Chapter XIX

But it was not to be long deferred--that decisive struggle which Marion clearly foresaw, and from which she shrank, notwithstanding Mr. Singleton's confident assurance of her victory. It was a day or two later that Earle said to her:--

"Since I am going away soon, Marion, it will be well that we shall settle all details of our future. Can you not make an effort and go with me? What need is there, in our case, for long waiting, or for submitting to a separation which would be very painful?"

The confident assurance of his tone--as if dealing with a point settled beyond all need of argument--made Marion's heart sink a little, but she nerved herself to the necessary degree of resolution, and answered, quietly:--

"There will be no need for long waiting or for separation either, if you will only consent to do what your uncle asks--to remain with him, and fulfil the duty which most plainly lies before you." She paused a moment, then added, in a softer tone, "You have refused to yield to his request, will you not yield to _mine_?"

Earle looked at her with eyes full of pained surprise. "_Et tu Brute!_" he said, with a faint smile. "I thought you, at least, understood how firmly my mind is made up on that subject--how impossible it is for me to resign all my cherished plans of life for the sake of inheriting my uncle's fortune."

"But what is to prevent your painting as many pictures as you like and still gratifying him?" she asked.

"Because no man can serve two masters, in temporal any more than in spiritual things. If I am to serve Art, I must do so with all my strength, not in a half-hearted _dilettante_ manner--but I am weary of saying these things. I hoped that by this time everyone understood them."

"I understand them perfectly," replied Marion; "but I do not think you are right. I think that, because you have never known the need or want of money, you are throwing away a fortune for a mere caprice, and you are condemning others as well as yourself to lifelong poverty."

"Not to poverty," he observed; "though certainly to narrower means than those my uncle possesses. It is for you to say whether or not you care to accept the life which I offer. I can not change it--I do not believe that even for you it would be best that I should."

"You are very kind to settle what would be best for me so entirely in accordance with your own tastes and will," she said, with her old tone of mockery. "May I ask why you are led to such a belief?"

"It is easily told," he answered, "and I will be perfectly frank in the telling. We all have some one point where temptation assails us with more force than at any other. With you, Marion, that point is an undue value of wealth and of all the things of the world that wealth commands,--things, for the most part, of great danger to one who does value them unduly. The possession of wealth, therefore, would be dangerous to you--more dangerous from the very strength of the passion with which you desire it. Forgive me if this sounds odiously like preaching, but it is true. I can not, then, change the whole intention and meaning of my life--give up my study of art and sink into a mere idle amateur--when by so doing I should gain nothing of value to myself, while working harm rather than good to you. Tell me that you believe I follow my conscience in this, and that you will be content with what I offer you?"

He held out his hand with a pleading gesture, but Marion would not see it. What he had said angered her more deeply than if he had let his refusal remain based solely on his own wishes. That he should recognize _hers_, yet coolly put them aside, reading her the while a moral lecture on their dangerous nature, filled her with a sense of passionate resentment.

"I might be content with what you offer," she said, "if it were not that you could so easily offer more--you could so easily gratify me, whom you profess to love, as well as the old man who loves you so well. But you will not yield in the least degree to either of us. You follow your own wishes, and declare mine to be mercenary and dangerous. The difference between us is that I have known something of the poverty you regard so lightly; and, while I might risk enduring it with a man who had no alternative of escape from it, I do not think my prospect of happiness would be great with a man who condemned me to it for the gratification of his own selfishness."

"Is that how the matter appears to you?" asked Earle. He paused for a minute and seemed to consider. "You may be right," he said, presently; "I may be acting selfishly--what man can be absolutely certain of his own motives?--but, to the best of my judgment, I am doing what I believe to be right. I can not yield to my uncle in this matter--not even though he has secured you as his advocate. I am sure that if I did yield, it would be worse for all of us. No, Marion; forgive me if I seem hard, but you must take me as I am, or not at all. You must consent to share my life as I have ordered it, or it is best that you should not share it at all."

