Читать книгу Great Possessions - Mrs. Wilfrid Ward - Страница 14

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The surprising disposal of Sir David Bright's fortune was to have very important consequences in a quiet household among the Malcot hills, of the existence of which Sir Edmund Grosse and Lady Rose Bright were entirely unaware.

In a small wind-swept wood that appeared to be seeking shelter in the hollow under the great massive curve of a green hill, there stood one of those English country houses that must have been planned, built, and finished with the sole object of obtaining coolness and shade. The principal living rooms looked north, and the staircase and a minute study were the only spots that ever received any direct rays of the sun. All the rooms except this favoured little study had windows opening to the ground, and immediately outside grew the rich mossy turf that indicates a clay soil. The mistress of the house was not easily daunted by her surroundings, and she had impressed her cheerful, comfortable, and fairly cultured mind on all the rooms. Mrs. Carteret was the widow of a Colonel Carteret, who had retired from the army to farm his own acres, and take his place in local politics. It is needless to say that, while the politics had gained from the help of an upright and chivalrous, if narrow, mind, the acres had profited little from his attentions. When he died he left all he possessed absolutely to his widow, who was not prepared to find how very little that all had become. Mrs. Carteret took up the burden of the acres, dairy, gardens, and stable, with a sense of sanctified duty none the less heroic in sensation because she was doing all these things for her own profit. Her neighbours held her in proportionate respect; and, as she had a fine person, pleasant manners, and good connections, she kept, without the aid of wealth, a comfortable corner in the society of the county.

It was not long after Colonel Carteret's death, and some thirteen years before the death of Sir David Bright, that the immediate neighbourhood became gradually conscious of the fact that Mrs. Carteret had adopted a little niece, the child of a soldier brother who had died in India. This child, from the first, made as little effect on her surroundings as it was possible for a child to do. Molly Dexter was small, thin, and sallow; her dark hair did not curl; and her grey eyes had a curious look that is not common, yet not very rare, in childhood. It is the look of one who waits for other circumstances and other people than those now present. I know nothing so discouraging in a child friend—or rather in a child acquaintance, for friendship is warned off by such eyes—as this particular look. Mrs. Carteret took her niece cheerfully in hand, commended the quiet of her ways, and gave credit to herself and open windows for a perceptible increase in the covering of flesh on the little bones, and a certain promise of firmness in the calves of the small legs. As to the rest: "Of course it was difficult at first," she said, "but now Molly is perfectly at home with me. Nurses never do understand children, and Mary used to excite her until she had fits of passion. But that is all past. She is quite a healthy and normal child now."

Molly was growing healthy, but whether she was normal or not is another point. It does not tend to make a child normal to change everything in life at the age of seven. Not one person, hardly one thing was the same to Molly since her father's death. The language of her ayah had until then been more familiar to her than any other language. The ayah's thoughts had been her thoughts. The East had had in charge the first years of Molly's dawning intelligence, and there seemed impressed, even on her tiny figure, something that told of patience, scorn, and reserve. And yet Mrs. Carteret was quite satisfied.

