where the words of secrecy would pass to the ear, or be blurted forth,
coarse and broken, under the fevered brain of drunkenness. Since ever that
night when the £7, 10s. flared its magnetic influence over their eyes, and
was communicated, by confidence and sympathy, to the two females, the
little world of this quaternity was changed. The women saw that other
lodgers would die, and the inspiring hope, not so demoniac as to curdle
the remaining drops of human kindness that refused to leave the female
breast, pointed in the inevitable direction of gaudy finery, which they
might flaunt in the wondering eyes of the poor people of Portsburgh; but
so slow a process did not suit the inflamed passions of the men. Hare had
been revolving in his mind a scheme to set up his own will as the arbiter
of the occasion, which would secure more money, even as he wished it; and
the secret of this talisman behoved to be communicated to his friend, now
poor and miserable, and dissolved in habits of sloth and inebriety. It was
in that small room, and while the two women were engaged in the front
apartments, that this mystic rite was performed between the solitary
inmates, over, as might be expected, the caldron fires of drink. Yes, the
mouth found power to utter the words which came as the dictates of a mere
desire for money, that they should seize the opportunity so often
presented to them of people lying drunk and senseless, and deprive them,
by suffocation, of life. The proposition was accepted under the same
approving auspices of mammon, who had already made both his own; and under
the force of that temptation involved in the words which had been uttered
in Surgeon's Square, offering a welcome to a return with a similar burden
to that of the pensioner. You may cease to indulge here in those visions
of the fancy which would represent human nature in convulsions, panting
under the impression of a thought which, at first, produced a revolt, and
then became conciliated. The "make" of each of these men was perfect under
its own conditions, and if there was any seriousness, it was only a
passing fear that they might bring their necks into jeopardy. Pity, which
never lived in them, could not be said to be dead; the impress of the
first money had burned into their souls; the welcome of the doctors rung
in their ears; and Grace, studying them in the distance, had flown past
them as an impossibility.
There is reason to believe that this resolution come to by these men,
sitting together in this dark room, passed as an element into an orgy,
different from all those in which they had so often indulged, if not from
any that the world ever witnessed; nor was it modified, if it was not
inflamed, by those visions of struggling nature expiring among their
hands, which, rising as mere spectral forms, disappeared as soon before
the images they pictured of a life of sensual indulgence and enervating
sloth. If the project had sprung out of the ebullitions of intoxicated
passions, it might have died away on the morrow, but, the result of
calculation, it only received strength from the hopes which it roused, and
which again were inflamed by the celebration. Nay, time, as day by day
passed without a likely lodger coming in, increased the desire to begin,
and chafed them into impatience. Hare accordingly resolved to commence
prowling about the streets for some promising individual whom he might
seduce into the house, and for some days he followed this occupation, but
his efforts failed, and the report at night only again inflamed the desire
of the morning. One afternoon, it was in December 1827, he again betook
himself to the street, and for hours dodged about searching among the poor
and miserable for some one who, already intoxicated, might offer those
facilities to a beginner which were afterwards held of small account when
practice gave proficiency and success confidence. At last he observed in
the Grassmarket a decent-looking elderly woman (Abigail Simpson, as
afterwards ascertained) whose wandering eye and irregular step shewed that
she had got more of the publican's drug than her perhaps weak head could
carry. His eye was immediately fixed upon her, and the old smile, which
always obeyed the bidding of an evil thought, played over his face, nor
did he let her out of his sight as he dogged her irregular movements from
place to place. He could see that she was poor, that she was probably
friendless, and, above all, that she was tipsy, and he knew enough of
degraded nature to tell him what the proverb has settled, _Qui a bu
boira_,--he who has drunk will drink more. Making up to her, he introduced
himself as one who had met her before, and to his delight, discovered that
she was inclined to be communicative, if not garrulous. It was not a
difficult matter to advise her to accompany him to his house, where he
would treat her with the old bribe of "a dram." So away they trudged
together, the dissembler taking special care as he went to keep her on her
course, from which she was every moment inclined to stray, by professions
of interest and friendship.
