For the Term of His Natural Life Read online

  PROLOGUE.

  On the evening of May 3, 1827, the garden of a large red-brickbow-windowed mansion called North End House, which, enclosed in spaciousgrounds, stands on the eastern height of Hampstead Heath, betweenFinchley Road and the Chestnut Avenue, was the scene of a domestictragedy.

  Three persons were the actors in it. One was an old man, whose whitehair and wrinkled face gave token that he was at least sixty yearsof age. He stood erect with his back to the wall, which separates thegarden from the Heath, in the attitude of one surprised into suddenpassion, and held uplifted the heavy ebony cane upon which hewas ordinarily accustomed to lean. He was confronted by a man oftwo-and-twenty, unusually tall and athletic of figure, dresses in roughseafaring clothes, and who held in his arms, protecting her, a ladyof middle age. The face of the young man wore an expression ofhorror-stricken astonishment, and the slight frame of the grey-hairedwoman was convulsed with sobs.

  These three people were Sir Richard Devine, his wife, and his only sonRichard, who had returned from abroad that morning.

  "So, madam," said Sir Richard, in the high-strung accents which incrises of great mental agony are common to the most self-restrained ofus, "you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty yearsyou have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years--in company witha scoundrel whose name is a byword for all that is profligate andbase--you have laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; andnow, because I dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confessyour shame, and glory in the confession!"

  "Mother, dear mother!" cried the young man, in a paroxysm of grief, "saythat you did not mean those words; you said them but in anger! See, I amcalm now, and he may strike me if he will."

  Lady Devine shuddered, creeping close, as though to hide herself in thebroad bosom of her son.

  The old man continued: "I married you, Ellinor Wade, for your beauty;you married me for my fortune. I was a plebeian, a ship's carpenter; youwere well born, your father was a man of fashion, a gambler, the friendof rakes and prodigals. I was rich. I had been knighted. I was in favourat Court. He wanted money, and he sold you. I paid the price he asked,but there was nothing of your cousin, my Lord Bellasis and Wotton, inthe bond."

  "Spare me, sir, spare me!" said Lady Ellinor faintly.

  "Spare you! Ay, you have spared me, have you not? Look ye," he cried,in sudden fury, "I am not to be fooled so easily. Your family are proud.Colonel Wade has other daughters. Your lover, my Lord Bellasis, evennow, thinks to retrieve his broken fortunes by marriage. You haveconfessed your shame. To-morrow your father, your sisters, all theworld, shall know the story you have told me!"

  "By Heaven, sir, you will not do this!" burst out the young man.

  "Silence, bastard!" cried Sir Richard. "Ay, bite your lips; the word isof your precious mother's making!"

  Lady Devine slipped through her son's arms and fell on her knees at herhusband's feet.

  "Do not do this, Richard. I have been faithful to you for two-and-twentyyears. I have borne all the slights and insults you have heaped upon me.The shameful secret of my early love broke from me when in your rage,you threatened him. Let me go away; kill me; but do not shame me."

  Sir Richard, who had turned to walk away, stopped suddenly, and hisgreat white eyebrows came together in his red face with a savage scowl.He laughed, and in that laugh his fury seemed to congeal into a cold andcruel hate.

  "You would preserve your good name then. You would conceal this disgracefrom the world. You shall have your wish--upon one condition."

  "What is it, sir?" she asked, rising, but trembling with terror, as shestood with drooping arms and widely opened eyes.

  The old man looked at her for an instant, and then said slowly, "Thatthis impostor, who so long has falsely borne my name, has wrongfullysquandered my money, and unlawfully eaten my bread, shall pack! That heabandon for ever the name he has usurped, keep himself from my sight,and never set foot again in house of mine."

  "You would not part me from my only son!" cried the wretched woman.

  "Take him with you to his father then."

  Richard Devine gently loosed the arms that again clung around his neck,kissed the pale face, and turned his own--scarcely less pale--towardsthe old man.

  "I owe you no duty," he said. "You have always hated and reviled me.When by your violence you drove me from your house, you set spies towatch me in the life I had chosen. I have nothing in common with you.I have long felt it. Now when I learn for the first time whose son Ireally am, I rejoice to think that I have less to thank you for thanI once believed. I accept the terms you offer. I will go. Nay, mother,think of your good name."

  Sir Richard Devine laughed again. "I am glad to see you are so welldisposed. Listen now. To-night I send for Quaid to alter my will. Mysister's son, Maurice Frere, shall be my heir in your stead. I giveyou nothing. You leave this house in an hour. You change your name; younever by word or deed make claim on me or mine. No matter what straitor poverty you plead--if even your life should hang upon the issue--theinstant I hear that there exists on earth one who calls himself RichardDevine, that instant shall your mother's shame become a public scandal.You know me. I keep my word. I return in an hour, madam; let me find himgone."

