Chapter XXVI

The first thing of which Marion was conscious when she entered the drawing-room was that a pair of bold, bright and keen dark eyes were instantly fastened on her. The owner of these eyes was a tall and very striking-looking man, whose originally brunette skin was so deeply bronzed by exposure to a tropical sun that he scarcely had the appearance of a white man at all; but whose clear-cut features at once recalled those of old Mr. Singleton, whose whole aspect was so unusual and so remarkably handsome that it would have been impossible for him either to personate or be mistaken for any one else. Marion recognized this even while Mr. Tom Singleton was in the act of stepping forward to take her hand, and said to herself that no one who had ever seen this man once could doubt whether or not he was the person he assumed to be.

"How do you do this morning, Miss Lynde?" said Mr. Singleton, who tried to conceal a certain awkwardness under more than his usual geniality of manner. "I hope we have not disturbed you too early, but I had your permission to present my cousin, Mr. George Singleton."

"Not my permission only, but my request," observed Marion, looking at the tall, handsome stranger, who bowed. "I am very glad to see Mr. George Singleton--at last."

"You are very good to say so," replied that gentleman, easily. "I assure you that, so far from expecting you to be glad to see me, I feel as apologetic as possible about my existence. Pray believe, Miss Lynde, that I mean to give you as little trouble as possible. I have no doubt we can soon arrive at an amicable arrangement."

"I have no doubt of it," said Marion, calmly. "But you will allow me to say how sorry I am that any arrangement should be necessary,--that your father was not aware of your existence when he made his will."

Mr. George Singleton shrugged his shoulders. "I am by no means certain that my father believed me to be dead," he answered. "At least he had no special reason for such a belief. He had indeed not heard from or of me in a long time, because that was thoroughly settled when we parted. I threw off his control, and he washed his hands of me. But I hardly thought he would ignore me completely in his will. No doubt he had a right to do so, for I had ignored every duty of a son; but he should have remembered that he also had something to answer for in our estrangement. However, that is neither here nor there. What I mean to say is that the consciousness of my shortcomings will make me easy to deal with; for I feel that my father was in great measure justified when he selected another heir."

This cool, careless frankness was so unexpected that for a moment Marion could only look at the speaker with a sense of surprise. He was so totally unlike what she had imagined! His bold, bright glance met hers, and, as if divining her thoughts, he smiled.

"Don't expect me to be like other people, Miss Lynde," he continued. "Tom here will tell you that I never was. Even as a boy I was always a law unto myself--a wild creature whom nothing could tame or restrain. Perhaps it is because I am still something of a wild man that I see no reason why we should not discuss and settle this business between us in a friendly manner. I have only the most friendly sentiments for you, being aware that my coming to life is rather hard lines for you."

Marion could not but respond to his smile and what seemed to be the genuine though somewhat blunt friendliness of his manner. Yet when she spoke her tone was slightly haughty.

"Pray do not think of me," she said. "The fact that your father left his fortune to me was the greatest surprise of my life,--a surprise from which I have hardly yet recovered. Naturally, therefore, it will be no great hardship to give it up."

"But I don't ask you to give it up," replied the tall, dark man, hastily. "There is enough to divide, and I assure you I am not a grasping fellow. Ask Tom if I am."

Mr. Tom Singleton smiled. "If so," he observed, "you must have changed very much."

"I haven't changed a particle. I did not give a thought to my father's fortune when I left him: I was thinking only of freedom, of escape from irksome control. And I hardly gave it a thought during the years that I have been out yonder, thoroughly satisfied with my own mode of life. I should not be here now but for the fact that a lawyer--what is his name?--took the trouble to write and inform me that my father was dead and I disinherited. Naturally one does not like to be ignored in that way; so I replied, directing him to contest the will. But since I have come, heard the circumstances of the case, and--and seen you, Miss Lynde, I perceive no reason for any such contest. We'll settle the matter more simply, if you say so."

