FAMILY MATTERS.
Four years passed away without bringing any further tidings of the
widow and her child, during all which time their names were not once
mentioned between uncle and niece. By the latter their existence was
by no means forgotten; she often thought about them, often longed to
see them. Whether it ever entered the mind of Squire Cortelyon that he
had a living grandson was known to himself alone. He grew old and made
no sign.
Meanwhile Miss Baynard had shot up from a lanky slip of a girl into a
very beautiful young woman.
When she first went to live at Stanbrook, the Squire, having no female
element in his house of a higher status than that of housekeeper,
engaged the services of Mrs. Budd--widow of the Rev. Onesimus
Budd--for the dual positions of _gouvernante_ and companion to his
orphan niece. Mrs. Budd's duties as governess had long ago come to an
end, but therewith she had assumed what to many people would have
seemed the much more responsible and onerous post of chaperon. But,
although a clever little woman in her way, Mrs. Budd was nothing if
not easy-going. For her the wheels of existence were always well
oiled. Nothing disturbed her much. Responsibility slid off her like
water off a duck's back. Life for her meant little more than a
sufficiency of sofas fitted with the softest cushions. She was
excessively good-natured, and, hating to be worried herself, was
careful never to worry others. She and her charge got on capitally
together, chiefly because she was too wise ever to offer any very
strenuous opposition to the whims and vagaries of that self-willed
young woman. A mild protest, by way of easement to her conscience, she
did now and then venture upon, which, however, Miss Baynard would
brush aside with as little effort or compunction as she would a
cobweb.
To some of Squire Cortelyon's neighbors it seemed an inconsistency on
his part that he, who had packed off his son to school at the earliest
possible age, should have taken to his hearth, and have kept her
there, an orphan niece of no fortune, when he might so easily have rid
himself of her in the same way that he had rid himself of Dick. And
certainly, as has been remarked, the Squire was no lover of children,
and was generally credited with not having an ounce of sentiment in
his composition. For all that, Miss Baynard stayed on at Stanbrook,
knowing no other house, her great-uncle so far relaxing his ingrained
parsimony on her account as to pay Mrs. Budd's salary without a
murmur, and allow his niece a few--a very few--guineas a year by way
of pocket-money.
Perhaps it might be said of Ambrose Cortelyon that he had never really
cared but for one person, and that one his sister Agatha, who had been
the solitary ray of sunshine that had brightened the home-life of his
youth--a youth repressed and stunted, and thrown back upon itself, but
in all higher respects uncared for, under the rule of a tyrannical and
passionate father, who was accustomed to flog him unmercifully for the
most trivial offences, and of an indifferent, cold-hearted mother, who
left her children to vegetate in the country for three parts of the
year, while she led the life of a woman of fashion in town.
But Agatha Cortelyon, in the course of time, had grown tired and sick
of her life at home, and had ended by running away with, and becoming
the wife of, an impecunious young lieutenant in a marching regiment.
Thereafter brother and sister had never met. The young wife had died
three years later, leaving one daughter, who in her turn had grown up
and married, but who had never been acknowledged or recognized in any
way by her mother's family. She also had died young, her husband
having pre-deceased her, leaving one child, the Miss Elinor Baynard
with whom we have now to do.
Not till then did Ambrose Cortelyon become aware of the existence of
his grand-niece. He had heard at the time of his sister's death, but
no further news having reference to her husband or child had reached
him, nor had he ever felt the least inclination to seek for any. Thus,
to find himself with a girl of twelve, of whom he had never heard,
thrown on his hands was for him anything but an agreeable surprise.
Immediately after her mother's funeral the child had been packed off
to Stanbrook by some half-cousins of her dead father--who had neither
the means nor the will to keep her--with almost as little ceremony as
if she had been a Christmas hamper.
The Squire happened to be out riding when Nell was put down by the
coach at the gate of Stanbrook, and it fell to Mrs. Dace, the
housekeeper, to break the news to him on his return and hand him a
letter from one of the half-cousins which the girl had brought with
her. When, an hour later, the Squire, in response to Nell's timid
knock at the library door, gruffly bade her enter, he was quite
prepared to dislike her at first sight, and had already determined in
his mind to at once pack her off to some cheap country school, and so
rid himself, at any rate for some time to come, of her unwelcome
presence under his roof.
