It was easily opened. He drew forth the contents with a detestable eagerness, and read as follows:
My dearest girl,—
This is the first moment that I have felt able to write to you, so great have been my sufferings, so keen my humiliation over this mercenary marriage of yours. I feel as if I had been living in a nightmare ever since that fatal day when I went to town to meet the inhuman monster who almost blighted my young life, and has now fastened his claws into you instead.
Oh, Virginia! Sooner—far sooner—would I have gone to the workhouse than be obliged to think of you in Gaunt's power! But you knew that! Again and again did I assure you, did I not, how far I was from demanding this sacrifice at your hands? How is he using you? That is the question that forces itself upon me every hour—that keeps me awake at night with the horrors! Your letter to Pansy was more or less reassuring, I must own. Perhaps, when he finds how useful and domestic you are, he may be kinder than my fears suggest?
Meantime, I miss you every moment. You will know how I have always detested the petty meannesses of life, the half-pounds of cooking butter, the scraps for the stock-pot, the way the coal disappears, the price of fish—all the endless, nauseating haggling over pence! To this you have left me, after all that I have suffered. After the shattering blows of the death of my first-born, my widowhood, our ruin—you have taken the hand of a man who can give you life's good things, and you have left me to the slavery which you found so unbearable. But I must not reproach you, for you may be already suffering for your mistake. Do write me a few lines, and tell me frankly how he is treating you?
If I am wrong, if he is behaving kindly to you, it will be such a relief to know it. He may, of course, actually have fallen in love with your looks. You are, as all declare, absurdly like me. If this should be so, I know, my darling daughter, that you will use your opportunity to help me. You must see that the allowance secured to me is wretchedly inadequate. £300 a year is impossible. It will mean an existence of continual debt. £400—that is, a hundred pounds a quarter—might be conceivable. It is the very lowest upon which one should be called upon to live. If Gaunt is inclined to be indulgent—if you have managed to get on his blind side—do strike while the iron is hot, and have this matter arranged for me, won't you?
It is not as if I asked for riches. Think of what I have been used to? Think of me here in this odious little town, non-existent as far as the county is concerned—Me, Mrs. Bernard Mynors—a prouder name than that of many a peer. Think of this in your luxury, and spare a little pity for your wretched mother.
Virginia Mynors.
Before that letter, Gaunt sat with clenched hands. The veins in his forehead swelled. How right he had been—how fatally exact in his forecast as far as the mother was concerned! How far was he right, after all, about the daughter?
Could that letter of hers to Pansy have conceivably been written as a blind—in case he should read it? No. That was not possible—at least it was not possible that Pansy's letter to her sister could have been the result of any kind of premeditation. Besides, the doctor's evidence of his wife's starved condition. Yet here were reproaches for the girl who had been obstinately bent upon a mercenary marriage—a sacrifice which she seemed to have made against her mother's pleadings!