the reception, the colleagues carried their burden, at an hour approaching
to twelve, to its destination. As usual, it was examined before
payment,--the amount of which, in this instance, we do not know; but,
whether from some want of success, consequent on the increased
watchfulness over cemeteries, attending the midnight adventures of our
friends Merrylees and the "Spune," or from a greater avidity for science
on the part of the surgeons, it is certain that, as the supply from Log's
lodgings increased, the value given for a burden became greater,
amounting, in some instances, to £12 or £14.
The band was thus again supplied with resources, and the consequence was
an increase of extravagance and riot--the former exhibiting itself in a
still more inconsistent style of dress on the part of the females, and the
latter in more frequent disturbances of the neighbours. Even questions
began to be put to Helen M'Dougal, which were parried by the intelligence
that she communicated,--that she had fallen heir to some house property
about her place of birth, and that it was only right that decent people
should rise in the world, and take the use of their own. Nor was Mary Hare
less adroit in her fences. But the explanations thus given of what
appeared to be a mystery were not deemed satisfactory, though no theory
could be formed by the remonstrants.
On the part of the _fortunate_ crew, the sums they received seemed only to
stimulate their avidity. Not now waiting for the dispersion of the
earnings, they aimed at a store, perhaps apprised by some looming
suspicion that their fortune was too good to last, and a strange
circumstance soon threw another temptation in their way. Young Mary
Haldane, the daughter of her whom we have seen so easily and suddenly
removed from the world and life, with all those sins on her head which had
accumulated from the day of her seduction, had been brought up by the
mother to ways as shameless as her own. As yet, however, it was the
morning of life to the girl, and it is not always or often that wayward
affections spent upon men more profligate than themselves, diminish the
love of such creatures to their parents, even if the latter ought, by
their neglect, to have earned nothing but hatred. We have seen one
daughter cast into inconsolable grief, another was to be a wanderer and
inquirer for her parent, with another and even more terrible issue. Having
ascertained, on the morning subsequent to that evening when the burden was
conveyed to Surgeon's Square, that her mother had not been seen on the
previous night, Mary occupied the day in searching. The woman was a
ken-speckle, the familiar object of all in the neighbourhood, as well as
the game of the urchins; and much curiosity was added to the sympathy for
the orphan, who, unfortunately, was scarcely less notorious. Many aided in
the inquiry, but with no more success, of course, than that which attended
the efforts of the daughter. It is still remembered how she went about in
her decayed finery, with swollen eyes, and the tears on her cheeks,
sobbing out her grief, amidst the fruitless question, "Had any one seen
Mary Haldane?" At length, one of the neighbours was told by a grocer in
Portsburgh, that the woman had been seen going towards Log's lodgings in
the company of William Hare--a trace which, as no suspicions as yet
attached to the man, held out some hope of success.
The information was immediately conveyed to the young woman, who thereupon
hastened to the West Port, where she got the story confirmed, with all the
minutiæ of Burke's gallant rescue of Hare's _protégée_ from the assaults
of the urchins. Nor did she stop till she got to Log's lodgings. Mrs Hare
denied that the woman had ever been in her house--a statement corroborated
by Helen M'Dougal, who, in her new-born pride, resented the imputation
that it could be possible for the beggar to have the impudence to approach
the residence of respectable people; but Hare, who in the back room had
heard the rencontre, came forth, and taking the part of the girl--with
what expression of countenance to his companions, it would be difficult
for a mere pen to give the symbols of an idea--sympathised with her, and
even more, asked her to come into the room with the window opening to the
dead wall, and get a dram to dry up her tears. The girl, also given to
drink, was tempted, and complied with the kind invitation. It was not long
till the colleague made his appearance, having, it is supposed, seen Mary
enter when he was lounging idly about the top of the close. They were no
sooner seated, and the whisky put upon the table by Helen M'Dougal, than
Hare began his explanation. He told her that her mother had spoken to him
on that day when she disappeared; that she told him she was going to
Midcalder, (where he knew she had some friends;) and that he had no doubt
she would be found there, to the great joy of the despairing girl.
