Great Possessions Part 18

"It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly.

"Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to himself than to her.

"Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!"

The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew into the room. A sandy coloured cat came from under the bed, looked at them, and then rubbed her arched back against the unsteady leg of the only table, which was laden with bottles and basins, finally retired into a further corner, and upset and broke one of the pink candles that belonged to the neighbour.

But Mrs. Moloney never took her eyes off the priest's pale face.

"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room."

"That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed."

Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and whispered to him--

"Father, you'll not let his soul slip through your fingers, will you, father dear? Just because of the poor lady who knows no better!"

"Who is she? She is not like the district visitors I've seen about in the parish."

"No, indeed; she is a lady, and I've done some work for her, and she would not be satisfied when she heard Moloney was ill but she must come herself, and yesterday, not to grudge her her due, father, the doctor said if he pulled through that I owed her his life. Well, that's proved a mistake, anyhow, but she's after spoiling his last chance, and he's not been the good man he was once, father."

"Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there is any change. I'm sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn't let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?"

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney's proceeding to make a cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys' instead of eating his dinner. He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and read his Office by the light of the tallow candle. That finished, he sat still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up; the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again.

After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour pa.s.sed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she added abruptly--

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it.

But how could there be this pa.s.sion of affection, this intensity of feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed.

She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this thing out. It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pa.s.s through, she might be intruding at too sacred a moment. She believed that the priest was hearing the dying man's confession. She had a half contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy. She felt she had been foolish not to go away at once. But she did not move for nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man's wife came in and started back.

"I'm sure I thought you had gone, miss." Her manner was much more cordial than it had been before. She was tearful and excited. "I want to raise him a bit higher, and there's a cloak here. He is going off fast now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many a year--and G.o.d Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years to change him, poor soul."

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the dying man. The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle dimmer. Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body laboured for breath. The flicker of light in the mind, that had been roused, perhaps, by those rites which had pa.s.sed in her absence, had faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now; the hands were cold and would never be warm again. The sandy cat had crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer to death. There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all for Molly. But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in the clear tones. At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words spoken to him.

"I commend thee to Almighty G.o.d, dearest brother, and commend thee to Him whose creature thou art; that, when thou shalt have paid the debt of humanity by death, thou mayest return to the Maker, Who formed thee of the dust of the earth. As thy soul goeth forth from the body, may the bright company of angels meet thee; may the judicial senate of Apostles greet thee; may the triumphant army of white-robed Martyrs come out to welcome thee; may the band of glowing Confessors, crowned with lilies, encircle thee; may the choir of Virgins, singing jubilees, receive thee; and the embrace of a blessed repose fold thee in the bosom of the Patriarchs; mild and festive may the aspect of Jesus Christ appear to thee, and may He award thee a place among them that stand before Him for ever."

And so it went on; some of it appealing to her more, some less; some pa.s.sages almost repulsive. But her imagination had caught on to the vast outlines of the prayer--the enormous nature of the claims made on behalf of the dying labourer.

Was it Pat Moloney who was to pa.s.s out of this darkness to "gaze with blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous a.s.sertion made with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command, by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance.

Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord, with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which, through the violence of anger or the heat of evil pa.s.sion, he hath at any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a zeal for G.o.d, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence--this great drama? Was it a mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.

CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational--a lower part of her nature,--they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as she intended, to make up for the short night. She wrote one or two brief notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say she was not at home. She could not keep quite still, and she did not want to go out. Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into more and more excitement. Her imagination pictured what might be the outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of her. In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such were the symptoms of "conversion" in a revivalist. But now there was no critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a solemn kind of joy. Next there came, after some hours of a sort of surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for action and for sacrifice. Her mind returned to the concrete, and the circ.u.mstances of her life. And then there came a most unwelcome thought.

If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child? Had she ever made any attempt to help the forlorn woman in Florence? Perhaps Madame Danterre's a.s.sertion, when Molly came of age, that she did not want to see Molly, was only an attempt to find out whether Molly really wished to come to her mother. From the day on which her ideal of her mother had been completely shattered Molly had shrunk from even thinking of her. She now shivered with repugnance, but she was almost glad to feel how repugnant this duty might be, much as a medieval penitent might have rejoiced in his own repugnance to the leprous wounds he was resolved to dress as an expiation for sin. It did not strike her, as it never struck the n.o.ble penitents in the Middle Ages, that it might be very trying to the object of these expiatory actions. She felt at the moment that it must be a comfort to her mother to receive all the love and devotion that she would offer her. And there was real heroism in the letter that Molly proceeded to write to Madame Danterre. For she knew that if her offer were accepted she risked the loss of all that at present made life very dear, both in what she already enjoyed, and in the hope that was hidden in her heart.

Molly had pride enough to shrink utterly from the connection with her mother, and her girl's innocence shrank, too, with quick sensitiveness from what might be before her. How strange now appeared the dreams of her childhood, the idealisation of the young and beautiful mother!

The letter was short, but very earnest, and had all the ring of truth in it. She could not but think that any mother would respond to it, and, for herself, after sending it there could be no looking back. Once the letter was posted to the lawyer to be forwarded to Madame Danterre, a huge weight seemed to be lifted from Molly's mind. That night she met Edmund Grosse at dinner. He had never seen her so bright and good-looking, and he found he had many questions to ask as to the summer abroad.

For several weeks Molly received no answer from Florence, but during that time she did not repent her hasty action. And during those weeks her interest in religion grew stronger. Just as she had been unable to work with philanthropists, she was ready now to take her religion alone.

She felt kinder to the world at large, but she did not at first feel any need of human help or human company. She went sometimes to a service at Westminster Abbey, sometimes to St. Paul's, sometimes to the Oratory, and two or three times to the church in West Kensington in which Father Molyneux was a.s.sistant parish priest. On the whole she liked this last much the best. Indeed, she was so much attracted by his sermons that she went to call upon him late one afternoon.

The visitor was shown into a rather bare parlour, and Father Molyneux soon came in. He was a good deal interested in seeing her there. He had never been more snubbed in his life than by this lady on their first meeting, and he had been much surprised at seeing her in the church soon afterwards. She was plainly dressed, though at an expense he would never have imagined to be possible, and she appeared a little softer than when he had seen her last. She looked at him rather hard, not with the look that puzzled Rose Bright; it was a look of sympathy and of inquiry.

"I have had curious experiences since we met," she said, "and I want to understand them better. Have you--has anybody been praying for me?"