"I hear that you have got the old Florentine looking-gla.s.ses from my sale."

"I don't think they were from your sale," said Molly hastily.

"Well, Perks told me so."

"Perks never told me," muttered Molly.

"I should think they must suit the house to perfection. Where have you put them?"

"In the small dining-room."

"Yes; they must do admirably there. I should like to see them again." He looked at her with a faintly sarcastic smile. She knew what he intended her to say, and, against her will, she said hastily:

"Won't you come and see them?"

"With great pleasure."

Molly saw that Adela had risen, and sprang up and turned away in one sudden movement. She was very angry with him for forcing her to say that, and she could not conceive what had made her yield.

"'The teeth that bite; the claws that scratch,'" he thought to himself, "but safely chained up--and the movements are beautiful." He stood looking after her.

"I did as you told me," said the hostess, pausing for a moment as she followed her guests to the door. "If Molly blames me, shall I say that you asked to take her in?"

"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-gla.s.ses again. Ten days pa.s.sed 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 _role_ 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.

Molly coloured deeply when she saw her visitor. She was annoyed to think that he would make her talk against her will--and they would not be interrupted. She could have used strong language to the butler, but she did not dare tell him that she would now see visitors. It would look to Edmund as if she were afraid of a _tete-a-tete_.

Almost as soon as he was in the room she had an impression that he was quite at home, curiously at his ease.

"I am glad the house is so little changed. I came to my first dance here. You have done wonderfully well, and all on the old lines. A friend told me it was the hugest success."

A remembrance of past jokes as to Edmund's second-hand compliments and his friend "Mr. Harris" came into Molly's mind, but she only felt angry at the remembrance.

He talked on about the pictures and the furniture until she became more natural. It was impossible not to be interested in her work, and the decoration and furnishing of the whole house was her own doing, not that of any hireling adviser. Then, too, he knew its history, and she became keenly interested. She had at times a strong feeling of the past life still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated life had intruded. She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty secret was a desecration or only a continuance of something that had gone before.

Suddenly she leant forward with the crude simplicity he was glad to see again.

"Have there been any wicked people here?" Her voice was low and young.

"'All houses in which men have lived and died are haunted houses,'" he quoted. "It's not very cynical to suppose that there has been sin and sorrow here before now."

"I think," said Molly quickly, "there was a wicked woman who used the little dining-room; perhaps she was only a guest. I don't think she went upstairs often."

"Perhaps she came in with my looking-gla.s.ses," suggested Edmund. "I have often wished I could see what they have seen."

Molly was now quite off her guard.

Edmund rose and examined some china on a table near him.

"Why are you so displeased with me?" he said, without any change of voice.

Molly sprang to her feet, careless whether her unguarded vehemence might betray her to his observation.

"I shall not answer that question," she said; but he knew that she would answer it.

"You cut me at the Court; you were displeased at having to sit by me at dinner; you have pretended not to see me at least four times since then, and your butler showed me up by mistake."

Molly had moved away from him to the window. She knew she must speak or her conduct would look too like wounded love--a thing quite unbearable.

She knew, too, that his influence would make her speak, and, besides that, something in her cried for the relief of speech. She needed a fight although she did not know it; an open fight with an enemy she could see would distract her from the incessant fight with an enemy she did not see.

"You are a strange man!" she cried, holding the curtain behind her lightly as she turned towards him. "You could make friends with me so that all the world might see you, and meanwhile, at the very same time, you were paying a low Italian scoundrel to produce lies against my sick and lonely mother! You could watch me and get out of me all you wanted to know because I was ignorant of the world. You could use the horrible influence you had gained over me by your experience of many women, to manage me as you liked. You told me not to marry Edgar Tonmore for some reason of your own; you told me to go and stay with my aunt; you came to see me one night in London, and wormed out of me my relations with my unfortunate mother. With all your knowledge of the world, with all your experience, did you never think I might come to find you out?"

Molly paused for a moment. She held herself erect, her white gown crushed against the rich, dark curtain, her great eyes searching the trees in the park below as if she sought there for the soul of her enemy. She did not know that she pulled hard at the curtain behind her with both hands; it could not have held out much longer, strong though it was.

"No; you knew life too well not to know that you might be found out, but the truth was that you did not care. It was so little a thing to you that, when you saw that I knew the truth, you could go on just the same, quite unabashed. You could force yourself on me by playing on your poverty; you, who had tried to ruin my mother! Well, she is out of your reach, and perhaps you have shifted your foul suspicions on to me.

Perhaps it is from me you hope to get the fortune that you mean to share. You drive me mad! I say things I don't want to say; you force me to lower myself, but----" She turned now and faced Edmund, who watched her, himself absolutely motionless. "Now that you have forced yourself on me again you shall answer me. Do you believe that I, Molly Dexter, have concealed or abetted in concealing or destroying any will in favour of Lady Rose Bright?"

There is a moment when pa.s.sion is astonishingly inventive. Molly had had no intention of saying anything of the kind, but the heat of pa.s.sion had produced a stroke of policy that no colder moment could have produced.

She was suddenly dumb with astonishment at her own words, and she dimly recognised that this represented a distinct crisis in her own mind.

Pa.s.sion and excitement had dissipated the last mists of self-deception.

Edmund waited till there could be no faint suspicion of his trying to interrupt her, and then said from his heart, in a voice she had never heard from him before:

"No, I swear to you I don't."

Molly had been deeply flushed. At these words she turned very white, and her hands let go the curtains. She put them out before her and seemed to grope her way to a stiff, high-backed chair near to her. She sat down in it and clasped her hands to her forehead.

"Now you must hear me," said Edmund. "I don't say I am blameless: in part of this I have done wrong, but not as wrong as you think. I must tell you my story; although perhaps it may seem blacker as I tell it, even to myself."

He sat down and bent forward a little.