And no doubt the poor girl's heart jumped to the valediction. She began to
get cheerful under the new-lighted lamp of hope; and if there was any
deficiency in the oil, it was supplied by the cognate combustible which,
like all other agents of the same kind, consumes by its latent fires those
who consume it. Glass succeeded glass, and with hope getting brighter and
brighter before her eyes, now dry enough, and sympathy sounding louder and
louder in her ears, what marvel that Mary Haldane should be as happy as
those who had preceded her in those jubilations. She talked of her lovers
and her youthful escapades--not forgetting those whisky-born fortunes,
embracing equipages and servants, which are the continual destiny of the
wretched, as if nature, in some mood of pity, made an imaginary
compensation for real privations and as real misery. How little conscious
was she that the two men, who responded so exuberantly to her wild
aspirations, were watching when they would exhaust and bring her "to the
point." Nor was the issue long delayed. Mary was one of those who, once
fairly begun, never stopped, if the means were in her power, till she had
run the full course. The symptoms of the artificial narcosis began to shew
themselves,--the thick speech, the heavy eye, the bent head, and only a
little longer and she was extended on the floor. Let us not speak of this
girl's youth, the interest of her peculiar fortunes, with no chance ever
given her of putting even the first step in the path of virtue. Why, there
was, even in the estimation of those who stood over, ready for the work of
their calling, a curious if not stimulating aptitude in sending her after
her mother. Did she not call there to see her, and find her? and why
should they defeat so laudable a purpose? The quarter of an hour's
suspension between life and death, with those mysterious agonies of which
the organism is capable, even in the absence of manifestations, or at
least in their suppression by external force, and Mary Haldane experienced
the fate of her mother. And with her mother, too, she lay that night in
the hall of Surgeon's Square.
The Grandmother and the Dumb Boy.
It has been said, that in the course of one man's life there occurs
usually only one springtide on which he may direct his barque to fortune,
and, so far as we have seen, this chance was not denied to the governors
of Log's lodgings; but nature has not equally decreed that the voyagers
shall see beyond that fortune, or to what it may lead. Nay, is there not
something in the circumference of the objects of a day, if not an hour, if
not a minute, which, like that which surrounds the scorpion, keeps all
inside inviolate from the anathemas beyond? But then the circumference is
ever changing, and ever enclosing new objects, till the last, with an
opening in the side, looks out upon the dark or light theatre of
retribution or salvation. We sometimes see this solitary springtide
surmounted by the shattered barque of age, from which the waters of life
are fast receding, and yet the voyager moves on. His fortune is a
_hysteria_, through the ecstatic delirium of which he cannot see the gulf
before his nose. These two men and two women whose history we record were
on their springtide, and we are not to wonder that, beyond the
circumference of rock and cloud, they were prevented from looking; not
that there were not openings through which they could see ruin, but that
the insanity of a fruitful wickedness made them revel blindly in the
buoyancy of their progress, heedless of all rocks and gulfs of
retribution.
Poor moralising this, we suspect, as regards men whose pleasures, bought
at such a price of a revolt against nature, could be termed only "painted
pain." But even they could not be exempted from the laws of human nature.
