"Oh, we will do the most delightful things, now that you have come; we must, of course, do b.a.l.l.s and plays, and then we will have quite a quiet day in the country in the new motor, and we will take some very nice men with us. And then you won"t mind sometimes coming to see people who are ill or poor or old?"
The little voice rose higher and higher in a sort of wail.
"It does cheer them up so to look in and out with a few flowers, and it need not take long."
"I don"t mind people when they are really ill," said Molly, in her low voice, "but I like them best unconscious."
Mrs. Delaport Green stared for a moment; then she jumped up and ran forward with extended hands to greet a lady in a plain coat and skirt and an uncompromising hat.
"Oh, how kind of you to come, and how are you getting on? Molly dear, this is the lady who lives in horrid Hoxton taking care of my poor people I told you about. Do tell her what you really mean about liking people best when they are unconscious, and you will both forgive me if I write one tiny little note meanwhile?"
Molly gave some tea to the newcomer as if she had lived in the house for years, and drew her into a talk which soon allayed her rising fears as to whether her own time would have to be devoted to horrid Hoxton. By calm and tranquil questions she elicited the fact that Mrs. Delaport Green had visited the settlement once during the winter.
"She comes as a sunbeam," said the resident with obviously genuine admiration, "and, of course, with all the claims on her time, and her anxiety as to her husband"s health, we don"t wish her to come often. She is just the inspiration we want."
The hostess having meanwhile asked four people to dinner, came rustling back, and, sitting on a low stool opposite the lady of the settlement, held one of her visitor"s large hands in both her own and patted it and asked questions about a number of poor people by name, and made love to her in many ways, until the latter, cheered and refreshed by the sunbeam, went out to seek the first of a series of "busses between Chelsea and Hoxton.
Mrs. Delaport Green gave a little sigh.
"I must order the motor. The dear thing needn"t have come your very first night, need she? It makes me miserable to leave you, but I was engaged to this dinner before I knew that you existed even! Isn"t it odd to think of that?" Her voice was full of feeling.
"And you must be longing to go to your room. You won"t have to dine with Tim, because he is dining at his club. Promise me that you won"t let Tim bore you: he likes horrid fat people, so I don"t think he will; and are you sure you have got everything you want?"
Molly"s impressions of her new surroundings were written a few weeks later in a letter to Miss Carew.
"MY DEAR CAREY,--
"I have been here for three weeks, but I doubt if I shall stay three months.
"I am living with a very clever woman, and I am learning life fairly quickly and getting to know a number of people. But I am not sure if either of us thinks our bargain quite worth while, though we are too wise to decide in a hurry. There are great attractions: the house, the clothes, the food, the servants, are absolutely perfect; the only thing not quite up to the mark in taste is the husband. But she sees him very little, and I hardly exchange two words with him in the day, and his att.i.tude towards us is that of a busy father towards his nursery. But I rather suspect that he gets his own way when he chooses. The servants work hard, and, I believe, honestly like her. The clergyman of the parish, a really striking person, is enthusiastic; so is her husband"s doctor, so are one religious d.u.c.h.ess and two mundane countesses. I believe that it is impossible to enumerate the number and variety of the men who like her. There are just one or two people who pose her, and Sir Edmund Grosse is one. He snubs her, and so she makes up to him hard. I must tell you that I have got quite intimate with Sir Edmund. He is of a different school from most of the men I have seen. He pays absurd compliments very naturally and cleverly, rather my idea of a Frenchman, but he is much more candid all the time. I shock people here if I simply say I don"t like any one. If you want to say anything against anybody you must begin by saying--"Of course, he means awfully well," and after that you may imply that he is the greatest scoundrel unhung. Sir Edmund is not at all ill-natured, and he can discuss people quite simply--not as if he wished to defend his own reputation for charity all the time.
