Might one assume that Sonia if she could have expressed a wish would have wanted her friend to inherit all that money so much, much more than the already generous gift of a thousand pounds.
But then Sonia had not expressed any wish, and was certainly not the kind of girl ever to make a will, even if she had had time to do so. In no conceivable circumstances could those sixty thousand pounds have been legally left to Tina. The fortune had come her way simply by chance and one must face the fact by something like fraud.
Tina winced as she came to that final conclusion. She was defrauding someone. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was defrauding her so-called cousin, Charles Linton. For since Sonia had died without leaving a will, Charles, as the sole surviving relation of the family, should surely inherit everything. At least, so far as Tina’s somewhat sketchy legal knowledge went, that seemed the right and proper conclusion.
No wonder he had looked at her yesterday evening with a curiosity not entirely friendly. Evidently he was personally known to Mr. Medway, and he would naturally have been told of the large legacy which had come into, and if the truth be told also left, the family with such unusual suddenness.
If he knew the real facts,’ thought Tina uncomfortably, ‘there would be a good deal more than that cool reserve in his manner.’
A few hours ago her one idea had been that she never wanted to see Charles Linton again. Now she had an uneasy desire to study him again, in the light of the new discovery. If only he had been an easy and understanding person, one might almost well, not have told him the true facts, of course but come to some sort of arrangement, suggested that it was hardly right that she, an absolute stranger, should inherit everything.
Tina bit her lip at this point. Charles Linton had not seemed at all the kind of person with whom one could make an unorthodox arrangement like that. He would want to know the whys and wherefores, and she hardly thought she would relish the task of pulling wool over those shrewd, bright eyes.
And yet one must do something! At least, if one were ever to have a quiet conscience again.
Tina had not come to any sort of decision, even by the time she returned to her hotel for lunch. The clerk at the desk glanced at her as she came in, and handed her a note which read:
‘Dr. Earle Morrison telephoned. Ringing later.’
Certainly Earle was not losing any time. She had hardly finished her lunch before she was called to the telephone.
‘Hello there! Aren’t you an elusive sort of person?’
Earle’s friendly, drawling voice made her smile. It was nice to feel there was someone in London who knew and liked her.
‘Why? Did you ring more than once?’ she wanted to know.
‘No. But I called you early, and they said you’d already gone out.’
‘Oh yes, I had to go somewhere on business.’
‘I see. How about dinner tonight? Could you make it?’
There was a moment’s hesitation. Somehow today it didn’t seem anything like so necessary to avoid Earle as it had yesterday. And anyway, one could hardly go on refusing his invitations without creating a rather peculiar impression.
‘Yes, I’d love it. When and where?’
‘Say seven-thirty, here. At the Bosanquet.’
Tina agreed, and only when she had rung off, did she wonder if he intended this to be a tête-à-tête dinner, as originally arranged, or whether he, intended to make it simply the postponed meal which he had suggested they should share with her new-found relation.
In her present state of mind she was not quite sure which she wanted it to be, for struggling with her nervous dread of meeting Charles Linton again, was a sort of fascinated interest in him partly because of his overwhelming personality and partly because of the place he now held in her own affairs.
As Tina dressed for her appointment that evening, she was distinctly aware of a desire to look her best. Because Earle was so nice, she supposed.
The Bosanquet was a considerably larger and more fashionable hotel than the one at which she herself was staying, but she guessed that it would probably not be necessary to wear evening dress. So she put on one of the few really good dresses she possessed—a fine black wool, cut on severe lines.
Sonia had once said that there was a certain sophisticated innocence about that dress. And remembering that now with a smile, Tina decided that the innocence would do for Earle and the sophistication for anyone else who happened to see her.
Slipping on a cream wool coat, which had already given her good service but always looked well, she surveyed the final effect in the mirror.
Yes, she looked her best. Not bright and polished and utterly sophisticated like Sonia, of course, but the black emphasised the delicate tones of her complexion and gave a soft brilliance to the very fair hair which curled almost in a fringe over her forehead and was worn long behind.
As she entered the foyer of the hotel her first thought was, ‘What a crowd! Shall I ever be able to find Earle?’
Then the throng seemed to break up into its component parts, grouping in couples and larger parties, and only a few individuals standing by pillars or near the wall waited for their companions.
She stood for a moment herself, glancing at each single figure in turn. Then someone came up and said, ‘Good evening. Miss Frayne.’ And it was not Earle. It was Charles Linton.
‘Oh—’ She hesitated, and then instinctively took the hand held out to her. ‘Good evening. I wasn’t sure whether you were coming or not.’
‘Earle was good enough to invite me too,’ he assured her, those slightly amused bright eyes watching her as he spoke. ‘As a matter of fact he’s just telephoned to say that he was out of London this afternoon and has been delayed coming back. He hopes to join us in about half an hour, but he asked me to meet you and make his excuses.’
‘Oh, I see.’ She was nonplussed for the first moment, and then curiously excited.
‘If you’re hungry, we have Earle’s permission to start dinner without him, or—’
‘Oh, I think we’ll wait for him, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I think so too. Shall we go into the lounge and have a drink and get to know each other?’
