'He will love you for yourself alone, I am assured,' persisted Eveline, in defence of her brother. 'You are beautiful, Cousin Olive; you ride, row, dance, play lawn-tennis, and flirt to perfection. Are not all these qualities calculated to excite admiration in a young officer; and then, more than all, you have such dear, funny ways with you.' And the warm-hearted girl concluded by laughing and kissing her cousin on both cheeks effusively.
The tenor of this remarkable will, which has been referred to more than once, was, to say the least of it, peculiar.
Some years before this period, Olive Raymond arrived at Dundargue an orphan, left in charge of Lord Aberfeldie—the child of his only sister, Muriel Graham, who had married a Mr. Raymond, a poor man, whom means furnished by the Aberfeldie family enabled to become one of the wealthiest planters in Jamaica. Both her parents had died early, and after her location at Dundargue she became a species of sister to Eveline and Allan Graham.
Happy, indeed, was Olive alike in her Scottish home in the lovely Carse of Gowrie, and when the family took up their abode, according to the season or the sitting of Parliament, at their West-end residence in London.
By will, Mr. Oliver Raymond left his entire fortune, which was very considerable, to his daughter; but, in gratitude to the family of his wife, on the strange condition that she was to marry his nephew, Allan Graham, whose death alone was to free her from that contingency. If she unreasonably refused, then, in that case, after her twenty-fifth year, she was to forfeit all that would accrue to her, save a very slender allowance—the share so forfeited to become the inheritance of her cousin Allan; and if he declined to wed his cousin Olive, then, in that case, the money so forfeited was to go to such Scottish charitable institutions as Lord Aberfeldie and the other trustees might select.
This will was, undoubtedly, a strange one; but then Mr. Raymond had been a strange and eccentric man, animated by an intense regard and esteem for the family of his deceased wife, the Grahams of Aberfeldie, to whom he felt all his good fortune had been due.
As children, the tenor of this tyrannical will in no way affected the relations of Olive and Allan with each other; and the latter—a manly and sturdy lad, when at home from the College of Glenalmond, where he pursued his studies and cultivated cricket, boxing, and football—petted and made much of the violet-eyed and brown-haired little cousin, who had dropped among them as if from the clouds; but after he had joined the Black Watch as a subaltern, and years passed on, and they began to be talked of and deemed in the family circle as an engaged couple, betrothed, affianced, and all the rest of it, the young beauty and heiress began to resent the terms of the will bitterly, perhaps not unreasonably; she became, as we have said, antagonistic, and was perplexed to think that her father could not have foreseen some difficulties on the part of his two legatees.
Thus, as they both grew older, she seldom replied to the letters which Allan wrote to her, by his parents' desire, perhaps, rather than his own, till he ceased to write to her at all, on which she became severely piqued; and once when she was a little way on in her 'teens,' and when Allan was at home for a very brief period before departing to India, she treated him with an indifference—almost animosity—that made him deem the girl wayward, cold-hearted, even purse-proud, and everything unpleasant; and with this fatal impression he rejoined the Black Watch, and amid many a flirtation might soon have forgotten the heiress that was growing up for him at Dundargue, but for the letters he received from thence, and in which ample references to her and her beauty and accomplishments were never omitted; while she, on the other hand, when she became of a marriageable age, seldom ceased to stigmatise the will as outrageous, indelicate, grotesque, and unjust. And now that her cousin Allan was coming home—nay, had come home—for a protracted period on leave of absence, she felt that a crisis was at hand in her fate—a crisis in which she, like a hunted creature, knew not how to escape.
'Yes, Allan will soon learn to love you for your own sake,' returned the gentle Eveline, after a pause.
'How can I ever be certain of that? Oh, I owe little indeed to papa, who by such a will as his seeks to degrade both your brother and myself,' replied Olive.