hands upon that woman’s form when he remembered the appealing look
of his extraordinary visitor. It was not personal fear or vulgar
superstition, but a higher motive; for inasmuch as no Christian
gentlemen would touch with unholy motive the form of a living wife
in the presence of a living husband, so he could not disturb the
sanctity of her spectral modesty before the face of her suppliant,
dead husband. To those who accept the story of the apparition,
the logic of the motive must be evident; and if so in this case,
why not in all others? Or it may be as it is in life. We meet our
acquaintances every day on the street; they pass us without seeing
us, or without our seeing them; and yet how absurd it would be to
deny their being on the street, walking straight on, absorbed beyond
recognition, simply because they did not stop and explain to us the
motive that brought them there! Ghosts, in like manner, may cross
the clown’s staring vision or the philosopher’s calmer sight, and,
because they do not pause and prattle of their object and tell them
the motive of their appearance, are we to conclude, as a logical
theory demonstrated, that that is a good reason to conclude they
were not there at all? Must all facts be denied until the motives
are discovered? Is a negative so powerful as to overwhelm an
affirmative? If so, the plea of not guilty offered by a criminal
should be enough to justify his discharge, despite of circumstantial
evidence strong enough to hang him or half a hundred like him.
As I stood that night out there in the fatal wood, and thought over
the murder and the murderer, I conceived a plan of punishment by
which, alone, I thought he could appease the outraged sense of human
tenderness for things so young as he had slaughtered.
XIV.
MY PLAN OF PUNISHMENT.
And this is my plan:
Chain him to the rock on which he took her life,—one chain to each
wrist, one chain to each ankle, and an iron hoop locked around his
waist, and this, too, fastened to the rock. Lay him on the spot where
she was found. Then leave him to himself and to the scenery which
he has disfigured so fearfully; but watch that no demon out of the
Davenport or Eddy witchcraft or mancraft boxes help him to unloose
those shackles. Lay him with his face to the avenging skies, and
place food within his reach, but so arrange it that it rests only on
the spots over which the red current of her life had ebbed. Let him
alone with the night, and the night will give him such a tangled and
convulsed spasm of horror as will make his very soul shriek aloud
for two almost impossible things, yet awhile, death or the Lord’s
pardon. And there he should remain until every hair of his head had
become white, and every black spot of his soul livid. Perhaps the
spirit that confronted me in silence and in peace might come to him
and watch him,—watch him till the dawn broke and the eyes of the
bright heavens took its place to look at him. And after that let the
authorities handle him as they pleased.
The reader will observe that in this project of mine I follow out the
classic ideas of the most elegant peoples and refined poets of the
world, who insisted before all things else that the dramatic unities
should be attended to. In that respect my plan would be without a
flaw.
And now, if I am asked for my theory of the murders, my answer
would be, that it might not be politic to give it publicity. This
much, however, I will say, reserving the more probable theory for
future emergencies. There is a link wanting at this time that must
be found before any progress can be made to a conclusive judgment.
The children left their temporary home intending to return in time
for the boy to attend his afternoon school. Their objective point,
as I said before, was May’s wood. This question then arises: What
occurred to make the girl, the senior, change her mind and go
farther away from home,—to Bussey’s wood? Going there would change
her original programme, relative to the boy. Did some one meet them
as if by accident,—_some one whom they knew_,—and did that person
induce her to continue to Bussey’s wood? Were there any evidences
that they stopped at all at May’s wood? But what inducement could
he use to get her to Bussey’s wood? The mother might have been the
inducement. They knew she was employed at Quincy, nearer to Bussey’s
than to May’s wood. They might have been told that she would meet
them at the former, and it would be a pleasant surprise. Another
question presents itself: What could have been the motive to get her
to secluded, distant Bussey? I answer, self-defence. Self-defence
against two children? Yes. The girl was an intelligent, observant
girl, and she may have been cognizant of some crime, the revelation
of which would have brought ruin and punishment upon the perpetrator;
or the perpetrator might, in his consciousness of the possibility of
her having discovered him, come to the resolution to dispose forever
of any chance of her being a witness against him. They were poor
children, and had only money enough to go and come from May’s wood;
and yet that money was found upon the girl. Consequently, she had not
been at any expense in getting to Bussey’s wood by the cars. _The
murderer paid their fare!_ After reaching the thick shades around
the rock, and giving her time to become confident of his integrity
and friendship,—so much so as to be sufficiently at ease to commence
the weaving of leaf chaplets, waiting the promised interview with
her mother,—he sent the boy down to the brook for water, and where
he was subsequently found. Then he turned upon the girl; for if the
boy had been near by, his cries could not have failed to arouse
assistance, for there were men working within three hundred yards of
the place where her body was discovered. He must have brought about
a separation between the children, and at that spot; for he could not
have murdered them together, and there, in that broad sunlight, with
the swirl of the mower’s scythes down in the near meadow evident to
his ear, carried the body of the boy to the brook at the foot of the
hill, and thrown it among the alders. He killed the girl as soon as
the boy was out of sight, and then he followed the little fellow to
the place where he had sent him, and slaughtered him in the gloom of
those thick bushes.
