Patrick Halliday and his wife--still, we presume, retaining her beauty,
at least in the matronly form--were happy as the day is long, or,
rather we should say, as the day is short, for night is more propitious
to love than day. Nothing was known to have occurred to break the
harmony which had begun in love, and surely when we have, as there
appeared to be here, the three requisites of happiness mentioned by
the ancients--health, beauty, and wealth, there was no room for any
suspicion that the good deities repented of their gifts. But all this
only tended to deepen the shadows of a mystery which we are about to
revive at this late period.
One day, when Patrick Halliday returned from a journey to Carlisle,
he was thunderstruck by the intelligence communicated to him by his
servant, that his wife had disappeared two days before, and no one
could tell whither she had gone. The servant, by her own report,
had been sent to Leith on a message, and had taken the daughter,
little Julia, with her; and when she came back, she found the door
unlocked, and her mistress gone. She had made inquiries among the
neighbours, she had gone to the acquaintances of the family, she had
had recourse to every one and every place where it was likely she would
get intelligence of her--all to no effect. Not a single individual
could even say so much as that he or she had seen her that day, and
at length, wearied out by her inquiries, she had had recourse to the
supposition that she had followed her husband to Carlisle.
The effect of this strange intelligence was simply stupifying. Halliday
dropt into a chair, and, compressing his temples with his trembling
hands, seemed to try to retain his consciousness against the echoes of
words which threatened to take it away. For a time he had no power of
thought, and even when the ideas began again to resume their train,
their efforts were broken and wild, tending to nothing but confusion.
He put question after question to the servant, every answer throwing
him back upon new suppositions, all equally fruitless. The only
notion that seemed to give him any relief was, that she had gone to a
distance, to some of her friends--wild enough, yet better than blank
despair; and as for infidelity, the thought never once occurred to him,
where there was no ground on which to rear even a doubt.
At length, on regaining something like composure, he rose from his
seat, and began to walk drearily through the house. He opened his
desk and found that a considerable sum of money he had left there was
untouched. He next opened the press in the wall, where she kept her
clothes. He could not see anything wanting--the gown was there which
latterly she had been in the habit of putting on when she went out to
walk with little Julia; her two bonnets, the good and the better--the
one for everyday and the one for Sunday--hung upon their pegs. Her
jewels, too, which were in a drawer of her cabinet, were all there,
with the exception of the marriage-ring she was in the habit of wearing
every day. There was nothing wanting, save her ordinary body clothes,
including the fringed yellow wrapper in which, during the forenoon,
she used to perform her domestic duties, and which he had often thought
became her better than even her silks. Wherever she had gone, she must
have departed in her undress and bareheaded--nay, her slippers must
have been on her feet, for not only were they away, but the high-heeled
shoes by which she replaced them when she went to walk were in the
place where they usually lay.
In the midst of all this mystery, the relations and others, who had
been quickened into a high-wrought curiosity by the inquiries made by
the servant, dropt in one after another in the expectation that the
missing wife would have returned with her husband, but they went away
more astonished than before, and leaving the almost frantic husband to
an increase of his apprehension and fears.
The dark night came on, and he retired to bed, there to have the
horrors of a roused fancy added to the deductions of a hapless and
demented reason.
In the morning he rose after a sleepless and miserable night, tried to
eat a little breakfast with the playful little Julia, the image of her
mother, by his side, asking him every now and then, in the midst of
her prattle, what had become of mammy, rose and went forth, scarcely
knowing whither to go. Directing his steps almost mechanically towards
his place of business, he ascertained that his clerk knew no more of
the missing wife than the others. On emerging again from his office,
he was doomed to run the ordinary gauntlet of inquiries, and not less
of strange looks where the inquirers seemed afraid to put the question.
Others tried to read him by a furtive glance, and went away with their
construction. No one could give him a word of comfort, if, indeed, he
had not sometimes reason to suspect that there were of his anxious
friends some who were not ill pleased that he had lost, no doubt by
elopement, a wife who outshone theirs.
