In the commencement of the seventeenth century, there stood among the woody hills and romantic gorges which sweep southwardly down from the bleak expanse of Dartmoor, one of those fine old English halls, which, dating from the reign of the last of the Tudors, united so much of modern comfort with so much of antique architectural beauty. Many specimens of this style of building are still to be found scattered throughout England, with their broad terraces, their quaintly sculptured porticoes, their tall projecting oriels, their many stacks of richly decorated chimneys, and their heraldic bearings adorning every salient point, grotesquely carved in the red freestone, which is their most usual, as indeed their most appropriate material. No one, however, existed, it is probable, at that day, more perfect in proportion to its size, or more admirably suited to its wild and romantic site, than the manor-house of Widecomb-Under-Moor, or, as it was more generally called in its somewhat sequestered neighborhood, the House in the Woods. Even at the present time, that is a very rural and little frequented district; its woods are more extensive, its moorlands wilder, its streams less often turned to purposes of manufacturing utility, than in any other tract of the southern counties; but at the time of which I write, when all England was comparatively speaking an agricultural country; when miles and miles of forest existed, where there now can scarcely be found acres; when the communications even between the neighboring country towns were difficult and tedious, and those between the country and metropolis almost impracticable; the region of Dartmoor and its surrounding woodlands was less known and less frequented, except by its own inhabitants, rude for the most part and uncultured as their native hills, than the prairies of the Far West, or the solitudes of the Rocky Mountains.

The few gentry, and lords of manors who owned estates, and had their castellated or Elizabethan dwellings, scattered here and there, at long intervals, among the sylvan scenery of that lonely region, were for the greater part little superior in habits, in refinement, and in mental culture, to the boors around them. Staunch hunters, and hard drinkers, up with the lark and abed before the curfew, loyal to their king, kind and liberal to their dependents, and devout before their God, they led obscure and blameless lives, careless of the great world, a rumor of which rarely wandered so far as to reach their ears, unknown to fame, yet neither useless nor unhonored within the sphere of their humble influence, marked by few faults and many unpretending virtues.

To this general rule, however, the lords of Widecomb Manor had long been an exception. Endowed with larger territorial possessions than most of their neighbors, connected with many of the noblest families of the realm, the St. Aubyns of Widecomb Manor had for several generations held themselves high above the squires of the vicinity, and the burghers of the circumjacent towns. Not confining themselves to the remote limits of their rural possessions, many of them had shone in the court and in the camp; several had held offices of trust and honor under Elizabeth and her successor; and when, in the reign of the unfortunate Charles, the troubles between the king and his Parliament broke out at length into open war, the St. Aubyn of that day, like many another gallant gentleman, emptied his patrimonial coffers to replenish the exhausted treasury; and melted his old plate and felled his older oaks, in order to support the king’s cause in the field, at the head of his own regiment of horse.

Thence, when the good cause succumbed for a time, and democratic license, hardly restrained by puritanic rigor, strode rampant over the prerogative of England’s crown, and the liberties of England’s people, fines, sequestrations, confiscations, fell heavily on the confirmed malignancy, as it was then termed, of the Lord of Widecomb; and he might well esteem himself fortunate, that he escaped beyond the seas with his head upon his shoulders, although he certainly had not where to lay it.

Returning at the restoration with the Second Charles, more fortunate than many of his friends, Sir Miles St. Aubyn recovered a considerable portion of his demesnes, which, though sequestrated, had not been sold, and with these the old mansion, now, alas! all too grand and stately for the diminished revenues of its owner, and the shrunken estates which it overlooked.

It would not perhaps have been too late, even then for prudence and economy, joined to a resolute will and energetic purpose, to retrieve the shaken fortunes of the house; but having recovered peace and a settled government, the people and the court of England appeared simultaneously to have lost their senses. The overstrained and somewhat hypocritical morality of the Protectorate was succeeded by the wildest license, the most extravagant debauchery; and in the orgies which followed their restoration to their patrimonial honors, too many of the gallant cavaliers discreditably squandered the last remnant of fortunes which had been half ruined in a cause so noble and so holy.

