SOLEMN FACTS FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE.
"ACCIDENTAL death," said the jury impanneled to inquire into the death
of Swinden.
"But it ought to be added, 'while in a state of intoxication,'" said a
listener to the evidence given on the inquest.
"Oh, yes, it may be put so, but where's the use? Will it hinder another
drunkard from the same fate when he cannot direct his own movements?"
"I am afraid not," said the medical gentleman in attendance; "if
warnings were of any use, we have them in abundance. This is the third
violent death through drink that I have had to examine into this week,
and it makes life seem one perpetual horror. In a case like this, the
world hears the fact, and shudders; but draw the curtain, look behind
the scenes, and one's disgust and indignation may expend themselves
on another object, while a shade of pity for the wretch cut off in an
instant through his mad folly may possibly arise."
"Look, there she is," said one of the jurymen who knew the
neighbourhood pretty well.
And as he spoke, a woman passed quickly along, dragging by the hand
a small, squalid, neglected-looking child. Every one shrank back to
make way for her, and she stalked on, looking half fiend, half idiot,
through a group of men whose sympathies would have naturally gathered
round a bereaved widow and her children, but who drew back from the
drunken wife who was partly responsible for her husband's fate.
"She knew his snare, and has been warned of the consequences, but she
drank as shamefully as he did, and never had a fireside fit for him
to sit down by. She left him to his own devices, well aware of narrow
escapes before from the death he has met now. And, while neglecting all
her duty to him, and home, and children, who is to acquit her of being
the indirect cause of the accident?"
"But, you see, all this 'might' have happened to the drunken husband
of a sober wife, and we are not legally able to recognise her in the
matter."
"Very true; but, strictly speaking, such deaths are not accidental;
they are something between murder and suicide. If he had been sober, he
would not have been on the rails, and if he had possessed a good wife,
and a peaceful home, he might have been sober. It is well to aim at the
beer-shops, but they are not the only sources of the mischief."
The event, which had furnished sad subject of thought to the wise
and good, and food for exciting gossip among the inhabitants of the
neighbourhood, was of immense use to the widow herself. Lost as she
was, by her own deliberate conduct, to all sense of womanly feeling
and delicacy of mind, her husband's awful death was to her the seed of
a great harvest. She was "the poor widow, whose drunken husband was
killed on the railway." She was "left with a family wholly unprovided
for, and had only her own exertions to look to for their support."
"Poor thing! As if it were not enough to have led her a life of misery,
but he must shock her nearly to death by such an end!" commented one
kind-hearted lady, as she tied up a bundle of clothing and sent it,
with a present of money besides, to the widow's house.
While others, equally pitiful and generous, gave as their means allowed
to this "case of destitution," without coming to see and inquire into
it for themselves. It is singular that it seldom enters these gentle
hearts to think that the sin and provocation in such "a case" may not
have been all on one side.
So Mrs. Swinden towered above all her neighbours on the stilts of her
misfortune and bereavement, put on her gifts of faded mourning, and
sometimes with one child, sometimes two or three, presented herself at
the houses of the gentry, and told her grievous story in her own lying
fashion to servants, and mistresses and masters, wherever she could
get a hearing, and often young ladies would come down and give from
their little store, and servants would find an old garment in their
box, and gather round to see the poor woman whose "case" was in all the
newspapers.
"Lightly come, lightly go" is a true proverb. Money's worth is only
known to those who work for it, and though there is fear of the snare
on the other side, yet under any circumstances, those who work and save
are infinitely more respectable than those who beg and spend. "If any
man will not work, neither shall he eat," is a rule of the Holy Book,
dictated by Him who knows what is in us.
Mrs. Swinden did no work, and she ate, or rather drank, as long as her
gifts lasted. Then the bundles of clothing melted rapidly away, and
articles that the givers only spared because they thought it a duty
to help to clothe the naked and consider the poor, were soon piled
on the shelves of the pawnshop, and the half-drunken mother would
stagger home to throw her children a few pence to get bread for their
craving hunger, while she lay down to sleep off the effects of her own
indulgence.
The poor child whose brain had given way under the shock caused by the
sudden view of its father's mutilated remains, had never been healthy,
and for reasons best known to herself, Mrs. Swinden had made it a
member of a burial society, and managed to maintain the usual deposit.
Her thoughts took a dreadful turn as she looked on the little pining
creature, and felt the maddening power of the drunkard's thirst. And
then the child pined more and shrank more; the coarse food she offered
it would not digest, however greedily devoured at first, and there were
easy ways of accounting for its illness. So its strength all went, and
a little shadow of skin and bone quietly yielded up the breath of life,
that a mother's loving care might have cherished into health and bloom,
and made a strength and staff to her own old age.
She had watched, not to detain the lingering spark of its earthly
existence, as watching mothers yearn to do as long as God permits, but
in anxious hope of its quicker departure. And when at last the flicker
ceased, and the chill of death had settled on the skeleton frame, she
laid it out, and set up a great lamentation at the new "stroke" that
had fallen upon her.
An unsuspecting doctor gave the necessary certificate, and the burial
society paid the money demanded by a member's death; and again Mrs.
Swinden was her own heroine.
The club money and the proceeds of begging expeditions were soon
exhausted in such hands as Mrs. Swinden's, and again she cast about
for means of replenishing her purse. What could she do? Work? Not if
she could help it, certainly. Beg? The givers were tired just now,
having been well taxed by the two deaths on which she had traded so
successfully. Sell something? She looked round; there was nothing left
to sell; the room contained little now but the children, and if any one
would buy children, she would certainly have sold them. Steal? Ah, but
how? From whom? Why, had she not a victim? Was there not somebody who
dared not resist a demand if she chose to make it? The bright thought
was worthy of her cause, and forthwith she set about it.
"Money I want, and money I must have," she said to herself. "They will
trust me no longer, and I can't live without drink."
So she put her widow's bonnet over her straggling hair and unwashed
face (she had preserved the bonnet because of the woeful tale it
silently told), and drawing the old shawl, on which no pawnbroker would
advance a penny, round her shoulders, she went out to pay a visit.
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