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.