← catalogue

Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers

by Thomas De Quincey · English · Gutenberg #6148 · 952,899 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers

Author: Thomas De Quincey


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6148]
                Most recently updated: June 15, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6148

Credits: Text file produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team
        
        HTML file produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS ***




Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team









NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.

By Thomas De Quincey.


Contents Of Volume I.

   The Household Wreck
   The Spanish Nun
   Flight Of A Tartar Tribe


Contents Of Volume II.

   System Of The Heavens As Revealed By Lord Rosse's Telescopes
   Modern Superstition
   Coleridge And Opium-Eating
   Temperance Movement
   On War
   The Last Days Of Immanuel Kant






VOLUME I.




THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.


'To be weak,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us, '_is
to be miserable_.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation, no matter
for its mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness, therefore, and
by a sad prerogative, as more miserable than what is most miserable
in all, that capital weakness of man which regards the _tenure_ of his
enjoyments and his power to protect, even for a moment, the crown of
flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few!--which sometimes
settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there never will be
an end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious
heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride--the
everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or
by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the
hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye
which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy
_present_, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which
all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but
unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the
subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet,
the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the
philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor
to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs
not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is
life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond
all beginning--then next a dim lotos of human consciousness, finding
itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a shore--then a few sunny
smiles and many tears--a little love and infinite strife--whisperings
from paradise and fierce mockeries from the anarchy of chaos--dust and
ashes--and once more darkness circling round, as if from the beginning,
and in this way rounding or making an island of our fantastic
existence,--_that_ is human life; _that_ the inevitable amount of man's
laughter and his tears--of what he suffers and he does--of his motions
this way and that way--to the right or to the left--backwards
or forwards--of all his seeming realities and all his absolute
negations--his shadowy pomps and his pompous shadows--of whatsoever he
thinks, finds, makes or mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in
dread hope anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for
ever and ever.

Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast
halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of
a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that
threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable existence,
and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and his power
have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a frailty, by
comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems to have
a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in which a
single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of
a memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster than the flying
showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician scatters
sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the self-same
tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at noon beheld
all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour looks out upon
a total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of any fugitive
memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked, or a wreck to
be obliterated.

These cases, though here spoken of rhetorically, are of daily
occurrence; and, though they may seem few by comparison with the
infinite millions of the species, they are many indeed, if they be
reckoned absolutely for themselves; and throughout the limits of a whole
nation, not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of their
heads, or even swallowed up in ruin themselves, or their course turned
out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness. Shipwrecks and nightly
conflagrations are sometimes, and especially among some nations,
wholesale calamities; battles yet more so; earthquakes, the famine, the
pestilence, though rarer, are visitations yet wider in their desolation.
Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent
scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the
sickness of the brain--lunacy--which, visiting nearly one thousand in
every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each
particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad
a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there is a sadder
even than _that_,--the sight of a family-ruin wrought by crime is even
more appalling. Forgery, breaches of trust, embezzlement, of private
or public funds--(a crime sadly on the increase since the example of
Fauntleroy, and the suggestion of its great feasibility first made by
him)--these enormities, followed too often, and countersigned for their
final result to the future happiness of families, by the appalling
catastrophe of suicide, must naturally, in every wealthy nation,
or wherever property and the modes of property are much developed,
constitute the vast majority of all that come under the review of public
justice. Any of these is sufficient to make shipwreck of all peace and
comfort for a family; and often, indeed, it happens that the desolation
is accomplished within the course of one revolving sun; often the
whole dire catastrophe, together with its total consequences, is both
accomplished and made known to those whom it chiefly concerns within one
and the same hour. The mighty Juggernaut of social life, moving onwards
with its everlasting thunders, pauses not for a moment to spare--to
pity--to look aside, but rushes forward for ever, impassive as the
marble in the quarry--caring not for whom it destroys, for the how
many, or for the results, direct and indirect, whether many or few.
The increasing grandeur and magnitude of the social system, the more it
multiplies and extends its victims, the more it conceals them; and for
the very same reason: just as in the Roman amphitheatres, when they grew
to the magnitude of mighty cities, (in some instances accommodating
four hundred thousand spectators, in many a fifth part of that amount,)
births and deaths became ordinary events, which, in a small modern
theatre, are rare and memorable; and exactly as these prodigious
accidents multiplied, _pari passu_, they were disregarded and easily
concealed: for curiosity was no longer excited; the sensation attached
to them was little or none.

From these terrific tragedies, which, like monsoons or tornadoes,
accomplish the work of years in an hour, not merely an impressive lesson
is derived, sometimes, perhaps, a warning, but also (and this is of
universal application) some consolation. Whatever may have been the
misfortunes or the sorrows of a man's life, he is still privileged to
regard himself and his friends as amongst the fortunate by comparison,
in so far as he has escaped these wholesale storms, either as an actor
in producing them, or a contributor to their violence--or even more
innocently, (though oftentimes not less miserably)--as a participator in
the instant ruin, or in the long arrears of suffering which they entail.

The following story falls within the class of hasty tragedies, and
sudden desolations here described. The reader is assured that every
incident is strictly true: nothing, in that respect, has been altered;
nor, indeed, anywhere except in the conversations, of which, though
the results and general outline are known, the separate details have
necessarily been lost under the agitating circumstances which produced
them. It has been judged right and delicate to conceal the name of the
great city, and therefore of the nation in which these events occurred,
chiefly out of consideration for the descendants of one person concerned
in the narrative: otherwise, it might not have been requisite: for it
is proper to mention, that every person directly a party to the case has
been long laid in the grave: all of them, with one solitary exception,
upwards of fifty years.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was early spring in the year 17--; the day was the 6th of April; and
the weather, which had been of a wintry fierceness for the preceding six
or seven weeks--cold indeed beyond anything known for many years,
gloomy for ever, and broken by continual storms--was now by a Swedish
transformation all at once bright, genial, heavenly. So sudden and so
early a prelusion of summer, it was generally feared, could not last.
But that only made every body the more eager to lose no hour of an
enjoyment that might prove so fleeting. It seemed as if the whole
population of the place, a population among the most numerous in
Christendom, had been composed of hybernating animals suddenly awakened
by the balmy sunshine from their long winter's torpor. Through every
hour of the golden morning the streets were resonant with female parties
of young and old, the timid and the bold, nay, even of the most delicate
valetudinarians, now first tempted to lay aside their wintry clothing
together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural environs of
our vast city, the woodlands, and the interminable meadows began daily
to re-echo the glad voices of the young and jovial awaking once again,
like the birds and the flowers, and universal nature, to the luxurious
happiness of this most delightful season.

Happiness do I say? Yes, happiness; happiness to me above all others.
For I also in those days was among the young and the gay; I was healthy;
I was strong; I was prosperous in a worldly sense! I owed no man a
shilling; feared no man's face; shunned no man's presence. I held a
respectable station in society; I was myself, let me venture to say it,
respected generally for my personal qualities, apart from any advantages
I might draw from fortune or inheritance; I had reason to think myself
popular amongst the very slender circle of my acquaintance; and finally,
which perhaps was the crowning grace to all these elements of happiness,
I suffered not from the presence of _ennui_, nor ever feared to suffer:
for my temperament was constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful
animal sensibility; and I knew the one great secret for maintaining its
equipoise, viz., by powerful daily exercise; and thus I lived in
the light and presence, or, (if I should not be suspected of seeking
rhetorical expressions, I would say,) in one eternal solstice of
unclouded hope.

These, you will say, were blessings; these were golden elements of
felicity. They were so; and yet, with the single exception of my
healthy frame and firm animal organization, I feel that I have mentioned
hitherto nothing but what by comparison might be thought of a vulgar
quality. All the other advantages that I have enumerated, had they been
yet wanting, might have been acquired; had they been forfeited, might
have been reconquered; had they been even irretrievably lost, might, by
a philosophic effort, have been dispensed with; compensations might have
been found for any of them, many equivalents, or if not, consolations at
least, for their absence. But now it remains to speak of other blessings
too mighty to be valued, not merely as transcending in rank and dignity
all other constituents of happiness, but for a reason far sadder than
that--because, once lost, they were incapable of restoration, and
because not to be dispensed with; blessings in which 'either we must
live or have no life:' lights to the darkness of our paths and to the
infirmity of our steps--which, once extinguished, never more on this
side the gates of Paradise can any man hope to see re-illumined for
himself. Amongst these I may mention an intellect, whether powerful or
not in itself, at any rate most elaborately cultivated; and, to say the
truth, I had little other business before me in this life than to pursue
this lofty and delightful task. I may add, as a blessing, not in the
same _positive_ sense as that which I have just mentioned, because not
of a nature to contribute so hourly to the employment of the thoughts,
but yet in this sense equal, that the absence of either would have been
an equal affliction,--namely, a conscience void of all offence. It
was little indeed that I, drawn by no necessities of situation into
temptations of that nature, had done no injury to any man. That was
fortunate; but I could not much value myself upon what was so much an
accident of my situation. Something, however, I might pretend to beyond
this _negative_ merit; for I had originally a benign nature; and, as I
advanced in years and thoughtfulness, the gratitude which possessed me
for my own exceeding happiness led me to do that by principle and system
which I had already done upon blind impulse; and thus upon a double
argument I was incapable of turning away from the prayer of the
afflicted, whatever had been the sacrifice to myself. Hardly, perhaps,
could it have been said in a sufficient sense at that time that I was
a religious man: yet, undoubtedly, I had all the foundations within me
upon which religion might hereafter have grown. My heart overflowed with
thankfulness to Providence: I had a natural tone of unaffected piety;
and thus far, at least, I might have been called a religious man, that
in the simplicity of truth I could have exclaimed,

  'O, Abner, I fear God, and I fear none beside.'

But wherefore seek to delay ascending by a natural climax to that final
consummation and perfect crown of my felicity--that almighty blessing
which ratified their value to all the rest? Wherefore, oh! wherefore
do I shrink in miserable weakness from--what? Is it from reviving,
from calling up again into fierce and insufferable light the images and
features of a long-buried happiness? That would be a natural shrinking
and a reasonable weakness. But how escape from reviving, whether I give
it utterance or not, that which is for ever vividly before me? What need
to call into artificial light that which, whether sleeping or waking, by
night or by day, for eight-and-thirty years has seemed by its miserable
splendor to scorch my brain? Wherefore shrink from giving language,
simple vocal utterance, to that burden of anguish which by so long an
endurance has lost no atom of its weight, nor can gain any most surely
by the loudest publication? Need there can be none, after this, to say
that the priceless blessing, which I have left to the final place in
this ascending review, was the companion of my life--my darling and
youthful wife. Oh! dovelike woman! fated in an hour the most
defenceless to meet with the ravening vulture,--lamb fallen amongst
wolves,--trembling--fluttering fawn, whose path was inevitably to be
crossed by the bloody tiger;--angel, whose most innocent heart fitted
thee for too early a flight from this impure planet; if indeed it were a
necessity that thou shouldst find no rest for thy footing except amidst
thy native heavens, if indeed to leave what was not worthy of thee were
a destiny not to be evaded--a summons not to be put by,--yet why, why,
again and again I demand--why was it also necessary that this, thy
departure, so full of wo to me, should also to thyself be heralded by
the pangs of martyrdom? Sainted love, if, like the ancient children
of the Hebrews, like Meshech and Abednego, thou wert called by divine
command, whilst yet almost a child, to walk, and to walk alone, through
the fiery furnace,--wherefore then couldst not thou, like that Meshech
and that Abednego, walk unsinged by the dreadful torment, and come forth
unharmed? Why, if the sacrifice were to be total, was it necessary to
reach it by so dire a struggle? and if the cup, the bitter cup, of final
separation from those that were the light of thy eyes and the pulse
of thy heart might not be put aside,--yet wherefore was it that thou
mightest not drink it up in the natural peace which belongs to a sinless
heart?

But these are murmurings, you will say, rebellious murmurings against
the proclamations of God. Not so: I have long since submitted myself,
resigned myself, nay, even reconciled myself, perhaps, to the great
wreck of my life, in so far as it was the will of God, and according to
the weakness of my imperfect nature. But my wrath still rises, like a
towering flame, against all the earthly instruments of this ruin; I am
still at times as unresigned as ever to this tragedy, in so far as it
was the work of human malice. Vengeance, as a mission for _me_, as
a task for _my_ hands in particular, is no longer possible; the
thunderbolts of retribution have been long since launched by other
hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do--I must--I shall
perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the
very impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of
heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my
heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word
or two upon what she was--and how far worthy of a love more honorable
to her (that was possible) and deeper (but that was not possible) than
mine. When first I saw her, she--my Agnes--was merely a child, not much
(if anything) above sixteen. But, as in perfect womanhood she retained
a most childlike expression of countenance, so even then in absolute
childhood she put forward the blossoms and the dignity of a woman. Never
yet did my eye light upon creature that was born of woman, nor could it
enter my heart to conceive one, possessing a figure more matchless in
its proportions, more statuesque, and more deliberately and advisedly to
be characterized by no adequate word but the word _magnificent_, (a word
too often and lightly abused.) In reality, speaking of women, I have
seen many beautiful figures, but hardly one except Agnes that could,
without hyperbole, be styled truly and memorably magnificent. Though
in the first order of tall women, yet, being full in person, and with a
symmetry that was absolutely faultless, she seemed to the random sight
as little above the ordinary height. Possibly from the dignity of her
person, assisted by the dignity of her movements, a stranger would
have been disposed to call her at a distance a woman of _commanding_
presence; but never, after he had approached near enough to behold her
face. Every thought of artifice, of practised effect, or of haughty
pretension, fled before the childlike innocence, the sweet feminine
timidity, and the more than cherub loveliness of that countenance, which
yet in its lineaments was noble, whilst its expression was purely gentle
and confiding. A shade of pensiveness there was about her; but _that_
was in her manners, scarcely ever in her features; and the exquisite
fairness of her complexion, enriched by the very sweetest and most
delicate bloom that ever I have beheld, should rather have allied it
to a tone of cheerfulness. Looking at this noble creature, as I first
looked at her, when yet upon the early threshold of womanhood

  'With household motions light and free,
  And steps of virgin liberty'

you might have supposed her some Hebe or young Aurora of the dawn. When
you saw only her superb figure, and its promise of womanly development,
with the measured dignity of her step, you might for a moment have
fancied her some imperial Medea of the Athenian stage--some Volumnia
from Rome,

  'Or ruling bandit's wife amidst the Grecian isles.'

 But catch one glance from her angelic countenance--and then combining
the face and the person, you would have dismissed all such fancies, and
have pronounced her a Pandora or an Eve, expressly accomplished and held
forth by nature as an exemplary model or ideal pattern for the future
female sex:--

  'A perfect woman, nobly plann'd,
  To warm, to comfort, to command:
  And yet a spirit too, and bright
  With something of an angel light.'

To this superb young woman, such as I have here sketched her, I
surrendered my heart for ever, almost from my first opportunity of
seeing her: for so natural and without disguise was her character, and
so winning the simplicity of her manners, due in part to her own native
dignity of mind, and in part to the deep solitude in which she had been
reared, that little penetration was required to put me in possession of
all her thoughts; and to win her love, not very much more than to let
her see, as see she could not avoid, in connection with that chivalrous
homage which at any rate was due to her sex and her sexual perfections,
a love for herself on my part, which was in its nature as exalted a
passion and as profoundly rooted as any merely human affection can ever
yet have been.

On the seventeenth birthday of Agnes we were married. Oh! calendar of
everlasting months--months that, like the mighty rivers, shall flow on
for ever, immortal as thou, Nile, or Danube, Euphrates, or St. Lawrence!
and ye, summer and winter, day and night, wherefore do you bring round
continually your signs, and seasons, and revolving hours, that still
point and barb the anguish of local recollections, telling me of this
and that celestial morning that never shall return, and of too blessed
expectations, travelling like yourselves through a heavenly zodiac of
changes, till at once and for ever they sank into the grave! Often do I
think of seeking for some quiet cell either in the Tropics or in
Arctic latitudes, where the changes of the year, and the external signs
corresponding to them, express themselves by no features like those in
which the same seasons are invested under our temperate climes: so that,
if knowing, we cannot at least feel the identity of their revolutions.
We were married, I have said, on the birthday--the seventeenth
birthday--of Agnes; and pretty nearly on her eighteenth it was that she
placed me at the summit of my happiness, whilst for herself she
thus completed the circle of her relations to this life's duties,
by presenting me with a son. Of this child, knowing how wearisome to
strangers is the fond exultation of parents, I shall simply say, that
he inherited his mother's beauty; the same touching loveliness and
innocence of expression, the same chiselled nose, mouth, and chin,
the same exquisite auburn hair. In many other features, not of person
merely, but also of mind and manners, as they gradually began to open
before me, this child deepened my love to him by recalling the image of
his mother; and what other image was there that I so much wished to
keep before me, whether waking or asleep? At the time to which I am now
coming but too rapidly, this child, still our only one, and unusually
premature, was within four months of completing his third year;
consequently Agnes was at that time in her twenty-first year; and I may
here add, with respect to myself, that I was in my twenty-sixth.