At length he found his way to the bailie’s office, where he got some of
the town constables to institute a secret search among the closes, and
thus the day passed resultless and weary, leaving him to another night
of misery.
Next day brought scarcely any change, except in the wider spread
throughout the city of the news, which, in the circumstances,
degenerated into the ordinary scandal. Nor did the husband make any
endeavour to check this, by stating to any one the part of the mystery
connected with the clothes--a secret which he kept to himself, and
brooded over with a morbid feeling he perhaps could not have explained
to himself. And that day passed also, leaving at its close an increased
curiosity on the part of the public, but with no change in the
conviction that the lady had merely played her husband false.
The next day was not so barren--nay, it was pregnant with a fact
calculated to increase the excitement without ameliorating the scandal.
On going up the High Street, Halliday met one of the officers who had
been engaged in the search, and who told him that another citizen had
disappeared in a not less mysterious way. The question, “Who is it?”
was put, but not answered, except by another question.
“Was Mrs Halliday acquainted with Mr Archibald Blair, advocate, in
Writers’ Court?”
“No,” was the answer of the husband; “and why do you put the question?”
“Because Mrs Blair requested me,” replied the officer. “She is in great
distress about her husband, and I think you had better see her.”
And so thought Patrick Halliday, as he hurried away to Writers’ Court,
much in the condition of one who would rush into the flames to avoid
the waves; for, dreadful as the death of his beloved wife would be
to him, more dreadful still was the thought that she had eloped with
another man, and that man might be Archibald Blair. On reaching the
house, where he was admitted upon the instant, he found a counterpart
of his own domestic tragedy--everything telling the tale of weariness,
anxiety, and fear; comers and goers with lugubrious countenances; and
Mrs Blair herself in a chair the picture of that very misery he had
himself endured, and was at that very moment enduring.
“Who are you?” she cried, as he approached her. “Are you come with good
news or bad?”
“My name is Halliday, madam,” replied he. “I understand you wish to see
me.”
“As much as you may perhaps wish to see me,” answered the lady.
“The town has been ringing for days with the news of the sudden
disappearance of your wife, who is said to be----,” and she faltered
at the word, “very beautiful. Is it true, and on what day did she
disappear?”
“Too true, madam,” groaned the unhappy man. “Tuesday was the day on
which she was found amissing.”
“Tuesday! Oh, unfortunate day!” rejoined she. “The very one, sir,
when my Archibald left me, perhaps never to return. Can you tell me,”
she continued, as she sobbed hysterically, “whether your wife and my
husband were ever at any time acquainted? Oh, I fear your answer, but I
must hear it.”
“I don’t think,” replied he, “that my wife ever knew of the existence
of your husband. Even _I_ never heard of his name, though I now
understand he was a promising advocate. I can, therefore, give you
small satisfaction; and, I presume, I can get as little from you when I
ask you, what I presume is unnecessary, whether you ever heard that my
wife was in any way acquainted with Mr Blair?”
“No,” replied she; “neither he nor I ever mentioned her name, nor did
it once come to my ears that Archibald was ever seen in the company of
any woman answering to the description of your wife.”
“Most wonderful circumstance, madam,” replied Halliday, into whose mind
a thought at the moment came, suggested by the mystery of the left
clothes. “Pray, madam,” he continued, “can you draw no conclusion from
Mr Blair’s desk or wardrobe whether or not he had provided himself for
the necessities of a journey?”
“That is the very wonder of all the wonders about this strange case,
sir,” she answered. “I have made a careful search, knowing the money
that was in the house, and having sent and inquired whether he had
drawn any from the bank, I am satisfied that he had not a penny of
money upon him. As for his wardrobe, every article is there, with the
exception of what he used when he went to take a walk in the morning--a
light dress, with a round felt hat in place of the square one. Even his
cane stands there in the lobby. Where could he have gone in such an
undress, and without money?”
