Ward
Jasper Lyle
The sight of those white hairs bent to the dust with shame and sorrow, was more than Lyle could bear—he, who had never known the strength of a parent’s love, was overcome. He married his victim—married her on her deathbed: for, five hours afterwards he was a widower, and the father of a son—the convict, Jasper Lyle.
The poor old clergyman wrote the record himself in the parish register, and died the day after. By one of those fatalities which for a time are permitted, to arrest the course of truth’s clear stream, the medical attendant and the nurse, who were the only people present at this melancholy bridal, were laid together in the narrow churchyard of the remote village, and the poor boy was committed to the care of a woman, who, so long as she was regularly paid, was content to let him share her scanty living with her own children. This woman believed the boy to be young Lyle’s natural son, for her husband was a new-comer in the village, and neither of them could read, nor had they any acquaintances there. After a while they left it, and carried young Jasper to London. The stipend paid for him was unexpectedly raised to what was to them a considerable annuity.
The baronetcy of Manvers, for want of male heirs, passed to the female line, and, at the age of five-and-twenty, John Lyle found himself, by an unlooked-for concurrence of circumstances, Sir John Manvers, with but a slender income for his position.
Interest, however, got him a commission, though he was beyond the regulated age—interest placed him on the staff of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and he, whose destinies had once appeared of no account, was now the admired favourite of a showy court, for such might then be termed the official residence of the Duke of L—, in Dublin. His tall, aristocratic form, his grave beauty, his proud reserve, attracted the attention of the elegant and witty Duchess of L—, and her admiration stamped him with a prestige surprising even to himself.
His past love! what was it now to him?—a dream-one, however, to which he looked back with uneasiness, for was there not a living witness of this “fantasy?” Every day, every hour, deepened the gulf between him and the dark paths of his young life. He had never made a friend. No one stood at hand to whom he might unburden his soul, and each succeeding week found him placed more irrevocably in a false position. He was looked upon as a rising man, poor in patrimony, but sure to force his way to better things.
While he was halting between two opinions, a familiar face suddenly carried him back to the old parsonage, and its dim and silent groves.
Although we may not have been intimate with an early associate, our hearts are strangely stirred at sight of one with whom we have been in communion under circumstances different or distant from those in which we again meet.
Something of pleasure lit up Sir John’s intelligent eye as he recognised the open countenance of Sir Adrian Fairfax, who was younger than himself, and whom he had known during the last few months of his residence at the vicarage; they were the first months of love—months in which life had been presented to him in its happiest phase.
But while the proud mind was debating which ought to be the first to speak, a vision stood between the two which riveted the gaze of both, and turned the current of young Manvers’s thoughts.
It was the Lady Amabel, who in all the purity of beautiful and innocent sixteen, suddenly appeared—the lily of the dazzling parterre. She leaned on the arm of the Duke of L—, and moved up the room to the dais, on which the Duchess was seated with the handsome and favourite aide-de-camp.
But love is ever at cross purposes. The heart of this gentle being stirred not, the eye was not illumined, as the young and handsome baronet bent over her. She smiled when Sir Adrian came to greet her; but he, at whose approach she blushed and trembled like a rose at morning prime, was Daveney, then a young ensign, without a prospect in the world save that to which blind fortune might lead him.
But the reader has seen that Daveney thought not of his gentle cousin. Both were much together in the early part of that brilliant Dublin season: but the young soldier changed his quarters—some said he withdrew purposely from the light of those eyes, that tempted him to love one whom it would be ruin to marry—some, that he was blind—some, that he was heartless; no matter—they were sundered.
Meanwhile Sir John’s heart was chilled towards one in whom he might have found a friend; and when some months afterwards he saw that Lady Amabel suffered Sir Adrian to talk to her for hours, the circumstance widened the gulf.
Later, at the age of eight-and-twenty, Manvers became associated in Ireland with the sweet and gracious being who eventually became his wife. She had wealth, connection, talent, and, above all, the most amiable disposition. The grave, austere young soldier was drawn imperceptibly towards this happy, ardent being. She shone upon him like sunlight upon snow—she was like a beam from heaven gilding the darkest recesses of a mine.
He might have told her all. Many a time he was disposed to throw himself at her feet, and disclose his early history; but her father—it was from her mother she derived the stamp of aristocracy—was a parvenu. Manvers dreaded, to lose this first real love, this darling of his heart and albeit she would have gone with him to the desert, he knew full well that his title and military interest, weighed heavily in his favour with the father.