  He passed them, upright, as if upborne by passion, strode down thegarden with the vigour that anger lends, and took the road to London.

  "Richard!" cried the poor mother. "Forgive me, my son! I have ruinedyou."

  Richard Devine tossed his black hair from his brow in sudden passion oflove and grief.

  "Mother, dear mother, do not weep," he said. "I am not worthy of yourtears. Forgive! It is I--impetuous and ungrateful during all your yearsof sorrow--who most need forgiveness. Let me share your burden thatI may lighten it. He is just. It is fitting that I go. I can earn aname--a name that I need not blush to bear nor you to hear. I am strong.I can work. The world is wide. Farewell! my own mother!"

  "Not yet, not yet! Ah! see he has taken the Belsize Road. Oh, Richard,pray Heaven they may not meet."

  "Tush! They will not meet! You are pale, you faint!"

  "A terror of I know not what coming evil overpowers me. I tremble forthe future. Oh, Richard, Richard! Forgive me! Pray for me."

  "Hush, dearest! Come, let me lead you in. I will write. I will send younews of me once at least, ere I depart. So--you are calmer, mother!"

  * * * * *

  Sir Richard Devine, knight, shipbuilder, naval contractor, andmillionaire, was the son of a Harwich boat carpenter. Early left anorphan with a sister to support, he soon reduced his sole aim in life tothe accumulation of money. In the Harwich boat-shed, nearly fifty yearsbefore, he had contracted--in defiance of prophesied failure--to buildthe Hastings sloop of war for His Majesty King George the Third's Lordsof the Admiralty. This contract was the thin end of that wedge whicheventually split the mighty oak block of Government patronage intothree-deckers and ships of the line; which did good service underPellew, Parker, Nelson, Hood; which exfoliated and ramified into hugedockyards at Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Sheerness, and bore, as its budsand flowers, countless barrels of measly pork and maggoty biscuit. Thesole aim of the coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine wasto make money. He had cringed and crawled and fluttered and blustered,had licked the dust off great men's shoes, and danced attendance ingreat men's ante-chambers. Nothing was too low, nothing too high forhim. A shrewd man of business, a thorough master of his trade, troubledwith no scruples of honour or of delicacy, he made money rapidly, andsaved it when made. The first hint that the public received of hiswealth was in 1796, when Mr. Devine, one of the shipwrights to theGovernment, and a comparatively young man of forty-four or thereabouts,subscribed five thousand pounds to the Loyalty Loan raised to prosecutethe French war. In 1805, after doing good, and it was hinted notunprofitable, service in the trial of Lord Melville, the Treasurerof the Navy, he married his sister to a wealthy Bristol merchant, oneAnthony Frere, and married himself to El
linor Wade, the eldest daughterof Colonel Wotton Wade, a boon companion of the Regent, and uncle bymarriage of a remarkable scamp and dandy, Lord Bellasis. At that time,what with lucky speculations in the Funds--assisted, it was whispered,by secret intelligence from France during the stormy years of '13, '14,and '15--and the legitimate profit on his Government contracts, he hadaccumulated a princely fortune, and could afford to live in princelymagnificence. But the old-man-of-the-sea burden of parsimony and avaricewhich he had voluntarily taken upon him was not to be shaken off,and the only show he made of his wealth was by purchasing, on hisknighthood, the rambling but comfortable house at Hampstead, andostensibly retiring from active business.

