"Thank G.o.d! you did," he cried, with an irrepressible burst of sympathy.
"It"s not much for a thief to have done, is it? But now I should like to do it all properly. Tell me; ought I to come away from here to-day, and give everything I have here to Lady Rose? If I ought, I will!"
"No, certainly not," said Mark. "I have been asked to offer you liberal conditions if you would agree to a compromise. I said they had come to quite the wrong person. No, no, don"t think I told them. They have fresh evidence that there was a will, and they believe they know that important papers were brought to you by Dr. Larrone when your mother died."
"And you came to frighten me with this?" There was a touch of reproach in her tone.
"No, I came, hoping you would give me the paper, as you have done, without knowing this."
Evidently this news impressed Molly deeply, but she did not want to discuss it. Presently she said:
"I am glad you came in time before I was frightened. How you have wanted to make me save my soul! You have helped me very much, but I cannot save my soul."
"But G.o.d can," said Mark.
"You see," she went on, "I never know what I am going to do--going to be--next. Imagine my being a thief! It seems now almost incredible. And I don"t know what may come next."
For a second she looked at him with wild terror in her eyes.
"Think how many years I have before me. How can I hope that I----?"
"You will do great, great good," said Mark, with emotion.
She shook her head.
"David committed a worse sin than yours."
Molly smiled, a little, incredulous, grey smile, for a moment.
"I may be good to-day. I may be full of peace and joy even to-night--but to-morrow? You told me once that I should only know true joy if I had been humbled in the dust. I am low enough now, but the comfort has not come yet, and, even if G.o.d comforts me, it won"t last. I shall still be I, and life is so long."
"You must trust Him--you must indeed. He will find a solution. You are exhausted now with the victory you have gained. Rest now, and then do the good things you have done before. Trust in the higher side of your character; G.o.d gave it to you. Believe me, He has called you to great things."
As he spoke she covered her face with her hands, and a deep blush of shame rose from her neck to her forehead, visible through the thin, white fingers.
"I suppose He will find a way out. As I can"t understand how you have cared so much to save my soul, I suppose I can understand His love still less. Must you go? You will pray for me, I know."
She held out her hand with a look of generous appeal to his forgiveness.
"G.o.d bless you!" he said, with complete sympathy, and then he went away to seek an interview with Sir Edmund Grosse.
Molly sank down on a low seat by the window. Then she went slowly upstairs, dragging her feet a little from fatigue, and took out of the tin box the packet of very old letters. She burned them one by one, with a match for each, kneeling in front of the empty fireplace in her bed-room. They told the story of her mother"s attempt to persuade Sir David of their marriage during his illness in India. It was not a pretty story--one of deceit and intrigue. It should disappear now.
Then she sat down in a deep chair in the window. She stayed very still, curled up against the cushion behind her, her eyes fixed on the ground.
She was hardly conscious of thought; she was trying to recall things Mark had said, murmuring them over to herself. She was trying not to sink into the depths of humiliation and despair. It was a blind clinging to a vague hope for better things, with a certain torpor of all her faculties.
Then gradually things in the vague gloom became definite to her. "No,"
she said to them with entreaty, "not to-night. My life is only just dead. I am tired by the shock--it was so sudden--only let me rest till morning, and in the morning I will try to face it."
She had, it seemed, quite settled this point; the present and the future were to be left; a pause was absolutely necessary. Then followed quickly the sharp pang of a fresh thought. It was not in her power to make things pause. She could not make a truce by calling it a truce. If she did not realise things now and act now herself, others would come upon the scene. Even to-night Sir Edmund Grosse might know. She shivered.
Perhaps he was being told now. It would be insufferable to endure his kindness prompted by Rose"s generous forgiveness. But ought she to find anything unbearable? Was she going to revolt at the very outset? She was not trained in spiritual matters, but it seemed to her that any revolt would betray a want of reality in her reparation, and in this great change of feeling she wanted above all things to be real. She tried to face what must come next. How could she hand over Westmoreland House? It could not be done as quietly as she had handed that letter to Father Mark. The house had been bought with the great lump sum Madame Danterre had acc.u.mulated in Florence--much of that money had been put in the bank before Sir David died. Perhaps if they were ready to come to terms, as Father Mark had said, an arrangement would be suggested in which Molly would not be expected to refund what she had spent, and would have the possession of Westmoreland House and its contents. The sale would realise enough to save her from actual want, and yet she would not be receiving a pension from Lady Rose. Her mind got out of gear and flashed through these thoughts until, unable to check it in any way, she burst into tears. She felt the self-deception of such plans with physical pain. What was that money in the bank at Florence but blackmail gathered in during Sir David"s life? "Why cannot I be straight even now?" she whispered. She was still sitting on the couch with one leg drawn up under her, gazing intently at the ground. No, the only money she possessed was 2000 invested at 3 per cent. "70 a year--that is less than I have given Carey, or the cook, or the butler."
