or the roughness of mere vitality, or the fusion of minds at a low level.

This particular calumny was well watered and manured with all these by-products of human life, and it grew to full size and height with a rapidity that could not have been attained under less favourable conditions.



BOOK IV



CHAPTER XXXII

ROSE SUMMONED TO LONDON

Rose was back in London the second week in July, summoned back rather imperiously by Mr. Murray, Junior. The house had been shut up since the departure of her tenants at Whitsuntide, and she had hoped not to reopen it until the autumn. She had intended to go directly to her mother's home in the country as soon as they could leave Paris. It was becoming a question whether it would be a greater risk for Lady Charlton to endure the heat in Paris or the fatigues of the long journey. Mr. Murray's letter decided them to move. Rose must go, and her mother would not stay behind alone. Lady Charlton decided to pay a month's visit to her youngest daughter in Scotland, as Rose might be kept in London.

It was a disappointment. The house in London would be nearly as stuffy as Paris. Rose disliked the season and was in no mood for the stale echoes of its dying excitements. She would not tell her friends that she was back; she would keep as quiet as she had been in Paris.

The first morning, after early service and breakfast, she went to the library to wait for the lawyer's visit. It was the only room in which to receive him; the dining-room, and drawing-room, and the little boudoir upstairs, were not opened. Rose was inclined to leave them as they were, with the furniture in brown wrappers, for the present; but she would rather have seen Mr. Murray in any room but the library.

The morning sun was full on the windows that opened to the rather dreary garden at the back. She wondered why Mr. Murray had written so urgently, and why Edmund Grosse had not written for several weeks. Up to now they had done all this horrid business between them, and she had only had occasional reports from her cousin. Now she must face the subject with the lawyer himself. She was puzzled to account for the change in the situation.

At the exact moment he had mentioned, Mr. Murray's tall person with its heavy, bent head appeared in the library. As they greeted they were both conscious that it was in this same room, seated at the wide writing-table still in the same place, and still bearing the large photograph of Sir David Bright, where he had first told her of the strange dispositions of her husband's will. He remembered vividly her look then—undaunted and confident—as she had gently but firmly asserted that there must be another will. But had she not also said it would never be found?

But the present occupied the lawyer much more than the past. He was eager and a little triumphant in his story of the progress of the case, and did not notice that the sweet face opposite to him became more and more white as he went on. He told her all he had told Sir Edmund when he first got back from the yacht; he told of the mysterious visit he had received from Dr. Larrone, and how he could prove from the letters of the Florentine detective that Madame Danterre had sent the doctor to England to take a certain small, black box to Miss Dexter.

Then he paused.

"I told Sir Edmund how our Florentine detective, Pietrino, had made friends with one of the nurses, and that she described Madame Danterre ordering the box to be opened and having a seizure—a heart attack—while the letters were spread out on her bed. Nurse Edith said then that she had put them back in a hurry and locked the box, and that it had not been reopened by Madame Danterre. Some weeks later when she was near her end, Madame Danterre had a scene with Dr. Larrone which ended in his consenting to take the box to London as soon as she was dead, but the nurse was sure that the doctor was told nothing as to the contents of the box. That was as much as we knew up to Easter, and while waiting for the arrival of Akers, and Stock, the other private who had witnessed the signature. They got here in Easter week, and I saw them with Sir Edmund, and we both cross-questioned them closely. Akers's evidence is beyond suspicion, and is perfectly supported by that of Stock. He described all that happened at the witnessing of the General's signature most circumstantially, but, of course, he knew nothing of the contents of the paper. But now I have more important evidence than any we have had so far, and the extraordinary thing is that Sir Edmund does not wish to hear it. I cannot understand why!"

Rose remained silent. She was looking fixedly at a paper-knife which she held in her hand.

It suddenly struck the lawyer as a flash of most embarrassing light that possibly there was some complication of a dangerous and tender kind between Sir Edmund and his cousin. He could not dwell on such a notion now—it might be absolute nonsense, but it made him go on hastily:

"I have had a visit from Nurse Edith, and as Pietrino suspected, she knows much more than she would allow to him. I think she was waiting to see if money would be offered for her information, but Pietrino would not fall into the risk of buying evidence. He waited; she was watched until she came to London, and she had not been here twenty-four hours before she came to me. She declares now that, as she was gathering up the papers, she had seen that the long letter Madame Danterre had been reading when she had the attack of faintness was written to some one called Rose. She knew it was that letter which had done the mischief. She slipped it into her pocket when she put the rest away. I believe it was naughty curiosity, but she wishes us to think that she knew the whole scandal about the General's will, and did what she did from a sense of justice. When off duty she took the paper to her room, and when she opened it she found the will inside it. In her excitement she called the housemaid, an Englishwoman with whom she had made friends, and she copied the will while they were together, and the names of Akers and Stock—of whom she could not possibly have heard—are in her copy. I have seen that copy, Lady Rose, and——" He paused and glanced at her for a moment, and then his eyes sought the trees in the garden even as they had done when he had made that other and awful announcement on the day of the memorial service to Sir David. Rose flushed a little, and her breathing came quickly, but she made no sign of impatience.