He won"t allow that Adela Delaport Green is a humbug: he says she is simply a happy combination of extraordinary cleverness and stupidity, of simplicity and art. "I believe she hardly ever has a consciously disingenuous moment," he said to me last night. "She likes clergymen and she likes great ladies, and she likes to make people like her. Of course, she is always designing; but she never stops to think, so that she doesn"t know she is designing. She is an amazing mimic. Something in this room to-night made me think of Dorset House directly I came in, and I remembered that, of course, she was at the party there last night. She must have put the sofa and the palms in the middle of the room to-day. At dinner to-night she suddenly told me that she wished she had been born a Roman Catholic, and I could not think why until I remembered that a Princess had just become a Papist. She could never have liked the Inquisition, but she thought the Pope had such a dear, kind face.
Now she will probably tremble on the verge of Rome until several Anglican bishops have asked their influential lady friends to keep her out of danger."
""And you don"t call her a humbug?"
""No; she is a child of nature, indulging her instincts without reflection. And please mark one thing, young lady; her models are all good women--very good women--and that"s not a point to be overlooked."
"I told him--I could not help it--how funny she had been yesterday, talking of going to early church. "I do love the little birds quite early," she said, "and one can see the changes of the season even in London, going every day, you know, and one feels so full of hope walking in the early morning fasting, and hope is next to charity, isn"t it?--though, of course, not so great."
"And she has been out in the shut motor exactly once in the early morning since I came up, and she knew that I knew it.
"However, Sir Edmund maintained that, at the moment, Adela quite believed she went out early every day, and I am not sure he is not right. But then, you see, Carey, that with her power of believing what she likes, and of intriguing without knowing it, I am not quite sure that she will last very well. She might get tired of me--quite believe I had done something which I had not done at all!
And then the innocent little intrigues might become less amusing to me than to other people. However, I believe I am useful for the present, and the life here suits me on the whole. But I will report again soon if the symptoms become more unfavourable, and ask your opinion as to my plans for the season if the Delaport Green alliance breaks down before then.
"Yours affectionately,
"MOLLY DEXTER."
CHAPTER VIII
AT GROOMBRIDGE CASTLE
Mrs. Delaport Green counted it as a large a.s.set in Molly"s favour that Sir Edmund Grosse was so attentive. Adela did not seriously mind Sir Edmund"s indifference to herself if he were only a constant visitor at her house, but she was far from understanding the motives that drew him there to see Molly. In fact, having decided, on the basis of his own theory of the conduct of Madame Danterre, that Molly had no right to any of the luxuries she enjoyed, he had been prepared to think of her as an unscrupulous and designing young woman. Somehow, from the moment he first saw her he felt all his prejudices to be confirmed. There was something in Molly which appeared to him to be a guilty consciousness that the wealth she enjoyed was ill-gotten. Miss Dexter, he thought, had by no means the bearing of a fresh ingenuous child who was innocently benefiting by the wickedness of another. The poor girl was, in fact, constantly wondering whether the people she met were hot partisans of Lady Rose Bright, or whether they knew of Madame Danterre"s existence, and if so, whether they had the further knowledge that Miss Molly Dexter was that lady"s daughter. They might, for either of these reasons, have some secret objection to herself. But she was skilful enough to hide the symptoms of these fears and suspicions from the men and women she usually came across in society, who only thought her reserve pride, and her occasional hesitations a little mysterious. From Sir Edmund she concealed less because she liked him much more, and he kindly interpreted her feelings of anxiety and discomfort to be those of guilt in a girl too young to be happy in criminal deceit. With his experience of life, and with his usually just perceptions, he ought to have known better; but there is some quality in a few men or women, intangible and yet unmistakable, which makes us instinctively suspect present, or foretell future, moral evil; and poor Molly was one of these. What it was, on the other hand, which made her trust Sir Edmund and drew her to him, it would need a subtle a.n.a.lysis of natural affinities to decide. No doubt it was greatly because he sought her that Molly liked him, but it was not only on that account. Nor was this only because Edmund was worldly wise, successful, and very gentle. There was a quality in the attraction that drew Molly to Edmund that cannot be put into words. It is the quality without which there has never been real tragedy in the relations of a woman to a man. In the first weeks in London this attraction hardly reached beyond the merest liking, and was a pleasant, sunny thing of innocent appearance.