Such was the fate of Sir Miles St. Aubyn. The brave and generous soldier of the First Charles sank into the selfish, dissipated roysterer under his unworthy successor. He never visited again the beautiful oak-woods and sparkling waters of his native place, but frittered away a frivolous and useless life among the orgies of Alsatia and the revels of Whitehall; and died, unfriended, and almost alone, leaving an only son, who had scarce seen his father, the heir to his impoverished fortunes and little honored name.

His son, who was born before the commencement of the troubles, of a lady highly-bred, and endowed as highly, who died—as the highly endowed die but too often—in the first prime of womanhood, was already a man when the restoration brought his father back to his native land, though not to his patrimonial estates or his paternal duties.

Miles St. Aubyn, the younger, had been educated during the period of the civil war, and during the protracted absence of his father, by a distant maternal relative, whose neutrality and humble position alike protected him from persecution by either of the hostile parties. He grew up, like his race, strong, active, bold and gallant; and if he had not received much of that peculiar nurture which renders men graceful and courtly-mannered, almost from their cradles, he was at least educated under the influence of those traditional principles which make them at the bottom, even if they lack something of external polish, high-souled and honorable gentlemen.

After the restoration he was sent abroad, as was the habit of the day, to push his fortunes with his sword in the Netherlands, then, as in all ages of the world, the chosen battle-ground of nations. There he served many years, if not with high distinction, at least with credit to his name; and if he did not win high fortune with his sword—and indeed the day for such winnings had already passed in Europe—he at least enjoyed the advantage of mingling, during his adventurous career, with the great, the noble, and the famous of the age; and when, on his return to his native land after his father’s death, he turned his sword into a ploughshare, and sought repose among the old staghorned oaks at Widecomb, he was no longer the enthusiastic, wild and headstrong youth of twenty years before; but a grave, polished, calm, accomplished man, with something of Spanish dignity and sternness engrafted on the frankness of his English character, and with the self-possession of one used familiarly to courts and camps showing itself in every word and motion.

He was a man moreover of worth, energy and resolution, and sitting down peacefully under the shadow of his own woods, he applied himself quietly, but with an iron steadiness of purpose that ensured success, to retrieving in some degree the fortunes of his race.

Soon after he returned he had taken unto himself a wife, not perhaps very wisely chosen from a family of descent prouder and haughtier even than his own, and of fortunes if not as much impoverished, at least so greatly diminished, as to render the lady’s dower a matter merely nominal. But it was an old affection—a long promise, hallowed by love and constancy and honor.

She was, moreover, a beautiful and charming creature, and, so long as she lived, rendered the old soldier a very proud and very happy husband, and when she died—which, most unhappily for all concerned, was but a few months after giving birth to an only son—left him so comfortless, and at the same time so wedded to the memory of the dead, that he never so much as envisaged the idea of a second marriage.

This gentleman it was, who, many long years after the death of the gentle Lady Alice, dwelt in serene and dignified seclusion in the old Hall, which he had never quitted since he became a widower; devoting his whole abilities to nursing his dilapidated estates, and educating his only son, whom he regarded with affection bordering on idolatry.

With the last Miles St. Aubyn, however, we shall have little to do henceforth, for the soldier of the Netherlands had departed so far from the traditions of his family—the eldest son of which had for generations borne the same name of Miles—as to drop that patrimonial appellation in the person of his son, whom he had caused to be christened Jasper, after a beloved friend, a brother of the lady afterward his wife, who had fallen by his side on a well-fought field in the Luxembourg.

What was the cause which induced the veteran, in other respects so severe a stickler for ancient habitudes, to swerve from this time-honored custom, it would be difficult to state; some of those who knew him best, attributing it merely to the desire of perpetuating the memory of his best friend in the person of his only child; while others ascribed it to a sort of superstitious feeling, which, attaching the continued decline of the house to the continual recurrence of the patronymic, looked forward in some degree to a revival of its honors with a new name to its lord.

Whatever might have been the cause, the consequences of this deviation from old family usage, as prognosticated by the dependents of Widecomb, and the superstitious inhabitants of the neighboring woods and wolds, were any thing but likely to better the fortunes of the lords of the manor; for not a few of them asserted, with undoubting faith, that the last St. Aubyn had seen the light of day, and that in the same generation which had seen the extinction of the old name the old race should itself pass away. Nor did they lack some sage authority to which they might refer for confirmation of their dark forebodings; for there existed, living yet in the mouths of men, one of those ancient saws, which were so common a century or two ago in the rural districts of England, as connected with the fortunes of the old houses; and which were referred to some Mother Shipton, or other equally infallible soothsayer of the county, whose dicta to the vulgar minds of the feudal tenantry were confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ.