Now, who was that man whom she would have exposed? With whose acts
could she have by locality and association of daily life become
acquainted? Was he from Lynn, or its vicinity,—where she had been
living before she came to Boston? Or was the discovery, or the
imagined discovery, of a crime made in Boston, and of some one living
in Boston? The girl was simply murdered,—no duplex crime,—attacked
while she was sitting with leaves and wreaths in her lap, and the
first blows were delivered upon her back and sides, and after that
in front and in great confusion. The boy was killed, not because he
saw the murder done upon his sister, but because he could have told
who it was that accompanied them from Boston, or joined them at May’s
wood, where they were expected, or anywhere along the first part of
that terrible journey. There was no other motive for his death. If
the man had not been seen by the boy, and known personally to the
boy, he would have been alive now. Consequently it was some one who
was intimate with those children and who could not allow the boy to
live any more than he could allow the girl to live. It was a double
self-defence.
Then who was that man? I think he lives; I think that he walks these
streets daily. I think that some of us at some time or other have
sat beside him in the cars going to and fro the city roads. I think
that now, as I sit here writing, he is sitting somewhere hereabouts
with his face dropped over upon his clenched hands, looking at that
dark rock out there in the woods and wondering if he will yet reach
the end of his life by the common methods of disease. I think that
he often passes by the police station, with a frightened look in his
eyes, and turns a corner quickly when one of the big police guards
stalks like a blue-coated and silver-plated Nemesis toward him. I
see him, in my mind’s eye, when he meets a girl and boy upon the
sidewalk,—how he stares at them with a fixed gaze, wondering how
those two whom he killed out yonder, in the old woods, are looking
now!—and, when this book is advertised, I can watch him wondering
what it is like; and then I trace him in his stealthy and frightened
step to the bookstore to buy it; and, when he turns these leaves and
comes to this sentence, I hear him curse me, and know that he would
like to have his hand upon my throat for recalling the memory of his
deed. But I tell him that he will not escape. He may pretend to pray
when others pray, to hide his wicked past in the garb of piety; he
may mutter his wrath on all of us who seek him for his punishment;
he may fly now the advancing steps of justice: but, as he flies,
the feet of justice may become inactive, while it sends over every
railroad and steamboat line of travel, by every wire that vibrates
to all the remotest places of retreat, the command of his arrest.
Wherever he is now, and wherever he may be then, he is doomed; and
at this instant he knows it and feels it so in every fibre of his
accursed carcass, even to those blood-stained hands beneath whose
nails there yet remains the red record of his crime. I have given one
theory, without in the least asserting it to be the correct one; but
it is as good a theory as the public can get hold of outside of that
mysterious room in the City Hall wherein the tall chief of police
weaves his webs.
There being nothing else but murder in the girl’s death, we must
seek for some motive that could have driven that man to so terrible
a necessity. What other than the one I have suggested? Was it
monomania for human blood? That could have been gratified among a
denser population than he would be likely to find in Bussey’s wood.
And monomania of that kind is not common, nor is it of sudden growth,
striking and slaking but once. It seeks its victim anywhere, without
plot and without care of consequences, anywhere and everywhere. It
is a madness that has no fear and is destitute of prudence. But here
was deliberate, deep-plotted murder. It required skill to induce
the girl to go farther away from home and her pledged duty to her
brother. The filial sense was invoked as paramount to the fraternal.
It required skill to separate the children. It was done. Does all
that look as if the man was crazed for blood, or blind by drink? I
think there was neither here. I cannot give my other theory; for,
if it did not detect in this case, it might suggest an excellent
method of repeating just such another crime, should any such be in
contemplation. The enemy of society and law studies the tactics of
justice, and frequently the plan of detection, if penetrated by
the culprit, becomes his surest chart of escape. There may, after
all,—but I don’t think so,—have been two persons engaged in this
series of murders; and in that light read the short recital that
follows, and perhaps, when the mystery shall be resolved by judicial
precision, you may turn back to this singular incident and compare it
with the concluding scenes of the catastrophes I have been treating
of. If truth be stranger than fiction, then the marvels of the
veritable make larger drafts upon our credulity than the fabrications
of the imaginist, and there can be no harm done if we prepare
ourselves for revelations that in time may be made to us, and whose
mysticism, enlightened by the practical test of law, will stand
forever in the dry tomes of jurisprudence, subduing the impertinence
of our dogmatical self-conceit, and establishing the fact that truth
is a principle that can traverse the air, as well as walk arm in arm
with us in our daily habits. This is the incident.
