Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XXI Part 6

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 G.o.d'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 p.r.o.noun, 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 pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.s 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 fort.i.tude 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 impa.s.sibility 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 a.s.suming 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 gla.s.s 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!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the writer; "never was a better mark."

"You don't know her name?"

"No; nor do I think any of my present people do."