The prophecy in question was certainly exceeding old; and had been handed down through many generations, by direct oral tradition, among a race of men wholly illiterate and uneducated; to whom perhaps alone, owing to the long expatriation of the late and present lords of the manor, it was now familiar; although in past times it had doubtless been accredited by the family to which it related.

It ran as follows, and, not being deficient in a sort of wild harmony and rugged solemnity, produced, by no means unnaturally, a powerful effect on the minds of hearers, when recited in awe-stricken tones and with a bended brow beside some feebly glimmering hearth, in the lulls of the tempest haply raving without, among the leafless trees, under the starless night—It ran as follows, and, universally believed by the vassals of the house, it remains for us to see how far its predictions were confirmed by events, and how far it influenced or foretold the course of passion, or the course of fate?—

Thus far it has been necessary for us to tread back the path of departed generations, and to retrace the fortunes of the Widecomb family, inasmuch as many of the events, which we shall have to narrate hereafter, and very much of the character of the principal personage, to whom our tale relates, have a direct relation to these precedents, and would have been to a certain degree incomprehensible but for this retrogression. If it obtain no other end, it will serve at least to explain how, amid scenes so rural and sequestered, and dwelling almost in solitude, among neighbors so rugged and uncivilized, there should have been found a family, deprived of all advantages of intercommunication with equals or superiors in intellect and demeanor, and even unassisted by the humanizing influence of familiar female society, which had yet maintained, as if traditionally, all the principles, all the ideas, and all the habitudes of the brightest schools of knightly courtesy and gentlemanly bearing, all the graces and easy dignity of courts, among the remote solitudes of the country.

At the time when our narrative commences, the soldier of the Netherlands, Sir Miles St. Aubyn—for though he cared not to bear a foreign title, he had been stricken a knight banneret on a bloody battle-field of Flanders—had fallen long into the sere, the yellow leaf; and though his cheek was still ruddy as a winter pippin, his eye bright and clear, and his foot firm as ever, his hair was as white as the drifted snow; his arm had lost its nervous power; and if his mind was still sane and his body sound, he was now more addicted to sit beside the glowing hearth in winter, or to bask in the summer sunshine, poring over some old chronicle or antique legend, than to wake the echoes of the oakwoods with his bugle-horn, or to rouse the heathcock from the heathy moorland with his blythe springers.

Not so, however, the child of his heart, Jasper. The boy on whom such anxious pains had been bestowed, on whom hopes so intense reposed, had reached his seventeenth summer. Like all his race, he was unusually tall, and admirably formed, both for agility and strength. Never, from his childhood upward, having mingled with any persons of vulgar station or unpolished demeanor, he was, as if by nature, graceful and easy. His manners although proud, and marked by something of that stern dignity which we have mentioned as a characteristic of the father, but which in one so youthful appeared strange and out of place, were ever those of a high and perfect gentleman. His features were marked with all the ancestral beauties, which may be traced in unmixed races through so many generations; and as it was a matter of notorious truth, that from the date of the conquest, no drop of Saxon or of Celtic blood had been infused into the pure Norman stream which flowed through the veins of the proud St. Aubyns, it was no marvel that after the lapse of so many ages the youthful Jasper should display, both in face and form, the characteristic lines and coloring peculiar to the noblest tribe of men that has ever issued from the great northern hive of nations. Accordingly, he had the rich dark chestnut hair, not curled, but waving in loose clusters; the clear gray eye; the aquiline nose; the keen and fiery look; the resolute mouth, and the iron jaw, which in all ages have belonged to the descendant of the Northman. While the spare yet sinewy frame, the deep, round chest, thin flanks, and limbs long and muscular and singularly agile, were not less perfect indications of his blood than the sharp, eagle-like expression of the bold countenance.

Trained in his early boyhood to all those exercises of activity and strength, which were in those days held essential to the gentleman, it needs not to say that Jasper St. Aubyn could ride, swim, fence, shoot, run, leap, pitch the bar, and go through every manoeuvre of the salle d’armes, the tilt-yard, and the manÈge, with equal grace and power. Nor had his lighter accomplishments been neglected; for the age of his father and grandfather, if profligate and dissolute even to debauchery, was still refined and polished, and to dance gracefully, and touch the lute or sing tastefully, was as much expected from the cavalier as to have a firm foot in the stirrup, or a strong and supple wrist with the backsword and rapier.