  His retirement was not a happy one. He was a stern father and a severemaster. His servants hated, and his wife feared him. His only sonRichard appeared to inherit his father's strong will and imperiousmanner. Under careful supervision and a just rule he might have beenguided to good; but left to his own devices outside, and galled bythe iron yoke of parental discipline at home, he became reckless andprodigal. The mother--poor, timid Ellinor, who had been rudely torn fromthe love of her youth, her cousin, Lord Bellasis--tried to restrain him,but the head-strong boy, though owning for his mother that strong lovewhich is often a part of such violent natures, proved intractable, andafter three years of parental feud, he went off to the Continent, topursue there the same reckless life which in London had offended SirRichard. Sir Richard, upon this, sent for Maurice Frere, his sister'sson--the abolition of the slave trade had ruined the Bristol House ofFrere--and bought for him a commission in a marching regiment, hintingdarkly of special favours to come. His open preference for his nephewhad galled to the quick his sensitive wife, who contrasted with someheart-pangs the gallant prodigality of her father with the niggardlyeconomy of her husband. Between the houses of parvenu Devine andlong-descended Wotton Wade there had long been little love. Sir Richardfelt that the colonel despised him for a city knight, and had heard thatover claret and cards Lord Bellasis and his friends had often lamentedthe hard fortune which gave the beauty, Ellinor, to so sordid abridegroom. Armigell Esme Wade, Viscount Bellasis and Wotton, was aproduct of his time. Of good family (his ancestor, Armigell, was reputedto have landed in America before Gilbert or Raleigh), he had inheritedhis manor of Bellasis, or Belsize, from one Sir Esme Wade, ambassadorfrom Queen Elizabeth to the King of Spain in the delicate matter ofMendoza, and afterwards counsellor to James I, and Lieutenant of theTower. This Esme was a man of dark devices. It was he who negotiatedwith Mary Stuart for Elizabeth; it was he who wormed out of Cobham theevidence against the great Raleigh. He became rich, and his sister (thewidow of Henry de Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into the familyof the Wottons, the wealth of the house was further increased by theunion of her daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade. Marmaduke Wade was aLord of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his diary [July17,1668] speaks of visiting him at Belsize. He was raised to the peeragein 1667 by the title of Baron Bellasis and Wotton, and married forhis second wife Anne, daughter of Philip Stanhope, second Earl ofChesterfield. Allied to this powerful house, the family tree of WottonWade grew and flourished.

  In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey,and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence seemedto have run itself out.

  The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, theadventurer, with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of theTower. No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he tookto dice, drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the lastcentury. He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all thenotorious "bloods" of the day.

  Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions afact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade," he says, "isreported to have lost one thousand guineas last night to that vulgarestof all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say the fool is notyet nineteen." From a pigeon Armigell Wade became a hawk, and at thirtyyears of age, having lost together with his estates all chance ofwinning the one woman who might have saved him--his cousin Ellinor--hebecame that most unhappy of all beings, a well-born blackleg. When hewas told by thin-lipped, cool Colonel Wade that the rich shipbuilder,Sir Richard Devine, had proposed an alliance with fair-haired gentleEllinor, he swore, with fierce knitting of his black brows, that nolaw of man nor Heaven should further restrain him in his selfishprodigality. "You have sold your daughter and ruined me," he said; "lookto the consequences." Colonel Wade sneered at his fiery kinsman: "Youwill find Sir Richard's house a pleasant one to visit, Armigell; and heshould be worth an income to so experienced a gambler as yourself." LordBellasis did visit at Sir Richard's house during the first year of hiscousin's marriage; but upon the birth of the son who is the hero of thishistory, he affected a quarrel with the city knight, and cursing himto the Prince and Poins for a miserly curmudgeon, who neither diced nordrank like a gentleman, departed, more desperately at war with fortunethan ever, for his old haunts. The year 1827 found him a hardened,hopeless old man of sixty, battered in health and ruined in pocket; butwho, by dint of stays, hair-dye, and courage, yet faced the world withundaunted front, and dined as gaily in bailiff-haunted Belsize as he haddined at Carlton House. Of the possessions of the House of Wotton Wade,this old manor, timberless and bare, was all that remained, and itsmaster rarely visited it.

  On the evening of May 3, 1827, Lord Bellasis had been attending a pigeonmatch at Hornsey Wood, and having resisted the importunities of hiscompanion, Mr. Lionel Crofton (a young gentleman-rake, whose positionin the sporting world was not the most secure), who wanted him to go oninto town, he had avowed his intention of striking across Hampstead toBelsize. "I have an appointment at the fir trees on the Heath," he said.

  "With a woman?" asked Mr. Crofton.

  "Not at all; with a parson."

  "A parson!"

  "You stare! Well, he is only just ordained. I met him last year at Bathon his vacation from Cambridge, and he was good enough to lose somemoney to me."

  "And now waits to pay it out of his first curacy. I wish your lordshipjoy with all my soul. Then, we must push on, for it grows late."

  "Thanks, my dear sir, for the 'we,' but I must go alone," said LordBellasis dryly. "To-morrow you can settle with me for the sitting oflast week. Hark! the clock is striking nine. Good night."

  * * * * *

  At half-past nine Richard Devine quitted his mother's house to begin thenew life he had chosen, and so, drawn together by that strange fate ofcircumstances which creates events, the father and son approached eachother.

