That same afternoon, Mary Sorel began a letter to Severance, a letter embroidered with points of admiration, dashes, underlinings, and parentheses.
"Dear Tony," she wrote, for she felt the warm affection of an Egeria, mingled with that of a mother-in-law elect, for him: and it pleased all that was snobbish in her soul to have this intimate feeling for an earl.
"Dear Tony, I shall be cabling you about the time you land, according to promise. But I promised as well to write a sort of diary letter, giving you all the developments day by day, and posting the document at the end of the week. Well, this is the first instalment, written—as you'll see by the date—on the day of your sailing.
"How I wish I had better news to give you! But don't be alarmed. Things are not going as we hoped, yet they might be worse. And now you are prepared by that preface, I'll try to tell you exactly the state of affairs!
"At least, I shall be able to explain a mystery that puzzled and worried us both yesterday, after the—I suppose in lieu of a better word I'm bound to call it 'marriage'! Neither you nor I could understand precisely how That Man had got my poor child so under his thumb, when by rights he should have been under her foot!
"What he does is this: he simply threatens at every turn to go away and tell everyone, including newspaper men, the whole story from beginning to end. You might think with an ordinary person that this was all bluff. Because, if the story hurt you and Marise, and even me, it would hurt him as much. But whatever he may be (and he might be almost anything!) he is not an ordinary person. He appears perfectly reckless of his own reputation. Apparently he cares not enough to lift his finger, or let it fall, for the opinion of others, no matter who. If he said he would do some dreadful thing it wouldn't be safe to hope he was merely making an idle threat. He would do it, I'm sure he would!
"That's the secret of his power over our poor little Marise, and I must admit, to a certain extent over me.
"I have been having a long talk with him about the future—the immediate future, I mean, of course, for the more distant future I hope and believe will be controlled by you!
"When I reproached the man for browbeating my daughter, he actually retorted that we had no right to try and pin him to a certain line of conduct, and not pay him for it! Shameless! But that sample will show you what we are going through. I shall indeed rejoice for every reason when you are restored to us. You have told me that your cousin ?none has what amounts to a million of American dollars, all her own, and that her father intends giving you another million on your marriage to her; so you will be in a position to complete your bargain with this Fiend. In order to obtain the money, he will have to keep his part of the agreement.
"Yes, 'Fiend' is the word. Indeed, I used it aloud this afternoon in addressing him, so utterly did he enrage me. He will not allow Marise to go with me to Los Angeles and accept the loan of Bell Towers, which you so kindly placed at our disposal till your return with your poor little invalid, ?none. He has a house of his own, out West, it seems—Arizona or somewhere wild-sounding. I believe it's near the Grand Canyon—wherever that is! And heaven alone knows what it's like—the house, I mean, not the Canyon, which I am told is an immense abyss miles deep, full of blood-red rocks or something terrific.
"Garth insists that the unhappy child shall accompany him to this desolate spot, which is more or less on the way to California. The alternative he puts before her is of course the eternal (I nearly said, 'infernal'!) one, of deserting his bride with a blast of trumpets. Neither you, nor Marise, nor I, can afford to let this happen! Almost anything would be preferable at a crisis so delicate for you with your uncle. Especially as Marise vows that, alone with her, the monster is not so formidable. In fact, she says she can account for his conduct at these times only by supposing that he does not like her, or is in love with someone else.
"I wonder, by the way, do you know at all if he has any money? My impression, when he so easily accepted your somewhat original offer, was that he had none. But he made Marise several handsome presents of jewellery, which must have cost a great deal, if he paid cash! Perhaps he used his V.C. to get them on tick—if such a thing is possible! Marise refused, quite definitely, she tells me, to take these gifts from him. To-day, she chanced to ask Garth how he had disposed of them after her refusal. Though she put the question most tactfully, even remarking that she was sorry for some little abruptness when returning the jewel-cases (I don't know details!), the man denied her right to ask what he had done. Marise persisted, however, in that sweet little determined way she has, and Garth at length flung out in reply that he had given the things to another person. Imagine it! Marise's wedding presents!
"Nothing more was to be got out of him, however. Instinct whispers to me that the child suspects a certain young woman of having received the jewels. (Why, such a thing is almost like being a receiver of stolen goods, since surely they're the property of Marise. Not that she wants or would look at them again!) She did not tell me this. It is my own heart—the heart of a mother—which speaks. All she said was, that Garth wouldn't mention the name of the receiver, and resented her 'catechising' him. He put the matter like this: If she'd given him wedding presents, and he practically trampled them under foot, with scorn, wouldn't she consider herself free to do what she liked with the objects? Wouldn't she wish to get rid of them and never see them again? Wouldn't her first thought be to give them away? And how would she feel if he wanted to know what she'd done with the things?
"To the three first questions, Marise found herself obliged to answer 'Yes.' (She has an almost abnormal sense of justice for a woman, you know!) To the fourth, sh............