His mind had been richly stored also, if not very sagely trained and regulated. For Sir Miles, in the course of his irregular and adventurous life, had read much more than he had meditated; had picked up much more of learning than he had of philosophy; and what philosophy he had belonged much more to the cold self-reliance of the camp than to the sounder tenets of the schools.

While filling his son’s mind, therefore, with much curious lore of all sorts; while making him a master of many tongues, and laying before him books of all kinds, the old banneret had taken little pains—perhaps he would not have succeeded had he taken more—to point the lessons which the books contained; to draw deductions from the facts which he inculcated; or to direct the course of the young man’s opinions.

Self-taught himself, or taught only in the hard school of experience, and having himself arrived at sound principles of conduct, he never seemed to recollect that the boy would run through no such ordeal, and reap no such lessons; nor did he ever reflect that the deductions which he had himself drawn from certain facts, acquired in one way, and under one set of circumstances, would probably be entirely different from those at which another would arrive, when his data were acquired in a very different manner, and under circumstances altogether diverse and dissimilar.

Thence it came that Jasper St. Aubyn, at the age of seventeen years, was in all qualities of body thoroughly trained and disciplined; and in all mental faculties perfectly educated, but entirely untrained, uncorrected and unchastened.

In manner, he was a perfect gentleman; in body, he was a perfect man; in mind, he was almost a perfect scholar. And what, our reader will perhaps inquire, what could he have been more; or what more could education have effected in his behalf?

Much—very much—good friend.

For as there is an education of the body, and an education of the brain, so is there also an education of the heart. And that is an education which men rarely have the faculty of imparting, and which few men ever have obtained, who have not enjoyed the inestimable advantage of female nurture during their youth, as well as their childhood; unless they have learned it in the course of painful years, from those severe and bitter teachers, those chasteners and purifiers of the heart—sorrow and suffering, which two are experience.

This, then, was the education in which Jasper St. Aubyn was altogether deficient; which Sir Miles had never so much as attempted to impart to him; and which, had he endeavored, he probably would have failed to bestow.

We do not mean to say that the boy was heartless—boys rarely are so, we might almost say never—nor that the impulses of his heart were toward evil rather than good; far from it. His heart, like all young and untainted hearts, was full of noble impulses—but they were impulses; full of fresh springing generous desires, of gracious sympathies and lofty aspirations—but he had not one principle—he never had been taught to question one impulse, before acting upon it—he never had learned to check one desire, to doubt the genuineness of one sympathy, to moderate the eagerness of one aspiration. He never had been brought to suspect that there were such virtues as self-control, or self-devotion; such vices as selfishness or self-abandonment—in a word, he never had so much as heard

and therefore he was, at the day of which we write, even what he was; and thereafter, what we propose to show you.

At the time when the youthful heir had attained his seventeenth year, the great object of his father’s life was accomplished; the fortunes of the family were so far at least retrieved, that if the St. Aubyns no longer aspired, as of old, to be the first or wealthiest family of the county, they were at least able to maintain the household on that footing of generous liberality and hospitable ease which has been at all times the pride and passion of the English country gentleman.

For many years Sir Miles had undergone the severest privations, and it was only by the endurance of actual poverty within doors, that he was enabled to maintain that footing abroad, without which he could scarcely have preserved his position in society.

For many years the park had been neglected, the gardens overrun with weeds and brambles, the courts grass-grown, and the house itself dilapidated, literally from the impossibility of supporting domestics sufficiently numerous to perform the necessary labors of the estate.

During much of this period it was to the beasts of the forest, the fowl of the moorland, and the fish of the streams, that the household of Widecomb had looked for their support; nor did the table of the banneret himself boast any liquor more generous than that afforded by the ale vats of March and October.

Throughout the whole of this dark and difficult time, however, the stout old soldier had never suffered one particle of that ceremonial, which he deemed essential as well to the formation as the preservation of the character of a true gentleman, to be relaxed or neglected by his diminished household.