Arrived at the lodging-house, the woman was introduced to Burke, with what
looks between the two may easily be imagined, as an old friend, and drink
was immediately procured. There was now a party which was joined by the
two women, who, when they saw the men plying the stranger with whisky--the
full value of which their difficulty in getting it to the extent they
desired was sufficiently known to them--must have been aware that there
was at the bottom of this generosity more than the friendship professed by
men dead to the feeling, even as regards those who might have had a claim
to it. The time passed, and the party became merry, nor was the stranger
the least joyous of them, for had she not fallen among friends by sheer
accident? and should she not prove her gratitude by being happy, ay, and
communicating to them all her secrets? Was she not fortunate in being able
to tell them that she was a pensioner of a gentleman in the New Town, who
paid her regularly one shilling and sixpence a-week, besides little
gratuities, such as the can of kitchen-fee she carried with her, and put
aside till she should depart? Yes, and more, that she was blessed with a
fine young daughter she had left at home, and who would be anxiously
waiting her return. And then that daughter was not only good, she was
_beautiful_, and the very pride of her soul. All this Hare heard; and he
could carry out the play she had begun, even amidst the intentions he
entertained, by expressing an interest in the mother's paragon, so deeply
felt, that, being unmarried, he would put in for her hand, provided the
mother would consent. And consent she did, so far as her condition would
allow, and here, newly forged, was another bond of friendship. Nay, when
he and the daughter should have become man and wife, it behoved that they
could not live without the good old mother--who, accordingly, would take
up her residence with them, with no more cares of poverty, and no
dependence upon the pensioning gentleman of the New Town.
Could any human creature be more happy? Nor were the actors less so,
though for a reason so very different. But the drink went done, even with
the forbearance of the men, that she who would pay so dearly for it should
have enough for their purpose. Mrs Hare had money, and there was the can
of kitchen-fee, which the stranger could sell, and take home with
her--_when the time came_--the price, one and sixpence, to help her little
pension, and get a dram at another time, when they would not be there to
give it to her. Then, to make the play even more merry and ingenious, this
small sum was, very soon after, again, taken from the now almost
unconscious woman's pocket, and laid out on more spirits, that the
expected opportunity might be made more propitious. The scene progressed
with even increased symptoms of noisy merriment. The old woman revived,
and, under so many influences bearing on a kindly heart, did her best to
sing some of her old songs--household words to her, no doubt, and feelings
as well, with which she often at home wiled back the days of her youth,
and charmed the ear of that daughter of whom she was so proud and so fond.
Nay, we have the hearsay of the day for saying, that Burke contributed his
part, singing, as he was so much in the habit of doing, some of those
airs, generally, according to the account of those who knew him,
sentimental, if not melancholy.
And here we are obliged absolutely to stop for a moment, not that we wish
to intrude upon the reader a moralising spirit, where every word suggests
a sermon out of more hardened things than stones, but that we are
mystified, and are inclined to ask counsel. Could that man have had any
sense of the beautiful in the sentiments of these lyrics which, it was
said, he sang with feeling, if not pathos? Can it be possible that such a
sense can be consistent with a demoralisation such as his? We suspect that
it is. We are led to expect its impossibility by a reference to opposite,
if not antagonistic, feelings: we cannot love and hate the same object.
This is true, and would seem to disprove our proposition _à priori_. We
can reconcile the contradiction only by having recourse to the different
faculties of the imagination and the sense. The poet who has ravished his
readers by a description of the beauty of female virtue and innocence has
been found in a brothel. One of the most touching religious poems in the
world has been sung by one who, among brawling revellers, maligned
religion and its votaries. The praises of temperance have been
enchantingly poured forth by a bacchanal. The oppressor of the poor has
wept at a representation of affecting generosity. Any one may fill up the
list without perhaps including a hypocrite. The imagination has its
emotions, and the sense its feelings, or, perhaps, no feelings. The why
and the wherefore touch the ultimate, and we are lost; but the fact
remains, as proved by evidence, that William Burke could, in song, be
pathetic.