He kept his secret, and married the heiress; and, in the course of time, he had almost forgot the very existence of his eldest born, when one day he received a letter from the woman Watson, informing him that his son had run away from her home; the boy, she said, must have been led astray, and she hoped to trace him. The annuity must be paid as usual. She doubted not he would be found, in same of the haunts of the metropolis, and she would inform Sir John as soon as she received tidings of the boy.
Upon this, after some hours’ deliberation, Sir John Manvers wrote to Mrs Watson, and, making it a condition that she should never again address him on the subject of this miserable child, he settled an annuity of two hundred a year on this woman and her husband for the boy’s maintenance, till of age, if he returned and reached the age of one-and-twenty. At the age of one-and-twenty some other steps were to be considered.
Sir John believed that the Watsons had some reason for endeavouring to overreach him, but it was not so in this instance; the child really was missing.
The man Watson would have pocketed the annuity without acting further in the matter. Mrs Watson was “used to the child,” and “had a liking for him;” so she did her best to discover him, but for a long time without success. Her husband kept back part of the sum allowed, and she afterwards learned that he bribed some infamous people to keep young Jasper out of the way of his nurse, who, though without firm principles, was not bad-hearted.
Sir John soon began to hope—God forgive him!—that he should hear no more of the poor boy cast upon the troubled waters of the world. In those days there were no railways, nor electric telegraphs, nor police; sin prospered much more secretly than it does now. Even now the little church in Cornwall lies remote from populous places, for no iron road can penetrate through the rugged defiles that lead to it.
Oh! that men would consider the future, and calculate even the chances of the evils which may accumulate from the commission of one solitary sin.
We are inclined to pity the youth, who in the poor curate’s daughter found relief after the gloomy days spent at home, and surely for him whose heart was softened at the sight of the father’s anguish them were hopes of better things; but his besetting demon was pride—pride fostered by his mother. Oh mothers! do you deeply weigh your responsibilities?—do you remember that it is to your hands the virgin soil of the garden foils for culture?
And lo! see what a strait this pride brought him to at last! And is it not always so? Are we not perpetually punished by the very instruments we have ourselves employed for evil? Do we not constantly stumble at the pit we have digged to serve our own purposes?
Pride made Sir John Manvers hesitate ere he recognised Sir Adrian Fairfax in the lighted saloons of Dublin Castle; he would have been his friend, but the opportunity was lost; and, though in after-years the incidents of their profession brought them nearer to each other, it then was too late to remedy the evil.
When a man is embarked in a bad scheme, he is at no loss for reasons, or rather excuses, for persevering in mischief; and Sir John Manvers, becoming day by day more accustomed to look on the sin he had committed as an error which could not be repaired, at last satisfied himself with the notion, that to place his son in his true position would be to entail irremediable sorrow on his household, and in nowise benefit the unfortunate Jasper.
Jasper!—what could have induced him to permit the child to be called after his grandfather, that poor, imbecile, wretched old curate?
Still, who was likely to search through an old parish register, and, in doing so, who would stop to inquire into the identity of John Lyle and his wife Mary and their son Jasper?
The very devils, we are told, “believe and tremble;” but how short-sighted are men, who only calculate on human chances!
No; there was little chance of the old yellow-leaved parish register of Tremorna ever being brought in evidence against him; and, besides, where was this boy—this Jasper?
Nurse Watson at length traced the child at last to some den of iniquity in the heart of London. She had a woman’s heart—it yearned to Jasper—he was a fine, manly child; and when she had relieved him of his soiled habiliments, and purified his strong young limbs with water, she was pleased with herself at having rescued this gentleman’s son from filth and vice.
She had, it is true, no fixed principles; but she had benefited by this child. She and her husband and children were living in ease and plenty on the money paid for him; and she believed that, in spite of what he had said, his father would rejoice at hearing that the lost sheep was found and in safe keeping.
She sought Sir John at his house in one of the squares; she was ungraciously received by his confidential valet, who would not give her admittance to his master. She was of a passionate and determined temper, and, enraged at the imperative tone of the saucy London menial, she told him, in plain terms, that as he would not let her see Sir John, whom she had watched into the house a few minutes before, he might carry the message himself, and tell him that “Jasper was found.”
Her voice was raised, her cheeks were crimson, her eyes flashed at the cool impertinence of Sir John’s “gentleman,” and at this juncture a lady descended the staircase and crossed the hall.
