"Say just what you like; I trust you entirely." He did not attempt to speak to Molly after dinner, or when they met again at a ball that same night. All her burning wish to snub him could not be gratified. He seemed not to know shat she was still in the room. But she knew instinctively that he watched her, and she was not sorry he should see her in the crowd, and be witness, however unwillingly, to her position in the world he knew so well. It added to the sense of intoxication that often possessed her now. "Be drunken," says Baudelaire, "be drunken with wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken." And that Molly could be drunken with flattery, with luxury, with movement, with music, with a sense of danger that gave a strong and subtle flavour to her pleasures, was the explanation (and the only one) of how she bore the hours of reaction, of the nausea experienced by that spiritual nature of hers which she had been so surprised to discover. It was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now. That Molly was gone, and he regretted her.
CHAPTER XXVII
MOLLY'S APPEAL
Edmund, it seemed, was in no hurry to see his Florentine looking-glasses again. Ten days passed before he called on Molly, and on the eleventh day Mr. Murray, Junior, wrote to say that he had some fresh and important intelligence to give him, and asked if Sir Edmund would call, not at his office, but at his own house.
Edmund flung the letter down impatiently. The situation was really a very trying one. He did not believe—he could not and would not believe—that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud. Murray was a lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and absurd. From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother's reply to her offer to go to Florence, Edmund had in his masculine way ranged her once for all among good and nice women. He had felt touched and guilty at a suspicion that he had been to blame in playing his paternal rôle too zealously. Until then he had at times had hard thoughts of her; after that time he was a little ashamed of himself, and he believed in her simplicity and goodness. He was sorry and disappointed now that she was making quite so much effect in this London world. There was something disquieting in Molly's success, and he could appraise better than any one what a remarkable success it was. But he felt that she was going the pace, and he would not have liked his daughter to go the pace, unmarried and at twenty-two. She needed friendship and advice. But the pinch came from the fact that the wealth he could have advised her to use wisely ought to be Rose's, and that he was resolved, in the depths of his soul, to regain that wealth for his cousin—for that "belle dame sans merci" who wrote him such pretty letters about his troubles.
Edmund put Murray's letter in his pocket, and immediately went out. He was living in a small, but clean, lodging in Fulham, kept by a former housemaid and a former footman of his own, now Mr. and Mrs. Tart, kindly souls who were proud to receive him. He gave no trouble, and the preparation of his coffee and boiled egg was all the cooking he had done for him. Mrs. Tart would have felt strangely upset had she known that the said coffee and egg were, on some days, his only food till tea-time; she was under the impression that he lunched at his club when not engaged to friends. Both she and Mr. Tart took immense pains with his clothes, and he would rather have been well valeted than eat luxurious luncheons every day.
He went out at once after getting Murray's letter, because he wanted to call on Molly before he heard any more of the important intelligence.
Molly was alone when he was announced. She had told the butler she was "not at home," but somehow the man decided to show Sir Edmund up because he saw that he wished to be shown up. Edmund had always had an odd influence below stairs, partly because he never forgot a servant's face.