The fact was that while her heart and soul had gone forward in dumb pain in utter darkness with the single aim of undoing the sin done, the mind still lagged and reasoned. This is a peculiar agony, and Molly had to drink of that agony.
Gradually and mercilessly her reason told her that an arrangement with Lady Rose, the appearance of having the right of possession in Westmoreland House, the readiness of all concerned to bury the story, and the possession of a fair income, would make it possible to live in her own cla.s.s quietly but, if tactfully, with a good repute. Then the thought of any kind of compromise became intolerable to her, and she realised that it was a fancy picture, not a real temptation.
To pretend that Westmoreland House was her own she could not do, but what was the alternative? Dragging poverty and shame, and with no opportunity for hiding what had pa.s.sed, for living it down. Even if she did the impossible to her pride and consented to receive a good allowance from Lady Rose, it would not be at all the same in the world"s view as the dignified income that could be raised from Westmoreland House, and from her mother"s jewels and furniture. Her fingers unconsciously touched the pearls round her neck. Surely she need not speculate as to how her mother obtained the magnificent jewels which she had worn up to the end? Then more light came--hard and cold, but clear.
If Molly had been innocent these things might have been so, but Molly had committed a fraud on a great scale. It would be by the mercy of the injured that she would be spared the rigours of the law. It was by the supreme mercy of G.o.d that she had had the chance of making the sacrifice before it was forced from her. And could she shrink from mere ordinary poverty, from a life such as the vast majority of men and women are living on this earth? She did not really shrink in her will. It was only a mechanical movement of thought from one point to another. Was it much punishment for what she had done to be very poor? Would it not be better to be uncla.s.sed--to live among people who help each other much because they have little to give? Would it not be the way to do what Father Mark had said she should try to do--those good things she had done before?
She could nurse, she could watch, she was able to do with little sleep.
She would be very humble with the sick and suffering now. And it would not surely be wrong to go and find such a life far away from where she had sinned? She began to wonder if she need stay and live through all the complications of the coming days. Must it be the right thing to stay because it was the most unbearable? She thought not. There are times when recklessness is the only safety. If she did not burn her ships now she could not tell what temptations might come. But she would not let it be among her motives that thus she would thereby escape unbearable pity from Lady Rose and the far sterner magnanimity of Edmund Grosse. She would act simply; she would ask Rose a favour; she would ask her to provide for Miss Carew.
Half consciously again her hands went to her throat. She unclasped the pearl necklace that Edmund had seen on Madame Danterre"s withered neck in the garden at Florence. She slipped off four large rings, and then gathered up a few jewels that lay about. "One ought not to leave valuables about," she thought, and she did not know that she added "after a death."
If Miss Carew had been in the room she would probably not have understood that anything special was going on. Molly moved quietly about, collecting together on a little table by the cupboard, rings, brooches, buckles, watches--anything of much value. She sought and found the key of the little safe in the wardrobe and put away these objects with the large jewel cases already inside it. She also put with them her cheque book and her banker"s book. A very small cheque book on a different bank where the interest of the 2000 had not been drawn on for six months, she put down on her writing table. Then she looked round the room. Was there nothing there really her own, and that she cared to keep either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had loved? An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round and could think of nothing. Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money. There was not so much as a letter which she cared ever to see again. She had burnt Edmund"s few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.
She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire. "I have everything new," she wailed, "nothing that I ever had before--not a photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter. I don"t feel that I am the same person." The words came back now. "Not the same person," and suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.
"Alone to land upon that sh.o.r.e With not one thing that we have known before."