Lady Manvers, for it was she, stopped at once; and instead of retiring, as some fine ladies would have done, or ordering the angry woman from the hall, she walked quietly up to Mrs Watson, and with a look of reproof to the valet, whose temper she knew, said, “My good woman, what is the matter, and who is Jasper?”
The voice, the calm sweet face, the graceful air of the gentle questioner, disarmed the wrath of the irritated woman; but she was at a loss what to say. She stammered, looked confused; the valet’s self-satisfied mien provoked her, and, in a word, Lady Manvers was very soon made aware that her husband had a secret which it was not his intention to share with her.
Lady Manvers trembled exceedingly, but not with anger. No; after a short time she was able to question herself as to what it would be her duty to do. She led Mrs Watson into her dressing-room, and bid her wait there till sent for; but Lady Manvers asked her no questions. No; this high-minded, generous lady went at once to her husband.
She would scarcely have believed the truth from his own lips. She was so proud of him, she would as soon have dreamt of his making her his wife while another claimant to that title lived, as of his having an heir to his estate unknown to her, the mother of his beautiful boy, his darling Gerard.
Sir John was utterly startled and thrown off his guard, as his wife, in her softest accent, but with her clear honest eyes fixed on his, asked him to “trust her with the secret which the woman Watson would not tell?” Who was Jasper? Who was Mrs Watson? Surely, if there was concealment, there must be something wrong; or did dear John think she, his own Nina, did not love him as she ought to do? Oh! if he had a sorrow or anxiety, might she not share it? If the sin of an early day hung heavy on his mind, would he not let her bear the burden with him?
And a hundred other such persuasive things she said, hanging on his shoulder, with her sweet face lifted imploringly to his moody countenance.
He bade her wait till evening for his reply; but she would not. She drew from him that Jasper was his son; but, he added, she was never to ask him about the boy’s unfortunate and ruined mother.
So the father tacitly stamped the brand of illegitimacy on the brow of his first-born; and the innocent woman he now deceived thanked him for such concessions as he had made, and resolved, without asking further permission, to send for Jasper.
But when Mrs Watson reached home, he had again absconded; and of this she did not fail to inform Lady Manvers, whose gentleness had won her regard.
The idea of this unfortunate child of ten years old, her husband’s son, wandering from haunt to haunt of iniquity, was a source of perpetual anxiety to Lady Manvers. She drove from one magistrate’s house to another, trying to discover the little recreant. She dreaded compromising her husband, yet was resolved on doing her duty. She met with nothing but courtesy and kindness, but all seemed unavailing; and she was beginning to despair, when, on the eve of departing for Scotland, where Sir John’s regiment was quartered, her attention was riveted by a paragraph in the newspaper, which she could not help connecting with the object of her search.
It was an extract from the minutes of a magistrate’s court. A little boy, “apparently between ten and eleven years,” had been brought before a magistrate, having been found among thieves and pickpockets in some disorderly meeting.
The evidence presented a sorry picture.
There stood the child in the dock.
The magistrate, a man esteemed for his benevolence, examined the little prisoner attentively ere he questioned him. At length the good man said,—“How old are you, my boy?” The child did not answer. The magistrate put the question again. No reply.
“Do you know,” said Mr M—, “how old you are?”
“No,” said the boy, his head bent down.
“Have you been brought here before?”
“No.” Here a constable intimated that this was not true.
“It seems,” said Mr M—, “that you have been brought here before. Why do you say no? Do you know that is a falsehood?”
“No:” still the same dogged look.
“Have you any parents?”
“No.”
“Who do you belong to?”
“No one.”
“Do you know what a lie is?”
“No.”
“Do you know that it is wrong to steal?”
“No.”
“Did you never hear of the Commandments?”
“No.”
“Do you know the name of God?”
“No.”
The kind-hearted magistrate stopped in these interrogatories, and laying down his pen, leaned forward; sorrow shaded his benevolent face as he said,—“My poor boy, what do you know?” (This scene is taken from a record in the Times newspaper of 1850.)
These were the first words of kindness which had ever been spoken to Jasper Lyle in his life, for he was the little prisoner; for though Mrs Watson had, as she expressed, “a liking for him,” she was rough-spoken to her own children, whom she always ordered, never asked, to do her bidding.
The unfortunate child lifted his face to Mr M—, and looked half-wonderingly at it. The mode of speech was evidently beyond his comprehension: he looked round at his evil associates, older by years in crime than he was, and laughed.
The magistrate had the young prisoner removed from the dock, and taken to his own house.
Lady Manvers ordered her carriage as soon as she had finished reading this paragraph. She drove, without delay, to Mrs Watson’s at Lambeth, and then hastened to Mr M—’s.