She bent her head with the air of one who accepts a final decision. "It is very good of you to put it so plainly," she said. "Your candor makes my decision very easy. The matter to me stands simply thus: you decline absolutely to make the least concession to my wishes, you sacrifice my happiness relentlessly to your own caprice, and yet you expect me to believe in the sincerity of your regard. I do not believe in it. I believe, indeed, that you have some kind of a fancy for me; but you think that, because I bring you nothing beside myself, you can make your own terms and order my life as it pleases you--"

"Marion!" cried Earle, shocked and startled. But she went steadily on:--

"That, however, is a mistake. If I bring nothing, I have in myself the power to win all things. I might give up all things for a man who truly loved me, and who was poor by no fault of his own. But for a man who loves me so little that he would condemn me uselessly to a sordid, narrow life--for that man I have only one word: go!"

She rose with a gesture, as if putting him from her; but Earle caught her extended hand.

"Marion!" he said, earnestly, "stop and think! You accuse me of selfishness, but is there no selfishness in your own conduct? In asking you to share my life as it is settled, I do not ask you to share poverty: I only do not promise you wealth. Do you care nothing for me without that wealth? Consider that I can only think you weigh me in the scale with my uncle's fortune and without that fortune hold me of no account."

"You must think what you please," returned Marion. "I have told you how the matter appears to me. If you care for me, you will accept your uncle's generous offer. That is my last word."

"Then we can only part," said Earle, dropping her hand. "It is evident that the love of money is more deeply rooted in you than love of me. God forgive you, Marion, and God bring you to some sense of the relative value of things! I have the presumption to think that what I give you is worth a little more than the fortune which you rate so highly. Some day you may learn how little money can really buy of what is best worth having in human life. In that day you may remember this choice."

"I shall never regret it," she answered, proudly.

"I hope from my heart that you may not, but _I_ shall long regret it. For I believe that you have a noble nature, to which you are doing violence. And I hoped that in the life to which I would have taken you, that nobler nature would have conquered the one which finds so much attraction in mercenary things."

The nobler nature of which he spoke struggled a little to assert itself, but was overborne by the lower and stronger nature--by anger, disappointment, and wounded pride. What! she, who had expected to sway and dominate all with whom she came in contact, to yield to this man--to give up the strongest wish, the most earnest resolve of her life? From her early youth embittered by adversity and galled by poverty, she had said to herself, "Some day I will be rich!" And now the opportunity to possess riches, and with riches the power for which she longed, was placed within her reach, and yet was held back by the selfish obstinacy of a man, who made his refusal worse by condemning her wishes. At this moment she felt that anything was more possible than to yield to him.

"You are wasting words," she observed, coldly. "My attraction for mercenary things concerns you no longer. Our folly is at an end. It _was_ folly I see, for you have no trust in me, nor any inclination to please me; and where these things do not exist, love does not exist either."

She gave him no opportunity to reply had he intended to do so, for she left the room abruptly with the last words.

And there was no deliberation about her next step. She went at once to Mr. Singleton. "I have come to tell you that your confidence in my power over your nephew is misplaced," she said. "I have failed entirely to influence him. He is going away."

The old man, who was leaning back in his deep velvet chair, his face against its soft richness, looking more than ever like a piece of fine ivory carving, did not appear very much surprised by this intelligence. He remained for a minute without speaking, regarding intently the girl before him. Her beauty was truly imperial; for excitement gave it a brilliance--a light to her eyes, a color to her cheeks--which was almost dazzling.

"What a splendid creature!" he said to himself; then he remarked aloud, very quietly:--

"And you are going with him?"

"No," she answered. "Since he has no regard for my wishes in a matter so important to me as well as to himself, I have declined to have anything further to do with him."

"Good!" said Mr. Singleton. His tone expressed not only approval, but intense satisfaction. "I am glad that some way to punish him has been found. But what is he made of that he can look at you and refuse to do what you ask! Has he gone mad with obstinacy, or is he a man of ice?"

"I do not know," she replied. "He cares only for himself and the gratification of his own whims, I suppose. He does not deserve that either you or I should think of him any more. And I," she added, more sternly, "am determined that I will _not_ think of him again. He has gone out of my life forever. There only remains for me now to go out of this house, with the most grateful memory, dear Mr. Singleton, of your kindness."