Oh, the immensity of such a mercy! That hymn had made her shiver as a child; how different it seemed now! Molly knelt down by the couch, and her shoulders trembled as a tempest of feeling came over her. Criminals hardened by long lives of fraud have been known to be happier after being found out--simply because the strain was over. They had destroyed their moral sense. Molly"s conscience was alive, though torn, bleeding, and debased. She could not be happy as they were, but yet there was the lifting of the weight as of a great mountain rolled away. She was afraid of the immense sense of relief that now seemed coming upon her. Could she really become free of the horrible Molly of the last months--this noxious, vile, lying, thieving woman? What an awful strain that woman had lived in! She had told Mark that what frightened her was the thought that she would still be herself. She longed now to cut away everything that had belonged to her. Might she not by G.o.d"s grace, in poverty and hard work, with everything around her quite different from the past, might she not quite do to death the Molly who had lived in Westmoreland House? The cry was more pa.s.sionate than spiritual perhaps, but the longing had its power to help. She rose and again moved quietly about the room of the dead, bad woman, which must be left in order for the new owners. She put some things together--what was necessary for a night or two--and felt almost glad that she had a comb and brush she had not yet used. There was a bag with cheap fittings Mrs. Carteret had given her as a girl, which would hold all she needed. And then she remembered that she had something she would like to take away; it was a nurse"s ap.r.o.n, and in its pocket a nurse"s case of small instruments. They were what she used when nursing with the district nurse in the village at home.
Then she sat down and wrote a cheque and a note, and proceeded to take them downstairs. The cheque was for 30 out of the little Dexter cheque book, and the note was an abrupt little line to tell a friend that she could not dine out that night. She "did not feel up to it" was the only excuse given, and a furious hostess declared that Miss Dexter had become perfectly insufferable. She seemed to think that she could do exactly as she chose because she was absurdly rich.
The butler was able to give Molly 30 in notes and cash, and it was his opinion that she wanted the money for playing cards that night. Molly crept upstairs again with a foreign Bradshaw in her hand. She looked out the train for the night boat to Dieppe. It left Charing Cross at 9.45.
She had chosen Dieppe for the first stage of her journey--of which she knew not the further direction--for two reasons. The first was because she knew that she ought to stay within reach if it were necessary for her to do business with her own or Lady Rose"s solicitors. She was determined not to give any trouble she could avoid giving, in the business of handing over that which had never belonged to her. At this time of year the journey to Dieppe would be no difficulty, and she wanted to go there rather than to Boulogne or any other French port, because she had the address of a very cheap and clean _pension_ in which Miss Carew had pa.s.sed some weeks before coming to live with Molly in London. From that _pension_ Molly could write the letters she felt physically incapable of writing to-night. The only note she determined to write at once was to Carey, asking her to remain at Westmoreland House and to tell the servants that Miss Dexter had gone abroad. She told her that she had gone to the _pension_ at Dieppe, but earnestly insisted that she should not follow her. She begged her to do nothing before getting a letter that she would write to her at once on arriving at Dieppe. She also asked her to keep the key of the safe which she enclosed in her letter. Molly sealed the letter, and then felt some hesitation as to when and how to give it to Miss Carew. She finally decided to send it by a messenger boy from the station when it would be too late for Miss Carew to follow her, and when it would still be in time to prevent any astonishment at her not returning home that night.
Miss Carew, thinking that Molly had gone out to dinner, came into her bed-room to look for a book. The night was hot and oppressive, but no one had raised the blinds since the sun had set, and the room was so dark that she did not at once see Molly. She started nervously, half expecting one of Molly"s impatient and rude exclamations on being disturbed, and, with an apology, was going away when Molly said gently:
"Stay a minute, Carey; I"m not going to dine out to-night."
"But there is no dinner ordered, and I have just had supper. I am going out this evening to see a friend."
"Never mind," Molly interrupted, "I can"t eat anything. I am going out for a drive in a hansom in the cool. Would you mind saying that I shall not want the motor?"
"My dear! are you not well?"
"Not very." And suddenly Miss Carew began to read the great change in her face. "It has none of it been very good for me, Carey; you have been quite right. This house and all was a mistake. You have never said it, but I have seen it in your eyes. And it has not even been in quite good taste for me to make such a splash--you thought that too. I"m going to stop it all now, dear, and probably the house will be sold; it"s been an unblest sort of thing."
Miss Carew stared. The tone was so different from any she had ever heard in Molly"s voice; it was very gentle, but exhausted, as if she had been through an acute crisis in an illness.
"Carey dear, you have always been so kind to me, and I have been very unkind to you. You will have to know things that will make you hate and despise me to-morrow. But would you mind giving me one kiss to-night?"
Miss Carew was very nervous at this request, but happily all the best side of her was roused by something in Molly that, in spite of a vast difference, recalled the Molly of seven years ago when she had first seen her. It was a real kiss--a kind of pact between them.
"I wonder if she will ever wish to do the same again!" thought Molly.
Then Miss Carew left her and she called the maid, who brought at her bidding a long black cloak and a small black toque--insignificant compared to anything else of Molly"s.
The mistress of Westmoreland House drove away in a hansom, with a bag in her hand, at twenty minutes past seven.