  * * * * *

  As the young man gained the middle of the path which led to the Heath,he met Sir Richard returning from the village. It was no part of hisplan to seek an interview with the man whom his mother had so deeplywronged, and he would have slunk past in the gloom; but seeing him thusalone returning to a desolated home, the prodigal was tempted to uttersome words of farewell and of regret. To his astonishment, however, SirRichard passed swiftly on, with body bent forward as one in the act offalling, and with eyes unconscious of surroundings, staring straightinto the distance. Half-terrified at this strange appearance, Richardhurried onward, and at a turn of the path stumbled upon something whichhorribly accounted for the curious action of the old man. A dead bodylay upon its face in the heather; beside it was a heavy riding whipstained at the handle with blood, and an open pocket-book. Richard tookup the book, and read, in gold letters on the cover, "Lord Bellasis."

  The unhappy young man knelt down beside the body and raised it.The skull had been fractured by a blow, but it seemed that life yetlingered. Overcome with horror--for he could not doubt but that hismother's worst fears had been realized--Richard knelt there holding hismurdered father in his arms, waiting until the murderer, whose name hebore, should have placed himself beyond pursuit. It seemed an hour tohis excited fancy before he saw a light pass along t
he front of thehouse he had quitted, and knew that Sir Richard had safely reached hischamber. With some bewildered intention of summoning aid, he left thebody and made towards the town. As he stepped out on the path he heardvoices, and presently some dozen men, one of whom held a horse, burstout upon him, and, with sudden fury, seized and flung him to the ground.

  At first the young man, so rudely assailed, did not comprehend his owndanger. His mind, bent upon one hideous explanation of the crime, didnot see another obvious one which had already occurred to the mind ofthe landlord of the Three Spaniards.

  "God defend me!" cried Mr. Mogford, scanning by the pale light ofthe rising moon the features of the murdered man, "but it is LordBellasis!--oh, you bloody villain! Jem, bring him along here, p'r'apshis lordship can recognize him!"

  "It was not I!" cried Richard Devine. "For God's sake, my lord say--"then he stopped abruptly, and being forced on his knees by his captors,remained staring at the dying man, in sudden and ghastly fear.

  Those men in whom emotion has the effect of quickening circulationof the blood reason rapidly in moments of danger, and in the terribleinstant when his eyes met those of Lord Bellasis, Richard Devine hadsummed up the chances of his future fortune, and realized to the fullhis personal peril. The runaway horse had given the alarm. Thedrinkers at the Spaniards' Inn had started to search the Heath, and haddiscovered a fellow in rough costume, whose person was unknown tothem, hastily quitting a spot where, beside a rifled pocket-book and ablood-stained whip, lay a dying man.

  The web of circumstantial evidence had enmeshed him. An hour ago escapewould have been easy. He would have had but to cry, "I am the son of SirRichard Devine. Come with me to yonder house, and I will prove toyou that I have but just quitted it,"--to place his innocence beyondimmediate question. That course of action was impossible now. KnowingSir Richard as he did, and believing, moreover, that in his ragingpassion the old man had himself met and murdered the destroyer ofhis honour, the son of Lord Bellasis and Lady Devine saw himself ina position which would compel him either to sacrifice himself, or topurchase a chance of safety at the price of his mother's dishonour andthe death of the man whom his mother had deceived. If the outcast sonwere brought a prisoner to North End House, Sir Richard--now doublyoppressed of fate--would be certain to deny him; and he would becompelled, in self-defence, to reveal a story which would at once bringhis mother to open infamy, and send to the gallows the man who had beenfor twenty years deceived--the man to whose kindness he owed educationand former fortune. He knelt, stupefied, unable to speak or move.

  "Come," cried Mogford again; "say, my lord, is this the villain?"

  Lord Bellasis rallied his failing senses, his glazing eyes stared intohis son's face with horrible eagerness; he shook his head, raised afeeble arm as though to point elsewhere, and fell back dead.

  "If you didn't murder him, you robbed him," growled Mogford, "and youshall sleep at Bow Street to-night. Tom, run on to meet the patrol, andleave word at the Gate-house that I've a passenger for the coach!--Bringhim on, Jack!--What's your name, eh?"

  He repeated the rough question twice before his prisoner answered, butat length Richard Devine raised a pale face which stern resolution hadalready hardened into defiant manhood, and said "Dawes--Rufus Dawes."

  * * * * *

  His new life had begun already: for that night one, Rufus Dawes, chargedwith murder and robbery, lay awake in prison, waiting for the fortune ofthe morrow.

  Two other men waited as eagerly. One, Mr. Lionel Crofton; the other, thehorseman who had appointment with the murdered Lord Bellasis under theshadow of the fir trees on Hampstead Heath. As for Sir Richard Devine,he waited for no one, for upon reaching his room he had fallen senselessin a fit of apoplexy.

  BOOK I.--THE SEA. 1827.

  CHAPTER I. THE PRISON SHIP.