"Sir David left the whole of his fortune to you subject to an annual payment of a thousand a-year to Madame Danterre during her lifetime."

Complete silence followed. Lady Rose either could not or would not speak. Out of the pale, distinguished slightly worn face the eyes looked at Mr. Murray with no surprise. Had she not always said that she did not believe the iniquitous will Mr. Murray had brought her to be the true one, but had she not also maintained that the true will would never be found? She did not say so to Mr. Murray, but in fact she shrank from making too sure of Nurse Edith's evidence. She had so long forbidden herself to believe in the return of worldly fortune or to wish for it.

Mr. Murray coughed. No words of congratulation seemed available. At last he went on:

"Nurse Edith says she did not read the letter which was with the will. Directly she went on duty in the morning, and while Madame Danterre was asleep she put the papers back in the black box and the key of the box in its usual place in a little bag on a table standing close by the head of the bed. It was, as I have said, this same box which was put into Dr. Larrone's care before he started on his mysterious journey to see Miss Dexter. Now our position is very strong. We have evidence of the witnessing of a paper by two men. We have the copy of the will made by the nurse and witnessed by the housemaid, and it bears the signatures of those two men. Then you must remember that, in a case of this kind, the court is much more likely to set aside a will leaving property away from the family than if the will in dispute had been an ordinary one in favour of his relations."

"Oh! it is horrible—too horrible!" cried Rose. "There must be some mistake. That young girl I met at Groombridge! Even if the poor mother were really wicked, that girl cannot have carried it on!"

Rose had leant her elbows on the table, and clasped her white hands tightly and then covered her face with them for a moment.

"I can't believe it. I feel there is some terrible mistake, and we might ruin this girl's life. It would be ill-gotten, unblest wealth."

The lawyer noted with surprise that these two—Sir Edmund and Lady Rose—were not more anxious for wealth, rather less so, since both had known comparative poverty.

"I don't believe anyone is the better for living on fraud, Lady Rose, and I don't believe you have any right to drop the case. You have to think of Sir David's good name and of his wishes. The will you are suffering from was a portentous wrong."

Rose trembled. Had she not felt it the most awful, the most portentous wrong? Had it not burnt deep miserable wounds in her soul? The whole horror of the desecration of her married life had been revealed to her in this room by this man. Did she need that he should tell her what that misery had been? The words he had used then were as well known to her as the words he had used to-day.

Rose said after a longer pause, and with slight hesitation:

"And Sir Edmund does not know what Nurse Edith told you? He has not seen the copy of the will?"

"No; I wanted him to, but he refused to hear any more on the subject. I cannot understand it at all." He spoke with considerable irritation, his big forehead contracted with a deep frown. "Sir Edmund, after making the guess on which the whole thing has turned, after discovering Akers and Stock, after spending large sums in the necessary work——"

"Has he spent much money?" Rose flushed deeply.

But Mr. Murray, who usually had more tact, was now too full of his grievance to pause.

"He spent money as long as he could, and now takes no more interest in the matter on the ground that he can no longer be of any use. Why, it was his judgment we wanted, his perceptions; no one could be of more use than Sir Edmund!"

"And who is paying the expenses now?"

"Ah! that is the reason why I wished to see you as soon as possible. I felt that I could not, without your approval, continue as we are now. The last cheque from Sir Edmund covered all expenses to the end of the year. I have advanced what has been necessary since then, and if you really wish the thing dropped, that is entirely my own affair. But I do most earnestly hope that you will not do anything so wrong. I feel very strongly my responsibility towards Sir David's memory in this matter."

"I feel," said Rose, but her manner was irresolute, "that the scandal has been forgotten by now; things come and go so fast. He will be remembered only as a great soldier who died for his country."

"It may be forgotten," said Mr. Murray in a stern voice she had never heard before. "It may be forgotten in a society which is always needing some new sensation and is always well supplied. But there is a less fluctuating public opinion. We men of business keep a clearer view of character, and we know better how through all classes there is a verdict passed on men that does not pass away in a season. Do you think, madam, that when men treasure a good name it is the gossip of a London season they regard? No; it is the thoughts of other good men in which they wish to live. It is the sympathy of the good that a good man has a right to. I believe in a future life, but I don't imagine I know whether in another world they rejoice or suffer pain by anything that affects their good name here. But I do know, Lady Rose, that deep in our nature is the sense of duty to their memory, and I cannot believe that such an instinct is without meaning or without some actual bearing on departed souls. I don't expect Sir David to visit me in dreams, but I do expect to feel a deep and reasonable self-reproach if I do not try to clear his name."

The heavy features of the solicitor had worked with a good deal of emotion. The thought, the words "departed souls," were no mere words to him in these summer days while Mrs. Murray, Junior, was supposed to be doing well after an operation in a nursing home, and the doctors were inclined to speak of next month's progress and on that of the month after that, and to be silent as to any dates far ahead. In his professional hours he did not dwell on these things, but it was the actual spiritual conditions of the life he and his wife were leading that gave a strange force to his words.

