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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. I.

T >> Thomas De Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. I.




An icy terror froze my blood at this moment when I looked at the
significant glances, too easily understood by me, that were exchanged
between the servants. My mouth had been for the last two hours growing
more and more parched, so that at present, from mere want of moisture,
I could not separate my lips to speak. One of the women saw the vain
efforts I was making, and hastily brought me a glass of water. With the
first recovery of speech, I asked them what little Francis had meant by
saying that he had seen his mother in her bedroom. Their reply was,
that they were as much at a loss to discover his meaning as I was; that
he had made the same assertion to them, and with so much earnestness,
that they had, all in succession, gone up stairs to look for her, and
with the fullest expectation of finding her. This was a mystery which
remained such to the very last; there was no doubt whatsoever that the
child believed himself to have seen his mother; that he could not have
seen her in her human bodily presence, there is as little doubt as
there is, alas! that in this world he never _did_ see her again.
The poor child constantly adhered to his story, and with a
circumstantiality far beyond all power of invention that could be
presumed in an artless infant. Every attempt at puzzling him or
entangling him in contradictions by means of cross-examination was but
labor thrown away; though indeed, it is true enough that for those
attempts, as will soon be seen, there was but a brief interval allowed.

Not dwelling upon this subject at present, I turned to Hannah--a woman
who held the nominal office of cook in our little establishment, but
whose real duties had been much more about her mistress's person--and
with a searching look of appeal I asked her whether, in this moment of
trial, when (as she might see) I was not so perfectly master of myself
as perhaps always to depend upon seeing what was best to be done, she
would consent to accompany me into the city, and take upon herself
those obvious considerations of policy or prudence which might but too
easily escape my mind, darkened, and likely to be darkened, as to its
power of discernment by the hurricane of affliction now too probably at
hand. She answered my appeal with the fervor I expected from what I had
already known of her character. She was a woman of a strong, fiery,
perhaps I might say of heroic mind, supported by a courage that was
absolutely indomitable, and by a strength of bodily frame very unusual
in a woman, and beyond the promise even of her person. She had suffered
as deep a wrench in her own affections as a human being can suffer; she
had lost her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty
and interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst
of all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large
commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of
every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very
much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him,
as regarded acts and probable intentions; and as regarded palliations
from childish years, from total inexperience, or any other alleviating
circumstances that could be urged, having everything to plead--and of
all his accomplices the only one who had anything to plead. Interest,
however, he had little or none; and whilst some hoary villains of the
party, who happened to be more powerfully befriended, were finally
allowed to escape with a punishment little more than nominal, he and
two others were selected as sacrifices to the offended laws. They
suffered capitally. All three behaved well; but the poor boy in
particular, with a courage, a resignation, and a meekness, so
distinguished and beyond his years as to attract the admiration and the
liveliest sympathy of the public universally. If strangers could feel
in that way, if the mere hardened executioner could be melted at the
final scene,--it may be judged to what a fierce and terrific height
would ascend the affliction of a doating mother, constitutionally too
fervid in her affections. I have heard an official person declare, that
the spectacle of her desolation and frantic anguish was the most
frightful thing he had ever witnessed, and so harrowing to the
feelings, that all who could by their rank venture upon such an
irregularity, absented themselves during the critical period from the
office which corresponded with the government; for, as I have said, the
affair took place in a large provincial city, at a great distance from
the capital. All who knew this woman, or who were witnesses to the
alteration which one fortnight had wrought in her person as well as her
demeanor, fancied it impossible that she could continue to live; or
that, if she did, it must be through the giving way of her reason. They
proved, however, to be mistaken; or, at least, if (as some thought) her
reason did suffer in some degree, this result showed itself in the
inequality of her temper, in moody fits of abstraction, and the morbid
energy of her manner at times under the absence of all adequate
external excitement, rather than in any positive and apparent
hallucinations of thought. The charm which had mainly carried off the
instant danger to her faculties, was doubtless the intense sympathy
which she met with. And in these offices of consolation my wife stood
foremost. For, and that was fortunate, she had found herself able,
without violence to her own sincerest opinions in the case, to offer
precisely that form of sympathy which was most soothing to the angry
irritation of the poor mother; not only had she shown a _direct_
interest in the boy, and not a mere interest of _reflection_ from
that which she took in the mother, and had expressed it by visits to
his dungeon, and by every sort of attention to his comforts which his
case called for, or the prison regulations allowed; not only had she
wept with the distracted woman as if for a brother of her own; but,
which went farther than all the rest in softening the mother's heart,
she had loudly and indignantly proclaimed her belief in the boy's
innocence, and in the same tone her sense of the crying injustice
committed as to the selection of the victims, and the proportion of the
punishment awarded. Others, in the language of a great poet,