But, before I come to that period of wo, let me say one word on the
temper of mind which so fluent and serene a current of prosperity may
be thought to have generated. Too common a course I know it is, when
the stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no
menace of a breeze--the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing cloud,
that in such circumstances the blood stagnates: life, from excess and
plethora of sweets, becomes insipid: the spirit of action droops: and
it is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and
molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly
undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, and disturbing a
slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid in its character. I have known
myself cases not a few, where, by the very nicest gradations, and by
steps too silent and insensible for daily notice, the utmost harmony and
reciprocal love had shaded down into fretfulness and petulance, purely
from too easy a life, and because all nobler agitations that might have
ruffled the sensations occasionally, and all distresses even on the
narrowest scale that might have re-awakened the solicitudes of love, by
opening necessities for sympathy, for counsel, or for mutual aid, had
been shut out by foresight too elaborate, or by prosperity too cloying.
But all this, had it otherwise been possible with my particular mind,
and at my early age, was utterly precluded by one remarkable peculiarity
in my temper. Whether it were that I derived from nature some jealousy
and suspicion of all happiness which seems too perfect and unalloyed--[a
spirit of restless distrust, which in ancient times often led men to
throw valuable gems into the sea, in the hope of thus propitiating the
dire deity of misfortune, by voluntarily breaking the fearful chain of
prosperity, and led some of them to weep and groan when the gems
thus sacrificed were afterwards brought back to their hand by simple
fishermen, who had recovered them in the intestines of fishes--a
portentous omen, which was interpreted into a sorrowful indication
that the deity thus answered the propitiatory appeal, and made solemn
proclamation that he had rejected it]--whether, I say, it were this
spirit of jealousy awaked in me by too steady and too profound a
felicity--or whether it were that great overthrows and calamities have
some mysterious power to send forward a dim misgiving of their advancing
footsteps, and really and indeed,

  'That in to-day already walks to-morrow;'

or whether it were partly, as I have already put the case in my first
supposition, a natural instinct of distrust, but irritated and enlivened
by a particular shock of superstitious alarm; which, or whether any of
these causes it were that kept me apprehensive, and on the watch for
disastrous change, I will not here undertake to determine. Too certain
it is that I was so. I never ridded myself of an over-mastering and
brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding feeling (that sometimes
was and sometimes was not exalted into a conscious presentiment) of
some great calamity travelling towards me; not perhaps immediately
impending--perhaps even at a great distance; but already--dating from
some secret hour--already in motion upon some remote line of approach.
This feeling I could not assuage by sharing it with Agnes. No motive
could be strong enough for persuading me to communicate so gloomy a
thought with one who, considering her extreme healthiness, was but too
remarkably prone to pensive, if not to sorrowful, contemplations. And
thus the obligation which I felt to silence and reserve, strengthened
the morbid impression I had received; whilst the remarkable incident
I have adverted to served powerfully to rivet the superstitious chain
which was continually gathering round me. The incident was this--and
before I repeat it, let me pledge my word of honor, that I report to you
the bare facts of the case, without exaggeration, and in the simplicity
of truth:--There was at that time resident in the great city, which
is the scene of my narrative, a woman, from some part of Hungary, who
pretended to the gift of looking into futurity. She had made herself
known advantageously in several of the greatest cities of Europe, under
the designation of the Hungarian Prophetess; and very extraordinary
instances were cited amongst the highest circles of her success in the
art which she professed. So ample were the pecuniary tributes which
she levied upon the hopes and the fears, or the simple curiosity of
the aristocracy, that she was thus able to display not unfrequently
a disinterestedness and a generosity, which seemed native to her
disposition, amongst the humbler classes of her applicants; for she
rejected no addresses that were made to her, provided only they were
not expressed in levity or scorn, but with sincerity, and in a spirit of
confiding respect. It happened, on one occasion, when a nursery-servant
of ours was waiting in her anteroom for the purpose of taking her turn
in consulting the prophetess professionally, that she had witnessed a
scene of consternation and unaffected maternal grief in this Hungarian
lady upon the sudden seizure of her son, a child of four or five years
old, by a spasmodic inflammation of the throat (since called croup)
peculiar to children, and in those days not very well understood by
medical men. The poor Hungarian, who had lived chiefly in warm, or
at least not damp, climates, and had never so much as heard of this
complaint, was almost wild with alarm at the rapid increase of the
symptoms which attend the paroxysms, and especially of that loud and
distressing sound which marks the impeded respiration. Great, therefore,
was her joy and gratitude on finding from our servant that she had
herself been in attendance more than once upon cases of the same nature,
but very much more violent,--and that, consequently, she was well
qualified to suggest and to superintend all the measures of instant
necessity, such as the hot-bath, the peculiar medicines, &c., which are
almost sure of success when applied in an early stage. Staying to give
her assistance until a considerable improvement had taken place in the
child, our servant then hurried home to her mistress. Agnes, it may
be imagined, dispatched her back with such further and more precise
directions as in a very short time availed to re-establish the child in
convalescence. These practical services, and the messages of maternal
sympathy repeatedly conveyed from Agnes, had completely won the heart of
the grateful Hungarian, and she announced her intention of calling with
her little boy, to make her personal acknowledgments for the kindness
which had been shown to her. She did so, and we were as much impressed
by the sultana-like style of her Oriental beauty, as she, on her part,
was touched and captivated by the youthful loveliness of my angelic
wife. After sitting for above an hour, during which time she talked with
a simplicity and good feeling that struck us as remarkable in a person
professing an art usually connected with so much of conscious fraud, she
rose to take her leave. I must mention that she had previously had our
little boy sitting on her knee, and had at intervals thrown a hasty
glance upon the palms of his hands. On parting, Agnes, with her usual
frankness, held out her hand. The Hungarian took it with an air of sad
solemnity, pressed it fervently, and said:--'Lady, it is my part in
this life to look behind the curtain of fate; and oftentimes I see such
sights in futurity--some near, some far off--as willingly I would _not_
see. For you, young and charming lady, looking like that angel which you
are, no destiny can be equal to your deserts. Yet sometimes, true it
is, God sees not as man sees; and he ordains, after his unfathomable
counsels, to the heavenly-minded a portion in heaven, and to the
children whom he loves a rest and a haven not built with hands.
Something that I have seen dimly warns me to look no farther. Yet, if
you desire it, I will do my office, and I will read for you with truth
the lines of fate as they are written upon your hands.' Agnes was a
little startled, or even shocked, by this solemn address; but, in a
minute or so, a mixed feeling--one half of which was curiosity, and
the other half a light-hearted mockery of her own mysterious awe in
the presence of what she had been taught to view as either fraud or
insanity--prompted her playfully to insist upon the fullest application
of the Hungarian's art to her own case; nay, she would have the hands
of our little Francis read and interpreted as well as her own, and
she desired to hear the full professional judgment delivered without
suppression or softening of its harshest awards. She laughed whilst she
said all this; but she also trembled a little. The Hungarian first
took the hand of our young child, and perused it with a long and steady
scrutiny. She said nothing, but sighed heavily as she resigned it. She
then took the hand of Agnes--looked bewildered and aghast--then gazed
piteously from Agnes to her child--and at last, bursting into tears,
began to move steadily out of the room. I followed her hastily, and
remonstrated upon this conduct, by pointing her attention to the obvious
truth--that these mysterious suppressions and insinuations, which
left all shadowy and indistinct, were far more alarming than the most
definite denunciations. Her answer yet rings in my ear:--'Why should I
make myself odious to you and to your innocent wife? Messenger of evil
I am, and have been to many; but evil I will not prophecy to her. Watch
and pray! Much may be done by effectual prayer. Human means, fleshly
arms, are vain. There is an enemy in the house of life,' [here she
quitted her palmistry for the language of astrology;] 'there is a
frightful danger at hand, both for your wife and your child. Already
on that dark ocean, over which we are all sailing, I can see dimly the
point at which the enemy's course shall cross your wife's. There is
but little interval remaining--not many hours. All is finished; all
is accomplished; and already he is almost up with the darlings of your
heart. Be vigilant, be vigilant, and yet look not to yourself, but to
Heaven, for deliverance.'

This woman was not an impostor: she spoke and uttered her oracles
under a wild sense of possession by some superior being, and of mystic
compulsion to say what she would have willingly left unsaid; and never
yet, before or since, have I seen the light of sadness settle with so
solemn an expression into human eyes as when she dropped my wife's
hand, and refused to deliver that burden of prophetic wo with which she
believed herself to be inspired.

The prophetess departed; and what mood of mind did she leave behind her
in Agnes and myself? Naturally there was a little drooping of spirits
at first; the solemnity and the heart-felt sincerity of fear and grief
which marked her demeanor, made it impossible, at the moment when we
were just fresh from their natural influences, that we should recoil
into our ordinary spirits. But with the inevitable elasticity of youth
and youthful gaiety we soon did so; we could not attempt to persuade
ourselves that there had been any conscious fraud or any attempt at
scenical effect in the Hungarian's conduct. She had no motive for
deceiving us; she had refused all offerings of money, and her whole
visit had evidently been made under an overflow of the most grateful
feelings for the attentions shown to her child. We acquitted her,
therefore, of sinister intentions; and with our feelings of jealousy,
feelings in which we had been educated, towards everything that tended
to superstition, we soon agreed to think her some gentle maniac or sad
enthusiast, suffering under some form of morbid melancholy. Forty-eight
hours, with two nights' sleep, sufficed to restore the wonted
equilibrium of our spirits; and that interval brought us onwards to
the 6th of April--the day on which, as I have already said, my story
properly commences.

 On that day, on that lovely 6th of April, such as I have described it,
that 6th of April, about nine o'clock in the morning, we were seated at
breakfast near the open window--we, that is, Agnes, myself, and little
Francis; the freshness of morning spirits rested upon us; the golden
light of the morning sun illuminated the room; incense was floating
through the air from the gorgeous flowers within and without the house;
there in youthful happiness we sat gathered together, a family of
love, and there we never sat again. Never again were we three gathered
together, nor ever shall be, so long as the sun and its golden
light--the morning and the evening--the earth and its flowers endure.

Often have I occupied myself in recalling every circumstance the most
trivial of this the final morning of what merits to be called my life.
Eleven o'clock, I remember, was striking when Agnes came into my study,
and said that she would go into the city, (for we lived in a quite rural
suburb,) that she would execute some trifling commissions which she
had received from a friend in the country, and would be at home again
between one and two for a stroll which we had agreed to take in the
neighboring meadows. About twenty minutes after this she again came into
my study dressed for going abroad; for such was my admiration of her,
that I had a fancy--fancy it must have been, and yet still I felt it to
be real--that under every change she looked best; if she put on a shawl,
then a shawl became the most feminine of ornaments; if she laid
aside her shawl and her bonnet, then how nymph-like she seemed in her
undisguised and unadorned beauty! Full-dress seemed for the time to be
best, as bringing forward into relief the splendor of her person, and
allowing the exposure of her arms; a simple morning-dress, again, seemed
better still, as fitted to call out the childlike innocence of her face,
by confining the attention to that. But all these are feelings of fond
and blind affection, hanging with rapture over the object of something
too like idolatry. God knows, if that be a sin, I was but too profound
a sinner; yet sin it never was, sin it could not be, to adore a beauty
such as thine, my Agnes. Neither was it her beauty by itself, and that
only, which I sought at such times to admire; there was a peculiar
sort of double relation in which she stood at moments of pleasurable
expectation and excitement, since our little Francis had become of an
age to join our party, which made some aspects of her character trebly
interesting. She was a wife--and wife to one whom she looked up to
as her superior in understanding and in knowledge of the world, whom,
therefore, she leaned to for protection. On the other hand, she was also
a mother. Whilst, therefore, to her child she supported the matronly
part of guide, and the air of an experienced person; to me she wore,
ingenuously and without disguise, the part of a child herself, with all
the giddy hopes and unchastised imaginings of that buoyant age. This
double character, one aspect of which looks towards her husband and one
to her children, sits most gracefully upon many a young wife whose heart
is pure and innocent; and the collision between the two separate parts
imposed by duty on the one hand, by extreme youth on the other, the
one telling her that she is a responsible head of a family and the
depository of her husband's honor in its tenderest and most vital
interests, the other telling her, through the liveliest language of
animal sensibility, and through the very pulses of her blood, that she
is herself a child; this collision gives an inexpressible charm to
the whole demeanor of many a young married woman, making her other
fascinations more touching to her husband, and deepening the admiration
she excites; and the more so, as it is a collision which cannot exist
except among the very innocent. Years, at any rate, will irresistibly
remove this peculiar charm, and gradually replace it by the graces
of the matronly character. But in Agnes this change had not yet been
effected, partly from nature, and partly from the extreme seclusion of
her life. Hitherto she still retained the unaffected expression of her
childlike nature; and so lovely in my eyes was this perfect exhibition
of natural feminine character, that she rarely or never went out alone
upon any little errand to town which might require her to rely upon her
own good sense and courage, that she did not previously come to exhibit
herself before me. Partly this was desired by me in that lover-like
feeling of admiration already explained, which leads one to court the
sight of a beloved object under every change of dress, and under all
effects of novelty. Partly it was the interest I took in that exhibition
of sweet timidity, and almost childish apprehensiveness, half disguised
or imperfectly acknowledged by herself, which (in the way I have just
explained) so touchingly contrasted with (and for that very reason so
touchingly drew forth) her matronly character. But I hear some objector
say at this point, ought not this very timidity, founded (as in part
at least it was) upon inexperience and conscious inability to face the
dangers of the world, to have suggested reasons for not leaving her to
her own protection? And does it not argue, on my part, an arrogant or
too blind a confidence in the durability of my happiness, as though
charmed against assaults, and liable to no shocks of sudden revolution?
I reply that, from the very constitution of society, and the tone of
manners in the city which we inhabited, there seemed to be a moral
impossibility that any dangers of consequence should meet her in the
course of those brief absences from my protection, which only
were possible; that even to herself any dangers, of a nature to be
anticipated under the known circumstances of the case, seemed almost
imaginary; that even _she_ acknowledged a propriety in being trained, by
slight and brief separations from my guardianship, to face more boldly
those cases of longer separation and of more absolute consignment to her
own resources which circumstances might arise to create necessarily, and
perhaps abruptly. And it is evident that, had she been the wife of any
man engaged in the duties of a profession, she might have been summoned
from the very first, and without the possibility of any such gradual
training, to the necessity of relying almost singly upon her own courage
and discretion. For the other question, whether I did not depend too
blindly and presumptuously upon my good luck in not at least affording
her my protection so long as nothing occurred to make it impossible? I
may reply, most truly, that all my feelings ran naturally in the very
opposite channel. So far from confiding too much in my luck, in the
present instance I was engaged in a task of writing upon some points
of business which could not admit of further delay; but now, and at all
times, I had a secret aversion to seeing so gentle a creature thrown
even for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which
scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources;
and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an
irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind
upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have
acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and
a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess,
it was in this very point of anxiety as to all that regarded my wife's
security. Her good sense, her prudence, her courage, (for courage she
had in the midst of her timidity,) her dignity of manner, the more
impressive from the childlike character of her countenance, all should
have combined to reassure me, and yet they did not. I was still anxious
for her safety to an irrational extent; and to sum up the whole in a
most weighty line of Shakspeare, I lived under the constant presence of
a feeling which only that great observer of human nature (so far as I
am aware) has ever noticed, viz., that merely the excess of my happiness
made me jealous of its ability to last, and in that extent less capable
of enjoying it; that in fact the prelibation of my tears, as a homage to
its fragility, was drawn forth by my very sense that my felicity was too
exquisite; or, in the words of the great master

  'I wept to have' [absolutely, by anticipation, shed tears in
  possessing] 'what I so feared to lose.'

Thus end my explanations, and I now pursue my narrative: Agnes, as
I have said, came into my room again before leaving the house--we
conversed for five minutes--we parted--she went out--her last words
being that she would return at half-past one o'clock; and not long
after that time, if ever mimic bells--bells of rejoicing, or bells of
mourning, are heard in desert spaces of the air, and (as some have said)
in unreal worlds, that mock our own, and repeat, for ridicule, the vain
and unprofitable motions of man, then too surely, about this hour, began
to toll the funeral knell of my earthly happiness--its final hour had
sounded.

       *       *       *       *       *

One o'clock had arrived; fifteen minutes after, I strolled into the
garden, and began to look over the little garden-gate in expectation of
every moment descrying Agnes in the distance. Half an hour passed,
and for ten minutes more I was tolerably quiet. From this time till
half-past two I became constantly more agitated--_agitated,_ perhaps, is
too strong a word--but I was restless and anxious beyond what I should
have chosen to acknowledge. Still I kept arguing, What is half an hour?
what is an hour? A thousand things might have occurred to cause that
delay, without needing to suppose any accident; or, if an accident, why
not a very trifling one? She may have slightly hurt her foot--she
may have slightly sprained her ankle. 'Oh, doubtless,' I exclaimed to
myself, 'it will be a mere trifle, or perhaps nothing at all.' But I
remember that, even whilst I was saying this, I took my hat and walked
with nervous haste into the little quiet lane upon which our garden-gate
opened. The lane led by a few turnings, and after a course of about five
hundred yards, into a broad high-road, which even at that day had begun
to assume the character of a street, and allowed an unobstructed
range of view in the direction of the city for at least a mile. Here
I stationed myself, for the air was so clear that I could distinguish
dress and figure to a much greater distance than usual. Even on such a
day, however, the remote distance was hazy and indistinct, and at any
other season I should have been diverted with the various mistakes
I made. From occasional combinations of color, modified by light and
shade, and of course powerfully assisted by the creative state of the
eye under this nervous apprehensiveness, I continued to shape into
images of Agnes forms without end, that upon nearer approach presented
the most grotesque contrasts to her impressive appearance. But I
had ceased even to comprehend the ludicrous; my agitation was now so
overruling and engrossing that I lost even my intellectual sense of it;
and now first I understood practically and feelingly the anguish of hope
alternating with disappointment, as it may be supposed to act upon the
poor shipwrecked seaman, alone and upon a desolate coast, straining his
sight for ever to the fickle element which has betrayed him, but
which only can deliver him, and with his eyes still tracing in the far
distance,

  'Ships, dim-discover'd, dropping from the clouds,'--

which a brief interval of suspense still for ever disperses into hollow
pageants of air or vapor. One deception melted away only to be succeeded
by another; still I fancied that at last to a certainty I could descry
the tall figure of Agnes, her gipsy hat, and even the peculiar elegance
of her walk. Often I went so far as to laugh at myself, and even to tax
my recent fears with unmanliness and effeminacy, on recollecting the
audible throbbings of my heart, and the nervous palpitations which had
besieged me; but these symptoms, whether effeminate or not, began to
come back tumultuously under the gloomy doubts that succeeded almost
before I had uttered this self-reproach. Still I found myself mocked
and deluded with false hopes; yet still I renewed my quick walk, and the
intensity of my watch for that radiant form that was fated never more to
be seen returning from the cruel city.

It was nearly half-past three, and therefore close upon two hours
beyond the time fixed by Agnes for her return, when I became absolutely
incapable of supporting the further torture of suspense, and I suddenly
took the resolution of returning home and concerting with my female
servants some energetic measures, though _what_ I could hardly say, on
behalf of their mistress. On entering the garden-gate I met our little
child Francis, who unconsciously inflicted a pang upon me which he
neither could have meditated nor have understood. I passed him at his
play, perhaps even unaware of his presence, but he recalled me to that
perception by crying aloud that he had just seen his mamma.

'When--where?' I asked convulsively.

'Up stairs in her bedroom,' was his instantaneous answer.

His manner was such as forbade me to suppose that he could be joking;
and, as it was barely possible (though, for reasons well known to me,
in the highest degree improbable) that Agnes might have returned by a
by-path, which, leading through a dangerous and disreputable suburb,
would not have coincided at any one point with the public road where I
had been keeping my station. I sprang forward into the house, up stairs,
and in rapid succession into every room where it was likely that she
might be found; but everywhere there was a dead silence, disturbed only
by myself, for, in my growing confusion of thought, I believe that
I rang the bell violently in every room I entered. No such summons,
however, was needed, for the servants, two of whom at the least were
most faithful creatures, and devotedly attached to their young mistress,
stood ready of themselves to come and make inquiries of me as soon as
they became aware of the alarming fact, that I had returned without her.

Until this moment, though having some private reasons for surprise that
she should have failed to come into the house for a minute or two at the
hour prefixed, in order to make some promised domestic arrangements for
the day, they had taken it for granted that she must have met with me at
some distance from home--and that either the extreme beauty of the
day had beguiled her of all petty household recollections, or (as a
conjecture more in harmony with past experiences) that my impatience
and solicitations had persuaded her to lay aside her own plans for the
moment at the risk of some little domestic inconvenience. Now, however,
in a single instant vanished _every_ mode of accounting for their
mistress's absence; and the consternation of our looks communicated
contagiously, by the most unerring of all languages, from each to the
other what thoughts were uppermost in our panic-stricken hearts. If
to any person it should seem that our alarm was disproportioned to the
occasion, and not justified at least by anything as yet made known to
us, let that person consider the weight due to the two following facts:
First, that from the recency of our settlement in this neighborhood, and
from the extreme seclusion of my wife's previous life at a vast distance
from the metropolis, she had positively no friends on her list of
visitors who resided in this great capital; secondly, and far above
all beside, let him remember the awful denunciations, so unexpectedly
tallying with this alarming and mysterious absence, of the Hungarian
prophetess; these had been slighted--almost dismissed from our thoughts;
but now in sudden reaction they came back upon us with a frightful power
to lacerate and to sting--the shadowy outline of a spiritual agency,
such as that which could at all predict the events, combining in one
mysterious effect, with the shadowy outline of those very predictions.
The power, that could have predicted, was as dim and as hard to grasp as
was the precise nature of the evil that had been predicted.

