Chapter 19

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 fashion 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 fashionable 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 _tête-à-tête_ 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 institutions. 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 gratitude impossible, but she constantly added ingratitude 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 passage.

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 superstition 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 hell," 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.

"It might kill him to wake him now," murmured Molly.

"Yes, that is just the difficulty." The young man was speaking more to himself than to her.

"Difficulty!" thought Molly with scorn. "Fiddlesticks!"

The silence was unbroken for some moments. The fresh autumn air blew into the room. A sandy coloured cat came from under the bed, looked at them, and then rubbed her arched back against the unsteady leg of the only table, which was laden with bottles and basins, finally retired into a further corner, and upset and broke one of the pink candles that belonged to the neighbour.

But Mrs. Moloney never took her eyes off the priest's pale face.

"I'll wait until he wakes," he said to her, "but is there anywhere else I could go? It's not good to crowd up this room."

"That's intended to remove me," thought Molly, "but it won't succeed."

Mrs. Moloney moved into the little back room, and pulled forward a chair. When the priest was seated she shut the door behind her and whispered to him--

"Father, you'll not let his soul slip through your fingers, will you, father dear? Just because of the poor lady who knows no better!"

"Who is she? She is not like the district visitors I've seen about in the parish."

"No, indeed; she is a lady, and I've done some work for her, and she would not be satisfied when she heard Moloney was ill but she must come herself, and yesterday, not to grudge her her due, father, the doctor said if he pulled through that I owed her his life. Well, that's proved a mistake, anyhow, but she's after spoiling his last chance, and he's not been the good man he was once, father."

"Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there is any change. I'm sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn't let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?"

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney's proceeding to make a cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys' instead of eating his dinner. He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and read his Office by the light of the tallow candle. That finished, he sat still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and the strange, grey eyes.

"I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath," he thought with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and Molly came in. She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual unmoved, impersonal voice.

"The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up; the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case. I must rouse him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again. After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything you like to him."

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased. Then she added abruptly--

"Do you mind telling me your name?"

"My name? Molyneux."

"Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?"

"I am his cousin."

"I have been at Groombridge." But the priest felt that the tone was not in the least more friendly.

"Moloney won't suffer now," she went on, turning towards the door, "and I think he will be conscious for a time."

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off. With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then she hesitated.

What would go on in the next room? She was anxious now to know more about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux's face. If he had only known this man before she could have understood it. But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no great loss to those he left? She had seen a strange intensity of reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed. She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this thing out. It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pass through, she might be intruding at too sacred a moment. She believed that the priest was hearing the dying man's confession. She had a half contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy. She felt she had been foolish not to go away at once. But she did not move for nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man's wife came in and started back.

"I'm sure I thought you had gone, miss." Her manner was much more cordial than it had been before. She was tearful and excited. "I want to raise him a bit higher, and there's a cloak here. He is going off fast now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many a year--and God Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years to change him, poor soul."

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the dying man. The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle dimmer. Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body laboured for breath. The flicker of light in the mind, that had been roused, perhaps, by those rites which had passed in her absence, had faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now; the hands were cold and would never be warm again. The sandy cat had crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer to death. There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all for Molly. But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in the clear tones. At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words spoken to him.

"I commend thee to Almighty God, dearest brother, and commend thee to Him whose creature thou art; that, when thou shalt have paid the debt of humanity by death, thou mayest return to the Maker, Who formed thee of the dust of the earth. As thy soul goeth forth from the body, may the bright company of angels meet thee; may the judicial senate of Apostles greet thee; may the triumphant army of white-robed Martyrs come out to welcome thee; may the band of glowing Confessors, crowned with lilies, encircle thee; may the choir of Virgins, singing jubilees, receive thee; and the embrace of a blessed repose fold thee in the bosom of the Patriarchs; mild and festive may the aspect of Jesus Christ appear to thee, and may He award thee a place among them that stand before Him for ever."

And so it went on; some of it appealing to her more, some less; some passages almost repulsive. But her imagination had caught on to the vast outlines of the prayer--the enormous nature of the claims made on behalf of the dying labourer.

Was it Pat Moloney who was to pass out of this darkness to "gaze with blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous assertion made with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command, by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance. Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord, with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which, through the violence of anger or the heat of evil passion, he hath at any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things."

Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence--this great drama? Was it a mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the redeemed soul of Pat Moloney.