'Had pitied _her,_ and not her grief;'

they had either not been able to see, or, from carelessness, had
neglected to see, any peculiar wrong done to her in the matter which
occasioned her grief,--but had simply felt compassion for her as for
one summoned, in a regular course of providential and human
dispensation, to face an affliction, heavy in itself, but not heavy
from any special defect of equity. Consequently their very sympathy,
being so much built upon the assumption that an only child had offended
to the extent implied in his sentence, oftentimes clothed itself in
expressions which she felt to be not consolations but insults, and, in
fact, so many justifications of those whom it relieved her overcharged
heart to regard as the very worst of enemies. Agnes, on the other hand,
took the very same view of the case as herself; and, though otherwise
the gentlest of all gentle creatures, yet here, from the generous
fervor of her reverence for justice, and her abhorrence of oppression,
she gave herself no trouble to moderate the energy of her language: nor
did I, on my part, feeling that substantially she was in the right,
think it of importance to dispute about the exact degrees of the wrong
done or the indignation due to it. In this way it happened naturally
enough that at one and the same time, though little contemplating
either of these results, Agnes had done a prodigious service to the
poor desolate mother by breaking the force of her misery, as well as by
arming the active agencies of indignation against the depressing ones
of solitary grief, and for herself had won a most grateful and devoted
friend, who would have gone through fire and water to serve her, and
was thenceforwards most anxious for some opportunity to testify how
deep had been her sense of the goodness shown to her by her benign
young mistress, and how incapable of suffering abatement by time. It
remains to add, which I have slightly noticed before, that this woman
was of unusual personal strength: her bodily frame matched with her
intellectual: and I notice this _now_ with the more emphasis,
because I am coming rapidly upon ground where it will be seen that this
one qualification was of more summary importance to us--did us more
'yeoman's service' at a crisis the most awful--than other qualities of
greater name and pretension. _Hannah_ was this woman's Christian
name; and her name and her memory are to me amongst the most hallowed
of my earthly recollections.

One of her two fellow-servants, known technically amongst us as the
'parlor maid,' was also, but not equally, attached to her mistress; and
merely because her nature, less powerfully formed and endowed, did not
allow her to entertain or to comprehend any service equally fervid of
passion or of impassioned action. She, however, was good, affectionate,
and worthy to be trusted. But a third there was, a nursery maid, and
therefore more naturally and more immediately standing within the
confidence of her mistress--her I could not trust: her I suspected. But
of that hereafter. Meantime, Hannah, she upon whom I leaned as upon a
staff in all which respected her mistress, ran up stairs, after I had
spoken and received her answer, in order hastily to dress and prepare
herself for going out along with me to the city. I did not ask her to
be quick in her movements: I knew there was no need: and, whilst she
was absent, I took up, in one of my fretful movements of nervousness, a
book which was lying upon a side-table: the book fell open of itself at
a particular page; and in that, perhaps, there was nothing
extraordinary, for it was a little portable edition of _Paradise
Lost_; and the page was one which I must naturally have turned to
many a time: for to Agnes I had read all the great masters of
literature, especially those of modern times; so that few people knew
the high classics more familiarly: and as to the passage in question,
from its divine beauty I had read it aloud to her, perhaps, on fifty
separate occasions. All this I mention to take away any appearance of a
vulgar attempt to create omens; but still, in the very act of
confessing the simple truth, and thus weakening the marvellous
character of the anecdote, I must notice it as a strange instance of
the '_Sortes Miltonianæ_,'--that precisely at such a moment as
this I should find thrown in my way, should feel tempted to take up,
and should open, a volume containing such a passage as the following:
and observe, moreover, that although the volume, _once being taken
up_, would naturally open where it had been most frequently read,
there were, however, many passages which had been read _as_
frequently--or more so. The particular passage upon which I opened at
this moment was that most beautiful one in which the fatal morning
separation is described between Adam and his bride--that separation so
pregnant with wo, which eventually proved the occasion of the mortal
transgression--the last scene between our first parents at which both
were innocent and both were happy--although the superior intellect
already felt, and, in the slight altercation preceding this separation,
had already expressed a dim misgiving of some coming change: these are
the words, and in depth of pathos they have rarely been approached:--