An icy terror froze my blood at this moment when I looked at the
significant glances, too easily understood by me, that were exchanged
between the servants. My mouth had been for the last two hours growing
more and more parched, so that at present, from mere want of moisture,
I could not separate my lips to speak. One of the women saw the vain
efforts I was making, and hastily brought me a glass of water. With the
first recovery of speech, I asked them what little Francis had meant by
saying that he had seen his mother in her bedroom. Their reply was, that
they were as much at a loss to discover his meaning as I was; that he
had made the same assertion to them, and with so much earnestness, that
they had, all in succession, gone up stairs to look for her, and
with the fullest expectation of finding her. This was a mystery which
remained such to the very last; there was no doubt whatsoever that the
child believed himself to have seen his mother; that he could not have
seen her in her human bodily presence, there is as little doubt as there
is, alas! that in this world he never _did_ see her again. The poor
child constantly adhered to his story, and with a circumstantiality
far beyond all power of invention that could be presumed in an
artless infant. Every attempt at puzzling him or entangling him in
contradictions by means of cross-examination was but labor thrown away;
though indeed, it is true enough that for those attempts, as will soon
be seen, there was but a brief interval allowed.

Not dwelling upon this subject at present, I turned to Hannah--a woman
who held the nominal office of cook in our little establishment, but
whose real duties had been much more about her mistress's person--and
with a searching look of appeal I asked her whether, in this moment of
trial, when (as she might see) I was not so perfectly master of myself
as perhaps always to depend upon seeing what was best to be done, she
would consent to accompany me into the city, and take upon herself those
obvious considerations of policy or prudence which might but too easily
escape my mind, darkened, and likely to be darkened, as to its power of
discernment by the hurricane of affliction now too probably at hand. She
answered my appeal with the fervor I expected from what I had already
known of her character. She was a woman of a strong, fiery, perhaps I
might say of heroic mind, supported by a courage that was absolutely
indomitable, and by a strength of bodily frame very unusual in a woman,
and beyond the promise even of her person. She had suffered as deep a
wrench in her own affections as a human being can suffer; she had
lost her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty and
interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst
of all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large
commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of
every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very
much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him,
as regarded acts and probable intentions; and as regarded palliations
from childish years, from total inexperience, or any other alleviating
circumstances that could be urged, having everything to plead--and of
all his accomplices the only one who had anything to plead. Interest,
however, he had little or none; and whilst some hoary villains of the
party, who happened to be more powerfully befriended, were finally
allowed to escape with a punishment little more than nominal, he and two
others were selected as sacrifices to the offended laws. They suffered
capitally. All three behaved well; but the poor boy in particular, with
a courage, a resignation, and a meekness, so distinguished and beyond
his years as to attract the admiration and the liveliest sympathy of
the public universally. If strangers could feel in that way, if the
mere hardened executioner could be melted at the final scene,--it may be
judged to what a fierce and terrific height would ascend the affliction
of a doating mother, constitutionally too fervid in her affections.
I have heard an official person declare, that the spectacle of her
desolation and frantic anguish was the most frightful thing he had ever
witnessed, and so harrowing to the feelings, that all who could by their
rank venture upon such an irregularity, absented themselves during the
critical period from the office which corresponded with the government;
for, as I have said, the affair took place in a large provincial city,
at a great distance from the capital. All who knew this woman, or who
were witnesses to the alteration which one fortnight had wrought in her
person as well as her demeanor, fancied it impossible that she could
continue to live; or that, if she did, it must be through the giving way
of her reason. They proved, however, to be mistaken; or, at least, if
(as some thought) her reason did suffer in some degree, this result
showed itself in the inequality of her temper, in moody fits of
abstraction, and the morbid energy of her manner at times under the
absence of all adequate external excitement, rather than in any positive
and apparent hallucinations of thought. The charm which had mainly
carried off the instant danger to her faculties, was doubtless the
intense sympathy which she met with. And in these offices of consolation
my wife stood foremost. For, and that was fortunate, she had found
herself able, without violence to her own sincerest opinions in the
case, to offer precisely that form of sympathy which was most soothing
to the angry irritation of the poor mother; not only had she shown a
_direct_ interest in the boy, and not a mere interest of _reflection_
from that which she took in the mother, and had expressed it by visits
to his dungeon, and by every sort of attention to his comforts which
his case called for, or the prison regulations allowed; not only had
she wept with the distracted woman as if for a brother of her own; but,
which went farther than all the rest in softening the mother's heart,
she had loudly and indignantly proclaimed her belief in the boy's
innocence, and in the same tone her sense of the crying injustice
committed as to the selection of the victims, and the proportion of the
punishment awarded. Others, in the language of a great poet,

  'Had pitied _her,_ and not her grief;'

they had either not been able to see, or, from carelessness, had
neglected to see, any peculiar wrong done to her in the matter which
occasioned her grief,--but had simply felt compassion for her as for one
summoned, in a regular course of providential and human dispensation,
to face an affliction, heavy in itself, but not heavy from any special
defect of equity. Consequently their very sympathy, being so much
built upon the assumption that an only child had offended to the extent
implied in his sentence, oftentimes clothed itself in expressions which
she felt to be not consolations but insults, and, in fact, so many
justifications of those whom it relieved her overcharged heart to regard
as the very worst of enemies. Agnes, on the other hand, took the very
same view of the case as herself; and, though otherwise the gentlest
of all gentle creatures, yet here, from the generous fervor of her
reverence for justice, and her abhorrence of oppression, she gave
herself no trouble to moderate the energy of her language: nor did I,
on my part, feeling that substantially she was in the right, think it of
importance to dispute about the exact degrees of the wrong done or the
indignation due to it. In this way it happened naturally enough that
at one and the same time, though little contemplating either of these
results, Agnes had done a prodigious service to the poor desolate mother
by breaking the force of her misery, as well as by arming the active
agencies of indignation against the depressing ones of solitary grief,
and for herself had won a most grateful and devoted friend, who would
have gone through fire and water to serve her, and was thenceforwards
most anxious for some opportunity to testify how deep had been her
sense of the goodness shown to her by her benign young mistress, and
how incapable of suffering abatement by time. It remains to add, which
I have slightly noticed before, that this woman was of unusual personal
strength: her bodily frame matched with her intellectual: and I notice
this _now_ with the more emphasis, because I am coming rapidly upon
ground where it will be seen that this one qualification was of more
summary importance to us--did us more 'yeoman's service' at a crisis
the most awful--than other qualities of greater name and pretension.
_Hannah_ was this woman's Christian name; and her name and her memory
are to me amongst the most hallowed of my earthly recollections.

One of her two fellow-servants, known technically amongst us as the
'parlor maid,' was also, but not equally, attached to her mistress; and
merely because her nature, less powerfully formed and endowed, did not
allow her to entertain or to comprehend any service equally fervid of
passion or of impassioned action. She, however, was good, affectionate,
and worthy to be trusted. But a third there was, a nursery maid, and
therefore more naturally and more immediately standing within the
confidence of her mistress--her I could not trust: her I suspected. But
of that hereafter. Meantime, Hannah, she upon whom I leaned as upon a
staff in all which respected her mistress, ran up stairs, after I had
spoken and received her answer, in order hastily to dress and prepare
herself for going out along with me to the city. I did not ask her to
be quick in her movements: I knew there was no need: and, whilst she was
absent, I took up, in one of my fretful movements of nervousness, a book
which was lying upon a side-table: the book fell open of itself at a
particular page; and in that, perhaps, there was nothing extraordinary,
for it was a little portable edition of _Paradise Lost_; and the page
was one which I must naturally have turned to many a time: for to Agnes
I had read all the great masters of literature, especially those of
modern times; so that few people knew the high classics more familiarly:
and as to the passage in question, from its divine beauty I had read it
aloud to her, perhaps, on fifty separate occasions. All this I mention
to take away any appearance of a vulgar attempt to create omens;
but still, in the very act of confessing the simple truth, and thus
weakening the marvellous character of the anecdote, I must notice it as
a strange instance of the '_Sortes Miltonianæ_,'--that precisely at such
a moment as this I should find thrown in my way, should feel tempted
to take up, and should open, a volume containing such a passage as the
following: and observe, moreover, that although the volume, _once being
taken up_, would naturally open where it had been most frequently
read, there were, however, many passages which had been read _as_
frequently--or more so. The particular passage upon which I opened
at this moment was that most beautiful one in which the fatal morning
separation is described between Adam and his bride--that separation so
pregnant with wo, which eventually proved the occasion of the mortal
transgression--the last scene between our first parents at which both
were innocent and both were happy--although the superior intellect
already felt, and, in the slight altercation preceding this separation,
had already expressed a dim misgiving of some coming change: these are
the words, and in depth of pathos they have rarely been approached:--

  'Oft he to her his charge of quick return
  Repeated; she to him as oft engag'd
  To be returned by noon amid the bow'r,
  And all things in best order to invite
  Noon-tide repast, or afternoon's repose.
  Oh much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve!
  Of thy presumed return, event perverse!
  Thou never from that hour in Paradise
  Found'st either sweet repast, or sound repose.'

'_My_ Eve!' I exclaimed, 'partner in _my_ paradise, where art thou?
_Much failing_ thou wilt not be found, nor _much deceived_; innocent in
any case thou art; but, alas! too surely by this time _hapless_, and the
victim of some diabolic wickedness.' Thus I murmured to myself; thus I
ejaculated; thus I apostrophized my Agnes; then again came a stormier
mood. I could not sit still; I could not stand in quiet; I threw the
book from me with violence against the wall; I began to hurry backwards
and forwards in a short uneasy walk, when suddenly a sound, a step; it
was the sound of the garden-gate opening, followed by a hasty tread.
Whose tread? Not for a moment could it be fancied the oread step which
belonged to that daughter of the hills--my wife, my Agnes; no, it was
the dull massy tread of a man: and immediately there came a loud blow
upon the door, and in the next moment, the bell having been found, a
furious peal of ringing. Oh coward heart! not for a lease of immortality
could I have gone forwards myself. My breath failed me; an interval
came in which respiration seemed to be stifled--the blood to halt in its
current; and then and there I recognised in myself the force and living
truth of that Scriptural description of a heart consciously beset by
evil without escape: 'Susannah _sighed_.' Yes, a long, long sigh--a
deep, deep sigh--that is, the natural language by which the over-charged
heart utters forth the wo that else would break it. I sighed--oh how
profoundly! But that did not give me power to move. Who will go to the
door? I whispered audibly. Who is at the door? was the inaudible whisper
of my heart. Then might be seen the characteristic differences of the
three women. That one, whom I suspected, I heard raising an upper window
to look out and reconnoitre. The affectionate Rachael, on the other
hand, ran eagerly down stairs; but Hannah, half dressed, even her
bosom exposed, passed her like a storm; and before I heard any sound of
opening a door, I saw from the spot where I stood the door already wide
open, and a man in the costume of a policeman. All that he said I could
not hear; but this I heard--that I was wanted at the police office, and
had better come off without delay. He seemed then to get a glimpse of
me, and to make an effort towards coming nearer; but I slunk away, and
left to Hannah the task of drawing from him any circumstances which he
might know. But apparently there was not much to tell, or rather, said
I, there is too much, the _much_ absorbs the _many_; some one mighty
evil transcends and quells all particulars. At length the door was
closed, and the man was gone. Hannah crept slowly along the passage, and
looked in hesitatingly. Her very movements and stealthy pace testified
that she had heard nothing which, even by comparison, she could think
good news. 'Tell me not now, Hannah,' I said; 'wait till we are in the
open air.' She went up stairs again. How short seemed the time till she
descended! how I longed for further respite! 'Hannah!' I said at length
when we were fairly moving upon the road, 'Hannah! I am too sure you
have nothing good to tell. But now tell me the worst, and let that be in
the fewest words possible.'

'Sir,' she said, 'we had better wait until we reach the office; for
really I could not understand the man. He says that my mistress is
detained upon some charge; but _what_, I could not at all make out. He
was a man that knew something of you, Sir, I believe, and he wished to
be civil, and kept saying, "Oh! I dare say it will turn out nothing
at all, many such charges are made idly and carelessly, and some
maliciously." "But what charges?" I cried, and then he wanted to speak
privately to you. But I told him that of all persons he must not speak
to you, if he had anything painful to tell; for that you were too much
disturbed already, and had been for some hours, out of anxiety and
terror about my mistress, to bear much more. So, when he heard that, he
was less willing to speak freely than before. He might prove wrong, he
said; he might give offence; things might turn out far otherwise than
according to first appearances; for his part, he could not believe
anything amiss of so sweet a lady. And after all, it would be better to
wait till we reached the office.'

Thus much then was clear--Agnes was under some accusation. This was
already worse than the worst I had anticipated. 'And then,' said I,
thinking aloud to Hannah, 'one of two things is apparent to me; either
the accusation is one of pure hellish malice, without a color of
probability or the shadow of a foundation, and that way, alas! I am
driven in my fears by that Hungarian woman's prophecy; or, which but for
my desponding heart I should be more inclined to think, the charge
has grown out of my poor wife's rustic ignorance as to the usages then
recently established by law with regard to the kind of money that could
be legally tendered. This, however, was a suggestion that did not tend
to alleviate my anxiety; and my nervousness had mounted to a painful,
almost to a disabling degree, by the time we reached the office. Already
on our road thither some parties had passed us who were conversing with
eagerness upon the case: so much we collected from the many and ardent
expressions about 'the lady's beauty,' though the rest of such words as
we could catch were ill calculated to relieve my suspense. This,
then, at least, was certain--that my poor timid Agnes had already been
exhibited before a tumultuous crowd; that her name and reputation had
gone forth as a subject of discussion for the public; and that the
domestic seclusion and privacy within which it was her matronly
privilege to move had already undergone a rude violation.

The office, and all the purlieus of the office, were occupied by a dense
crowd. That, perhaps, was always the case, more or less, at this time
of day; but at present the crowd was manifestly possessed by a more than
ordinary interest; and there was a unity in this possessing interest;
all were talking on the same subject, the case in which Agnes had so
recently appeared in some character or other; and by this time it became
but too certain in the character of an accused person. Pity was the
prevailing sentiment amongst the mob; but the opinions varied much as to
the probable criminality of the prisoner. I made my way into the office.
The presiding magistrates had all retired for the afternoon, and would
not reassemble until eight o'clock in the evening. Some clerks only
or officers of the court remained, who were too much harassed by
applications for various forms and papers connected with the routine of
public business, and by other official duties which required signatures
or attestations, to find much leisure for answering individual
questions. Some, however, listened with a marked air of attention to my
earnest request for the circumstantial details of the case, but finally
referred me to a vast folio volume, in which were entered all the
charges, of whatever nature, involving any serious tendency--in fact,
all that exceeded a misdemeanor--in the regular chronological succession
according to which they came before the magistrate. Here, in this vast
calendar of guilt and misery, amidst the _aliases_ or cant designations
of ruffians, prostitutes, felons, stood the description, at full length,
Christian and surnames all properly registered, of my Agnes--of her
whose very name had always sounded to my ears like the very echo of
mountain innocence, purity, and pastoral simplicity. Here in another
column stood the name and residence of her accuser. I shall call him
_Barratt_, for that was amongst his names, and a name by which he had at
one period of his infamous life been known to the public, though not his
principal name, or the one which he had thought fit to assume at
this era. James Barratt, then, as I shall here call him, was a
haberdasher--keeping a large and conspicuous shop in a very crowded and
what was then considered a fashionable part of the city. The charge was
plain and short. Did I live to read it? It accused Agnes M---- of having
on that morning secreted in her muff, and feloniously carried away, a
valuable piece of Mechlin lace, the property of James Barratt. And the
result of the first examination was thus communicated in a separate
column, written in red ink--'Remanded to the second day after to-morrow
for final examination.' Everything in this sin-polluted register was
in manuscript; but at night the records of each day were regularly
transferred to a printed journal, enlarged by comments and explanatory
descriptions from some one of the clerks, whose province it was to
furnish this intelligence to the public journals. On that same night,
therefore, would go forth to the world such an account of the case, and
such a description of my wife's person, as would inevitably summon
to the next exhibition of her misery, as by special invitation and
advertisement, the whole world of this vast metropolis--the idle, the
curious, the brutal, the hardened amateur in spectacles of wo, and the
benign philanthropist who frequents such scenes with the purpose of
carrying alleviation to their afflictions. All alike, whatever might
be their motives or the spirit of their actions, would rush (as to
some grand festival of curiosity and sentimental luxury) to this public
martyrdom of my innocent wife.

Meantime, what was the first thing to be done? Manifestly, to see Agnes:
her account of the affair might suggest the steps to be taken. Prudence,
therefore, at any rate, prescribed this course; and my heart would not
have tolerated any other. I applied, therefore, at once, for information
as to the proper mode of effecting this purpose without delay. What
was my horror at learning that, by a recent regulation of all the
police-offices, under the direction of the public minister who presided
over that department of the national administration, no person could be
admitted to an interview with any accused party during the progress of
the official examinations; or, in fact, until the final committal of
the prisoner for trial. This rule was supposed to be attended by great
public advantages, and had rarely been relaxed--never, indeed, without a
special interposition of the police minister authorizing its suspension.
But was the exclusion absolute and universal? Might not, at least,
a female servant, simply as the bearer of such articles as were
indispensable to female delicacy and comfort, have access to her
mistress? No; the exclusion was total and unconditional. To argue the
point was manifestly idle; the subordinate officers had no discretion in
the matter; nor, in fact, had any other official person, whatever were
his rank, except the supreme one; and to him I neither had any obvious
means of introduction, nor (in case of obtaining such an introduction)
any chance of success; for the spirit of the rule, I foresaw it would be
answered, applied with especial force to cases like the present.

Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation,
superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery
that was now opening its artillery upon me--for misery has a privilege,
and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing--had combined to procure for
me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. Answers had been given
with precision, explanations made at length, and anxiety shown
to satisfy my inquiries. But this could not last; the inexorable
necessities of public business coming back in a torrent upon the
official people after this momentary interruption, forbade them to
indulge any further consideration for an individual case, and I saw that
I must not stay any longer. I was rapidly coming to be regarded as a
hinderance to the movement of public affairs; and the recollection
that I might again have occasion for some appeal to these men in their
official characters, admonished me not to abuse my privilege of the
moment. After returning thanks, therefore, for the disposition shown to
oblige me, I retired.