The circle behoved to contain its objects, and to change from day to day
till the last came, with the lateral opening looking into perdition;
perhaps any other mode ever devised by man of bringing sacrifices to
mammon might not have been utterly exclusive of an attempt to get into a
caste above. Bankrupts, thieves, adulterers, and even ordinary murderers,
sometimes in our day try their hands at this, and make wonderful
successes, for even these crimes which make men what they are, are not
absolutely incompatible with a modern conventional status; but the crime
of the men of our history involved in its very nature the impossibility of
ever holding up the head in any other way than a swagger of desperation,
or directing the eyes to an honest face, except as a look of dogged
defiance. So, in addition to those evidences of change at Log's lodgings,
we have only to mention the restlessness of the moneyed vagabonds driving
them out to the streets to pull companions of their grade into
drinking-houses, and treating them with the money which, however they
might love it, burnt their hands that dispensed it. The delirium of
intoxication amidst living objects that carried the mind out, was the
refuge from, not the spectre of conscience, for conscience they had none,
but that of justice, which no averting of the eyes could enable them to
avoid, only the reeling of them could make it a changing phantasmagoria.
And why, when we have so much deeper tragedies to recount, ought we to
stop our narrative to record--unless, indeed, for the mere sake of the
arithmetic of murders--a mere interlude resorted to as a relief from
dithyrambism? Childermas day came round again! Poor Joe the miller could
bring his price of eleven pounds as well as the rest of them. No doubt,
when he offered himself, in the heyday of his life, to Jenny the farmer's
daughter, he thought himself of greater account than merely eleven pounds;
but men undergo deterioration. Even when rejected, he would have spurned
the valuation when he sung that jolly song of independence so often sung
by his craft, and which declares the determination that neither lawyer nor
doctor would "e'er get a fee from him,"--true enough, yet, alas! not false
in the reverse, that doctors would give a fee _for_ him. Joe's
miscalculations were due to his ignorance of the effects of intemperance,
for it will not do to say that these are known when every day brings up
new developments of consequences resulting from this most dangerous of all
the voluntary evils of man. Say that the drunkard dares the advent of
poverty, crime, the horrors of _delirium tremens_--death,--could he say
that this last is a greater violence to nature than that produced by the
grip and the pressure which, in all these cases, were only consequent upon
the inebriation, which, again, was the act of his own will? It was while
in a state of inebriety that the prowler met Joe. He was already made and
prepared, and the subsequent decoyment, the additional drink, the final
onset of the grim actors, their success, were only the development of a
drama wrought out by actors who took an advantage accorded by himself. Our
authority for treating this case as a mere interlude is derived from the
admission of Burke himself, who, as a great judge could estimate the
importance of what by others cannot be estimated at all, for the simple
reason that the smallest of these tragedies so far transcends all power of
comprehension that comparison becomes a farce; yet though this once jolly
son of a jolly craft might have earned the contempt attributed to a
facility of dying, he was, we are assured, mourned in the hamlet of his
birth, where his frailties, if condemned, were placed, as is too often the
case, to the account of a good heart. Nay, for aught we know,--and we say
it the more readily that no one can trace or enumerate the threads which
the poorest of God's creatures leaves ramifying from heart to heart, all
to respond, as by electric sympathy, to the shock of his death,--the
farmer's daughter might even be concussed to tears--how much too
late--when the terrible tragedy was divulged. We may be at least certain
that Joe never dreamed that a man's character in the world depends upon
his manner of leaving it, or he would have saved his reputation by a
greater resistance when the enemies were upon him, but he was also then
too late: the devil, whom he might have fought with and defeated if sober,
had taken on a strange form, and was unknown to the victim, for the reason
that the victim did not know himself.
However unimportant he might be in these annals, the price which the
miller brought was sufficient to stimulate the now, and long before,
irredeemable actors to a deed which, in the estimation of Burke himself,
as it must ever be in that of a blushing nation, stood unparalleled among
his own atrocities, as by all experiences else it was unparalleled in the
world. Before entering upon the detail, we feel inclined to philosophise a
little. We have been obliged to speak of these men as men, because they
possessed all the physical characters of the species. In a natural view it
has been said that, by the presence of the lower animals in the world, man
is more injured in his ideas of a high nature and destiny than he is
benefited in the temporal advantages of being fed and clothed by them.
