Many have, doubtless, both heard and read of the case of murder in which
Jeffrey performed his greatest feat of oratory and power over a jury,
and in which, while engaged in his grand speech of more than six hours,
he caught, from an open window, the aphony which threatened to close up
his voice for ever afterwards. I have had occasion to notice the wants
in reported cases tried before courts; and in reference to the one I
have now mentioned, I have reason, from my inquiries, to know that the
most curious details of the transaction are not only not to be found in
the report, but not even suggested, if they do not, in some particulars,
appear to be opposed to the public testimony. The agent of the panel
sits behind the counsel, delivering to him sometimes very crude
materials for the defence, and the counsel sifts that matter; sometimes
taking a handful of the chaff to blind a juryman or a judge, but more
often casting it away as either useless or dangerous. In that unused
chaff there are often pickles not of the kind put into the sack, and
again laid as an offering before the blind goddess, but of a different
kind of grain--nor often less pleasant, or, if applied, less acceptable
to justice.
In a certain month in the year 18--, a writer in Dundee, of the name of
David M----, was busy in his office, in a dark street off the High
Street--busy, no doubt, in discharging the functions of that office
represented by AEsop as occupied by a monkey, holding the scales between
the litigating cats. He heard a horse stop at his office door, as if
brought suddenly up by a jerk of the rein.
"There is haste here," he thought; "what is up?"
And presently the door opened, and there came, or rather rushed, in a
man, of the appearance of a country farmer, greatly more excited than
these douce men generally are--except, perhaps, in the midst of a
plentiful harvest-home--splashed up with mud to the back of the neck,
and breathing as hard as, no doubt, the horse was that carried him.
"What is it, Mr. S----?" inquired the writer, as he looked at his
client.
"A dreadful business!" replied he; and he turned, went back to the door,
shut it, and tested the hold of the lock; then laying down his hat and
whip, and pulling off his big-coat, he drew a chair so near the writer,
that the man of law, _brusque_ and even jolly as he was, instinctively
withdrew his, as if he feared an appeal for money.
"What is the business?" again asked the writer, as he saw the man in a
spasmodic difficulty to begin.
"We are all ruined at D----!" he at length said; "Mrs. S----is in your
jail, hard by, on a charge of murder."
"Mrs. S----! of all the women in the world!" ejaculated the writer in
unfeigned amazement: "murder of whom?"
"Of a servant at D----," replied Mr. S----; "one of our own women."
"And what could be the motive?"
"The young woman," continued S----, "had been observed to be pregnant,
and the report was got up that my son was the party responsible and
blameable. Then the charge is, that my wife gave the girl poison,
either to procure abortion, or to take away her life. The woman is dead
and buried; but, I believe, her body has been taken up out of the grave
and examined, and poison found in the stomach."
"An ugly account," said the writer. "I mean not ugly as regards the
evidence, of which, as yet, I have heard nothing. I could say beforehand
that I don't believe the authorities will be able to bring home an act
of this kind to so rational and respectable a woman, as I have known
Mrs. S----to be; but if you wish me to get her off, you must allow me to
look at the case as if she were guilty."
"Guilty!" echoed the man, with a shudder.
"Yes. Were I to go fumbling about in an affair of this kind, acting upon
a notion--whatever I may think or feel--that Mrs. S----, though your
wife, _could not_ possibly do an act of that kind, I would neither hound
up, as I ought, the investigations of the prosecutor, nor get up proper
evidence--not to meet their proofs only, but to overturn them."
"I would have thought you would have been keener to get off an innocent
person--a wife, and the mother of a family, too--than a guilty one,"
said S----.
"We cannot get you people to understand these things," replied the
writer; "but so it is, at least with me, and I rather think a good
number of my brethren. We have a pride in getting off a guilty person;
whereas we have only a spice of satisfaction in saving an innocent one.
Perhaps I have an object, for your own sake, in speaking thus frankly to
you; and I tell you at once, that if you intend to help me to get off
your wife, you must, as soon as you can--even here, at this
moment--renounce all blind confidence in her innocence."
"Terrible condition!" said the farmer.
"Not pleasant, but useful. How, in God's name, am I to know how to
doctor, purge, or scarify, or anoint a testimony against you, unless I
know that it exists, and where to find it?"
"Very true," rejoined the farmer, trying to follow the clever "limb."