Yet somehow he did neither one nor the other. Was it because he was
struck by a vague, elusive something in the girl's eyes, her air, her
manner, and the way she carried her head, which brought vividly to
mind the half-forgotten image of the dead-and-gone sister of his
youth, that his determination to send her away presently melted into
thin air and never again took shape in his thoughts? In any case, from
that day forward Stanbrook was Nell's home; but that its being so was
due not so much to the mere tie of relationship, by which her uncle
set no great store, as to a sentimental recollection on his part, was
what she had no knowledge of and would have found hard to credit. She
had grown up self-willed and high-spirited, and with no small share of
that determination of character--some people, chiefly such as had come
into contact with it, stigmatized it as sheer obstinacy--for which
the Cortelyons had always been noted. But above and beyond that,
she had an intense scorn for all that was mean, base, sordid, or
double-faced, and she was never slow to give expression to it.
For many of the small conventions and grandmotherly restrictions with
which society at that period (leaving the present out of question) saw
fit to hedge round its fledglings, she betrayed a fine indifference,
going her own way without let or hindrance, and without deigning a
thought to what others might say or think about her. That she should
be regarded with favorable eyes by mothers with daughters about the
same age as herself could hardly be expected. They averred that she
set their darlings "a dangerous example"; but many of the darlings in
question secretly envied her, and wished that a kind fate had allowed
of their following her example.
Her uncle must be credited with allowing her to do pretty much as she
liked. There was nothing strait-laced about the Squire. He was a
strenuous hater of shams in others, while not being without a few
little weaknesses of his own; and his niece's somewhat wilful
independence of character secretly delighted him, even when, as
sometimes happened, it opposed itself to his own flinty will, and
sparks resulted from the collision.
Between two people so constituted there could be and was no question
of sentiment. From the first it had seemed to Nell that her uncle
simply tolerated her presence under his roof. He had taken her in
because no other door was open to her, and because it would never have
done for Squire Cortelyon's niece to have sought the shelter of the
workhouse. His kindness, if kindness it could be called, had in it, or
so she fancied, a certain grudging element which deprived it of
whatever grace it might otherwise have had.
She knew nothing of a certain strange, haunting likeness on her own
part, nor how often, when her uncle's eyes seemed to be watching her
every movement, it was not her he saw at all, but some one known to
her only by hearsay, who had been in her grave these forty years or
more.
When Dick Cortelyon had been a little more than four years in his
grave, the Squire, acting on his doctor's advice, went up to London
for the purpose of undergoing a certain operation. It was an operation
which is not usually supposed to be attended with any particular risk,
and Mr. Cortelyon was quite cheerful about it; but of course in such a
case, although he did not seem to think so, the question of age
becomes an important factor. At this time he was within a month or so
of his seventy-second birthday, but, barring his permanent lameness,
the result of an accident a score years before, he avouched himself to
be--and he fully believed it--as brisk and robust as when he was only
half that age.
So up to town, accompanied by his niece, he travelled by easy stages
in the roomy and comfortable, if somewhat lumbering, family chariot,
which dated from his grandfather's time; while, perched in the rumble,
Tatham, his body-servant, made platonic love to Miss Baynard's elderly
maid, who had not known what it was to feel a man's arm round her
waist for more years than she cared to remember.
Comfortable lodgings in Bloomsbury had been secured beforehand, and
there the operation was presently performed by one of the most eminent
surgeons of the day.
Everything went well with the Squire, as he had felt sure from the
first it would do, and at the end of six weeks he was back at
Stanbrook thoroughly cured.
But Miss Baynard, when she found herself in London, set herself a task
she had hitherto had no opportunity of undertaking. This was nothing
less than the hunting-up of her dead cousin's widow and child.
As already stated, she had lost the address given her by Dick, and had
never afterwards found it. She remembered that the name on the slip of
paper, that of Dick's wife's uncle, was McManus, and that the man was
a tobacconist in a small way of business in one of the many turnings
off Holborn, but the name of the street itself she had clean
forgotten.
Fortunately for her purpose, there was a sharp youth connected with
the lodgings who, besides making himself generally useful indoors, was
willing to run on errands of any and every kind for anybody disposed
to pay for his services. Him Miss Baynard engaged to discover for her
what she wanted to know; nor had she long to wait. Within a very few
hours he placed in her hands the address of Mr. McManus.