Personally, he was at all times clad point device; nor did he ever fail in being mounted, himself and at least one attendant, as became a cavalier of honor. The hours of the early dinner, and of the more agreeable and social supper, were announced duly by the clang of trumpets, even when there were no guests to be summoned, save the old banneret and his motherless child, and perhaps the only visiter for years at Widecomb Manor, the gray-haired vicar of the village, who had served years before as chaplain of an English regiment in the Low Countries, with Sir Miles. Nor was the pewter tankard, containing at the best but toast and ale, stirred with a sprig of rosemary, handed around the board with less solemnity than had it been a golden hanap mantling with the first vintages of Burgundy or Xeres.

Thus it was that, as Jasper advanced gradually toward years of manhood, the fortunes of the house improving in proportion to his growth, seeing no alteration in the routine of the household, he scarcely was aware that any change had taken place in more essential points.

The eye and ear of the child had been taken by the banners, the trumpets, and the glittering board, and his fancy riveted by the solemnity and grave decorum which characterized the meals partaken in the great hall; and naturally enough he never knew that the pewter platters and tankards had been exchanged, since those days, for plate of silver, and the strong ale converted into claret or canary.

The consequence of this was simply that he found himself a youth of seventeen, surrounded by all the means and appliances of luxury, with servants, horses, hounds, and falcons at his command, the leading personage, beyond all comparison, of the neighborhood, highly born, handsome, well bred and accomplished. All this, by the way, was entirely uncorrected by any memory of past sufferings or sorrows, either on his own part or on that of his family, or by any knowledge of the privations and exertions on the part of Sir Miles, by which this present affluence had been purchased; and he became, naturally enough, somewhat over confident in his own qualities, somewhat over-bearing in his manner, and not a little intolerant and inconsiderate as to the opinions and feelings of others. He then presented, in a word, the not unusual picture of an arrogant, self-sufficient, proud and fiery youth, with many generous and noble points, and many high qualities, which, duly cultivated, might have rendered him a good, a happy, and perhaps even a great man; but which, untrained as they were, and suffered to run up into a rank and unpruned overgrowth, were but too likely to degenerate themselves into vices, and to render him at some future day a tormentor of himself, and an oppressor of others.

Now, however, he was a general favorite, for largely endowed with animal spirits, indulged in every wish that his fancy could form, never crossed in the least particular, it was rarely that his violent temper would display itself, or his innate selfishness rise conspicuous above the superficial face of good-nature and somewhat careless affability, which he presented to the general observer.

It was, perhaps, unfortunate for Jasper, no less than for those who were in after days connected with him, whether for good or evil, that, at this critical period of his adolescence, when the character of the man is developed from the accidents of boyhood, in proportion as his increasing years and altered habits and pursuits led him to be more abroad, and cast him in some degree into the world, the advancing years and growing infirmities of his father kept him closer to the library and the hall.

So that at the very time when his expanding mind and nascent passions most needed sage advice and moderate coercion, or at least wary guidance, he was abandoned almost entirely to his own direction. The first outbreaks, therefore, of evil principles, the germs of a masterful will, the seeds of fierce and fiery passions, and, above all, the growing recklessness with regard to the feelings and the rights of others, which could scarcely have escaped the notice of the shrewd old man had he accompanied his son abroad, and which, if noticed, would surely have been repressed, were allowed to increase hourly by self-indulgence and the want of restraint, unknown and unsuspected to the youth himself, for whom one day they were to be the cause of so many and so bitter trials.

But it is now time that, turning from this brief retrospect of previous events, and this short analysis of the early constitution of the mind of him whose singular career is to form the subject of this narrative, we should introduce our reader to the scene of action, and to the person whose adventures in after life will perhaps excuse the space which has necessarily been allotted to the antecedents of the first marked event which befel him, and from which all the rest took their rise in a train of connection, which, although difficult to trace by a casual observer, was in reality close and perfect.

The manor-house of Widecomb, such as it has been slightly sketched above, stood on a broad flat terrace, paved with slabs of red freestone, and adorned with a massive balustrade of the same material, interspersed with grotesque images at the points where it was reached from the esplanade below, by three or four flights of broad and easy steps.

The mansion itself was large, and singularly picturesque, but the beauties of the building were as nothing to those of the scenery which it overlooked.

