My dear Molly,--It will be five weeks on Tuesday next since we saw K.
I., and except a bit of a note, of which I 'll speak presently, never
any tidings of him has reached us! I suppose, within the memory of
man, wickedness equal to this has not been heard of. To go and disgrace
himself, and, what's more, disgrace _us_, at his time of life, with two
daughters grown up, and a son just going into the world, is a depth of
baseness to which the mind cannot ascend.
They 're away in Germany, my dear,--the happy pair! I wish I was near
him. I 'd only ask to be for five minutes within reach of him. Faith, I
don't think he 'd be so seductive and captivating for a little time to
come. They 're off, I hear, to what they call the "Hearts Forest,"--a
place, I take from the name, to be the favorite resort of loving
couples. From the first day, Molly, I suspected what was coming; for,
though James and Mary Anne persisted in saying that he was only gone
for a day or two, I went to his drawers and saw that he had taken every
stitch of his clothes that was good for anything away with him.
"If he 's only gone for two days," says I, "what does he want with
fourteen shirts and four embroidered fronts for dress, not to speak of
his new black suit and his undress Deputy-Lieutenant's coat?" I tossed
and tumbled over everything, and sure enough there was little left to
look at. So you see, Molly, it was all planned before, and the whole was
arranged with a cold-blooded duplicity that makes me boil to think over.
This wasn't all, either; but he must go and draw a bill on the landlord
for a hundred and twenty pounds; and, without the slightest attention to
all that we owed in the hotel, or even leaving us a sixpence, away goes
my gallant Lutherian, only thinking of love and pleasure!
The half of the McCarthy legacy is gone already to meet these demands
and enable us to come on here; and even with that I could n't have done
it if it had n't been for Lord George's kindness, for he knows so much
about bills, and bankers, and when the exchange is good, and what is
the favorable moment to draw upon London, that, as he says himself, one
learns at last to "make a pound go as far as five."
As to staying any longer at Bonn, it was out of the question. The whole
town was talking of K. I., and everybody used to stop us and ask, with a
mournful voice, if we had n't got any tidings of Mr. Dodd?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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