A pertinent question, which was just the counterpart of that which
Patrick Halliday had put to himself. The resemblance between the two
cases struck him as wonderful, and no doubt if he had stated to Mrs
Blair the analogous facts connected with his wife’s wardrobe, the
untouched money, and the missing slippers, that lady would have shared
in his wonder; but he felt disinclined to add to her apprehensions
by acquainting her with facts which could lead to no practical use.
There was sufficient community of feeling between them without going
into further minutiæ, and the conversation ended with looks of fearful
foreboding.
Patrick Halliday left the house of the advocate only to saunter like
one broke loose from Bedlam, going hither and thither without aim;
learning, as he went, that the absence of Mr Blair had got abroad
abreast of his own evil, and that the public had adopted the theory
that his wife and the advocate had gone off together. The conclusion
was only too natural, nor would it in all likelihood have been much
modified even though all the facts inferring some other solution had
come to be known. Even he himself was coming gradually to see that the
disappearance of the two occurring at the same time, almost at the
same hour, could not be countervailed by the other facts. But behind
all this there was the apparent difficulty to be overcome that two
individuals so well known in a news-loving city should have been in the
habit of meeting, wherever the place might be, without any one having
ever seen them--nay, the almost impossible thing that a woman without
a bonnet, arrayed in a yellow wrapper, and with coloured slippers on
her feet, could have passed through any of the streets without being
recognised, and that the same immunity from all observation should have
been enjoyed by a public man so well known--dressed, too, in a manner
calculated to attract notice. There was certainly another theory, and
some people entertained the possibility, if not the reasonableness of
it, that the two clandestine lovers might have concealed themselves
for an obvious purpose in some of those houses whose keepers have an
interest in the concealment of their guilty lodgers. But this theory
must have appeared a very dubious one, for it involved a degree of
imprudence, if not recklessness, amounting to voluntary ruin, where
a little foresight might have secured their object without further
sacrifice than the care required in the preservation of their guilty
secret. But, unlikely as this theory was, it was not left untested, for
special visits and inquiries were made in all places known as likely to
offer refuge to persons in their circumstances and condition.
All was still in vain; another day passed, and another, till the
entire week proved the inutility of both search and inquiry. The
ordinary age of a wonder was attained, with the usual consequence of
the beginning of that decay which is inherent in all things. Yet it is
with these moral organisms as with the physical--they cast their seeds
to come up again as memories. A month elapsed, and then another, and
another, till these periods carried the mere diluted interest of the
early days. So it is that the big animal, the world, on which man is
one of the small parasites, supplies the sap as the desires require,
and changes it as the appetite changes, with that variety which is
the law of nature. Even as regarded Patrick Halliday and Mrs Blair,
the moral granulation began gradually and silently to fill up the
excavated sores in their hearts, and by and by it ought by rule to have
come about that the cicatrices would follow, and then the smoothing
of the covering, even to the pellucid skin. And as for the public,
new wonders, from the ever-discharging womb of events, were rising up
every day, so that the story of the once famed Julia Halliday and the
advocate Blair was at length assuming the sombre colours of one of the
acted romances of life. But it takes long to make a complete romance.
There is a vitality in moral events as in some physical ones which
revives in overt symptoms, and so it was in the case we are concerned
with. A whole year had at length passed, and brooding silence had waxed
thick over the now comparatively-old event; but the silence was to be
broken by the speaking of an inanimate thing as strange in itself as
the old mystery.