The Roman felt the inconveniences of the presence of apes in the same
world with him, when he cried out, in rage or satire or pity, _Simia, quam
similis, turpissima bestia, nobis_! Then what is the use of these beings
always putting us in mind of our resemblance to them? If we are to believe
Pythagoras, Mr Tweddel, or Mr Smith, or any one of the vegetarians, we
could, in their absence, live on herbs and fruits, and be clothed with
cotton and linen. Their presence in the same world, and with so much in
common with us, is a continual satire on man's psychological privilege or
peculium, and to get quit of this many early nations accorded a soul and a
hereafter to them. The satire was inverted when men made gods of them. We
of a modern age shew our respect by an act of parliament against being
cruel to them; and secondly, by eating them. In the midst of such curious
speculations we are always apt to forget that within the moralities of our
species we have gorillas far fiercer than any brother or sister of that
"splendid specimen" described by Du Chaillu, and yet the strength and
savagery of this animal have been called in doubt.
One day, about a month after the disposal of Joe the miller, Hare was
again on the track of the unfortunate, and this time, as it was said, sent
out by his colleague, as if the latter had wished to seek in repetition
the assuagement of familiarity. Alas! the old search. You cry me mercy,
and I would forbear did I not know that truth must bear her crown amidst
the lying conventionalities of refinement; and virtue, who is her
companion, looks to her for strength, while she shines the brighter for
the proximity of vice. Yes, the old threading through the mazes of human
beings,--now passing between the ripe and the raw, the full-blooded youth
and the tottering beggar, the rich and the poor--apportioning the meed of
his approbation according to the selective affinities of the possible.
Polypheme had no tastes; this man was refined. Yea, even like the good
philanthropist who passes by those who do not require his help, and turns
kindly to the maimed and the blind and the miserable, his were claimed by
those on whom the hard and heavy hand of calamity had pressed. The goddess
pitied Iphigenia, and made her a priestess, not because she was beautiful
and the daughter of a great king, but because she was unfortunate.
But on this occasion the searcher was _sought_. While standing on the High
Street holding the button of the ragged coat of an old man who pleased
him, and whose escape, seeing he was a dipsomaniac, would be nothing short
of miracle, there came up to him an Irishwoman, also advanced in years,
apparently a weary tramp, her shoes covered with dust, and her poor
clothes looking as if she had slept in them all night among straw. She was
a stranger in a strange city, and by her side was a little boy whom she
held by the hand, for he was one of God's stricken--deaf and dumb--with
that wistful peering of the eyes which is as often the effect of the
infirmity as of the habit of solicitation. She told him that she was from
Ireland, that she was on the search for some one of her countrymen or
countrywomen whom she knew, and from whom she intended to claim that
privilege of friendship and assistance which the people of that country,
with all their faults, are so liberal in according. Was there need for a
bond of confidence? He himself was of the ould country, and would he not
assist a country-woman with a charge so helpless, so pitiful, so
burdensome, except for the love which bore it? Nay, did he not know the
very person she sought? and did she not reside in Log's lodgings, whereto
he would be so delighted to lead her? Happy escape for the button-held,
and yet strange freak of the mind as it works awry often for an opposite;
for he seemed, as he departed, to envy the new comer, who had thus secured
the friendship of one now possessed of money, and not backward in shewing
it.
