“I will be here at the time, so help me God,” said he—and he kept his word. It was the last right act of his life. As if to make his cousin out a prophet, he rode Eclipse, and broke his neck in earnest, though not in “sober earnest.”
When Charles Evans heard of it, he only said, “One poor devil less in the world;” but he murmured to himself, as he turned away, “Poor Cousin Ned!”
——
CHAPTER III.
“Send the little girl to my room to-night, aunty, when you have made her decent. I must see what she is fit for, and what she looks like. Remember, she is to have good warm clothes, but no gewgawry.”
At 8 o’clock precisely, Marie came into Mr. Evans’s room with a waiter, on which was spread the most frugal sort of a supper. Rye bread and butter and black tea, it was his sovereign pleasure to be served with at night.
Mrs. Evans had had time only to extemporise an amelioration in the girl’s dress. She was at that very awkward age when a girl is not a child or a woman. She had a heavy burden of deep-red hair, and all her bones showed through their scant covering of flesh—and they seemed hung on wires, and very loosely hung, too. Her eyes were a very deep blue, but she had been somewhat “cross-eyed” from infancy, and now the defect was much aggravated by her constant weeping. She was very timid, shrinking from every one. What had she ever found in her lot to assure her or give her confidence?
Poor, forlorn, ill-dressed, cross-eyed, red-haired, little one—all your defects are so many commendations to Charles Evans. In the deep selfishness of his benevolence he could love just such a child—one whom others would only pity and never think of loving. And he felt a sort of secure property in her when he saw that no one else would be likely to care for her; but he would be very certain not to let her know that he had any kind feelings for her. He was a scraggy limb of the law, and one would think that all the sap of his life had been written out in deeds and documents that brought him dollars, and that all the warmth of his heart had been expended on the Loco Foco candidates from his ward, district, city, county, etc., etc., during the time he had been a legal voter, which had now reached the term of fourteen years. He had amassed a large property, and had neither “chick nor child” to leave it to, as his friends said, all and singular of said friends having made up their minds that he would never marry, though he had only reached the mature and well-judging age of thirty-five.
He liked to be thought well of, as who does not; and there was a delicate flattery to him in the thought that Fanny Evans trusted her child to him before any of her own or her husband’s relatives. To any one of these relatives he would have spoken of the burden of bringing up other folks’ brats, but in his heart he thought “it was very wise, and well-judged, and kind of Fanny, to leave the girl to me; and when Ned is out of the way, I shall have nothing to interfere with my plans for the child’s welfare.”
When Marie had set his waiter upon the table, she stopped and timidly raised her cross-eyes to Mr. Evans, to see if he wanted any thing more.