Sylvia was aghast to think that she had perhaps wounded him. He seemed to fear that he had flaunted his fortune in her face. He looked acutely uncomfortable. She found that, as she had thought, she could say anything, anything to him, and say it easily. She went to him quickly and laid her hand on his arm. "It's splendid," she said, looking deeply and frankly into his eyes. "Judith will be too rejoiced! It is like magic. And nobody but you could have done it so that the money seems the least part of the deed!"
He looked down at her, touched, moved, his eyes very tender, but sad as though with a divination of the barrier his fortune eternally raised between them.
The door opened suddenly and Mrs. Marshall-Smith came in quickly, not looking at them at all. From the pale agitation of her face they recoiled, startled and alarmed. She sat down abruptly as though her knees had given way under her. Her gloved hands were perceptibly trembling in her lap. She looked straight at Sylvia, and for an instant did not speak. If she had rushed in screaming wildly, her aspect to Sylvia's eyes would scarcely have been more eloquent of portentous news to come. It was a fitting introduction to what she now said to them in an unsteady voice: "I've just heard—a despatch from Jamiaca—something terrible has happened. The news came to the American Express office when I was there. It is awful. Molly Sommerville driving her car alone—an appalling accident to the steering-gear, they think. Molly found dead under the car."
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR
It shocked Sylvia that Molly's death should make so little difference. After one sober evening with the stunning words fresh before their eyes, the three friends quickly returned to their ordinary routine of life. It was not that they did not care, she reflected—she did care. She had cried and cried at the thought of that quivering, vital spirit broken by the inert crushing mass of steel—she could not bring herself to think of the soft body, mangled, bloody. Austin cared too: she was sure of it; but when they had expressed their pity, what more could they do? The cabled statement was so bald, they hardly could believe it—they failed altogether to realize what it meant—they had no details on which to base any commentary. She who had lived so intensely, was dead. They were sorry for her. That was all.
As an apology for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt Victoria's dictum: "We can know nothing about it until Felix comes. Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think." That Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them doubted. Indeed, they united in insisting on the number of natural—oh, perfectly natural—reasons for his coming. He had always spent a part of every winter there, had in fact a tiny apartment on the Rue St. Honoré which dated from his bachelor life; and now he had a double reason for coming, since much of Molly's fortune chanced to be in French bonds. Her father had been (among other things) American agent for the Comptoir National des Escomptes, and he had taken advantage of his unusual opportunities for acquiring solid French and remunerative Algerian securities. Page had said at once that Morrison would need to go through a good many formalities, under the French laws. So pending fuller information, they did not discuss the tragedy. Their lives ran on, and Molly, dead, was in their minds almost as little as Molly, living but absent, had been.
It was only two months before Felix Morrison arrived in Paris. They had expected him. They had spoken of the chance of his arrival on this or that day. Sylvia had rehearsed all the possible forms of self-possession for their first meeting; but on the rainy February afternoon when she came in from representing Aunt Victoria at a reception and saw him sitting by the fire, her heart sank down and stopped for an instant, and when it went on beating she could hear no sound but the drumming of her pulse. The back of his chair was towards her. All she could see as she stood for a moment in the doorway was his head, the thick, graying dark hair, and one long-fingered, sensitive, beautiful hand lying on the arm of the chair. At the sight, she felt in her own palm the soft firmness of those fingers as palpably as ever she had in reality.
The instant's pause before Aunt Victoria saw her standing there, gave her back her self-control. When Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned and gravely held out her hand, Sylvia came forward with a sober self-possession. The man turned too, sprang up with an exclamation apparently of surprise, "Miss Marshall, you here!" and extended his hand. Sylvia, searching his face earnestly, found it so worn, saw in it such dark traces of suffering and sorrow, that the quick tears of sympathy stood in her eyes.
Her dread of the meeting, a morbid dread that had in it an acknowledged element of horror, vanished. Before that moment she had seen only Molly's face as it had looked the day of their desperate talk, white and despairing, and resolutely bent over the steering-wheel. She had not been able to imagine Felix' face at all, had instinctively put it out of her mind; but as she looked into it now, her fear of it disappeared. It was the fine, sensitive face of a fine, sensitive man who has known a great shock. What had she feared she would see there? He was still holding her hand, very much affected at seeing her, evidently still in a super-sensitive condition when everything affected him strongly. "She loved you—she admired you so!" he said, his wonderful voice wavering and uncertain. Sylvia's tears fell openly at this. She sat down on a low stool near her aunt's knees. "I can't believe it—I haven't been able to believe it!" she told him; "Molly was—she was more alive than anybody I ever saw!"