Recurring to our real tragedy, the effect of the drink soon again sent the
creature from her lyrics into a condition which might have suited the
purpose of the men; but whether it was that, as beginners, they lost
courage, or that lodgers came in and defeated their intentions, they
failed that night in effecting their object. The unconscious woman was
lifted into a bed, where she lay till the morning. A severe sickness was
the consequence of the importunities of her new-made friends; and the
colleagues, exasperated by their defeat of the previous night, were
alongside of the bed, with offerings of sympathy, and more drink. In the
midst of all this, she cried that she wished to get home to her beloved
daughter, at the very time that she weakly accepted that which
incapacitated her. By and by, the lodgers for the night began to leave the
house; and the victim being once more reduced to unconsciousness, they
fell to their work in the precise manner they had planned. Hare laid hold
of the apertures of breathing, and Burke throwing himself on her body to
repress struggles and keep down the ribs, maintained his position till the
last sob escaped from the oppressed lungs; and the woman, after a struggle
of fully a quarter of an hour, was a corpse. In the evening the body was
conveyed to Surgeon's Square, and ten pounds procured for it.
All this tragedy was being acted while the daughter, at Gilmerton, was
waiting anxiously for the return of her mother. The evening had passed
without exciting in her much alarm; but when the morning came, with no
mother, and no intelligence, she became oppressed with fears. Without
having tasted breakfast, she sallied forth. The village was gone through,
and afforded no trace. She next directed her steps to Edinburgh, inquiring
at every one she met if they had seen a woman of the appearance she
described. At length she resorted to the house of the gentleman who paid
the pension, but beyond the information that she had been there on the
previous day, she could get no satisfaction. She then wandered through all
parts of the city, calling on every one she knew, and putting the same
question--if they had seen her mother?--but always receiving the same
answer. No weariness oppressed her in this vain search. The night set in
only as a prelude to the revival of her hopes in the morning; and search
followed search, and day followed day, every hour diminishing hope. The
time was now counted by weeks, and as these sped, by months, yet ever as
the time flew, and the hope decayed, the love increased with every
accession of her grief. At length even hope was relinquished, and all
speculations were lost in mystery. The only conclusion that could
rationally be come to was, that the missing one had wandered by the canal
and been drowned; for that a human being could disappear and be for ever
lost in the city of Edinburgh, with its humane inhabitants ready to render
succour, and its vigilant police ever on the watch, was what no one could
conceive. The explanation was to come at a time which, to grief, might be
thought long in the future; and such an explanation to a daughter! ay, and
a daughter of whom the mother was so proud and so fond.
The Mother and Daughter.
If we were to estimate the benefits derived from sacrificing to mammon,
according to the material uses to which they are devoted, we would be apt
to form a very humble estimate of his godship; but these, we suspect,
constitute, even with the lowest of his worshippers, only a small part of
the charm of his gifts. Seventeen pounds ten shillings, the price of one
dead body, and that of the life and the corpse of another, produced a
change in the economy of Log's house and in the minds of its ruling
inhabitants. This appeared first in the dresses of the women, who, from
being little better than trulls, with clothes bought in pawnshops, and
often not far removed from ragged tanterwallops, began to be equipped like
respectable people. Bonnets were got from the milliner direct; and it is
even said that fine prints appeared in gaudy colours on the two women of
Log's house. It was observed, too, that they held their heads higher, and
walked more circumspectly, as if some species of pride--the kind we leave
to the moral analyst--had asserted its universal power, undismayed by the
scowl of vice. Lodgers began to be less cared for, as mere lodgers, though
the most squalid of them had recommendations of another kind, of which
they themselves were not aware; and as for the men, the producers of this
wonderful change, they were now gentlemen at large--the huckster's cart,
the hurley, the old horse, the stool, and the awl-box, having been
discharged and despised as unworthy of those who held in their hands a
charm invested with even greater power than the ring of Giges or Mongogul,
even that of turning, by a touch, the mortal part of human nature into
gold.
