Charles Tyrrell; or, The Bitter Blood. Volumes I and II

by G. P. R. James

"A man puts a lemon to a bottle of spirits," he said, "and people call him a sensible fellow, and go to drink punch with him; but if a man were to eat a whole lemon, plain people would say he was mad."

Again, on the occasion of his own marriage, he set out upon the principle of finding somebody the direct reverse of her who had been chosen by his father, declaring that he looked upon it as a duty to his children. Such an event, he said, as the marriage of his father and mother was sufficient to serve ten generations, and that he would do his best to dilute the quintessence of bitterness which had been hence produced. He chose, accordingly, a young lady from a distant part of the country, possessed of little of no fortune, of a gay and happy disposition, who had been brought up in great subjection to the will of parents that were really kind to her, and who had a fund of gentle and kindly feelings and good principles, but who was somewhat imprudent and incautious of speech, and of a timid as well as of an affectionate nature. From the first sight of Sir Francis Tyrrell, she had rather disliked him than otherwise. He had gained a little by attention upon her good graces, and upon her esteem by some philanthropic doctrines which he put forth, with no desire, indeed, of deceiving her or others, but solely because they were theories for which he had a fondness, and in which his vanity was concerned.

His progress in her favour, however, had not arrived beyond the dangerous point of indifference when he proposed himself to her parents as her future husband. She shrank from the very idea; but he was wealthy, bore a fair reputation, had, indeed, acquired a high character as a man of honour and integrity, and her parents pressed her so urgently to accept him, that she who was accustomed to yield to them in all things, yielded to them in this also, and she became the wife of a man that she did not love; though it is but fair to say, that there was no other person for whom she had any decided preference.

She married Sir Francis Tyrrell with the full desire and determination to love him as much as she could, and to make him as happy as it was in her power to do, and there were a variety of circumstances which combined to render the first two years of their union tolerably happy. In the first place, there were novelty and passion upon his side; in the next place, her very gentleness was a fortress to her upon which it was difficult to begin an attack; in the third place, her mildness and placability were something so new to the conceptions of Sir Francis, that they made him feel more or less ashamed of his own violence, till he became more familiar with the qualities which at first disarmed him.

But he was one of those who did not like to lead, but rather preferred to drive or to goad; and from the very first moment that some slight remonstrance on the part of Lady Tyrrell, with regard to something in which he had no business to interfere, gave the slightest suspicion of opposition to his will, the violent, the sarcastic, the bitter, the selfish spirit rose up with delight, unfettered; and the system of domineering and tyranny began in full force. The parents of the lady lived to see her apparent happiness, but not to witness its reverse. Her mother died before she had been married six months, and her father scarcely survived two years. Perhaps a suspicion of the truth troubled his deathbed, but we cannot say.

Unless we listen to the voice of the better spirit within us, prosperity and age generally lead forward selfishness between them; and then that selfishness who has hidden herself bashfully in the presence of the more generous feelings of youth, rushes forward with daring impudence, and blindfolds our eyes lest we should see her deformity. Such was the case with Sir Francis Tyrrell. There was no counterbalancing power to check or to control. His feelings of religion, if he had any, were not active; he had speculated away the greater part of his morality. He would not, indeed, have done anything that was glaringly and universally admitted to be evil; first, because his vanity would not consent to his incurring the reputation of a vicious man; and, secondly, because his passions did not particularly take that course. But of the moralities of life, which go hand in hand with the charities of life, he had no conception. To trample upon those who were prostrate before him; to make his own house a hell, and to act the part of ruling fiend himself; to cast every kind of aspersion and imputation, true or false, upon every one that offended him, and many that never offended him at all; to be suspicious, jealous, irritable without cause; to allow no opinion to prevail but his own; to deal a very different measure to himself and others; to exact the utmost, and to grant the least; to be avaricious while he was ostentatious, sensorious when he affected to be candid, and harshly severe to every one while he assumed the language of philanthropy, he considered to be no wrong, and sat down with the conviction that he was a very good and virtuous man.

The effect upon his wife was, that for a time she sank into a state of timid and cheerless despair, from which she at length rallied herself to make ineffectual resistance. When he accused her of things she had never committed, and purposes she had never entertained, she would now rouse herself to repel the charge, but still, having the worst of the argument, and cut to the heart by sarcasms and insinuations, she would have recourse to flight to her own chamber, and end the day in tears. When he was simply violent, she had the good sense to sit in quiet and make no reply.

But under all these cruel circumstances her health was daily injured, and she who had been full of bloom, and life, and health, became pale, and worn, and thin, and unequal to the least exertion. Sir Francis and Lady Tyrrell had but one child, a son, who was born in the second year of their marriage; but of that son, for various reasons, it will be necessary to speak apart.

CHAPTER II.

It is a terrible thing when youth--the time of sport and enjoyment, the period which nature has set apart for acquiring knowledge, and power, and expansion, and for tasting all the multitude of sweet and magnificent things which crowd the creation, in their first freshness and with the zest of novelty--is clouded with storms or drenched with tears. It is not so terrible by any means when the mere ills of fortune afflict us; for they are light things to the buoyancy of youth, and are soon thrown off by the heart which has not learned the foresight of fresh sorrows. The body habituates itself more easily to anything than the mind, and privations twice or thrice endured are privations no longer. But it is a terrible thing, indeed, when--in those warm days of youth when the heart is all affection, the mind longing for thrilling sympathies, the soul eager to love and be beloved--the faults, the vices, or the circumstances of others cut us off from those sweet natural ties with which nature, as with a wreath of flowers, has garlanded our early days; when we have either lost and regret, or known but to contemn, the kindred whose veins flow with the same blood as our own, or the parents who gave us being.