A Minion of the Moon: A Romance of the King's Highway

by T. W. Speight

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.