She laughed, a little nervously.
‘That seems a good idea. It’s funny that we’re really related, and yet haven’t met each other until yesterday, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose that was inevitable, considering the Atlantic Ocean was between us.’
‘But you were over in the States once, weren’t you?’
‘For quite a short visit. And you? You haven’t been back to England since you were an infant, I believe?’
‘No,’ Tina said, hating the lie. ‘No, I haven’t.’
There didn’t seem much else to say until they were comfortably settled in a quiet corner of the lounge and drinks had been placed before them. Then, with a sort of desperate rashness, she plunged straight into the most thorny subject.
‘I went to see Mr. Medway this morning.’
‘Oh yes?’ He was polite, but not overwhelmingly interested, it seemed.
‘He told me about Aunt Maggie’s big legacy.’
‘Yes, of course. You didn’t know about it until this morning?’
‘No. At least, I had no idea of the size of it. When he wrote to me first, he thought it was only about a thousand pounds.’
‘I see. And since then Aunt Carrie’s little lot rolled in?’
‘Y-yes.’
‘You must be feeling pretty well on top of the world at the moment, then.’ He didn’t look at her, but smiled that rather disturbing little smile, and thoughtfully studied his whisky.
‘Well yes. I mean no.’
‘No?’ He glanced up quickly, and for the twentieth time she was struck with the extraordinary penetration of his look. ‘What’s the snag?’
‘Don’t you think I might very well feel extremely uncomfortable about the whole business?’ she said slowly
No.’ He was dryly positive a
bout that. ‘It must take an extraordinarily sensitive nature to feel uncomfortable about receiving sixty thousand pounds.’
‘In the circumstances?’
‘What circumstances, my little cousin?’ he said quietly She flushed when he called her that at least half with pleasure, she realised in some surprise.
‘Charles may I call you that?’
‘It seems the most reasonable thing, Sonia,’ he agreed gravely.
‘I can’t help feeling that you ought to have had at least some of that money.’
‘I can’t help feeling the same,’ he said with a cool smile. ‘But our feeling happens to be wrong, you know.’
‘No, it doesn’t! Aunt what was her name? Carrie—you see I couldn’t even remember her name for the moment! Aunt Carrie could never have intended me to have her money. She probably hardly knew that I existed and anyway, I’m no real relation. Mother wasn’t even their sister, you know.’
‘I know. But then, you see, she left the money to Aunt Maggie and Aunt Maggie was perfectly entitled to leave it to you. Q.E.D.’
‘Ethically it’s all wrong.’ Tina found she was quite hot about the argument by now.
‘But legally quite right.’ She saw he was a good deal amused at her earnestness.
‘Must one consider only the legal aspect?’
‘Why, of course. What else did you want to consider?’
‘Well, what I said the ethical side of it.’
He shook his head thoughtfully, but still smiled in a way that made her feel he was not very serious about the business.
‘I’m afraid however much my natural cupidity and your natural delicacy enter into it, the ethics are quite sound too.’
‘Charles—’ she couldn’t smile, if he could—‘won’t you let us come to some arrangement about it?’
‘No, you funny child, I won’t,’ he said with a laugh.
‘I’m not that!’
‘What?’
‘A funny child.’
‘No?’ He studied her judicially. ‘You’re an unworldly little thing, anyway. A strange product for New York. What on earth did you do there for a living, I mean?’
‘I played the violin in a nightclub.’
‘Good God!’
‘Yes, it was rather frightful sometimes.’
‘No, I meant it’s the last thing on earth I could have imagined you doing. It’s all wrong for your type. So is your name, of course,’ he added thoughtfully.
‘My—my name?’
‘Yes. You don’t look in the least a Sonia.’
‘Why not?’ She passed the tip of her tongue over lips that had grown suddenly dry.
‘We-ell, don’t you think “Sonia” sounds bright and sophisticated and just a little hard?’
She couldn’t answer him. She could only stare in a sort of superstitious dread. It was as though he had raised Sonia’s very ghost.
‘Don’t look like that.’ He laughed, rather puzzledly, and put his hand over hers not unkindly.
She glanced down at the hand. It was long and strong and brown. An extraordinarily fine hand, with undoubted strength in it.
‘Well?’ he said as she remained silent.
‘N-nothing.’ She glanced up, stammering a little with the confusion of her thoughts. ‘I was thinking what nice hands you have.’
‘Really?’ He was quite unabashed, and regarded his hands with the same critical amusement he was inclined to direct on her. ‘Oh, they’re all right. At least they are useful hands.’
‘In your work, you mean?’ She looked at him with half shy curiosity. ‘You’re very fond of your work, aren’t you?’
‘Very,’ he agreed briefly.
‘I can’t connect you with it, somehow. It seems frivolous for you.’
‘Frivolous!’ He looked astounded. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard surgery described as frivolous.’
‘Oh, but it isn’t surgery in the usual sense, is it? I think Earle said you specialised in plastic surgery.’