"She never loved him," thought Mr. Murray as he looked out of the window. He was on the same side of the writing-table that he had been on when he had first told her of the deep insult offered to her by Sir David. He did not realise now the intensity of the contempt he had felt then for the departed General as he looked at his photograph. It was intolerable, he had thought then, that a man should have those large, full eyes, that straight, manly look and bearing, who had gone to his grave having deliberately planned that his dead hand should so deeply wound a defenceless woman, and that woman his sweet, young wife. Murray's mind was so full now of relief at the idea that Sir David had done his best at the last, that in his relief he almost forgot that, in a woman's mind the main fact might still be that there had been a Madame Danterre in the case!

But Rose now, as when he had first told her of Madame Danterre's existence, was seeking with a single eye to find the truth. It had seemed to her then a moral impossibility to believe that her husband had meant to leave this horrible insult to their married life. David had been incapable of anything so monstrous; he had not in his character even the courage of such a crime.

But now the key to the situation, according to Mr. Murray, was Molly; and Rose again brought to bear all that she had of perception, of experience, of instinct, to see her way clearly. She was silent; then at last she looked up.

"Mr. Murray, Miss Dexter could not commit such a crime. Why, I know her; I spent some days in a country house with her. I know her quite well, and I don't like her very much, but she really can't have done anything of the kind, and therefore, the case won't be proved. I am sure it won't. And if it fails only harm will be done to David's memory, not good."

"That is what Sir Edmund said, but believe me, Lady Rose, you have neither of you anything to go upon. You think it impossible, but you don't either of you see the immense force of the temptation. Some crimes may need a villainous nature. This, if you could see it truly, only needs one that is human under temptation, ignorant of danger, and ambitious."

"But then, was that why Edmund would have nothing more to do with the case?" thought Rose.

The look of clear, earnest, searching in Rose's eyes was clouded by a frown.

The clock struck twelve. Mr. Murray rose.

"I am half an hour late for an appointment. Lady Rose, forgive me; I am an old man, and maybe I take a harsh view of what passes before me. But there is nothing, let me tell you, that alarms me more in the present day than the way in which men and women lose their sense of duty in their sense of sentimental sympathy."



CHAPTER XXXIII

BROWN HOLLAND COVERS

That afternoon Rose was standing by the window in the drawing-room when she became conscious that her gown was quite hot in the burning sun, and, undoubtedly, its soft, grey tone would fade. She drew back and pulled down the blinds.

It was not the first time she had put off her black, for, in the Paris heat, it had become intolerable, and she had certainly enjoyed her visit to an inexpensive but excellent dressmaker, who had produced this grey gown with all its determined simplicity.

Rose looked round at the drawing-room now. The furniture in holland covers was stacked in the middle of the room; the pictures were wrapped in brown paper with large and rather unnecessary white labels printed with "Glass" in red letters. The fire-irons were dressed in something that looked like Jaeger and the tassels of the blinds hung in yellow cambric bags. Rose smiled a little as she recalled how strange and strong an impression a room in such a state had made on her in her childhood. The drawing-room in her London home had seemed incomparably more attractive then than at any other time. Lady Charlton had once brought Rose up to see a dentist on a bright, autumn day. She had not been much hurt, but it was a great comfort when the visit was over. She and her mother had dinner on two large mutton chops, and some apricot tartlets from a pastry-cook, things ordered by Lady Charlton with a view to giving as little trouble as possible to two able-bodied women who were living on board wages, and both of whom were, in private life, excellent cooks. Lady Charlton was anxious, too, not to give trouble by sending messages, having quite forgotten that there was also a boy who lived in the house. So, after lunch, she had gone out to find a cab for herself, and had left Rose to rest with a book on the big morocco sofa in the dining-room.

Rose had found her way to the drawing-room, and she could see now the half-open shutter and the rich light of the autumn sun turning all the dust of the air to gold in one big shaft of light. The child had never seen the house when the family was away before, and with awestruck, mysterious joy, she had lifted corners of covers and peered under chairs and recognised legs of tables and footstools. Then she had stood up and taken a comprehensive view of the whole of this world of mountains and valleys, precipices and familiar little home corners, all covered in brown holland, like sand instead of grass, all golden lights and soft shadows.

What had there been so very exciting in it—an excitement she could still recall as keenly now? Was it the greatness of the revolution, or surprise at the new order of things? It was such a startling interruption of all the usual relations between the furniture of the house and its human beings. A great London house wrapped up in the old way spoke more of the old order its influence, its importance, than did the house when inhabited, and out of its curl papers. Nothing could speak more of law and order and care, and the "proper" condition of things, and the self-respect of housemaids, the passing effectiveness of sweeps, and the unobtrusive attentiveness of carpenters! But to the child there had been a glorious sense of loneliness and licence as she danced up and down the broad vacant spaces and jumped over the rolls of Turkey carpets.

Rose envied that child now, with an envy that she hoped was not bitter. It is not because we knew no sorrows in our childhood that we would fain recall it. It is because we now so seldom know one whole hour of its licensed freedom, its absolute liberty in spite of bonds.

A loud door-bell, as it seemed to Rose, sounded through the house as she closed the shutter she had opened when she came in. She knew whose ring it must be, and came quietly downstairs with a little frown.