"Seen you Miss Lynde!" It sounded simple enough, but the eyes of this wild man, as he called himself, emphasized the statement so that Marion could not doubt that her beauty might again secure for her an easy victory--if she cared for it. But she did not suffer this consciousness to appear in her manner or her voice as she replied:--

"We can settle it very simply, I think. Shall we now put aside the preliminaries and proceed to business?"

"Immediately, if you desire," answered Mr. Singleton. He bent forward slightly, pulling his long, dark moustache with a muscular, sunburned hand, while his brilliant gaze never wavered from Marion's face. His cousin also looked at her, apprehensively as it seemed, and gave a nervous cough. She met his eyes for an instant and smiled gravely, then turned her glance back to the other man.

"I am very sure, Mr. Singleton," she said, "that your father must have left his fortune to me under a wrong impression of your death. If this were not so he certainly left it under a false impression of my character. To retain money of which the rightful heir is living, is something of which I could never be guilty if every court of law in the land declared that the will should stand. Your father's fortune, then, is yours, and I will immediately take steps to resign all claim of mine upon it."

"But I have not asked you to resign more than a portion of it," answered Singleton, impetuously. "It is right enough that you should have half, since my father gave you the whole."

"You are very generous," she said, with a proud gentleness of tone; "but it is quite impossible for me to keep the half of your fortune. Your father would never have left it to me but for circumstances which need not be entered into--he wished to punish some one else. But he could never have wished to disinherit his son. I am certain of that. He liked me, however--I think I may say as much as that; he was very kind to me, and I believe that even if he had known of your existence he might have remembered me with a legacy; do you not think so?" She turned, as she uttered the last words, to Mr. Tom Singleton.

"I am sure of it," replied that gentleman.

"Believing this, I am willing to take what he would have been likely to give. It is rather difficult, of course, to conjecture what the exact amount would have been, but it seems to me that he would probably have left me about ten thousand dollars."

Both men uttered a sharp exclamation. "Absurd! You must certainly take more than that," said George Singleton.

"Remember that you are giving up half a million," remarked his cousin.

But Marion shook her head. "It is with extreme reluctance," she said, "that I have decided to take anything. Mr. Singleton is aware that my intention yesterday was to keep nothing, but I have been advised to the contrary by one whose opinion I respect; and so I have determined to take what I think your father, under ordinary circumstances, might have given one with no claim upon him, but in whom he had taken an interest."

"But why should you fix upon such a paltry sum?" demanded George Singleton. "There was nothing niggardly about my father. He was cold and hard as an icicle, but he always gave like a prince."

"That would have been a very generous bequest to one who had touched his life as slightly as I had," remarked Marion, "and who had no claim upon him whatever--"

"He calls you his adopted daughter in his will."

"He was very good to me," she replied, simply, while tears came to her eyes. "But I think he only said that to make such a disposition of his fortune seem more reasonable. Your cousin here has perhaps told you, or at least he can tell you, all the circumstances--how your father was disappointed in some one else on whom he had set his heart."

"Brian Earle," said George Singleton, carelessly. "Yes, I know."

"Well, he thought that I had been disappointed too; and so--partly from a generous impulse to atone for the disappointment, and partly from a desire to punish one who had greatly angered him--he made _me_ his heir. But it was all an accident, a caprice, if I may say so; and if he had lived longer he would have undone it, no doubt."

"You did not know my father if you think so," said the son, quietly. "He had caprices perhaps, but they hardened into resolutions that never changed. Who should know that better than I? No, no, Miss Lynde, this will never do! I can not take a fortune from your hands without litigation or any difficulty whatever, and leave you only a paltry ten thousand dollars. It is simply impossible."

"It is altogether impossible that I can retain any more," answered Marion. "As I have already said, I would prefer to retain none at all; and if I consent to keep anything, it can only be such a moderate legacy as might have been left me."

"As would _never_ have been left to you! My father was not a man to do things in that manner. What was your legacy, Tom?"

"Fifty thousand dollars," replied Mr. Tom Singleton.

"Something like that I might agree to, Miss Lynde, if you will insist on the legacy view of the matter; but I should much prefer to simply divide the fortune."

