Helen Forsyth

by Thomas Waters

I have mentioned in ‘The Orphans’ that I was at the same time engaged in an affair which required my presence in Scotland. The case was a remarkable one.

James Fergusson, a romantic, dreamy youth, born and bred at Clyde Cottage, about five miles distant from the City of Glasgow, and sole heir to about four hundred pounds per annum, chiefly in house property, chose, at the ripe age of twenty, or thereabout, to fall, or fancy himself, in love with one Helen Forsyth, a gay damsel whom he met with at a funeral, of all occasions in the world for the bringing about of such a catastrophe. The girl was pretty, and considerably younger than he, her age in years being three less. In knowledge of the world she was at least ten years his senior.

Her mother was an adept in the baser department of that science; the daughter her apt pupil. This Mrs. Forsyth, who, though she could scarcely be less than five or six-and-thirty, had a very youthful appearance, was an equivocal widow, engaged in a poorly-paying mantua-making business in a by-street in Glasgow. It was shrewdly doubted that she had a legal title to the name of Forsyth, or that her dainty daughter was born in wedlock.

The purport of the counsel which, under such circumstances, such a mother gave Helen Forsyth upon the latter’s return from the funeral, may, with the help of after discoveries, be easily imagined:

“James Fergusson’s shy advances were not only to be encouraged, they should be stimulated by all the arts familiar to pretty, provocative damsel-kind. His bedridden father could not last many weeks, people said, and then he would possess in his own right full four hundred a year, and was, moreover, reputed to be a soft, simple youth, whom a clever wife might rule with absolute sway. Such a chance it would be just downright madness to miss. No silly scruples about… Read More