LETTER XXIII. MRS. DODD TO MISTRESS MARY GALLAGHER, DODSBOROUGH.
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."