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.”