'Oft he to her his charge of quick return
Repeated; she to him as oft engag'd
To be returned by noon amid the bow'r,
And all things in best order to invite
Noon-tide repast, or afternoon's repose.
Oh much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve!
Of thy presumed return, event perverse!
Thou never from that hour in Paradise
Found'st either sweet repast, or sound repose.'

'_My_ Eve!' I exclaimed, 'partner in _my_ paradise, where art thou?
_Much failing_ thou wilt not be found, nor _much deceived_; innocent in
any case thou art; but, alas! too surely by this time _hapless_, and
the victim of some diabolic wickedness.' Thus I murmured to myself;
thus I ejaculated; thus I apostrophized my Agnes; then again came a
stormier mood. I could not sit still; I could not stand in quiet; I
threw the book from me with violence against the wall; I began to hurry
backwards and forwards in a short uneasy walk, when suddenly a sound, a
step; it was the sound of the garden-gate opening, followed by a hasty
tread. Whose tread? Not for a moment could it be fancied the oread step
which belonged to that daughter of the hills--my wife, my Agnes; no, it
was the dull massy tread of a man: and immediately there came a loud
blow upon the door, and in the next moment, the bell having been found,
a furious peal of ringing. Oh coward heart! not for a lease of
immortality could I have gone forwards myself. My breath failed me; an
interval came in which respiration seemed to be stifled--the blood to
halt in its current; and then and there I recognised in myself the
force and living truth of that Scriptural description of a heart
consciously beset by evil without escape: 'Susannah _sighed_.' Yes, a
long, long sigh--a deep, deep sigh--that is, the natural language by
which the over-charged heart utters forth the wo that else would break
it. I sighed--oh how profoundly! But that did not give me power to
move. Who will go to the door? I whispered audibly. Who is at the door?
was the inaudible whisper of my heart. Then might be seen the
characteristic differences of the three women. That one, whom I
suspected, I heard raising an upper window to look out and reconnoitre.
The affectionate Rachael, on the other hand, ran eagerly down stairs;
but Hannah, half dressed, even her bosom exposed, passed her like a
storm; and before I heard any sound of opening a door, I saw from the
spot where I stood the door already wide open, and a man in the costume
of a policeman. All that he said I could not hear; but this I heard--
that I was wanted at the police office, and had better come off without
delay. He seemed then to get a glimpse of me, and to make an effort
towards coming nearer; but I slunk away, and left to Hannah the task of
drawing from him any circumstances which he might know. But apparently
there was not much to tell, or rather, said I, there is too much, the
_much_ absorbs the _many_; some one mighty evil transcends and quells
all particulars. At length the door was closed, and the man was gone.
Hannah crept slowly along the passage, and looked in hesitatingly. Her
very movements and stealthy pace testified that she had heard nothing
which, even by comparison, she could think good news. 'Tell me not now,
Hannah,' I said; 'wait till we are in the open air.' She went up stairs
again. How short seemed the time till she descended! how I longed for
further respite! 'Hannah!' I said at length when we were fairly moving
upon the road, 'Hannah! I am too sure you have nothing good to tell.
But now tell me the worst, and let that be in the fewest words
possible.'

'Sir,' she said, 'we had better wait until we reach the office; for
really I could not understand the man. He says that my mistress is
detained upon some charge; but _what_, I could not at all make
out. He was a man that knew something of you, Sir, I believe, and he
wished to be civil, and kept saying, "Oh! I dare say it will turn out
nothing at all, many such charges are made idly and carelessly, and
some maliciously." "But what charges?" I cried, and then he wanted to
speak privately to you. But I told him that of all persons he must not
speak to you, if he had anything painful to tell; for that you were too
much disturbed already, and had been for some hours, out of anxiety and
terror about my mistress, to bear much more. So, when he heard that, he
was less willing to speak freely than before. He might prove wrong, he
said; he might give offence; things might turn out far otherwise than
according to first appearances; for his part, he could not believe
anything amiss of so sweet a lady. And after all, it would be better to
wait till we reached the office.'