Once, indeed, the widow was puzzled. Molly had strayed away by herself, and could not be found for nearly two hours. Provided with two figs and several bits of biscuit, a half-crown and a shilling, she had started to walk through the deep, heavy lanes between the great hills, with the firm intention of taking ship to France. Mrs. Carteret treated the escapade kindly and firmly; not making too much of it, but giving such sufficient punishment as to prevent anything so silly happening again. But she had no suspicion of what really had happened. Molly had, in fact, started with the intention of finding her mother. It was two years since she had come to live with Mrs. Carteret, and, if the child had spoken her secret thought, she would have told you that throughout those two years she had been meaning to run away and find her mother. In that she would have fallen into an exaggeration not uncommon with some grown-up people. It had been only at moments far apart, or occasionally for quite a succession of nights in bed, that she had spent a brief space before falling asleep in dreaming of going to seek her mother. But whole months had passed without any such thought; and during these long interludes the healthy country scenes about her, and the common causes for smiles and tears in a child's life, filled her consciousness. Still, the undercurrent of the deeper life was there, and very small incidents were strong enough to bring it to the surface. Molly had short daily lessons from the clergyman's daughter, a young lady who also took a cheerful, airy view of the child, and said she would grow out of her little faults in time. In one of these lessons Molly learnt with surprising eagerness how to find France for herself on the map. That France was much nearer to England than to India, and how it was usual to cross the Channel were facts easily acquired. Molly was amazingly backward in her lessons, or she must have learnt these things before. When lessons were over and she went out into the garden, instead of running as usual she walked so slowly that Mrs. Carteret, while talking to the gardener, actually wondered what was in that child's mind. Molly was living through again the parting with the ayah. She could feel the intensely familiar touch of the soft, dark hand; she could see the adoring love of the dark eyes with their passionate anger at the separation. The woman had to be revenged on her enemies who were tearing the child from her. "They deceive you," she said. "The beautiful mother is not dead; she lives in France, not England; they will try to keep you from her, but the faithful child will find a way."

Molly unconsciously in her own mind had already begun to put these words into English, whereas a year before she would have kept to the ayah's own language. But in either language those words came to her as the last message from that other life of warmth and love and colour in which she had once been a queen. Indeed, every English child brought home from India is a sovereign dethroned. And the repetition of the ayah's last words gave utterance to a sense of wrong that Molly nourished against her present rulers and against the world in which she was not understood.

That same day Mrs. Carteret spoke sharply and with indignation because Molly had trodden purely by accident on the pug; and her aunt said that the one thing with which she had no patience was cruelty to animals—whereas the child was passionately fond of animals. Again, on that same day, Molly fell into a very particularly dirty little pond near the cowshed at the farm. Mary, the nurse, no doubt was the sufferer, and she said that she did not suppose that black nurses minded being covered with muck—how should they?—and she supposed she must be treated as if she were a negro herself, but time would show whether she were a black slave or an Englishwoman with a house of her own which she could have now if she liked for the asking. While Mary spoke she pushed and pulled, and, in general treated Molly's small person as something unpleasant, and to be kept at a distance. Once clean and dressed again, Molly sat down quite quietly to consider the ways and means of getting to France, with the result already told.

Several years passed after that, in which Mrs. Carteret did by Molly, as by every one else, all the duties that were quite obviously evident to her, and did not go about seeking for any fanciful ones. And Molly grew up, sometimes happy, and sometimes not, saying sometimes the things she really meant when she was in a temper, and acquiescing in Mrs. Carteret's explanation that she had not meant them when she had regained her self-control.

Until Molly was between fifteen and sixteen, Mrs. Carteret was able to keep to her optimism as to their mutual relations.

"The child is, of course, very backward. I tried to think it was want of education, but I've come to see it's of no use to expect to make Molly an interesting or agreeable woman; and very plain, of course, she must be. But, you know, plenty of plain, uninteresting women have very fairly happy lives, and under the circumstances"—but there Mrs. Carteret stopped, and her guest, the wife of the vicar, knew no more of the circumstances than did the world at large.

But when Molly was about the age of fifteen she began to display more troublesome qualities, and a certain faculty for doing quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful antecedents to be dying from exhaustion, Molly had herself sought whisky from the nearest inn. She had bought a whole bottle of whisky, though indeed, being seized with qualms, she had poured half the contents of the bottle into a ditch before going back to the cottage. And it was undoubtedly Mrs. Carteret's duty to protest when she found that Molly had held a baby with diphtheria folded closely in her arms while the mother fetched the doctor.

Can any one blame Mrs. Carteret for finding these doings a little trying? And it showed how freakish and contradictory Molly was in all her ways that she would never join nicely in school feasts, or harvest homes, or anything pleasant or cheerful. Nor did she make friends even with those she had worried over in times of sickness. She would risk some serious infection, or meddle, with her odd notions, day after day in a cottage; and then she would hardly nod to the convalescent boy or girl when she met them again in the lanes.