Slowly did I and Hannah retrace our steps. Hannah sustained, in the tone
of her spirits, by the extremity of her anger, a mood of feeling which
I did not share. Indignation was to her in the stead of consolation and
hope. I, for my part, could not seek even a momentary shelter from my
tempestuous affliction in that temper of mind. The man who could accuse
my Agnes, and accuse her of such a crime, I felt to be a monster; and
in my thoughts he was already doomed to a bloody atonement (atonement!
alas! what atonement!) whenever the time arrived that _her_ cause would
not be prejudiced, or the current of public feeling made to turn in his
favor by investing him with the semblance of an injured or suffering
person. So much was settled in my thoughts with the stern serenity of a
decree issuing from a judgment-seat. But that gave no relief, no shadow
of relief, to the misery which was now consuming me. Here was an end, in
one hour, to the happiness of a life. In one hour it had given way, root
and branch--had melted like so much frost-work, or a pageant of vapory
exhalations. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and yet for ever
and ever, I comprehended the total ruin of my situation. The case, as
others might think, was yet in suspense; and there was room enough for
very rational hopes, especially where there was an absolute certainty of
innocence. Total freedom from all doubt on that point seemed to justify
almost more than hopes. This might be said, and most people would have
been more or less consoled by it. I was not. I felt as certain, as
irredeemably, as hopelessly certain of the final results as though I
had seen the record in the books of Heaven. 'Hope nothing,' I said to
myself; 'think not of hope in this world, but think only how best to
walk steadily, and not to reel like a creature wanting discourse of
reason, or incapable of religious hopes under the burden which it has
pleased God to impose, and which in this life cannot be shaken off. The
countenance of man is made to look upward and to the skies. Thither also
point henceforwards your heart and your thoughts. Never again let your
thoughts travel earthwards. Settle them on the heavens, to which your
Agnes is already summoned. The call is clear, and not to be mistaken.
Little in _her_ fate now depends upon you, or upon anything that man
can do. Look, therefore, to yourself; see that you make not shipwreck
of your heavenly freight because your earthly freight is lost; and miss
not, by any acts of wild and presumptuous despair, that final reunion
with your Agnes, which can only be descried through vistas that open
through the heavens.'

Such were the thoughts, thoughts often made audible, which came
spontaneously like oracles from afar, as I strode homewards with Hannah
by my side. Her, meantime, I seemed to hear; for at times I seemed and
I intended to answer her. But answer her I did not; for not ten words of
all that she said did I really and consciously hear. How I went through
that night is more entirely a blank in my memory, more entirely a
chapter of chaos and the confusion of chaos, than any other passage
the most impressive in my life. If I even slumbered for a moment, as at
intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing
or pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a
momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this
enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation
_as_ rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if the
momentary trance--this fugitive beguilement of my wo--had been conceded
by a demon's subtle malice only with the purpose of barbing the pang,
by thus forcing it into a stronger relief through the insidious peace
preceding it. It is a well known and most familiar experience to all
the sons and daughters of affliction, that under no circumstances is the
piercing, lancinating torment of a recent calamity felt so keenly as in
the first moments of awaking in the morning from the night's slumbers.
Just at the very instant when the clouds of sleep, and the whole
fantastic illusions of dreaminess are dispersing, just as the
realities of life are re-assuming their steadfast forms--re-shaping
themselves--and settling anew into those fixed relations which they are
to preserve throughout the waking hours; in that particular crisis of
transition from the unreal to the real, the wo which besieges the brain
and the life-springs at the heart rushes in afresh amongst the other
crowd of realities, and has at the moment of restoration literally the
force and liveliness of a new birth--the very same pang, and no whit
feebler, as that which belonged to it when it was first made known. From
the total hush of oblivion which had buried it and sealed it up, as it
were, during the sleeping hours, it starts into sudden life on our
first awaking, and is to all intents and purposes a new and not an
old affliction--one which brings with it the old original shock which
attended its first annunciation.

That night--that first night of separation from my wife--_how_ it
passed, I know not; I know only _that_ it passed, I being in our common
bed-chamber, that holiest of all temples that are consecrated to human
attachments, whenever the heart is pure of man and woman, and the love
is strong--I being in that bedchamber, once the temple now the sepulchre
of our happiness,--I there, and my wife--my innocent wife--in a dungeon.
As the morning light began to break, somebody knocked at the door; it
was Hannah: she took my hand--misery levels all feeble distinctions of
station, sex, age--she noticed my excessive feverishness, and gravely
remonstrated with me upon the necessity there was that I should maintain
as much health as possible for the sake of 'others,' if not for myself.
She then brought me some tea, which refreshed me greatly; for I
had tasted nothing at all beyond a little water since the preceding
morning's breakfast. This refreshment seemed to relax and thaw the stiff
frozen state of cheerless, rayless despair in which I had passed the
night; I became susceptible of consolation--that consolation which lies
involved in kindness and gentleness of manner--if not susceptible more
than before of any positive hope. I sat down; and, having no witnesses
to my weakness but this kind and faithful woman, I wept, and I found a
relief in tears; and she, with the ready sympathy of woman, wept along
with me. All at once she ventured upon the circumstances (so far as she
had been able to collect them from the reports of those who had been
present at the examination) of our calamity. There was little indeed
either to excite or to gratify any interest or curiosity separate from
the _personal_ interest inevitably connected with a case to which there
were two such parties as a brutal, sensual, degraded ruffian, on one
side in character of accuser, and on the other as defendant, a meek
angel of a woman, timid and fainting from the horrors of her situation,
and under the licentious gaze of the crowd--yet, at the same time, bold
in conscious innocence, and in the very teeth of the suspicions which
beset her, winning the good opinion, as well as the good wishes of all
who saw her. There had been at this first examination little for her to
say beyond the assigning her name, age, and place of abode; and here
it was fortunate that her own excellent good sense concurred with
her perfect integrity and intuitive hatred of all indirect or crooked
courses in prompting her to an undisguised statement of the simple
truth, without a momentary hesitation or attempt either at evasion or
suppression. With equally good intentions in similar situations many a
woman has seriously injured her cause by slight evasions of the entire
truth, where nevertheless her only purpose has been the natural and
ingenuous one of seeking to save the reputation untainted of a name
which she felt to have been confided to her keeping. The purpose was an
honorable one, but erroneously pursued. Agnes fell into no such error.
She answered calmly, simply, and truly, to every question put by the
magistrates; and beyond _that_ there was little opportunity for her to
speak; the whole business of this preliminary examination being confined
to the deposition of the accuser as to the circumstances under which he
alleged the act of felonious appropriation to have taken place. These
circumstances were perfectly uninteresting, considered in themselves;
but amongst them was one which to us had the most shocking interest,
from the absolute proof thus furnished of a deep-laid plot against
Agnes. But for this one circumstance there would have been a possibility
that the whole had originated in error--error growing out of and
acting upon a nature originally suspicious, and confirmed perhaps by
an unfortunate experience. And in proportion as that was possible, the
chances increased that the accuser might, as the examinations advanced,
and the winning character of the accused party began to develop itself,
begin to see his error, and to retract his own over-hasty suspicions.
But now we saw at a glance that for this hope there was no countenance
whatever, since one solitary circumstance sufficed to establish a
conspiracy. The deposition bore--that the lace had been secreted and
afterwards detected in a muff; now it was a fact as well known to both
of us as the fact of Agnes having gone out at all--that she had laid
aside her winter's dress for the first time on this genial sunny day.
Muff she had not at the time, nor could have had appropriately from the
style of her costume in other respects. What was the effect upon us of
this remarkable discovery! Of course there died at once the hope of any
abandonment by the prosecutor of his purpose; because here was proof of
a predetermined plot. This hope died at once; but then, as it was one
which never had presented itself to my mind, I lost nothing by which I
had ever been solaced. On the other hand, it will be obvious that a new
hope at the same time arose to take its place, viz., the reasonable one
that by this single detection, if once established, we might raise a
strong presumption of conspiracy, and moreover that, as a leading fact
or clue, it might serve to guide us in detecting others. Hannah
was sanguine in this expectation; and for a moment her hopes were
contagiously exciting to mine. But the hideous despondency which in
my mind had settled upon the whole affair from the very first, the
superstitious presentiment I had of a total blight brooding over the
entire harvest of my life and its promises, (tracing itself originally,
I am almost ashamed to own, up to that prediction of the Hungarian
woman)--denied me steady light, anything--all in short but a wandering
ray of hope. It was right, of course, nay, indispensable, that the
circumstance of the muff should be strongly insisted upon at the
next examination, pressed against the prosecutor, and sifted to the
uttermost. An able lawyer would turn this to a triumphant account; and
it would be admirable as a means of pre-engaging the good opinion as
well as the sympathies of the public in behalf of the prisoner. But,
for its final effect--my conviction remained, not to be shaken, that all
would be useless; that our doom had gone forth, and was irrevocable.

Let me not linger too much over those sad times. Morning came on as
usual; for it is strange, but true, that to the very wretched it seems
wonderful that times and seasons should keep their appointed courses
in the midst of such mighty overthrows, and such interruption to the
courses of their own wonted happiness and their habitual expectations.
Why should morning and night, why should all movements in the natural
world be so regular, whilst in the moral world all is so irregular
and anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the
mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet
ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will
be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonizing punishment,
has derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the
day would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was _but_
a day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness must and
would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual, and shine
with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what _had_ indeed
suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but would then have
ceased to suffer. 'La Journée,' said Damien,

  'La journée sera dure, mais elle se passera.'

'----_Se passera_:' yes, that is true, I whispered to myself; my day
also, my season of trial will be hard to bear; but that also will have
an end; that also '_se passera_.' Thus I talked or thought so long as I
thought at all; for the hour was now rapidly approaching, when thinking
in any shape would for some time be at an end for me.

That day, as the morning advanced, I went again, accompanied by Hannah,
to the police court and to the prison--a vast, ancient, in parts
ruinous, and most gloomy pile of building. In those days the
administration of justice was, if not more corrupt, certainly in its
inferior departments by far more careless than it is at present, and
liable to thousands of interruptions and mal-practices, supporting
themselves upon old traditionary usages which required at least half
a century, and the shattering everywhere given to old systems by the
French Revolution, together with the universal energy of mind applied
to those subjects over the whole length and breadth of Christendom, to
approach with any effectual reforms. Knowing this, and having myself had
direct personal cognisance of various cases in which bribery had been
applied with success, I was not without considerable hope that perhaps
Hannah and myself might avail ourselves of this irregular passport
through the gates of the prison. And, had the new regulation been of
somewhat longer standing, there is little doubt that I should have been
found right; unfortunately, as yet it had all the freshness of newborn
vigor, and kept itself in remembrance by the singular irritation it
excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one particular minister,
new to the possession of power, anxious to distinguish himself, proud
of his creative functions within the range of his office, and very
sensitively jealous on the point of opposition to his mandates. Vain,
therefore, on this day were all my efforts to corrupt the jailers; and,
in fact, anticipating a time when I might have occasion to corrupt some
of them for a more important purpose and on a larger scale, I did not
think it prudent to proclaim my character beforehand as one who tampered
with such means, and thus to arm against myself those jealousies in
official people, which it was so peculiarly important that I should keep
asleep.

All that day, however, I lingered about the avenues and vast courts
in the precincts of the prison, and near one particular wing of the
building, which had been pointed out to me by a jailer as the section
allotted to those who were in the situation of Agnes; that is, waiting
their final commitment for trial. The building generally he could
indicate with certainty, but he professed himself unable to indicate
the particular part of it which 'the young woman brought in on the day
previous' would be likely to occupy; consequently he could not point
out the window from which her cell (her '_cell_!' what a word!) would be
lighted. 'But, master,' he went on to say, 'I would advise nobody to try
that game.' He looked with an air so significant, and at the same time
used a gesture so indicative of private understanding, that I at
once apprehended his meaning, and assured him that he had altogether
misconstrued my drift; that, as to attempts at escape, or at any mode of
communicating with the prisoner from the outside, I trusted all _that_
was perfectly needless; and that at any rate in my eyes it was perfectly
hopeless. 'Well, master,' he replied, 'that's neither here nor there.
You've come down handsomely, that I _will_ say; and where a gentleman
acts like a gentleman, and behaves himself as such, I'm not the man to
go and split upon him for a word. To be sure it's quite nat'ral that a
gentleman--put case that a young woman is his fancy woman--it's nothing
but nat'ral that he should want to get her out of such an old rat-hole
as this, where many's the fine-timbered creature, both he and she, that
has lain to rot, and has never got out of the old trap at all, first
or last'----'How so?' I interrupted him; 'surely they don't detain the
corpses of prisoners?' 'Ay, but mind you--put case that he or that she
should die in this rat-trap before sentence is past, why then the prison
counts them as its own children, and buries them in its own chapel--that
old stack of pigeon-holes that you see up yonder to the right hand.' So
then, after all, thought I, if my poor Agnes should, in her desolation
and solitary confinement to these wretched walls, find her frail
strength give way--should the moral horrors of her situation work their
natural effect upon her health, and she should chance to die within this
dungeon, here within this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection,
and in that case her prison-doors have already closed upon her for
ever. The man, who perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature,
though tainted by the mercenary feelings too inevitably belonging to
his situation, seemed to guess at the character of my ruminations by the
change of my countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in
so much trouble;' and it seemed to increase his respect for me that this
trouble should be directed to the case of a woman, for he appeared
to have a manly sense of the peculiar appeal made to the honor and
gallantry of man, by the mere general fact of the feebleness and the
dependence of woman. I looked at him more attentively in consequence of
the feeling tone in which he now spoke, and was surprised that I had not
more particularly noticed him before; he was a fine looking, youngish
man, with a bold Robin-hood style of figure and appearance; and, morally
speaking, he was absolutely transfigured to my eyes by the effect worked
upon him for the moment, through the simple calling up of his better
nature. However, he recurred to his cautions about the peril in a legal
sense of tampering with the windows, bolts, and bars of the old decaying
prison; which, in fact, precisely according to the degree in which its
absolute power over its prisoners was annually growing less and less,
grew more and more jealous of its own reputation, and punished the
attempts to break loose with the more severity, in exact proportion as
they were the more tempting by the chances of success. I persisted in
disowning any schemes of the sort, and especially upon the ground of
their hopelessness. But this, on the other hand, was a ground that in
his inner thoughts he treated with scorn; and I could easily see that,
with a little skilful management of opportunity, I might, upon occasion,
draw from him all the secrets he knew as to the special points of
infirmity in this old ruinous building. For the present, and until it
should certainly appear that there was some use to be derived from
this species of knowledge, I forbore to raise superfluous suspicions
by availing myself further of his communicative disposition. Taking,
however, the precaution of securing his name, together with his
particular office and designation in the prison, I parted from him as
if to go home, but in fact to resume my sad roamings up and down the
precincts of the jail.

What made these precincts much larger than otherwise they would have
been, was the circumstance that, by a usage derived from older days,
both criminal prisoners and those who were prisoners for debt, equally
fell under the custody of this huge caravanserai for the indifferent
reception of crime, of misdemeanor, and of misfortune. And those who
came under the two first titles, were lodged here through all stages of
their connection with public justice; alike when mere objects of vague
suspicion to the police, when under examination upon a specific charge,
when fully committed for trial, when convicted and under sentence,
awaiting the execution of that sentence, and, in a large proportion of
cases, even through their final stage of punishment, when it happened
to be of any nature compatible with in-door confinement. Hence it arose
that the number of those who haunted the prison gates, with or without
a title to admission, was enormous; all the relatives, or more properly
the acquaintances and connections of the criminal population within
the prison, being swelled by all the families of needy debtors who came
daily, either to offer the consolation of their society, or to diminish
their common expenditure by uniting their slender establishments. One
of the rules applied to the management of this vast multitude that were
every day candidates for admission was, that to save the endless trouble
as well as risk, perhaps, of opening and shutting the main gates
to every successive arrival, periodic intervals were fixed for the
admission by wholesale; and as these periods came round every two hours,
it would happen at many parts of the day that vast crowds accumulated
waiting for the next opening of the gate. These crowds were assembled
in two or three large outer courts, in which also were many stalls and
booths, kept there upon some local privilege of ancient inheritance,
or upon some other plea made good by gifts or bribes--some by Jews
and others by Christians, perhaps equally Jewish. Superadded to these
stationary elements of this miscellaneous population, were others drawn
thither by pure motives of curiosity, so that altogether an almost
permanent mob was gathered together in these courts; and amid this mob
it was,--from I know not what definite motive, partly because I thought
it probable that amongst these people I should hear the cause of Agnes
peculiarly the subject of conversation; and so, in fact, it did really
happen,--but partly, and even more, I believe, because I now awfully
began to shrink from solitude. Tumult I must have, and distraction of
thought. Amid this mob, I say, it was that I passed two days. Feverish I
had been from the first--and from bad to worse, in such a case, was, at
any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also amongst this crowd of
the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the desponding, and the
dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger body of contagion
lurking than according to their mere numerical expectations. There was
at that season a very extensive depopulation going on in some quarters
of this great metropolis, and in other cities of the same empire, by
means of a very malignant typhus. This fever is supposed to be the
peculiar product of jails; and though it had not as yet been felt as
a scourge and devastator of this particular jail, or at least the
consequent mortality had been hitherto kept down to a moderate amount,
yet it was highly probable that a certain quantity of contagion, much
beyond the proportion of other popular assemblages less uniformly
wretched in their composition, was here to be found all day long; and
doubtless my excited state, and irritable habit of body, had offered
a peculiar predisposition that favored the rapid development of this
contagion. However this might be, the result was, that on the evening
of the second day which I spent in haunting the purlieus of the prison,
(consequently the night preceding the second public examination of
Agnes,) I was attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury, that
before morning I had lost all command of my intellectual faculties. For
some weeks I became a pitiable maniac, and in every sense the wreck of
my former self; and seven entire weeks, together with the better half of
an eighth week, had passed over my head whilst I lay unconscious of time
and its dreadful freight of events, excepting in so far as my disordered
brain, by its fantastic coinages, created endless mimicries and
mockeries of these events--less substantial, but oftentimes less
afflicting, or less agitating. It would have been well for me had my
destiny decided that I was not to be recalled to this world of wo. But
I had no such happiness in store. I recovered, and through twenty and
eight years my groans have recorded the sorrow I feel that I did.

       *       *       *       *       *

I shall not rehearse circumstantially, and point by point, the sad
unfolding, as it proceeded through successive revelations to me, of all
which had happened during my state of physical incapacity. When I first
became aware that my wandering senses had returned to me, and knew, by
the cessation of all throbbings, and the unutterable pains that had
so long possessed my brain, that I was now returning from the gates of
death, a sad confusion assailed me as to some indefinite cloud of evil
that had been hovering over me at the time when I first fell into a
state of insensibility. For a time I struggled vainly to recover the
lost connection of my thoughts, and I endeavored ineffectually to
address myself to sleep. I opened my eyes, but found the glare of light
painful beyond measure. Strength, however, it seemed to me that I had,
and more than enough, to raise myself out of bed. I made the attempt,
but fell back, almost giddy with the effort. At the sound of the
disturbance which I had thus made, a woman whom I did not know came from
behind a curtain, and spoke to me. Shrinking from any communication
with a stranger, especially one whose discretion I could not estimate in
making discoveries to me with the requisite caution, I asked her simply
what o'clock it was.

'Eleven in the forenoon,' she replied.

'And what day of the month?'

'The second,' was her brief answer.

I felt almost a sense of shame in adding--; 'The second! but of what
month?'

'Of June,' was the startling rejoinder.