Hitherto even the philosophers had been wrong in their estimate of man and
the world on which he lives. The ill-natured cynics represented that, in
his earthly aspect, man is a parasite on the great animal the world;
preying on his fellow-creatures, he is, in return, preyed upon by
parasites. There are those that prey upon his body, others that, in the
form of pains, ride upon the back of his vicious pleasures. There are
those that fawn upon him, and feed upon his fortunes, and when he dies he
is eaten by parasites. But there was in reserve, and unknown to these
detractors, a chapter on human nature only laid open to our time and
country, for though the Easterns had their fable of the gouls, it was
received only as a fairy tale by the Westerns, till they were surprised
into a belief even transcending the images of Arabian fancy. Yet the more
hopeful philosophers, who draw their inspirations from Calvary, where was
seen the consideration for the shekels of silver, are not dismayed. Yea,
in this lowly thing we call our body, which preys on garbage, and is
preyed upon in return, is a microcosm, which represents, in extension,
that which has no limit--in perfection, that which is without end--in
beauty, that which the poet cannot, with all his inspiration, describe.
We would not be true to human nature if we limited the effects of this
change in the fortunes of Log's house to what we have already described.
The vicious heart pants for pleasures to worry it. _La lampe inextinguible
du plaisir_ must burn, though fed with rancid oil extracted from decayed
organisms; and so there was a growing increase, not only in the number,
but in the intensity of the "enjoyments" of the bacchanalian nights. If
the neighbours had noticed the external changes, they were not the less
observant--though destined to be long ignorant of the cause--of what was
nightly acted within. The brawls and fights were louder and more frequent,
and the dithyrambics which mixed with them in grotesque inconsistency had
more of the _ménad_ of the priests of Cybele. Yet all this, by God's law,
was sternly a necessity: we need no moral here. Secrecy and publicity are
separate instruments of divine retribution, working strangely and
mysteriously to the same end. Even the ordinary secret sin corrodes the
heart by its immurement, and the sin of Log's house was not an ordinary
one. The more it is suppressed, the greater the elasticity of the torment.
When freed from the prison of the heart it produces that recoil of the
good which isolates the criminal from the smiles of fellowship and the
help of society. Yes, this is the point with the diverging paths of ruin
or redemption, and Heaven still vindicates the old economy. If the sinner
will be saved by penitence, he must give signs of his suffering, and the
world will profit by it as well as himself. If he hurries to ruin, he will
still give evidence of his agony. In either case, that Providence which
watches over us will still serve its purpose.
Only one of these paths was here open, and the quaternity even rushed into
it. The progress of the ruin must keep apace. The excitement, in the
shape, to them, of pleasure, must be sustained; and above all, the men had
tasted the _power_ of money--not to be estimated by what it produced--in
what simply pleased such strange natures. They had got their heads into
the dagon temple, and though all the rest of the body was exposed, they
felt, however much they were in danger of justice, that they had some
security against a continuance of the misery and contempt of their prior
lives. They must, accordingly, go on, for they were dipsomaniacs in blood.
The £17, 10s. must, if it had not already, come to an end, under the
expense of these nightly orgies, and, behold the prowler again out to look
for a new victim.