There was no one to tell her aunt what new, strange instincts and aspirations were struggling to the light in Molly. A passionate pity for pain would seize on her and hold her in a grip until she had done some definite act to relieve it. But pity was either not akin to love in Molly, or her affections had been too starved to take root after the immediate impulse of mercy was passed. The girl was not popular in the village, although, unlike Mrs. Carteret, her poorer neighbours had a great idea of Molly's cleverness. Needless to say that when, after some unmeasured effort at relieving suffering, Molly would come home with a sense of joy she rarely knew after any other act, it hurt her to the quick and roused her deepest anger to find herself treated like a naughty, inconsiderate child. The storms between Mrs. Carteret and Molly were increasing in number and intensity, with outspoken wrath on one side, and a white heat of dumb, indignant resistance on the other. Then, happily, there came a change. Molly's education had been of the very slightest until she was nearly sixteen, when Mrs. Carteret told her to expect the arrival of a finishing governess. She also announced that a music master from the cathedral town would, in future, come over twice a week to give her lessons.

"It's not my doing," said Mrs. Carteret—and meaning only to be candid she sounded very ungracious; and although she did not pay for these things, it was due to her urgent representations of their need that they had been provided. Molly supposed that all such financial arrangements were made for her by her father's lawyer, of whom she had heard Mrs. Carteret speak.

Throughout these years it had never occurred to Mrs. Carteret to doubt that Molly believed her mother to be dead, and she never for a moment supposed the child's silence on the subject to be ominous. Such silence did not show any special power of reserve; many children brought up like Molly will carefully conceal knowledge which they believe that those in authority over them suppose them not to possess. Perhaps in Molly's case there was an instinctive shrinking from exposing an ideal to scorn. Perhaps there was a wholly unconscious want of faith in the ideal itself, an ideal which had been built up upon one phrase. Yet the notion of the beautiful, exiled mother, so cruelly concealed from her child, was very precious, however insecurely founded. It must be concealed from other eyes by mists of incense, and honoured in the silence of the sanctuary.

The new governess, Miss Carew, was a very fair teacher, and she soon recognised the quality of her pupil's mind. Mrs. Carteret was possibly a little disappointed on finding that Miss Carew considered Molly to be very clever, as well as very ignorant. The widow was herself accustomed to feel superior to her own circle in literary attainments—a sensation which she justified by an occasional reading of French memoirs and by always getting through at least two articles in each Nineteenth Century. It was a detail that she had never cared for poetry; Sir James Stephen, she knew, had also never cared to have ideas expressed in verse. But she felt a little dull when Miss Carew and Molly discussed Browning and Tennyson and De Musset. Miss Carew fired Molly with new thoughts and new ambitions in matters intellectual, but also in more mundane affairs. If it is possible to be in the world and not of it we have all of us also known people who are of the world though not in it; and Miss Carew was undoubtedly one of the latter. Her tongue babbled of beauties and courts, of manners, of wealth, and of chiffons, with the free idealism of an amateur, and this without intending to do more than enliven the dull daily walks through Malcot lanes.

Two years of this companionship rapidly developed Molly. She did not now merely condemn her aunt and her friends from pure ignorant dislike; she knew from other testimony that they were rather stupid, ignorant, badly-dressed, and provincial. But the chief change in her state of mind lay in her hopes for her own future. Miss Carew had pointed out that, if such a very large salary could be given for the governess, there must surely be plenty of money for Molly's disposal later on. Why should not Molly have a splendid and delightful life before her? And then poor Miss Carew would suppress a sigh at her own prospects in which the pupil never showed the least interest. It was before Miss Carew's second year of teaching had come to an end, and while Molly was rapidly enlarging her mental horizon, that the girl came to a very serious crisis in her life.