On the 8th of April I had fallen ill, and it was now actually the 2d
of June. Oh! sickening calculation! revolting register of hours! for in
that same moment which brought back this one recollection, perhaps by
steadying my brain, rushed back in a torrent all the other dreadful
remembrances of the period, and now the more so, because, though the
event was still uncertain as regarded my knowledge, it must have become
dreadfully certain as regarded the facts of the case, and the happiness
of all who were concerned. Alas! one little circumstance too painfully
assured me that this event had not been a happy one. Had Agnes been
restored to her liberty and her home, where would she have been
found but watching at my bed-side? That too certainly I knew, and the
inference was too bitter to support.

On this same day, some hours afterwards, upon Hannah's return from the
city, I received from her, and heard with perfect calmness, the whole
sum of evil which awaited me. Little Francis--she took up her tale at
that point--'was with God:' so she expressed herself. He had died of the
same fever which had attacked me--had died and been buried nearly
five weeks before. Too probably he had caught the infection from me.
Almost--such are the caprices of human feeling--almost I could have
rejoiced that this young memorial of my vanished happiness had vanished
also. It gave me a pang, nevertheless, that the grave should thus have
closed upon him before I had seen his fair little face again. But I
steeled my heart to hear worse things than this. Next she went on to
inform me that already, on the first or second day of our calamity, she
had taken upon herself, without waiting for authority, on observing the
rapid approaches of illness in me, and arguing the state of helplessness
which would follow, to write off at once a summons in the most urgent
terms to the brother of my wife. This gentleman, whom I shall call
Pierpoint, was a high-spirited, generous young man as I have ever known.
When I say that he was a sportsman, that at one season of the year he
did little else than pursue his darling amusement of fox-hunting, for
which indeed he had almost a maniacal passion--saying this, I shall
already have prejudged him in the opinions of many, who fancy all such
persons the slaves of corporeal enjoyments. But, with submission, the
truth lies the other way. According to my experience, people of these
habits have their bodies more than usually under their command, as being
subdued by severe exercise; and their minds, neither better nor worse on
an average than those of their neighbors, are more available from being
so much more rarely clogged by morbid habits in that uneasy yoke-fellow
of the intellectual part--the body. He at all events was a man to
justify in his own person this way of thinking; for he was a man not
only of sound, but even of bold and energetic intellect, and in all
moral respects one whom any man might feel proud to call his friend.
This young man, Pierpoint, without delay obeyed the summons; and on
being made acquainted with what had already passed, the first step he
took was to call upon Barratt, and without further question than what
might ascertain his identity, he proceeded to inflict upon him a severe
horsewhipping. A worse step on his sister's account he could not have
taken. Previously to this the popular feeling had run strongly against
Barratt, but now its unity was broken. A new element was introduced
into the question: Democratic feelings were armed against this outrage;
gentlemen and nobles, it was said, thought themselves not amenable
to justice; and again, the majesty of the law was offended at this
intrusion upon an affair already under solemn course of adjudication.
Everything, however, passes away under the healing hand of time, and
this also faded from the public mind. People remembered also that he
was a brother, and in that character, at any rate, had a right to some
allowances for his intemperance; and what quickened the oblivion of the
affair was, which in itself was sufficiently strange, that Barratt did
not revive the case in the public mind by seeking legal reparation for
his injuries. It was, however, still matter of regret that Pierpoint
should have indulged himself in this movement of passion, since
undoubtedly it broke and disturbed the else uniform stream of public
indignation, by investing the original aggressor with something like the
character of an injured person; and therefore with some set-off to plead
against his own wantonness of malice;--his malice might now assume the
nobler aspect of revenge.

Thus far, in reporting the circumstances, Hannah had dallied--thus far
I had rejoiced that she dallied, with the main burden of the wo; but now
there remained nothing to dally with any longer--and she rushed along in
her narrative, hurrying to tell--I hurrying to hear. A second, a third
examination had ensued, then a final committal--all this within a week.
By that time all the world was agitated with the case; literally not
the city only, vast as that city was, but the nation was convulsed and
divided into parties upon the question, Whether the prosecution were one
of mere malice or not? The very government of the land was reported to
be equally interested, and almost equally divided in opinion. In this
state of public feeling came the trial. Image to yourself, oh reader,
whosoever you are, the intensity of the excitement which by that time
had arisen in all people to be spectators of the scene--then image to
yourself the effect of all this, a perfect consciousness that in
herself as a centre was settled the whole mighty interest of
the exhibition--that interest again of so dubious and mixed a
character--sympathy in some with mere misfortune--sympathy in others
with female frailty and guilt, not perhaps founded upon an absolute
unwavering belief in her innocence, even amongst those who were most
loud and positive as partisans in affirming it,--and then remember that
all this hideous scenical display and notoriety settled upon one whose
very nature, constitutionally timid, recoiled with the triple agony of
womanly shame--of matronly dignity--of insulted innocence, from every
mode and shape of public display. Combine all these circumstances and
elements of the case, and you may faintly enter into the situation of my
poor Agnes. Perhaps the best way to express it at once is by recurring
to the case of a young female Christian martyr, in the early ages of
Christianity, exposed in the bloody amphitheatre of Rome or Verona, to
'fight with wild beasts,' as it was expressed in mockery--she to fight
the lamb to fight with lions! But in reality the young martyr _had_
a fight to maintain, and a fight (in contempt of that cruel mockery)
fiercer than the fiercest of her persecutors could have faced
perhaps--the combat with the instincts of her own shrinking, trembling,
fainting nature. Such a fight had my Agnes to maintain; and at that time
there was a large party of gentlemen in whom the gentlemanly instinct
was predominant, and who felt so powerfully the cruel indignities of her
situation, that they made a public appeal in her behalf. One thing, and
a strong one, which they said, was this:--'We all talk and move in this
case as if, because the question appears doubtful to some people, and
the accused party to some people wears a doubtful character, it would
follow that she therefore had in reality a mixed character composed in
joint proportions of the best and the worst that is imputed to her. But
let us not forget that this mixed character belongs not to her, but
to the infirmity of our human judgments--_they_ are mixed--_they_ are
dubious--but she is not--she is, or she is not, guilty--there is no
middle case--and let us consider for a single moment, that if this young
lady (as many among us heartily believe) _is_ innocent, then and upon
that supposition let us consider how cruel we should all think the
public exposure which aggravates the other injuries (as in that case
they must be thought) to which her situation exposes her.' They went on
to make some suggestions for the officers of the court in preparing
the arrangements for the trial, and some also for the guidance of
the audience, which showed the same generous anxiety for sparing the
feelings of the prisoner. If these did not wholly succeed in repressing
the open avowal of coarse and brutal curiosity amongst the intensely
vulgar, at least they availed to diffuse amongst the neutral and
indifferent part of the public a sentiment of respect and forbearance
which, emanating from high quarters, had a very extensive influence upon
most of what met the eye or the ear of my poor wife. She, on the day of
trial, was supported by her brother; and by that time she needed support
indeed. I was reported to be dying; her little son was dead; neither had
she been allowed to see him. Perhaps these things, by weaning her from
all further care about life, might have found their natural effect in
making her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its issue.
And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering
sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies,
'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the
deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry
light--sweet and woful to remember. Then----but why linger? I hurry to
the close: she was pronounced guilty; whether by a jury or a bench of
judges, I do not say--having determined, from the beginning, to give no
hint of the land in which all these events happened; neither is that of
the slightest consequence. Guilty she was pronounced: but sentence at
that time was deferred. Ask me not, I beseech you, about the muff
or other circumstances inconsistent with the hostile evidence. These
circumstances had the testimony, you will observe, of my own servants
only; nay, as it turned out, of one servant exclusively: _that_
naturally diminished their value. And, on the other side, evidence was
arrayed, perjury was suborned, that would have wrecked a wilderness of
simple truth trusting to its own unaided forces. What followed? Did this
judgment of the court settle the opinion of the public? Opinion of
the public! Did it settle the winds? Did it settle the motion of the
Atlantic? Wilder, fiercer, and louder grew the cry against the wretched
accuser: mighty had been the power over the vast audience of the
dignity, the affliction, the perfect simplicity, and the Madonna beauty
of the prisoner. That beauty so childlike, and at the same time so
saintly, made, besides, so touching in its pathos by means of the
abandonment--the careless abandonment and the infinite desolation of her
air and manner--would of itself, and without further aid, have made many
converts. Much more was done by the simplicity of her statements, and
the indifference with which she neglected to improve any strong points
in her own favor--the indifference, as every heart perceived, of
despairing grief. Then came the manners on the hostile side--the haggard
consciousness of guilt, the drooping tone, the bravado and fierce strut
which sought to dissemble all this. Not one amongst all the witnesses,
assembled on that side, had (by all agreement) the bold natural tone of
conscious uprightness. Hence it could not be surprising that the storm
of popular opinion made itself heard with a louder and a louder sound.
The government itself began to be disturbed; the ministers of the
sovereign were agitated; and, had no menaces been thrown out, it was
generally understood that they would have given way to the popular
voice, now continually more distinct and clamorous. In the midst of all
this tumult, obscure murmurs began to arise that Barratt had practised
the same or similar villanies in former instances. One case in
particular was beginning to be whispered about, which at once threw
a light upon the whole affair: it was the case of a young and very
beautiful married woman, who had been on the very brink of a catastrophe
such as had befallen my own wife, when some seasonable interference, of
what nature was not known, had critically delivered her. This case
arose 'like a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand,' then spread and
threatened to burst in tempest upon the public mind, when all at once,
more suddenly even than it had arisen, it was hushed up, or in some way
disappeared. But a trifling circumstance made it possible to trace
this case:--in after times, when means offered, but unfortunately no
particular purpose of good, nor any purpose, in fact, beyond that of
curiosity, it _was_ traced; and enough was soon ascertained to have
blown to fragments any possible conspiracy emanating from this Barratt,
had that been of any further importance. However, in spite of all that
money or art could effect, a sullen growl continued to be heard amongst
the populace of villanies many and profound that had been effected or
attempted by this Barratt; and accordingly, much in the same way as
was many years afterwards practised in London, when a hosier had caused
several young people to be prosecuted to death for passing forged
bank-notes, the wrath of the people showed itself in marking the shop
for vengeance upon any favorable occasion offering through fire or
riots, and in the mean time in deserting it. These things had been going
on for some time when I awoke from my long delirium; but the effect they
had produced upon a weak and obstinate and haughty government, or at
least upon the weak and obstinate and haughty member of the government
who presided in the police administration, was, to confirm and rivet the
line of conduct which had been made the object of popular denunciation.
More energetically, more scornfully, to express that determination of
flying in the face of public opinion and censure, four days before my
awakening, Agnes had been brought up to receive her sentence. On
that same day (nay, it was said in that same hour,) petitions, very
numerously signed, and various petitions from different ranks, different
ages, different sexes, were carried up to the throne, praying, upon
manifold grounds, but all noticing the extreme doubtfulness of the
case, for an unconditional pardon. By whose advice or influence, it was
guessed easily, though never exactly ascertained, these petitions were
unanimously, almost contemptuously rejected. And to express the contempt
of public opinion as powerfully as possible, Agnes was sentenced by the
court, reassembled in full pomp, order, and ceremonial costume, to a
punishment the severest that the laws allowed--viz. hard labor for ten
years. The people raged more than ever; threats public and private
were conveyed to the ears of the minister chiefly concerned in the
responsibility, and who had indeed, by empty and ostentatious talking,
assumed that responsibility to himself in a way that was perfectly
needless.

Thus stood matters when I awoke to consciousness: and this was the
fatal journal of the interval--interval so long as measured by my fierce
calendar of delirium--so brief measured by the huge circuit of
events which it embraced, and their mightiness for evil. Wrath, wrath
immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable, burned at my heart like
a cancer. The worst had come. And the thing which kills a man for
action--the living in two climates at once--a torrid and a frigid
zone--of hope and fear--that was past. Weak--suppose I were for the
moment: I felt that a day or two might bring back my strength. No
miserable tremors of hope _now_ shook my nerves: if they shook from that
inevitable rocking of the waters that follows a storm, so much might
be pardoned to the infirmity of a nature that could not lay aside its
fleshly necessities, nor altogether forego its homage to 'these frail
elements,' but which by inspiration already lived within a region
where no voices were heard but the spiritual voices of transcendent
passions--of

  'Wrongs unrevenged, and insults unredress'd.'

Six days from that time I was well--well and strong. I rose from bed; I
bathed; I dressed; dressed as if I were a bridegroom. And that _was_ in
fact a great day in my life. I was to see Agnes. Oh! yes: permission had
been obtained from the lordly minister that I should see my wife. Is it
possible? Can such condescensions exist? Yes: solicitations from
ladies, eloquent notes wet with ducal tears, these had won from the
thrice-radiant secretary, redolent of roseate attar, a countersign to
some order or other, by which I--yes I--under license of a fop, and
supervision of a jailer--was to see and for a time to converse with my
own wife.

The hour appointed for the first day's interview was eight o'clock
in the evening. On the outside of the jail all was summer light and
animation. The sports of children in the streets of mighty cities are
but sad, and too painfully recall the circumstances of freedom and
breezy nature that are not there. But still the pomp of glorious summer,
and the presence, 'not to be put by,' of the everlasting light, that
is either always present, or always dawning--these potent elements
impregnate the very city life, and the dim reflex of nature which is
found at the bottom of well-like streets, with more solemn powers to
move and to soothe in summer. I struck upon the prison gates, the first
among multitudes waiting to strike. Not because we struck, but because
the hour had sounded, suddenly the gate opened; and in we streamed. I,
as a visitor for the first time, was immediately distinguished by the
jailers, whose glance of the eye is fatally unerring. 'Who was it that I
wanted?' At the name a stir of emotion was manifest, even there: the dry
bones stirred and moved: the passions outside had long ago passed to the
interior of this gloomy prison: and not a man but had his hypothesis on
the case; not a man but had almost fought with some comrade (many had
literally fought) about the merits of their several opinions.

If any man had expected a scene at this reunion, he would have been
disappointed. Exhaustion, and the ravages of sorrow, had left to dear
Agnes so little power of animation or of action, that her emotions were
rather to be guessed at, both for kind and for degree, than directly
to have been perceived. She was in fact a sick patient, far gone in an
illness that should properly have confined her to bed; and was as much
past the power of replying to my frenzied exclamations, as a dying
victim of fever of entering upon a strife of argument. In bed, however,
she was not. When the door opened she was discovered sitting at a table
placed against the opposite wall, her head pillowed upon her arms, and
these resting upon the table. Her beautiful long auburn hair had escaped
from its confinement, and was floating over the table and her own
person. She took no notice of the disturbance made by our entrance, did
not turn, did not raise her head, nor make an effort to do so, nor by
any sign whatever intimate that she was conscious of our presence, until
the turnkey in a respectful tone announced me. Upon that a low groan, or
rather a feeble moan, showed that she had become aware of my presence,
and relieved me from all apprehension of causing too sudden a shock by
taking her in my arms. The turnkey had now retired; we were alone. I
knelt by her side, threw my arms about her, and pressed her to my heart.
She drooped her head upon my shoulder, and lay for some time like one
who slumbered; but, alas! not as she had used to slumber. Her breathing,
which had been like that of sinless infancy, was now frightfully short
and quick; she seemed not properly to breathe, but to gasp. This,
thought I, may be sudden agitation, and in that case she will gradually
recover; half an hour will restore her. Wo is me! she did _not_ recover;
and internally I said--she never _will_ recover. The arrows have gone
too deep for a frame so exquisite in its sensibility, and already her
hours are numbered.

At this first visit I said nothing to her about the past; _that_, and
the whole extent to which our communications should go, I left rather
to her own choice. At the second visit, however, upon some word or other
arising which furnished an occasion for touching on this hateful topic,
I pressed her, contrary to my own previous intention, for as full an
account of the fatal event as she could without a distressing effort
communicate. To my surprise she was silent--gloomily--almost it might
have seemed obstinately silent. A horrid thought came into my mind;
could it, might it have been possible that my noble-minded wife, such
she had ever seemed to me, was open to temptations of this nature? Could
it have been that in some moment of infirmity, when her better angel was
away from her side, she had yielded to a sudden impulse of frailty,
such as a second moment for consideration would have resisted, but which
unhappily had been followed by no such opportunity of retrieval? I
had heard of such things. Cases there were in our own times (and not
confined to one nation), when irregular impulses of this sort were known
to have haunted and besieged natures not otherwise ignoble and base.
I ran over some of the names amongst those which were taxed with this
propensity. More than one were the names of people in a technical sense
held noble. That, nor any other consideration abated my horror. Better,
I said, better, (because more compatible with elevation of mind,) better
to have committed some bloody act--some murderous act. Dreadful was the
panic I underwent. God pardon the wrong I did; and even now I pray
to him--as though the past thing were a future thing and capable
of change--that he would forbid her for ever to know what was the
derogatory thought I had admitted. I sometimes think, by recollecting a
momentary blush that suffused her marble countenance,--I think--I fear
that she might have read what was fighting in my mind. Yet that would
admit of another explanation. If she did read the very worst, meek
saint! she suffered no complaint or sense of that injury to escape her.
It might, however, be that perception, or it might be that fear which
roused her to an effort that otherwise had seemed too revolting to
undertake. She now rehearsed the whole steps of the affair from first to
last; but the only material addition, which her narrative made to that
which the trial itself had involved, was the following:--On two separate
occasions previous to the last and fatal one, when she had happened to
walk unaccompanied by me in the city, the monster Barratt had met her
in the street. He had probably--and this was, indeed, subsequently
ascertained--at first, and for some time afterwards, mistaken her rank,
and had addressed some proposals to her, which, from the suppressed
tone of his speaking, or from her own terror and surprise, she had not
clearly understood; but enough had reached her alarmed ear to satisfy
her that they were of a nature in the last degree licentious and
insulting. Terrified and shocked rather than indignant, for she too
easily presumed the man to be a maniac, she hurried homewards; and was
rejoiced, on first venturing to look round when close to her own gate,
to perceive that the man was not following. There, however, she was
mistaken; for either on this occasion, or on some other, he had traced
her homewards. The last of these rencontres had occurred just three
months before the fatal 6th of April; and if, in any one instance, Agnes
had departed from the strict line of her duty as a wife, or had shown
a defect of judgment, it was at this point--in not having frankly and
fully reported the circumstances to me. On the last of these occasions
I had met her at the garden-gate, and had particularly remarked that she
seemed agitated; and now, at recalling these incidents, Agnes reminded
me that I had noticed that circumstance to herself, and that she had
answered me faithfully as to the main fact. It was true she had done so;
for she had said that she had just met a lunatic who had alarmed her
by fixing his attention upon herself, and speaking to her in a ruffian
manner; and it was also true that she did sincerely regard him in that
light. This led me at the time to construe the whole affair into a
casual collision with some poor maniac escaping from his keepers, and of
no future moment, having passed by without present consequences. But had
she, instead of thus reporting her own erroneous impression, reported
the entire circumstances of the case, I should have given them a
very different interpretation. Affection for me, and fear to throw me
needlessly into a quarrel with a man of apparently brutal and violent
nature--these considerations, as too often they do with the most upright
wives, had operated to check Agnes in the perfect sincerity of her
communications. She had told nothing _but_ the truth--only, and fatally
it turned out for us both, she had not told the _whole_ truth. The very
suppression, to which she had reconciled herself, under the belief that
thus she was providing for my safety and her own consequent happiness,
had been the indirect occasion of ruin to both. It was impossible to
show displeasure under such circumstances, or under any circumstances,
to one whose self-reproaches were at any rate too bitter; but certainly,
as a general rule, every conscientious woman should resolve to consider
her husband's honor in the first case, and far before all other regards
whatsoever; to make this the first, the second, the third law of her
conduct, and his personal safety but the fourth or fifth. Yet women,
and especially when the interests of children are at stake upon their
husbands' safety, rarely indeed are able to take this Roman view of
their duties.

