Читать книгу Under the Broad Arrow - George Forbes - Страница 7

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JOHN FITCH, before his sentence and transportation to New South Wales for the robbery of a considerable sum from one of his dupes, whom he had enticed into a secluded part of Vauxhall Gardens, and there plundered him, had obtained for himself as a man about town a reputation for gallantry which brought to him an easy victim in the person of Jane Harding, a young girl who, unfortunately, had no mother to care for her, and who lived with her father in the county of Chester.

The pretended devotion of such a man as Fitch was highly gratifying to the vanity of this young and unsophisticated girl, and that an ex-post captain in His Majesty's Navy, as he represented himself to be, should pay her his addresses was regarded by her with a feeling of pride which soon developed into a more ardent passion.

It is probable that at this time Captain Fitch really had it in his mind to marry Jane; but circumstances arose which caused him to abandon any such honorable intention. A rumor, at this eventful period, first reached his ears that Mr. Harding, the father of Jane, had been a considerable loser by several speculations in which he had ventured large sums. This induced Fitch to take a temporary pause in his courtship. Marriage, unless attended with pecuniary advantages, was entirely opposed to his principles; and, as the reports of Mr. Harding's embarrassments were confirmed, his attentions to Jane became less marked, and his visits less frequent. Although he had now relinquished all idea of a matrimonial connection, yet, when the unhappy girl reproached him for his neglect, his passions were aroused, and he pressed for an immediate union, representing, at the same time, the necessity which existed that, for the present, the marriage should be kept secret, lest his friends might be angered by his forming an alliance with one of inferior birth to himself.

In an evil hour the hapless girl consented to his proposal, and left the protection of her father's house, taking with her, at the instigation of her lover, a sum of money which her father kept locked in a bureau, and of which she obtained the key. Fitch easily found among his dissolute associates one who readily entered into the conspiracy he had planned, and who, in the guise of a minister of religion, performed a mock ceremony of marriage between the betrayer and his innocent victim.

After the ceremony, Fitch and his supposed wife took up their quarters in expensive apartments in London; nor was it long before Jane discovered how cruelly she had been deceived. The visitors who came to the house were exclusively composed of men of dissipated habits of the worst type who lived in those bad old days, and Jane, who had known the protection of a father's home, now found herself exposed to the familiarities of heartless libertines, from whom her husband made no effort to shield her.

Among those who pressed upon her his unwelcome attentions was Lieutenant Parkhurst, who was destined to play an important part in the subsequent events of her career. This man, a friend of her supposed husband's, and, like him, of good family connections, made no secret of the admiration which he felt for her, and from which she shrank with all the outraged modesty of her sex.

Overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse for what she had done, Jane had almost made up her mind to return home and intercede with her father for his forgiveness, when an event happened that was destined to change the whole course of her future life.

Unable to understand the sudden disappearance of his daughter, and not suspecting her of having robbed him of his money, Mr. Harding had given information to the police, who, with little difficulty, traced the theft to Jane, whose reputed husband then brutally informed her of the deceit which had been practiced upon her with regard to her marriage, and left her to the mercy of the law.

Distracted by the unforeseen calamities which had come upon him, Mr. Harding then endeavored to withdraw the prosecution against his daughter, but without avail, and, under the harsh and cruel laws in force at the time, Jane was transported for the term of seven years to the penal settlement of Van Diemen's Land.