Dr. Binn relates in his book, published some years ago, the
following:—
“A young and beautiful quadroon girl named Duncan, and residing in
Jamaica, West Indies, was murdered in a retired spot _a few paces
from the public highway_. [Such was the case in the murder of
Isabella Joyce.] Upon discovery of the deed, and investigation by the
coroner, a reward, amounting to a large sum of money [similar in the
Joyce case], was offered for the detection of the guilty party, but
without avail. A year passed over with no light from the judicial
lantern illumining the black mystery of the deed, and the case was
in process of lapsing into oblivion, when two negroes named Pendrill
and Chitty were arrested for some minor thefts and lodged in prison.
One was placed in the Kingston penitentiary and the other in Falmouth
jail. The distance between these two places was eighty miles. It must
be borne in mind that these two men were ignorant of their mutual
arrest and confinement, though as it turned out afterward were well
acquainted with each other. In the course of their imprisonment they
became restless and talked in their sleep, and then conversations
were addressed to a young girl who, it would seem, stood by and
upbraided them with her murder. They would then entreat her to go
away. This happened so frequently as to lead to inquiries which
resulted in the conviction of those two haunted men, of the murder
that had so long baffled the detection of justice.
XV.
THE CHILDREN.
In a court of justice, if I was put upon my oath, I could not swear
that it was a ghost that I saw when I stood at the end of the garden
on that luminous night; nor would I swear that it was a man with his
vitality in force; but I would swear that I saw something that looked
like a man, but might have been a ghost. It acted as if it might have
been either,—but if a man, like a crazy one, and who had a charm to
subdue, upon the instant and without effort, the temper of two severe
watch-dogs, one a mastiff, the other a bull, and also to suspend for
more than a second my power of vision.
After I had finished writing my narrative, and thought that I had
nothing further to do in this business besides giving my manuscript
into the hands of the printer, I became possessed of two photographs
kindly lent to my curiosity by the chief of police. They are the
portraits of Isabella and John Joyce. My first idea was to have them
multiplied and affixed somewhere in my pages, but then I thought of
the illustrated papers with their abominable attempts to illustrate
by the pencil every spasm to which human nature is incident, and was
stopped at once from that design.
The face of the girl is bright, expressive, and, in a degree, pretty.
Had she lived to womanhood she might have grown into what is called
a _fine_ woman. The features are large and regular, the eyes full of
vivacity and good temper, the nose prominent and well shaped, the
mouth pleasant, and indicative of resolution. Altogether the girl had
a generous and loving kind of lookout, and not rare in the species at
her budding and buoyant age. She looks like a child beginning to see
the vague outline of the sea on which she must voyage with the rest,
and not at all having such quick destruction in her thoughts, as came
to her ere she heard the breakers of human experience sobbing on the
shore. She was not too young to die, but too young to be slaughtered.
The boy’s face is that of a child; but a bright and reflective little
fellow, with a large development of brain, and, by the extreme
innocence of his expression, casting a deeper shadow of crime upon
the wretch who took away his life. Taking the photograph as a test,
he seems to be about eight years old and no more, and with such a
face that it must have been a sad thing for those who found him, to
look upon with the mask of murder stamped upon it.
I have also seen a bundle of papers, written over in large,
straggling chirography, and said to be communications of spirits,
through mediums, upon the topic of the murders. There is one-half
page written, so those say,—his wife, for instance,—who knew his
“hand of write,” by the dead father of the children. Their testimony,
whatever it may be, has as yet been of no special advantage in
directing investigation, at least as far as I know; probably on the
theory that if the souls of the departed undertook to interfere
in the proceedings of our courts, they might produce embarrassing
predicaments, being so far as we are instructed in such matters
incapable of appearing bodily on the witness-stand to testify to
facts within their knowledge; and, besides, it would be exceedingly
inconvenient for our judicial officials to serve a summons upon them,
as their places of special abode cannot, at present, be determined
upon with any exactness outside of a graveyard directory. Cases are,
however, upon the record wherein ghosts have pointed out such lines
of proceedings as finally led to the proper adjustment of contested
property and estates. Perhaps the day may reach us when not only the
spirit of the law, and the spirit of the past, but the spirits of
the dead, will have large control over the vexed condition of our
temporary existence here.
XVI.
GHOSTS.