Thus much then was clear--Agnes was under some accusation. This was
already worse than the worst I had anticipated. 'And then,' said I,
thinking aloud to Hannah, 'one of two things is apparent to me; either
the accusation is one of pure hellish malice, without a color of
probability or the shadow of a foundation, and that way, alas! I am
driven in my fears by that Hungarian woman's prophecy; or, which but
for my desponding heart I should be more inclined to think, the charge
has grown out of my poor wife's rustic ignorance as to the usages then
recently established by law with regard to the kind of money that could
be legally tendered. This, however, was a suggestion that did not tend
to alleviate my anxiety; and my nervousness had mounted to a painful,
almost to a disabling degree, by the time we reached the office.
Already on our road thither some parties had passed us who were
conversing with eagerness upon the case: so much we collected from the
many and ardent expressions about 'the lady's beauty,' though the rest
of such words as we could catch were ill calculated to relieve my
suspense. This, then, at least, was certain--that my poor timid Agnes
had already been exhibited before a tumultuous crowd; that her name and
reputation had gone forth as a subject of discussion for the public;
and that the domestic seclusion and privacy within which it was her
matronly privilege to move had already undergone a rude violation.

The office, and all the purlieus of the office, were occupied by a
dense crowd. That, perhaps, was always the case, more or less, at this
time of day; but at present the crowd was manifestly possessed by a
more than ordinary interest; and there was a unity in this possessing
interest; all were talking on the same subject, the case in which Agnes
had so recently appeared in some character or other; and by this time
it became but too certain in the character of an accused person. Pity
was the prevailing sentiment amongst the mob; but the opinions varied
much as to the probable criminality of the prisoner. I made my way into
the office. The presiding magistrates had all retired for the
afternoon, and would not reassemble until eight o'clock in the evening.
Some clerks only or officers of the court remained, who were too much
harassed by applications for various forms and papers connected with
the routine of public business, and by other official duties which
required signatures or attestations, to find much leisure for answering
individual questions. Some, however, listened with a marked air of
attention to my earnest request for the circumstantial details of the
case, but finally referred me to a vast folio volume, in which were
entered all the charges, of whatever nature, involving any serious
tendency--in fact, all that exceeded a misdemeanor--in the regular
chronological succession according to which they came before the
magistrate. Here, in this vast calendar of guilt and misery, amidst the
_aliases_ or cant designations of ruffians, prostitutes, felons,
stood the description, at full length, Christian and surnames all
properly registered, of my Agnes--of her whose very name had always
sounded to my ears like the very echo of mountain innocence, purity,
and pastoral simplicity. Here in another column stood the name and
residence of her accuser. I shall call him _Barratt_, for that was
amongst his names, and a name by which he had at one period of his
infamous life been known to the public, though not his principal name,
or the one which he had thought fit to assume at this era. James
Barratt, then, as I shall here call him, was a haberdasher--keeping a
large and conspicuous shop in a very crowded and what was then
considered a fashionable part of the city. The charge was plain and
short. Did I live to read it? It accused Agnes M---- of having on that
morning secreted in her muff, and feloniously carried away, a valuable
piece of Mechlin lace, the property of James Barratt. And the result of
the first examination was thus communicated in a separate column,
written in red ink--'Remanded to the second day after to-morrow for
final examination.' Everything in this sin-polluted register was in
manuscript; but at night the records of each day were regularly
transferred to a printed journal, enlarged by comments and explanatory
descriptions from some one of the clerks, whose province it was to
furnish this intelligence to the public journals. On that same night,
therefore, would go forth to the world such an account of the case, and
such a description of my wife's person, as would inevitably summon to
the next exhibition of her misery, as by special invitation and
advertisement, the whole world of this vast metropolis--the idle, the
curious, the brutal, the hardened amateur in spectacles of wo, and the
benign philanthropist who frequents such scenes with the purpose of
carrying alleviation to their afflictions. All alike, whatever might be
their motives or the spirit of their actions, would rush (as to some
grand festival of curiosity and sentimental luxury) to this public
martyrdom of my innocent wife.