So along they went, up between the high houses of Edinburgh's principal
thoroughfare and down by the then Old Bow, with its strange old fronts and
leering storm windows, as if they were curious about the modern people, so
unlike their ancient inhabitants, all which sights raised a wonderment in
the western Celt, which could only be satisfied by questions, and which,
again, were answered with as much particularity as if she was not only to
see them all again, but to seek them out for a purpose. Then how the boy
watched the face of the man, as if some instinct had told him he would
befriend his grandmother, and be in the room of a father to him. And what
had this boy ever learned yet through his eyes alone, to be able to read
backwards the looks of love. Do we not get dreary? The road has no
windings, and there are no trees to conceal the cave of skulls on the
Aventinian mount. Once again with his victim,--for surely we cannot count
the deaf and dumb boy with the wistful eyes as being destined to have his
name--if it could be known in the strange country--recorded in the list,
within the little back room. The colleague was there, lying drowsy from
the prior night's potations, but not unexpectant of the return of his
friend. His eye brightened as the quickened orb threw off the drowsy
vapours; and could he be otherwise than polite--the word is not
misapplied--to the strangers? But where was the Irish friend? Oh, she
would come in good time; and though it were long, did not Helen M'Dougal
place upon the table, in a goodly bottle, that which qualified the ardour
of impatience? The boy must be cared for too till the friend came, and
Mary Hare would do that duty in the front room--yea, might there not have
been sweetmeats in Log's lodgings when the Logs had now waxed wealthy? In
two hours that woman was lying a corpse in the bed of the small room "with
the window looking out on the dead wall." The boy was dumb, but he had
wistful eyes, and begged imploringly with these to see his grandmother.
The women could not even lie to him, and tell him he would see her in the
morning.
In the evening the two men sat over the fire in that same room, with the
body of the woman stretched out on the bed which was at the back of the
wall behind them. The boy was still under the charge of Mary Hare in the
front room. Every moment that had separated him from his grandmother--to
him all the world of his knowledge and affections--rendered the duty of
the governess more difficult, and even strange sounds, between a groan and
a scream, made their way out of his speechless mouth, as if nature in an
agony struggled against her own decrees. The sounds found their way to the
back room, and it came to be a question with the men, as they still sat
looking into the fire, what was to be done with him. It was proposed by
one, we know not which, that he should be taken out in the dark to the
Canongate and there left. The policy had two reasons to support it. In the
first place, he could not peach, and was therefore safe; in the second,
they could hardly venture the offer of two burdens, however welcome at
Surgeon's Square, for fear of awakening suspicions, a reason, this latter,
which was rejected by the other, supposed to be Burke, for the other
reason, that the boy, when dead, could be kept in the house for a few days
without great depreciation in value; and even if they should get for him
a pound or two less, they could make it up upon a fresher one next time.
There was thus some little disagreement between the faithful friends,
which must await a settlement; and, in the meantime, Hare went out to get
a tea-chest for the conveyance of the inhabitant of the bed against the
wall. On his departure, his friend sat ruminating. At one time, when
alone, and amidst the sombre yet sometimes _soft_ influences of
melancholy, with her throng of shades of the past and gone, he used to
sing to himself plaintive airs. Perhaps his melancholy at these times was
poetical. These shades point to the ghosts of our friends, that seem to
stand on yonder shore of the land of shadows, and beckon us to them. We
resist the appeal from day to day for the sake of those that remain. These
die too, and the crowd of beckoners increases, till all that formed our
world seem to have flitted away, and then we make the sign of resignation
to the hermit shadow (in his case the hangman) that is to lead us to them.
If he ever did indulge in these plaintive airs, now was the propitious
time, but his mind was engaged on something more practical--the
resolution, turned and turned again, and examined and laid aside to come
back--yes, the resolution to send the boy after his grandmother.
The night passed, the boy having by some means been made to understand
that his protectress was in bed unwell, but the mutterings of the mute
might have indicated that he had fears which, perhaps, he could not
comprehend. The morning found the resolution of the prior night unshaken;
and, in that same back room where the grandmother lay, Burke took the boy
on his knee, and, as he himself expressed it, broke his back. No wonder
that he described this scene as the one that lay most heavily upon his
heart, and said that he was haunted by the recollection of the piteous
expression of the wistful eyes as the victim looked in his face. The lad
was laid on the bed along with his grandmother; and in the evening an old
herring barrel held the couple who in life were each to each the one thing
loved--and love is the same in the high and the low--had the same fate,
enclosed in the same receptacle, and dealt with in the same way in
Surgeon's Square.