"Don't hesitate. I will have more pleasure, and not, maybe, much less
hope, in hearing you detail all the grounds of your suspicion against
your wife, than in listening to your nasaling and canting about her
innocence. All this is for your good, my dear sir, take it as you will."
"I believe it," said the farmer, "and will try to act up to what you
say; but I cannot, of my own knowledge, say much, as yet. These things
are done privately, within the house, and a farmer is mostly out of
doors."
"Well, away, get access to your wife, ferret everything out of her, as
well for her as against her. If she bought poison, where she bought it,
what rats were to be poisoned, how it was applied, how she communicated
with the girl, and where, and all, and everything you can gather.
Question your servants all they saw or heard; your son, what he has to
say; ascertain who came about the house, how affected towards the girl,
whether there were more lovers than your son, whether the girl was
melancholy, or hopeful, and likely to do the thing or not; but, above
all, keep it ever in view that your wife is in prison, and suspected,
and let me know every item you can bring against her. Away, and lose no
time, for I see it's a matter of neck and neck between her and the
prosecutor, and, consequently, neck and noose, or neck and no noose,
between her and the hangman."
Utterly confounded by this array of instructions, the poor farmer sat
and looked blank. It was impossible he could remember all he had been
requested to do; and the duty of finding out facts to criminate the wife
who had lived with him so long in love and confidence, bore down upon
him with a weight he could hardly sustain.
"I will do what I can," he said.
"You must do _more_ than you can," said the writer; "but, again I say,
let me know every, the smallest item you can discover against your
wife."
And, thus charged, Mr. S----mounted his horse, and rode home to a
miserable house with a miserable heart.
Extraordinary as the case was, it was entrusted to the charge of an
extraordinary man, well remembered yet throughout that county, and much
beyond it. In personal respects he was strong, broad, and muscular, with
a florid countenance never out of humour, and an eye that flashed in so
many different directions, that it was impossible to arrest it for two
moments at a time. All action, nothing resisted him; all impulse and
sensibility, nothing escaped his observation; yet no one could say that
any subject retained his mind for more time than would have sufficed
another merely to glance at it. He could speak to a hundred men in a day
upon a hundred topics, and sit down and run off twenty pages of a paper
without an hour of previous meditation; break off at a pronoun, at a
call to the further end of the town; drink as much in a few minutes'
conversation with a client as would have taken another an hour to enjoy,
and return and finish his paper in less time than another would take to
think of it. Always, to appearance, off his guard, he was always master
of his position, nor could any obstacle make him stand and calculate
its dimensions--it must be surmounted or broken, if his head or the laws
should be broken with it; always pressing, he never seemed to be
impressed, and the gain or loss of a case was equally indifferent to
him. His passion was action, his desire money; but the money went as it
came--made without effort and spent without reason. Yet no man hated
him; most loved him; few admired him; and even those he might injure by
his apparent recklessness could not resist the good nature by which he
warded off every attack.
He saw at once, after he had dismissed S----, that he had got hold of a
desperate case, and also that he behoved to have recourse to desperate
means; but it seemed to take no grip of his mind for more than a few
minutes, by the end of which he was full swing in some other matter of
business, to be followed with the same rapidity by something else, and,
probably, after that, pleasure till three in the morning, when he would
be carried home to an elegant house in a certain species of carriage
with one wheel. Nor had even that consummation any effect on to-morrow's
avocations, for which he would be ready at the earliest hour; and in
this case he _was_ ready. He set about his inquiries, first proceeded to
D----to get a view of the premises--the room where the young woman lay,
where the son slept, and the bedroom of the mother--and ascertain
whether the premises permitted of intercourse with the servants unknown
to the farmer and his wife. He next began his precognition of those
connected with the house, and, on returning to town, procured access to
Mrs. S----.