She found him at home, and told her mission with her accustomed grace and tact. Mr M— rose from his chair, opened the door of his library, and led from an inner room a handsome boy, who, accustomed to resist, would have run back, and even now drew his curly locks against his large speaking eyes, and strove to shut out the sight of her who stood before him as an angel of compassion.
Mrs Watson was summoned, and as Jasper recognised her, he dropped the magistrate’s hand, and went to the woman; but there was no demonstration of tenderness on the part of either, and Lady Manvers, agitated and dismayed, burst into tears.
When Sir John Manvers found that his wife had actually stood face to face with his first-born son, he felt the reality of the secret buried in the old Cornish church.
The departure for Scotland was delayed for some days. He spent many hours in his library, affecting to be engaged in business with his agent; but oh! the tortures he suffered! Now he would go to Nina, and confess all. He opened the door; a merry voice echoed from the stairs, his boy Gerard came bounding down, crying “Papa, papa.” Sir John closed the door abruptly; the boy cast his whip upon the ground and sat down weeping on the mat. He had never been denied admittance before; but his father’s countenance had frightened him; he dared not lift his hand to the lock, but he did not move; he sat there sobbing as if his little heart would break.
And the father sat within; he had no tears, but his youngest son’s honest sobs struck to his heart.
He heard his wife come down the staircase; he heard her carry off the weeping Gerard. The child went sobbing up the stairs on its mother’s shoulder, and Sir John felt that she would not intrude upon his privacy at a juncture when old associations were so seriously revived.
Ah! how could that pure-minded, high-souled woman understand or believe in his remorse?
Remorse without repentance!
Sir John Manvers easily taught his amiable wife to believe that she having succeeded in persuading him to adopt his son and provide for him, her mission was over; still Lady Manvers entreated that she might continue to interest herself in the boy, till he became accustomed to his new sphere of existence. She sought out an excellent clergyman at Clapham, who took a limited number of pupils; she candidly admitted the chief points in Jasper’s story, she anticipated for the good man much trouble and discouragement, she prepared him for the worst. He tried his best with the child, but he had not strength either of mind or body to cope with young Jasper.
The boy passed from one master to another, till a resolute man was found to take charge of him as a Westminster scholar, when he battled through life in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, for twelve months; headed a conspiracy against the assistant-masters, and would have been expelled, but that his “uncle,” as Sir John was reputed to be, had interest enough to withdraw him privately, and finally to get him a commission.
It was Jasper Lyle’s luck to be ordered at once to join his regiment in India. He opened his military career before a fortress which surrendered to the British arms. The banner planted on the battlements was a rag dripping with gore. The young ensign was mentioned honourably in general orders, and for a time the laurel wreath of fame acted as a talisman in checking evil principles; but ill weeds are hard to eradicate, and he would have been disgraced for debt; had debt in the army been disgraceful. Sir John found himself answerable for bills which his son had chosen to draw on his father’s bankers, and an angry correspondence took place, in which the baronet threatened to leave the young man to the consequences of his folly and dishonesty.
And at every fresh revival of error, Lady Manvers pleaded for the recreant, who each time promised fair; for his connection with the upper classes of society had taught him to dread the ills of poverty.
Although he had been first made to believe that he was a distant relation of Sir John’s, he soon ascertained, through Mrs Watson, the real position he held in Lady Manvers’s eyes. Of his true condition he could not dream. He was specious enough to keep his ground with his father’s gentle wife, and so, alternately in disgrace with the former, and in treaty with the latter as a mediator, he contrived to keep his commission and to satisfy his creditors.
An opportunity for an exchange to a regiment at the Cape occurred during the government of Sir Adrian Fairfax, and Sir John Manvers, anxious to rid himself even for a period of Jasper’s presence, addressed a confidential letter to Sir Adrian, with whom of late years he had become more intimately acquainted, through the friendship existing between Lady Amabel and Lady Manvers, and introducing the reprobate to him as “the issue of an unfortunate connection,” asked his Excellency’s patronage.
Lyle had capital credentials as a soldier; his domestic principles were but lightly touched upon. He had been “rather wild,” was “careless in expenditure,” etc. Sir John trusted that under Sir Adrian’s kind patronage he would “become steady;” in a word, the kind Sir Adrian, on reading the letters of introduction forwarded to him by Lady Amabel, on Lyle’s arrival at Cape Town was more inclined to pity than condemn the young man, and accordingly wrote, as we have seen, to his wife, requesting her to receive the new-comer with hospitality.