To return to the narrative. Agnes had not, nor could have, the most
remote suspicion of this Barratt's connection with the shop which he had
not accidentally entered; and the sudden appearance of this wretch it
was, at the very moment of finding herself charged with so vile and
degrading an offence, that contributed most of all to rob her of her
natural firmness, by suddenly revealing to her terrified heart the depth
of the conspiracy which thus yawned like a gulf below her. And not only
had this sudden horror, upon discovering a guilty design in what before
had seemed accident, and links uniting remote incidents which else
seemed casual and disconnected, greatly disturbed and confused her
manner, which confusion again had become more intense upon her own
consciousness that she _was_ confused, and that her manner was greatly
to her disadvantage; but--which was the worst effect of all, because the
rest could not operate against her, except upon those who were present
to witness it, whereas this was noted down and recorded--so utterly
did her confusion strip her of all presence of mind, that she did not
consciously notice (and consequently could not protest against at
the moment when it was most important to do so, and most natural) the
important circumstance of the muff. This capital objection, therefore,
though dwelt upon and improved to the utmost at the trial, was looked
upon by the judges as an after-thought; and merely because it had not
been seized upon by herself, and urged in the first moments of her
almost incapacitating terror on finding this amongst the circumstances
of the charge against her--as if an ingenuous nature, in the very act of
recoiling with horror from a criminal charge the most degrading, and in
the very instant of discovering, with a perfect rapture of alarm, the
too plausible appearance of probability amongst the circumstances, would
be likely to pause, and with attorney-like dexterity, to pick out the
particular circumstance that might admit of being _proved_ to be false,
when the conscience proclaimed, though in despondence for the result,
that all the circumstances were, as to the use made of them, one tissue
of falsehoods. Agnes, who had made a powerful effort in speaking of the
case at all, found her calmness increase as she advanced; and she now
told me, that in reality there were two discoveries which she made in
the same instant, and not one only, which had disarmed her firmness and
ordinary presence of mind. One I have mentioned--the fact of Barratt,
the proprietor of the shop, being the same person who had in former
instances persecuted her in the street; but the other was even more
alarming--it has been said already that it was _not_ a pure matter of
accident that she had visited this particular shop. In reality, that
nursery-maid, of whom some mention has been made above, and in terms
expressing the suspicion with which even then I regarded her, had
persuaded her into going thither by some representations which Agnes
had already ascertained to be altogether unwarranted. Other presumptions
against this girl's fidelity crowded dimly upon my wife's mind at the
very moment of finding her eyes thus suddenly opened. And it was not
five minutes after her first examination, and in fact five minutes
after it had ceased to be of use to her, that she remembered another
circumstance which now, when combined with the sequel, told its own
tale,--the muff had been missed some little time before the 6th of
April. Search had been made for it; but, the particular occasion which
required it having passed off, this search was laid aside for the
present, in the expectation that it would soon reappear in some corner
of the house before it was wanted: then came the sunny day, which made
it no longer useful, and would perhaps have dismissed it entirely from
the recollection of all parties, until it was now brought back in this
memorable way. The name of my wife was embroidered within, upon the
lining, and it thus became a serviceable link to the hellish cabal
against her. Upon reviewing the circumstances from first to last, upon
recalling the manner of the girl at the time when the muff was missed,
and upon combining the whole with her recent deception, by which she had
misled her poor mistress into visiting this shop, Agnes began to see the
entire truth as to this servant's wicked collusion with Barratt, though,
perhaps, it might be too much to suppose her aware of the unhappy result
to which her collusion tended. All this she saw at a glance when it was
too late, for her first examination was over. This girl, I must add, had
left our house during my illness, and she had afterwards a melancholy
end.

One thing surprised me in all this. Barratt's purpose must manifestly
have been to create merely a terror in my poor wife's mind, and to stop
short of any legal consequences, in order to profit of that panic and
confusion for extorting compliances with his hideous pretensions. It
perplexed me, therefore, that he did not appear to have pursued this
manifestly his primary purpose, the other being merely a mask to conceal
his true ends, and also (as he fancied) a means for effecting them. In
this, however, I had soon occasion to find that I was deceived. He had,
but without the knowledge of Agnes, taken such steps as were then open
to him, for making overtures to her with regard to the terms upon which
he would agree to defeat the charge against her by failing to appear.
But the law had travelled too fast for him, and too determinately; so
that, by the time he supposed terror to have operated sufficiently in
favor of his views, it had already become unsafe to venture upon such
explicit proposals as he would otherwise have tried. His own safety was
now at stake, and would have been compromised by any open or written
avowal of the motives on which he had been all along acting. In fact, at
this time he was foiled by the agent in whom he confided; but much
more he had been confounded upon another point--the prodigious interest
manifested by the public. Thus it seems--that, whilst he meditated only
a snare for my poor Agnes, he had prepared one for himself; and finally,
to evade the suspicions which began to arise powerfully as to his true
motives, and thus to stave off his own ruin, had found himself in a
manner obliged to go forward and consummate the ruin of another.

       *       *       *       *       *

The state of Agnes, as to health and bodily strength, was now becoming
such that I was forcibly warned--whatsoever I meditated doing, to do
quickly. There was this urgent reason for alarm: once conveyed into
that region of the prison in which sentences like hers were executed, it
became hopeless that I could communicate with her again. All intercourse
whatsoever, and with whomsoever, was then placed under the most rigorous
interdict; and the alarming circumstance was, that this transfer was
governed by no settled rules, but might take place at any hour, and
would certainly be precipitated by the slightest violence on my part,
the slightest indiscretion, or the slightest argument for suspicion.
Hard indeed was the part I had to play, for it was indispensable that
I should appear calm and tranquil, in order to disarm suspicions around
me, whilst continually contemplating the possibility that I myself might
be summoned to extremities which I could not so much as trust myself to
name or distinctly to conceive. But thus stood the case: the Government,
it was understood, angered by the public opposition, resolute for the
triumph of what they called 'principle,' had settled finally that the
sentence should be carried into execution. Now that she, that my Agnes,
being the frail wreck that she had become, could have stood one week of
this sentence practically and literally enforced--was a mere chimera. A
few hours probably of the experiment would have settled that question
by dismissing her to the death she longed for; but because the suffering
would be short, was I to stand by and to witness the degradation--the
pollution--attempted to be fastened upon her. What! to know that her
beautiful tresses would be shorn ignominiously--a felon's dress forced
upon her--a vile taskmaster with authority to----; blistered be the
tongue that could go on to utter, in connection with her innocent name,
the vile dishonors which were to settle upon her person! I, however, and
her brother had taken such resolutions that this result was one barely
possible; and yet I sickened (yes, literally I many times experienced
the effect of physical sickness) at contemplating our own utter childish
helplessness, and recollecting that every night during our seclusion
from the prison the last irreversible step might be taken--and in the
morning we might find a solitary cell, and the angel form that had
illuminated it gone where we could not follow, and leaving behind her
the certainty that we should see her no more. Every night, at the hour
of locking up, _she_, at least, manifestly had a fear that she saw
us for the last time; she put her arms feebly about my neck, sobbed
convulsively, and, I believe, guessed--but, if really so, did not much
reprove or quarrel with the desperate purposes which I struggled with in
regard to her own life. One thing was quite evident--that to the peace
of her latter days, now hurrying to their close, it was indispensable
that she should pass them undivided from me; and possibly, as was
afterwards alleged, when it became easy to allege any thing, some
relenting did take place in high quarters at this time; for upon some
medical reports made just now, a most seasonable indulgence was granted,
viz. that Hannah was permitted to attend her mistress constantly; and
it was also felt as a great alleviation of the horrors belonging to this
prison, that candles were now allowed throughout the nights. But I was
warned privately that these indulgences were with no consent from
the police minister; and that circumstances might soon withdraw the
momentary intercession by which we profited. With this knowledge, we
could not linger in our preparations; we had resolved upon accomplishing
an escape for Agnes, at whatever risk or price; the main difficulty was
her own extreme feebleness, which might forbid her to co-operate with us
in any degree at the critical moment; and the main danger was--delay. We
pushed forward, therefore, in our attempts with prodigious energy, and I
for my part with an energy like that of insanity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first attempt we made was upon the fidelity to his trust of the
chief jailer. He was a coarse, vulgar man, brutal in his manners, but
with vestiges of generosity in his character--though damaged a good deal
by his daily associates. Him we invited to a meeting at a tavern in
the neighborhood of the prison, disguising our names as too certain to
betray our objects, and baiting our invitation with some hints which
we had ascertained were likely to prove temptations under his immediate
circumstances. He had a graceless young son whom he was most anxious to
wean from his dissolute connections, and to steady, by placing him in
some office of no great responsibility. Upon this knowledge we framed
the terms of our invitation.

These proved to be effectual, as regarded our immediate object of
obtaining an interview of persuasion. The night was wet; and at seven
o'clock, the hour fixed for the interview, we were seated in readiness,
much perplexed to know whether he would take any notice of our
invitation. We had waited three quarters of an hour, when we heard a
heavy lumbering step ascending the stair. The door was thrown open
to its widest extent, and in the centre of the door-way stood a short
stout-built man, and the very broadest I ever beheld--staring at us with
bold inquiring eyes. His salutation was something to this effect.

'What the hell do you gay fellows want with me? What the blazes is this
humbugging letter about? My son, and be hanged! What do you know of my
son?'

Upon this overture we ventured to request that he would come in and
suffer us to shut the door, which we also locked. Next we produced the
official paper nominating his son to a small place in the customs,--not
yielding much, it was true, in the way of salary, but fortunately, and
in accordance with the known wishes of the father, unburdened with any
dangerous trust.

'Well, I suppose I must say thank ye: but what comes next? What am I to
do to pay the damages?' We informed him that for this particular little
service we asked no return.

'No, no,' said he, 'that'll not go down: that cat'll not jump. I'm
not green enough for that. So, say away--what's the damage?' We then
explained that we had certainly a favor and a great one to ask: ['Ay,
I'll be bound you have,' was his parenthesis:] but that for this we were
prepared to offer a separate remuneration; repeating that with respect
to the little place procured for his son, it had not cost us anything,
and therefore we did really and sincerely decline to receive anything
in return; satisfied that, by this little offering, we had procured
the opportunity of this present interview. At this point we withdrew a
covering from the table upon which we had previously arranged a heap of
gold coins, amounting in value to twelve hundred English guineas: this
being the entire sum which circumstances allowed us to raise on so
sudden a warning: for some landed property that we both had was so
settled and limited, that we could not convert it into money either
by way of sale, loan, or mortgage. This sum, stating to him its exact
amount, we offered to his acceptance, upon the single condition that he
would look aside, or wink hard, or (in whatever way he chose to express
it) would make, or suffer to be made, such facilities for our liberating
a female prisoner as we would point out. He mused: full five minutes he
sat deliberating without opening his lips. At length he shocked us by
saying, in a firm, decisive tone, that left us little hope of altering
his resolution,--'No: gentlemen, it's a very fair offer, and a good deal
of money for a single prisoner. I think I can guess at the person. It's
a fair offer--fair enough. But, bless your heart! if I were to do the
thing you want--why perhaps another case might be overlooked: but this
prisoner, no: there's too much depending. No, they would turn me out of
my place. Now the place is worth more to me in the long run than what
you offer: though you bid fair enough, if it were only for my time in
it. But look here: in case I can get my son to come into harness, I'm
expecting to get the office for him after I've retired. So I can't do
it. But I'll tell you what: you've been kind to my son: and therefore
I'll not say a word about it. You're safe for me. And so good-night
to you.' Saying which, and standing no further question, he walked
resolutely out of the room and down stairs.

Two days we mourned over this failure, and scarcely knew which way
to turn for another ray of hope;--on the third morning we received
intelligence that this very jailer had been attacked by the fever,
which, after long desolating the city, had at length made its way into
the prison. In a very few days the jailer was lying without hope of
recovery: and of necessity another person was appointed to fill his
station for the present. This person I had seen, and I liked him less
by much than the one he succeeded: he had an Italian appearance, and he
wore an air of Italian subtlety and dissimulation. I was surprised to
find, on proposing the same service to him, and on the same terms, that
he made no objection whatever, but closed instantly with my offers. In
prudence, however, I had made this change in the articles: a sum equal
to two hundred English guineas, or one-sixth part of the whole money, he
was to receive beforehand as a retaining fee; but the remainder was to
be paid only to himself, or to anybody of his appointing, at the very
moment of our finding the prison gates thrown open to us. He spoke
fairly enough, and seemed to meditate no treachery; nor was there any
obvious or known interest to serve by treachery; and yet I doubted him
grievously.

The night came: it was chosen as a gala night, one of two nights
throughout the year in which the prisoners were allowed to celebrate a
great national event: and in those days of relaxed prison management
the utmost license was allowed to the rejoicing. This indulgence was
extended to prisoners of all classes, though, of course, under more
restrictions with regard to the criminal class. Ten o'clock came--the
hour at which we had been instructed to hold ourselves in readiness.
We had been long prepared. Agnes had been dressed by Hannah in such a
costume externally (a man's hat and cloak, &c.) that, from her height,
she might easily have passed amongst a mob of masquerading figures in
the debtors' halls and galleries for a young stripling. Pierpoint and
myself were also to a certain degree disguised; so far, at least, that
we should not have been recognized at any hurried glance by those of the
prison officers who had become acquainted with our persons. We were all
more or less disguised about the face; and in that age when masks were
commonly used at all hours by people of a certain rank, there would have
been nothing suspicious in any possible costume of the kind in a night
like this, if we could succeed in passing for friends of debtors.

I am impatient of these details, and I hasten over the ground. One
entire hour passed away, and no jailer appeared. We began to despond
heavily; and Agnes, poor thing! was now the most agitated of us all.
At length eleven struck in the harsh tones of the prison-clock. A
few minutes after, we heard the sound of bolts drawing, and bars
unfastening. The jailer entered--drunk, and much disposed to be
insolent. I thought it advisable to give him another bribe, and he
resumed the fawning insinuation of his manner. He now directed us, by
passages which he pointed out, to gain the other side of the prison.
There we were to mix with the debtors and their mob of friends, and
to await his joining us, which in that crowd he could do without much
suspicion. He wished us to traverse the passages separately; but this
was impossible, for it was necessary that one of us should support Agnes
on each side. I previously persuaded her to take a small quantity
of brandy, which we rejoiced to see had given her, at this moment of
starting, a most seasonable strength and animation. The gloomy passages
were more than usually empty, for all the turnkeys were employed in a
vigilant custody of the gates, and examination of the parties going out.
So the jailer had told us, and the news alarmed us. We came at length to
a turning which brought us in sight of a strong iron gate, that divided
the two main quarters of the prison. For this we had not been prepared.
The man, however, opened the gate without a word spoken, only putting
out his hand for a fee; and in my joy, perhaps, I gave him one
imprudently large. After passing this gate, the distant uproar of the
debtors guided us to the scene of their merriment; and when there, such
was the tumult and the vast multitude assembled, that we now hoped in
good earnest to accomplish our purpose without accident. Just at this
moment the jailer appeared in the distance; he seemed looking towards
us, and at length one of our party could distinguish that he was
beckoning to us. We went forward, and found him in some agitation, real
or counterfeit. He muttered a word or two quite unintelligible about the
man at the wicket, told us we must wait a while, and he would then see
what could be done for us. We were beginning to demur, and to express
the suspicions which now too seriously arose, when he, seeing, or
affecting to see some object of alarm, pushed us with a hurried movement
into a cell opening upon the part of the gallery at which we were now
standing. Not knowing whether we really might not be retreating from
some danger, we could do no otherwise than comply with his signals; but
we were troubled at finding ourselves immediately locked in from the
outside, and thus apparently all our motions had only sufficed to
exchange one prison for another.

We were now completely in the dark, and found, by a hard breathing from
one corner of the little dormitory, that it was not unoccupied. Having
taken care to provide ourselves separately with means for striking a
light, we soon had more than one torch burning. The brilliant light
falling upon the eyes of a man who lay stretched on the iron bedstead,
woke him. It proved to be my friend the under-jailer, Ratcliffe, but
no longer holding any office in the prison. He sprang up, and a rapid
explanation took place. He had become a prisoner for debt; and on this
evening, after having caroused through the day with some friends
from the country, had retired at an early hour to sleep away
his intoxication. I on my part thought it prudent to intrust him
unreservedly with our situation and purposes, not omitting our gloomy
suspicions. Ratcliffe looked, with a pity that won my love, upon the
poor wasted Agnes. He had seen her on her first entrance into the
prison, had spoken to her, and therefore knew _from_ what she had
fallen, _to_ what. Even then he had felt for her; how much more at this
time, when he beheld, by the fierce light of the torches, her wo-worn
features!

'Who was it,' he asked eagerly, 'you made the bargain with? Manasseh?'

'The same.'

'Then I can tell you this--not a greater villain walks the earth. He is
a Jew from Portugal; he has betrayed many a man, and will many another,
unless he gets his own neck stretched, which might happen, if I told all
I know.'

'But what was it probable that this man meditated? Or how could it
profit him to betray us?'