Meantime, what was the first thing to be done? Manifestly, to see
Agnes: her account of the affair might suggest the steps to be taken.
Prudence, therefore, at any rate, prescribed this course; and my heart
would not have tolerated any other. I applied, therefore, at once, for
information as to the proper mode of effecting this purpose without
delay. What was my horror at learning that, by a recent regulation of
all the police-offices, under the direction of the public minister who
presided over that department of the national administration, no person
could be admitted to an interview with any accused party during the
progress of the official examinations; or, in fact, until the final
committal of the prisoner for trial. This rule was supposed to be
attended by great public advantages, and had rarely been relaxed--
never, indeed, without a special interposition of the police minister
authorizing its suspension. But was the exclusion absolute and
universal? Might not, at least, a female servant, simply as the bearer
of such articles as were indispensable to female delicacy and comfort,
have access to her mistress? No; the exclusion was total and
unconditional. To argue the point was manifestly idle; the subordinate
officers had no discretion in the matter; nor, in fact, had any other
official person, whatever were his rank, except the supreme one; and to
him I neither had any obvious means of introduction, nor (in case of
obtaining such an introduction) any chance of success; for the spirit
of the rule, I foresaw it would be answered, applied with especial
force to cases like the present.

Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation,
superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery
that was now opening its artillery upon me--for misery has a privilege,
and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing--had combined to procure for
me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. Answers had been given
with precision, explanations made at length, and anxiety shown to
satisfy my inquiries. But this could not last; the inexorable
necessities of public business coming back in a torrent upon the
official people after this momentary interruption, forbade them to
indulge any further consideration for an individual case, and I saw
that I must not stay any longer. I was rapidly coming to be regarded as
a hinderance to the movement of public affairs; and the recollection
that I might again have occasion for some appeal to these men in their
official characters, admonished me not to abuse my privilege of the
moment. After returning thanks, therefore, for the disposition shown to
oblige me, I retired.

Slowly did I and Hannah retrace our steps. Hannah sustained, in the
tone of her spirits, by the extremity of her anger, a mood of feeling
which I did not share. Indignation was to her in the stead of
consolation and hope. I, for my part, could not seek even a momentary
shelter from my tempestuous affliction in that temper of mind. The man
who could accuse my Agnes, and accuse her of such a crime, I felt to be
a monster; and in my thoughts he was already doomed to a bloody
atonement (atonement! alas! what atonement!) whenever the time arrived
that _her_ cause would not be prejudiced, or the current of public
feeling made to turn in his favor by investing him with the semblance
of an injured or suffering person. So much was settled in my thoughts
with the stern serenity of a decree issuing from a judgment-seat. But
that gave no relief, no shadow of relief, to the misery which was now
consuming me. Here was an end, in one hour, to the happiness of a life.
In one hour it had given way, root and branch--had melted like so much
frost-work, or a pageant of vapory exhalations. In a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, and yet for ever and ever, I comprehended the
total ruin of my situation. The case, as others might think, was yet in
suspense; and there was room enough for very rational hopes, especially
where there was an absolute certainty of innocence. Total freedom from
all doubt on that point seemed to justify almost more than hopes. This
might be said, and most people would have been more or less consoled by
it. I was not. I felt as certain, as irredeemably, as hopelessly
certain of the final results as though I had seen the record in the
books of Heaven. 'Hope nothing,' I said to myself; 'think not of hope
in this world, but think only how best to walk steadily, and not to
reel like a creature wanting discourse of reason, or incapable of
religious hopes under the burden which it has pleased God to impose,
and which in this life cannot be shaken off. The countenance of man is
made to look upward and to the skies. Thither also point henceforwards
your heart and your thoughts. Never again let your thoughts travel
earthwards. Settle them on the heavens, to which your Agnes is already
summoned. The call is clear, and not to be mistaken. Little in
_her_ fate now depends upon you, or upon anything that man can do.
Look, therefore, to yourself; see that you make not shipwreck of your
heavenly freight because your earthly freight is lost; and miss not, by
any acts of wild and presumptuous despair, that final reunion with your
Agnes, which can only be descried through vistas that open through the
heavens.'

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