There had been known to both of the men, and not less to the women, an
unfortunate creature of the name of Mary Haldane, whose vagrant beat was
the old scene of the Grassmarket. Her life had not been all through a
succession of those scenes in which her class figure; for, previous to the
birth of a natural child, the fruit of seduction, she had been not only
respected for a fair reputation, but looked on favourably for those
personal qualities so often the means of ruin. Then the demon drink had
met her at that turn of the fortunes of so many of her kind, when decayed
beauty is not compensated by the consolations of penitence. The road down
was easy, even to that stage where flapping rags could scarcely cover the
body. Need we say that this creature was likely, when the prowler knew
from his own experience that she would drink _to the point_. One day he
accordingly issued forth to seek for Mary, but Mary had been in the drink
fever for days, and he could only regret that so favourable a condition
had not ensued in Log's house, where the termination would not have been
the recovery which this time once more awaited her. Exasperated by his
disappointment, he was only the more determined to overlook other tempting
objects in that fruitful field of human weeds, fit enough for death's
scythe. Nor had he to wait long. Two days afterwards Mary was standing at
the mouth of the narrow close up which she lived.[6] The moment he saw
her, the old smile and eloquent twinkle again illuminated or darkened his
face, for he was as sure of his prey as the fox is of its spoil when it
sits in the roost with its head under its wing. Nor was the smile less
expressive that Mary presented to him. The red and swollen eyes, the
quivering cheeks, and all the other signs of that unhappiness through
which the rebel spirit will still shoot its buoyance in spite of depressed
nature. Misery is easily approached. The dram is again the bribe, and the
kindliness of the offer a recommendation, which was as much a surprise as
a pleasure to one from whom all kindliness had been long barred by the
magnetic repulsion of poverty and degradation. Poor Mary was once more
happy; and, accompanying her "friend," she trudged along to the place
where the _envied_ stimulant awaited her.
As they were slowly wending their way along the West Port, the people, as
some of them afterwards stated, looked earnestly at the couple, without
being able to explain the sympathy which brought them together; for
already Hare was upon the rise in society, with a new coat and hat, and
even a tie; but the presence of the _gentleman_ did not prevent the
children from pursuing their old game of teazing Mary, nor could the
threatenings of her protector keep them off. At this juncture, who should
approach from the opposite direction but the colleague. The mutual
smile--yea, more. Would Burke, who had the character of being serviceable
to the unfortunate, permit Mary Haldane to be abused while he was present?
He would protect the friendless; and so the boys got a drubbing, and
injured misfortune was vindicated. Having accomplished this act of
justice, Burke, who had now so little to do, and was so far above
cobbling, proceeded on what had been intended as a pleasant stroll, while
his friend and Mary held their way to Log's lodgings. In a short time he
was seen to return with a quicker step; and by and by they are all
assembled in the little dark room "with the window looking out on the dead
wall"--where the women, who knew that the money was getting exhausted,
received them with their peculiar welcome.
Well, you expect something, and already the heart throbs,--and do not stop
it; for pity does not close her eye upon the unfortunate, even where sin
has contributed to the misery of the sufferer. But here you cannot help
yourself: the inevitable recoil from cruelty will open the issues of
compassion whether you will or no; and so strangely formed are we, that
here you may be the more willing to acknowledge the soft emotion, that
Mary's eyes reeled with delight when she saw Helen M'Dougal place upon the
table a supply of whisky, which to her share would transcend even the
necessities of "the want" after the fever. There was on this occasion no
necessity for the siren song to charm into confidence where the bottle
was, a band more hallowed, in the estimation of the guest, than the
pledges of love. Neither Hare's sardonic jollity nor Burke's pathos was
needed where the work was apparently so easy; and they were no longer
neophytes, but adepts, not only in confidence, but manipulation. Yea, it
was the work of apprentices, and they were journeymen; nor was it
necessary that they should concern themselves with more than filling the
glass and contemplating the imbodied value--ten pounds--as, by her fading
energies and impending unconsciousness, it assumed its full proportions.
All is ready--the drooping head--the closing eye--the languid, helpless
body. The women get the hint. They knew the unseemliness of being
spectators--nay, they were delicate. A repetition of the former scene,
only with even less resistance. Hare holds again the lips, and Burke
presses his twelve stone weight. Scarcely a sigh; but on a trial if dead,
a long gurgling indraught. More required--and all is still in that dark
room "with the window looking out on the dead wall."