'That's more than I can tell. He wants to get your money, and that he
doesn't know how to bring about without doing his part. But that's what
he never _will_ do, take my word for it. That would cut him out of all
chance for the head-jailer's place.' He mused a little, and then told us
that he could himself put us outside the prison walls, and _would_ do it
without fee or reward. 'But we must be quiet, or that devil will bethink
him of me. I'll wager something he thought that I was out merry-making
like the rest; and if he should chance to light upon the truth, he'll be
back in no time.' Ratcliffe then removed an old fire-grate, at the back
of which was an iron plate, that swung round into a similar fire-place
in the contiguous cell. From that, by a removal of a few slight
obstacles, we passed, by a long avenue, into the chapel. Then he left
us, whilst he went out alone to reconnoitre his ground. Agnes was now
in so pitiable a condition of weakness, as we stood on the very brink of
our final effort, that we placed her in a pew, where she could rest as
upon a sofa. Previously we had stood upon graves, and with monuments
more or less conspicuous all around us: some raised by friends to
the memory of friends--some by subscriptions in the prison--some by
children, who had risen into prosperity, to the memory of a father,
brother, or other relative, who had died in captivity. I was grieved
that these sad memorials should meet the eye of my wife at this moment
of awe and terrific anxiety. Pierpoint and I were well armed, and all
of us determined not to suffer a recapture, now that we were free of the
crowds that made resistance hopeless. This Agnes easily perceived;
and _that_, by suggesting a bloody arbitration, did not lessen her
agitation. I hoped therefore, that, by placing her in the pew, I might
at least liberate her for the moment from the besetting memorials of
sorrow and calamity. But, as if in the very teeth of my purpose, one of
the large columns which supported the roof of the chapel, had its basis
and lower part of the shaft in this very pew. On the side of it, and
just facing her as she lay reclining on the cushions, appeared a
mural tablet, with a bas-relief in white marble, to the memory of two
children, twins, who had lived and died at the same time, and in
this prison--children who had never breathed another air than that of
captivity, their parents having passed many years within these walls,
under confinement for debt. The sculptures were not remarkable, being a
trite, but not the less affecting, representation of angels descending
to receive the infants; but the hallowed words of the inscription,
distinct and legible--'Suffer little children to come unto me, and
forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God'--met her eye,
and, by the thoughts they awakened, made me fear that she would become
unequal to the exertions which yet awaited her. At this moment Ratcliffe
returned, and informed us that all was right; and that, from the ruinous
state of all the buildings which surrounded the chapel, no difficulty
remained for us, who were, in fact, beyond the strong part of the
prison, excepting at a single door, which we should be obliged to break
down. But had we any means arranged for pursuing our flight, and turning
this escape to account when out of confinement? All that, I assured him,
was provided for long ago. We proceeded, and soon reached the door. We
had one crow-bar amongst us, but beyond that had no better weapons
than the loose stones found about some new-made graves in the chapel.
Ratcliffe and Pierpoint, both powerful men, applied themselves by turns
to the door, whilst Hannah and I supported Agnes. The door did not
yield, being of enormous strength; but the wall did, and a large mass
of stone-work fell outwards, twisting the door aside; so that, by
afterwards working with our hands, we removed stones many enough to
admit of our egress. Unfortunately this aperture was high above the
ground, and it was necessary to climb over a huge heap of loose rubbish
in order to profit by it. My brother-in-law passed first in order to
receive my wife, quite helpless at surmounting the obstacle by her own
efforts, out of my arms. He had gone through the opening, and, turning
round so as to face me, he naturally could see something that I did
_not_ see. 'Look behind!' he called out rapidly. I did so, and saw the
murderous villain Manasseh with his arm uplifted, and in the act of
cutting at my wife, nearly insensible as she was, with a cutlass. The
blow was not for me, but for her, as the fugitive prisoner; and the law
would have borne him out in the act. I saw, I comprehended the whole. I
groped, as far as I could without letting my wife drop, for my pistols;
but all that I could do would have been unavailing, and too late--she
would have been murdered in my arms. But--and that was what none of us
saw--neither I, nor Pierpoint, nor the hound Manasseh--one person stood
back in the shade; one person had seen, but had not uttered a word
on seeing Manasseh advancing through the shades; one person only
had forecast the exact succession of all that was coming; me she saw
embarrassed and my hands preoccupied--Pierpoint and Ratcliffe useless
by position--and the gleam of the dog's eye directed her to his aim. The
crow-bar was leaning against the shattered wall. This she had silently
seized. One blow knocked up the sword; a second laid the villain
prostrate. At this moment appeared another of the turnkeys advancing
from the rear, for the noise of our assault upon the door had drawn
attention in the interior of the prison, from which, however, no great
number of assistants could on this dangerous night venture to absent
themselves. What followed for the next few minutes hurried onwards,
incident crowding upon incident, like the motions of a dream:--Manasseh,
lying on the ground, yelled out, 'The bell! the bell!' to him who
followed. The man understood, and made for the belfry-door attached
to the chapel; upon which Pierpoint drew a pistol, and sent the bullet
whizzing past his ear so truly, that fear made the man obedient to the
counter-orders of Pierpoint for the moment. He paused and awaited the
issue. In a moment had all cleared the wall, traversed the waste ground
beyond it, lifted Agnes over the low railing, shaken hands with our
benefactor Ratcliffe, and pushed onwards as rapidly as we were able
to the little dark lane, a quarter of a mile distant, where had stood
waiting for the last two hours a chaise-and-four.

[Ratcliffe, before my story closes, I will pursue to the last of my
acquaintance with him, according to the just claims of his services. He
had privately whispered to me, as we went along, that he could speak to
the innocence of that lady, pointing to my wife, better than anybody.
He was the person whom (as then holding an office in the prison) Barratt
had attempted to employ as agent in conveying any messages that he found
it safe to send--obscurely hinting the terms on which he would desist
from prosecution. Ratcliffe had at first undertaken the negotiation from
mere levity of character. But when the story and the public interest
spread, and after himself becoming deeply struck by the prisoner's
affliction, beauty, and reputed innocence, he had pursued it only as a
means of entrapping Barratt into such written communications and such
private confessions of the truth as might have served Agnes effectually.
He wanted the art, however, to disguise his purposes: Barratt came to
suspect him violently, and feared his evidence so far, even for those
imperfect and merely oral overtures which he had really sent through
Ratcliffe--that on the very day of the trial, he, as was believed,
though by another nominally, contrived that Ratcliffe should be arrested
for debt; and, after harassing him with intricate forms of business, had
finally caused him to be conveyed to prison. Ratcliffe was thus involved
in his own troubles at the time; and afterwards supposed that, without
written documents to support his evidence, he could not be of much
service to the re-establisment of my wife's reputation. Six months after
his services in the night-escape from the prison, I saw him, and pressed
him to take the money so justly forfeited to him by Manasseh's perfidy.
He would, however, be persuaded to take no more than paid his debts. A
second and a third time his debts were paid by myself and Pierpoint.
But the same habits of intemperance and dissolute pleasure which led him
into these debts, finally ruined his constitution; and he died, though
otherwise of a fine generous manly nature, a martyr to dissipation at
the early age of twenty-nine. With respect to his prison confinement, it
was so frequently recurring in his life, and was alleviated by so many
indulgences, that he scarcely viewed it as a hardship: having once been
an officer of the prison, and having thus formed connections with the
whole official establishment, and done services to many of them, and
being of so convivial a turn, he was, even as a prisoner, treated with
distinction, and considered as a privileged son of the house.]

It was just striking twelve o'clock as we entered the lane where the
carriage was drawn up. Rain, about the profoundest I had ever witnessed,
was falling. Though near to midsummer, the night had been unusually dark
to begin with, and from the increasing rain had become much more so. We
could see nothing; and at first we feared that some mistake had occurred
as to the station of the carriage--in which case we might have sought
for it vainly through the intricate labyrinth of the streets in
that quarter. I first descried it by the light of a torch, reflected
powerfully from the large eyes of the leaders. All was ready.
Horse-keepers were at the horses' heads. The postilions were mounted;
each door had the steps let down: Agnes was lifted in: Hannah and I
followed: Pierpoint mounted his horse; and at the word--Oh! how strange
a word!--'_All's right_,' the horses sprang off like leopards, a manner
ill-suited to the slippery pavement of a narrow street. At that moment,
but we valued it little indeed, we heard the prison-bell ringing out
loud and clear. Thrice within the first three minutes we had to pull up
suddenly, on the brink of formidable accidents, from the dangerous
speed we maintained, and which, nevertheless, the driver had orders to
maintain, as essential to our plan. All the stoppages and hinderances
of every kind along the road had been anticipated previously, and met by
contrivance, of one kind or other; and Pierpoint was constantly a
little ahead of us to attend to anything that had been neglected. The
consequence of these arrangements was--that no person along the road
could possibly have assisted to trace us by any thing in our appearance:
for we passed all objects at too flying a pace, and through darkness too
profound, to allow of any one feature in our equipage being distinctly
noticed. Ten miles out of town, a space which we traversed in forty-four
minutes, a second relay of horses was ready; but we carried on the same
postilions throughout. Six miles ahead of this distance we had a second
relay; and with this set of horses, after pushing two miles further
along the road, we crossed by a miserable lane five miles long, scarcely
even a bridge road, into another of the great roads from the capital;
and by thus crossing the country, we came back upon the city at a point
far distant from that at which we left it. We had performed a distance
of forty-two miles in three hours, and lost a fourth hour upon the
wretched five miles of cross-road. It was, therefore, four o'clock, and
broad daylight, when we drew near the suburbs of the city; but a most
happy accident now favored us; a fog the most intense now prevailed;
nobody could see an object six feet distant; we alighted in an
uninhabited new-built street, plunged into the fog, thus confounding our
traces to any observer. We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had
been stationed at a little distance. Thence, according to our plan, we
drove to a miserable quarter of the town, whither the poor only and the
wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy dirty staircase, and, befriended by
the fog, still growing thicker and thicker, and by the early hour of the
morning, reached a house previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye
and the imagination from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still
was a home--a sanctuary--an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from
persecution. Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more
Agnes, Hannah, and I, the shattered members of a shattered family, were
thus gathered together in a house of our own.

Yes: once again, daughter of the hills, thou sleptst as heretofore in my
encircling arms; but not again in that peace which crowned thy innocence
in those days, and should have crowned it now. Through the whole of our
flying journey, in some circumstances at its outset strikingly recalling
to me that blessed one which followed our marriage, Agnes slept away
unconscious of our movements. She slept through all that day and the
following night; and I watched over her with as much jealousy of all
that might disturb her, as a mother watches over her new-born baby; for
I hoped, I fancied, that a long--long rest, a rest, a halcyon calm, a
deep, deep Sabbath of security, might prove healing and medicinal. I
thought wrong; her breathing became more disturbed, and sleep was now
haunted by dreams; all of us, indeed, were agitated by dreams; the past
pursued me, and the present, for high rewards had been advertised by
Government to those who traced us; and though for the moment we were
secure, because we never went abroad, and could not have been naturally
sought in such a neighborhood, still that very circumstance would
eventually operate against us. At length, every night I dreamed of
our insecurity under a thousand forms; but more often by far my dreams
turned upon our wrongs; wrath moved me rather than fear. Every night,
for the greater part, I lay painfully and elaborately involved, by deep
sense of wrong,

  '--in long orations, which I pleaded
  Before unjust tribunals.'
  [Footnote: From a MS. poem of a great living Poet.]

And for poor Agnes, her also did the remembrance of mighty wrongs occupy
through vast worlds of sleep in the same way--though colored by
that tenderness which belonged to her gentler nature. One dream in
particular--a dream of sublime circumstances--she repeated to me so
movingly, with a pathos so thrilling, that by some profound sympathy
it transplanted itself to my own sleep, settled itself there, and is to
this hour a part of the fixed dream scenery which revolves at intervals
through my sleeping life. This it was:--She would hear a trumpet
sound--though perhaps as having been the prelude to the solemn entry of
the judges at a town which she had once visited in her childhood; other
preparations would follow, and at last all the solemnities of a great
trial would shape themselves and fall into settled images. The audience
was assembled, the judges were arrayed, the court was set. The prisoner
was cited. Inquest was made, witnesses were called; and false witnesses
came tumultuously to the bar. Then again a trumpet was heard, but the
trumpet of a mighty archangel; and then would roll away thick clouds and
vapors. Again the audience, but another audience, was assembled; again
the tribunal was established; again the court was set; but a tribunal
and a court--how different to her! _That_ had been composed of men
seeking indeed for truth, but themselves erring and fallible creatures;
the witnesses had been full of lies, the judges of darkness. But
here was a court composed of heavenly witnesses--here was a righteous
tribunal--and then at last a judge that could not be deceived. The judge
smote with his eye a person who sought to hide himself in the crowd;
the guilty man stepped forward; the poor prisoner was called up to the
presence of the mighty judge; suddenly the voice of a little child was
heard ascending before her. Then the trumpet sounded once again; and
then there were new heavens and a new earth; and her tears and
her agitation (for she had seen her little Francis) awoke the poor
palpitating dreamer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two months passed on: nothing could possibly be done materially to raise
the standard of those wretched accommodations which the house
offered. The dilapidated walls, the mouldering plaster, the blackened
mantel-pieces, the stained and polluted wainscots--what could be
attempted to hide or to repair all this by those who durst not venture
abroad? Yet whatever could be done, Hannah did; and, in the mean time,
very soon indeed my Agnes ceased to see or to be offended by these
objects. First of all her sight went from her; and nothing which
appealed to that sense could ever more offend her. It is to me the one
only consolation I have, that my presence and that of Hannah, with such
innocent frauds as we concerted together, made her latter days pass in
a heavenly calm, by persuading her that our security was absolute,
and that all search after us had ceased, under a belief on the part of
Government that we had gained the shelter of a foreign land. All this
was a delusion; but it was a delusion--blessed be Heaven! which
lasted exactly as long as her life, and was just commensurate with its
necessity. I hurry over the final circumstances.

There was fortunately now, even for me, no fear that the hand of any
policeman or emissary of justice could effectually disturb the latter
days of my wife; for, besides pistols always lying loaded in an inner
room, there happened to be a long narrow passage on entering the house,
which, by means of a blunderbuss, I could have swept effectually, and
cleared many times over; and I know what to do in a last extremity.
Just two months it was, to a day, since we had entered the house; and
it happened that the medical attendant upon Agnes, who awakened no
suspicion by his visits, had prescribed some opiate or anodyne which had
not come; being dark early, for it was now September, I had ventured out
to fetch it. In this I conceived there could be no danger. On my return
I saw a man examining the fastenings of the door. He made no opposition
to my entrance, nor seemed much to observe it--but I was disturbed. Two
hours after, both Hannah and I heard a noise about the door, and voices
in low conversation. It is remarkable that Agnes heard this also--so
quick had grown her hearing. She was agitated, but was easily calmed;
and at ten o'clock we were all in bed. The hand of Agnes was in mine;
so only she felt herself in security. She had been restless for an hour,
and talking at intervals in sleep. Once she certainly wakened, for she
pressed her lips to mine. Two minutes after, I heard something in
her breathing which did not please me. I rose hastily--brought a
light--raised her head--two long, long gentle sighs, that scarcely moved
the lips, were all that could be perceived. At that moment, at that very
moment, Hannah called out to me that the door was surrounded. 'Open it!'
I said; six men entered; Agnes it was they sought; I pointed to the bed;
they advanced, gazed, and walked away in silence.

After this I wandered about, caring little for life or its affairs, and
roused only at times to think of vengeance upon all who had contributed
to lay waste my happiness. In this pursuit, however, I was confounded
as much by my own thoughts as by the difficulties of accomplishing my
purpose. To assault and murder either of the two principal agents in
this tragedy, what would it be, what other effect could it have, than to
invest them with the character of injured and suffering people, and thus
to attract a pity or a forgiveness at least to their persons which never
otherwise could have illustrated their deaths? I remembered, indeed, the
words of a sea-captain who had taken such vengeance as had offered at
the moment upon his bitter enemy and persecutor (a young passenger on
board his ship), who had informed against him at the Custom-house on his
arrival in port, and had thus effected the confiscation of his ship,
and the ruin of the captain's family. The vengeance, and it was all
that circumstances allowed, consisted in coming behind the young man
clandestinely and pushing him into the deep waters of the dock, when,
being unable to swim, he perished by drowning. 'And the like,' said the
captain, when musing on his trivial vengeance, 'and the like happens
to many an honest sailor.' Yes, thought I, the captain was right. The
momentary shock of a pistol-bullet--what is it? Perhaps it may save
the wretch after all from the pangs of some lingering disease; and then
again I shall have the character of a murderer, if known to have shot
him; he will with many people have no such character, but at worst the
character of a man too harsh (they will say), and possibly mistaken in
protecting his property. And then, if not known as the man who shot
him, where is the shadow even of vengeance? Strange it seemed to me, and
passing strange, that I should be the person to urge arguments in behalf
of letting this man escape. For at one time I had as certainly, as
inexorably, doomed him as ever I took any resolution in my life. But the
fact is, and I began to see it upon closer view, it is not easy by any
means to take an adequate vengeance for any injury beyond a very trivial
standard; and that with common magnanimity one does not care to avenge.
Whilst I was in this mood of mind, still debating with myself whether
I should or should not contaminate my hands with the blood of this
monster, and still unable to shut my eyes upon one fact, viz. that my
buried Agnes could above all things have urged me to abstain from such
acts of violence, too evidently useless, listlessly and scarcely knowing
what I was in quest of, I strayed by accident into a church where a
venerable old man was preaching at the very moment I entered; he was
either delivering as a text, or repeating in the course of his sermon,
these words--'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.' By
some accident also he fixed his eyes upon me at the moment; and
this concurrence with the subject then occupying my thoughts so much
impressed me, that I determined very seriously to review my half-formed
purposes of revenge; and well it was that I did so: for in that same
week an explosion of popular fury brought the life of this wretched
Barratt to a shocking termination, pretty much resembling the fate of
the De Witts in Holland. And the consequences to me were such, and so
full of all the consolation and indemnification which this world could
give me, that I have often shuddered since then at the narrow escape
I had had from myself intercepting this remarkable retribution. The
villain had again been attempting to play off the same hellish scheme
with a beautiful young rustic which had succeeded in the case of my
ill-fated Agnes. But the young woman in this instance had a high, and,
in fact, termagant spirit. Rustic as she was, she had been warned of the
character of the man; everybody, in fact, was familiar with the recent
tragedy. Either her lover or her brother happened to be waiting for
her outside the window. He saw in part the very tricks in the act of
perpetration by which some article or other, meant to be claimed as
stolen property, was conveyed into a parcel she had incautiously laid
down. He heard the charge against her made by Barratt, and seconded by
his creatures--heard her appeal--sprang to her aid--dragged the ruffian
into the street, when in less time than the tale could be told, and
before the police (though tolerably alert) could effectually interpose
for his rescue, the mob had so used or so abused the opportunity they
had long wished for, that he remained the mere disfigured wreck of what
had once been a man, rather than a creature with any resemblance to
humanity. I myself heard the uproar at a distance, and the shouts and
yells of savage exultation; they were sounds I shall never forget,
though I did not at that time know them for what they were, or
understood their meaning. The result, however, to me was something
beyond this, and worthy to have been purchased with my heart's blood.
Barratt still breathed; spite of his mutilations he could speak; he was
rational. One only thing he demanded--it was that his dying confession
might be taken. Two magistrates and a clergyman attended. He gave a
list of those whom he had trepanned, and had failed to trepan, by his
artifices and threats, into the sacrifice of their honor. He expired
before the record was closed, but not before he had placed my wife's
name in the latter list as the one whose injuries in his dying moments
most appalled him. This confession on the following day went into the
hands of the hostile minister, and my revenge was perfect.




THE SPANISH NUN.


Why is it that _Adventures_ are so generally repulsive to people of
meditative minds? It is for the same reason that any other want of law,
that any other anarchy is repulsive. Floating passively from action to
action, as helplessly as a withered leaf surrendered to the breath
of winds, the human spirit (out of which comes all grandeur of human
motions) is exhibited in mere _Adventures_, as either entirely laid
asleep, or as acting only by lower organs that regulate the _means_,
whilst the _ends_ are derived from alien sources, and are imperiously
predetermined. It is a case of exception, however, when even amongst
such adventures the agent reacts upon his own difficulties and
necessities by a temper of extraordinary courage, and a mind of
premature decision. Further strength arises to such an exception, if the
very moulding accidents of the life, if the very external coercions are
themselves unusually romantic. They may thus gain a separate interest of
their own. And, lastly, the whole is locked into validity of interest,
even for the psychological philosopher, by complete authentication
of its truth. In the case now brought before him, the reader must not
doubt; for no memoir exists, or personal biography, that is so trebly
authenticated by proofs and attestations direct and collateral. From the
archives of the Royal Marine at Seville, from the autobiography or the
heroine, from contemporary chronicles, and from several official sources
scattered in and out of Spain, some of them ecclesiastical, the
amplest proofs have been drawn, and may yet be greatly extended, of the
extraordinary events here recorded. M. de Ferrer, a Spaniard of much
research, and originally incredulous as to the facts, published about
seventeen years ago a selection from the leading documents, accompanied
by his _palinode_ as to their accuracy. His materials have been since
used for the basis of more than one narrative, not inaccurate, in
French, German and Spanish journals of high authority. It is seldom the
case that French writers err by prolixity. They _have_ done so in this
case. The present narrative, which contains no sentence derived from any
foreign one, has the great advantage of close compression; my own pages,
after equating the size, being as 1 to 3 of the shortest continental
form. In the mode of narration, I am vain enough to flatter myself
that the reader will find little reason to hesitate between us. Mine
at least, weary nobody; which is more than can be always said for the
continental versions.