Will it be impertinent if I say that I am no advocate of the
spiritualistic doctrines? Will it be less out of place, if I add
that I am no direct opponent of that wonderful creed,—new creed,
some people call it; but, in fact, as long established as the
first death,—as old as man’s first doubt, or his first impulse to
worship the unseen, or investigate the first difficulty? I assume
no dictatorship of judgment, adhere to no prejudice or formula of
education, or habit of social or sectional condition, but place
myself in that grand philosophic pause of suspended opinion. There
have been good Turks, there are good Turks; there have been good
Jews, there are good Jews. One of the latter, leaving his old
traditions, rules now the destiny of a great so-called, and properly
so-called I believe, Christian Empire; but because in our youth
we have been led to think hard of bloody Mahomet, and the Jewish
unbelievers of the first Christian era, when mysteries assumed the
prerogative of logical religion, and faith was not as quick to
conceive as it has been since, we are not justified in believing that
the Turk and the Jew are beyond the pale of our sympathies, and, for
old deeds done under peculiar pressure, are to be anathematized from
our human charities. There are members known, of the spiritualist
belief, to be as pure and spotless as any equal number of any other
God-believing sect; and while we cannot but look with feelings akin
to pity at some of the phases of their peculiar practice, it behooves
no man, limited as we all are in our claim to exact knowledge, to
condemn the whole because some of their people do certain things,
that, in the performance, border upon the absurd.
The mystery of life is more mysterious than the mystery of death. In
the first we would, if not governed by the subjection of judgment
to certain rules and discipline of faith, be led to believe in a
thousand things that appeal to us daily by the miraculous condition
of their nature. Science, while it reveals, establishes materiality;
and the farther it advances into the realms of air, the more it
fills that air with material substances. Dare it go higher yet, and
rob the firmament of all its poetry, its vague spirit of religious
spirituality, and, sweeping away the dreams of the tenderest
imaginations, build up the steps of the Eternal throne with granite
boulders, and form of the Almighty a statue of specific gravity, with
needs like our own, and humanly dependent on the vegetation and the
atmosphere of these terrestrial regions which astronomy with its
supernaturally endowed telescope has established as fact?
It may be an objection, founded upon some basis of common sense,
that I have introduced what I call a veritable ghost into my work.
I cannot help that. In fact I never would have written my book if
I had not had that interview with what now, in all the sincerity
that is left to a man in these abominable days, I believe and assert
was a ghost; a real ghost,—no dramatic shade made up of an off-duty
carpenter with an actor to speak his part,—a ghost arranged for the
nonce with a screen between us, of vapory muslin; but a solemn, a
meaning, a power to move, but not a power to absolutely affright,
ghost. In fact I see no reason to be frightened by them. Grant that
they exist,—you never have heard of one that did harm to anybody.
They have, it is to be supposed, thrown off the passions of the
flesh, with the flesh,—the passion of anger, the passion of mischief,
and all the low and base adjunctives that adhere to us in our state
of usual visibility. They are not monsters, but symbols, or aerial
realities of our former friends. Even the ghost of Robespierre,
of Nero, or Jeffrey, would be harmless, bad as they were when
encompassed in their fibrous shells of flesh. Ghosts, as a general
rule of logic, cannot be as bad as those of earth with whom they have
their interviews. And it is not to be supposed that they always
have a sublime or important mission to accomplish. If the rule holds
good that Providence allows them to flit hitherward, the ghost of
a washerwoman has as much right to appear to her successor of the
soap-suds, as the ghost of Cæsar to his slayer before the battle that
settled the destiny of half a world. And the washerwoman’s ghost
could not do that, or would not even think of doing that, and yet she
might have her homely mission, as important to her friends, as ghosts
of a higher rank. But they all have their mission, the ghosts of
demi-gods as well as the ghosts of plebeians. They easily establish,
what otherwise could not be practically proved, the vexed question
of the immortality of the soul. A testimony of a dead man would be
as valuable to me, with regard to that matter, as the wire-drawn
assertions of a man paid a large salary to keep good, and say that we
turn into ghosts after all,—for they all say that.
Now I most respectfully ask what harm does it do to believe in
ghosts? Is it weakness? Then St. Paul was weak to idiocy, for he was
the apostle of the supernatural, as the Bible will prove, if you
choose to consult his record. Was our Saviour weak? It was he,—that
supremely blessed, that uncontradictable authority, either in
assertion or suggestion—who took upon himself the spectral character,
and asked Thomas to test him, by placing his hands upon the image
of his wounds. Or, if he was not a ghost, but a substantial form
of flesh after his crucifixion, death then makes no difference
in our condition, and is but a process without a change. Had his
apostles and disciples disbelieved in his appearance after death, and
hooted at the story told of his ghost wandering toward them, where
would be the Christian church to-day, and where the theory of the
resurrection? We disbelieve now, and scoff at what the Saviour did,
and his apostles saw, unless he was an impostor, and they liars.
Do we in our churches, when we read the biblical narrative of the
innumerable appearances, sneer at the book that tells us its contents
are the result of divine inspiration, and every word is true? That
man or woman would not be a church-member long who dared to do a
thing so impious.