The jail of Dundee was at that time over the courthouse, a miserable den
of a few dark rooms, presenting the appearance of displenished garrets,
with small grated windows and a few benches. Here the woman sat
revolving, no doubt, in her mind all the events of a life of comfort and
respectability, and now under the risk of being brought to a termination
by her body being suspended in the front of that building where she had
seen before this terrible consummation of justice enacted with the
familiar and dismal forms of the tragedy of the gallows. We write of
these things as parrots gabble, we read of them as monkeys ogle the, to
them, strange actions of human beings; but what is all that comes by the
eye or the ear of the experiences of an exterior spirit to the workings
of that spirit in its own interior world, where thought follows thought
with endless ramifications, weaving and interweaving scenes of love and
joy and pain, contrasting and mixing, dissolving and remixing--bright
lights and dark shadows--all seen through the blue-tinged and distorting
lens of present shame? We cannot realize these things, nor did the
writer try. He had only the practical work to do--if possible, to get
this woman's neck kept out of a kench; nor did it signify much to him
how that was effected; but effected it would be, if the invention of one
man could do it, and if that failed, and the woman was suspended, it
would trouble him no more than would the loss of a small-debt case.
"Sorry to see you in this infernal place, Mrs. S----," he said, as he
threw himself upon a bench. "I must get you out, that's certain; but I
can promise you that certainty only upon the condition of making a clean
breast--only to me, you know."
"I know only that I never poisoned the woman," replied she.
"Do you want to be hanged?" said he, with the reckless abruptness so
peculiar a feature of his character, at the same time taking a rapid
glance of her demeanour. He knew all about the firmness derived from
the confidence of innocence, of which a certain class of rhapsodists
make so much in a heroic way, and yet he had always entertained the
heterodoxical notion that guilt is a firmer and often more composed
condition than innocence, inasmuch as his experience led him to know
that the latter is shaky, anxious, and sensitive, and the former stern
and imperturbable. Nor did his quick mind want reasons for showing that
such ought, by natural laws, to be the case; for it is never to be lost
sight of, that, in so far as regards murder, which requires for its
perpetration a peculiar form of mind and a most unnatural condition of
the feelings, the same hardness of nerve which enables a man or woman to
do the deed, serves equally well the purpose of helping them to stand up
against the shame, while the innocent person, in nine hundred and
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand--the probable proportion of those
who _cannot_ kill--has not the fortitude to withstand the ignominy,
simply because he wants the power to slay. So without in his heart
prejudging the woman, he drew his conclusions, true or false, from the
impassibility of her demeanour. Her answer was ready----
"How could they hang an innocent woman?"
"But they _do_ hang hundreds, who say just what you say," replied he.
"What are you to make of that riddle? Come, did you ever buy any
poison?--please leave out the rats."
"No; neither for rats nor servants," was the composed reply.
"And you never gave the woman a dose?"
"Yes; I have given her medicine more than once."
"Oh, a capital thing to save life; but you know her life was not saved.
She died and was buried, and has been taken up; and I suspect it was not
your jalap that was found in the body. But what interest had you in
being so very kind to the woman who was to bring shame on your family by
bearing a child to your son?"
"I never knew she was in that way; but though I had known it, I could
not have taken away her life."
"Then, who gave her the poison?"
"I do not know."
"And cannot even suspect any one?"
"No."
"Good-bye!" he said, as he started up and hurried away; muttering to
himself, as the jailer undid the bolts, "Always the same!--the women are
always innocent; and yet we see them stretching ropes other than
clothes' ropes every now and then."
Defeated, but as little discomfited, as we might gather from his pithy
soliloquy, his next step was to double up, as he termed it, the
authorities, who, he knew, would never have gone the length of
apprehending the woman without having got hold of evidence sufficient to
justify Sir William Rae, the Lord Advocate, a considerate and prudent
man, that the charge lay heavy on the prisoner. He had no right of
access, at this stage, to the names of the intended witnesses; but to a
man of his activity it is no difficult matter to find these out, from
the natural garrulity of the people, and a kind of self-importance in
being a Crown testimony. Then to find them out was next to drawing them
out; for it may be safely said for our writer that there was no man,
from the time of John Wilkes, who could exercise a more winning
persuasion. One by one he ferreted them out, wheedled, threatened,
adjured, but found himself resisted in every attempt to break them down
or to turn them to him. At every stage of his inquiry he saw the case
for the prisoner assuming a dark aspect--as dark, he so termed it, as
the face of a hanged culprit.
"The beagles have got a track. There are more foxes in the cover than
one; and shall it be said I, David M----, cannot beat out another as
stimulating to the nose?"
In a quarter of an hour after having made this observation to himself,
he was posting on horseback to the farm of D----, where he arrived in as
short a time as he generally took on his journeys.
"I am afraid to ask you for intelligence," said the farmer, as he stood
by the horse's side, and addressed the writer, who kept his seat.