One day, when Patrick Halliday had returned from his office in the
upper part of the city to Peddie’s Land for the purpose of getting a
letter which he had by mistake left on the table in the morning, he
found that the servant had gone out as usual for the purpose of taking
little Julia for an airing; but, getting entrance by his own key, he
proceeded along the lobby to the parlour, on opening the door of which,
and entering, his eye was attracted to something on the floor. The
room was at the time shaded by the hangings drawn together to keep out
the rays of the sun, and, not distinguishing the object very well, he
thought it was some plaything of Julia’s. On taking it up he found, to
his amazement, that it was one of the slippers of his wife. It had a
damp musty smell, which he found so unpleasant that he threw it down on
the floor again, and then began to think where in the world it had come
from, or how it came to be there. The servant might explain it when she
came in; but why she should have gone out with that remaining to be
explained he could not understand. Meanwhile his only conclusion was,
that sufficient search had not been made for the slippers, and that the
dog, which was out with the maid, had dragged the article from some
nook or corner which had escaped observation. Under this impression
he felt inclined to seek for the neighbour of that which had been so
strangely found, altogether oblivious of the fact that, if the slipper
had been left by the runaway, she must have departed either bare-footed
or in her stocking-soles; for her shoes, so far as he could know, had
been accounted for.
But he was not to be called upon to make this search; something else
awaited him; for, as he sat enveloped in the darkness of this new
mystery, his eye, wandering about in the shaded room, was attracted by
another object. Rising, as if by a start, he proceeded to the spot, and
took up, to his further amazement, a man’s shoe. He at first supposed
that it was one of his own; but on looking at the silver buckle, on
which were engraved--not an uncommon thing at the time--two initial
letters, (these were “A. B.,”) he was at no loss for the name. It
was that of the missing advocate. This shoe, like the slipper, was
covered with white mould, and smelt of an odour different from and
more disagreeable than mere must. He was now in more perplexity than
ever, nor could he bring his mind to a supposition of how these things
came to be there. It was the time of popular superstitions, when
intelligences in the shape of ghosts and hobgoblins, and all forms
of good and devilish beings, seemed to have nothing else to do than
to entertain themselves with the fancies, feelings, and passions of
men, and we might not be surprised to find that Patrick Halliday was
brought under the feeling of an indescribable awe--nay, it is doubtful
if even the veritable spirits of his wife and her paramour, if they
had then and there appeared in that shaded room before him, would have
produced a stronger impression upon him than did those speechless yet
eloquent things. A moral vertigo was on him; he threw himself again
into a chair, and felt his knees knocking against each other, as if the
nerves, paralysed by the deep impression upon the brain, were no longer
under the influence of the will.
After sitting for a time in this state of perplexity and awe, from
which he could not extricate himself, the servant, with his daughter,
returned. He called her to his presence, and asked her, pointing to the
shoe and the slipper, “how those things came to be there?”
The girl was seized with as great wonder as he himself had been, and
there was even a greater cause for astonishment on her part, insomuch
as, according to her declaration, she had cleaned out and dusted the
parlour within half an hour of going forth, and these articles were
certainly not in the room then. As for the outer door, she had left it
fastened in the usual way, and the windows were carefully drawn down
before her departure. Where _could_ they have come from, she questioned
both her master and herself, with an equal chance of a satisfactory
answer from either. Then she would not have been a woman if she could
have resisted the claims of superstition in a case so inexplicable, so
extraordinary, so unparalleled even in winter fireside stories. And
so she looked at her master, and he looked at her, in blank wonder,
without either of them having the power of venturing even a surmise as
to how or by what earthly or unearthly means those ominous things, so
terrible in the associations by which they were linked to their owners,
came to be where they were.
After some longer time uselessly occupied, Patrick Halliday bethought
himself of going to Writers’ Court, so taking up the silver-buckled
shoe, and putting it into his large coat pocket, he proceeded to Mrs
Blair’s. He found her in that state of reconciled despondency to which
she had been reduced for more than two months; but the moment she saw
Patrick Halliday enter, she sprang up as if she had been quickened
by the impulse of a new-born hope rising amidst the clouds of a
long-settled despair. The movement was soon stayed when her keenness
scanned the face of the man; but a new feeling took possession of her
when she saw him draw out of his pocket the silver-buckled shoe with
which she had been as familiar as with her own.