"You are certainly your father's son in generosity, Mr. Singleton," said Marion. "But believe me you are wasting words. My resolution is finally taken. I shall make over your fortune to you, retaining only ten thousand dollars for myself. That is settled."

It was natural, however, that neither of the two men would accept this settlement of the case. Both declared it was manifestly unjust, and each exhausted his powers of argument and persuasion in trying to move Marion. It was a singular battle; a singular turn in an altogether singular affair;--and when at last they were forced to go without having altered her resolution, they looked at each other with a sense of baffled defeat, which presently made George Singleton burst into a laugh.

"By Jove!" he said, "this is a reversal of the usual order of things. To think of a disinherited man, instead of having to fight for his rights, being forced to beg and pray that his supplanter will keep a fair share of the inheritance! What makes the girl so obstinate? Has she money besides?"

"I don't believe that she has a sixpence," replied his cousin.

"Then what on earth, in the name of all that is wonderful, is the meaning of it? She does not look like a fool."

Mr. Singleton laughed. "Miss Lynde," he said, "is about as far from being a fool as it is possible to imagine. We all thought her at first very shrewd and scheming, and there is no doubt but that she might have wound your father round her finger without any trouble at all. She is just the kind of a person he liked best: beautiful, clever--_he_ never fancied fools, you know,--and she charmed him, without any apparent effort, from the first. But if she schemed for any share of his fortune it was in a very subtle way--"

"In the light of her conduct now, I don't see how it is possible to believe that she ever schemed at all," interposed the other.

"I _don't_ believe it," said Tom Singleton; "although the fact remains that, in choosing between Brian and his uncle, she stood by the latter."

"There might have been other than mercenary considerations for that. I can't imagine that this splendid creature ever cared about marrying Brian."

Mr. Singleton did not commit himself to an opinion on that point. He said, diplomatically: "It is hard to tell what a woman does care to do in such a case, and Miss Lynde by no means wears her heart on her sleeve. Well, the long and short of the matter was that Brian obstinately went away, and that your father made this girl his heir--for the very reasons she has given, I have no doubt. She was most genuinely astonished when I told her the news, and my belief that she had ever schemed for such a result was shaken then. But from something she said to me yesterday I think she is afraid that such a belief lingers in people's minds, and she is determined to disprove it as completely as possible. Hence her quixotic conduct. I can explain it in no other way."

"She is a queer girl," observed George Singleton, meditatively; "and so handsome that I don't wonder she knocked over my father--who was always a worshiper of beauty,--and even that solemn prig, Mr. Brian Earle, without loss of time."

"She knocked over another man here in Scarborough, who has a hand in her affairs at present," said Mr. Singleton, significantly. "Did it ever occur to you to wonder why that fellow Rathborne should have interested himself to look you up and notify you of your lost inheritance?"

"Why should I wonder over anything so simple? Self-interest prompted him, of course. If there had been a contest over the will, he might have pocketed a considerable slice of the fortune."

"Well, I suppose that influenced him; but his chief reason was a desire to do Miss Lynde an ill turn, and so revenge himself for her having trifled with his feelings."

"You are sure of this?" asked George Singleton, with a quick look out of his dark, flashing eyes.

"Perfectly sure. Everyone in Scarborough knows the circumstances. He considered himself very badly used, I believe--chiefly because he was engaged to Miss Lynde's cousin; and the latter, who is something of an heiress, broke the engagement. He fell between two stools, and has never forgiven her who was the cause of the fall."

"The wretched cad!" said George Singleton, emphatically. "As if anything that a woman could do to a man would justify him in such cowardly retaliation! I am glad you told me this. I will end my association with him as soon as may be, and let him know at the same time my opinion of him--and of Miss Lynde."

"Do be cautious, George. I shall be sorry I told you the story if you go out of your way to insult the man in consequence. No doubt he _was_ badly used."

The other laughed scornfully. "As if that would excuse him! But I don't believe a word of it. That girl is too proud ever to have taken the trouble to use _him_ badly. But a man might lose his head just by looking at her. What a beauty she is!"