"No," said Mr. Singleton. He extended his hand and laid it on her arm, as if he would detain her by force. "It is not for you to go, but for him. And he shall go at once."

"Not on my account." she said, haughtily. "_He_ has a right here, I have none."

"You have the right that I ask you to stay," observed Mr. Singleton. "He has no other than my invitation, and that will be withdrawn as soon as I see him. Like yourself, I am done with him now forever. I have borne much from him and hoped much from him; but I see that the first was useless, and the last without any rational ground. This offense--his conduct to you--I will never forgive. But I hope, my dear, that you will suffer me to make what atonement for it I can. I consider you as much my adopted daughter as if this marriage on which I set my heart had taken place."

"You are very good," replied Marion. A vision passed before her as she spoke of all that this might mean; but she felt strangely dead toward it, as if already the fortune she coveted had been robbed of half its lustre.

"Stay with me, then," said Mr. Singleton. "I can not part with you, if Brian can. I want your society while I live, and I will provide for you liberally when I die. Will you stay?--is that agreed upon?"

"Yes," she answered. "If you care for me I will stay. Nobody else does care."

Then suddenly her proud composure gave way. She burst into tears, and made her escape from the room.

Perhaps those tears hardened Mr. Singleton's resolve, or perhaps it needed no hardening. After a few minutes he rang his bell, and sent the servant who answered it to summon Brian Earle to him.

The latter was on the point of leaving the house when he received the message, but he immediately obeyed it, saying to himself as he laid down his hat, "As well now as later." For he knew perfectly what was before him; and Mr. Singleton's icy manner was no surprise to him when he entered the room where Marion had brought her story so short a time before.

"I am informed by Miss Lynde," said Mr. Singleton, severely, "that your engagement to her is at an end, for the reason that you refuse to yield your wishes to hers as well as to mine, and she very wisely declines to countenance your folly and selfishness by sacrificing her life to it. Is this true?"

"Perfectly true," replied the young man, calmly. "Miss Lynde thinks me not worth accepting without your fortune. I regret to say that this, to my mind, betrays a nature so mercenary that I am not sorry a conclusive test should have arisen, and ended an arrangement which certainly would not be for the happiness of either of us."

"That is how it appears to you, is it?" said Mr. Singleton. "Well, let me tell you that, to me, your conduct is so utterly without reason or excuse, so shameful in its selfish disregard of everyone's wishes but your own, that I finally cast off all regard for you. Go your way, study the art to which you have sacrificed not only me but the woman to whom you pledged your faith; but remember that you have lost your last chance with me. Not a sixpence of my money will ever go to you."

"I have never wanted it," said Brian, proudly.

"No," answered his uncle. "But in the days to come, when your need for money increases, and you find that fame and fortune are not so easily won as you imagine now, you _will_ want it; you will curse your folly then when it is too late; and you will think, perhaps, of the old man who offered you so much for so little, and to whom you refused that little."

Angry as the speaker was, something in the tone of his last words almost shook Brian's resolution. For a moment he asked himself if, after all, he might not be the victim of a self-willed delusion; if his uncle might not be right, and if it might not be his duty to yield. But this was only for a moment. He had the faculty of seeing clearly and deciding firmly once for all. He had long before this weighed every aspect of a question which so importantly concerned his life, and his final decision was based on many strong grounds. Those grounds he saw no reason to reconsider now.

"I am very sorry," he said, gravely, "for all that has happened,--most sorry for any disappointment or pain I have caused you or another. But there are many reasons why I cannot comply with your wishes; and, since further discussion of the subject is useless, I will beg your permission to leave you."

"Leave me and leave my house!" said Mr. Singleton, emphatically. "It is my duty to guard Miss Lynde from any possible annoyance, and to meet you could only be an annoyance to her now. You will, therefore, be good enough to go at once."

"I will do so," replied Brian, rising. "God bless you, sir, and believe that I am very grateful for all your kindness to me. I wish that I could have repaid you better."

Then, before his uncle could answer, he went away.