Occupied with her first joy in knowledge, and with dreams of future delights in the great world, she had not broken out into any very freakish act of benevolence for a long time. One night, when Mrs. Carteret and Miss Carew met at dinner time, they continued to wait in vain for Molly. The servants hunted for her, Mrs. Carteret called up the front stairs, and Miss Carew went as far as the little carpenter's shop opening from the greenhouse to find her. It was a dark night, and there was nothing that could have taken her out of doors, but that she was out could not be doubted. The gardener and coachman were sent for, and before ten o'clock the policeman in the village joined in the search, and yet nothing was heard of Molly. Mrs. Carteret became really frightened, and Miss Carew was surprised to see her betray so much feeling as almost to lose her self-control. She kept walking up and down, while odd spasmodic little sentences escaped from her every few minutes.

"How could I answer for it to John if his girl came to any harm?" she repeated several times.

She kept moving from room to room with a really scared expression. Once the governess overheard her exclaim with an intensely bitter accent, "Even her wretched mother would have taken more care of her!"

At that moment the door opened; Molly came quietly in, looking at them both with bright, defiant eyes. From her hat to the edge of her skirt she appeared to be one mass of light, brown mud; her right cheek was bleeding from a scratch, and the sleeve of her coat was torn open.

"Where have you been to?" demanded Mrs. Carteret, in a voice that trembled from the reaction of fear to anger.

"I went for a walk, and I found a man lying half in the water in Brown-rushes pond; he had evidently fallen in drunk. I got him out after nearly falling in myself, and then I had to get some one to look after him. They took him in at Brown-rushes farm, and I found out who he was and went to tell his wife, who is ill, that he was quite safe. I stayed a little while with her, and then I came home. I have walked about twenty miles, and, as you can see, I have had several tumbles, and I am very tired."

Molly's voice had been very quiet, but very distinct, and her look and bearing were full of an unspoken defiance.

"And you never thought whether I should be frightened meanwhile?" said Mrs. Carteret.

"Frightened about me?" said Molly in astonishment.

"You had no thought for my anxiety—the strain on my nerves," her aunt went on.

"I thought you might be angry, but I never for a moment thought you would be frightened."

Miss Carew looked from one to the other in alarm and perplexity. She felt for them both, for the woman who had been startled by the extent of her fears, and was the more angry in consequence, and for Molly, who betrayed her utter want of belief in any kind of feeling on Mrs. Carteret's part.

"If you do not care for my feelings, or, indeed, believe in them, I wish you would have some care for your own good name." A moment's pause followed these words, and then in a low voice, but quite distinct, came the conclusion, "You must remember that your mother's daughter must be more careful than other girls."

Molly's cheeks, just now bright from the battle with the autumn wind, became as white as marble. There was no concealment possible; both women saw that the child realised the full import of the words, and that she knew they could read what was written on her face. There could be no possibility of keeping up appearances after such a moment. But Miss Carew moved forward, and flung her arms round Molly with a gesture of simple but complete womanliness. "You must have a hot bath at once," she cried, "or you will catch your death of cold."

"Perhaps it would be better if I did," cried Molly in a voice fearful to her hearers in its stony hardness and hopelessness. "What does it matter?"

Miss Carew would have been less unhappy if the child had burst into any reproaches, however angry or unseemly; she wanted to hear her say that something was a lie, that some one was a liar, but what was so awful to the ordinary little woman was to realise that Molly believed what had been said, or rather the awful implication of what had been said. The real horror was that Molly should come to such knowledge in such a way.

The girl made no effort to shake her off, and not the least response to her caress. With perfect dignity she went quietly up-stairs. With perfect dignity she let the governess and the housemaid do to her whatever they liked. They bathed Molly, rubbed her with lotions, poulticed her with mustard, gave her a hot drink, and all the time Miss Carew's heart ached at the impossibility of helping her in the very least.

"Can I leave the door open between our rooms, in case you want anything in the night?" she faltered.

"Oh, yes; certainly."

"May I kiss you?"

"Yes, of course."