Mrs. Delaport Green was, for a short time, of opinion that the problem of whether to prolong Molly"s visit or not would be settled for her by a quite new development. Then she doubted, and watched, and was puzzled.
Why, she thought, should such a great person as Sir Edmund Grosse, who was certainly in no need of fortune-hunting, be so attentive to Molly if he did not really like her? At times she had a notion that he did not like her at all, but at other times surely he liked her more than he knew himself. He said that she was graceful, clever, and interesting; and the acute little onlooker had not the shadow of a doubt that he held these opinions, but why did she at moments think that he disliked Molly?
Certainly the dislike, if dislike it were, did not prevent him from very constantly seeking her society. It was the only intimacy that Molly had formed since she had come up to London.
As Lent was drawing to a close, Mrs. Delaport Green became much occupied at the thought of how many services she wished to attend. "One does so wish one could be in several churches at once," she murmured to a devout lady at an evening party. But, finding one of these churches to be excessively crowded on Palm Sunday, she had gone for a turn in the country in her motor with a friend, "as, after all, green fields, and a few early primroses make one realise, more than anything else in the world, the things one wishes one could think about quietly at such seasons."
For Easter there were the happiest prospects, as she and Molly had been invited to stay at a delightful house "far from the madding crowd"--Groombridge Castle--with a group of dear friends.
Molly, knowing that "dear friends" with her hostess meant new and most desirable acquaintances, bought hats adorned with spring flowers and garments appropriate to the season with great satisfaction.
Their luggage, their bags, and their maid looked perfect on the day of departure, and Tim had gone off to Brighton in an excellent temper. Mrs.
Delaport Green trod on air in pretty buckled shoes, and patted the toy terrier under her arm and felt as if all the society papers on the bookstall knew that they would soon have to tell whither she was going.
"I saw Sir Edmund Grosse"s servant just now," she said to Molly with great satisfaction. "Very likely Sir Edmund is coming to Groombridge.
Why does one always think that everybody going by the same train is coming with one? Did you tell him where we were going?"
"No, I don"t think so; I have hardly seen him for a week, and I thought he was going abroad for Easter."
When the three hours" journey was ended and the friends emerged on the platform, they were both glad to see Sir Edmund"s servant again and the luggage with his master"s name. There was a crowd of Easter holiday visitors, and Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly were some moments in making their way out of the station. When they were seated in the carriage that was to take them to the Castle, Mrs. Delaport Green turned expectantly to the footman.
"Are we to wait for any one else?"
"No, ma"am; Lady Rose Bright and the two gentlemen have started in the other carriage."
They drove off.
"I am so glad it is Lady Rose Bright." Molly hardly heard the words.
"I have so wished to know her," Adela went on joyfully, "and she has had such an interesting story and so extraordinary."
"Can I get away--can I go back?" thought Molly, and she leant forward and drew off her cloak as if she felt suffocated. "To meet her is just the one thing I can"t do. Oh, it is hard, it is horrible!"
"You see," Adela continued, "she married Sir David Bright, who was three times her age, because he was very rich, and also, of course, because she loved him for having won the Victoria Cross, and then he died, and they found he had left all the money to some one he had liked better all the time. So there is a horrid woman with forty thousand a-year somewhere or other, and Rose Bright is almost starving and can"t afford to buy decent boots, and every one is devoted to her. I am rather surprised that she should come to Groombridge for a party, she has shut herself up so much; but it must be a year and a half at least since that wicked old General was killed, and he certainly didn"t deserve much mourning at _her_ hands."
As Adela"s little staccato voice went on, Molly stiffened and straightened and starched herself morally, not unaided by this facile description of the story in which she was so much involved. She would fight it out here and now; nothing should make her flinch; she would come up to time as calm and cool as if she were quite happy. And, after all, Sir Edmund Grosse would be there to help her.
It was not until the first of the two heavy handsome old-fashioned carriages, drawn by fine, sleek horses, was beginning to crawl up a very steep hill that its occupants began to take an interest in those who were following.
"Who is in the carriage behind us?" asked Sir Edmund of the young man usually called Billy, who was sitting opposite him, and whom he was never glad to meet.