There the little girl remained till her fourteenth year. In that period, she saw her father some six or eight times. Their interviews were constrained affairs, for Mountjoy Ponsonby was not a man of domestic or affectionate nature, and the child of the wife with whom he had quarrelled bitterly made little appeal to him. He usually gave his daughter much good advice, found her exceedingly docile, but equally difficult, and was always embarrassed by an unspoken appeal in her nature which he dumbly resented. He looked forward with repugnance and dread to the days when she could be no longer stuffed away in a convent, and he rather hoped that she would feel herself religiously called upon to stay there.
Like many other men, he had formed the habit of looking on himself as immortal, so that when he was instantly killed by being thrown from his horse, he had made no provision for his child’s future. On his own side of the family there was no near kindred; and the Boston relatives instantly put in a claim for the custody of little Charlotte.
The man who was most actively interested in the little girl’s future was one Cornelius Spencer, a dry, hard-working, quiet man, capable of loving with singular intensity and equally capable of concealing his emotions. He had paid a quiet court to the beautiful Charlotte K——, and family gossip said that he took her elopement very seriously; but it was all conjecture, for he kept his own counsel. A year later, he married Martha Winston, her cousin, a lady who, furthermore said family gossip, had been in love with him for several years.
The Spencer marriage turned out well; how nearly that well may be translated happily, who can say? At least, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Spencer were a decorous couple, he given to amassing this world’s goods, she devoted to a thrifty oversight of their expenditures and to a calm enjoyment of their prosperity. Two daughters came to them, handsome children whose education from the first was up to the strictest standards of conservative Boston.
There was much sage wagging of heads among the Boston kin when Cornelius Spencer came forward as the potential guardian of the orphan immured in the convent. But though they conjectured again, Mrs. Spencer kept her own counsel as her husband had kept his years before. Of course, said the kinship, it was a bitter pill to her. Charlotte K—— had always outshone her in brains, in wit, in beauty. She had been proud to marry the man whom Charlotte had refused; and to find that man, eighteen years later, still cherishing sentimental memories of her rival, determined to make himself a second father to that rival’s child,—ah, well, Martha was a remarkable woman to bear it all so quietly!
It happened that, on the day the young girl appeared in charge of the nun who brought her North, a very observant lady was calling upon Mrs. Cornelius Spencer. The lady was the wife of an army officer, and had a taste for letter-writing, in fact, felt that letter-writing was her only gift. A few extracts from her epistle to her husband will throw some light upon Charlotte Ponsonby’s girlhood experiences.
“—I have been visiting about for days among the K—— kin. They are as magnificently satisfied with themselves as ever, take themselves very seriously, are as proud of their money-making powers as of their blue blood; really it’s wonderful how they all make money, and talk, as they have always done, from a very much higher plane than they really live on.
“Among others, Martha Spencer asked me to luncheon, and I went there this morning. Really, Cornelius must have made oodles of money. The mere household accessories were simple enough; but the books, the pictures, and the curios were a joy. I feasted my soul, and I wished for you, my dear, to enjoy it with me.
“But I’ll talk of those things to you later. What I want to tell you about now is an incident that I am afraid may slip away from me, and I want to describe it while my impressions are fresh,
“You remember I wrote you, in a previous letter, about the lawsuit and how old Dry-as-dust Cornelius has a real spark of romance in him after all, and of how he has disinterred his old love’s child from a convent where she was to have been buried alive. It was my happy fate to see the sequel this morning.