"Get me two and five-eighths of a glass of whisky in a jug of milk, and
I'll tell you then what I want. I have no time to dismount."
The farmer complied.
"The case looks ugly," said the writer, as he handed back the jug.
"These witnesses would hang a calendared saint of a hundred miracles.
Are any tramps in the habit of coming about you?"
"Too many."
"Do you know any of them?"
"Scarcely--not by name."
"Any women?--never mind the men," said the writer impatiently.
"Yes; there is one who used to come often; she sold small things."
"Is that all you know of her? Has she no mark, man? Is her nose long or
short? no squint, lame leg, or pock-pits?"
"She had usually a small cage, in which she kept a couple of white
mice."
"White mice!" ejaculated the writer; "never was a better mark."
"You don't know her name?"
"No; nor do I think any of my present people do."
"When was she here last?"
"About a month ago."
"Anywhere near the time of the girl's death?"
"Ay, just about that time, or maybe a week before."
"And you can give me no trace of her?"
"None whatever, except that I think I saw her take to the east, in the
way to Arbroath. But I do not see how she can be of any use."
"I don't want you to see that she can be of any use," said the writer,
laughing; "but I want you to hear whereabout she is."
"I will try what I can," said the farmer.
"And let me know by some messenger who can ride as fast as I can." Then
adding, "Gilderoy was saved by a _brown_ mouse, which gnawed the string
by which the key of the jail door of Forfar hung on a nail, whereby the
key fell to the ground, and was pulled by him through an opening at the
bottom. Heard you ever the story?"
"No."
"But it's true, nevertheless. What would you say if a _white_ mouse, or
two of them, should save the life of your wife?"
"I would say it was wonderful," replied the farmer, with eyes a-goggled
by amazement.
"And so would I," answered Mr. M----, as he put the rowels into the side
of his horse and began a hard trot, which he would not slacken till he
was at the Cowgate port, and not even then, for he made his way
generally through the streets of the town with equal rapidity, and
always the safer that he was the "fresher."
On arriving at his office he sat down, and, without apparently any
premeditation, unless what he had indulged in during his trot, wrote off
with his usual rapidity four letters to the following effect:--"Dear
Sir,--As agent for Mrs. S----, who now lies in our jail on a charge of
murder, I request you will endeavour to find some trace of a woman who
goes through the country with a cage and two white mice. Grave
suspicions attach to her, as the person who administered the poison, and
I wish your energies to be employed in aiding me to search her out." The
letters were directed to agents in Arbroath, Forfar, Kirriemuir, and
Montrose, and immediately committed to a clerk to be taken to the
post-office, with a good-natured laugh on the lips of the writer--and,
within the teeth, the little monologue--"The wrinkled skin easily
conceals a scar."
From some source or another, probably the true one may be guessed, an
_uberrima fides_ began to hang round a report that a new feature had
spread over the face of Mrs. S----'s case; and that, in place of her
being the guilty person, the culprit was a tramp, with white mice in a
cage. Nor were the authorities long in being startled by the report; but
where that woman was no one could tell, and a vague report was no
foundation for authoritative action. But if it was not for a Lord
Advocate to seek out or hunt after white mice, that was no reason why
the prisoner's agent should not condescend to so very humble an office;
and, accordingly, two days after the despatch of the letters I have
mentioned, the same horse that carried the writer on the former
occasion, and knew so well the prick of his rowels, was ready saddled at
the door of the office. The head of the agent was instantly drawn out of
some other deep well of legal truth, some score of directions given to
clerks, and he was off on the road to Glammis, but not before some
flash had shown him what he was to do when he got there. The same rapid
trot was commenced, and continued, to the great diminution of the sap of
the animal, until the place he was destined for loomed before him. He
now commenced inquiries upon inquiries. Every traveller was questioned,
every door got a touch of his whip, until at length he got a trace, and
he was again in full pursuit. I think it is Suidas who says that these
pretty little animals, called white mice, are very amatory, and have a
strong odour, but this must be only to their mates. I doubt if even the
nostrils of a writer are equal to this perception, whatever sense they
may possess in the case of pigeons with a pluckable covering. But,
however this may be, it was soon observable that our pursuer had at
least something in his eye. The spurs were active; and, by and by, he
drew up at a small road-side change-house, into the kitchen of which he
tumbled, without a premonitory question, and there, before him, sat the
veritable mistress of these very white mice, spaeing the fortunes of
some laughing girls, who saw the illuminated figures of their lovers in
the future.[A]
"Can you read me _my_ fortune?" he said, in his own peculiar way.
