Although Mrs. Wynford had long ago made up her mind that Evelyn was to have none of the immediate advantages of her birth and future prospects, she was fond of talking to the child about the grandeur which lay before her.
“If I die, Eve,” she said, “you will have to go across the sea in a big ship to England. You would have a rough time of it, perhaps, on board, but you won’t mind that, my beauty.”
“I am not a beauty, mother,” answered Evelyn. “You know I am not. You know I am a very plain girl.”
“Hark to the child!” shrieked Mrs. Wynford. “It is as good as a play to hear her. If you are not beautiful in body, my darling, you are beautiful in your spirit. Yes, you have inherited from your proud English father lots of gold and a lovely castle, and all your relations will have to eat humble-pie to you; but you have got your spirit from me, Eve – don’t forget that.”
“Tell me about the Castle, mother, and about my father,” said Evelyn, nestling up close to her parent, as they sat by the roaring fire in the winter evenings.
Mrs. Wynford knew very little, and what she did know she exaggerated. She gave Evelyn vivid pictures, however, in each and all of which the principal figure was Evelyn herself – Evelyn claiming her rights, mastering her relations, letting her unknown cousin know that she, Evelyn, was the heiress, and that the cousin was nobody. Only one person in the group of Evelyn’s future relations did Mrs. Wynford counsel her to be civil to.
“The worst of it all is this, Eve,” she said – “while your uncle lives you do not own a pennypiece of the estate; and he may hold out for many a long day, so you had best be agreeable to him. Besides, he is like your father. Your father was a very handsome man and a very fine man, and I loved him, child. I took a fancy to him from the day he arrived at the ranch, and when he asked me to marry him I thought myself in rare good luck. But he died soon after you were born. Had he lived I’d have been the lady of the Castle, but I’d not go there without him, and you shall never go while I live.”
“I don’t want to, mother. You are more to me than twenty castles,” said the enthusiastic little girl.
Mrs. Wynford had one friend whom Evelyn tolerated and presently loved. That friend was a woman, partly of French extraction, who had come to stay at the ranch once during a severe illness of its owner. Her name was Jasper – Amelia Jasper; but she was known on the ranch by the title of Jasper alone. She was not a lady in any sense of the word, and did not pretend that she was one; but she was possessed of a certain strange fascination which she could exercise at will over those with whom she came in contact, and she made herself so useful to Mrs. Wynford and so necessary to Evelyn that she was never allowed to leave the ranch again. She soon obtained a great power over the curious, uneducated woman who was Evelyn’s mother; and when at last Mrs. Wynford found that she was smitten with an incurable disease, and that at any moment death would come to fetch her, she asked her dear friend Jasper to take the child to England.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Jasper. “I’ll take Evelyn to England, and stay with her there.”
Mrs. Wynford laughed.
“You are clever enough, Jasper,” she said; “but what a figure of fun you would look in the grand sort of imperial residence that my dear late husband has described to me! You are not a lady, you know, although you are smart and clever enough to beat half the ladies out of existence.”
“I shall know how to manage,” said Jasper. “I, too, have heard of the ways of English grandees. I’ll be Evelyn’s maid. She cannot do without a maid, can she? I’ll take Evelyn back, and I will stay with her as her maid.”
Mrs. Wynford hailed this idea as a splendid one, and she even wrote a very badly spelt letter to Lady Frances, which Jasper was to convey and deliver herself, if possible, to her proud ladyship, as the widow called her sister-in-law. In this letter Mrs. Wynford demanded that Jasper was to stay with Evelyn as long as Evelyn wished for her, and she finally added:
“I dare you, Lady Frances, fine lady as you are, to part the child from her maid.”
When Mrs. Wynford died Evelyn gave way to the most terrible grief. She refused to eat; she refused to leave her mother’s dead body. She shrieked herself into hysterics on the day of the funeral, and then the poor little girl was prostrated with nervous fever. Finally, she became so unwell that it was impossible for her to travel to England for some months. And so it happened that nearly a year elapsed between the death of the mother and the arrival of the child at Castle Wynford.
CHAPTER IV. – “I DRAW THE LINE AT UNCLE NED.”
“Well, Jasper,” said Evelyn in a very eager voice to her maid that first night, “and how do you like it all?”
“How do you like it, Evelyn?” was the response.
“That is so like you, Jasper!” replied the spoilt little girl. “When all is said and done, you are not a scrap original. You make me like you – I cannot help myself – but in some ways you are too cautious to please me. You don’t want to say what you think of the place until you know my opinion. Well, I don’t care; I’ll tell you out plump what I think of everything. The place is horrid, and so are the people. I wish – oh! I wish I was back again on the ranch with mother.”
Jasper looked down rather scornfully at the small girl, who, in a rich and elaborately embroidered dressing-gown, was kneeling by the fire. Evelyn’s handsome eyes, the only really good feature she possessed, were fixed full upon her maid’s face.
“The Castle is too stiff for me,” she said, “and too – too airified and high and mighty. Mother was quite right when she spoke of Castle Wynford. I don’t care for anybody in the place except Uncle Ned. I don’t know how I shall live here. Oh Jasper, don’t you remember the evenings at home? Cannot you recall that night when Whitefoot was ill, and you and mothery and I had to sit up all through the long hours nursing her, and how we thought the dear old moo-cow would die! Don’t you remember the mulled cider and the gingerbread and the doughnuts and the apple-rings? How we toasted the apple-rings by the fire, and how they spluttered, and how good the hot cider was? And don’t you remember how mothery sang, and how you and I caught each other’s hands and danced, and dear old Whitefoot looked up at us with her big, sorrowful eyes? It is true that she died in the morning, but we had a jolly night. We’ll never have such times any more. Oh, I do wish my own mothery had not died and gone to heaven! Oh, I do wish it – I do!”
Evelyn crossed her arms tightly on her breast and began to sway herself backwards and forwards. Tears streamed from her eyes; she did not attempt to wipe them away.
“Now then, it is my turn to speak,” said Jasper. “I tell you what it is, Eve; you are about the biggest goose that was ever born in this world. Who would compare that stupid, rough old ranch with this lovely, magnificent house? And it is your own, Eve – or rather it will be your own. I took a good stare at the Squire, and I do not believe he will live to be very old; and whenever he dies you are to take possession – you and I together, Eve love – and out will go her ladyship, and out will go proud Miss Audrey. That will be a fine day, darling – a day worth living for.”
“Yes,” said Evelyn slowly; “and then we’ll alter things. We’ll make the Castle something like the ranch. We’ll get over some of our friends, and they shall live in the house. Mr. and Mrs. Petrie, who keep the egg-farm not a mile from the ranch, and Mr. Thomas Longchamp and Pete and Dick and Tom and Michael. I told them all when I was going away that when I was mistress of the Castle they should come, and we’ll go on much as we went on at the ranch. If mothery up in heaven can see me she will be glad. But, Jasper, why do you speak in that scornful way of my cousin Audrey? I think she is very beautiful. I think she is quite the most beautiful girl I have ever looked at. As to her being stately, she cannot help being stately. I wish I could walk like her, and talk like her, and speak like her; I do, Jasper – I do really.”
“Let me see,” said Jasper in a contemplative