It was built on the last and lowest slope of one of those romantic spurs which trend southerly from the wild and heathery heights of Dartmoor. And although the broad and beautifully kept lawn was embosomed in a very woody and sylvan chase, full of deep glens and tangled dingles, which was in turn framed on three sides by the deep oak-woods, which covered all the rounded hills in the rear of the estate and to the right and left hand, yet as the land continued to fall toward the south for many and many a mile, the sight could range from the oriel windows of the great hall, and of the fine old library, situated on either hand of the entrance and armory, over a wide expanse of richly cultivated country, with more than one navigable river winding among the woods and corn-fields, and many a village steeple glittering among the hedgerows, until in the far distance it was bounded by a blue hazy line, which seemed to melt into the sky, but which was in truth, though not to be distinguished as such unless by a practiced eye, the British Channel.

The Hall itself and even the southern verge of the chase, which bounded the estate in that direction, lay, however, at a very considerable distance from the cultivated country, and was divided from it by a vast broken chasm, with banks so precipitous and rocky that no road had ever been carried through it, while its great width had deterred men from the idea of bridging it. Through this strange and terrific gorge there rushed an impetuous and powerful torrent, broken by many falls and rapids, with many a deep and limpid pool between them, favorite haunts of the large salmon and sea trout which abounded in its waters. This brook, for it scarcely can be called a river, although after the rains of autumn or the melting snows of spring it sent down an immense volume of dark, rust colored water, with a roar that could be heard for miles, to the distant Tamar, swept down the hills in a series of cascades from the right hand side of the park, until it reached the brink of the chasm we have described, lying at right angles to its former course, down which it plunged in an impetuous shoot of nearly three hundred feet, and rushed thence easterly away, walled on each side by the precipitous rock, until some five miles thence it was crossed at a deep and somewhat dangerous ford, by the only great road which traversed that district, and by which alone strangers could reach the Hall and its beautiful demesnes.

To the westward or right hand side of the chase the country was entirely wild and savage, covered with thick woods, interspersed with lonely heaths, and intersected by hundreds of clear brawling rills. To the eastward, however, although much broken by forest ground, there was a wide range of rich pasture fields and meadows, divided by great overgrown hawthorn hedges, each hedge almost a thicket, and penetrated by numerous lanes and horse-roads buried between deep banks, and overcanopied by foliage, that, even at noonday, was almost impenetrable to the sunshine.

Here and there lay scattered among the fields and woods innumerable farm-houses and granges, the abodes of small freeholders, once tenants and vassals of the great St. Aubyns; and, at about six miles from the Hall, nestled in a green valley, through which ran a clear, bright trout-stream to join the turbulent torrent, stood the little market town of Widecomb-Under-Moor, from their unalienated property in which the family of St. Aubyn derived the most valuable portion of their incomes.

Over the whole of this pleasant and peaceful tract, whether it was still owned by themselves, or had passed into the hands of the free yeomanry, the Lords of Widecomb still held manorial rights, and the few feudal privileges which had survived the revolution; and, through the whole of it, Sir Miles St. Aubyn was regarded with unmixed love and veneration, while the boy Jasper was looked upon almost as a son in every family, though some old men would shake their heads doubtfully, and mutter sage but unregarded saws concerning his present disposition and future prospects; and some old grandames would prognosticate disasters, horrors, and even crimes as hanging over his career, in consequence, perhaps, of the inauspicious change in the patronymic of his race.

They were a happy and an unsophisticated race who inhabited those lonely glens. Sufficiently well provided to be above the want of necessaries, or the fear of poverty, they were not so far removed from the necessity of labor as to have incurred vicious ambitions—moderate, frugal, and industrious, they lived uncorrupted, and died happy in their unlearned innocence.

It was the boast of the district that bars and locks were appendages to doors entirely unusual and useless; that the cage of Widecomb had not held a tenant since the days of stiff old Oliver; and that no deed of violence or blood had ever tainted those calm vales with horror.

Alas! how soon was that boast to be annulled; how soon were the details of a dread domestic tragedy, full of dark horrors, and reproductive of guilt through generations, to render the very name of Widecomb a terror, and to invest the beauteous scenery with images of superstitious awe and hatred. But we must not anticipate, nor seek as yet to penetrate the secrets of that destiny, which even during the morn of promising young life, seemed to overhang the house,

——