“Where, in the Lord’s name!--” she cried, without being able to say
more, while she seized spasmodically the strange object, still covered
as it was with the mould, and with the silver obscured by the passage
of time. And, gazing at it, she heard Halliday’s account of how he came
to be in possession of it, along with the slipper.
“Have you the neighbour in the house?” he inquired.
“No, no,” said she; “but I am certain that that is one of the shoes
Archibald had on the day he disappeared. Oh, sir, I can scarcely look
at these initials; and there is such a death-like odour about it that
it sickens me.”
“It is the same with the slipper,” said he. “It would seem that both of
them had been taken off the feet of corpses.”
“Strange mystery altogether,” added she, with a deep sigh. “Oh, I could
have wished I had not seen these--it only serves to renew my care,
without satisfying my natural desire to know the fate of one I loved so
dearly.”
“It is so with me as well, madam,” rejoined Mr Patrick; “but the
finding of this shoe and slipper may satisfy us of the connexion
between your husband and my wife.”
“Yes, yes,” ejaculated she; “but oh, merciful God! what a wretched
satisfaction to the bereaved wife and the deserted child. You are a
man, and can bear up. A poor woman must sit in solitude and mourn,
while the flesh wastes day by day under the weary spirit.”
“And you can suggest nothing to help me to an explanation of this new
mystery?” said he.
“Nothing; all is darker than ever,” replied she. “But, sir, you have
got the only trace that for a long year has been found of this most
unfortunate--I fear, unhappy pair, and it will be for you to improve it
in some way. Something more will follow. I will go over with you myself
to your house. A woman’s eyes are sharper than a man’s. I would like to
examine the house, and judge for myself.”
And the lady, rising, went and dressed herself. In a few minutes more
they were on the way to Peddie’s Land; probably, as they went along,
objects of speculation to those who knew the strange link by which
their fortunes were joined. Nor was it unlikely that evil tongues might
suggest that as their partners had played them false, they intended to
make amends by a kind of poetical retribution. Alas! how different from
their thoughts, how unlike their feelings, how far distant from their
object!
On arriving at the house, a new wonder was to meet them, almost upon
the threshold. The servant ran forward to Halliday, holding in her hand
the partner of the silver-buckled shoe which her master had in his
pocket. She was utterly unable to say a word, her eyes were strained
not less in width than in intensity, her mouth was open like that
of an idiot, and motioning and muttering, “Come, come,” she led her
master and Mrs Blair on through two or three rooms till she came to a
small closet, at the back of which there was a door, now for the first
time in Patrick Halliday’s experience found open. In explanation of
which peculiarity we require to suspend our narrative for a minute or
two, to enable us to inform the reader, that the house then occupied
by Halliday had, five years before, and immediately preceding his
marriage, been in possession of George Morgan, a wool-dealer.
Morgan’s warehouse, where he stored his wool, entered from a close to
the west, through a pend, between Peddie’s Land and the large tenement
adjoining. The run of the warehouse was thus at right angles to that
of the dwelling-house, and Morgan was thereby enabled to knock out a
small door at the back of a press, through which he could conveniently
pass to his place of business without being at the trouble of going
down the close to the main entry. After Morgan’s death, the house and
warehouse went to his heirs, from whom Halliday rented the former,
the other having been let to some other person for three years, after
which it had been without a tenant. We may state also that Halliday
was at first quite aware of the existence of the door at the back of
the press, and had even taken the precaution of getting it locked; but
as no requisition had been made by the tenant of the warehouse to have
the communication more securely barred, the door had been left in the
condition we have described.
Resuming our story: the servant, when she came to the point where we
left her, stopped and trembled; but by this time Halliday had begun to
see whither these pointings tended, and pushing the girl aside with
a view to examine the door, he was astonished to find that it opened
to his touch--a fact better known by Nettle, his dog, who had, as the
shoes testified, been there before.