"Na; I ken ye owre weel," was the quick reply, as she turned a pair of
keen, grey eyes on him.
"Well, you'll speak to me at any rate," he said. "I have something to
say to you."
And, going into the adjoining parlour, he called for a half-mutchkin. He
needed some himself, and he knew the tramp was not an abstainer.
"Tell the woman to come ben," he said, as the man placed the whisky on
the table.
"What can you want, Mr. M----, with that old, never-mend vagabond?"
"Perhaps an uncle has left her five hundred pounds," said the writer
with a chuckle.
"Gude save us! the creature will go mad," said the man, as he went out,
not knowing whether his guest was in humour or earnest.
But, whatever he said to the woman, there she was, presently, white mice
and all, seated alongside of the writer, who could make a beggar or a
baron at home with him, with equal ease, and in an equally short time.
"You're obliged to me, I think, if I can trust to a pretty long memory,"
he said, handing her a glass of the spirits.
"Ay; but it doesna need a lang memory to mind gi'en me this," she
replied, not wishing any other reason for her obligation.
"And you've forgotten the pirn scrape?"
"The deil's in a lang memory; but I hinna," she replied, with more
confidence, for by this time the whisky had disappeared in the
accustomed bourne of departed spirits.
"Weel, it's a bad business that at your auld freend's at D----," said
he, getting into his Scotch, for familiarity. "Hae ye heard?"
"Wha hasna heard? I kenned the lassie brawly; but I didna like her--she
was never gude to a puir cratur like me."
"But they say ye ken mair than ither folk?" said he.
"Maybe I do," replied the woman, getting proud of the impeachment. "Hae
we nae lugs and een, ay, and stamachs, like ither folk?"
"And could ye do naething to save this puir woman, the wife o' a gude
buirdly man, wi' an open hand to your kin, and the mither o' a family?"
"I care naething about her being the wife o' a man, or the mither o' a
family; but I ken what I ken."
"And sometimes what ye dinna ken, when you tell the lasses o' their
lovers ye never saw."
"The deil tak their louping hearts into his hand for silly gawkies; if
they werena a' red-wood about lads, they wadna heed me a whistle. But
though I might try to get Mrs. S----'s head out o' the loop, I wadna
like to put my ain in."
"I'll tak gude care o' that," said the writer. "I got ye out o' a scrape
before."
"Weel than----"
"And weel than," echoed he.
"And better than weel than; suppose I swore I did it mysel'--and maybe I
did; that's no your business--they wadna hang a puir wretch like me for
her ain words, wad they, when there's nae proof I did it but my ain
tongue?"
"No likely," replied he; "and then a hunder gowden guineas as a present,
no as a bribe----"
"I want nae bribes--I gie value for my fortunes. If it's wind, wind is
the breath o' life; a present!"
"Would make your een jump," added he, finishing his sentence.
"Jump! ay, loup! Whar are they?"
"You'll get the half when you come into the town, and the other when
Mrs. S----is safe. You will ca' at my office on Wednesday; and, after
that, I'll tak care o' you. In the meantime, ye maun sell your mice."
"Geordie Cameron offered me five shillings for them; I'll gie them to
him."
"No," replied the writer; "no to a _man_. Ken ye nae woman-tramp-will
tak them, and show them about as you do?"
"Ou ay; I'll gie them to Meg Davidson, wha's to be here the night. But
whaurfor no Geordie?"
"Never ye mind that, I ken the difference; and if Meg doesna give you
the five shillings, I will."
"Well, buy them yoursel'," said the woman.
"Done," said he; "there's five guineas for them, and you can gie them to
Meg as a present. Now, are ye firm?"
"Firm!" she cried, as she clutched the money, and gave a shrill laugh,
from a nerve that was never softened by pity or penitence. "I think nae
mair on't, man--sir, I mean, for ye proved yoursel' a gentleman to me
afore--than I do now in spaeing twins to your wife at her next
doun-lying."
A rap on the table, from the bottom of the pewter measure, brought in
the landlord.
"Fill that again," said the writer.