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

by G. P. R. James

There are few situations more solitary, more painful, more moving, than that of an orphan. I remember a schoolfellow who had many friends who were kind to him and fond of him: but he said to me one day, in speaking of his holiday sports, "I, you know, have no father or mother." And there was a look of thoughtful melancholy in his face, and a tone of desolation in his voice, which struck me strangely, even young as I then was. But that situation, lonely as it is, deprived of all the tender and consoling associations of kindred feeling, is bright and cheerful, gay and happy, compared with that in which Charles Tyrrell commenced his career on earth.

He was as beautiful a child as ever was seen; strong vigorous, and healthy; with his mother's fair complexion, a fine, intelligent countenance, even in infancy and a smile of peculiar sweetness. His father was fond of him as long as he continued an infant. He was proud of him, I was going to say, but I believe the proper term would be, conceited of him. Everybody admired the child, and expressed their admiration, and, by some strange complication of ideas, the admiration seemed to the father reflected back upon himself. The child amused him too, and interested him, and for a certain time he seemed to derive a pleasure from caressing it, which softened his manner, if not his feelings.

Hard must be the heart and selfish the mind which is not softened and expanded by communion with sweet infancy. The innocence of childhood is the tenderest, and not the least potent remonstrance against the vices and the errors of grown man, if he would but listen to the lesson and take it to his heart. Seldom, too seldom, do we do so; and I cannot say that it was the case with Sir Francis Tyrrell; but still he could not undergo that influence without losing something of his harshness from the gentle presence of the child.

To Lady Tyrrell the birth of her infant was a renewal of hope and a solid store of happiness. She had a fresh object before her, a new motive for exertion and endurance; and as she gazed upon his infant face, she promised herself, for his sake, to bear all and to strive for all. Her health, however, gave way under constant irritation; and as the boy grew up, his father lost that pride in him which he had before experienced; and though he had fondled the infant, he chided and railed at the child; while Lady Tyrrell, who was, perhaps, inclined to be a little over-indulgent to her only son, roused herself to defend him from the bitter and unmerited reproaches of his father, when, perhaps, in her own case, she might have borne those reproaches in silence.

Every point of his education became a subject of contention. While a child, he had been to Sir Francis a mere plaything; but the moment that his reason began to expand, his father looked upon him as a new object of tyranny, and Lady Tyrrell would often sit and gaze with melancholy eyes upon her son's face, thinking of his future fate, and sorrowing, from the sad experience of her own, over the long and miserable years to be passed under the sway of such a man as his father. She exerted herself to conquer even her own affection for the child, and the selfishness of that affection. In order as much to remove him from home, and to give him the blessing of other society, as to ensure him a good education, she determined, if possible, to send him to school, though she thereby lost the comfort of his presence, and the continual solace and relief of all his sports, and words, and looks.

Sir Francis, however, on the contrary, did not choose to sacrifice his own pleasure. He did not choose to lose the new object of tyranny which he had acquired. He declared he intended to have a tutor in the house when his son was old enough to learn anything; and the very wish which his wife expressed, that the boy should be sent to school, only hardened his determination to keep him at home. He had no confidence in virtue or in sincerity of any kind; and although he knew that Lady Tyrrell was, when he married her, as frank and open as the day, he still could not persuade himself that she acted towards him without guile.

It was this error which, in the present instance, ultimately produced the result that she wished. He one day heard her say, by chance, while stooping over her boy, that it would break her heart to part with him; and a suspicion crossed his mind that she had proposed to send the child to school for the purpose of inducing him to pursue exactly the opposite course. The very thought was, indeed, but little complimentary to his own disposition, and arose from an internal consciousness (the full force of which he would not acknowledge) of the contradictory and mulish character of his own mind. His determination, however, was fixed by a scene of altercation with the boy himself, whom he had punished severely for doing something that his mother had directed him to do, but whom he could induce by no means, neither by anger nor by blows, to acknowledge that he had done wrong in the slightest degree. It was determined, in consequence, that he should go to school, and to school he was accordingly sent; but, unfortunately, not to a school which was at all likely to correct the constitutional errors of his disposition, or to afford to his mind that strong moral tone which might have served to counteract all the evils with which his mind became familiarized at home.

As it is not our purpose to trace him through the uninteresting details of a school life, we shall content ourselves with showing what was his natural disposition; and though he is the person destined to act the most prominent part in these pages, we shall in no degree conceal that which was evil in his nature. His first great fault, then, was a part of his inheritance, the violent passion of his father. Even when a child, he would throw himself down in fits of ungovernable anger, and lie writhing on the ground, as if in convulsions, till the fit went off. He had much of the talent, too, of his father; perhaps; indeed, more, and certainly possessed genius of a higher order; for the qualities of his mind received a much greater degree of expansion from being united with superior qualities of the heart. There was, however, a frequent similarity to be observed between the turn and form of his ideas and those of Sir Francis. In his childhood, even, he had been known unconsciously to utter many a keen and cutting phrase, which brought upon the countenance of his father a sarcastic smile, in which was strangely blended an expression of contempt and bitterness with that of approbation and pleasure.

The boy, indeed, would have been altogether what his nurses called the "moral of his father," with a finer person and much greater corporeal powers, had it not been that his mother's nature was intimately mingled with the whole, and counterbalanced many faults, if it did not counteract them. Under her tuition he acquired a love of truth which never left him through life; but he had by nature a frank straightforwardness of character which was very winning. One saw, even in his very infancy and childhood, that the heart acted before the mind had been taught to act; and with a spirit which was utterly insusceptible of fear, and a body not very sensitive of suffering, some of his very good qualities might have led him to wound the feelings of others much more frequently than he did, if he had not possessed a natural tenderness and kindness of heart, which led him, with a sort of unerring instinct, to perceive the points on which others were vulnerable, and to spare them on those points, except when moved by some fierce opposition or angry passion. He was also by nature--and that, too, he derived from his mother--most affectionate. That is to say, he did not attach himself to every one, or lightly. He was not as the seed of the mistletoe or the moss, that fixes itself upon everything wherever it lights, and grows there till it is torn away. But he had within his heart the power of deep attachment; strong, permanent, immoveable. He was not likely to form friendships very easily, or to love often; but where he did love, he loved wholly and for ever.

The first instance in which these qualities were put to the proof, was in choosing between his father and his mother. We may call it choosing, though, indeed, there was no choice; for he could not but love the one, and it was very easy not to love the other. On that mother, then, fixed the whole strength of his infant affection, and it grew with his growth, and strengthened with his strength. Everything that occurred--the gentle warnings and reproaches which she sometimes forced herself to make when he behaved ill; her ill health; her deep melancholy; her conduct to her husband, and his conduct to her, all made him cling the more closely to her--made him love her and respect her the more.