Great Possessions | Page 9

had been standing when she undid the things;
she left the ring and the photograph on the table, and she sank into a
chair near the fire holding the bit of paper. The tone of it astonished and
confused her. It was more the stern moralist asking to be forgiven for
doing right than the guilty husband asking for mercy in her thoughts of
him.
"Yes," thought Rose at length, "that is because she was his wife, and
when he came to face death it was the great wrong of infidelity to her
that haunted him. I must have seemed almost a partner in the wrong."
Again the confused sense of guilt seized her, the horrible possibility of
having been a wife only in name. She did not weigh the matter calmly
enough to feel quite as distinctly as she ought to have done that she
could not be touched or denied in the faintest degree by a sin that was
not her sin. Still she raised her head as she could not have done some
weeks before; for the most acute phase of her trial had been faced and
had been passed. Now in her moments of most bitter pain in the very
depths of her soul was peace. As she became calmer she tried again to
connect together those three parts of the message from the battle-field,
the ring, the photograph, and the letter; but she could not do so. At last
she put them away in the drawer of her bureau, and then wrote to tell
her mother and the lawyer that Sir David had sent her a photograph, a
ring, and a few private lines--that was all. There was no will.
Still everything had not been brought back. There had been
portmanteaux sent down to Capetown, and there might yet be
discovered a small despatch box, or a writing case, something or other
that might hold a will. But the limit of time was reached at last; the
portmanteaux and a despatch box were recovered, but they held no will.
The solicitor delayed to the last possible moment, and then the will was
proved. It was published in the papers at a moment when a lull in the
war gave leisure for private gossip, and the gossip accordingly raged

hotly. All the sweetness, gentleness, and kindness that made Rose
deservedly popular did not prevent there being two currents of opinion.
There are wits so active that they cannot share the views of all
right-minded people. While the majority sympathised deeply with Rose,
there were a few who insinuated that she must be to some degree to
blame for what had happened.
"Well, don't you know, I never could understand why she married a
man so much older than herself. Of course she had not a penny and he
was awfully rich, and people don't look too close into a man's character
in such cases. It is rather convenient for some women to be very
innocent."
Sir Edmund Grosse, to whom the remark was addressed at a small
country house party, turned his back for a moment on the speaker in
order to pick up a paper, and then said in a low, indifferent voice:
"David Bright came into his cousin's fortune unexpectedly a year after
he married Lady Rose."
The subject was dropped that time, but he met it again in somewhat the
same terms in London. There seemed a sort of vague impression that
Lady Rose had married for the sake of the wealth she had lost. Also at
his club there was talk he did not like, not against Rose indeed, but
dwelling on the other side of the story, and he hated to hear Rose's
name connected with it. People forgot his relationship, and after all he
was only a second cousin.
Edmund Grosse was at this time just over forty. He was a tall, loosely
built man, with rather a colourless face, with an expression negative in
repose, and faintly humorous when speaking. He was rich and
supposed to be lazy; he knew his world and had lived it in and for it
systematically. Some one had said that he took all the frivolous things
of life seriously and all the serious things frivolously. He could advise
on the choice of a hotel or a motor-car with intense earnestness, and he
had healed more than one matrimonial breach that threatened to
become tragic by appealing to the sense of humour in both parties. He
never took for granted that anybody was very good or very bad. The
best women possible liked him, and looked sorry and incredulous when

they were informed by his enemies that he had no morals. He had never
told any one that he was sad and bored. Nor had he