‘Well?’ His surprise remained for a moment. Then suddenly he gave a scornful laugh. ‘Oh, you goose! I suppose that suggests lifting dowagers’ faces and disguising gangsters, to your mind?’
‘I’m sorry.’ She flushed. ‘Have I been rather a fool?’
‘Very much so,’ he assured her coolly.
Then it’s something very different?’
‘Yes, Sonia. Something very different. It is remaking shattered faces and bodies and sometimes shattered lives.’
‘Oh!’ In that moment she sensed something of his passionate obsession with his work. ‘How thrilling, Charles.’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s thrilling. To see your work in terms of re-made lives it’s thrilling. That’s why—’ He stopped and laughed suddenly, and to her surprise she saw that he had flushed slightly in his turn.
‘Yes? That’s why?—’
‘Nothing.’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘Something quite personal, and decidedly tactless.’
‘I don’t think that really worries you,’ Tina said calmly. ‘Suppose you tell me.’
He shrugged, and the momentary embarrassment disappeared so completely that she wondered if it had ever, really been there.
‘Very well, then. That is why I presumed to think the money from our late lamented aunts could have run very usefully through my hands.’
‘Yes, I agree with you, ‘Tina said soberly. ‘Then now will you let us let us come to some sort of arrangement?’
‘In spite of the beautifully tactful way of putting it, I will not,’ he assured her, just a trifle mockingly.
‘But why not?’ She felt almost that he enjoyed the discomfort which her legacy caused her. If he had known!
‘Why not? Because one can’t cast a covetous eye on a large sum of money belonging to someone else and just think, “I could use that. If it’s offered, I shall take it.”
‘You know it isn’t like that.’
‘Near enough.’
‘Charles, I think you’re disgustingly exasperating!’
‘Do you?’ He was quite cool about it. ‘Cousins usually are, I believe.’
‘Meaning that you think I am?’
‘Well persistent with the charitable offers, shall we say.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt or offend you.’
‘It takes much more than that to offend me,’ he assured her with a brilliant smile. ‘And ten times more than that to hurt me.’
She thought it must be nice to be so gloriously self-sufficient, and armed against outside influences.
‘Then you don’t put me down as exasperating?’
He considered her amusedly again and said:
‘No. But shockingly unworldly. Don’t go about offering your fortune so eagerly to any other deserving cases. You may come up against someone who hasn’t got my beautiful and disinterested disposition. Then you’ll be skinned of everything, and I shall have a penniless and bewildered cousin to add to my other cares.’
‘Do you really suppose I should come to you if I were in trouble?’ she inquired indignantly, extremely nettled by his smiling confidence.
‘No.’ He regarded her negligently. ‘I should probably have to find it out for myself.’
‘How dare you!’ She gave an angry little laugh.
‘How dare I what?’
‘Suggest that I that I am any responsibility of yours.’
He leant his arms on the small table between them and smiled full at her.
‘And aren’t you?’
‘Why, of course not!’ In one sense she was horrified at the idea it implied a dangerous degree of interest in her movements and in another she was angrily intrigued that he should advance such a preposterous theory with such smiling calm.
It was difficult to say whether he would have maintained the claim or just let the subject go, for at that moment Earle arrived apologetic and rather transparently anxious to know how they had got on together. Perhaps he had sensed the faint ant
agonism at the air terminal the previous’ day. For all his casual air, he was sensitive to atmosphere, and the glance which he gave now from his friend to Tina was a little quizzical.
But if he had expected to find an increase of tension, he was mistaken. As they accompanied him into the grill-room, they appeared admirably in accord, and during the meal conversation flowed easily and pleasantly.
More than once during that evening Tina asked herself anxiously if hers were really a nature that took quite naturally to deception. ‘Certainly I’m doing this very well,’ she reflected grimly.
In spite of any secret anxiety, she found she was able to smile and talk with Earle even to meet Charles’ glance calmly and, with every appearance of-confidence. And all the time she was thinking:
‘Have I really settled the question of this legacy? Can I possibly leave things as they are? I’ve done my very best to make him listen to reason. What else can I do? I dare not go on arguing the matter indefinitely. He’s no fool. He’ll begin to suspect something.’
And yet she knew that if she did leave things as they were, her conscience would torment her endlessly.
That money belonged to Charles, by every right legal or moral. Somehow, somehow, she must see that he got it. The simple question was how?
For one moment, and one moment only, she toyed with the idea of telling him the real truth. Then a single glance at that uncompromising profile made her shrink from the idea with horror. For a man who smiled easily, he could give an extraordinarily forbidding impression. Tina didn’t think she would like to be the person who owned to having cheated and fooled him.
Curiously enough, the two men were speaking just then of someone they both knew and apparently had reason to dislike. Earle said: ‘He just doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. That’s all there is to it.’
And Charles, with a rather frightening gleam in his eye, said dryly:
‘My dear fellow, you flatter him. He does know the difference between right and wrong, but it doesn’t happen to interest him.’
Tina glanced from one to the other with such an expression of serious concentration that Earle laughed suddenly and remarked:
‘We’re boring Sonia with talk of someone she doesn’t know.’
Bargain Wife Page 5
