CHAPTER XVI

MOLLY’S LETTER TO HER MOTHER

There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly.  It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature.  She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational—­a lower part of her nature,—­they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties.  Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before.  She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites.  Externally it worked something in this way.

The day on which Pat Moloney died at dawn she could not rest so much as she intended, to make up for the short night.  She wrote one or two brief notes begging to be let off engagements, and told the servants to say she was not at home.  She could not keep quite still, and she did not want to go out.  Gradually, as the day wore on, she worked herself into more and more excitement.  Her imagination pictured what might be the outcome of such a view of life and death as seemed to have taken hold of her.  In her usual moods she would have thought with sarcasm that such were the symptoms of “conversion” in a revivalist.  But now there was no critical faculty awake for cynicism; the critical faculty was full of a solemn kind of joy.  Next there came, after some hours of a sort of surprise at this sudden and vehement sense of uplifting, the wish for action and for sacrifice.  Her mind returned to the concrete, and the circumstances of her life.  And then there came a most unwelcome thought.  If Molly wanted to sacrifice herself indeed, and wished to do some real good about which there could be no self-delusion, was there not one duty quite obviously in her path, her duty as a child?  Had she ever made any attempt to help the forlorn woman in Florence?  Perhaps Madame Danterre’s assertion, when Molly came of age, that she did not want to see Molly, was only an attempt to find out whether Molly really wished to come to her mother.  From the day on which her ideal of her mother had been completely shattered Molly had shrunk from even thinking of her.  She now shivered with repugnance, but she was almost glad to feel how repugnant this duty might be, much as a medieval penitent might have rejoiced in his own repugnance to the leprous wounds he was resolved to dress as an expiation for sin.  It did not strike her, as it never struck the noble penitents in the Middle Ages, that it might be very trying to the object of these expiatory actions.  She felt at the moment that it must be a comfort to her mother to receive all the love and devotion that she would offer her.  And there was real heroism in the letter that Molly proceeded to write to Madame Danterre.  For she knew that if her offer were accepted she risked the loss of all that at present made life very dear, both in what she already enjoyed, and in the hope that was hidden in her heart.