On a night in the year 1592, (but which night is a secret liable to 365
answers,) a Spanish '_son of somebody_,' [Footnote: _i.e._ 'Hidalgo']
in the fortified town of St. Sebastian, received the disagreeable
intelligence from a nurse, that his wife had just presented him with a
daughter. No present that the poor misjudging lady could possibly have
made him was so entirely useless for any purpose of his. He had three
daughters already, which happened to be more by 2+1 than _his_ reckoning
assumed as a reasonable allowance of daughters. A supernumerary son
might have been stowed away; but daughters in excess were the very
nuisance of Spain. He did, therefore, what in such cases every proud
and lazy Spanish gentleman was apt to do--he wrapped the new little
daughter, odious to his paternal eyes, in a pocket handkerchief; and
then, wrapping up his own throat with a good deal more care, off he
bolted to the neighboring convent of St. Sebastian, not merely of that
city, but also (amongst several convents) the one dedicated to that
saint. It is well that in this quarrelsome world we quarrel furiously
about tastes; since agreeing too closely about the objects to be
liked and appropriated would breed much more fighting than is bred by
disagreeing. That little human tadpole, which the old toad of a father
would not suffer to stay ten minutes in his house, proved as welcome at
the nunnery of St. Sebastian as she was odious elsewhere. The superior
of the convent was aunt, by the mother's side, to the new-born stranger.
She, therefore, kissed and blessed the little lady. The poor nuns, who
were never to have any babies of their own, and were languishing for
some amusement, perfectly doated on this prospect of a wee pet. The
superior thanked the hidalgo for his very splendid present. The nuns
thanked him each and all; until the old crocodile actually began to
cry and whimper sentimentally at what he now perceived to be excess of
munificence in himself. Munificence, indeed, he remarked, was his foible
next after parental tenderness.

What a luxury it is sometimes to a cynic that there go two words to a
bargain. In the convent of St. Sebastian all was gratitude; gratitude
(as aforesaid) to the hidalgo from all the convent for his present,
until at last the hidalgo began to express gratitude to _them_ for their
gratitude to _him_. Then came a rolling fire of thanks to St. Sebastian;
from the superior, for sending a future saint; from the nuns, for
sending such a love of a plaything; and, finally, from papa, for sending
such substantial board and well-bolted lodgings, 'from which,' said the
malicious old fellow, 'my pussy will never find her way out to a thorny
and dangerous world.' Won't she? I suspect, son of somebody, that the
next time you see 'pussy,' which may happen to be also the last,
will not be in a convent of any kind. At present, whilst this general
rendering of thanks was going on, one person only took no part in them.
That person was 'pussy,' whose little figure lay quietly stretched out
in the arms of a smiling young nun, with eyes nearly shut, yet peering
a little at the candles. Pussy said nothing. It's of no great use to
say much, when all the world is against you. But if St. Sebastian had
enabled her to speak out the whole truth, pussy _would_ have said: 'So,
Mr. Hidalgo, you have been engaging lodgings for me; lodgings for life.
Wait a little. We'll try that question, when my claws are grown a little
longer.'

Disappointment, therefore, was gathering ahead. But for the present
there was nothing of the kind. That noble old crocodile, papa, was not
in the least disappointed as regarded _his_ expectation of having
no anxiety to waste, and no money to pay, on account of his youngest
daughter. He insisted on his right to forget her; and in a week _had_
forgotten her, never to think of her again but once. The lady superior,
as regarded _her_ demands, was equally content, and through a course of
several years; for, as often as she asked pussy if she would be a
saint, pussy replied that she would, if saints were allowed plenty of
sweetmeats. But least of all were the nuns disappointed. Everything that
they had fancied possible in a human plaything fell short of what pussy
realized in racketing, racing, and eternal plots against the peace of
the elder nuns. No fox ever kept a hen-roost in such alarm as pussy kept
the dormitory of the senior sisters; whilst the younger ladies were
run off their legs by the eternal wiles, and had their chapel gravity
discomposed, even in chapel, by the eternal antics of this privileged
little kitten.

The kitten had long ago received a baptismal name, which was Kitty; this
is Catharine, or Kate, or _Hispanice_ Catalina. It was a good name, as
it recalled her original name of pussy. And, by the way, she had also an
ancient and honorable surname, viz., _De Erauso_, which is to this day a
name rooted in Biscay. Her father, the _hidalgo_, was a military officer
in the Spanish service, and had little care whether his kitten should
turn out a wolf or a lamb, having made over the fee simple of his own
interest in the little Kate to St. Sebastian, 'to have and to hold,'
so long as Kate should keep her hold of this present life. Kate had
no apparent intention to let slip that hold, for she was blooming as
a rose-bush in June, tall and strong as a young cedar. Yet,
notwithstanding this robust health and the strength of the convent
walls, the time was drawing near when St. Sebastian's lease in Kate
must, in legal phrase, 'determine;' and any _chateaux en Espagne_,
that the Saint might have built on the cloisteral fidelity of his pet
Catalina, must suddenly give way in one hour, like many other vanities
in our own days of Spanish bonds and promises. After reaching her tenth
year, Catalina became thoughtful, and not very docile. At times she
was even headstrong and turbulent, so that the gentle sisterhood of St.
Sebastian, who had no other pet or plaything in the world, began to weep
in secret--fearing that they might have been rearing by mistake some
future tigress--for as to infancy, _that_, you know, is playful and
innocent even in the cubs of a tigress. But _there_ the ladies were
going too far. Catalina was impetuous and aspiring, but not cruel. She
was gentle, if people would let her be so. But woe to those that
took liberties with _her_! A female servant of the convent, in some
authority, one day, in passing up the aisle to matins, _wilfully_ gave
Kate a push; and in return, Kate, who never left her debts in arrear,
gave the servant for a keepsake a look which that servant carried with
her in fearful remembrance to her grave. It seemed as if Kate had tropic
blood in her veins, that continually called her away to the tropics. It
was all the fault of that 'blue rejoicing sky,' of those purple Biscayan
mountains, of that tumultuous ocean, which she beheld daily from the
nunnery gardens. Or, if only half of it was _their_ fault, the other
half lay in those golden tales, streaming upwards even into the
sanctuaries of convents, like morning mists touched by earliest
sunlight, of kingdoms overshadowing a new world which had been founded
by her kinsmen with the simple aid of a horse and a lance. The reader is
to remember that this is no romance, or at least no fiction, that he
is reading; and it is proper to remind the reader of real romances in
Ariosto or our own Spenser, that such martial ladies as the _Marfisa_,
or _Bradamant_ of the first, and _Britomart_ of the other, were really
not the improbabilities that modern society imagines. Many a stout man,
as you will soon see, found that Kate, with a sabre in hand, and well
mounted, was but too serious a fact.

The day is come--the evening is come--when our poor Kate, that had for
fifteen years been so tenderly rocked in the arms of St. Sebastian and
his daughters, and that henceforth shall hardly find a breathing space
between eternal storms, must see her peaceful cell, must see the holy
chapel, for the last time. It was at vespers, it was during the chanting
of the vesper service, that she finally read the secret signal for her
departure, which long she had been looking for. It happened that her
aunt, the Lady Principal, had forgotten her breviary. As this was in
a private 'scrutoire, she did not choose to send a servant for it, but
gave the key to her niece. The niece, on opening the 'scrutoire, saw,
with that rapidity of eye-glance for the one thing needed in any great
emergency, which ever attended her through life, that _now_ was the
moment for an attempt which, if neglected, might never return. There lay
the total keys, in one massive _trousseau_, of that fortress impregnable
even to armies from without. Saint Sebastian! do you see what your
pet is going to do? And do it she will, as sure as your name is St.
Sebastian. Kate went back to her aunt with the breviary and the key; but
taking good care to leave that awful door, on whose hinge revolved her
whole life, unlocked. Delivering the two articles to the Superior, she
complained of a headache--[Ah, Kate! what did you know of headaches,
except now and then afterwards from a stray bullet, or so?]--upon which
her aunt, kissing her forehead, dismissed her to bed. Now, then, through
three-fourths of an hour Kate will have free elbow-room for unanchoring
her boat, for unshipping her oars, and for pulling ahead right out of
St. Sebastian's cove into the main ocean of life.

Catalina, the reader is to understand, does not belong to the class of
persons in whom chiefly I pretend to an interest. But everywhere one
loves energy and indomitable courage. I, for my part, admire not, by
preference, anything that points to this world. It is the child of
reverie and profounder sensibility who turns _away_ from the world as
hateful and insufficient, that engages _my_ interest: whereas Catalina
was the very model of the class fitted for facing this world, and who
express their love to it by fighting with it and kicking it from year to
year. But, always, what is best in its kind one admires, even though the
kind be disagreeable. Kate's advantages for her _role_ in this life lay
in four things, viz., in a well-built person, and a particularly strong
wrist; 2d, in a heart that nothing could appal; 3d, in a sagacious head,
never drawn aside from the _hoc age_ [from the instant question of life]
by any weakness of imagination; 4th, in a tolerably thick skin--not
literally, for she was fair and blooming, and decidedly handsome, having
such a skin as became a young woman of family in northernmost Spain.
But her sensibilities were obtuse as regarded _some_ modes of delicacy,
_some_ modes of equity, _some_ modes of the world's opinion, and
_all_ modes whatever of personal hardship. Lay a stress on that word
_some_--for, as to delicacy, she never lost sight of the kind which
peculiarly concerns her sex. Long afterwards she told the Pope himself,
when confessing without disguise her sad and infinite wanderings to the
paternal old man (and I feel convinced of her veracity), that in this
respect, even then, at middle age, she was as pure as is a child. And,
as to equity, it was only that she substituted the equity of camps for
the polished (but often more iniquitous) equity of courts and towns. As
to the third item--the world's opinion--I don't know that you need lay
a stress on _some_; for, generally speaking, _all_ that the world did,
said, or thought, was alike contemptible in her eyes, in which, perhaps,
she was not so _very_ far wrong. I must add, though at the cost of
interrupting the story by two or three more sentences, that Catalina had
also a fifth advantage, which sounds humbly, but is really of use in a
world, where even to fold and seal a letter adroitly is not the least
of accomplishments. She was a _handy_ girl. She could turn her hand to
anything, of which I will give you two memorable instances. Was there
ever a girl in this world but herself that cheated and snapped her
fingers at that awful Inquisition, which brooded over the convents of
Spain, that did this without collusion from outside, trusting to nobody,
but to herself, and what? to one needle, two hanks of thread, and a very
inferior pair of scissors? For, that the scissors were bad, though Kate
does not say so in her memoirs, I knew by an _a priori_ argument, viz.,
because _all_ scissors were bad in the year 1607. Now, say all decent
logicians, from a universal to a particular _valet consequentia_, _all_
scissors were bad: _ergo_, _some_ scissors were bad. The second instance
of her handiness will surprise you even more:--She once stood upon a
scaffold, under sentence of death--[but, understand, on the evidence
of false witnesses]. Jack Ketch was absolutely tying the knot under her
ear, and the shameful man of ropes fumbled so deplorably, that Kate (who
by much nautical experience had learned from another sort of 'Jack'
how a knot _should_ be tied in this world,) lost all patience with the
contemptible artist, told him she was ashamed of him, took the rope out
of his hand, and tied the knot irreproachably herself. The crowd saluted
her with a festal roll, long and loud, of _vivas_; and this word _viva_
of good augury--but stop; let me not anticipate.

From this sketch of Catalina's character, the reader is prepared to
understand the decision of her present proceeding. She had no time to
lose: the twilight favored her; but she must get under hiding before
pursuit commenced. Consequently she lost not one of her forty-five
minutes in picking and choosing. No _shilly-shally_ in Kate. She saw
with the eyeball of an eagle what was indispensable. Some little money
perhaps to pay the first toll-bar of life: so, out of four shillings in
Aunty's purse, she took one. You can't say _that_ was exorbitant. Which
of us wouldn't subscribe a shilling for poor Katy to put into the first
trouser pockets that ever she will wear? I remember even yet, as a
personal experience, that when first arrayed, at four years old, in
nankeen trousers, though still so far retaining hermaphrodite relations
of dress as to wear a petticoat above my trousers, all my female friends
(because they pitied me, as one that had suffered from years of ague)
filled my pockets with half-crowns, of which I can render no account at
this day. But what were my poor pretensions by the side of Kate's? Kate
was a fine blooming girl of fifteen, with no touch of ague, and, before
the next sun rises, Kate shall draw on her first trousers, and made by
her own hand; and, that she may do so, of all the valuables in Aunty's
repository she takes nothing beside the shilling, _quantum sufficit_ of
thread, one stout needle, and (as I told you before, if you would please
to remember things) one bad pair of scissors. Now she was ready; ready
to cast off St. Sebastian's towing-rope; ready to cut and run for port
anywhere. The finishing touch of her preparations was to pick out the
proper keys: even there she showed the same discretion. She did do no
gratuitous mischief. She did not take the wine-cellar key, which would
have irritated the good father confessor; she took those keys only that
belonged to _her_, if ever keys did; for they were the keys that locked
her out from her natural birthright of liberty. 'Show me,' says the
Romish Casuist, 'her right in law to let herself out of that nunnery.'
'Show us,' we reply, '_your_ right to lock her in.'

Right or wrong, however, in strict casuistry, Kate was resolved to let
herself out; and _did_ so; and, for fear any man should creep in whilst
vespers lasted, and steal the kitchen grate, she locked her old friends
_in_. Then she sought a shelter. The air was not cold. She hurried into
a chestnut wood, and upon withered leaves slept till dawn. Spanish diet
and youth leaves the digestion undisordered, and the slumbers light.
When the lark rose, up rose Catalina. No time to lose, for she was still
in the dress of a nun, and liable to be arrested by any man in Spain.
With her _armed_ finger, [aye, by the way, I forgot the thimble; but
Kate did _not_]--she set to work upon her amply-embroidered petticoat.
She turned it wrong side out; and with the magic that only female hands
possess, she had soon sketched and finished a dashing pair of Wellington
trousers. All other changes were made according to the materials she
possessed, and quite sufficiently to disguise the two main perils--her
sex, and her monastic dedication. What was she to do next. Speaking of
Wellington trousers would remind _us_, but could hardly remind _her_,
of Vittoria, where she dimly had heard of some maternal relative.
To Vittoria, therefore, she bent her course; and, like the Duke of
Wellington, but arriving more than two centuries earlier, [though _he_
too is an early riser,] she gained a great victory at that place. She
had made a two days' march, baggage far in the rear, and no provisions
but wild berries; she depended for anything better, as light-heartedly
as the Duke, upon attacking, sword in hand, storming her dear friend's
entrenchments, and effecting a lodgment in his breakfast-room, should he
happen to have one. This amiable relative, an elderly man, had but
one foible, or perhaps one virtue in this world; but _that_ he had in
perfection,--it was pedantry. On that hint Catalina spoke: she knew
by heart, from the services of the convent, a few Latin phrases.
Latin!--Oh, but _that_ was charming; and in one so young! The grave Don
owned the soft impeachment; relented at once, and clasped the hopeful
young gentleman in the Wellington trousers to his _uncular_ and rather
angular breast. In this house the yarn of life was of a mingled quality.
The table was good, but that was exactly what Kate cared little about.
The amusement was of the worst kind. It consisted chiefly in conjugating
Latin verbs, especially such as were obstinately irregular. To show
him a withered frost-bitten verb, that wanted its preterite, wanted its
supines, wanted, in fact, everything in this world, fruits or blossoms,
that make a verb desirable, was to earn the Don's gratitude for life.
All day long he was marching and countermarching his favorite
brigades of verbs--verbs frequentative, verbs inceptive, verbs
desiderative--horse, foot, and artillery; changing front, advancing from
the rear, throwing out skirmishing parties, until Kate, not given to
faint, must have thought of such a resource, as once in her life she had
thought so seasonably of a vesper headache. This was really worse than
St. Sebastian's. It reminds one of a French gayety in Thiebault or
some such author, who describes a rustic party, under equal despair, as
employing themselves in conjugating the verb _s'ennuyer,--Je m'ennuie,
tu t'ennuies, il s'ennuit; nous nous ennuyons_, &c.; thence to
the imperfect--_Je m'ennuyois, tu t'ennuyois_, &c.; thence to the
imperative--_Qu'il s'ennuye_, &c.; and so on through the whole
melancholy conjugation. Now, you know, when the time comes that, _nous
nous ennuyons_, the best course is, to part. Kate saw _that_; and she
walked off from the Don's [of whose amorous passion for defective
verbs one would have wished to know the catastrophe], and took from his
mantel-piece rather move silver than she had levied on her aunt. But the
Don also was a relative; and really he owed her a small cheque on his
banker for turning out on his field-days. A man, if he _is_ a kinsman,
has no right to bore one _gratis_.

From Vittoria, Kate was guided by a carrier to Valladolid. Luckily, as
it seemed at first, but it made little difference in the end, here, at
Valladolid, were the King and his Court. Consequently, there was plenty
of regiments and plenty of regimental bands. Attracted by one of these,
Catalina was quietly listening to the music, when some street
ruffians, in derision of the gay colors and the form of her forest-made
costume--[rascals! one would like to have seen what sort of trousers
_they_ would have made with no better scissors!]--began to pelt her with
stones. Ah, my friends, of the genus _blackguard_, you little know who
it is that you are selecting for experiments. This is the one creature
of fifteen in all Spain, be the other male or female, whom nature, and
temper, and provocation have qualified for taking the conceit out of
you. This she very soon did, laying open a head or two with a sharp
stone, and letting out rather too little than too much of bad
Valladolid blood. But mark the constant villany of this world.
Certain Alguazils--very like some other Alguazils that I know nearer
home--having stood by quietly to see the friendless stranger insulted
and assaulted, now felt it their duty to apprehend the poor nun for
murderous violence: and had there been such a thing as a treadmill in
Valladolid, Kate was booked for a place on it without further inquiry.
Luckily, injustice does not _always_ prosper. A gallant young cavalier,
who had witnessed from his windows the whole affair, had seen the
provocation, and admired Catalina's behavior--equally patient at first
and bold at last--hastened into the street, pursued the officers, forced
them to release their prisoner, upon stating the circumstances of the
case, and instantly offered Catalina a situation amongst his retinue.
He was a man of birth and fortune; and the place offered, that of
an honorary page, not being at all degrading even to a 'daughter of
somebody,' was cheerfully accepted. Here Catalina spent a happy month.
She was now splendidly dressed in dark blue velvet, by a tailor that
did not work within the gloom of a chestnut forest. She and the young
cavalier, Don Francisco de Cardenas, were mutually pleased, and had
mu

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/6148