Great Possessions

by Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

Meanwhile, the old rector was still gruff and still proffered snubs which were gratefully received, for Mark was genuinely anxious not to be misled by the atmosphere of praise and affection in which he was living.

Nothing warned him of impending danger (to use a phrase of old-fashioned romance) when he was told that Miss Dexter was asking to see him. He had not seen her for a long time, and was quite glad that she should come.

He looked young, eager, and happy as he came quickly into the parlour, but after a few minutes the simple warmth of his manner changed into a more negative politeness. There was something so gorgeous in Molly's appearance, and so very strange in her face, that even a man who had seen less of the world than is obtained in a year on the mission in London, could not fail to be somewhat puzzled.

Molly hardly spoke for some moments, and silence was apparently inevitable. Then she burst out, without preparation, in a wild, incoherent way, with her whole life's story. The story of a child deserted by her mother, neglected by her father, taken from the ayah who was the only person who had ever loved her, and sent like a parcel to the care of a hard and selfish aunt who was ashamed of her. It might have been horribly pathetic only that it was impossible that so much egotism and bitterness should not choke the sympathy of the listener. But as the story came to Molly's twenty-first year, the strange, bitter self-defence (she had not yet explained why she should defend herself at all to Father Molyneux), all the unpleasing moral side of the story became merged in the sense of its dramatic qualities.

Molly had never told it to anyone before now, and, indeed, she had not realised several features of the case until quite lately. She told well the disillusion as to her mother, her own single-handed fight with life, the double sense of shame as to her mother's past, and her own ambiguous position. She told him how she felt at first meeting Rose Bright, of her own sense of sailing under false colours, and she actually explained, in her strange pleading for a favourable judgment, how everything that happened had naturally hardened her heart and made her feel as if she had been born an outcast. Lastly, she told how Sir Edmund Grosse had pursued her mother with detectives, and, as she had for a time believed, had pursued herself with the hypocritical appearance of friendship. She had been wrong, it seemed now, in judging him so harshly, but it had hurt terribly at the time.

Through all this Mark was struggling against the repulsion that threatened to drown the sympathy he wanted to give her. But he had, naturally, not the faintest suspicion as to what was coming or that Molly was confiding in him a story of her own wrong-doing. He was absolutely confounded when she went on, still in the tone of passionate self-defence, to tell how she had found the will leaving the whole of Sir David's fortune to Lady Rose. He simply stared at Molly when she said:

"Who could suppose for a single moment that I should be obliged, on account of a scrap of paper which was evidently sent to my mother for her to dispose of as she liked, to become a pauper and to give a fortune to Lady Rose Bright?"

But although he was too astounded for speech, and his face showed strange, stern lines, it was now that there awoke in his heart the passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen for his own portion.

"It's a hard, hard case," he murmured, to Molly's surprise.

She had been so occupied in her own outpouring that she had hardly thought of him at first, except as a human outlet for her story made safe by the fact that he was a priest. But when he had betrayed his silent but most eloquent amazement, she had suddenly realised what the effect of her confidences might be on such a man, and half expected anathemas to thunder over her head.