"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."