Great Possessions Part 17

CHAPTER XV

A POOR MAN'S DEATH

Early in October, Molly and Miss Carew took up their abode in a flat with quite large rooms and a pleasing view of Hyde Park.

August and September had been two of the healthiest and most normal months that Molly had ever spent or was likely ever to spend again. The weeks between the rupture with the Delaport Greens and the journey to Switzerland had been trying, although it was undoubtedly much pleasanter to be Mrs. Carteret's guest than it had ever been to be a permanent inmate of her house.

Molly--thought Mrs. Carteret--was restless, not inclined to morbid thoughts, and more gentle than of yore, but more nervous and fanciful.

It was not until after a fortnight abroad, after the revelation of mountains realised for the first time, that Molly had the courage to say to herself that she had been a fool during the visit to Aunt Anne. Was it in the least likely that a man of Edmund Grosse's kind would act romantically or hastily? Of course not. She had been as foolish as Mrs.

Browning's little Effie in dreaming that a lover might come riding over the Malcot hills on a July evening.

The girls with whom Molly had travelled were of a healthy, intellectual type, and Molly, under their influence, had grown to feel the worth of the higher side of Nature's gifts. And so, vigorous in mind and body, she had come to London in October, so she said, to study music.

Miss Carew was a little disappointed when Molly expressed lofty indifference as to who had yet come to London. But that indifference did not last long when her friends of the season began to find her out. Then Miss Carew surprised Molly by her excessive nervousness and shyness of new acquaintances. "Carey" had always professed to love society, and had always been very carefully dressed in the fas.h.i.+on of the moment. But, as a civilian may idealise warfare and be well read in tactics, and yet be unequal to the emergency when war actually raises its grisly head, so it was with poor Miss Carew. She simply collapsed when Molly's worldly friends, as she called them with envious admiration, swept into the room, garnished with wonderful hats and fas.h.i.+onable furs. She had none of a Frenchwoman's gift for ignoring social differences, and she had the uneasy pride that is rare in a Celt, although she had all a Celt's taste for refinement and show and glitter. Miss Carew sat more and more stiffly at the tea-table, until she confided frankly to Molly--

"My dear, I am too old, and I am simply in the way. It is just too late in my life, you see, after all the years of governess work. Of course, if my beloved father had lived, I should never have been a governess.

But as it is, I think I need not appear when you have visitors, except now and then."

Molly acquiesced after enough protest, chiefly because she had begun to wonder if it would be quite easy to have an occasional _tete-a-tete_ with men friends without having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen's buildings in West Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying. He and his wife had been thriftless and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work, and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to speak of anything distinctly. Three years ago he had fallen from a ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had been supported by his wife, who "didn't hold" with those inst.i.tutions. A kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first. Pat kept about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and drifted more and more into public houses. He had never been a thorough drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and self-indulgent. But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants that were poison in his condition. At last a chill mercifully hastened matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was nearing his end in semi-consciousness. Molly Dexter then descended on the Moloneys in one of her almost irresistible cravings to relieve suffering.

Ordinary human nature when not in pain was often too repugnant to Molly for her to be able to do good works in company with other people. She was, as she had told Edmund Grosse, a born anti-clerical, and she scorned philanthropists; so her best moods had to work themselves out alone and without direction. Nor was she likely to spoil the recipients of her attentions, partly from the strength of her character, partly because the poor know instinctively whether they are merely the objects on which to vent a restless longing to relieve pain, or whether they are loved for themselves.

Molly, in the village at home, had always made the expression of grat.i.tude impossible, but she constantly added ingrat.i.tude as a large item in the account she kept running, in her darker hours, against the human race.

Late on a wet and windy October evening she went to undertake the nursing of Pat Moloney for the first part of the night. She had been visiting him constantly for several weeks, and actually nursing him for three days.

"Has the doctor been?"

"Yes, miss" (in a very loud whisper); "he says Pat is awful bad; he left a paper for you."

Molly Dexter walked across the small, bare room and took a paper of directions from the chimney-piece, and then stood looking at the old man's heavy figure on the bed. He was lying on his side, his face turned to the wall.

"You had better rest in the back room while I am here," she said.

"I couldn't, indeed I couldn't, miss, him being like that; you mustn't ask me to. Besides, I've been round and asked the priest to come, and so I couldn't take my things off. I'll just have some tea and a drop of whisky in it, and I can keep going all the night, it's more than likely he'll die at the dawn."

Molly eyed the woman with supreme contempt.

"It isn't at all certain that he's going to die, he'll make a good fight yet if you will give him a chance."

Mrs. Moloney looked deeply offended. It had been all very well to be guided by a lady at the beginning of the illness, but now it was very different. She felt half consciously that science had done its worst, and bigger questions than temperatures and drugs were at issue.

"A priest now," said Molly, in a whisper of intense scorn, "would kill him at once."

Mrs. Moloney did not condescend to reply. She had propped a poor little crucifix, a black cross, with a chipped white figure on it, against a jam pot on a shelf under the window, and she had borrowed two candlesticks with coloured candles from a labourer's wife on the floor beneath. The window had been shut, so that the wind should not blow down these objects.

Molly looked at the man on the bed and sniffed.

"He must have air--" the whisper was a snort.

At that moment there was a knock on the outer door. On the iron outer stairs was standing the priest.

"It's just the curate," said Mrs. Moloney, looking out of the window; and then she disappeared into the tiny pa.s.sage.

Molly stood defiantly, her figure drawn to its full height. She felt that she knew exactly the kind of Irish curate who was coming in to disturb, and probably kill, the unhappy man on the bed. Well, she should make a fight for this poor, crushed life; she would stand between the horrible tyranny and superst.i.tion that lit those pink candles, and that would rouse a man to make his poor wretched conscience unhappy and frighten him to death. "If there is a h.e.l.l," she muttered, "it must be ready to punish such brutality as that."

Mrs. Moloney opened the door as wide as possible, and the priest came in. Miss Dexter looked at him in amazement; how, and where had she seen him before?

He went straight to the bed and looked at the man in silence, while Molly looked at him. He was about middle height, with very dark hair and eyes, a small, well-formed head, and a very good forehead. It was not until he turned to Mrs. Moloney that Molly understood why she had fancied that she had seen him before. She was sure now that she had seen his photograph, but, although she was certain of having seen it, she could not remember when or where she had done so.

"Can't you open the window, Mrs. Moloney?"

"It's the only place to make into an altar, father?"

"Oh, never mind that yet; I will manage."

Molly stepped forward; whatever he was going to do, it should not be done without a protest.

"The doctor's orders are that he is not to be disturbed."

The priest did not seem aware of the exceedingly unpleasant expression on Molly's countenance.

"It would be a great mistake to wake him, of course," he said; and then, "Do you suppose he will sleep for long?"

"I haven't the faintest notion"; the uttermost degree of scorn was conveyed in those few words.

Mrs. Moloney suppressed a sob.

"He's not been to the Sacraments for three years," she murmured.

The priest leant over the bed and looked intently at the dying man.

Mrs. Moloney opened the window and put the crucifix and candlesticks in a corner on the dirty floor.