From the period of his arrival at Newlands to his departure from the colony, the reader has watched young Lyle’s career. Afterwards ruined in fortune, overcome by his evil passions, possessed, so to speak, by a devil, he abjured all allegiance to his country’s laws. Branded as a swindler, he resolved on making a new road for himself in the great wilderness of life, where bad men think that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. The details of that career need not be enlarged upon. Lyle himself related to Gray how the disciples of his evil creed treated him: they abandoned him as recklessly as he would have abandoned them.
Tried and convicted of seditious leadership at a time when other nations were shaken to their centre by the thunders of republican eloquence, he was condemned to transportation for life, and Sir John Manvers, striving to suppress the whispers of conscience, reconciled himself to the issue of events by hoping that he had “done the State some service” in substituting for this vicious heir to his title and estate the docile yet manly Gerard.
Ah! he would not, he dared not, look into first causes.
News came home of the loss of the Trafalgar; a list of survivors and of those drowned accompanied the official notification of the event. Sir John Manvers was absent from his wife when informed of the dreadful tidings. He shut himself up for some days, and people looked at him when he emerged from his solitude, and whispers went about—“What a shock Sir John Manvers had sustained in the death of his nephew, or, as people believed him to be, his son, for whom he had formerly done so much, but who was so incorrigibly vicious.”
Next Sir John took steps to ascertain, through Sir Adrian Fairfax, all the particulars of Jasper’s marriage with Eleanor Daveney. He had heard of the birth of a son, and he received with breathless thankfulness of heart the tidings of poor little Francis Lyle’s death.
He tried to wash his brain of these awful realities; he at times rejoiced in some of the pleasantest things that life could give—a lovely wife, with the sweetest temper and the firmest principles, graced his hearth; beautiful children made his lofty halls musical with laughter; many partings and meetings had endeared him more and more to that beloved wife, those noble-looking children. He was in the prime of life, and had won many laurels; but he was restless, eager for command, impatient of solitude, yet reserved and abstracted in society.
He could not keep away the dread remorse that haunted him. All the sophistry in the world could not veil the sin he had committed against the helpless, unoffending infant, the melancholy legacy of his ill-starred Mary. True, he had a strange facility of suppressing deadly memories by the aspirations of some new ambition; but there were times when, like our fallen parents at noon-day in the garden, he “heard the voice of God,” and was “afraid.”
But all the remorse, all the repentance in the world, could not compel the sea to “give up her dead;” and, if the strict performance of his duty to his family and his country could have made atonement for his early crime, God would have had compassion on the sinner. But God requires another kind of repentance, another atonement, than that existing between man and his brother. The thief on the cross was justified and pardoned at the last moment; but albeit the justification and the atonement sufficed to save, he acknowledged the justice of this world’s condemnation.
There was nothing of this in all Sir John Manvers’s regrets for the past. He trembled at the warning voice that pierced the worldly din surrounding him, or disturbed the repose he sought; but he did not say with David, “Against Thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.”
And so it is ever with sin prosperous; there may be warnings, there may be misgivings, there may be heavy regrets for the ill we have done our neighbour; but there is not that depth of remorse which bids us cast ourselves before God for pardon and for grace to “lead a new life.”
Still, long association with an amiable woman and an innocent family had softened the heart of Sir John Manvers, and he would have given worlds that he had never been tempted.
The command at the Cape of Good Hope was offered to him soon after the loss of the Trafalgar; his acceptance of it was requested as a favour, since every one knew it was eventually designed for Sir Adrian Fairfax, then absent in India. Change of any kind was agreeable to Sir John, who was weary of a country gentleman’s life at home, and whose finances would be advantageously recruited by a measure which would lead to something better. He parted from his family with the less regret, that, on obtaining a better appointment, they were to join him.
But when Mr Daveney presented himself before this proud General, with the information that the wretched prodigal was not only alive, but would ere long be brought forth to be tried for his life as a traitor, Sir John Manvers beheld the truth in all its hideous nakedness.
“Better, oh better, had the sea engulfed him!” exclaimed the sinful father, in the solitude of his tent, “than that my hand should sign his death-warrant.”
Sir John Manvers uttered these words as he heard the sentry again challenge some invader of his privacy. He re-seated himself in his easy-chair, tried to quell the anguished thoughts that surged within his breast, and turned, with apparent calmness, to his aide-de-camp, who, putting aside the canvas screen, stepped into the General’s presence, and laid before him a packet of letters brought in by another express.
